Winter Prey (16 page)

They headed for the Mueller house, riding together in the sheriff’s truck, crimson flashers working on top.

“You were hard on him,” Carr said abruptly. “On Phil.”

“You’ve got four murder victims and now this,” Lucas said. “What do you expect, violin music?”

“I don’t know what I expected,” Carr said.

The sheriff was pushing the truck, moving fast. Lucas caught the bank sign: minus twenty-eight.

He said it aloud: “Twenty-eight below.”

“Yeah.” The wind had picked up again, and was blowing thin streamers of snow off rooftops and drifts. The sheriff hunched over the steering wheel. “If the kid’s been outside, he’s dead. He doesn’t need anybody to kill him.”

A moment passed in silence. Lucas couldn’t think about John Mueller: when he thought about him, he could feel a darkness creeping over his mind. Maybe the kid was at another friend’s house, maybe . . .

“How long has Bergen had the drinking problem?” he asked.

“Since college. He told me he went to his first AA meeting before he was legal to drink,” Carr said. His heavy face was a faint unhealthy green in the dashboard lights.

“How bad? DTs? Memory loss? Blackouts?”

“Like that,” Carr said.

“But he’s been dry? Lately?”

“I think so. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, if a guy keeps his head down. He can drink at night, hold it together during the day. I used to do a little drinking myself.”

“Lot of cops do.”

Carr looked across the seat at him: “You too?”

“No, no. I’ve abused a few things, but not booze. I’ve always had a taste for uppers.”

“Cocaine?”

Lucas laughed, a dry rattle: the kid’s face kept popping up. Small kid, sweet-faced. “I can hear the beads of sweat popping out of your forehead, Shelly. No. I’m afraid of that shit. Might be too good, if you know what I mean.”

“Any alcoholic’d know what you mean,” Carr said.

“I’ve done a little speed from time to time,” Lucas continued, looking out at the dark featureless forest that lined the road. “Not lately. Speed and alcohol, they’re for different personalities.”

“Either one of them’ll kill you,” Carr said.

They passed a video rental shop with three people standing outside; they all turned to watch the sheriff’s truck go by. Lucas said, “People do weird things when they’re drunk. And they forget things. If he was drunk, the time . . .”

“He says he wasn’t,” Carr said.

“Would he lie about it?”

“I don’t think so,” Carr said. “Under other circumstances, he might—drinkers lie to themselves when they’re starting again. But with this, all these dead people, I don’t think he’d lie. Like I told you, Phil Bergen’s a moral man. That’s why he drinks in the first place.”

There were twenty people at the Muellers’, mostly neighbors, with three deputies. A half-dozen men on snowmobiles were organizing a patrol of ditches and trails within two miles of the house.

Carr plunged into it while Lucas drifted around the edges, helpless. He didn’t know anything about missing persons searches, not out here in the woods, and Carr seemed to know a lot about it.

A few moments after Carr and Lucas arrived, the boy’s father hurried out into the yard, pulling on a snowmobile suit. A woman stood in the door in a white baker’s dress, hands clasped to her face. The image stuck with Lucas: it was an effect of pure terror.

Mueller said something to Carr and they talked for a moment, then Carr shook his head. Lucas heard him say “Three of them up north . . . .”

The father had been looking around the yard, as though his son might walk out of the woods. Instead of the boy, he saw Lucas and stepped toward him. “You sonofabitch,” he screamed, eyes rolling. A deputy caught him, jostled him, stayed between them. Faces in the yard turned toward Lucas. “Where’s my boy, where’s my boy?” Mueller screamed.

Carr came over and said, “You better leave. Take my truck. Call Lacey, tell him to get Gene, and the three of you go on out to Harper’s place. There’s nothing you can do here.”

“Must be something,” Lucas said. A deputy was talking to Mueller, Mueller’s eyes still fixed on Lucas.

“There’s nothing,” Carr said. “Just get out. Go on down to Harper’s like we planned.”

Lucas met Lacey and Climpt at the 77 Tap, a bar ten miles east of Grant. The bar was an old one, a simple cube with shingle siding and a few dark windows up above, living rooms upstairs for the owner. An antique gas pump sat to one side of the place, with a set of rusting, unused bait tanks, all of it awash in snow. A Leinenkugel’s sign provided most of the exterior lighting.

Inside, the bar smelled of fried fish and old beer; an Elton John song was playing on the jukebox. Lacey and Climpt were sitting in one of the three booths.

“No sign of the kid?” Lacey asked as he slid out of the booth. Climpt threw two dollars on the table and stood up behind him, chewing on a wooden matchstick.

“Not when I left,” Lucas said.

Lacey and Climpt looked at each other and Climpt shook his head. “If he ain’t at somebody’s house . . .”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t your fault,” Climpt said, looking levelly at Lucas. “What’re you supposed to do?”

“Yeah.” Lucas shook his head and they started for the door. “So tell me about Harper.”

Lacey was pulling on his gloves. “He’s our local hood. He spent two years in prison over in Minnesota for ag assault—this was way back, must’ve been a couple of years after he got out of high school. He’s been in jail since then, maybe three or four times.”

“For?”

“Brawling, mostly. Fighting in bars. He’d pick out somebody, get on them, goad them into a fight and then hurt them. You know the type. He’s beat up some women we know of, but they never wanted to do anything about it. Either because they were still hoping to get together with him or because they were scared. You know.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s carried a gun off and on, smokes a little marijuana, maybe does a little coke, we’ve heard both,” Lacey continued. “He says he needs the gun to protect himself
when he’s taking cash home from the station.”

“He’s a felon,” Lucas said.

“Got his rights back,” Lacey said. “Shouldn’t of. There’s been rumors that when he’s been hard up for money, he’d go down to the Cities and knock over a liquor store or a 7-Eleven. Maybe that’s just bar talk.”

“Maybe,” Climpt grunted. He looked at Lucas: “He’s not like a TV bully. He’s a bully, but he’s not a coward. He’s a mean sonofabitch.”

Climpt and Lacey rode together, and Lucas followed them out, occasional muted cop chatter burbling out of the radio. The roads had cleared except for icy corners and intersections, and traffic was light because of the cold. They made good time.

Knuckle Lake popped up as a fuzzy ball of light far away down the highway, brightening and separating into business signs and streetlights as they got closer. There were a half dozen buildings scattered around the four corners: a motel, two bars, a general store, a cafe, and the Amoco station. The station was brightly lit, with snow piled twenty feet high along the back property lines. One car sat at a gas pump, engine off, the driver elsewhere. An old Chevy was visible through the windows of the single repair bay. They stopped in front of the big window, the other two trucks swinging in behind. A teenager in a ragged trench coat and tennis shoes peered through the glass at them: he was all by himself, like a guppie in a well-lit aquarium.

Lucas followed Climpt inside. Climpt nodded at the kid and said, “Hello, Tommy. How you doing?”

“Okay, just fine, Mr. Climpt,” the kid said. He was nervous, and a shock of straw-colored hair fell out from under his watch cap, his Adam’s apple bobbing spasmodically.

“How long you been out?” Climpt asked.

“Oh, two months now,” the kid said.

“Tommy used to borrow cars, go for rides,” Climpt said.

“Bad habit,” Lucas said, crossing his arms, leaning against
the candy machine. “Everybody gets pissed off at you.”

“I quit,” the kid said.

“He’s a good mechanic,” Climpt said. Then: “Where’s Russ?”

“Down to the house, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“It’d be better if you didn’t call him,” Lucas said.

“Whatever,” the kid said. “I’m, you know, whatever.”

“Whatever,” Climpt said. He pointed a finger at the kid’s face, and the kid swallowed. “We won’t be tellin’ Russ we talked to you.”

Back outside, Climpt said, “He won’t call.”

“How far is Harper’s place?”

“Two minutes from here,” Carr said.

“Think he’ll be a problem?”

“Not if we get right on top of him,” Climpt said. “He won’t win no college scholarship, but he’s not stupid enough to take on a whole . . . whatever we are.”

“A posse,” Lucas said.

Climpt laughed, a short bark. “Right. A posse.”

John Mueller came back to Lucas’ mind, like a nagging toothache, a pain that wouldn’t go away but couldn’t be fixed. Maybe he was at a friend’s; maybe they’d already found him . . . .

Harper’s house huddled in a copse of birch and red pine, alone on an unlit stretch of side road, a free-standing garage in back, a mercury-vapor yard-light overhead. Windows were lit in the back of the house. Climpt killed his lights and pulled into the end of the drive, and Lucas pulled in behind him.

Climpt and Lacey got out, pushed the truck doors shut instead of slamming them. “Are you carrying?” Climpt asked.

“Yeah.”

“Might loosen it up. Russ’s always got something around.”

“All right.” Lucas turned to Lacey, who had his hands in
his pockets and was staring up at the house. “Henry, why don’t you sit out here by the truck. Get the shotgun and just hang back.”

Lacey nodded and walked back toward the Suburban.

“I’ll try to get a little edge on him right away,” Lucas told Climpt as they started up the driveway. “I won’t pull any real shit, but you can act like you think I might.”

Woodsmoke drifted down on them, an acrid odor that cut at the nose and throat. Two feet of pristine snow covered the front porch. “Looks like he doesn’t use the front door at all,” Climpt said.

As they walked around the side of the house, they heard the gun rack rattle as Lacey unlocked the shotgun and took it out, then the ratcheting sound of a twelve-gauge shell being pumped home. At the back door, Lucas could hear the sounds of a television—not the words but the rhythms.