Winter Prey (15 page)

“An interesting idea,” she said. “The problem isn’t you, the problem is Being.”

“My God, that
does
make me sound like an asshole.”

“Carr seems like a decent sort,” Lucas said.

“He is. Very decent,” Weather agreed.

“Religious.”

“Very. You want pie? They have key lime.”

“I’ll take coffee; I’m bloated,” Lucas said.

Weather waved at the waitress, said,
two coffees,
and turned back to Lucas. “Are you a Catholic?”

“Everybody asks me that. I am, but I’m seriously lapsed,” he said.

“So you won’t be going to the Tuesday meetings, huh?”

“No.”

“But you’re going over tonight, to talk to Phil.” She made it a statement.

“I really don’t . . .”

“It’s all over town,” Weather said. “He’s the main suspect.”

“He’s not,” Lucas said with a touch of asperity.

“That’s not what I heard,” she said. “Or everybody else hears, for that matter.”

“Jesus, that’s just wrong,” Lucas said, shaking his head.

“If you say so,” she said.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Why should I? You’re going to question him again tonight after Shelly gets out of the Tuesday service.”

The coffee came and Lucas waited until the waitress was gone before he picked up the conversation. “Is there anything that everybody in town doesn’t know?”

“Not much,” Weather admitted. “There are sixty people working for the sheriff and only about four thousand people in town, in winter. You figure it out. And have you wondered why Shelly’s going to Tuesday service when he should be questioning Phil?”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Lucas said.

“Because he wants to see Jeanine Perkins. He and Jeanine have been screwing at motels in Hayward and Park Falls.”

“And everybody in town knows?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet. But they will.”

“Carr’s married.”

“Yup. His wife is mad,” Weather said.

“Uh . . .”

“She has a severe psychological affliction. She can’t stop doing housework.”

“What?” He started to laugh.

“It’s true,” Weather said solemnly. “It’s not funny, buster. She washes the floors and the walls and the blinds and the toilets and sinks and pipes and the washer and drier and the furnace. And then she washes all the clothes over and over. Once she washed her own hands so many times that she rubbed a part of the skin off and we had to treat her for burns.”

“My God.” He still thought it was mildly funny.

“Nothing anybody can do about it. She’s in therapy, but it doesn’t help,” Weather said. “A friend told me that she won’t have sex with Shelly because it’s dirty. I mean, not psychologically dirty, but you know—dirty. Physically dirty.”

“So Carr solves his problem by having it off with a woman in his Pentecostal group.”

“
Having it off
is such a romantic way to put it; British, isn’t it?” she teased.

“You don’t act like a doctor,” Lucas said.

“You mean because I gossip and flirt?”

“Mmmm.”

“You have to live here a while,” she said with a hint of tension in her voice. She looked around the room, at the people talking over the red votive candles. “There’s nothing to do but work. Nothing.”

“Then why stay?”

“I have to,” she said. “My dad came here from Finland, and spent his life working in the woods, in the timber. And sailing on the lakes. Never had any money. But I maxed out in everything at school.”

“You went to the high school here in Grant?”

“Yup. Anyway, I was trying to save money to go to college, but it looked tough. Then some of the teachers got together and chipped in, and this old fart county commissioner who I didn’t know from Adam called down to Madison and pulled some strings and got me a full-load scholarship. And they kept the money coming all the way through medical school. I paid it all back. I even set up a little scholarship fund at the high school while I was
working in Minneapolis, but that’s not what everybody wanted.”

“They wanted you back here,” Lucas said.

“Yes.” She nodded. She picked up her empty wineglass and turned it in her hands. “Everything around here is timber and tourism, with a little farming. The roads are not much good and there’s a lot of drinking. The timber accidents are terrible—you ought to see somebody caught by a log when it’s rolling down to a sawmill. And with tractor accidents and people run over with boat propellers . . . They had an old guy here who could do enough general surgery to get you on a helicopter to Duluth or down to the Cities, and as long as he was here I didn’t feel like I had to come back.”

“Then he retired.”

“Kicked off,” Weather said. “Heart attack. He was sixty-three. He ate six pancakes with butter and bacon every morning, cream in his coffee, cheeseburger for lunch, steak for dinner, drank a pint of Johnnie Walker every night and smoked like a chimney. It was amazing he made it as long as he did.”

“They couldn’t get anybody else?”

She laughed, not a pleasant laugh, looked out the window at the snow: “Are you kidding? Look outside. It’s twenty-five below zero and still going down and the movie theater is closed in the winter.”

“So what do you do for entertainment?”

“That’s a little personal,” she said, grinning, reaching across the table to touch the back of his hand, “for this stage of our relationship.”

“What?”

CHAPTER
8

The dinner left Lucas vaguely mystified but not unhappy. They said good-bye in the restaurant parking lot, awkwardly. He didn’t want to leave. The talk ran on in the snow, the air so cold that it felt like after-shave. Finally they stepped apart and Weather got in her Jeep.

“See you,” she said.

“Yeah.” Definitely.

Lucas watched her go, pulled his hat on, and drove the six blocks to the church. Carr was waiting in the vestibule with two women, the three of them chatting brightly, nodding. One of the women was as large as Lucas and blond, and wore a red knitted hat with snowflakes and reindeer on it. Her coat carried a button that said
Free the Animals.
The other woman was small and dark, with gray streaks in her hair, lines at the corners of her eyes. Carr called the dark one
Jeanine
as Lucas came up.

“This is Lucas Davenport . . .” Carr was saying.

“Lieutenant Davenport,” Jeanine said. She had soft, warm hands and a strong grip. “And our friend Mary . . .”

Mary fawned and Lucas retreated a couple of steps, said to Carr, “We better go.”

“Yeah, sure,” Carr said reluctantly. “Ladies, we gotta work.”

They walked out together and Lucas asked Carr, “Did you talk to Bergen?”

“Not myself—Helen Arris got him. I had to go back out to the house. They’re taking the place apart.”

“How about the Harper warrant?”

“Got it.” Carr patted his chest and then yawned. “It’s getting to be a long day.”

“How about the Harper place? What can we do?”

“We’re allowed to go into the kid’s room and the other principal rooms of the house, not including any office or Harper’s own bedroom if that’s separate from the kid’s. We can look at anything we believe is the kid’s, or that Harper says is the kid’s.”

“I’d like to poke around.”

“So would I, but the judge didn’t want to hear about it,” Carr said. “He was gonna confine us to the boy’s room, but I got him to include his other personal effects—we can look inside closets and cupboards and so on, in the main rooms. Of course, if we
see
anything that’s clearly illegal . . .”

“Yeah. By the way, Gene Climpt . . .”

“ . . . invited himself along, which is fine with me. Gene’s a tough old bird. And Lacey’s coming; said he didn’t want to miss it.”

They’d walked around the church and started down the carefully shoveled sidewalk to the rectory.

“How many accidents has Bergen had? Car accidents?” Lucas asked.

Carr looked at him, frowning, and said, “Why?”

“I heard you fixed a couple of drunk-driving tickets for him,” Lucas said. “I just wondered if he ever hit anything.”

“Where’d you hear . . .”

“Rumors, Shelly. Has he ever hit anything?”

They’d stopped on the sidewalk and Carr stared at him for a moment and said, finally, “I got no leverage with you. You don’t need the job.”

“So . . .”

Carr started down the walk again. “He was in a one-car accident three years ago, hit a pylon at the end of a bridge, totaled out the car. He was drunk. He got caught two other times, drunk. One was pretty marginal. The other time he was on his butt.”

“Gotta be careful about your relationship with him,” Lucas said. “People are talking about this. The driving problems.”

“Who?”

“Just people,” Lucas said.

Carr sighed. “Darn it, Lucas.”

“Bergen lied to me yesterday,” Lucas said. “He told me he was a good driver . . . a small lie but it kind of throws some doubt on the rest of what he said.”

“I don’t understand it,” Carr said. “I know in my soul that he’s innocent. I just can’t understand what he’s hiding. If he’s hiding anything. Maybe we just don’t understand the sequence.”

They were at the rectory door. Carr pushed the doorbell and they fell silent, hands in their pockets, breathing long gouts of steam out into the night air. After a moment Carr frowned, pushed the doorbell again. They could hear the chimes inside.

“I know he’s here,” Carr said. He stepped back from the porch, looked at the lighted windows, then pushed the doorbell a third time. There was a noise from inside, a thump, and Carr stood on his tiptoes to peer through the small window set in the door.

“Oh, no,” he groaned. He pulled open the storm door and pushed through the inner door, Lucas trailing behind. The priest stood in the hallway, leaning on one wall, looking at them. He was wearing a white t-shirt, pulled out of his black pants, and gray wool socks. His hair stood almost straight up, as though he’d been electrocuted. He was holding a glass and the room smelled of bourbon.

“You idiot,” Carr said quietly. He walked across the room and took the glass from the priest, who let it go, his hand slack. Carr turned back toward Lucas as though looking for a place to throw it.

“You know what they’re saying,” Bergen said at Carr’s back. “They’re saying I did it.”

“Jesus, we’ve been trying . . .” Lucas started.

“Don’t you blaspheme in this house!” the priest shouted.

“I’ll kick your ass if you give me trouble,” Lucas shouted back. He crossed the carpet, walking around Carr, who caught at his coat sleeve, and confronted the priest: “What happened out at the LaCourts’?”

“They were alive when I saw them!” Bergen shouted.

“They were alive—every one of them!”

“Did you have a relationship with Claudia LaCourt? Now or ever?”

The priest seemed startled: “A relationship? You mean sexual?”

“That’s what I mean,” Lucas snapped. “Were you screwing her?”

“No. That’s ridiculous.” The wind went out of him, and he staggered to a La-Z-Boy and dropped into it, looking up at Lucas in wonder. “I mean, I’ve never . . . What are you asking?”

Carr had stepped into the kitchen, came back with an empty Jim Beam bottle, held it up to Lucas.

“I’ve heard rumors that the two of you might be involved.”

“No, no,” Bergen said, shaking his head. He seemed genuinely astonished. “When I was in the seminary, I slept with a woman from a neighboring college. I also got drunk and was talked into . . . having sex with a prostitute. One time. Just once. After I was ordained, never. I never broke my vows.”

His face had gone opaque, either from whiskey or calculation.

“Have you ever had a homosexual involvement?”

“Davenport . . .” Carr said, a warning in his voice.

“
What?
” Bergen was back on his feet now, face flushed, furious.

“Yes or no,” Lucas pressed.

“No. Never.”

Lucas couldn’t tell if Bergen was lying or telling the
truth. He sounded right, but his eyes had cleared, and Lucas could see him calculating, weighing his responses. “How about the booze? Were you drinking that night, at the LaCourts’?”

The priest turned and let himself fall back into the chair. “No. Absolutely not. This is my first bottle in a year. More than a year.”

“There’s something wrong with the time,” Lucas said. “Tell us what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know,” Bergen said. He dropped his head to his hands, then ran his hands halfway up to the top of his head and pulled out at the hair until it was again standing up in spikes. “I keep trying to find ways . . . I wasn’t drinking.”

“The firemen. Do you have any trouble with them?”

Bergen looked up, eyes narrowing. “Dick Westrom doesn’t particularly care for me. I take my business to the other hardware store, it belongs to one of the parishioners. The other man, Duane . . . I hardly know him. I can’t think what he’d have against me. Maybe something I don’t know about.”

“How about the people who reported the fire?” Lucas asked, looking across the room at Carr. Carr was still holding the bottle of Jim Beam as though he were presenting evidence to a jury.

“They’re okay,” Carr said. “They’re out of it. They saw the fire, made the call. They’re too old and have too many physical problems to be involved.”

The three of them looked at each other, waiting for another question, but there were none. The time simply didn’t work. Lucas searched Bergen’s face. He found nothing but the waxy opacity.

“All right,” he said finally. “Maybe there was another Jeep. Maybe Duane saw Father Bergen’s Jeep earlier, going down the lake road, and it stuck in his mind and when he saw a car go by, he thought it was yours.”

“He didn’t see a Jeep earlier,” Carr said, shaking his head. “I asked him that—if he’d seen Phil’s Jeep go down the lake road.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, still studying the priest. “Maybe . . . I don’t know.”

Carr looked at Bergen. “I’m dumping the bottle, Phil. And I’m calling Joe.”

Bergen’s head went down. “Okay.”

“Who’s Joe?” Lucas asked.

“His AA sponsor,” Carr said. “We’ve had this problem before.”

Bergen looked up at Carr, his voice rasping: “Shelly, I don’t know if this guy believes me,” he said, tipping his head at Lucas. “But I’ll tell you: I’d swear on the Holy Eucharist that I had nothing to do with the LaCourts.”

“Yeah,” Carr said. He reached out and Bergen took his hand, and Carr pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let’s call Joe, get him over here.”

Joe was a dark man, with a drooping black mustache and heavy eyebrows. He wore an old green Korean War-style olive-drab billed hat with earflaps. He glanced at Lucas, nodded at Carr and said, “How bad?”

“Drank at least a fifth,” Carr said. “He’s gone.”

“Goddammit.” Joe looked up at the house, then back to Carr. “He’d gone more’n a year. It’s the rumors coming out of your office, Shelly.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll try to stop it, but I don’t know . . .”

“Better more’n try. Phil’s got the thirst as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen.” Joe stepped toward the door, turned, about to say something else, when Bergen pulled the door open behind him.

“Shelly!” he called. He was too loud. “Telephone—it’s your office. They say it’s an emergency.”

Carr looked at Lucas and said, “Maybe something broke.”

He hurried inside and Joe took Bergen by the shoulder and said, “Phil, we can handle this.”

“Joe, I . . .” Bergen seemed overcome, looked glassily at Lucas, still on the sidewalk, and pulled Joe inside, closing the door.

Lucas waited, hands in his pockets, the warmth he’d accumulated in the house slowly dissipating. Bergen was a smart guy, and no stranger to manipulation. But he didn’t have the sociopath edge, the just-below-the-surface glassiness of the real thing.

Thirty seconds after he’d gone inside, Carr burst out.

“Come on,” he said shortly, striding past Lucas toward the trucks.

“What happened?”

“That kid you talked to, the one that told you about the picture?” Carr was talking over his shoulder.

“John Mueller.” Jug-ears, off-brand shoes, embarrassed.

“He’s missing. Can’t be found.”

“What?” Lucas grabbed Carr’s arm. “Fuckin’ tell me.”

“His father was working late at his shop, out on the highway,” Carr said. They were standing in the street. “He’d left the kid at home watching television. When his mother got home, and the kid wasn’t there, she thought he was out at the shop. It wasn’t until his parents got together that they realized he was gone. A neighbor kid’s got a Nintendo and John’s been going down there after school a couple nights a week, and sometimes stays for dinner. They called the neighbors but there wasn’t anybody home, and they thought maybe they’d all gone down to the Arby’s. So they drove around until they found the neighbors, but they hadn’t seen him either.”

“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said, looking past Carr at nothing. “I might of put a finger on him.”

“Don’t even think that,” Carr said, his voice grim.