Winter Prey (26 page)

Carr was unhappy about the trip: “We need pressure up here. I could send somebody else.”

“I want to talk to this guy,” Lucas said. “Think about it: he may have seen our man. He may
know
him.”

“All right. But hurry, okay?” Carr said anxiously. “Have you heard about Phil?”

“Bergen? What?”

“He showed up for Mass. We’d been looking for him, couldn’t find him, then he drove up a half hour before Mass, wouldn’t talk to us. After his regular sermon at
Mass this morning, he said he needed to talk to us as friends and neighbors. And he just let it out: he said he knew about the talk in town. He said he had nothing to do with the LaCourts or John Mueller, but that the suspicion was killing him. He said that he’d gotten drunk the night we found him, and said last night he’d gone to Hayward and started drinking again. Said he got right to the edge, right to the place where he couldn’t get back, and he stopped. Said he talked to Jesus and stopped drinking. He asked us to pray for him.”

“And you believe him?” Lucas asked.

“Absolutely. But you’d have to have been there to understand it. The man spoke to Jesus Christ, and while he was talking to us, the Holy Spirit was there in the church. You could feel it—it was like a . . . warmth. When Phil was walking away from the altar after the Mass, he broke down and began to cry, and you could feel the Spirit descending.” Carr’s eyes were glazing as he relived it. Lucas stepped away, spooked.

“I got a call from my nun friend,” Lucas said. Carr wrenched himself back to the present. “She checked out some Church sources. They say Bergen’s straight. Never had any sexual interest in men. That’s not a hundred percent, of course.”

Carr said, “Which leaves us the question of Bob Dell.”

“We’ve got to talk to Bergen again. You can do it today or wait until I get back.”

“We’ll have to wait,” Carr said. “After this morning, Phil’s way beyond me.”

“I’ll try to get back tonight,” Lucas said. “But I might not. If I don’t, could you put somebody with Weather?”

“Yeah. I’ll have Gene go on over,” Carr said.

Weather declared John Mueller dead under suspicious circumstances and ordered the body shipped to a forensic pathologist in Milwaukee. Lucas told her he was leaving, explained, and said he would try to get back.

“That’s a twelve-hour round trip,” she said. “Take it easy.”

“Gene’ll take me into town. Could you catch a ride with Shelly?”

“Sure.” They were standing next to Climpt’s truck, a few feet from Climpt and Carr. When he turned to get in, she caught him and kissed him. “But hurry back.”

On the way back, Climpt said, “You ever thought about having kids?”

“I’ve got one. A daughter,” Lucas said. And then remembered Weather’s story about Climpt’s daughter.

Climpt nodded, said, “Lucky man. I had a daughter, but she was killed in an accident.”

“Weather told me about it,” Lucas said.

Climpt glanced at him and grinned.
He could have made a Marlboro commercial,
Lucas thought. “Everybody feels sorry for me. Sort of wears on you after a while, thirty years,” Climpt said.

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, what I was gonna say . . . I’m thinking I might kill this asshole for what he did to that LaCourt girl and now the Mueller kid. If we get him, and we get him in a place where we can do it, just sort of turn your head.” His voice was mild, careful.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, looking out the window.

“You don’t have to do it—just don’t stop me,” Climpt said.

“Won’t bring your daughter back, Gene.”

“I know that,” Climpt rasped. “Jesus Christ, Davenport.”

“Sorry.”

After a long silence, listening to the snow tires rumble over the rough roadway, Climpt said, “I just can’t deal with people that kill kids. Can’t even read about it in the newspaper or listen to it on TV. Killing a kid is the worst thing you can do. The absolute fuckin’ worst.”

The drive to Milwaukee was long and complicated, a web of country roads and two-lane highways into Green Bay, and then the quick trip south along the lake on I-43. Domeier
had given him a sequence of exits, and he got the right off-ramp the first time. The doughnut place was halfway down a flat-roofed shopping center that appeared to be in permanent recession. Lucas parked and walked inside.

The Milwaukee cop was a squat, red-faced man wearing a long wool coat and a longshoreman’s watch cap. He sat at the counter, dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee, charming an equally squat waitress who talked with a grin past a lipstick-smeared cigarette. When Lucas walked in she snatched the cigarette from her mouth and dropped her hand below counter level. Domeier looked over his shoulder, squinted, and said, “You gotta be Davenport.”

“Yeah. You’re telepathic?”

“You look like you been colder’n a well-digger’s ass,” Domeier said. “And I hear it’s been colder’n a well-digger’s ass up there.”

“Got that right,” Lucas said. They shook hands and Lucas scanned the menu above the counter. “Gimme two vanilla, one with coconut and one with peanuts, and a large coffee black,” he said, dropping onto a stool next to Domeier. The coffee shop made him feel like a metropolitan cop again.

The waitress went off to get the coffee, the cigarette back in her mouth. “It’s not so cold down here?” Lucas asked Domeier, picking up the conversation.

“Oh, it’s cold, six or eight below, but nothing like what you got,” Domeier said.

They talked while Lucas ate the doughnuts, feeling each other out. Lucas talked about Minneapolis, pension, and bennies.

“I’d like to go somewhere warmer if I could figure out some way to transfer pension and bennies,” Domeier said. “You know, someplace out in the Southwest, not too hot, not too cold. Dry. Someplace that needs a sex guy and’d give me three weeks off the first year.”

“A move sets you back,” Lucas said. “You don’t know the town, you don’t know the cops or the assholes. A place isn’t the same if you haven’t been on patrol.”

“I’d hate to go back in uniform,” Domeier said with an exaggerated shudder. “Hated that shit, giving out speeding tickets, breaking up fights.”

“And you got a great job right here,” the waitress said. “What would you do if you didn’t have Polaroid Peter?”

“Polaroid who?” asked Lucas.

“Peter,” Domeier said, dropping his face into his hands. “A guy who’s trying to kill me.”

The waitress cackled and Domeier said, “He’s like a flasher. He drops trow in the privacy of his own home, takes a Polaroid picture of his dick. Pretty average dick, I don’t know what he’s bragging about. Then he drops the picture around a high school or in a mall or someplace where there are bunches of teenage girls. A girl picks it up and zam—she’s flashed. We think he’s probably around somewhere, watching. Gettin’ off on it.”

Lucas had started laughing and nearly choked on a piece of doughnut. Domeier absently whacked him on the back. “What happens when a guy picks up the picture?” Lucas asked.

“Guys don’t,” Domeier said morosely. “Or if they do, they don’t tell anybody. We’ve got two dozen calls about these things, and every time the picture’s been picked up by a teenage girl. They see it laying there on the sidewalk, and they just gotta look. And if we got twenty-five calls, this guy must’ve struck a hundred times.”

“Probably five hundred if you got twenty-five calls,” Lucas said.

“Driving us nuts,” Domeier said, finishing his coffee.

“Big deal,” Lucas said. “Actually sounds kind of amusing.”

“Yeah?” Domeier looked at him. “You wanna tell that to the mayor?”

“Uh-oh,” Lucas said.

“He went on television and promised we’d get the guy soon,” Domeier said. “The whole sex unit’s having an argument about whether we oughta shit or go blind.”

Lucas started laughing again and said, “You ready?”

“Let’s go,” Domeier said.

Bobby McLain lived in a two-story apartment complex built of concrete blocks painted beige and brown, in a neighborhood that alternated shabby old brown-brick apartments with shabby new concrete-block apartments. The streets were bleak, snow piled over the curbs, big rusting sedans from the seventies parked next to the snowpiles. Even the trees looked dark and crabbed. Domeier rode with Lucas, and pointed out the hand-painted Chevy van under a security light on the west side of the complex. “That’s Bobby’s. It’s painted with a roller.”

“What color is that?” Lucas asked as they pulled in beside it.

“Off-grape,” Domeier said. “You don’t see that many off-grape vans around. Not without Dead Head stickers, anyway.”

They climbed out, looked up and down the street. Nobody in sight: not a soul other than themselves. At the door, they could hear a television going inside. Lucas knocked, and the television sound died.

“Who is it?” The voice squeaked like a new adolescent’s.

“Domeier. Milwaukee PD.” After a moment of silence, Domeier said, “Open the fuckin’ door, Bobby.”

“What do you want?”

Lucas stepped to the left, noticed Domeier edging to the right, out of the direct line of the door.

“I want you to open the fuckin’ door,” Domeier said.

He kicked it, and the voice on the other side said, “Okay, okay, okay. Just one goddamn minute.”

A few seconds later the door opened. Bobby McLain was a fat young man with thick glasses and short blond hair. He wore loose khaki trousers and a white crew-neck t-shirt that had been laundered to a dirty yellow. He sat in an aging wheelchair, hand-powered.

“Come in and shut the door,” he said, wheeling himself backwards.

They stepped inside, Domeier first. McLain’s apartment smelled of old pizza and cat shit. The floor was covered with a stained shag carpet that might once have been apricot-colored. The living room, where they were standing, had been converted to a computer office, with two large Macintoshes sitting on library tables, surrounded by paper and other unidentifiable machines.

Domeier was focused on the kitchen. Lucas pushed the door shut with his foot. “Somebody just run out the back?” Domeier asked.

“No, no,” McLain said, and he looked around toward the kitchen. “Really . . .”

Domeier relaxed, said, “Okay,” and stepped toward the kitchen and looked in. Without looking back at McLain he said, “The guy there is named Davenport, he’s a deputy sheriff from Ojibway County, up north, and he’s investigating a multiple murder. He thinks you might be involved.”

“Me?” McLain’s eyes had gone round, and he stared up at Lucas. “What?”

“Some people were killed because of one of your porno magazines, Bobby,” Lucas said. A chair next to one of the Macintoshes was stacked with computer paper. Lucas picked up the paper, tossed it on the table, and turned the chair around to sit on it. His face was only a foot from McLain’s. “We only got a piece of one page. We need the rest of the magazine,” he said.

Domeier stepped over to the crippled man and handed him a Xerox copy of the original page. At the same time he took one of the handles on the back of McLain’s wheelchair and jiggled it. McLain glanced up nervously and then went back to the Xerox copy.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“C’mon, Bobby, we’re talking heavy-duty shit here—like prison,” Domeier said. He jiggled the chair handle again. “We all know where the goddamn thing came from.”

McLain turned the page in his hand, glanced at the blank back side, then said, “Maybe.” Domeier glanced at Lucas and then Bobby said, “I gotta know what’s in it for me.”

Domeier leaned close and said, “To start with, I won’t dump you outa this chair on your fat physically challenged butt.”

“And you get a lot of goodwill from the cops,” Lucas said. “This stuff you print, kiddie porn, this shit could be a crime. And we can seize anything that’s instrumental to a crime. If we get pissed, you could say good-bye to these computers.”

Bobby looked nervously at the Xerox copy, then turned his head to Domeier and said irritably, “Quit fuckin’ with my chair.”

“Where’s this magazine?”

McLain shook his head, then said, “Down the hall, goddammit.”

He pivoted his chair and rolled down a short hallway past the bathroom to the door of the only bedroom, wheeled inside. The bedroom was chaotic; pieces of clothing were draped over chairs and the chest of drawers, the floor was littered with computer magazines and books on printing. A high-intensity reading light was screwed to the corner of a bed; the windows were covered with sheets of black paper thumbtacked in place. McLain pushed a jumble of old canvas gym shoes out of the way and jerked open a double-wide closet. The closet was piled chest-high with pulp black-and-white magazines. “You’ll have to look through it, but this is all I got,” he said. “There should be three or four copies of each issue.”