Winter Prey (11 page)

“Mph. You say Lisa was scared? How do you know she was scared?”

“Because she showed it to me,” John said.

“What?” Lucas frowned, missing something.

“She’s a girl. And the picture—you know . . .” John twisted in his chair. “She wouldn’t show something like
that
to a boy if she wasn’t scared about it.”

“Okay.” Lucas ran over the questions one more time, probed the contents of the picture the boy had seen, but got nothing more. “Is your dad out at his shop?”

“Sure—I guess,” the kid said, nodding.

“Did you tell him about the picture?”

“No.” John looked uncomfortable. “I mean . . . how could I tell him about that?”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Let’s ride out there and I’ll tell him about you talking to us. Just so everything’s okay. And I think we ought to keep it between us.”

“Sure. I’m not going to tell anybody else,” John said. “Not about that,” he said earnestly, eyes big.

“Good,” Lucas said. He relaxed and smiled. “Go get your stuff, and let’s go out to your place.”

“Did we do good?” Rusty asked lazily when John had gone.

“Yeah, you did good,” Lucas said.

The two deputies slapped hands and Lucas said, “You’re all done with Lisa’s friends?”

“Yeah, all done,” Rusty said.

“Great. Now do this other kid’s friends. The Harper kid. Look for connections between Lisa and Harper,” Lucas said. “And if this picture was passed around, find out who passed it.”

Lucas used a pay phone in the teachers’ lounge to call the sheriff’s office. “You sound funny,” he said when Carr came on.

“You’re being relayed. What’d you need?”

“Are we scrambled?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll talk to you later. Something’s come up.”

“I’m on my way to the LaCourts’.”

“I’m heading that way, so I’ll see you there,” Lucas said. He hung up momentarily, then redialed the sheriff’s office, got Helen, the office manager, and asked her to start digging up the files on the Harper murder.

John Mueller had gone to put his books away and get his coat and boots. As Lucas waited for him at the front door, a bell rang and kids flooded into the hallways. Another, nonstudent head bobbed above the others in the stream, caught his eye. The doctor. He took a step toward her. He’d been a while without a woman friend; thought he could get away from the need by making a hermit of himself, by working out. He was wrong, judging from the tension in his chest . . . unless he was having a heart attack. Weather was pulling on her cap as she came toward him, and oversized mittens with leather palms. She nodded, stopped and said, “Anything good?”

“Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head.
Not pretty,
he thought,
but very attractive. A little rough, like she might enjoy the occasional fistfight. Who is she dating? There must be someone. The guy is probably an asshole; probably has little tassels on his shoes and combs them straight in the morning, before he puts the mousse on his hair.

“I was doing TB patches down there.” She nodded back down the hall, toward a set of open double doors. A gymnasium. “And one kid was scared to death that somebody was going to come kill him in the night.”

Lucas shrugged. “That’s the way it goes.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was wrong.

“Mr. Liberal,” she said, her voice flat.

“Hey, nothing I can do about it except catch the asshole,” Lucas said, irritated. “Look, I didn’t really . . .” He was about to go on but she turned away.

“Do that,” she said, and pushed through the door to the outside.

Annoyed, Lucas leaned against the entryway bulletin board, watching her walk to her car. Had a nice walk, he decided. When he turned back to the school, looking for John, he saw a yellow-haired girl watching
him.

She stood in a classroom doorway, staring at him with a peculiar intensity, as though memorizing his face. She was tall, but slight, angular with just the first signs of an adolescent roundness. And she was pale as paper. The most curious thing was her hair, which was an opaque yellow, the color of a sunflower petal, and close-cropped. With her pointed chin, large tilted eyes and short hair, she had a waifish look, like she should be selling matches. She wore a homemade dress of thin print material, cotton, with short sleeves: summer wear. She held three books close to her chest. When he looked at her, she held his eyes for a moment, a gaze with a solid sexuality to it, speculative, but at the same time, hurt, then turned and walked away.

John arrived in a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood and mittens. “Do you have a cop car?” he asked.

“No. A four-by-four,” Lucas said.

“How come?”

“I’m new here.”

John’s father was a mild, round-faced man in a yellow wool sweater and corduroys. “How come you didn’t tell me?” he asked his son. He sat on a high stool. On his bench, a fox
skin was half-stretched over a wooden form. John shrugged, looked away.

“Embarrassed,” Lucas said. “He did the right thing, today. We didn’t want you to think we were grilling him. We’d have called you, to get you in, but I was right there and he was . . .”

“That’s okay, as long as John’s not in trouble,” his father said. He patted John on the head.

“No, no. He did the right thing. He’s a smart kid,” Lucas said.

The picture was critical. He felt it, knew it. Whistled to himself as he drove out to the LaCourt house. Progress.

Helper was working in the fire station parking lot, rolling hose onto a reel, when Lucas passed on his way to the LaCourts’. A sheriff’s car was parked in a cleared space to one side of the LaCourts’ driveway, and a deputy waved him through. A half-dozen men were working around or simply standing around the house, which was tented with sheets of Army canvas, and looked like an olive-drab haystack. Power lines, mounted on makeshift poles, ran through gaps in the canvas. Lucas parked at the garage and hurried inside. Two sheriff’s deputies were warming themselves at the stove, along with a crime tech from Madison.

“Seen the sheriff?” Lucas asked.

“He’s in the house,” one of the deputies said. To the tech he said, “That’s Davenport.”

“Been looking for you,” the tech said, walking over. “I’m the lab chief here . . . Tod Crane.” Crane looked like he might be starving. His fingers and wrists were thin, bony, and the skin on his balding head seemed to be stretched over his skull like a banjo covering. When they shook hands, an unexpected muscle showed up: he had a grip like a pair of channel-lock pliers.

“How’s it going?” Lucas asked.

“It’s a fuckin’ mess,” Crane said. He held up his hands, flexed them. They were bone-white and trembling with cold. “Whoever did it spread gas-oil premix all over the house. When he touched it off, Boom. We’re finding stuff
blown right through some of the internal walls.”

“Premix from the boats?”

“Yeah, that’s what we think. Maybe some straight gas from the snowmobiles. We’ve found three six-gallon cans. The LaCourts had two boats, a pontoon and a fishing rig, and there aren’t any gas cans with them. And premix, you put it in a bottle with a wick, it’s called a Molotov cocktail.”

“Any chance our man was hurt? Or burned?” Lucas asked.

“No way to tell, but he’d have to be careful,” Crane said. “He spread around quite a bit of gas. We’ve got an arson guy coming up this afternoon to see if we can isolate where the fire started.”

Lucas nodded. “I’m looking for a piece of paper,” he said. “It was a picture, apparently torn from a magazine or a newspaper. It shows a naked man and a naked boy on the bed behind him. It might be in the house.”

“Yeah? That’s new?” Crane’s eyebrows went up.

“Yup.”

“Think he was trying to burn it up?” Crane asked.

“The thought crossed my mind.”

“I’ll tell you right now, there were a couple of filing cabinets that were dumped and doused with gas, and he shot some gas into a closet full of paper stuff, photographs, like that. He did the same thing on the chests of drawers in the parents’ bedroom, after he dumped them.”

“So maybe . . .”

“There ought to be some reason he torched the place. I mean, besides being nuts,” Crane said. “If he’d just killed them and walked, it might of been a day or two before anybody found them. He’d have time to set up an alibi. This way he tipped his hand right away.”

“So find the paper,” Lucas said.

“We’ll look,” Crane said. “Hell, it’s nice to have something specific to look for.”

Carr came in while they were talking. He’d mellowed since morning, a small satisfied smile on his face. “They’re gone,
the reporters. Most of them, anyway,” he said. “Poof.”

“Probably found a better murder,” Lucas said.

“I talked to Helen, back at the office,” Carr said. “What’s this about Jim Harper?”

“Rusty and Dusty found a kid at the junior high who says Jim Harper posed for sex photos with an adult male,” Lucas said. “That’d be a long-term felony and might be worth killing somebody for. The picture came out of a pulp-paper magazine or newspaper. Some kids got hold of it and it may have been passed around the school. Lisa LaCourt had it last. She took it home on Thursday and showed it to this kid who talked to me.”

“Who is it? The kid at the school?”

“John Mueller. His father’s a taxidermist,” Lucas said.

Carr nodded. “Sure, I know him. That’s an okay family. Damn, these things could be tied.”

Lucas shrugged. “It’s a possibility. The Harper kid’s parents, are they around?”

“One of them is, the old man, Russ. The wife left years ago, went out to California. She was back for the funeral, though.”

“What does Harper do?” Lucas asked.

“Runs an Amoco station out at Knuckle Lake.”

“Okay, I’ll head out there.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Carr shook his head. “Better not go alone. Are you gonna be up late?”

“Sure.”

“Harper’s open till midnight. He’d never talk to us if he didn’t have to: never to a cop. Why don’t I pick up a search warrant for Jim Harper’s stuff out at his house, and we’ll get a couple deputies and go out there late? I got church.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Harper’s an asshole?”

“He is,” Carr said, nodding. And he said, “Lord, if these two cases are tied together and we could nail them down in a day or two . . . that’d make me a very happy man.”