Winter Prey (10 page)

The firehouse was a tan pole barn built on a concrete slab, nestled in a stand of pine just off the highway. One end of the building was dominated by three oversized garage doors for the fire trucks. The office was at the other end, with a row of small windows. Lucas parked in one of four plowed-out spaces and walked into the office, found it empty. Another door led out of the office into the back and Lucas stuck his head through.

“Hello?”

“Yeah?” A heavyset blond man sat at a worktable, a fishing reel disassembled in the light of a high-intensity lamp. A thin, almost transparent beard covered his acne-pitted face. His eyes were blue, careful. A small kitchen area was laid out along one wall behind him. At the other end of the room, a broken-down couch, two aging easy chairs and two wooden kitchen chairs faced a color television. Lockers lined a third wall, each locker stenciled with a man’s last name. Another door led back into the truck shed. A flight of stairs went up to a half-loft.

“I’m looking for Duane Helper,” Lucas said.

“That’s me. You must be Davenport,” Helper said. He had a heavy, almost Germanic voice, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing jeans with wide red suspenders over a blue work shirt. His hand was heavy, like his body, but crusted with calluses. “A whole caravan of TV people just came out of the lake road. The sheriff let them in to take pictures of the house.”

“Yeah, he was going to do that,” Lucas said.

“I heard Phil Bergen is the main suspect.” Helper said it bluntly, as a challenge.

Lucas shook his head. “We don’t have any suspects yet.”

“That’s not the way I heard it,” Helper said. The television was playing a game show and Helper picked up a remote control and punched it off.

“Then what you heard is wrong,” Lucas said sharply. Helper seemed to be looking for an edge. He was closed-faced, with small eyes; when he played his fingers through his beard, the fingers seemed too short for their thickness, like sausages. Lucas sat down across the round table from him and they started through the time sequence.

“I remember seeing the car, but I didn’t remember it was right when the alarm came in,” Helper said. “I thought maybe I’d walked up and looked out the window, saw the car, and then we’d talked about something else and I’d gone back to the window again and that’s when the alarm came in. That’s not the way Dick remembers it.”

“How sure are you? Either way?”

Helper rubbed his forehead. “Dick’s probably right. We talked about it and he was sure.”

“If you went to the window twice, how much time would there have been between the two trips?” Lucas asked.

“Well, I don’t know, it would have only been a minute or two, I suppose.”

“So even if you went twice, it wasn’t long.”

“No, I guess not,” Helper said.

“Did you actually see Bergen’s Jeep come out of the lake road?”

“No, but that’s the impression I got. He was moving slow when he went past, even with the snow, and he was accelerating. Like he’d just turned the corner onto 77.”

“Okay.” Lucas stood up, walked once around the room. Looked at the stairs.

“What’s up there?”

“There’s a bunk room right at the top. I live in the back. I’m the only professional firefighter here.”

“You’re on duty twenty-four hours a day?”

“I have time off during the day and early evenings, when we can get volunteers to pick it up,” Helper said. “But yeah, I’m here most of the time.”

“Huh.” Lucas took a turn around the room, thumbnail pressed against his upper teeth, thinking. The time problem was becoming difficult. He looked at Helper. “What about Father Bergen? Do you know him?”

“Not really. I don’t believe I’ve spoken six words to him. He drinks, though. He’s been busted for drunk driving, but . . .” He trailed off and looked away.

“But what?” Helper was holding something back, but he wanted Lucas to know it.

“Sheriff Carr’s on the county fire board,” Helper said.

“Yeah? So what?” Lucas made his response a little short, a little tough.

“He’s thick with Bergen. I know you’re from the outside, but if I talk, and if it gets back to Shelly, he could hurt me.” Helper let the statement lie there, waiting.

Lucas thought it over. Helper might be trying to build an alliance or drive a wedge between himself and Carr. But for what? Most likely he was worried for exactly the reason he claimed: his job. Lucas shook his head. “It won’t get back to him if it doesn’t need to. Even if it needs to, I can keep the source to myself. If it seems reasonable.”

Helper looked at him for a moment, judging him, then looked out the window toward the road. “Well. First off, about that drunk driving. Shelly fixed it. Fixed it a couple of times and maybe more.”

He glanced at Lucas. There was more to come, Lucas thought. Helper mentioned the ticket-fixing as a test. “What else?” he pressed.

Helper let it go. “There’re rumors that Father Bergen’s . . . that if you’re a careful dad, you wouldn’t want your boy singing in his choir, so to speak.”

“He’s gay?” Gay would be interesting. Small-town gays felt all kinds of pressure, especially if they were in the closet. And a priest . . .

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Helper said. He added, carefully, “It’s just gossip. I never gave it much thought. In fact, I don’t think it’s true. But I don’t know. With this kind of thing, these killings, I figured you’d probably want to hear everything.”

“Sure.” Lucas made a note.

They talked for another five minutes, then three patrol deputies stomped in from duty at the LaCourt house. They were cold and went straight to the coffee. Helper got up to start another pot.

“Anything happening down at the house?” Lucas asked.

“Not much. Guys from Madison are crawling around the place,” said one of the deputies. His face was red as a raw steak.

“Is the sheriff down there?”

“He went back to the office, he was gonna talk to some of the TV people.”

“All right.”

Lucas looked back at Helper, fussing with the coffee. Small-town fireman. He heard things, sitting around with twenty or thirty different firemen every week, nothing much to do.

“Thanks,” he said. He nodded at Helper and headed for the door, the phone ringing as he went out. The wind bit at him again, and he hunched against it, hurried around the truck. He was fumbling for his keys when Helper stuck his head out the door and called after him: “It’s a deputy looking for you.”

Lucas went back inside and picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

“This is Rusty, at the school. You better get your ass up here.”

Grant Junior High was a red-brick rectangle with blue-spruce accents spotted around the lawn. A man in a snowmobile suit worked on the flat roof, pushing snow off. The harsh scraping sounds carried forever on the cold air. Lucas parked in front, zipped his parka, pulled on his ski gloves. Down the street, the bank time-and-temperature sign said
-
21.
The sun was rolling across the southern sky, as pale as an old silver dime.

Bob Jones was waiting outside the principal’s office when Lucas walked in. Jones was a round-faced man, balding, with rosy cheeks, a short black villain’s mustache and professional-principal’s placating smile. He wore a blue suit with a stiff-collared white shirt, and his necktie was patriotically striped with red, white, and blue diagonals.

“Glad to see you,” he said as they shook hands. “I’ve heard about you. Heck of a record. Come on, I’ll take you down to the conference room. The boy’s name is John Mueller.” The school had wide halls painted an institutional beige, with tan lockers spotted between cork bulletin boards. The air smelled of sweat socks, paper, and pencil-sharpener shavings.

Halfway down the hall, Jones said, “I’d like you to talk to John’s father about this. When you’re done with him. I don’t think there’s a legal problem, but if you could talk to him . . .”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

Rusty and Dusty were sitting at the conference table drinking coffee, Rusty with his feet on the table. They were both large, beefy, square-faced, white-toothed, with elaborately casual hairdos, Rusty a Chippewa, Dusty with the transparent pallor of a pure Swede. Rusty hastily pulled his feet off the table when Lucas and Jones walked in, leaving a ring of dirty water on the tabletop.

“Where’s the kid?” Lucas asked.

“Back in his math class,” said Dusty.

“I’ll get him,” Jones volunteered. He promptly disappeared down the hall, his heels echoing off the terrazzo.

Dusty wiped the water off the tabletop with his elbow and pushed a file at Lucas. “Kid’s name is John Mueller. We pulled his records. He’s pretty much of an A-B student. Quiet. His father runs a taxidermy shop out on County N, his mother works at Grotek’s Bakery.”

Lucas sat down, opened the file, started paging through it. “What about this other kid? You said on the phone that another kid was murdered.”

Rusty nodded, taking it from Dusty. “Jim Harper. He went to school here, seventh grade. He was killed around three months back,” Rusty said.

“October 20th,” said Dusty.

“What’s the story?” Lucas asked.

“Strangled. First they thought it was an accident, but the doc had the body sent down to Milwaukee, and they figured he was strangled. Never caught anybody.”

“First murder of a local resident in fourteen years,” Rusty said.

“Jesus Christ, nobody told me,” Lucas said. He looked up at them.

Dusty shrugged. “Well . . . I guess nobody thought about it. It’s kind of embarrassing, really. We got nothing on the killing. Zero. Zilch. It’s been three months now; I think people’d like to forget it.”

“And he went to this school, and he was in classes with the LaCourt girl . . . I mean, Jesus . . . .”

Jones returned, ushering a young boy into the room. The kid was skinny and jug-eared, with hair the color of ripe wheat, big eyes, a thin nose and wide mouth. He wore a flannel shirt and faded jeans over off-brand gym shoes. He looked like an elf, Lucas thought.

“How are you? John? Is that right?” Lucas asked as Jones backed out of the room. “I understand you have some information about Lisa.”

The kid nodded, slipped into the chair across the table from Lucas, turned a thumb to the other two deputies. “I already talked to these guys,” he said.

“I know, but I’d like to hear it fresh, if that’s okay,” Lucas said. He said it serious, as though he were talking to an adult. John nodded just as seriously. “So: how’d you know Lisa?”

“We ride the bus together. I get off at County N and she goes on.”

“And did she say something?” Lucas asked.

“She was really scared,” John said intently. His ears reddened, sticking out from his head like small Frisbees. “She had this picture, from school.”

“What was it?”

“It was from a newspaper,” John said. “It was a picture of Jim Harper, the kid who got killed. You know about him?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Yeah, it was really like . . .” John looked away and swallowed, then back. “He was naked on the bed and there was this naked man standing next to him with, you know, this, uh, I mean it was stickin’ up.”

Lucas looked at him, and the kid peered solemnly back. “He had an erection? The man?” Lucas asked.

“Yup,” John said earnestly.

“Where’s the picture?” Lucas felt a tingle: this was something.

“Lisa took it home,” John said. “She was going to show it to her mom.”

“When? What day?” Lucas asked. Rusty and Dusty watched the questioning, eyes shifting from Lucas to the kid and back.

“Last week. Thursday, ’cause that’s store night and Mom works late, and when I got home Dad was cooking.”

“Do you know where she got the picture?” Lucas asked.

“She said she got it from some other kid,” John said, shrugging. “I don’t know who. It was all crinkled up, like it had been passed around.”

“What’d the man look like? Did you recognize him?”

“Nope. His head wasn’t in the picture,” the boy said. “I mean, it looked like the whole picture was there, but it cut off his head like somebody didn’t aim the camera right.”

Dammit.
“So you could only see his body.”

“Yeah. And some stuff around him. The bed and stuff,” John said.

“Was the man big or small? His body?” Lucas asked.

“He was pretty big. Kind of fat.”

“What color was his hair?” asked Lucas.

John cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t notice a lot of chest hair or stomach hair or hair around his crotch?” Lucas fished for a word the kid
could relate to: “I mean, like really kind of gross?”

“No. Nothing like that . . . but it was a black-and-white picture and it wasn’t very good,” John said. “You know those newspapers they have at the Super Valu . . . ?”

“National Enquirer,”
Rusty said.

“Yeah. The picture was like from that. Not very good.”

If the hair didn’t strike him as gross, then the guy was probably a blond,
Lucas thought. Black hair on cheap paper would blot. “If it wasn’t very good, could you be sure it was Jim?” Lucas asked.

The boy nodded. “It was Jim, all right. You could see his face, smiling like Jim. And Jim lost a finger and you could see if you looked real close that the kid in the picture didn’t have a finger. And he had an earring and Jim wore an earring. He was the first guy in the school to get one.”