Winter Prey (22 page)

“We’ll try to trace it, but I can’t promise anything,” Crane said.

Carr looked at Lucas and said, “Come on outside a minute.”

Lucas pulled his parka back on, zipped it, followed Carr through the door.

“We got Bob Dell’s birthdate off his DMV records and ran those through the NCIC,” Carr said. “He was arrested a few times in Madison, apparently when he was going to school there. Disturbing the peace and once for assault. The disturbing the peace things were for demonstrations, the assault was for a bar fight. The charge was dropped before it got to court and apparently didn’t amount to much. I called Madison, and it was just an ordinary bar, not a gay bar or anything. The demonstrations involved some kind of political thing, but it wasn’t gay rights, whatever it was.”

“Nothing there,” Lucas said.

“Well, you remember what Lacey’s wife said about Dell not liking women? I called her up, and asked her what she meant, and she hemmed and hawed and finally said yeah, there were rumors among the eligible women in town that you’d be wasting your time chasing Dell.”

“How solid were the rumors? Anything explicit?” Lucas asked.

“Nothing she knew about.”

“Where’s this place he works?”

“Sawmill, about ten minutes from here,” Carr said.

“Let’s go.”

Carr led the way down to the sawmill, a yellow-steel pole barn on a concrete slab. A thirty-foot-high stack of oak logs was racked above a concrete ramp that led into the mill.

Inside the mill, the temperature hovered just above freezing. A half-dozen men worked around the saws. Lucas waited in the work bay while Carr poked his head
into the office to talk to the owner. Lucas heard him say, “No, no, no, there’s no problem, honest to God, we’re just trying to run down every last . . .” And then a cut started, and he watched the saws until Carr came back out.

“That’s Bob in the vest,” Carr said. “I’ll get him when they finish the cut.”

Dell was a tall man, wearing jeans and a sleeveless down vest with heavy leather gloves and a yellow hard hat. He worked with the logs, jockeying them for the cut. When the cut was done, they took him outside, away from the noise of the mill. The tall man lit a cigarette and said, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

Lucas said, “Did you have any visitors, or see anybody out around your place the night the LaCourts were killed?”

Dell shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t see anybody. I came home, watched TV, ate dinner, and then my beeper went off and I hauled my butt up there.”

Carr snapped his fingers. “That’s right: you’re with the fire department.”

Dell nodded. “Yeah. I figured you’d be around sooner or later, if you didn’t catch somebody. I mean, me being a single guy and all, and just down that road.”

“We don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Carr said.

“You already have,” Dell said, looking back at the mill.

“So you saw nobody that night. From the time you left work until the time you went to the fire, you saw nobody,” Lucas said.

“Nobody.”

“Didn’t Father Bergen stop by?” Lucas asked.

“No, no.” Dell looked mystified. “Why would he?”

“Aren’t you one of his parishioners?”

“Off and on, I guess,” Dell said, “But he doesn’t come around.”

“So you’re not close to him?”

“What’s this about, Sheriff?” Dell asked, looking at Carr.

“I gotta ask you something here, Bob, and I swear it’ll go no further than the three of us,” Carr said. “I mean, I hate to ask . . .”

“Ask it,” Dell said. He’d stiffened up; he knew what was coming.

“We’ve heard some rumors in town that you might be gay, is what I guess it is.”

Dell turned away from them, looked up into the forest. “That’s what it is, huh?” And after a minute, “What would that have to do with anything?”

The sheriff stared at him for a minute, then looked at Lucas and said, “Sonofabitch.”

“I never saw Father Phil,” Dell said. “Think whatever you want, I never saw him. I haven’t laid eyes on him for three weeks, and that sure doesn’t have anything to do with . . . my sex choices.”

The sheriff wouldn’t look at him. Instead, he looked at Lucas, but said to Dell, “If you’re lying, you’ll go to jail. This is critical information.”

“I’m not lying. I’d swear in court,” Dell said. “I’d swear in church, for that matter.”

Now Carr looked at him, a level stare, and finally he said, “All right. Lucas, have you got anything more?”

“Not right now.”

“Thanks, Bob.”

“This is gonna ruin me here,” Dell said quietly. “I’ll have to leave.”

“Bob, you don’t . . .”

“Yeah, I will,” Dell said. “But I hate to, because I liked it. A lot. Had friends, not gays, just friends. That’s gone.” He turned and walked away, down to the sawmill.

“What do you think?” Carr asked as he watched him go.

“It sounded like the truth,” Lucas said. “But I’ve been lied to before and believed it.”

“Want to go back to Phil?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not quite yet. We’ve got both of them denying it and nothing to show otherwise. Let’s see what my Church friend has to say. I should hear from her tonight or tomorrow.”

“We don’t have time . . .” Carr started.

“If this is the answer to the time conflict, then it’s not critical to the case,” Lucas said. “Bergen would be out of it.”

“It’s a sad day,” Carr said. He looked back at the mill as Dell disappeared inside. “Bob wasn’t a bad guy.”

“Well, he could hang on if he’s got real friends.”

“Naw, he’s right,” Carr said. “With his job and all, he’s gonna have to leave, sooner or later.”

Lucas met Climpt at the Mill, a restaurant-motel built on the banks of a frozen creek. The old mill pond, below the restaurant windows, had been finished with a Zamboni to make a skating rink. A dozen men sat on stools at a dining counter, and another dozen people were scattered in twos and threes at tables around the dining room. Climpt was standing by the windows with a mug of chicken broth, looking down at the mill pond, where a solitary old man in a Russian greatcoat turned circles on the ice.

“Been out there since I got here,” Climpt said when Lucas stepped up beside him. “He’s eighty-five this year.”

“Every day now, for an hour, don’t matter how cold it is,” a waitress said, coming up to Lucas’ elbow. The old man was turning eights, building off the circles, his hands clenched behind his back, his face turned up to the sky. He was smiling, not fiercely, or as a matter of focus, but with simple distracted pleasure, moving with a rhythm, a beat, that came from the past. The waitress watched with them for a moment, then said, “Are you going to eat, or . . .”

“I could take a cup of soup,” Lucas said.

The waitress, still looking down at the old man on the rink, said, “He’s trying to remember what it was like when he was a kid; that’s what he says, anyway. I think he’s getting ready to die.”

She went away, and Climpt, voice pitched low, asked, “You got the warrant?”

“Yeah.”

“I brought a crowbar and a short sledge in case we have trouble getting in.”

“Good enough,” Lucas said. The waitress came back with a mug of the chicken broth, and asked, “You’re that detective Shelly brought in, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“We’re praying for you,” she said.

“That’s right,” said a man at the counter. He was heavyset, and a roll of fat on the back of his neck folded over the collar of his flannel shirt. Everybody in the place was looking at them. “You just find the sons of bitches,” he said. “After that, you can leave them to us.”

Lucas and Climpt rode to the Schoeneckers’ house in Lucas’ truck, hoping that it’d be less noticeable than a sheriff’s van. “So what do you know about these people?” Lucas asked on the way over.

“They’re private and quiet,” Climpt said. “Andy’s a bookkeeper, handles businesses in town. Judy stays home. They been here for twenty years, must be—come from over in Vilas County, I guess. You just never see them unless you see Andy going in or out of his office. They don’t socialize that I know of. I don’t know if they’re church people, but I don’t think so. Here, that’s their driveway.”

“Private house, too,” Lucas said.

The Schoeneckers lived on an acreage at the north end of town, in a neat yellow rambler with blue trim. The lawn was heavily landscaped, dotted with clusters of blue spruce that effectively sheltered the house from both wind and eyesight. Lucas drove up to the garage and parked.

An inch of unbroken snow lay in the driveway.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Climpt said. “Nobody going in or out.”

Lucas scuffed the snow with his boot. “They cleared it off after the last storm. This is all blown in.”

“Yeah. Where are they?”

They went to the front door and Lucas rang the bell. He rang it twice more, but the house felt empty. “Got good locks,” Climpt said, looking at the inner door through the glass of the storm door.

“Let’s try the back, see if there’s a door on the garage,” Lucas suggested. “They’re usually easier.”

They followed a snow-blown sidewalk around to the back. The locks on the back door were the same as on the front. Climpt tried the knob, rattled it, put his weight against the door. It didn’t budge. “Gonna have to break it,” he said. “Let me get the bar.”

“Hang on a second,” Lucas said. A power outlet with a steel cover was set into the garage wall, just at light-switch height. Lucas lifted the cover, looked inside. Nothing. A post lantern with a yellow bug light sat at the corner of a back deck. He waded through thigh-deep snow to get to it, looked into the four-sided lantern, then lifted one of the glass elements, fished around, and came up with a key.

“Fuckin’ rural-ass hayshakers,” he said, grinning at Climpt.

The key worked on the door into the garage. The door between the garage and the house was unlocked. Lucas led the way in, found the inside of the Schoeneckers’ house almost as cold as the outside. They walked through quickly, checking each room.

“Gone,” Lucas said from the master bedroom. The closets and dressers were half-empty. A stack of wire hangers lay on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. “Packed up.”

“And not coming back in a hurry, either,” Climpt said from down the hall. “Look at this.”

Climpt was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet. Lucas looked. The bowl was empty, but stained purple with antifreeze. “They winterized.”

“Yup. They’ll be gone a while.”

“So let’s go through it,” Lucas said.

They began with the parents’ bedroom and found nothing at all. The second bedroom was shared by the Schoeneckers’ daughters. Again, they came up empty. They worked through the bathroom, the living room, the dining room, took apart the kitchen, spent half an hour in the basement.

“Not a goddamned thing,” Climpt growled,
scratching his head. They were back in the living room. “I never seen a house so empty of anything.”

“Not a single videotape,” Lucas said. He walked back down the hall to the master bedroom, checked the television there. A tape player was built into the base. In the living room, a bigger television was hooked into a separate tape player. “They’ve got two videotape players and no tapes.”

“Could rent ’em,” Climpt said.