Winter Prey (25 page)

By three o’clock that morning the crime scene techs were packing up and the phone company had come and gone. Bergen had still not been found.

“I’m going home,” Carr said. “I’ll leave somebody.”

“No, we’re okay,” Weather said. “Lucas has his .45 and I have the rifle . . . and I seriously doubt that’d he’d be back again.”

“All right,” Carr said. He flushed slightly. Lucas realized that he assumed that he and Weather were in bed together. “Stay on the handset.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. Then, glancing at Weather, said to Carr, “C’mere and talk a minute. Privately.”

“What?” Weather asked, hands on her hips.

“Law enforcement talk,” Lucas said.

Carr followed him into the guest bedroom. Lucas picked up his shoulder holster, took the pistol out. He’d reloaded after he got out of the shower, and now he
punched out the chambered round and reseated it in the magazine.

“If we don’t find Bergen tonight, he could get lynched tomorrow,” he said.

“I know that,” Carr said. “I’m praying he’s drunk somewhere. First time for that.”

“But the main thing I want to say is, we need to get Weather out of town. She’s gonna fight it, but I’ve contaminated her. I can’t quite think why, but I guess I have.”

“So work on her,” Carr said.

Lucas gestured to his bag on the floor, the rumpled bedclothes. “We’re not quite as friendly as you think, Shelly.”

Carr flushed again, then said, “I’ll talk to her tomorrow, we’ll work something out. I’ll have a guy with her all day.”

“Good.”

When the last man left, Weather pushed the door shut, looked at Lucas.

“What was that little bull session about?” she asked suspiciously.

“I asked some routine questions and let Shelly get a good look at my clothes and my watch and the rumpled-up bed in the guest room,” Lucas said. He shivered.

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Huh. I appreciate that. I guess. Are you still cold?”

“Yeah. Freezing. But I’m okay.”

“That was the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw, you tearing through the snow like that in your bare feet. I honest to God thought you were in trouble when I got you back in here, I thought you were gonna have a heart attack.”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he said.

She walked back into the living room, looked at the damaged walls, and said, “I’m really cranked, Davenport. Pissed and cranked. I’m gonna have to reschedule the hysterectomy I had going this morning . . . maybe I can push it back into the afternoon. Jesus, I’m wound up.”

“You’ve got about two quarts of adrenaline working their way through your body. You’ll fall apart in an hour or so.”

“You think so?” She was interested. “Hey, look at the holes in the walls—my God.”

She called the hospital’s night charge nurse, explained the problem, rescheduled the operation, unloaded then reloaded her .22, asked Davenport to demonstrate his .45, went repeatedly back to the buckshot holes, poking at them with an index finger, going outside to see if they’d gone through. She found three holes in her leather couch, and was outraged all over again. Lucas let her go. He went into the kitchen, made a bowl of chicken noodle soup, ate it all, went back into the living room, and fell on the couch.

“What about the shots you fired? Could you have hit somebody across the lake?” she demanded. She had the magazine out of his .45 and was pointing it at her own image in the mirror over the fireplace.

“No. Some people call a .45 slug a flying ashtray. It’s fat, heavy, and slow. It’ll knock the shit out of you close up, but it’s not a long-range item. Fired from here, on the level, it wouldn’t make it halfway across.”

“Any chance you hit him?” she asked.

“No . . . I just didn’t want him swarming through the door with the shotgun. I might of got him, but he would have got us, too.”

“God, it was loud,” she said. “The shots almost broke my eardrums.”

“You lose a little high-frequency hearing every time you fire one without ear protection, and that’s a fact,” Lucas said.

She ran out of gas. Suddenly. She stopped talking, came over and slumped next to him on the couch.

“Snuggle up,” he said, and pulled her down. She lay quietly for a moment, her back to him, then started to softly cry. “Goddamn him, he shot my house,” she said.

Her body shook with the anger of it, and Lucas wrapped his arm around her and held on.

CHAPTER
13

The Iceman rode wildly across the frozen lake, off the tracks, a plume of snow thrown high behind the sled when he banked through the long, sinuous turns that would take him to the Circle Lake intersection. He could see police flashers streaming down through the town, but couldn’t hear them: and they certainly couldn’t see him. He was running without lights, his sled as black as his snowmobile suit, invisible in the night.

The gunfight had surprised him, but not frightened him. He had simply seen the truth: not tonight. He couldn’t get at her tonight, because if he stayed, if he fought it out with whoever was inside—and it was almost certainly the cop from Minneapolis—he could be hurt. And hurt was good as dead.

Time time time
 . . .

He was running out of it. He could feel it trickling through his fingers. Davenport and Crane had taken something out of the LaCourt house, and it was almost certainly the photograph. But they had sent it to the lab in Madison: maybe it had been ruined in the fire after all. He’d talked to the cops who’d been there when they were looking at it, but they had
no precise details. Just a piece of paper, they said.

If Weather Karkinnen ever saw the photograph, they’d be on him.

Weather: why was Davenport at her house? Guarding her? Screwing her? Why would they be guarding her? Had she given them something? But the only thing she had to give them was the identification, and if she’d given them that, they’d be knocking on his door.

The intersection came up, marked by two distinctively pink sodium vapor lights. He was in luck: there were no other sleds at the crossing. If they saw him running a blacked-out sled, they’d be curious.

He bucked through the intersection, up the boat landing, down the landing road, onto the trail built in the ditch beside the road. A moment later he turned onto Circle Creek, ran under the road and two minutes later onto the lake. He turned on his lights in the creek bed but kept cranking. There were more snowmobiles on Circle Lake, and he crossed paths with them, moving south and west.

He worked through his options:

He could run. Get in the car, make some excuse for a couple days’ absence, and never come back. By the time they started looking for him, he’d be buried in Alaska or the Northwest Territories. But if he was missing, it wouldn’t take long for the cops to figure out what happened. And if he ran, he’d have to give up almost everything he had. Take only what would fit in the car, and he’d have to dump the car in a few days. And he still might get caught: they had his picture, his fingerprints.

He could go after the other members of the club, take them all out in one night. The problem was, some of them had already taken off. The Schoeneckers: how would he find them? No good.

He had to stay. He had to find out about the photograph. Had to go back for Weather. He’d missed her twice now, and he was uneasy about it. When he’d been a kid, working the schoolyard, there’d always been a few people he’d never been able to get at. They’d always outmaneuvered him, always foiled him, sometimes goading him into trouble.
Weather was like that: he needed to get at her, but she turned him away.

He bucked up over another intersection, down a long bumpy lane cleared through the woods by the local snowmobile club, onto the next lake, and across. He came off the lake, took the boat landing road out to the highway, sat for a moment, then turned left.

The yellow-haired girl was waiting. So was her brother, Mark. Mark with the dark hair and the large brown eyes. The yellow-haired girl let him in, helped him take off his snowmobile suit. Mark was smiling nervously: he was like that, he needed to be calmed. The Iceman liked working with Mark
because
of the resistance. If the yellow-haired girl hadn’t been there . . .

“Let’s go back to my room,” she said.

“Where’s Rosie?”

“She went out drinking,” the yellow-haired girl said.

“I gotta get going,” said Mark.

“Where’re you going?” Smiling, quiet. But the shooting still boiled in his blood. God, if he could get Weather someplace alone, if he could have her for a while . . .

“Out with Bob,” said Mark.

“It’s cold out there,” he said.

“I’ll be okay,” Mark said. He wouldn’t meet his eyes. “He’s gonna pick me up.”

“And I’ll be here,” said the yellow-haired girl. She was wearing a sweatsuit, old and pilled, wished it were something more elegant for him. She plucked at the pants leg, afraid of what he might say; of cruelty in his words.

But he said, “That’s great.” He touched her head and the warmth flowed through her.

Later in the evening he was lying in her bed, smoking. He thought of Weather, of Davenport, of Carr, of the picture; of Weather, of Davenport, round and round . . .

The yellow-haired girl was breathing softly next to him, her hand on his stomach.

He needed time to find out about the photo. If he could just put them off for a few days, he could find out. He could get details. Without the photo, there wouldn’t be a link, but he needed
time.

CHAPTER
14

The telephone rang in the kitchen.

Lucas let it ring, heard a voice talking into the answering machine. He should get it, he thought. He rolled over and looked at the green luminous numbers on the bedstand clock. Nine-fifteen.

Four hours lying awake, with a few sporadic minutes of sleep. The air in the house was cool, almost cold, and he pulled the blankets up over his ears. The phone rang again, two rings, then stopped as the answering machine came on. There was no talk this time. Whoever it was had hung up.

A minute later the phone rang twice again. Irritated, Lucas thought about getting up. The ringing stopped, and a moment later began again, two more rings. Angry now, he slipped out of bed, wrapped the comforter around his shoulders, stomped down the hall to the kitchen, and glared at the phone.

Ten seconds passed. It rang again, and he snatched it up. “What?” he snarled.

“Ah. I knew you were sleeping in,” the nun said with satisfaction. “You’ve got a message on the answering machine, by the way.”

Lucas looked down at the machine, saw the blinking red light. “I’m freezing my butt off. Couldn’t . . .”

“The message isn’t from me. I know you’ve got one because your phone’s only ringing twice before the machine answers, instead of four or five times,” she said, sounding even more pleased with herself.

“How’d you get the number?”

“Sheriff’s secretary,” Elle said. “She told me what happened last night, and that you’re guarding the body of some lady doctor who’s quite attractive. Are you okay, by the way?”

“Elle . . .” Lucas said impatiently, “You sound too smug for this to be a gossip call.”

“I’ll be gone for the day and I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I found a couple of Phil Bergen’s friends. I didn’t want to put it on an answering machine.”

“What’d they say?”

“They say he was awkward around women but that he was certainly oriented toward them. He was
not
interested in men.”

“For sure?” Lucas thought,
Shit.

“Yes. One of them laughed when I asked the question. Bergen’s not a complete ’phobe, but he has a distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality. That attitude wasn’t a cover for a secret interest, if you were about to ask me that.”

Lucas chewed on his lower lip, then said, “Okay. I appreciate your help.”

“Lucas, these are people who would know,” Elle said. “One was Bergen’s college confessor. He wouldn’t have talked to me if homosexuality had ever been broached in confession, so it must not have been. And it would have been.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Dammit. That makes things harder.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Will you be down next week?”

“If I get done up here.”

“We’ll see you then. We’ll get a game. By the way, something serious was happening at the sheriff’s office. Nobody had any time to speak to me, something about a lost kid . . .”

“Oh, my God,” Lucas said. “Elle, I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up, started to punch in the number for the sheriff’s office, saw the blinking light on the answering machine and poked it.

Carr’s voice rasped out of the speaker: “Davenport, where’n the heck are you? We found the Mueller kid. He’s dead and it wasn’t an accident. I’m going to send somebody over to wake you up.”

Just before the phone hung up, Carr called to someone in the background, “Get Gene over to Weather Karkinnen’s house.”

There was a motor sound outside. Lucas used two fingers to separate the curtain over the kitchen sink and looked out. A sheriff’s truck was pulling into the driveway. Lucas hurried to Weather’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, and he opened it and stuck his head inside. She was curled under a down comforter, and looked small and innocent.

“Weather, wake up,” he said.

“Huh?” She rolled, half-asleep, and looked up at him.

“They found the Mueller kid and he’s dead,” Lucas said. “I’m going.”

She sat up, instantly awake, and threw off the bedcovers. She was wearing a long-sleeved white flannel nightgown. “I’m coming with you.”

“You’ve got an operation.”

“I’ll be okay, a few hours is fine.”

“You really don’t . . .”

“I’m the county coroner, Lucas,” she said, “I’ve got to go anyway.” Her hair stuck out from her head in a corona and her face was still morning-slack. She had a red pillow-wrinkle on one cheek. Her cotton nightgown hid all of her figure except her hips, which shaped and moved the soft fabric. She started toward the bath that opened off her bedroom, felt him watching her, said, “What?”

“You look terrific.”

“Jesus, I’m a wreck,” she said. She stepped back to him, stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, and Climpt began banging on the door.

“That’s Gene,” Lucas said, stepping back toward the hall. “Five minutes.”

“Ten,” she said. “I mean, it won’t make any difference to John Mueller.”

She said it offhandedly, a surgeon and a coroner who dealt in death. But Lucas was stricken. She saw it in his face, a quick tightening, and said, “Oh, God, Lucas, I didn’t mean it.”

“You’re right, though,” he said, his voice gone hard. “Ten minutes. It won’t make any difference to the kid.”

Lucas let Climpt in, and while the deputy looked at the damage from the night’s shooting, went back to the bathroom for a quick cleanup.

When he came back out, Weather was coming down the hall, dressed in insulated jeans and a wool shirt, carrying the bag she’d had at the LaCourts’. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“You were lucky last night,” Climpt said. He was standing in the living room, smoking a cigarette, looking at the damage from the firefight.

“I don’t think there was anything lucky about it,” Weather said. “Look what he did.”

“If’d been me out there, you’d a been dead. He should of waited until you were right at the door.”

“I’ll tell him when I see him,” Lucas said.

John Mueller’s body had been dumped in an abandoned sandpit off a blacktopped government road in the Chequamegon National Forest, fifteen miles from his home. A half-dozen sheriff’s vehicles were jammed into the turnoff, and the snow had been beaten down by people walking into the pit.

“Shelly’s freaked out,” Climpt said, talking past a new cigarette. “Something happened at Mass today.”

“They found Bergen?”

“Yeah, I guess. He was there.”

They could see the sheriff standing alone, like a fat dark scarecrow, just inside the sandpit. “This is his worst nightmare,” Weather said.

Climpt nodded. “All he wanted was a nice easy cruise up to retirement, taking care of people. Which he’s pretty good at.”

They parked and started up toward a cluster of cops at the edge of the sandpit. A civilian in an orange parka stood off to the side, next to a snowmobile, talking to another deputy. Carr saw them coming and walked down the freshly trampled path to meet them.

“How are you?” Carr asked Weather. “Get any sleep?”

“Very little,” Weather said. “Is the kid . . .”

“Right there. We haven’t called his folks yet.” Carr looked at Lucas. “How long will it take to catch this guy?”

“That’s not a reasonable question,” Weather snapped.

But Lucas looked up the rise to the cluster of cops around the body. “Three or four days,” he said after a few seconds. “He’s out of control. Unless we’re missing some big connection on this kid, there wasn’t any reason to kill him. He took a hell of a risk for no gain.”

“Will he kill more people?” Carr asked. His voice was a compound of anger, tension, and sorrow, as though he’d worked out the answer.

“He could.” Lucas nodded, looking straight into Carr’s dry, exhausted eyes. “Yeah, I’d say he could. You better find the Schoeneckers. If they’re involved, and they’re someplace where he could get at them . . .”

“We got bulletins out all over the south, from Florida to Arizona. We’re interviewing their friends.”

Weather was moving on toward the body, and Lucas trailed after her. Carr hooked his elbow. “You gotta figure a way to make something happen, Lucas.”

“I know,” Lucas said.

John Mueller’s body had been found by the snowmobiler in the orange parka. He’d seen two coyotes working over the spot and assumed they’d killed a deer. He’d stopped to see if it was a buck and still had antlers. He chased off the dogs, saw the boy’s coat, and called the sheriff’s department. The first deputy at the scene had shot a coyote and covered the boy with a plastic tarp.

“Bad,” Weather said when she lifted the tarp. Around them, the talking stopped as everybody looked at them crouched over the body. “Is that him?”

Lucas studied the child’s half-eaten face, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. I’m almost sure. Jesus Christ.”

He walked away, unable to handle it. He hadn’t had that problem since his third week on patrol: cops looked at dead people, end of story.

“You all right?” Climpt asked.

“Got on top of me,” Lucas said.

He was halfway back to the cars when he saw Crane, the crime-scene tech from Madison, walking up the path.

“Anything for me?” Crane asked.

“I doubt it. The scene’s pretty cut up and coyotes have been at the body. It’ll take an ME to figure out how he was killed.”

“I’ve got a metal detector, I’ll check the site for shells. Listen, I got some news for you this morning. I tried to call and was told you were on the way out here. Remember that burnt-up page from the porno magazine that we sent down to Madison? The one with the picture you want?”

“Yeah?”

“We shipped it to all the major departments in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota, and we actually got a callback. A guy named . . .” Crane patted his pockets, pulled off a glove, dipped into one, and came up with a slender reporter’s notebook. “ . . . a guy named Curt Domeier with the Milwaukee PD. He says he might know the publisher. He says give him a call.”

Lucas took the notebook page: something to do. He walked down to the truck, called the dispatcher, and was patched through to Milwaukee. Domeier worked with the sex unit. He wasn’t in his office, but picked up a phone on a page. Lucas introduced himself and said, “The Madison guys say you might know who put out the paper.”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen this particular one, but he uses those little dingbats—that’s what they call them, dingbats—at the ends of the stories. They look like playing-card suits. Hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. I’ve never seen that anywhere
else, but I’ve seen it with this guy.” Domeier’s voice was rusty but casual, the kind of cop who chewed gum while he drank coffee.

“Can we get our hands on him?” Lucas asked.

“No problem. He works out of his apartment, up on the north side off I-43. He’s a crippled guy, does Macintosh services.”

“Macintosh? Like the computer?”

“Exactly. He does magazine stuff, cheap,” Domeier said. “Makeup, layout, that stuff.”

“We got four dead up here,” Lucas said.

“I been reading about it. I thought it was three.”

“There’ll be another in the paper tomorrow morning, a little kid.”

“No shit?” Polite interest.

“We think the killer might have hit the family because of the picture on that page,” Lucas said.

“I can talk to this guy right now or you could come down and we could both go see him,” Domeier said. “Whatever you want.”

“Why don’t I come down?”

“Tomorrow?”

“How about this afternoon or tonight?” Lucas said.

“I’d have to talk to somebody here about overtime, but if your chief called down . . . I could use the bucks.”

“I’ll get him to call. Where’ll we meet?” Lucas asked.

“There’s a doughnut place, right off the interstate.”