Winter Prey (9 page)

He and Carr started to laugh, then Carr said, “We’re getting hysterical.” To Lucas he said, “Didn’t get any sleep. I picked out some guys to work with you, six of them, smartest ones we got. They’re down in the canteen. You ready?”

“Yup. Let’s do it,” Lucas said.

The deputies arranged themselves around a half-dozen rickety square tables, drinking coffee and chewing on candy bars, looking Lucas over. Carr poked his finger at them and called out their names. Five of the six wore uniforms. The sixth, an older man, wore jeans and a heavy sweater and carried an automatic pistol just to the left of his navel in a cross-draw position.

“ . . . Gene Climpt, investigator,” Carr said, pointing at him. Climpt nodded. His face was deeply weathered, like a chunk of lake driftwood, his eyes careful, watchful. “You met him out at the house last night.”

Lucas nodded at Climpt, then looked around the room. The best people in the department, Carr said. With two exceptions, they were all white and chunky. One was an Indian, and Climpt, the investigator, was lean as a lightning rod. “The sheriff and I worked out a few approaches last night,” Lucas began. “What we’re doing today is talking to people. I’ll talk to the firefighters who were the first out at the house. We’ve also got to find the LaCourts’ personal friends, their daughter’s friends at school, and the people who took part in a religious group that Claudia LaCourt was a member of.”

They talked for twenty minutes, dividing up the preliminaries. Climpt took two deputies to begin tracking the LaCourts’ friends, and he’d talk to the tribal people about any job-related problems LaCourt might have had at the casino. Two more deputies—Russell Hinks and Dustin Bane, Rusty and Dusty—would take the school. The last man would canvass all the houses down the lake road, asking if anyone had seen anything unusual before the fire. The night before, Climpt had been looking for immediate possibilities.

“I’ll be checking back during the day,” Lucas said. “If anybody finds anything, call me. And I mean anything.”

As the deputies shuffled out, pulling on coats, Carr turned to Lucas and said, “I’ve got some paperwork before you leave. I want to get you legal.”

“Sure.” He followed Carr into the hallway, and when they were away from the other deputies asked, “Is this
Climpt guy . . . is he going to work with me? Or is he gonna be a problem?”

“Why should he be?” Carr asked.

“I’m doing a job that he might have expected to get.”

Carr shook his head. “Gene’s not that way. Not at all.”

Bergen stumbled into the hallway, looked around, spotted Carr. “Shelly . . .” he called.

Carr stopped, looked back. Bergen was wearing wind pants and a three-part parka, a Day-Glo orange hunter’s hat, ski mitts and heavy-duty pac boots. He looked more like an out-of-shape lumberjack than a priest. “Phil, how’r you feeling?”

“You ought to know,” Bergen said harshly, stripping his mitts off and slapping them against his leg as he came down the hall. “The talk all over town is, Bergen did it. Bergen killed the LaCourts. I had about half the usual congregation at Mass this morning. I’ll be lucky to have that tomorrow.”

“Phil, I don’t know . . .” Carr started.

“Don’t BS me, Shelly,” Bergen said. “The word’s coming out of this office. I’m the prime suspect.”

“If the word’s coming out of this office, I’ll stop it—because you’re not the prime suspect,” Carr said. “We don’t have any suspects.”

Bergen looked at Lucas. His lower lip trembled and he shook his head, turned back to Carr: “You’re a little late, Shelly; and I’ll tell you, I won’t put up with it. I have a reputation and you and your hired gun”—he looked at Lucas again, then back to Carr—“are ruining it. That’s called slander or libel.”

Carr took him by the arm, said, “C’mon down to my office, Phil.” To Lucas he said, “Go down there to the end of the hall, ask for Helen Arris.”

Helen Arris was a big-haired office manager, a woman who might have been in her forties or fifties or early sixties, who chewed gum and called him dear, and who did the paperwork in five minutes. When they finished with
the paper, she took his photograph with a Polaroid camera, slipped the photo into a plastic form, stuck the form into a hot press, slammed the press, waited ten seconds, then handed him a mint-new identification card.

“Be careful out there,” she said, sounding like somebody on a TV cop show.

Lucas got a notebook from the Explorer and decided to walk down to Grant Hardware, a block back toward the highway. This would be a long day. If they were going to break the killings, they’d do it in a week. And the more they could get early, the better their chances were.

A closet-sized book-and-newspaper store sat on the corner and he stopped for a
Wall Street Journal;
he passed a t-shirt store, a shoe repair shop, and one of the bakeries before he crossed in midblock to the hardware store. The store had a snowblower display in the front window, along with a stack of VCRs and pumpkin-colored plastic sleds. A bell rang over the door when Lucas walked in, and the odor of hot coffee hung in the air. A man sat on a wooden stool, behind the cashier’s counter, reading a
People
magazine and drinking coffee from a deep china cup. Lucas walked down toward the counter, aging wooden floor creaking beneath him.

“Dick Westrom?”

“That’s me,” the counterman said.

“Lucas Davenport. I’m . . .”

“The detective, yeah.” Westrom stood up and leaned across the counter to shake hands. He was big, fifty pounds too heavy for his height, with blond hair fading to white and large watery cow eyes that looked away from Lucas. He tipped his head at another chair at the other end of the counter. “My girl’s out getting a bite, but there’s nobody around . . . we could talk here, if that’s all right.”

“That’s fine,” Lucas said. He took off his jacket, walked around the counter and sat down. “I need to know exactly what happened last night, the whole sequence.”

Westrom had found Frank LaCourt’s body, nearly
tripping over it as he hauled hose off the truck.

“You didn’t see him right away, laying there?” Lucas asked.

“No. Most of the light was from the fire, it was flickering, you know, and Frank had a layer of snow on him,” Westrom said. He had a confidential manner of talking, out of the side of his mouth, as though he were telling secrets in a prison yard. “He was easy to see when you got right on top of him, but from a few feet away . . . hell, you couldn’t hardly see him at all.”

“That was the first you knew there were dead people?”

“Well, I thought there might be somebody inside, there was a smell, you know. That hit us as soon as we got there, and I think Duane said something like, ‘We got a dead one.’ ”

Westrom insisted that the priest had passed the fire station within seconds of the alarm.

“Look. I got nothing against Phil Bergen,” Westrom said, shooting sideways glances at Lucas. “Shelly Carr was trying to get some extra time out of me last night, so I know where
he’s
at. But I’ll tell you this: I was nukin’ a couple of ham sandwiches . . .”

“Yeah?” Lucas said, a neutral noise to keep Westrom rolling.

“And Duane said, ‘There goes Father Phil. Hell of a night to be out.’ Duane was standing by the front window and I saw Phil going by. Just then the buzzer went off on the microwave. I mean
right then,
when I was looking at the taillights. I says, ‘Well, he’s a big-shot priest with a big-shot Grand Cherokee, so he can go
where
he wants,
when
he wants.’ ”

“Sounds like you don’t care for him,” Lucas said. And Lucas didn’t care for Westrom, the eyes always slipping and sliding.

“Well, personally, I don’t. But that’s neither here nor there, and he can go about his business,” Westrom said. He pursed his lips in disapproval. His eyes touched Lucas’ face and then skipped away. “Anyway, I was taking the sandwiches out, they’re in these cellophane packets, you
know, and I was just trying to grab them by the edges and not get burned. I said ‘Come and get it,’ and the phone rang. Duane picked it up and he said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and punched in the beeper code and said, ‘It’s LaCourts’, let’s go.’ I was still standing there with the sandwiches. Never got to open them. Phil hadn’t gone by more’n ten seconds before. Shelly was trying to get me to say it was a minute or two or three, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t more’n ten seconds and it might have been five.”

“Huh.” Lucas nodded.

“Check with Duane,” Westrom said. “He’ll tell you.”

“Is Duane a friend of yours?”

“Duane? Well, no. I like him okay. We just don’t, you know . . . relate.”

“Do you know of anything that Father Bergen might have against the LaCourts?”

“Nope. But he was close to Claudia,” Westrom said, with a distinct spin on the word
close.

“How close?” Lucas asked, tilting his head.

Westrom’s eyes wandered around Lucas without settling. “Claudia had a reputation before she married Frank. She got around. She was a pretty thing, too, she had big . . .” Westrom cupped his hands at his chest and bounced them a couple of times. “And Phil . . . He
is
a man. Being a priest and all, it must be tough.”

“You think he and Claudia could have been fooling around?” Lucas asked.

Westrom edged forward in his chair and said confidentially, “I don’t know about that. We probably would have heard if she was. But it might go way back, something with Father Phil. Maybe Phil wanted to get it started again or something.” Westrom’s nose twitched.

“How many black Jeeps in Ojibway County?” Lucas asked. “There must be quite a few.”

“Bet there aren’t, not in the winter. Not Grand Cherokees—those are mostly summer-people cars. I can’t think of any besides Phil’s.” He looked at Lucas curiously: “Are you a Catholic?”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause you sound like you’re trying to find an excuse for Phil Bergen.”

Lucas’ notebook cover said, “Westrom, Helper.” He drew a line through Westrom, started the Explorer, headed out Highway 77 to the fire station.

In the daytime, with sunlight and the roads freshly plowed, the half-hour trip of the night before was cut to ten minutes. From the high points of the road, he could see forever across the low-lying land, with the contrasting black pine forests cut by the silvery glint of the frozen lakes.