Winter Prey (23 page)

“Even then . . .”

“Did those boxes in the basement . . . just a minute,” Climpt said suddenly, and disappeared down the basement steps.

Lucas wandered through the still, cold house, then went to the garage, opened the door, and looked in. Climpt came back up the stairs, carrying two boxes, and Lucas said, “They’ve got two cars. The garage is tracked on both sides.”

“Yeah, I believe they do.”

“How often do families go on vacations and take two cars when there are only four of them?” Lucas asked.

“Look at this,” Climpt said. He held the boxes out to Lucas. One was the carton for a video camera. The other was a carton for a Polaroid Spectra camera. “A video camera and no videotapes. And last night Henry Lacey said that Polaroid was taken with a Spectra camera.”

“Jesus.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair. “Okay. Tell you what. You go through that file cabinet with the bills, get all the credit card numbers you can find. Especially gas card numbers, but get all of them. I’m going back to the girls’ room. I can’t believe teenagers wouldn’t leave
something.
”

He began going through the room inch by inch, pulling the drawers from all the dressers, looking under them, checking bottles and boxes, paging through piles of homework papers dating back to elementary school. He felt inside shoes, lifted the mattress.

Climpt came in and said, “I got all the numbers they had, I think. They had Sunoco and Amoco gas cards. They
also bought quite a bit of gas from Russ Harper, which is pretty strange when you consider his station is fifteen miles from here.”

“Keep those slips,” Lucas said as he dropped the mattress back in place. “And check and see if there’s any garbage outside.”

“All right.”

A half-dozen books sat upright on top of the bureau, pressed together by malachite bookends shaped like chess knights. Lucas looked at the books, turned them, held them page-down and flipped through them. An aluminum-foil gum wrapper fell from the Holy Bible. Lucas picked it up, unfolded it, found a phone number and the name
Betty
written in orange ink.

He put the book back, walked into the living room as Climpt came in from outside. “No garbage. They cleaned the place out, is what they did.”

“Okay.” Lucas picked up the phone, dialed the number on the gum wrapper.

The call was answered on the first ring. “This is the Ojibway Action Line. Can I help you?” The voice was female and professionally cheerful.

“What’s the Ojibway Action Line?” Lucas asked.

“Who is this?” The voice lost a touch of its good cheer.

“A county sheriff’s deputy,” Lucas said.

“You’re a deputy and don’t know what the Ojibway Action Line is?”

“I’m new.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lucas Davenport. Gene Climpt is here if you want to talk to him.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay, I heard about you. Besides, it’s not a secret—we’re the crisis line for county human services. We’re right in the front of the phone book.”

“All right. Can I speak to Betty?”

There was a moment of silence, then the woman said, “There’s not really a Betty here, Mr. Davenport. That’s a code name for our sexual abuse counselor.”

CHAPTER
12

Lucas parked in Weather’s driveway, climbed out of the truck, and trudged to the porch, carrying a bottle of wine. He was reaching for the bell when Weather pulled the door open.

“Fuck dinner,” Lucas said, stepping inside. “Let’s catch a plane to Australia. Lay on the beach for a couple of weeks.”

“I’d be embarrassed. I’m so winter-white I’m transparent,” Weather said. She took the bottle. “Come in.”

She’d taken some trouble, he thought. A handmade rag rug stretched across the entry; that hadn’t been there the night before. A fire crackled in the Volkswagen-sized fireplace. And there was a hint of Chanel in the air. “Pretty impressive, huh? With the fire and everything?”

“I like it,” he said simply. He didn’t smile. He’d been told that his smile sometimes frightened people.

She seemed both embarrassed and pleased. “Leave your coat in the closet and your boots by the door. I just started cooking. Steak and shrimp. We’ll both need heart bypasses if we eat it all.”

Lucas kicked off his boots and wandered through the
living room in his stocking feet. He hadn’t seen it in the dark, the night before, and in the morning he’d rushed out, thinking about Bergen . . . .

“How’d the operation go?” he called to her in the kitchen.

“Fine. I had to pin some leg bones back together. Nasty, but not too complicated. This woman went up on her roof to push the snow off, and
she
fell off instead. Right onto the driveway. She hobbled around for almost four days before she came in, the damn fool. She wouldn’t believe the bone was broken until we showed her the X rays.”

“Huh.” Silver picture frames stood on a couch table, with hand-colored photos of a man and woman, still young. Sailboats figured in half the photographs. Her parents. A small ebony grand piano sat in an alcove, top propped up, sheet music for Erroll Garner’s “Dreamy” on the music stand.

He went back into the kitchen. Weather was wearing a dress, the first he’d seen her in, simple, soft-shouldered; she had a long, slender neck with a scattering of freckles along her spine. She said, smiling, “I’m going to make stuff so good it’ll hurt your mouth.”

“Let me help,” he said.

She had him haul a grill from the basement to the back deck, which she’d partially shoveled off. He stacked it with charcoal and started it. At the same time she put a pot of water on the stove. A bag of oversized, already-shelled shrimp went into a colander, which she set aside. Herbs and a carton of buttermilk became salad dressing; a lump of cheese joined a pile of mushrooms, celery, walnuts, watercress, and apples on the cutting board. She began slicing.

“I won’t ask if you like mushrooms; you’ve got no choice,” she said. “Oh—get the wine going. It’s supposed to breathe for a while.”

The outside temperature had been rising through the afternoon, and was now approaching zero. A breeze had sprung up and felt almost damp compared to the astringent dryness
of the air at twenty below. Lucas put his boots back on and tended the charcoal; the cold felt good on his skin, taken only a few seconds at a time.

The salad was tart and just right. The shrimp were killers. He ate a dozen of them, finally tearing himself away from the table long enough to put the steaks on.

“I haven’t eaten like this since . . . I don’t know when. You must like cooking,” Lucas said as he stood inside the glass doors, looking out at the grill.

“I don’t, really. I took a class at the high school called Five Good Things,” she confessed. “That’s what they taught me. How to make five good things. This is one of them.”

“That’s a class I need,” Lucas said, slipping back outside with a plate. The steaks were perfect, she said. Red inside, a little char on the outside.

“No Mueller kid?” she asked.

He shook his head, and the feel of the evening suddenly warped. “I can’t think about it right now,” he said.

“Fine,” she said hastily, picking up his mood. “It’s a terrible business anyway.”

“Let me tell you a couple of things,” he said. “But it can’t go any further.”

“It won’t.”

He outlined what had happened. The priest and the time problem, the homosexual question and Harper, the Schoeneckers’ search.

She listened solemnly and finally said, “I don’t know Phil Bergen very well, but he never struck me as gay. The few times I’ve talked to him, he seemed almost shy. He was reacting to me.”

“Well, we don’t know for sure,” Lucas said. “But it would explain a lot.”

“So what’s happening with the Schoeneckers?”

“Carr’s meeting with the sexual therapist right now to see if they can match any calls with the Schoeneckers’ kids—the kids never actually came in, but they get a
lot of anonymous calls that never develop into anything. The calls are taped, so there might be something. And we’re checking credit cards, trying to find out where they are. They just took off, supposedly to Florida.”

“If all this is true, the town’ll be a mess,” Weather said.

“The town’ll handle it. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before,” Lucas said. “The big question is, how out-of-control is the killer? What is he doing?”

“Hey, you’ll give me nightmares,” she said. “Eat, eat.”

Lucas gave up halfway through his steak and staggered off to an overstuffed couch in front of the fireplace. Weather put an ounce of cognac in each of two glasses, pulled open the drapes that covered the sliding glass doors to the deck, and dropped into an E-Z Boy that sat at right angles to the couch. They both put their feet on the scarred coffee table that ran the length of the couch.

“Blimp,” Lucas said.

“Moi?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“No, me. Christ, if somebody dropped a dictionary on my gut, I’d blow up. Look at that.” Lucas pointed out the doors, where a crescent moon was just edging up over the trees across the lake.

“I feel like . . .” she started, looking out at the moon.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m starting out on an adventure.”

“I wish I was,” Lucas said. “All I do is lay around.”

“Well, writing games . . . You said the money was pretty good.”

“Yeah, like
you
came up here to make a lot of money.”

“Not quite the same thing,” she said.

“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “But I’d like to do something useful. That’s what I’m finding out. When I was a cop, I was doing something. Now I’m just making money.”

“For now you’re a cop again,” she said.

“For a couple of weeks.”

“How about going back to Minneapolis?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Lucas said. He swirled his
cognac in the glass, finished it. “I had a case last summer, in New York. Now this. I sometimes think I could make something out of it, just picking up work. But when I get real, I know it’ll never happen. There’s just not
enough
to do.”

“Ah, well . . . nobody said life’d get easier.”

“Yeah, but you always think it will,” Lucas said. “The next thing you know, you’re sixty-five and living in a rundown condo on Miami Beach, wondering how you’re going to pay for your next set of false teeth.”

Weather burst out laughing and Lucas grinned in the dark, listening to her, delighted that he’d made her laugh. “The man is an incorrigible optimist,” she said.

They talked about people they knew in common, both in Grant and in the Cities.

“Gene Climpt doesn’t look like a tragedy, but he is,” she told him. “He married his high school sweetheart right after he got in the Highway Patrol—he was in the patrol before Shelly, way back, this was when I was in junior high school. Anyway, they had a baby girl, a toddler. One day Gene’s wife was running a bath for the baby, running just hot water and planning to cool it later, when the phone rang. She went to answer it, and the kid climbed on the toilet and leaned over the tub and fell in.”

“My God.”

“Yeah. She died from the scalding. Then, when Gene was at the funeral home, his wife shot herself. Killed herself. She couldn’t stand the baby dying. They buried them both together.”

“Jesus. He never remarried?”

She shook her head. “Nope. He’s fooled around with a few women over the years, but nobody’s ever got him. Quite a few tried.”

Weather had worked nights at St. Paul-Ramsey General for seven years while she was doing her surgical residency at the University of Minnesota, and knew eight or ten St.
Paul cops. Did she like them? “Cops are like everybody else, some of them are nice and some of them are assholes. They do have a tendency to hustle you,” she said.

“A hospital’s a good place to hang around if you’re on patrol, and if the person you’ve brought in isn’t a kid or your partner,” Lucas said. “It’s warm, you’re safe, you can get free coffee. There are pretty women around. Most of the women you see, when you’re working, are either victims or perpetrators. Nothing like having a good-looking woman tell you to stick your speeding ticket in your ass to chill off your day.”

“They’re right, cops should stick the tickets,” Weather declared.

“Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. It always used to amaze me, seeing cops writing tickets. The Cities are coming apart; people are getting killed every night and you can’t walk downtown without a panhandler extorting money out of you. And half the time when you see a cop, he’s giving a ticket to some poor jerk who was going sixty-five in a fifty-five zone. The whole world is going by at sixty-five even while he’s writing the ticket. I don’t know why cops do it, it just makes everybody mad at them.”

“Sixty-five is breaking the law,” Lucas said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh, bullshit.”

“All right, it’s bullshit.”

“Don’t they have quotas for tickets?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

“Well, yeah, but they don’t call it that. They have
performance standards.
They say an on-the-ball patrolman should write about X number of tickets in a month. So a patrol guy gets to the end of the month and counts his tickets and says, ‘Shit, I need ten more tickets.’ So he goes out to a speed trap and spends an hour getting his ten tickets.”

“That’s a quota.”

“Shhh. It’s a hell of a lot more lucrative for the city than busting some dumb-ass junkie burglar.”