Winter Prey (28 page)

“I was at the LaCourts’. I was there,” Bergen said.

Lucas looked him over, then nodded. “Then we’ve still got a problem,” he said. “The time.”

“Forget the time,” Bergen said. “I swear: I was there and they were alive. I believe the killer came just as I left—maybe even was there before I left, and waited until I’d gone—and killed them and spread the gas around, but accidently set it off too soon. If the firemen are wrong by a few minutes, then the times work out and you’re barking up the wrong tree. And you’ve managed to severely . . . damage me in the process.”

Carr looked at Lucas. Lucas looked at Bergen for a long beat, nodded, and said, “Maybe.”

Bergen looked from Lucas to Carr, waiting, and Carr finally said, “Let’s go.” To Bergen: “Phil, I’m sorry about this. You know I am.”

Bergen nodded, tight-mouthed, unforgiving.

Outside, Carr asked, “Do you believe him now?”

“I believe he’s not gay.”

“That’s a start.” They walked to the car in silence, then Carr said wearily, “And thanks for taking the rap on Bob Dell. Maybe when this is over, Phil and I can patch things up.”

“I’m going to get Gene and take Harper. Why don’t you catch a nap for a couple of hours?”

“Can’t. My wife’d be cleaning,” Carr said. “That’s pretty noisy. I can’t sleep worth a damn when she’s working.”

Lucas called Climpt on the radio, got him headed back toward the courthouse. While Carr returned to his office, Lucas found Henry Lacey talking to a deputy.

“I need to talk to you for a minute,” he said.

Lacey nodded, said, “Check you later, Carl.” And to Lucas, “What’s going on?”

“There’re rumors that Shelly’s having an affair with a lady at the church. I think I met her the other night.”

“So . . . ?” Lacey was defensive.

“Is she married or what?”

“Widowed,” Lacey said reluctantly.

“You think you could get Shelly over to her house? On the sly? Get him a nap, get her to stroke him a little? The guy’s on the edge of something bad.”

Lacey showed the shadow of a smile and nodded. “I’ll do it. I should have thought of it.”

Lucas, Climpt, and the young deputy Dusty, who’d first talked to John Mueller at the school, took Harper out of his gas station at 4:30, just before full dark.

Lucas and Climpt ate a long lunch, reviewed the newest information coming out of the Madison laboratory crew at the LaCourt house, stalled around until the county judge left the courthouse, then picked up Dusty and headed out to Knuckle Lake. When they pulled into the station in Climpt’s Suburban, they could see Harper through the gas station window, counting change into a cash register. He came out snarling.

“If you ain’t got a warrant I want you off my property,” he said.

“You’re under arrest,” Climpt said.

Harper stopped so quickly he almost skidded. “Say what?”

“You’re under arrest for the promotion of child pornography. Put your hands on the car.”

Harper, dumbfounded, took the position on the truck. Dusty shook him down, then cuffed his hands. A kid who’d been working in the repair bay came out to watch, nervously wiping his hands with an oily rag. “You want him to stay open or you want to close down?” Climpt asked.

“You stay open until the regular quitting time, and there better be every last dime in the register,” Harper shouted at the kid. He turned and looked at Lucas. “You motherfucker.” And then back at the kid: “I’ll call you. I should be out real quick.”

“There’s no bail hearing until Monday. Court’s closed,” Climpt told him.

“You fuckers,” Harper snarled. “You’re trying to do me.” And he shouted at the kid: “You’re in charge over the weekend. But I’m gonna count every dime.”

On the way back to town, Lucas turned over to look at Harper, cuffed in the back. “I’ll say two things to you, and
you might talk them over with your attorney. The first is, the Schoeneckers. Think about them. The next thing is,
somebody
is gonna get immunity to testify. But only one somebody.”

“You can kiss my ass.”

Harper called an attorney from the jail’s booking room. The attorney ran across the street from the bank building, spoke with Harper privately for ten minutes, then came out to discuss bail with the county attorney.

“We’ll ask the judge to set it at a quarter million on Monday, in court,” the county attorney said. He was a mildly fat man with light-brown eyes and pale brown hair, and he wore a medium-brown suit with buffed natural loafers.

“A quarter million? Eldon, my lord, Russ Harper runs a filling station,” said Harper’s attorney. He was a thin, weathered man with long yellow hair and weather-roughened hands. “Get real. And we figure this is important enough that we can get the judge out here tomorrow morning.”

“I wouldn’t want to call him on a Saturday. He goes fishing on Saturdays, and gets quite a little toot on, sittin’ out there in that shack,” the county attorney said. “And Russ’s station could be worth a quarter million. Maybe.”

“There’s no way.”

“We’ll talk to the judge Monday,” the county attorney said.

“I’m told that this gentleman”—Harper’s attorney nodded at Lucas—“and Gene Climpt have already beat up my client on one occasion—and this is more harassment.”

“Russ Harper’s not the most reliable source, and we’re talking about child pornography here,” the county attorney said. But he looked at Lucas and Climpt. “And I’m prepared to guarantee that Mr. Harper will be perfectly safe in jail over the weekend. If he’s not, somebody else will be sitting in there with him.”

“He’s safe enough,” said Lacey, who’d joined them. “Nobody’ll lay a finger on him.”

Carr was in his office, looking perceptibly brighter.

“Get some sleep?” Lucas asked. “You’re looking better.”

“Three, four hours. Henry talked me into it,” he said, a ribbon of guilt and pleasure running through his voice. “I need a week. All done with Harper?”

“He’s inside,” Lucas said.

“Good. Wanna call Dan?”

Dan Jones was the perfect double of the junior high principal. “We’re twin brothers,” he said. “He went into education, I went into journalism.”

“Dan was all-state baseball, Bob was all-state football. I remember when you boys were tearing the place up,” Carr said, his face animated. And Lucas thought:
He does like it, the good-old-boy political schmoozing.

“Glory days,” said Dan. To Lucas: “Did you play?”

“Hockey,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, typical Minnesota,” Dan said, grinning. Then he turned to Carr and asked, “Exactly what is it you want, Shelly?”

Carr filled Jones in about Harper, and Jones took notes on a reporter’s pad. “We don’t want to mislead you,” Carr said, just slightly formal. “We’re not saying Russ killed the LaCourts—in fact, we know he didn’t. But as background, so you won’t go astray, we want you to know that we developed the information about the porno ring out of the murder investigation.”

“So you think the two are related?”

“It’s very possible . . . if you sort of leaned that way, you’d be okay,” Carr said.

“To be frank—no bullshit—we want the story out to put pressure on the other members of this child-molester group, whoever they are. We need to break something open, but we don’t want you to say that,” Lucas said. “We think there’s a chance that Harper’ll try to deal. Go for immunity or reduced charges. That could be significant. But we’d like to have it reported as rumor,” Lucas said.

Climpt was digging around on his desk, found the porno magazine from Milwaukee, said, “You can refer to this, but
you can’t say directly what’s in it,” and passed it across to the newspaper editor.

Jones recoiled. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” he said. Then he remembered, and glanced up at Carr: “Sorry, Shelly.”

“Well, I know what you mean,” Carr said lamely.

“Horseshit reproduction,” Jones said, turning the paper in his hand. “This is like toilet paper.”

“In more ways than one,” Carr said. “What about the story? Can you do something with it?”

Jones was on his feet. “Oh, hell yes! The Russ Harper arrest is big. The AP’ll want that, and I can string it down to Milwaukee and St. Paul. Sure. People are so freaked out I’ve been talking to old man Donohue . . .”

Climpt said to Lucas, “Donohue owns the paper.”

“ . . . about putting out an extra. With Johnny Mueller and now this, I’ll talk to him tonight, see if we can get it out Sunday morning. I’ll need the arrest reports on Russ.”

“Got them right here,” Carr said, passing him some Xeroxed copies of the arrest log.

“Thanks. Whether or not Donohue goes with the extra, we’ll have it on the radio in half an hour. It’ll be all over town in an hour.”

When Jones had gone, Carr leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and said, “Think we’ll shake something loose?”

“Something,” Lucas said.

CHAPTER
16

Weather Karkinnen threw her scrub suit into the laundry rack and stepped into the shower. Her nipples felt sore and she scratched at them, wondering, then realized: beard burn. Davenport hadn’t shaved for an entire day when she attacked him in the bathtub, and he had a beard like a porcupine.

She laughed at herself: she hadn’t felt so alive in years. Lucas had been an energetic lover, but also, at times, strangely soft, as though he were afraid he might hurt her. The combination was irresistible. She thought about the tub again as she dried off with one of the rough hospital towels: that was the most contrived entrance she’d ever engineered. The bottle of wine, the robe slipping off . . .

She laughed aloud, her laughter echoing off the tiles of the surgeons’ locker room.

She left, hurrying: almost six-thirty. Lucas said he’d be done with Harper by six or seven. Maybe they could drive over to Hayward for dinner, or one of those places off Teal Lake or Lost Land Lake. Good restaurants over there.

As she left the locker room, she stopped at the nurses’ station to get the final list for the morning. Civilians sometimes thought surgeons worked every week or two, after an exhaustive study of the patient. More often, they worked every day, and sometimes two or three times a day, with little interaction with the patient at all. Weather was building a reputation in the North Woods, and now had referrals from all the adjoining counties. Sometimes she thought it was a conspiracy by the referring docs to keep her busy, to pin her down.

“ . . . Charlie Denning, fixing his toe,” she said. “He can hardly walk, so you’ll have to get a wheelchair out to his car. His wife is bringing him in.”

As they went through it, she was aware that the charge nurse kept checking her, a small smile on her face. Everybody knew that Lucas was staying at her house in some capacity, and Weather suspected that a few of the nurses had, during the day, figured out the capacity. She didn’t care.

“ . . . probably gonna have to clean her up, and I want the whole area shaved. I doubt that she did a very good job of it, she’s pretty old and I’m not sure how clearly I was getting through to her.”

The charge nurse’s family had been friends of her family, though the nurse was ten years older. Still, they were friends, and when Weather finished with the work list, she started for the door, then turned and said, “Is it that obvious?”

“Pretty obvious,” the nurse said. “The other girls say he’s a well-set-up man, the ones who have seen him.”

Weather laughed. “My God—small towns, I love ’em.” She started away again. The nurse called, “Don’t wear him out, Doctor,” and as she went out the door, Weather was still laughing.

Her escort was a surly, heavyset deputy named Arne Bruun. He’d been two years behind her in high school. He’d been president of the Young Republicans Club and allegedly had now drifted so far to the right that the Republicans wouldn’t have him. He stood up when she walked into the lobby,
rolled a copy of
Guns and Ammo,
and stuck it in his coat pocket.

“Ready to roll?” He was pleasant enough but had the strong jaw-muscle complex of a marginal paranoid.

“Ready to roll,” she said.

He went through the door first, looked around, waved her on, and they walked together to the parking lot. The days were beginning to lengthen, but it was fully dark, and the thermometer had crashed again. The Indians called it the Moon of the Falling Cold.

Bruun unlocked the passenger door of the Suburban, let her climb up, shut it behind her, and walked around the nose of the truck. The hospital was on the south edge of town; Weather lived on the north side. The quickest route to her home was down the frontage road along Highway 77 to Buhler’s Road, and across the highway at the light, avoiding the traffic of Main Street.

“Gettin’ cold again,” Bruun said as he climbed into the truck cab. Following Carr’s instructions, she’d called for a lift home. Bruun had been on patrol, and had waited in the lobby for only a few minutes: the truck was still warm inside. “If it gets much worse, there won’t be any deer alive next year. Or anything else.”

“I understand they’re gonna truck in hay.”

They were talking about the haylift when she saw the snowmobile on the side of the road. The rider was kneeling beside it, working on it, fifteen feet from the stop sign for Buhler’s Road. There was a trail beside the road, and sleds broke down all the time. But something caught her attention; the man beside it looked down toward them while his hands continued working.

“Sled broke down,” she said.

Bruun was already watching it. “Yup.” He touched the brake to slow for the stop sign. They were almost on top of the sled. Weather watched it, watched it. The Suburban was rolling to a stop, just past the sled, the headlights reflecting off the snowbanks, back on the rider. She saw him stand up, saw the gun come out, saw him running toward her window.

“
Gun,
” she screamed. “He’s got . . .”

She dropped in the seat and Bruun hit the gas and the window six inches above her head exploded and Bruun shrieked with pain, jerked the steering wheel. The truck skidded, lurched, came around, and the rear window shattered over her, as though somebody had hit it with a hammer. Weather looked to her left; Bruun’s head and face were covered with blood, and he crouched over the wheel, the truck still sliding in a circle, engine screaming, tires screeching . . .

The shotgun roared again: she heard it this time, the first time she’d heard it. And heard the shot pecking at the door by her elbow. Bruun grunted, stayed with the wheel . . . they were running now, the truck bumping . . .

“Gotta get back, gotta get . . .” Bruun groaned. Weather, sensing the speed, pushed herself up in the seat. The side window was gone, but the mirror was still there. The rider was on the sled, coming after them, and she flashed to the night of the murders, the sled running in the ditch . . .

They were passing a tree farm on the road back to the hospital parking lot, the straight, regimented rows of pine flashing by like a black picket fence.

“No, no,” she said. Heart in her throat. Looked into the mirror, the sled closing, closing . . .

“Gun coming up!” she shouted at Bruun.

Bruun put his head down and Weather slid to the floor. Two quick shots, almost lost in the roar of the engine, pellets hammering through the shattered back window into the cab, another shot crashing through the back window into the windshield, ricocheting. Bruun groaned again and said, “Hit, I’m hit.”

But he kept his foot on the pedal and the speed went up. The shotgun was silent. Weather sat higher, looking out the shattered side window, then out the back.

The road was empty. “He’s gone,” she said.

Bruun’s chin was almost on the hub of the wheel. “Hold on,” he grated. He hit the brake, but too late.

The entrance to the hospital parking lot was not straight in. The entry road went sharply right, specifically to slow
incoming traffic. They were there—and they were going much too fast to make the turn. Weather braced herself, locking her arms against the dashboard. A small flower garden was buried under the snow where they’d hit. There was a foot-high wall around it . . .

The truck fishtailed when Bruun hit the brake, and then hit the flower-garden wall. The truck bounced, twisting, plowing through the snow, engine whining . . .

There were people in the parking lot.

She saw them clearly, sharply, frozen, like the face of the queen of hearts when somebody riffles a deck of cards.

Then the truck was in the parking lot, moving sideways. It hit a snowbank and rolled onto its side, almost as if it had been tripped. She felt it going, grabbed the door handle, tried to hold on, felt the door handle wrench away from her, fell, felt the softness of the deputy beneath her . . . Heard Bruun screaming . . .

And finally it stopped.

She’d lost track of anything but the sensations of impact. But she was alive, sitting on top of Bruun. She looked to her left, through the cracked windshield, saw legs . . .

Voices. “Stay there, stay there . . .”

And she thought:
Fire.

She could smell it, feel it. She’d worked in a burn unit, wanted nothing to do with burns. She pulled herself up, carefully avoiding Bruun, who was alive, holding himself, moaning, “Oh boy, oh boy . . .”

She unlocked the passenger-side door, tried to push it open. It moved a few inches. More voices. Shouting.

Faces at the windshield, then somebody on top. A man looked in the side window: Robbie, the night-orderly body-builder, who she’d not-very-secretly made fun of because of his hobby. Now he pried the door open with sheer strength, and she’d never been so happy to see a muscleman. He was scared for her: “Are you all right, Doctor?”

“Snowmobile,” she said. “Where’s the man on the snowmobile?”

The body-builder looked up over into the group of people still gathering, and, puzzled, asked, “Who?”

Weather sat on the edge of the hospital bed in her scrub suit. Her left arm and leg were bruised, and she had three small cuts on the back of her left hand, none requiring stitches. No apparent internal injuries. Bruun was in the recovery room. She’d taken pellets out of his arm and chest cavity.

“You’re gonna hurt like a sonofagun tomorrow,” said Rice, the GP who’d come to look at her, and later assisted in the operation on Bruun. “You can bet on it. Take a bunch of ibuprofen before you go to bed. And don’t do anything too strenuous tonight.” His face was solemn, but his eyes flicked at Lucas.

“Yeah, yeah—take off,” Weather said.