Winter Prey ld-5 Read online

  "Maybe he was thinking about fingerprints. What'd LaCourt do?"

  "He worked down at the res, at the Eagle Casino. He was a security guy."

  "Lots of money in casinos," Lucas said. "Was he in trouble down there?"

  "I don't know," Carr said simply.

  "How about his wife?"

  "She was a teacher's aide."

  "Any marital problems or ex-husbands wandering around?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, they were both married before. I'll check Frank's ex-wife, but I know her, Jean Hansen, and she wouldn't hurt a fly. And Claudia's ex is Jimmy Wilson and Jimmy moved out to Phoenix three or four winters back, but he wouldn't do this, either. I'll check on him, but neither one of the divorces was really nasty. The people just didn't like each other anymore. You know?"

  "Yeah, I know. How about the girl? Did she have any boyfriends?"

  "I'll check that too," Carr said. "But, uh, I don't know. I'll check. She's pretty young."

  "There's been a rash of teenagers killing their families and friends."

  "Yeah. A generation of weasels."

  "And teenage boys sometimes mix up fire and sex. You get a lot of teenage firebugs. If there was somebody hot for the girl, it'd be something to look into."

  "You could talk to Bob Jones at the junior high. He's the principal and he does the counseling, so he might know."

  "Um," Lucas said. His sleeve touched a burnt wall, and he brushed it off.

  "I'm hoping you'll stay around a while," Carr blurted. Before Lucas could answer, he said, "Come on down this way."

  They picked their way toward the other end of the house, through the living room, into the kitchen by the back door. Two heavily wrapped figures were crouched over a third body.

  The larger of the two people stood up, nodded at Carr. He wore a Russian-style hat with the flaps pulled down and a deputy sheriff's patch on the front. The other, with the bag, was using a metal tool to turn the victim's head.

  "Can't believe this weather," the deputy said. "I'm so fuck-uh, cold I can't believe it."

  "Fucking cold is what you meant to say," said the figure still crouched over the body. Her voice was low and uninflected, almost scholarly. "I really don't mind the word, especially when it's so fucking cold."

  "It wasn't you he was worried about, it was me," Carr said bluntly. "You see anything down there, Weather, or are you just fooling around?"

  The woman looked up and said, "We've got to get them down to Milwaukee and let the pros take a look. No amateur nights at the funeral home."

  "Can you see anything at all?" Lucas asked.

  The doctor looked down at the woman under her hands. "Claudia was shot, obviously, and with a pretty powerful weapon. Could be a rifle. The whole back of her head was shattered and a good part of her brain is gone. The slug went straight through. We'll have to hope the crime lab people can recover it. It's not inside her."

  "How about the girl?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah. It'll take an autopsy to tell you anything definitive. There are signs of charred cloth around her waist and between her legs, so I'd say she was wearing underpants and maybe even, um, what do you call those fleece pants, like uh…"

  "Sweat pants," Carr said.

  "Yes, like that. And Claudia was definitely dressed, jeans and long underwear."

  "You're saying they weren't raped," Lucas said.

  The woman stood and nodded. Her parka hood was tight around her face, and nothing showed but an oval patch of skin around her eyes and nose. "I can't say it for sure, but just up front, it doesn't look like it. But what happened to her might have been worse."

  "Worse?" Carr recoiled.

  "Yes." She stooped, opened her bag, and the deputy said, "I don't want to look at this." She stood up again and handed Carr a Ziploc bag. Inside was something that looked like a dried apricot that had been left on a charcoal grill. Carr peered at it and then gave it to Lucas.

  "What is it?" Carr asked the woman.

  "Ear," she and Lucas said simultaneously. Lucas handed it back to her.

  "Ear? You can't be serious," Carr said.

  "Taken off before or after she was killed?" Lucas asked, his voice mild, interested. Carr looked at him in horror.

  "You'd need a lab to tell you that," Weather said in her professional voice, matching Lucas. "There are some crusts that look like blood. I'm not sure, but I'd say she was alive when it was taken off."

  The sheriff looked at the bag in the doctor's hand and turned and walked two steps away, bent over and retched, a stream of saliva pouring from his mouth. After a moment, he straightened, wiped his mouth on the back of a glove, and said, "I gotta get out of here."

  "And Frank was done with an ax," Lucas said.

  "No, I don't think so. Not an ax," the woman said, shaking her head. Lucas peered at her, but could see almost nothing of her face. "A machete, a very sharp machete. Or maybe something even thinner. Maybe something like, um, a scimitar."

  "A what?" The sheriff goggled at her.

  "I don't know," she said defensively. "Whatever it was, the blade was very thin and sharp. Like a five-pound razor. It cut through the bone, rather than smashing through like a wedge-shaped weapon would. But it had weight, too."

  "Don't go telling that to anybody at the Register," Carr said. "They'd go crazy."

  "They're gonna go crazy anyway," she said.

  "Well, don't make them any crazier."

  "What about the guy's face?" Lucas asked. "The bites?"

  "Dog," she said. "Coyote. God knows I see enough dog bites around here and it looks like a dog did it."

  "You can hear them howling at night, bunches of them," the deputy said. "Coyotes."

  "Yeah, I've got them up around my place," Lucas said.

  "Are you with the state?" the woman asked.

  "No. I used to be a Minneapolis cop. I've got a cabin over in Sawyer County and the sheriff asked me to run over and take a look."

  "Lucas Davenport," the sheriff said, nodding at him. "I'm sorry, Lucas, this is Weather Karkinnen."

  "I've heard about you," the woman said, nodding.

  "Weather was a surgeon down in the Cities before she came back home," the sheriff said to Lucas.

  "Is that Weather, like 'Stormy Weather'?" Lucas asked.

  "Exactly," the doctor said.

  "I hope what you heard about Davenport was good," Carr said to her.

  The doctor looked up at Lucas and tilted her head. The light on her changed and he could see that her eyes were blue. Her nose seemed to be slightly crooked. "I remember that he killed an awful lot of people," she said.

  The doctor was freezing, she said, and she led the way toward the front door, the deputy following, Carr stumbling behind. Lucas lingered, looking down at the dead woman. As he turned to leave, he saw a slice of nickeled metal under a piece of crumbled and blackened wallboard. From the curve of it, he knew what it was: the forepart of a trigger guard.

  "Hey," he called after the others. "Is that camera guy still in the house?"

  Carr called back, "The video guy's in the garage, but the other guy's here."

  "Send him back here, we got a weapon."

  Carr, Weather, and the photographer came back. Lucas pointed out the trigger guard, and the photographer took two shots of the area. Moving carefully, Lucas lifted the wallboard. A revolver. A nickel-finish Smith and Wesson on a heavy frame, walnut grips. He pushed the board back out of the way, then stood back as the photographer shot the gun in relation to the body.

  "You got a chalk or a grease pencil?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah, and a tape measure." The photographer groped in his pocket, came up with a grease pencil.

  "Shouldn't you leave it for the lab guys?" Carr asked nervously.

  "Big frame, could be the murder weapon," Lucas said. He drew a quick outline around the weapon, then measured the distance of the gun from the wall and the dead woman's head and one hand, while the photographer noted them. With the measurements done, Lucas hand
ed the grease pencil back to the photographer, looked around, picked up a splinter of wood, pushed it through the fingerguard, behind the trigger, and lifted the pistol from the floor. He looked at the doctor. "Do you have another one of those Ziplocs?"

  "Yes." She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.

  "Six shells, unfired," he said. "Shit."

  "Unfired?" Carr asked.

  "Yeah. I don't think it's the murder weapon. The killer wouldn't reload and then drop it on the floor… at least I can't think why he would."

  "So?" Weather looked up at him.

  "So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand. She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble," Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: "You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway."

  "I'll get it going," Carr said. Then: "I n-n-need some coffee."

  "I think you're fairly hypothermic, Shelly," Weather said. "What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy was walking up the driveway. "I got those tarps, Sheriff. They're right behind me in a Guard truck."

  "Good. Get some help and cover up the whole works," Carr said, waving at the house. "There'll be guys in the garage." To Lucas he said, "I got some canvas sheets from the National Guard guys and we're gonna cover the whole house until the guys from Madison get here."

  "Good." Lucas nodded. "You really need the lab guys for this. Don't let anybody touch anything. Not even the bodies."

  The garage was warm, with deputies and firemen standing around an old-fashioned iron stove stoked with oak splits. The deputy who'd been doing the filming spotted them and came over with one of Lucas' Thermos jugs.

  "I saved some," he said.

  "Thanks, Tommy." The sheriff nodded, took a cup, hand shaking, passed it to Lucas, then took a cup for himself. "Let's get over in the corner where we can talk," he said. Carr walked around the nose of LaCourt's old Chevy station wagon, away from the gathering of deputies and firemen, turned, took a sip of coffee. He said, "We've got a problem." He stopped, then asked, "You're not a Catholic, are you?"

  "Dominus vobiscum," Lucas said. "So what?"

  "You are? I haven't been in the Church long enough to remember the Latin business," Carr said. He seemed to think about that for a moment, sipped coffee, then said, "I converted a few years back. I was a Lutheran until I met Father Phil. He's the parish priest in Grant."

  "Yeah? I don't have much interest in the Church anymore."

  "Hmph. You should consider…"

  "Tell me about the problem," Lucas said impatiently.

  "I'm trying to, but it's complicated," Carr said. "Okay. We figure whoever killed these folks must've started the fire. It was snowing all afternoon-we had about four inches of new snow. When the firemen got here, though, the snow'd just about quit. But Frank's body had maybe a half-inch of snow on it. That's why I had them put the tarp over it, I thought we could fix an exact time. It wasn't long between the time he was killed and the fire. But it was some time. That's important. Some time. And now you tell me the girl might have been tortured… more time."

  "Okay." Lucas nodded, nodding at the emphasis.

  "Whoever started the fire did it with gasoline," Carr said. "You can still smell it, and the house went up like a torch. Maybe the killer brought the gas with him or maybe he used Frank's. There're a couple boats and a snowmobile out in the back shed but there aren't any gas cans with them, and no cans in here. The cans'd most likely have some gas in them."

  "Anyway, the house went up fast," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. The folks across the lake were watching television. They say that one minute there was nothing out the window but the snow. The next minute there was a fireball. They called the firehouse."

  "The one I came by? Down at the corner?"

  "Yeah. There were two guys down there. They were making a snack and one of them saw a black Jeep go by. Just a few seconds later, the alarm came in. They thought the Jeep belonged to Phil… the priest. Father Philip Bergen, the pastor at All Souls."

  "Did it?" Lucas asked.

  "Yes. They said it looked like Phil was coming out of the lake road. So I called him and asked him if he'd seen anything unusual. A fire or somebody in the road. And he said no. Then, before I could say anything else, he said he was here, at the LaCourts'."

  "Here?" Lucas eyebrows went up.

  "Yeah. Here. He said everything was all right when he left."

  "Huh." Lucas thought about it. "Are we sure the time is right?"

  "It's right. One of the firemen was standing at the microwave with one of those prefab ham sandwiches. They take two minutes to cook and it was about ready. The other one said, 'There goes Father Phil, hell of a night to be out.' Then the microwave alarm went off, the guy got his sandwich out, and before he could unwrap it, the alarm came in."

  "That's tight."

  "Yeah. There wasn't enough time for Frank to have that snow pile up on him. Not if Phil's telling the truth."

  "Time is weird," Lucas said. "Especially in an emergency. If it wasn't just a minute, if it was five minutes, then this Father Phil could have…"

  "That's what I figured… but doesn't look that way." Carr shook his head, swirled coffee around the coffee cup, then set it on the hood of the Chevy and flexed his fingers, trying to work some warmth back in them. "I got the firemen and went over it a couple of times. There just isn't time."

  "So the priest…"

  "He said he left the house and drove straight out to the highway and then into town. I asked him how long it took him to get from the house, here, to the highway, and he said three or four minutes. It's about a mile, so that's about right, with the snow and everything."

  "Hmp."

  "But if he had something to do with it, why'd he admit being here? That doesn't make any gol-darned sense," the sheriff said.

  "Have you hit him with this? Sat him down, gone over it?"

  "No. I'm not real experienced with interrogation. I can take some kid who's stolen a car or ripped off a beer sign and sit him down by one of the holding cells and scare the devil out of him, but this would be… different. I don't know about this kind of stuff. Killers."

  "Did you tell him about the time bind?" Lucas asked.

  "Not yet."

  "Good."

  "I was stumped," Carr said, turning to stare blankly at the garage wall, remembering. "When he said he was here, I couldn't think what to say. So I said, 'Okay, we'll get back to you.' He wanted to come out when we told him the family was dead, do the last rites, but we told him to stay put, in town. We didn't want him to…"

  "… Contaminate his memory."

  "Yeah." Carr nodded, picked up the coffee he'd set on the car hood, and finished it.

  "How about the firemen? Would they have any reason to lie about it?"

  Carr shook his head. "I know them both, and they're not particular friends. So it wouldn't be like a conspiracy."

  "Okay."

  Two firemen came through the door. The first was encased in rubber and canvas, and on top of that, an inch-thick layer of ice.

  "You look like you fell in the lake," Carr said. "You must be freezing to death."

  "It was the spray. I'm not cold, but I can't move," the fireman said. The second fireman said, "Stand still." The fireman stood like a fat rubber scarecrow and began chipping the ice away with a wooden mallet and a cold chisel.

  They watched the ice chips fly for a moment, then Carr said, "Something else. When he went by the fire station, he was towing a snowmobile trailer. He's big in one of the snowmobile clubs-he's the president, in fact, or was last year. They'd had a run toda
y, out of a bar across the lake. So he was out on the lake with his sled."

  "And those tracks came up from the lake."

  "Where nobody'd be without a sled."

  "Huh. So you think the priest had something to do with it?"

  Carr looked worried. "No. Absolutely not. I know him: he's a friend of mine. But I can't figure it out. He doesn't lie, about anything. He's a moral man."

  "If a guy's under pressure…"

  Carr shook his head. Once they'd been playing golf, he said, both of them fierce competitors. And they were dead even after seventeen. Bergen put his tee shot into a group of pines on the right side of the fairway, made a great recovery and was on the green in two. He two-putted for par, while Carr bogied the hole, and lost.

  "I was bragging about his recovery to the other guys in the locker room, and he just looked sadder and sadder. When we were walking down to the bar he grabbed me, and he looked like he was about to cry. His second shot had gone under one of the evergreens, he said, and he'd kicked it out. He wanted to win so bad. But cheating, it wrecked him. He couldn't handle it. That's the kind of guy he is. He wouldn't steal a dime, he wouldn't steal a golf stroke. He's absolutely straight, and incapable of being anything else."

  The fireman with the chisel and mallet laid the tools on the floor, grabbed the front of the other fireman's rubber coat, and ripped it open.

  "That's got it," said the second man. "I can take it from here." He looked at Carr: "Fun in the great outdoors, huh?"

  The doctor was edging between the wall and the nose of the station wagon, followed by a tall man wrapped in a heavy arctic parka. The doctor had light hair spiked with strands of white, cut efficiently short. She was small, but athletic with wide shoulders, a nose that was a bit too big and a little crooked, bent to the left. She had high cheekbones and dark-blue eyes, a mouth that was wide and mobile. She had just a bit of the brawler about her, Lucas thought, with the vaguely Oriental cast that Slavs often carry. She was not pretty, but she was strikingly attractive. "Is this a secret conversation?" she asked. She was carrying a cup of coffee.