Winter Prey (4 page)

“Yes.” She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.

“Six shells, unfired,” he said. “Shit.”

“Unfired?” Carr asked.

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s the murder weapon. The killer wouldn’t reload and then drop it on the floor . . . at least I can’t think why he would.”

“So?” Weather looked up at him.

“So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand. She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble,” Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: “You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway.”

“I’ll get it going,” Carr said. Then: “I n-n-need some coffee.”

“I think you’re fairly hypothermic, Shelly,” Weather said. “What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy was walking up the driveway. “I got those tarps, Sheriff. They’re right behind me in a Guard truck.”

“Good. Get some help and cover up the whole works,” Carr said, waving at the house. “There’ll be guys in the garage.” To Lucas he said, “I got some canvas sheets from the National Guard guys and we’re gonna cover the whole house until the guys from Madison get here.”

“Good.” Lucas nodded. “You really need the lab guys for this. Don’t let anybody touch anything. Not even the bodies.”

The garage was warm, with deputies and firemen standing around an old-fashioned iron stove stoked with oak splits. The deputy who’d been doing the filming spotted them and
came over with one of Lucas’ Thermos jugs.

“I saved some,” he said.

“Thanks, Tommy.” The sheriff nodded, took a cup, hand shaking, passed it to Lucas, then took a cup for himself. “Let’s get over in the corner where we can talk,” he said. Carr walked around the nose of LaCourt’s old Chevy station wagon, away from the gathering of deputies and firemen, turned, took a sip of coffee. He said, “We’ve got a problem.” He stopped, then asked, “You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

“Dominus vobiscum,” Lucas said. “So what?”

“You are? I haven’t been in the Church long enough to remember the Latin business,” Carr said. He seemed to think about that for a moment, sipped coffee, then said, “I converted a few years back. I was a Lutheran until I met Father Phil. He’s the parish priest in Grant.”

“Yeah? I don’t have much interest in the Church anymore.”

“Hmph. You should consider . . .”

“Tell me about the problem,” Lucas said impatiently.

“I’m trying to, but it’s complicated,” Carr said. “Okay. We figure whoever killed these folks must’ve started the fire. It was snowing all afternoon—we had about four inches of new snow. When the firemen got here, though, the snow’d just about quit. But Frank’s body had maybe a half-inch of snow on it. That’s why I had them put the tarp over it, I thought we could fix an exact time. It wasn’t long between the time he was killed and the fire. But it was
some
time. That’s important.
Some
time. And now you tell me the girl might have been tortured . . .
more
time.”

“Okay.” Lucas nodded, nodding at the emphasis.

“Whoever started the fire did it with gasoline,” Carr said. “You can still smell it, and the house went up like a torch. Maybe the killer brought the gas with him or maybe he used Frank’s. There’re a couple boats and a snowmobile out in the back shed but there aren’t any gas cans with them, and no cans in here. The cans’d most likely have some gas in them.”

“Anyway, the house went up fast,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. The folks across the lake were watching television. They say that one minute there was nothing out the window but the snow. The next minute there was a fireball. They called the firehouse.”

“The one I came by? Down at the corner?”

“Yeah. There were two guys down there. They were making a snack and one of them saw a black Jeep go by. Just a few seconds later, the alarm came in. They thought the Jeep belonged to Phil . . . the priest. Father Philip Bergen, the pastor at All Souls.”

“Did it?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. They said it looked like Phil was coming out of the lake road. So I called him and asked him if he’d seen anything unusual. A fire or somebody in the road. And he said no. Then, before I could say anything else, he said he was here, at the LaCourts’.”

“Here?” Lucas eyebrows went up.

“Yeah. Here. He said everything was all right when he left.”

“Huh.” Lucas thought about it. “Are we sure the time is right?”

“It’s right. One of the firemen was standing at the microwave with one of those prefab ham sandwiches. They take two minutes to cook and it was about ready. The other one said, ‘There goes Father Phil, hell of a night to be out.’ Then the microwave alarm went off, the guy got his sandwich out, and before he could unwrap it, the alarm came in.”

“That’s tight.”

“Yeah. There wasn’t enough time for Frank to have that snow pile up on him. Not if Phil’s telling the truth.”

“Time is weird,” Lucas said. “Especially in an emergency. If it
wasn’t
just a minute, if it was five minutes, then this Father Phil
could
have . . .”

“That’s what I figured . . . but doesn’t look that way.” Carr shook his head, swirled coffee around the coffee cup, then set it on the hood of the Chevy and flexed his fingers, trying to work some warmth back in them. “I got
the firemen and went over it a couple of times. There just isn’t time.”

“So the priest . . .”

“He said he left the house and drove straight out to the highway and then into town. I asked him how long it took him to get from the house, here, to the highway, and he said three or four minutes. It’s about a mile, so that’s about right, with the snow and everything.”

“Hmp.”

“But if he had something to do with it, why’d he admit being here? That doesn’t make any gol-darned sense,” the sheriff said.

“Have you hit him with this? Sat him down, gone over it?”

“No. I’m not real experienced with interrogation. I can take some kid who’s stolen a car or ripped off a beer sign and sit him down by one of the holding cells and scare the devil out of him, but this would be . . . different. I don’t know about this kind of stuff. Killers.”

“Did you tell him about the time bind?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet.”

“Good.”

“I was stumped,” Carr said, turning to stare blankly at the garage wall, remembering. “When he said he was here, I couldn’t think what to say. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you.’ He wanted to come out when we told him the family was dead, do the last rites, but we told him to stay put, in town. We didn’t want him to . . .”

“ . . . Contaminate his memory.”

“Yeah.” Carr nodded, picked up the coffee he’d set on the car hood, and finished it.

“How about the firemen? Would they have any reason to lie about it?”

Carr shook his head. “I know them both, and they’re not particular friends. So it wouldn’t be like a conspiracy.”

“Okay.”

Two firemen came through the door. The first was encased in rubber and canvas, and on top of that, an inch-thick layer of ice.

“You look like you fell in the lake,” Carr said. “You must be freezing to death.”

“It was the spray. I’m not cold, but I can’t move,” the fireman said. The second fireman said, “Stand still.” The fireman stood like a fat rubber scarecrow and began chipping the ice away with a wooden mallet and a cold chisel.

They watched the ice chips fly for a moment, then Carr said, “Something else. When he went by the fire station, he was towing a snowmobile trailer. He’s big in one of the snowmobile clubs—he’s the president, in fact, or was last year. They’d had a run today, out of a bar across the lake. So he was out on the lake with his sled.”

“And those tracks came up from the lake.”

“Where nobody’d be without a sled.”

“Huh. So you think the priest had something to do with it?”

Carr looked worried. “No. Absolutely not. I know him: he’s a friend of mine. But I can’t figure it out. He doesn’t lie, about anything. He’s a moral man.”

“If a guy’s under pressure . . .”

Carr shook his head. Once they’d been playing golf, he said, both of them fierce competitors. And they were dead even after seventeen. Bergen put his tee shot into a group of pines on the right side of the fairway, made a great recovery and was on the green in two. He two-putted for par, while Carr bogied the hole, and lost.

“I was bragging about his recovery to the other guys in the locker room, and he just looked sadder and sadder. When we were walking down to the bar he grabbed me, and he looked like he was about to cry. His second shot had gone under one of the evergreens, he said, and he’d kicked it out. He wanted to win so bad. But cheating, it wrecked him. He couldn’t handle it. That’s the kind of guy he is. He wouldn’t steal a dime, he wouldn’t steal a golf stroke. He’s absolutely straight, and incapable of being anything else.”

The fireman with the chisel and mallet laid the tools on the floor, grabbed the front of the other fireman’s rubber coat, and ripped it open.

“That’s got it,” said the second man. “I can take it from here.” He looked at Carr: “Fun in the great outdoors, huh?”

The doctor was edging between the wall and the nose of the station wagon, followed by a tall man wrapped in a heavy arctic parka. The doctor had light hair spiked with strands of white, cut efficiently short. She was small, but athletic with wide shoulders, a nose that was a bit too big and a little crooked, bent to the left. She had high cheekbones and dark-blue eyes, a mouth that was wide and mobile. She had just a bit of the brawler about her, Lucas thought, with the vaguely Oriental cast that Slavs often carry. She was not pretty, but she was strikingly attractive. “Is this a secret conversation?” she asked. She was carrying a cup of coffee.

“No, not really,” Carr said, glancing at Lucas. He gave a tiny backwards wag of his head that meant,
Don’t say anything about the priest.

The tall man said, “Shelly, I hit every place on the road. Nobody saw anything connected, but we’ve got three people missing yet. I’m trying to track them down now.”

“Thanks, Gene,” Carr said, and the tall man headed toward the door. To Lucas, he said, “My lead investigator.”

Lucas nodded, and looked at Weather. “I don’t suppose there was any reason to do body temps.”

The doctor shook her head, took another sip of coffee. Lucas noticed that she wore no rings. “Not on the two women. The fire and the water and the ice and snow would mess everything up. Frank was pretty bundled up, though, and I did take a temp on him. Sixty-four degrees. He hadn’t been dead that long.”

“Huh,” said Carr, glancing at Lucas.

The doctor caught it and looked from Lucas to Carr and asked, “Is that critical?”

“You might want to write it down somewhere,” Carr said.

“There’s a question about how long they were dead before the fire started,” Lucas said.

Weather was looking at him oddly. “Maddog, right?”

“What?”

“You were the guy who killed the Maddog after he sliced up all those women. And you were in that fight with those Indian guys.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”
The Crows coming out of that house in the dark, .45s in their hands . . . . Why’d she have to bring that up?

“I had a friend who did that New York cop, the woman who was shot in the chest? I can’t remember her name, but at the time she was pretty famous.”

“Lily Rothenburg.”
Damn. Sloan on the steps of Hennepin General, white-faced, saying, “Got your shit together? . . . Lily’s been shot.” Sweet Lily.

“Oh, yes,” Weather said, nodding. “I knew it was a flower name. She’s back in New York?”

“Yeah. She’s a captain now. Your friend was a redheaded surgeon? I remember.”

“Yup. That’s her. And she was there when the big shoot-out happened. She says it was the most exciting night of her career. She was doing two ops at the same time, going back and forth between rooms.”