The morning broke bitterly cold. The clouds had cleared and a low-angle, razor-sharp sunshine cut through the red pines that sheltered the motel. Lucas, stiff from a too-short bed and a too-fat pillow, zipped his parka, pulled on his gloves and stepped outside. His face was soft and warm from shaving; the air was an icy slap.
The oldest part of Grant was built on a hill across the highway from the motel, small gray houses with backyard clotheslines awash in the snow. Wavering spires of gray woodsmoke curled up from two hundred tin chimneys, and the corrosive smell of burning oak bark shifted through town like a dirty tramp.
Lucas had grown up in Minneapolis, had learned to fish along the urban Mississippi, in the shadow of smokestacks and powerlines and six-lane bridges, with oil cans, worn-out tires and dead carp sharing space on the mud flats. When he began making serious money as an adult, he'd bought a cabin on a quiet lake in Wisconsin's North Woods. And started learning about small towns.
About the odd comforts and discomforts of knowing everyone; of talking to people who had roads, lakes, and entire townships named after their families. People who made their living in the woods, guiding tourists, growing Christmas trees, netting suckers and trapping crawdads for bait.
Not Minneapolis, but he liked it.
He yawned and walked down to his truck, squinting against the sun, the new snow crunching underfoot. A friendly, familiar weight pulled at his left side. The parka made a waist holster impractical, so he'd hung his.45 in a shoulder rig. The pistol simply felt right. It had been a while since he'd carried one. He touched the coat's zipper tag with his left hand, pulled it down an inch, then grinned to himself. Rehearsing. Not that he'd need it.
Ojibway County wasn't Minneapolis. If someone came after him in Ojibway County, he'd bring a deer rifle or a shotgun, not some bullshit.22 hideout piece. And if somebody came with a scoped.30-06, the.45 would be about as useful as a rock. Still, it felt good. He touched the zipper tag again with his left hand and mentally slipped the right hand into the coat.
The truck had been sitting in the brutal cold overnight, but the motel provided post outlets for oil-pan heaters. Lucas unplugged the extension cord from both the post and the truck, tossed the cord in the back seat, cranked up the engine and let it run while he went down to the motel office for a cup of free coffee.
"Cold," he said to the hotel owner.
"Any colder, I'd have to bring my brass monkey inside," the man said. He'd been honing the line all morning. "Have a sweet roll, too, we got a deal on them."
"Thanks."
Cold air was still pouring from the truck's heater vents when Lucas returned to it, balancing the coffee and sweet roll. He shut the fan off and headed into town.
There were only two real possibilities with the LaCourt killings, he thought. They were done by a stranger, a traveling killer, as part of a robbery, picked out because the house was isolated. Or they were done for a reason. The fire suggested a reason. A traveler would have hauled Frank LaCourt's body inside, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and left. He might be days away before the murders were uncovered. With the fire, he couldn't have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes away.
A local guy who set a fire meant either a psychotic arsonist-unlikely-or that something was being covered. Something that pointed at the killer. Fingerprints. Semen. Personal records. Or might the fire have been set to distract the investigation?
The gun he'd found with Claudia LaCourt, unfired, suggested that the LaCourts knew something was happening, but they hadn't called 9-1-1. The situation may have been somewhat ambiguous… Huh.
And the girl with the missing ear might have been interrogated. Another suggestion that something was going on.
The image of the ear in the Ziploc bag popped into his mind. Carr had bent and retched because he was human, as the LaCourt girl had once been. She'd been alive at this time yesterday, chatting with her friends on the telephone, watching television, trying on clothes. Making plans. Now she was a charred husk.
And to Lucas, she was an abstraction: a victim. Did that make him less than human? He half-smiled at the introspective thought; he tried to stay away from introspection. Bad for the health.
But in truth he didn't feel much for Lisa LaCourt. He'd seen too many dead children. Babies in garbage cans, killed by their parents; toddlers beaten and maimed; thirteen-year-olds who shot each other with a zealous enthusiasm scraped right off the TV screen. Not that their elders were much better. Wives killed with fists, husbands killed with hammers, homosexuals slashed to pieces in frenzies of sexual jealousy. After a while it all ran together.
On the other hand, he thought, if it were Sarah… His mouth straightened into a thin line. He couldn't put his daughter together with the images of violent death that he'd collected over the years. They simply would not fit. But Sarah was almost ready for school now, she'd be moving out into the bigger world.
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He shook off the thought and looked out the window.
Grant's Main Street was a three-block row of slightly shabby storefronts, elbow to elbow, like a town in the old west. The combinations that would have been strange in other places were typical for the North Woods: a Laundromat-bookstore-bar, an Indian souvenir store-computer outlet, a satellite dish-plumber. There were two bakeries, a furniture store, a scattering of insurance agents and real estate dealers, a couple of lawyers. The county courthouse was a low rambling building of fieldstone and steel at the end of Main. A cluster of sheriff's trucks sat in a parking lot in back and Lucas wheeled in beside them. A Bronco with an unfamiliar EYE3 logo was parked in a visitor's slot by the door.
A deputy coming out nodded at him, said, "Mornin'," and politely held the door. The sheriff's outer office was behind a second door, decorated with curling DARE antidrug posters and the odors of aging nicotine and bad nerves. A reporter and a cameraman were slumped in green leatherette chairs scarred with cigarette burns and what looked like razor cuts. The reporter was working on her lipstick with a gold compact and a small red brush. She looked up when Lucas stepped in. He nodded and she nodded back. A steel door and a bulletproof glass window were set in the wall opposite the reporter. Lucas went to the window, looked at the empty desk behind it, and pushed the call button next to the window.
"It'll just piss them off," the reporter said. She had a tapered fox-face with a tiny chin, big eyes and wide cheekbones, as though she'd been especially bred for television. She rubbed her lips together, then snapped the compact shut, dropped it in her purse, and gave him a reflexive smile. The cameraman was asleep.
"Yeah? Where're you guys from?" Lucas asked. The reporter was very pretty, with her mobile eyes and trained expressions, like a latter-day All-American geisha girl. Weather could never work for television, he thought. Her features were too distinctive. Could be a movie star, though.
"Milwaukee," she said. "Are you with the Star-Tribune?"
"Nope." He shook his head, giving her nothing.
"A cop?" The reporter perked up.
"An interested onlooker," Lucas said, grinning at her. "Lots of reporters around?"
"I guess so," she said, a frown flitting across her face. "I heard Eight talking on their radios, so they're up here somewhere, and I heard the Strib came in last night. Probably out at the lake. Are you one of the lab people from Madison?"
"No," Lucas said.
A harried middle-aged woman bustled up behind the glass, peered through, and said, "Davenport?"
"Yes." The reporter was wearing perfume. Something slightly fruity.
"I'll buzz you in," the woman said.
"FBI?" the reporter pressed.
"No," he said.
The woman inside pressed her entry button and as Lucas slipped through the door, the reporter called, "Tell Sheriff Carr we're gonna put something on the air whether he talks to us or not."
Carr had a corner office overlooking the parking lot, the county garage and a corroded bronze statue of a World War I doughboy. The beige walls were hung with a dozen photographs of Carr with other politicians, three plaques, a bachelor's degree certificate from the University of Wisconsin/River Falls, and two fish-stamp prints with the actual stamps mounted in the mats below the prints. A computer and laser printer sat on a side table, and an intricate thirty-button decorator-blue telephone occupied one corner of an expansive walnut desk. Carr was sitting behind the desk, looking gloomily across a tape recorder at Henry Lacey.
"You got reporters," Lucas said, propping himself in the office door.
"Like deer ticks," Carr said, looking up. "Morning. Come in."
"All you can get from deer ticks is Lyme's disease," said Lacey. "Reporters can get your ass fired."
"Should I let them shoot pictures of the house?" Carr asked Lucas. "They're all over me to let them in."
"Why wouldn't you?" Lucas asked. He stepped into the office and dropped into a visitor's chair, slumped, got comfortable.
Carr scratched his head. "I dunno… it doesn't seem right."
"Look, it's all bullshit," Lucas said. "The outside of a burnt house doesn't mean anything to anybody, especially if they live in Milwaukee. Think about it."
"Yeah." Carr was still reluctant.
"If I were you, I'd draw up a little site map and pass it out-where the bodies were and so on," Lucas said. "That doesn't mean shit either, but they'll think you're a hell of a guy. They'll give you a break."
"I could use a break," Carr said. He scratched his head again, working at it.
"Did the guys from Madison get here?" Lucas asked.
"Two hours ago," said Lacey. "They're out at the house."
"Good." Lucas nodded. "How's it look out there?"
"Like last night. Uglier. There was a lump of frozen blood under Frank's head about the size of a milk jug. They're moving the bodies out in an hour or so, but they say it could take a couple of weeks to process the house."
"We gotta push them: there's something in there we need, or the guy wouldn't have burned the place," Lucas said irritably. Two weeks? Impossible. They needed information now. "Anything more new?"
"Yeah. We got a call," Carr said. He reached across his desk and pushed a button on the tape recorder. There was a burst of music, a woman country-western singer, then a man's voice: You tell them goddamned flatheads down at FNR to stay away from white women or they'll get what LaCourt got.
Lucas stuck out his bottom lip, shook his head: this was bullshit.
The music swelled, as if somebody had taken his mouth away from the phone, then a new voice said, Give'm all a six-pack of Schlitz and send them down to Chicago with the niggers.
The music came up, then there were a couple of indistinguishable words, a barking laugh, a click and a dead line.
"Called in on the 9-1-1 number, where we got an automatic trace. Went out to a pay phone at the Legion Hall. There were maybe fifty people out there," Lacey said. "Mostly drunk."
"That's what it sounded like, drunks," Lucas agreed. A waste of time. "What's the FNR? The Res?"
"Yeah. Foret Noire," Carr said. He pronounced it For-A Nwa. "The thing is, most everybody in town'll know about the call before this afternoon. The girl on the message center talked it all over the courthouse. The guys from the tribe'll be up here. We're gonna have to tell the FBI. Possible civil rights whatchamajigger."
"Aw, no," Lucas groaned, closing his eyes. "Not the feebs."
"Gonna have to," Carr said, shaking his head. "I'll try to keep them off, but I bet they're here by the weekend."
"Tell him about the windigo," Lacey said.
"There's rumors around the reservation that a windigo's been raised by the winter," Carr said, looking even gloomier.
"I've heard of them," Lucas said. "But I don't know…"
"Cannibal spirits, roaming the snowdrifts, eating people," Lacey said. "If you see one, bring him in for questioning."
He and Carr started to laugh, then Carr said, "We're getting hysterical." To Lucas he said, "Didn't get any sleep. I picked out some guys to work with you, six of them, smartest ones we got. They're down in the canteen. You ready?"
"Yup. Let's do it," Lucas said.
The deputies arranged themselves around a half-dozen rickety square tables, drinking coffee and chewing on candy bars, looking Lucas over. Carr poked his finger at them and called out their names. Five of the six wore uniforms. The sixth, an older man, wore jeans and a heavy sweater and carried an automatic pistol just to the left of his navel in a cross-draw position.
"… Gene Climpt, investigator," Carr said, pointing at him. Climpt nodded. His face was deeply weathered, like a chunk of lake driftwood, his eyes careful, watchful. "You met him out at the house last night."
Lucas nodded at Climpt, then looked around the room. The best people in the department, Carr said. With two exceptions, they were all white and chunky. One was an Indian, and Climpt, the investigator, was lean as a lightning rod. "The sheriff and I worked out a few approaches last night," Lucas began. "What we're doing today is talking to people. I'll talk to the firefighters who were the first out at the house. We've also got to find the LaCourts' personal friends, their daughter's friends at school, and the people who took part in a religious group that Claudia LaCourt was a member of."
They talked for twenty minutes, dividing up the preliminaries. Climpt took two deputies to begin tracking the LaCourts' friends, and he'd talk to the tribal people about any job-related problems LaCourt might have had at the casino. Two more deputies-Russell Hinks and Dustin Bane, Rusty and Dusty-would take the school. The last man would canvass all the houses down the lake road, asking if anyone had seen anything unusual before the fire. The night before, Climpt had been looking for immediate possibilities.
"I'll be checking back during the day," Lucas said. "If anybody finds anything, call me. And I mean anything."
As the deputies shuffled out, pulling on coats, Carr turned to Lucas and said, "I've got some paperwork before you leave. I want to get you legal."
"Sure." He followed Carr into the hallway, and when they were away from the other deputies asked, "Is this Climpt guy… is he going to work with me? Or is he gonna be a problem?"
"Why should he be?" Carr asked.
"I'm doing a job that he might have expected to get."
Carr shook his head. "Gene's not that way. Not at all."
Bergen stumbled into the hallway, looked around, spotted Carr. "Shelly…" he called.
Carr stopped, looked back. Bergen was wearing wind pants and a three-part parka, a Day-Glo orange hunter's hat, ski mitts and heavy-duty pac boots. He looked more like an out-of-shape lumberjack than a priest. "Phil, how'r you feeling?"
"You ought to know," Bergen said harshly, stripping his mitts off and slapping them against his leg as he came down the hall. "The talk all over town is, Bergen did it. Bergen killed the LaCourts. I had about half the usual congregation at Mass this morning. I'll be lucky to have that tomorrow."
"Phil, I don't know…" Carr started.
"Don't BS me, Shelly," Bergen said. "The word's coming out of this office. I'm the prime suspect."
"If the word's coming out of this office, I'll stop it-because you're not the prime suspect," Carr said. "We don't have any suspects."
Bergen looked at Lucas. His lower lip trembled and he shook his head, turned back to Carr: "You're a little late, Shelly; and I'll tell you, I won't put up with it. I have a reputation and you and your hired gun"-he looked at Lucas again, then back to Carr-"are ruining it. That's called slander or libel."
Carr took him by the arm, said, "C'mon down to my office, Phil." To Lucas he said, "Go down there to the end of the hall, ask for Helen Arris."
Helen Arris was a big-haired office manager, a woman who might have been in her forties or fifties or early sixties, who chewed gum and called him dear, and who did the paperwork in five minutes. When they finished with the paper, she took his photograph with a Polaroid camera, slipped the photo into a plastic form, stuck the form into a hot press, slammed the press, waited ten seconds, then handed him a mint-new identification card.
"Be careful out there," she said, sounding like somebody on a TV cop show.
Lucas got a notebook from the Explorer and decided to walk down to Grant Hardware, a block back toward the highway. This would be a long day. If they were going to break the killings, they'd do it in a week. And the more they could get early, the better their chances were.
A closet-sized book-and-newspaper store sat on the corner and he stopped for a Wall Street Journal; he passed a t-shirt store, a shoe repair shop, and one of the bakeries before he crossed in midblock to the hardware store. The store had a snowblower display in the front window, along with a stack of VCRs and pumpkin-colored plastic sleds. A bell rang over the door when Lucas walked in, and the odor of hot coffee hung in the air. A man sat on a wooden stool, behind the cashier's counter, reading a People magazine and drinking coffee from a deep china cup. Lucas walked down toward the counter, aging wooden floor creaking beneath him.
"Dick Westrom?"
"That's me," the counterman said.
"Lucas Davenport. I'm…"
"The detective, yeah." Westrom stood up and leaned across the counter to shake hands. He was big, fifty pounds too heavy for his height, with blond hair fading to white and large watery cow eyes that looked away from Lucas. He tipped his head at another chair at the other end of the counter. "My girl's out getting a bite, but there's nobody around… we could talk here, if that's all right."
"That's fine," Lucas said. He took off his jacket, walked around the counter and sat down. "I need to know exactly what happened last night, the whole sequence."
Westrom had found Frank LaCourt's body, nearly tripping over it as he hauled hose off the truck.
"You didn't see him right away, laying there?" Lucas asked.
"No. Most of the light was from the fire, it was flickering, you know, and Frank had a layer of snow on him," Westrom said. He had a confidential manner of talking, out of the side of his mouth, as though he were telling secrets in a prison yard. "He was easy to see when you got right on top of him, but from a few feet away… hell, you couldn't hardly see him at all."
"That was the first you knew there were dead people?"
"Well, I thought there might be somebody inside, there was a smell, you know. That hit us as soon as we got there, and I think Duane said something like, 'We got a dead one.' "
Westrom insisted that the priest had passed the fire station within seconds of the alarm.
"Look. I got nothing against Phil Bergen," Westrom said, shooting sideways glances at Lucas. "Shelly Carr was trying to get some extra time out of me last night, so I know where he's at. But I'll tell you this: I was nukin' a couple of ham sandwiches…"
"Yeah?" Lucas said, a neutral noise to keep Westrom rolling.
"And Duane said, 'There goes Father Phil. Hell of a night to be out.' Duane was standing by the front window and I saw Phil going by. Just then the buzzer went off on the microwave. I mean right then, when I was looking at the taillights. I says, 'Well, he's a big-shot priest with a big-shot Grand Cherokee, so he can go where he wants, when he wants.' "
"Sounds like you don't care for him," Lucas said. And Lucas didn't care for Westrom, the eyes always slipping and sliding.
"Well, personally, I don't. But that's neither here nor there, and he can go about his business," Westrom said. He pursed his lips in disapproval. His eyes touched Lucas' face and then skipped away. "Anyway, I was taking the sandwiches out, they're in these cellophane packets, you know, and I was just trying to grab them by the edges and not get burned. I said 'Come and get it,' and the phone rang. Duane picked it up and he said, 'Oh, shit,' and punched in the beeper code and said, 'It's LaCourts', let's go.' I was still standing there with the sandwiches. Never got to open them. Phil hadn't gone by more'n ten seconds before. Shelly was trying to get me to say it was a minute or two or three, but it wasn't. It wasn't more'n ten seconds and it might have been five."
"Huh." Lucas nodded.
"Check with Duane," Westrom said. "He'll tell you."
"Is Duane a friend of yours?"
"Duane? Well, no. I like him okay. We just don't, you know… relate."
"Do you know of anything that Father Bergen might have against the LaCourts?"
"Nope. But he was close to Claudia," Westrom said, with a distinct spin on the word close.
"How close?" Lucas asked, tilting his head.
Westrom's eyes wandered around Lucas without settling. "Claudia had a reputation before she married Frank. She got around. She was a pretty thing, too, she had big…" Westrom cupped his hands at his chest and bounced them a couple of times. "And Phil… He is a man. Being a priest and all, it must be tough."
"You think he and Claudia could have been fooling around?" Lucas asked.
Westrom edged forward in his chair and said confidentially, "I don't know about that. We probably would have heard if she was. But it might go way back, something with Father Phil. Maybe Phil wanted to get it started again or something." Westrom's nose twitched.
"How many black Jeeps in Ojibway County?" Lucas asked. "There must be quite a few."
"Bet there aren't, not in the winter. Not Grand Cherokees-those are mostly summer-people cars. I can't think of any besides Phil's." He looked at Lucas curiously: "Are you a Catholic?"
"Why?"
" 'Cause you sound like you're trying to find an excuse for Phil Bergen."
Lucas' notebook cover said, "Westrom, Helper." He drew a line through Westrom, started the Explorer, headed out Highway 77 to the fire station.
In the daytime, with sunlight and the roads freshly plowed, the half-hour trip of the night before was cut to ten minutes. From the high points of the road, he could see forever across the low-lying land, with the contrasting black pine forests cut by the silvery glint of the frozen lakes.
The firehouse was a tan pole barn built on a concrete slab, nestled in a stand of pine just off the highway. One end of the building was dominated by three oversized garage doors for the fire trucks. The office was at the other end, with a row of small windows. Lucas parked in one of four plowed-out spaces and walked into the office, found it empty. Another door led out of the office into the back and Lucas stuck his head through.
"Hello?"
"Yeah?" A heavyset blond man sat at a worktable, a fishing reel disassembled in the light of a high-intensity lamp. A thin, almost transparent beard covered his acne-pitted face. His eyes were blue, careful. A small kitchen area was laid out along one wall behind him. At the other end of the room, a broken-down couch, two aging easy chairs and two wooden kitchen chairs faced a color television. Lockers lined a third wall, each locker stenciled with a man's last name. Another door led back into the truck shed. A flight of stairs went up to a half-loft.
"I'm looking for Duane Helper," Lucas said.
"That's me. You must be Davenport," Helper said. He had a heavy, almost Germanic voice, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing jeans with wide red suspenders over a blue work shirt. His hand was heavy, like his body, but crusted with calluses. "A whole caravan of TV people just came out of the lake road. The sheriff let them in to take pictures of the house."
"Yeah, he was going to do that," Lucas said.
"I heard Phil Bergen is the main suspect." Helper said it bluntly, as a challenge.
Lucas shook his head. "We don't have any suspects yet."
"That's not the way I heard it," Helper said. The television was playing a game show and Helper picked up a remote control and punched it off.
"Then what you heard is wrong," Lucas said sharply. Helper seemed to be looking for an edge. He was closed-faced, with small eyes; when he played his fingers through his beard, the fingers seemed too short for their thickness, like sausages. Lucas sat down across the round table from him and they started through the time sequence.
"I remember seeing the car, but I didn't remember it was right when the alarm came in," Helper said. "I thought maybe I'd walked up and looked out the window, saw the car, and then we'd talked about something else and I'd gone back to the window again and that's when the alarm came in. That's not the way Dick remembers it."
"How sure are you? Either way?"
Helper rubbed his forehead. "Dick's probably right. We talked about it and he was sure."
"If you went to the window twice, how much time would there have been between the two trips?" Lucas asked.
"Well, I don't know, it would have only been a minute or two, I suppose."
"So even if you went twice, it wasn't long."
"No, I guess not," Helper said.
"Did you actually see Bergen's Jeep come out of the lake road?"
"No, but that's the impression I got. He was moving slow when he went past, even with the snow, and he was accelerating. Like he'd just turned the corner onto 77."
"Okay." Lucas stood up, walked once around the room. Looked at the stairs.
"What's up there?"
"There's a bunk room right at the top. I live in the back. I'm the only professional firefighter here."
"You're on duty twenty-four hours a day?"
"I have time off during the day and early evenings, when we can get volunteers to pick it up," Helper said. "But yeah, I'm here most of the time."
"Huh." Lucas took a turn around the room, thumbnail pressed against his upper teeth, thinking. The time problem was becoming difficult. He looked at Helper. "What about Father Bergen? Do you know him?"
"Not really. I don't believe I've spoken six words to him. He drinks, though. He's been busted for drunk driving, but…" He trailed off and looked away.
"But what?" Helper was holding something back, but he wanted Lucas to know it.
"Sheriff Carr's on the county fire board," Helper said.
"Yeah? So what?" Lucas made his response a little short, a little tough.
"He's thick with Bergen. I know you're from the outside, but if I talk, and if it gets back to Shelly, he could hurt me." Helper let the statement lie there, waiting.
Lucas thought it over. Helper might be trying to build an alliance or drive a wedge between himself and Carr. But for what? Most likely he was worried for exactly the reason he claimed: his job. Lucas shook his head. "It won't get back to him if it doesn't need to. Even if it needs to, I can keep the source to myself. If it seems reasonable."
Helper looked at him for a moment, judging him, then looked out the window toward the road. "Well. First off, about that drunk driving. Shelly fixed it. Fixed it a couple of times and maybe more."
He glanced at Lucas. There was more to come, Lucas thought. Helper mentioned the ticket-fixing as a test. "What else?" he pressed.
Helper let it go. "There're rumors that Father Bergen's… that if you're a careful dad, you wouldn't want your boy singing in his choir, so to speak."
"He's gay?" Gay would be interesting. Small-town gays felt all kinds of pressure, especially if they were in the closet. And a priest…
"That's what I've heard," Helper said. He added, carefully, "It's just gossip. I never gave it much thought. In fact, I don't think it's true. But I don't know. With this kind of thing, these killings, I figured you'd probably want to hear everything."
"Sure." Lucas made a note.
They talked for another five minutes, then three patrol deputies stomped in from duty at the LaCourt house. They were cold and went straight to the coffee. Helper got up to start another pot.
"Anything happening down at the house?" Lucas asked.
"Not much. Guys from Madison are crawling around the place," said one of the deputies. His face was red as a raw steak.
"Is the sheriff down there?"
"He went back to the office, he was gonna talk to some of the TV people."
"All right."
Lucas looked back at Helper, fussing with the coffee. Small-town fireman. He heard things, sitting around with twenty or thirty different firemen every week, nothing much to do.
"Thanks," he said. He nodded at Helper and headed for the door, the phone ringing as he went out. The wind bit at him again, and he hunched against it, hurried around the truck. He was fumbling for his keys when Helper stuck his head out the door and called after him: "It's a deputy looking for you."
Lucas went back inside and picked up the phone. "Yeah?"
"This is Rusty, at the school. You better get your ass up here."
Grant Junior High was a red-brick rectangle with blue-spruce accents spotted around the lawn. A man in a snowmobile suit worked on the flat roof, pushing snow off. The harsh scraping sounds carried forever on the cold air. Lucas parked in front, zipped his parka, pulled on his ski gloves. Down the street, the bank time-and-temperature sign said – 21. The sun was rolling across the southern sky, as pale as an old silver dime.
Bob Jones was waiting outside the principal's office when Lucas walked in. Jones was a round-faced man, balding, with rosy cheeks, a short black villain's mustache and professional-principal's placating smile. He wore a blue suit with a stiff-collared white shirt, and his necktie was patriotically striped with red, white, and blue diagonals.
"Glad to see you," he said as they shook hands. "I've heard about you. Heck of a record. Come on, I'll take you down to the conference room. The boy's name is John Mueller." The school had wide halls painted an institutional beige, with tan lockers spotted between cork bulletin boards. The air smelled of sweat socks, paper, and pencil-sharpener shavings.
Halfway down the hall, Jones said, "I'd like you to talk to John's father about this. When you're done with him. I don't think there's a legal problem, but if you could talk to him…"
"Sure," Lucas said.
Rusty and Dusty were sitting at the conference table drinking coffee, Rusty with his feet on the table. They were both large, beefy, square-faced, white-toothed, with elaborately casual hairdos, Rusty a Chippewa, Dusty with the transparent pallor of a pure Swede. Rusty hastily pulled his feet off the table when Lucas and Jones walked in, leaving a ring of dirty water on the tabletop.
"Where's the kid?" Lucas asked.
"Back in his math class," said Dusty.
"I'll get him," Jones volunteered. He promptly disappeared down the hall, his heels echoing off the terrazzo.
Dusty wiped the water off the tabletop with his elbow and pushed a file at Lucas. "Kid's name is John Mueller. We pulled his records. He's pretty much of an A-B student. Quiet. His father runs a taxidermy shop out on County N, his mother works at Grotek's Bakery."
Lucas sat down, opened the file, started paging through it. "What about this other kid? You said on the phone that another kid was murdered."
Rusty nodded, taking it from Dusty. "Jim Harper. He went to school here, seventh grade. He was killed around three months back," Rusty said.
"October 20th," said Dusty.
"What's the story?" Lucas asked.
"Strangled. First they thought it was an accident, but the doc had the body sent down to Milwaukee, and they figured he was strangled. Never caught anybody."
"First murder of a local resident in fourteen years," Rusty said.
"Jesus Christ, nobody told me," Lucas said. He looked up at them.
Dusty shrugged. "Well… I guess nobody thought about it. It's kind of embarrassing, really. We got nothing on the killing. Zero. Zilch. It's been three months now; I think people'd like to forget it."
"And he went to this school, and he was in classes with the LaCourt girl… I mean, Jesus…"
Jones returned, ushering a young boy into the room. The kid was skinny and jug-eared, with hair the color of ripe wheat, big eyes, a thin nose and wide mouth. He wore a flannel shirt and faded jeans over off-brand gym shoes. He looked like an elf, Lucas thought.
"How are you? John? Is that right?" Lucas asked as Jones backed out of the room. "I understand you have some information about Lisa."
The kid nodded, slipped into the chair across the table from Lucas, turned a thumb to the other two deputies. "I already talked to these guys," he said.
"I know, but I'd like to hear it fresh, if that's okay," Lucas said. He said it serious, as though he were talking to an adult. John nodded just as seriously. "So: how'd you know Lisa?"
"We ride the bus together. I get off at County N and she goes on."
"And did she say something?" Lucas asked.
"She was really scared," John said intently. His ears reddened, sticking out from his head like small Frisbees. "She had this picture, from school."
"What was it?"
"It was from a newspaper," John said. "It was a picture of Jim Harper, the kid who got killed. You know about him?"
"I've heard."
"Yeah, it was really like…" John looked away and swallowed, then back. "He was naked on the bed and there was this naked man standing next to him with, you know, this, uh, I mean it was stickin' up."
Lucas looked at him, and the kid peered solemnly back. "He had an erection? The man?" Lucas asked.
"Yup," John said earnestly.
"Where's the picture?" Lucas felt a tingle: this was something.
"Lisa took it home," John said. "She was going to show it to her mom."
"When? What day?" Lucas asked. Rusty and Dusty watched the questioning, eyes shifting from Lucas to the kid and back.
"Last week. Thursday, 'cause that's store night and Mom works late, and when I got home Dad was cooking."
"Do you know where she got the picture?" Lucas asked.
"She said she got it from some other kid," John said, shrugging. "I don't know who. It was all crinkled up, like it had been passed around."
"What'd the man look like? Did you recognize him?"
"Nope. His head wasn't in the picture," the boy said. "I mean, it looked like the whole picture was there, but it cut off his head like somebody didn't aim the camera right."
Dammit. "So you could only see his body."
"Yeah. And some stuff around him. The bed and stuff," John said.
"Was the man big or small? His body?" Lucas asked.
"He was pretty big. Kind of fat."
"What color was his hair?" asked Lucas.
John cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. "I don't remember."
"You didn't notice a lot of chest hair or stomach hair or hair around his crotch?" Lucas fished for a word the kid could relate to: "I mean, like really kind of gross?"
"No. Nothing like that… but it was a black-and-white picture and it wasn't very good," John said. "You know those newspapers they have at the Super Valu…?"
"National Enquirer," Rusty said.
"Yeah. The picture was like from that. Not very good."
If the hair didn't strike him as gross, then the guy was probably a blond, Lucas thought. Black hair on cheap paper would blot. "If it wasn't very good, could you be sure it was Jim?" Lucas asked.
The boy nodded. "It was Jim, all right. You could see his face, smiling like Jim. And Jim lost a finger and you could see if you looked real close that the kid in the picture didn't have a finger. And he had an earring and Jim wore an earring. He was the first guy in the school to get one."
"Mph. You say Lisa was scared? How do you know she was scared?"
"Because she showed it to me," John said.
"What?" Lucas frowned, missing something.
"She's a girl. And the picture-you know…" John twisted in his chair. "She wouldn't show something like that to a boy if she wasn't scared about it."
"Okay." Lucas ran over the questions one more time, probed the contents of the picture the boy had seen, but got nothing more. "Is your dad out at his shop?"
"Sure-I guess," the kid said, nodding.
"Did you tell him about the picture?"
"No." John looked uncomfortable. "I mean… how could I tell him about that?"
"Okay," Lucas said. "Let's ride out there and I'll tell him about you talking to us. Just so everything's okay. And I think we ought to keep it between us."
"Sure. I'm not going to tell anybody else," John said. "Not about that," he said earnestly, eyes big.
"Good," Lucas said. He relaxed and smiled. "Go get your stuff, and let's go out to your place."
"Did we do good?" Rusty asked lazily when John had gone.
"Yeah, you did good," Lucas said.
The two deputies slapped hands and Lucas said, "You're all done with Lisa's friends?"
"Yeah, all done," Rusty said.
"Great. Now do this other kid's friends. The Harper kid. Look for connections between Lisa and Harper," Lucas said. "And if this picture was passed around, find out who passed it."
Lucas used a pay phone in the teachers' lounge to call the sheriff's office. "You sound funny," he said when Carr came on.
"You're being relayed. What'd you need?"
"Are we scrambled?"
"Not really."
"I'll talk to you later. Something's come up."
"I'm on my way to the LaCourts'."
"I'm heading that way, so I'll see you there," Lucas said. He hung up momentarily, then redialed the sheriff's office, got Helen, the office manager, and asked her to start digging up the files on the Harper murder.
John Mueller had gone to put his books away and get his coat and boots. As Lucas waited for him at the front door, a bell rang and kids flooded into the hallways. Another, nonstudent head bobbed above the others in the stream, caught his eye. The doctor. He took a step toward her. He'd been a while without a woman friend; thought he could get away from the need by making a hermit of himself, by working out. He was wrong, judging from the tension in his chest… unless he was having a heart attack. Weather was pulling on her cap as she came toward him, and oversized mittens with leather palms. She nodded, stopped and said, "Anything good?"
"Not a thing," he said, shaking his head. Not pretty, he thought, but very attractive. A little rough, like she might enjoy the occasional fistfight. Who is she dating? There must be someone. The guy is probably an asshole; probably has little tassels on his shoes and combs them straight in the morning, before he puts the mousse on his hair.
"I was doing TB patches down there." She nodded back down the hall, toward a set of open double doors. A gymnasium. "And one kid was scared to death that somebody was going to come kill him in the night."
Lucas shrugged. "That's the way it goes." As soon as he said it, he knew it was wrong.
"Mr. Liberal," she said, her voice flat.
"Hey, nothing I can do about it except catch the asshole," Lucas said, irritated. "Look, I didn't really…" He was about to go on but she turned away.
"Do that," she said, and pushed through the door to the outside.
Annoyed, Lucas leaned against the entryway bulletin board, watching her walk to her car. Had a nice walk, he decided. When he turned back to the school, looking for John, he saw a yellow-haired girl watching him.
She stood in a classroom doorway, staring at him with a peculiar intensity, as though memorizing his face. She was tall, but slight, angular with just the first signs of an adolescent roundness. And she was pale as paper. The most curious thing was her hair, which was an opaque yellow, the color of a sunflower petal, and close-cropped. With her pointed chin, large tilted eyes and short hair, she had a waifish look, like she should be selling matches. She wore a homemade dress of thin print material, cotton, with short sleeves: summer wear. She held three books close to her chest. When he looked at her, she held his eyes for a moment, a gaze with a solid sexuality to it, speculative, but at the same time, hurt, then turned and walked away.
John arrived in a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood and mittens. "Do you have a cop car?" he asked.
"No. A four-by-four," Lucas said.
"How come?"
"I'm new here."
John's father was a mild, round-faced man in a yellow wool sweater and corduroys. "How come you didn't tell me?" he asked his son. He sat on a high stool. On his bench, a fox skin was half-stretched over a wooden form. John shrugged, looked away.
"Embarrassed," Lucas said. "He did the right thing, today. We didn't want you to think we were grilling him. We'd have called you, to get you in, but I was right there and he was…"
"That's okay, as long as John's not in trouble," his father said. He patted John on the head.
"No, no. He did the right thing. He's a smart kid," Lucas said.
The picture was critical. He felt it, knew it. Whistled to himself as he drove out to the LaCourt house. Progress.
Helper was working in the fire station parking lot, rolling hose onto a reel, when Lucas passed on his way to the LaCourts'. A sheriff's car was parked in a cleared space to one side of the LaCourts' driveway, and a deputy waved him through. A half-dozen men were working around or simply standing around the house, which was tented with sheets of Army canvas, and looked like an olive-drab haystack. Power lines, mounted on makeshift poles, ran through gaps in the canvas. Lucas parked at the garage and hurried inside. Two sheriff's deputies were warming themselves at the stove, along with a crime tech from Madison.
"Seen the sheriff?" Lucas asked.
"He's in the house," one of the deputies said. To the tech he said, "That's Davenport."
"Been looking for you," the tech said, walking over. "I'm the lab chief here… Tod Crane." Crane looked like he might be starving. His fingers and wrists were thin, bony, and the skin on his balding head seemed to be stretched over his skull like a banjo covering. When they shook hands, an unexpected muscle showed up: he had a grip like a pair of channel-lock pliers.
"How's it going?" Lucas asked.
"It's a fuckin' mess," Crane said. He held up his hands, flexed them. They were bone-white and trembling with cold. "Whoever did it spread gas-oil premix all over the house. When he touched it off, Boom. We're finding stuff blown right through some of the internal walls."
"Premix from the boats?"
"Yeah, that's what we think. Maybe some straight gas from the snowmobiles. We've found three six-gallon cans. The LaCourts had two boats, a pontoon and a fishing rig, and there aren't any gas cans with them. And premix, you put it in a bottle with a wick, it's called a Molotov cocktail."
"Any chance our man was hurt? Or burned?" Lucas asked.
"No way to tell, but he'd have to be careful," Crane said. "He spread around quite a bit of gas. We've got an arson guy coming up this afternoon to see if we can isolate where the fire started."
Lucas nodded. "I'm looking for a piece of paper," he said. "It was a picture, apparently torn from a magazine or a newspaper. It shows a naked man and a naked boy on the bed behind him. It might be in the house."
"Yeah? That's new?" Crane's eyebrows went up.
"Yup."
"Think he was trying to burn it up?" Crane asked.
"The thought crossed my mind."
"I'll tell you right now, there were a couple of filing cabinets that were dumped and doused with gas, and he shot some gas into a closet full of paper stuff, photographs, like that. He did the same thing on the chests of drawers in the parents' bedroom, after he dumped them."
"So maybe…"
"There ought to be some reason he torched the place. I mean, besides being nuts," Crane said. "If he'd just killed them and walked, it might of been a day or two before anybody found them. He'd have time to set up an alibi. This way he tipped his hand right away."
"So find the paper," Lucas said.
"We'll look," Crane said. "Hell, it's nice to have something specific to look for."
Carr came in while they were talking. He'd mellowed since morning, a small satisfied smile on his face. "They're gone, the reporters. Most of them, anyway," he said. "Poof."
"Probably found a better murder," Lucas said.
"I talked to Helen, back at the office," Carr said. "What's this about Jim Harper?"
"Rusty and Dusty found a kid at the junior high who says Jim Harper posed for sex photos with an adult male," Lucas said. "That'd be a long-term felony and might be worth killing somebody for. The picture came out of a pulp-paper magazine or newspaper. Some kids got hold of it and it may have been passed around the school. Lisa LaCourt had it last. She took it home on Thursday and showed it to this kid who talked to me."
"Who is it? The kid at the school?"
"John Mueller. His father's a taxidermist," Lucas said.
Carr nodded. "Sure, I know him. That's an okay family. Damn, these things could be tied."
Lucas shrugged. "It's a possibility. The Harper kid's parents, are they around?"
"One of them is, the old man, Russ. The wife left years ago, went out to California. She was back for the funeral, though."
"What does Harper do?" Lucas asked.
"Runs an Amoco station out at Knuckle Lake."
"Okay, I'll head out there."
"Whoa, whoa." Carr shook his head. "Better not go alone. Are you gonna be up late?"
"Sure."
"Harper's open till midnight. He'd never talk to us if he didn't have to: never to a cop. Why don't I pick up a search warrant for Jim Harper's stuff out at his house, and we'll get a couple deputies and go out there late? I got church."
"All right," Lucas said. "Harper's an asshole?"
"He is," Carr said, nodding. And he said, "Lord, if these two cases are tied together and we could nail them down in a day or two… that'd make me a very happy man."
"Will Father Bergen be at your service tonight?" Lucas asked.
"Probably not. He's pretty shook up. You heard him this morning."
"Yeah." Lucas crossed his arms, watching Carr. "The Mueller kid said the adult in the photo was a big guy. And probably blond or fair. The kid didn't remember the guy as being hairy, which means he probably didn't have much."
"Like Father Phil," Carr said, flushing. "Well, it wasn't Phil. There are a thousand chunky blonds in this county. I'm one."
"I talked to the firemen. Westrom thinks Bergen did it. He says so. And he looks like someone who'd talk about it."
"Dick's the gossip-central for the whole town," Carr said. Then, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, "God damn him."
"Have you ever heard anything about Bergen being involved in sexual escapades?"
Carr stepped back. "No. Absolutely not. Why?"
"Just bullshit, probably. There are rumors around that he's messed with both women and men."
"A homosexual?" Carr was flabbergasted. "That's ridiculous. Where'n the heck are you getting this stuff?"
"Just asking around. Anyway, we've gotta talk to him again," Lucas said. "After your service? Then we can hit Harper."
Carr looked worried. "All right. I'll see you at the church at nine o'clock. Are we still meeting with the other guys at five?"
"Yeah. But I don't think there's much, except for Rusty and Dusty coming up with the photo thing."
"You're not going to tear Phil up, are you?" Carr asked.
"There's something out of sync, here," Lucas said, avoiding a direct answer. "He's not telling us something, maybe. I gotta think about it."