Winter Prey (20 page)

CHAPTER
11

Lucas stepped quietly into the house, pulled off his boots, and stopped to listen. The furnace had apparently just come on: the heating ducts were clicking and snapping as they filled with hot air and expanded. Weather had left a small light on over the sink. He tiptoed through the kitchen and living room, down the hall to the guest room, and turned on the light.

The room felt unused, lonely. The bureau had been dusted, but there was nothing on top of it and the drawers were empty. A lamp and a small travel alarm sat on a bedstand, with a paper pad and a pen; the pad appeared to be untouched. The room was ready for guests, Lucas thought, but no guests ever came.

He peeled off his parka, shirt, pants, and thermal underwear and tossed them on the bureau. He’d stopped at the motel and picked up his shaving kit and fresh underwear. He put them on the bedstand with his watch, took his .45 from its holster, jacked a shell into the chamber, and laid it next to the clock. After listening for another moment at the open bedroom door, he turned off the light and crawled into bed. The bed was too solid, too springy, as though it had
never been slept in. The pillow pushed his head up. He’d never get to sleep.

The bed sagged.

Somebody there. Disoriented for a moment, he turned his head, opened his eyes. Saw a light in the hallway, remembered the weight. He half-sat, supporting himself with his elbows, and found Weather sitting on the end of the bed. She was dressed for work, carrying a cup of coffee, sipping from it.

“Jesus, what time is it?”

“A little after six. I’m outa here,” she said. She was stone-cold awake. “Thanks for coming over.”

“Let me get up.”

“No, no. Shelly’s sending a deputy over. I feel silly.”

“Don’t. There’s nothing silly about it,” he said sharply.

“And you should go somewhere else at night. Pick someplace at random. A motel in Park Falls. Tell us you’re leaving, and we’ll have somebody run interference for you out the highway to make sure you’re not followed.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. She patted his foot. “You look like a bear in the morning,” she said. “And your long underwear is cute. I like the color.”

Lucas looked down at the long underwear; it was vaguely pink. “Washed it with a red shirt,” he mumbled. “And this is not the goddamn morning. Morning starts when the mailman arrives.”

“He doesn’t get here until one o’clock,” Weather said.

“Then morning starts at one o’clock,” he said. He dropped back on the pillow. “John Mueller?”

“They never found him,” she said. “When the deputy called, I asked.”

“Ah, God.”

“I’m afraid he’s gone,” she said. She glanced at her watch.

“And I’ve got to go. Make sure all the doors are locked, and go out through the garage when you leave. The garage door locks automatically.”

“Sure. Would you . . .”

“What?”

“Have dinner with me tonight? Again?”

“God, you’re rushing me,” she said. “I like that in a man. Sure. But why don’t we have it here? I’ll cook.”

“Terrific.”

“Six o’clock,” she said. She nodded at the bedstand as she went out the door. “That’s a big gun.”

He heard the door to the garage open and close, and after that the house was silent. Lucas drifted back to sleep, now comfortable in the strange bedroom. When he woke again, it was eight o’clock. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then staggered down the hall to the bathroom, shaved, half-fell into the shower, got a dose of icy water for his trouble, huddled outside the plastic curtain until the water turned hot, then stood under it, letting the stinging jets of water beat on his neck.

Harper. They had to put the screws on Harper. So far, he was the only person who might know something. He stepped out of the shower, looked in the medicine cabinet for shampoo. There wasn’t any, but there were two packs of birth control pills. He picked them up, turned them over, looked at the prescription label. More than two years old. Huh. He’d hoped he’d find that they’d been taken out the day before. Vanity. He dropped them back where he’d found them. Of course, if she hadn’t been on the pill for two years, she probably didn’t have much going.

He looked under the sink, found a bottle of Pert, got back in the shower and washed his hair.

Harper wasn’t the only problem. There was still the time discrepancy. Something happened there. Something was going on with the priest. He didn’t seem to fit with the child-sex angle. There’d been a notorious string of cases in Minnesota of priests abusing parish children, but in those cases, the men had invariably acted alone. The standing of a priest in a small community would almost seem automatically to preclude any kind of ring.

“Aw, no,” Lucas sputtered.

He should have seen it. He stepped out of the shower, mopped his face and walked down the hall to the kitchen,
found the telephone. He got Carr at his office.

“You get any sleep?” he asked.

“Couple hours on the office couch,” Carr said. “We got a search warrant for Judy Schoenecker’s place. You can take it out there.”

“I’d like to take Gene along. He was pretty good with Harper.”

“I understand Russ might have a sore nose this morning,” Carr said.

“It’s the cold weather,” Lucas said. “Listen, how many people live down Storm Lake Road, beyond the LaCourts’ house? How many other residences?”

“Hmp. Twenty or thirty, maybe. Plus a couple resorts, but those are closed, of course. Nobody there but the owners.”

“Could you get a list for me?”

“Sure. The assessor’ll know. We can get his plat books. What’re you looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Lucas said.

When he hung up, he realized he was freezing, hustled back to the bathroom, and jumped into the shower. After two more minutes of hot water, he toweled off, dressed, and let himself out of the house.

Carr was munching on a powdered doughnut hole when Lucas got in. He pointed at a white paper bag and said, “Have one. Why do you want those names down the road?”

“Just to see what’s down there,” Lucas said, fishing a sweet roll out of the bag. “Did you get them?”

“I told George—he’s the assessor—I told him we needed them ASAP, so they should be ready,” Carr said. “I’ll take you down.”

George was tall and dark, balding, with fingers pointed like crow-quill pens. He pulled out a plat map of the lake area and used a sharp-nailed index finger to trace the road and tick off the inhabitants, right down to the infants. Three of the houses were lived in by single men.

“Do you know these guys?” Lucas asked Carr, touching the houses of the three single men.

“Yup,” Carr said. “But the only one I know well is Donny Riley, he’s in the Ojibway Rod and Gun Club. Pretty good guy. He’s a retired mail carrier. The other two, Bob Dell works up in a sawmill and Darrell Anderson runs the Stone Hawk Resort.”

“Are they married? Divorced, widowed? What?”

“Riley was married for years. His wife died. Darrell’s gone off-and-on with one of the gals from the hospital, but I don’t know much about him. Bob is pretty much a bachelor-farmer type.”

“Any of them Catholics?” Lucas asked.

“Well . . .” Carr looked at the assessor, and then they both looked at Lucas. “I believe Bob goes to Sunday Mass.”

“Does he come from here?”

“No, no, he comes from Milwaukee,” Carr said. “What’re we pushing toward here?”

“Nothing special,” Lucas said. “Let’s go back upstairs.” And to the assessor he said, “Thanks.”

Lacey was sitting in Carr’s office, his feet on the corner of the sheriff’s desk. When they came in, he quickly pulled his feet off, then crossed his legs.

“You’re gonna ruin my desk and I’ll take it out of your paycheck,” Carr grumbled.

“Sorry,” Lacey said.

“Now what the heck was all that about? Down there with George?” Carr asked Lucas as he settled into his swivel chair.

“There’s a rumor around—just a rumor—that Phil Bergen’s gay. That why I asked him last night if he’d ever had any homosexual contacts.”

“That’s the worst kind of bull,” Carr blurted. “Where’d you hear that gay stuff?”

“Look: I keep trying to figure why he says he was at the LaCourts’ when the LaCourts were dead,” Lucas said. “Why he won’t back off of it. And I got to thinking, what if he was somewhere else down the road, but can’t say so?”

“Dammit,” Carr said. He spun and looked out his window through the half-open venetian blinds. “You got a dirty mind, Davenport.”

“Are you thinking about anybody in particular?” Lacey asked. Lucas repeated the three names. Lacey stared at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, edged forward in his chair, and looked at the sheriff. “Um, Shelly, listen. My wife knows Bob Dell. I once said something about he’s a good-looking guy, just kidding her, and she said, ‘Bob’s not the sort that goes for women, I kinda think.’ That’s what she said.”

“She was saying he’s gay?” Carr asked, turning, pulling his head back, staring owlishly at his deputy.

“Well, not exactly,” Lacey said. “Just that he wasn’t the type who was interested in women.”

“This is awful,” Carr said, looking back to Lucas.

“It would explain a hell of a lot,” Lucas said. “If people down there know that this Bob Dell is gay . . . maybe Bergen was down there, got caught in a lie, and then couldn’t back off of it. Look at his drinking. If he’s innocent, where’s all the pressure coming from?”

“From this office for one thing,” Carr said. He climbed out of his chair, took a meandering walk around the office, a knuckle pressed to his teeth. “We’ve got to check on Dell,” he said finally.

“See if you can get his birthdate. Query the NCIC and Milwaukee, if that’s where he’s from,” Lucas said. “And think about it: if this is Bergen’s problem, then he’s in the clear on the murder.”

“Yeah.” Carr spun and stared through his window, which looked out at a snowpile, a drifted-in fence and the backs of several houses on the next street. “But he wouldn’t be clear on the gay thing. And that’d kill him.”

They all thought about it for a minute, then Carr said, “Gene Climpt will meet you out at the Mill restaurant at noon.” He passed Lucas a warrant.

Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his coat pocket. “Nothing at all on John Mueller?”

Carr shook his head: “Nothing. We’re looking for a body now.”