The dinner left Lucas vaguely mystified but not unhappy. They said good-bye in the restaurant parking lot, awkwardly. He didn't want to leave. The talk ran on in the snow, the air so cold that it felt like after-shave. Finally they stepped apart and Weather got in her Jeep.
"See you," she said.
"Yeah." Definitely.
Lucas watched her go, pulled his hat on, and drove the six blocks to the church. Carr was waiting in the vestibule with two women, the three of them chatting brightly, nodding. One of the women was as large as Lucas and blond, and wore a red knitted hat with snowflakes and reindeer on it. Her coat carried a button that said Free the Animals. The other woman was small and dark, with gray streaks in her hair, lines at the corners of her eyes. Carr called the dark one Jeanine as Lucas came up.
"This is Lucas Davenport…" Carr was saying.
"Lieutenant Davenport," Jeanine said. She had soft, warm hands and a strong grip. "And our friend Mary…"
Mary fawned and Lucas retreated a couple of steps, said to Carr, "We better go."
"Yeah, sure," Carr said reluctantly. "Ladies, we gotta work."
They walked out together and Lucas asked Carr, "Did you talk to Bergen?"
"Not myself-Helen Arris got him. I had to go back out to the house. They're taking the place apart."
"How about the Harper warrant?"
"Got it." Carr patted his chest and then yawned. "It's getting to be a long day."
"How about the Harper place? What can we do?"
"We're allowed to go into the kid's room and the other principal rooms of the house, not including any office or Harper's own bedroom if that's separate from the kid's. We can look at anything we believe is the kid's, or that Harper says is the kid's."
"I'd like to poke around."
"So would I, but the judge didn't want to hear about it," Carr said. "He was gonna confine us to the boy's room, but I got him to include his other personal effects-we can look inside closets and cupboards and so on, in the main rooms. Of course, if we see anything that's clearly illegal…"
"Yeah. By the way, Gene Climpt…"
"… invited himself along, which is fine with me. Gene's a tough old bird. And Lacey's coming; said he didn't want to miss it."
They'd walked around the church and started down the carefully shoveled sidewalk to the rectory.
"How many accidents has Bergen had? Car accidents?" Lucas asked.
Carr looked at him, frowning, and said, "Why?"
"I heard you fixed a couple of drunk-driving tickets for him," Lucas said. "I just wondered if he ever hit anything."
"Where'd you hear…"
"Rumors, Shelly. Has he ever hit anything?"
They'd stopped on the sidewalk and Carr stared at him for a moment and said, finally, "I got no leverage with you. You don't need the job."
"So…"
Carr started down the walk again. "He was in a one-car accident three years ago, hit a pylon at the end of a bridge, totaled out the car. He was drunk. He got caught two other times, drunk. One was pretty marginal. The other time he was on his butt."
"Gotta be careful about your relationship with him," Lucas said. "People are talking about this. The driving problems."
"Who?"
"Just people," Lucas said.
Carr sighed. "Darn it, Lucas."
"Bergen lied to me yesterday," Lucas said. "He told me he was a good driver… a small lie but it kind of throws some doubt on the rest of what he said."
"I don't understand it," Carr said. "I know in my soul that he's innocent. I just can't understand what he's hiding. If he's hiding anything. Maybe we just don't understand the sequence."
They were at the rectory door. Carr pushed the doorbell and they fell silent, hands in their pockets, breathing long gouts of steam out into the night air. After a moment Carr frowned, pushed the doorbell again. They could hear the chimes inside.
"I know he's here," Carr said. He stepped back from the porch, looked at the lighted windows, then pushed the doorbell a third time. There was a noise from inside, a thump, and Carr stood on his tiptoes to peer through the small window set in the door.
"Oh, no," he groaned. He pulled open the storm door and pushed through the inner door, Lucas trailing behind. The priest stood in the hallway, leaning on one wall, looking at them. He was wearing a white t-shirt, pulled out of his black pants, and gray wool socks. His hair stood almost straight up, as though he'd been electrocuted. He was holding a glass and the room smelled of bourbon.
"You idiot," Carr said quietly. He walked across the room and took the glass from the priest, who let it go, his hand slack. Carr turned back toward Lucas as though looking for a place to throw it.
"You know what they're saying," Bergen said at Carr's back. "They're saying I did it."
"Jesus, we've been trying…" Lucas started.
"Don't you blaspheme in this house!" the priest shouted.
"I'll kick your ass if you give me trouble," Lucas shouted back. He crossed the carpet, walking around Carr, who caught at his coat sleeve, and confronted the priest: "What happened out at the LaCourts'?"
"They were alive when I saw them!" Bergen shouted.
"They were alive-every one of them!"
"Did you have a relationship with Claudia LaCourt? Now or ever?"
The priest seemed startled: "A relationship? You mean sexual?"
"That's what I mean," Lucas snapped. "Were you screwing her?"
"No. That's ridiculous." The wind went out of him, and he staggered to a La-Z-Boy and dropped into it, looking up at Lucas in wonder. "I mean, I've never… What are you asking?"
Carr had stepped into the kitchen, came back with an empty Jim Beam bottle, held it up to Lucas.
"I've heard rumors that the two of you might be involved."
"No, no," Bergen said, shaking his head. He seemed genuinely astonished. "When I was in the seminary, I slept with a woman from a neighboring college. I also got drunk and was talked into… having sex with a prostitute. One time. Just once. After I was ordained, never. I never broke my vows."
His face had gone opaque, either from whiskey or calculation.
"Have you ever had a homosexual involvement?"
"Davenport…" Carr said, a warning in his voice.
"What?" Bergen was back on his feet now, face flushed, furious.
"Yes or no," Lucas pressed.
"No. Never."
Lucas couldn't tell if Bergen was lying or telling the truth. He sounded right, but his eyes had cleared, and Lucas could see him calculating, weighing his responses. "How about the booze? Were you drinking that night, at the LaCourts'?"
The priest turned and let himself fall back into the chair. "No. Absolutely not. This is my first bottle in a year. More than a year."
"There's something wrong with the time," Lucas said. "Tell us what's wrong."
"I don't know," Bergen said. He dropped his head to his hands, then ran his hands halfway up to the top of his head and pulled out at the hair until it was again standing up in spikes. "I keep trying to find ways… I wasn't drinking."
"The firemen. Do you have any trouble with them?"
Bergen looked up, eyes narrowing. "Dick Westrom doesn't particularly care for me. I take my business to the other hardware store, it belongs to one of the parishioners. The other man, Duane… I hardly know him. I can't think what he'd have against me. Maybe something I don't know about."
"How about the people who reported the fire?" Lucas asked, looking across the room at Carr. Carr was still holding the bottle of Jim Beam as though he were presenting evidence to a jury.
"They're okay," Carr said. "They're out of it. They saw the fire, made the call. They're too old and have too many physical problems to be involved."
The three of them looked at each other, waiting for another question, but there were none. The time simply didn't work. Lucas searched Bergen's face. He found nothing but the waxy opacity.
"All right," he said finally. "Maybe there was another Jeep. Maybe Duane saw Father Bergen's Jeep earlier, going down the lake road, and it stuck in his mind and when he saw a car go by, he thought it was yours."
"He didn't see a Jeep earlier," Carr said, shaking his head. "I asked him that-if he'd seen Phil's Jeep go down the lake road."
"I don't know," Lucas said, still studying the priest. "Maybe… I don't know."
Carr looked at Bergen. "I'm dumping the bottle, Phil. And I'm calling Joe."
Bergen's head went down. "Okay."
"Who's Joe?" Lucas asked.
"His AA sponsor," Carr said. "We've had this problem before."
Bergen looked up at Carr, his voice rasping: "Shelly, I don't know if this guy believes me," he said, tipping his head at Lucas. "But I'll tell you: I'd swear on the Holy Eucharist that I had nothing to do with the LaCourts."
"Yeah," Carr said. He reached out and Bergen took his hand, and Carr pulled him to his feet. "Come on, let's call Joe, get him over here."
Joe was a dark man, with a drooping black mustache and heavy eyebrows. He wore an old green Korean War-style olive-drab billed hat with earflaps. He glanced at Lucas, nodded at Carr and said, "How bad?"
"Drank at least a fifth," Carr said. "He's gone."
"Goddammit." Joe looked up at the house, then back to Carr. "He'd gone more'n a year. It's the rumors coming out of your office, Shelly."
"Yeah, I know. I'll try to stop it, but I don't know…"
"Better more'n try. Phil's got the thirst as bad as anyone I've ever seen." Joe stepped toward the door, turned, about to say something else, when Bergen pulled the door open behind him.
"Shelly!" he called. He was too loud. "Telephone-it's your office. They say it's an emergency."
Carr looked at Lucas and said, "Maybe something broke."
He hurried inside and Joe took Bergen by the shoulder and said, "Phil, we can handle this."
"Joe, I…" Bergen seemed overcome, looked glassily at Lucas, still on the sidewalk, and pulled Joe inside, closing the door.
Lucas waited, hands in his pockets, the warmth he'd accumulated in the house slowly dissipating. Bergen was a smart guy, and no stranger to manipulation. But he didn't have the sociopath edge, the just-below-the-surface glassiness of the real thing.
Thirty seconds after he'd gone inside, Carr burst out.
"Come on," he said shortly, striding past Lucas toward the trucks.
"What happened?"
"That kid you talked to, the one that told you about the picture?" Carr was talking over his shoulder.
"John Mueller." Jug-ears, off-brand shoes, embarrassed.
"He's missing. Can't be found."
"What?" Lucas grabbed Carr's arm. "Fuckin' tell me."
"His father was working late at his shop, out on the highway," Carr said. They were standing in the street. "He'd left the kid at home watching television. When his mother got home, and the kid wasn't there, she thought he was out at the shop. It wasn't until his parents got together that they realized he was gone. A neighbor kid's got a Nintendo and John's been going down there after school a couple nights a week, and sometimes stays for dinner. They called the neighbors but there wasn't anybody home, and they thought maybe they'd all gone down to the Arby's. So they drove around until they found the neighbors, but they hadn't seen him either."
"Sonofabitch," Lucas said, looking past Carr at nothing. "I might of put a finger on him."
"Don't even think that," Carr said, his voice grim.
They headed for the Mueller house, riding together in the sheriff's truck, crimson flashers working on top.
"You were hard on him," Carr said abruptly. "On Phil."
"You've got four murder victims and now this," Lucas said. "What do you expect, violin music?"
"I don't know what I expected," Carr said.
The sheriff was pushing the truck, moving fast. Lucas caught the bank sign: minus twenty-eight.
He said it aloud: "Twenty-eight below."
"Yeah." The wind had picked up again, and was blowing thin streamers of snow off rooftops and drifts. The sheriff hunched over the steering wheel. "If the kid's been outside, he's dead. He doesn't need anybody to kill him."
A moment passed in silence. Lucas couldn't think about John Mueller: when he thought about him, he could feel a darkness creeping over his mind. Maybe the kid was at another friend's house, maybe…
"How long has Bergen had the drinking problem?" he asked.
"Since college. He told me he went to his first AA meeting before he was legal to drink," Carr said. His heavy face was a faint unhealthy green in the dashboard lights.
"How bad? DTs? Memory loss? Blackouts?"
"Like that," Carr said.
"But he's been dry? Lately?"
"I think so. Sometimes it's hard to tell, if a guy keeps his head down. He can drink at night, hold it together during the day. I used to do a little drinking myself."
"Lot of cops do."
Carr looked across the seat at him: "You too?"
"No, no. I've abused a few things, but not booze. I've always had a taste for uppers."
"Cocaine?"
Lucas laughed, a dry rattle: the kid's face kept popping up. Small kid, sweet-faced. "I can hear the beads of sweat popping out of your forehead, Shelly. No. I'm afraid of that shit. Might be too good, if you know what I mean."
"Any alcoholic'd know what you mean," Carr said.
"I've done a little speed from time to time," Lucas continued, looking out at the dark featureless forest that lined the road. "Not lately. Speed and alcohol, they're for different personalities."
"Either one of them'll kill you," Carr said.
They passed a video rental shop with three people standing outside; they all turned to watch the sheriff's truck go by. Lucas said, "People do weird things when they're drunk. And they forget things. If he was drunk, the time…"
"He says he wasn't," Carr said.
"Would he lie about it?"
"I don't think so," Carr said. "Under other circumstances, he might-drinkers lie to themselves when they're starting again. But with this, all these dead people, I don't think he'd lie. Like I told you, Phil Bergen's a moral man. That's why he drinks in the first place."
There were twenty people at the Muellers', mostly neighbors, with three deputies. A half-dozen men on snowmobiles were organizing a patrol of ditches and trails within two miles of the house.
Carr plunged into it while Lucas drifted around the edges, helpless. He didn't know anything about missing persons searches, not out here in the woods, and Carr seemed to know a lot about it.
A few moments after Carr and Lucas arrived, the boy's father hurried out into the yard, pulling on a snowmobile suit. A woman stood in the door in a white baker's dress, hands clasped to her face. The image stuck with Lucas: it was an effect of pure terror.
Mueller said something to Carr and they talked for a moment, then Carr shook his head. Lucas heard him say "Three of them up north…"
The father had been looking around the yard, as though his son might walk out of the woods. Instead of the boy, he saw Lucas and stepped toward him. "You sonofabitch," he screamed, eyes rolling. A deputy caught him, jostled him, stayed between them. Faces in the yard turned toward Lucas. "Where's my boy, where's my boy?" Mueller screamed.
Carr came over and said, "You better leave. Take my truck. Call Lacey, tell him to get Gene, and the three of you go on out to Harper's place. There's nothing you can do here."
"Must be something," Lucas said. A deputy was talking to Mueller, Mueller's eyes still fixed on Lucas.
"There's nothing," Carr said. "Just get out. Go on down to Harper's like we planned."
Lucas met Lacey and Climpt at the 77 Tap, a bar ten miles east of Grant. The bar was an old one, a simple cube with shingle siding and a few dark windows up above, living rooms upstairs for the owner. An antique gas pump sat to one side of the place, with a set of rusting, unused bait tanks, all of it awash in snow. A Leinenkugel's sign provided most of the exterior lighting.
Inside, the bar smelled of fried fish and old beer; an Elton John song was playing on the jukebox. Lacey and Climpt were sitting in one of the three booths.
"No sign of the kid?" Lacey asked as he slid out of the booth. Climpt threw two dollars on the table and stood up behind him, chewing on a wooden matchstick.
"Not when I left," Lucas said.
Lacey and Climpt looked at each other and Climpt shook his head. "If he ain't at somebody's house…"
"Yeah."
"Ain't your fault," Climpt said, looking levelly at Lucas. "What're you supposed to do?"
"Yeah." Lucas shook his head and they started for the door. "So tell me about Harper."
Lacey was pulling on his gloves. "He's our local hood. He spent two years in prison over in Minnesota for ag assault-this was way back, must've been a couple of years after he got out of high school. He's been in jail since then, maybe three or four times."
"For?"
"Brawling, mostly. Fighting in bars. He'd pick out somebody, get on them, goad them into a fight and then hurt them. You know the type. He's beat up some women we know of, but they never wanted to do anything about it. Either because they were still hoping to get together with him or because they were scared. You know."
"Yeah."
"He's carried a gun off and on, smokes a little marijuana, maybe does a little coke, we've heard both," Lacey continued. "He says he needs the gun to protect himself when he's taking cash home from the station."
"He's a felon," Lucas said.
"Got his rights back," Lacey said. "Shouldn't of. There's been rumors that when he's been hard up for money, he'd go down to the Cities and knock over a liquor store or a 7-Eleven. Maybe that's just bar talk."
"Maybe," Climpt grunted. He looked at Lucas: "He's not like a TV bully. He's a bully, but he's not a coward. He's a mean sonofabitch."
Climpt and Lacey rode together, and Lucas followed them out, occasional muted cop chatter burbling out of the radio. The roads had cleared except for icy corners and intersections, and traffic was light because of the cold. They made good time.
Knuckle Lake popped up as a fuzzy ball of light far away down the highway, brightening and separating into business signs and streetlights as they got closer. There were a half dozen buildings scattered around the four corners: a motel, two bars, a general store, a cafe, and the Amoco station. The station was brightly lit, with snow piled twenty feet high along the back property lines. One car sat at a gas pump, engine off, the driver elsewhere. An old Chevy was visible through the windows of the single repair bay. They stopped in front of the big window, the other two trucks swinging in behind. A teenager in a ragged trench coat and tennis shoes peered through the glass at them: he was all by himself, like a guppie in a well-lit aquarium.
Lucas followed Climpt inside. Climpt nodded at the kid and said, "Hello, Tommy. How you doing?"
"Okay, just fine, Mr. Climpt," the kid said. He was nervous, and a shock of straw-colored hair fell out from under his watch cap, his Adam's apple bobbing spasmodically.
"How long you been out?" Climpt asked.
"Oh, two months now," the kid said.
"Tommy used to borrow cars, go for rides," Climpt said.
"Bad habit," Lucas said, crossing his arms, leaning against the candy machine. "Everybody gets pissed off at you."
"I quit," the kid said.
"He's a good mechanic," Climpt said. Then: "Where's Russ?"
"Down to the house, I guess."
"Okay."
"It'd be better if you didn't call him," Lucas said.
"Whatever," the kid said. "I'm, you know, whatever."
"Whatever," Climpt said. He pointed a finger at the kid's face, and the kid swallowed. "We won't be tellin' Russ we talked to you."
Back outside, Climpt said, "He won't call."
"How far is Harper's place?"
"Two minutes from here," Carr said.
"Think he'll be a problem?"
"Not if we get right on top of him," Climpt said. "He won't win no college scholarship, but he's not stupid enough to take on a whole… whatever we are."
"A posse," Lucas said.
Climpt laughed, a short bark. "Right. A posse."
John Mueller came back to Lucas' mind, like a nagging toothache, a pain that wouldn't go away but couldn't be fixed. Maybe he was at a friend's; maybe they'd already found him…
Harper's house huddled in a copse of birch and red pine, alone on an unlit stretch of side road, a free-standing garage in back, a mercury-vapor yard-light overhead. Windows were lit in the back of the house. Climpt killed his lights and pulled into the end of the drive, and Lucas pulled in behind him.
Climpt and Lacey got out, pushed the truck doors shut instead of slamming them. "Are you carrying?" Climpt asked.
"Yeah."
"Might loosen it up. Russ's always got something around."
"All right." Lucas turned to Lacey, who had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the house. "Henry, why don't you sit out here by the truck. Get the shotgun and just hang back."
Lacey nodded and walked back toward the Suburban.
"I'll try to get a little edge on him right away," Lucas told Climpt as they started up the driveway. "I won't pull any real shit, but you can act like you think I might."
Woodsmoke drifted down on them, an acrid odor that cut at the nose and throat. Two feet of pristine snow covered the front porch. "Looks like he doesn't use the front door at all," Climpt said.
As they walked around the side of the house, they heard the gun rack rattle as Lacey unlocked the shotgun and took it out, then the ratcheting sound of a twelve-gauge shell being pumped home. At the back door, Lucas could hear the sounds of a television-not the words but the rhythms.
"Stand down at the bottom where he can see you," Lucas told Climpt. He went to the top of the stoop and knocked on the door, then stepped to the side. A moment later the yellow porch light came on, and then a curtain pulled back. A man's head appeared behind the window glass. He looked at Climpt, hesitated, made a head gesture, and fumbled with the doorknob.
"We're okay," Lucas muttered.
Harper pulled open the inner door, saw Lucas, frowned. He was an oval-faced man, with a narrow chin, thick, short lips, and scar tissue on his forehead and under his eyes. His eyes were the size of dimes, and black, like a lizard's. He was unshaven. He pushed open the storm door, looked down at Climpt and said, "What do you want, Gene?"
"We need to talk to you about the death of your son, and we need to look through Jim's stuff again," Climpt said.
Harper's thick lips twisted. "You got a warrant?"
"Yeah, we got a warrant."
After another long moment Harper said, "Now what the fuck are you fuckin' with me for, Climpt?" The question came in a low voice, rough and guttural, angry but unafraid.
"We're not fuckin' with you," Lucas snapped back. He hooked the storm door handle with his left hand and jerked it open. Harper pulled back an inch, then settled in a fighting stance, ready to swing. He was round-shouldered but hard, with hands that looked granite-gray in the bad light. Lucas took his right hand out of his pocket, a bare hand with a.45. "Swing on me and I'll beat the shit out of you," he said. "And if I start to lose I'll blow your fuckin' nuts off."
"What?" Harper stepped back, dropping his right hand.
"You heard me, asshole."
"Oh, yeah," Harper said. He straightened, let the left hand drop. "You're the big city guy, uh? Big city guy, big city asshole gonna blow my nuts off." He took another step back, the anger spreading from his eyes over his face, ready to go again.
"Come on, motherfucker," Lucas said. He lifted the.45 out to the side. "You put your own boy out on the corner givin' blowjobs to fat guys, there's nobody in this county'd blame me if I spread your brains all over the house. So you wanna do it? Come on, come on…"
"You're fuckin' nuts," Harper said. But his voice had changed again, uncertainty near the surface, and his eyes shifted past Lucas to Climpt. "Why are you fuckin' with me, Gene?"
"The LaCourt girl, the one who was killed, had a picture of your boy, naked, with a grown-up male," Climpt said.
Lucas dropped the gun to his side, moved forward, one foot inside, shoulder against the door, forcing Harper back. "She showed it around and then the family was wiped out," he said. "We want to look at Jim's things, see if there's anything that might indicate who it was."
"Sure as shit wasn't me."
"We're looking for a guy who's blond and a little fat," Lucas said. He stepped through the storm door into a mudroom, crowding Harper, who backed through an inner door into the kitchen. Climpt was a step behind. "You don't have any friends that look like that, do you?"
Climpt called out to the truck, "Henry, c'mon."
"I want to see that warrant," Harper said, backing farther into the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of onions and bad meat and old soured milk.
"Henry's got it," Climpt said. Harper looked past Lucas as Lacey walked up. Lacey pulled a paper out of his pocket and handed it to Lucas, who handed it to Harper. While Harper looked at it, Lucas decocked the.45. At the latching sound, Harper looked up and said, "Smith and Wesson. Is that the.40 or the.45?"
"The.45," Lucas said.
"I'd have gone with the.40," Harper said as the two deputies came in behind Carr. He'd gone into the asshole-cooperative mode, an almost imperceptible groveling learned in prisons.
"Right," said Lucas, ignoring the comment. He put the pistol back in his coat pocket. "Where's the kid's room?"
"You don't think I know about guns? I…"
"I don't give a fuck what you know," Lucas snapped. "Where's the kid's room?"
Harper muttered shit, crumbled the warrant in his hand and threw it on the floor, turned and led them through a narrow archway into the living room. The TV was tuned to professional wrestling, and a cardboard tray, stained orange from the sauce of an instant spaghetti dinner, sat on a round oak table with an empty crockery coffee cup. Harper brushed past it, into a hallway. The first door on the right was open, into a bathroom; the next door, to the left, was half-open, and Harper pulled it closed. "That's mine. Nothin' of Jim's in there."
At the last door, on the right, he stopped and gestured with his thumb: "That was Jim's."
Lucas pushed the door open. Jim Harper had been dead for more than two months, but his room was like he'd left it: a pair of dirty jeans, a t-shirt and pair of underpants tossed in a corner, now covered with dust. The bed was unmade, a discolored flat-sheet and an olive-drab Army blanket tangled on a yellowed fitted sheet. The pillow was small, gray, dotted with what might have been blood. Lucas looked closer: blood, all right, but only in small spots, as though the kid had acne and picked at the sores. Clothes were pinched in the drawers of the single bureau, and two of the drawers hung open.
"The cops already been through it, messed it up," Harper said over Lucas' shoulder. "Didn't find anything."
Lucas looked back down the hall at Lacey. "Henry, why don't you and Mr. Harper here go sit and watch some TV? Gene and I'll look around."
"Hey…" Harper said.
"Shut up," said Lucas.
"They turned the room over and didn't find anything," Lucas said to Climpt. "If you were a kid, hiding something, where'd you put it?"
"What I've been thinking is, Russ's such an asshole, why would a kid hide anything from him? Nothing the kid could do would bother him much."
Lucas shrugged. "Maybe he'd hide something just so he could keep it."
"That's a point," Climpt said. After a moment: "I always hid stuff in the basement. Maybe in a closet if it was just overnight and small-dirty magazines, that sort of thing. I suppose the attic, if they got one."
"Let's do a quick run through this, then maybe look around a little."
The house was an old one, with hardwood planked floors covered with patches of linoleum, and lath-and-plaster walls. Lucas dug through the kid's closet, shaking out a stack of magazines and comic books, checking shoes and the few shirts hanging inside. There were no loose floorboards and the plaster wall was cracked but intact. Climpt tossed the bureau again, pulling out each drawer to turn it over, checked the heat register, found it solid. In ten minutes they'd decided the room was clean.
"Attic or basement?" asked Climpt.
"Let's see how much trouble the attic is."
The attic access was through a hatch in the bathroom. Standing on a chair, Lucas pushed up the hatch and was showered with dust and asbestos insulation. He pulled it shut again and climbed down, brushing the dirt out of his hair.
"Hasn't been open in a while," he said.
"Basement," said Climpt. They headed for the basement stairs, found Lacey digging through a freestanding wardrobe in the living room while Harper slumped in a chair.
"Anything?" Lucas asked.
"Nope."
"We'll be down the basement," Lucas said.
Harper watched them go, but said nothing. "I wish that fucker'd give me a reason to slam him up alongside the head," Climpt said.
The basement smelled of cobwebs, dust, engine oil, and coal. The walls' granite fieldstone was mortared with crumbling, sandy concrete. Two bare bulbs, dangling from ancient fraying wire, provided all the light. There were two small rooms, filled with the clutter of a rural half-century: racks of dusty Ball jars, broken crocks, an antique lawnmower, a lever-action.22 covered with rust. A dozen leg-hold jump traps hung from a nail, and hanging next to them, two dozen tiny feet tied together with twine.
"Gophers," Climpt said, touching them. They swayed like a grisly wind chime. "County used to pay a bounty on them, way back, nickel a pair on front feet."
A railroad-tie workbench was wedged into a corner with a rusting vise fitted at one end. A huge old coal furnace hunkered in the middle of the main room like a dead oak, stone cold. A diminutive propane burner stood in what had once been a coal room, galvanized ducts leading to the rooms above. The coal room was the cleanest place in the basement, apparently cleaned when the furnace was installed. At a glance, there was no place to hide anything.
Lucas wandered over to the coal furnace, pulled open the furnace door, looked at a pile of old ashes, closed it. "This could take a while," he said.
They took fifteen minutes, Climpt repeating, "Someplace where he could get it quick…" They found nothing, and started up the steps, unsatisfied. The basement had too many nooks and crannies. "If one of those fieldstones pulled out…" Lucas started.
"We'd never find it: there must be two thousand of them," Climpt said.
And Lucas said, "Wait a minute," went back down the stairs and looked toward the propane burner.
"If that's the coal room, shouldn't there be a coal chute?" he asked.
"Yeah, there should," Climpt said.
They found the chute door set in the wall behind the propane burner, four feet above the floor and virtually invisible in the bad light. Lucas reached back, unlatched the door and felt inside. His hand fell on a stack of paper.
"Something," he said. "Paper." He pulled it out. Three glossy sex magazines and two sex comics. He handed them to Climpt, reached back inside for another quick check, came up with a small corner of notebook paper, blank, that might have been used as a bookmark. Lucas stuck the paper in his pocket.
"Porn," said Climpt, standing under one of the hanging light bulbs. They shook out the magazines, found nothing inside.
"Check 'em," Lucas said. "We're looking for a picture of a kid on a bed."
They flipped through the magazines, but all of the pictures were obviously commercial and involved women. The Mueller kid had described the photo he'd seen as rough, printed on newsprint.
"Nothing much," Climpt said. "I mean, a lot of pussy… Goddamn Shelly'd have a heart attack."
Lucas went back to the coal chute for a final check, reached far inside, felt just a corner of a piece of plastic. He had to stretch to fish it out.
A Polaroid.
Climpt came to look over his shoulder.
A young boy, slender, nude, standing in front of a crouched woman, pushing into her mouth. His hands were wrapped around her skull. All that was visible of the woman was her dark hair, the lower part of her face from her nose down, and part of her neck. She was obviously older, probably in her forties.
The boy's left hand was visible and a finger was gone.
"Don't know the woman, just from that," Climpt said. "But that's Jim doin' her."
"Hey, Lucas," Lacey called from upstairs.
"Yeah?"
"It's like… ah, Christ!" Lacey blurted.
Lucas looked at Climpt, who shrugged, and they headed up the stairs. Lacey was standing in the door to the living room, his face dead white. Harper sat in a chair, a half-amused look on his face. They were looking at the television. The video was cheap, clear enough: two men were lying on a bed, fondling each other.
"You sell this shit?" Climpt growled at Harper.
"I told Henry-it all belonged to Jim. I don't look at homo shit."
"Found it in the wardrobe," Lacey said. "There weren't any labels."
Lucas handed Lacey the Polaroid.
"Sonofagun," Lacey whispered.
"Yeah," Lucas said. "You want to look at this, Harper?" No more Russ or Mr. Harper. He held it out in front of Harper, who reached for it, but Lucas pulled it back. "Just look-don't touch."
Harper peered at the picture and drawled, "Looks like Jim, gettin' him some head. Damn, I wish I knew her-she looks like she knows what she's doing."
He still had the slightly amused look on his face. He was about to say something else when Climpt stepped past Lucas, grabbed Harper by the shirt, and hauled him out of the chair. "You motherfucker."
Harper covered his gut with his elbows, kept his hands up in front of his face. He didn't want to get hurt, but he wasn't scared, Lucas thought.
"Hey, hey," said Lacey, trying to intervene. "Let him…"
Climpt shoved Harper at Lucas, who caught him, still off-balance, said, "Fuck, I don't want him," and spun him into the wall. Climpt caught him on the rebound, dragged him backwards by the collar and as Lacey shouted, "Hey," banged the back of Harper's head against the opposite wall, then pulled him forward, letting go as Lucas put his hand in Harper's face and snapped him backwards into the chair.
"Knock it off," Lacey said.
"Set your own kid up for this shit, didn't you?" Climpt said, his face an inch from Harper's. Harper spit at him, a spray of spittle. Climpt caught him by the shirt collar and the skin under his neck and hoisted him a foot out of the chair. "Sold his ass to faggots and anybody else who wanted some young stuff. You know what they're gonna do to you in the joint? You know what they do to child fuckers? You're gonna wear out your kneecaps kneeling on the floors, blowing those guys."
Lacey, face red, had Climpt by the shoulder, pulling at him. Lucas put his arm between Harper and Climpt, said, "Gene, let him go. Gene…"
Climpt looked blindly at Lucas, then dropped Harper back in the chair, turned away, wiped his face with his forearm.
"Motherfucker," Harper said, pulling down his shirt.
Lucas turned to Lacey. "Could you get Shelly on the radio? Don't mention the Polaroid directly, but tell him we got something. And we need to see him."
Lacey stepped back, reluctantly. "You guys won't…"
"No, no," Lucas said. "And listen, ask him about the Mueller kid, if there's been any progress."
"What about the Mueller kid?" Harper asked.
"He's missing," Lucas said, turning back to him.
Lacey was walking out through the kitchen. When the back door banged shut, Lucas stepped up to Harper. "I believe you spit on deputy Climpt, and I feel kinda shortchanged, you know. You didn't spit on me."
"Fuck you," Harper said. He looked from Lucas to Climpt and back. "I got my rights."
Lucas took him by the shirt as Climpt had, jerked him out of the chair, ran him straight back at the wall, slammed him against it. Harper covered, still not ready to resist. Climpt caught his right arm, twisted it. Both Lucas and Climpt were bigger than Harper, and pinned him on the wall.
"Remember what you said about your vise?" Lucas asked, face half-turned to Climpt. Climpt grunted. "Watch this-this is nasty."
He caught the flesh between Harper's nostrils by his thumb and middle fingers and squeezed, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh. Harper's mouth dropped as though he were going to scream, but Climpt's hand came up and squeezed his throat.
Lucas squeezed, squeezed, then said, "Who's the woman in the picture? Who is it?"
Harper, his body bucking, shook his head. "Better let go of his throat for a minute, Gene," Lucas said, and he let go of Harper's nose. Harper groaned, thrashed, sucked air, and Lucas asked, "Who is that, asshole? Who's the woman?"
"Don't know…"
"Let me try," Climpt said, and he caught Harper's nose as Lucas had, his thick yellow fingernails squeezing…
The sound that came from Harper's throat might have been a scream if it had been pitched lower. As it was, it was a kind of blackboard scratching squeak, and he shuddered.
"Who is it?" Lucas asked.
"Don't…"
Climpt looked at Lucas, who shook his head, and they both released him at the same moment. Tears were running down Harper's face and he caught his head in his hands and dropped to his knees. Lucas squatted beside him.
"You know some stuff," Lucas said. "You know the woman or you know somebody who knows the woman."
Harper got one foot beneath him, then heaved himself up. His eyes were red, and tears still poured down his face. "Motherfuckers."
Climpt cuffed him on the side of the head. "You ain't listening. You know who this is, this woman. If you don't spit out the name…"
"You're gonna what? Beat me around?" Harper asked, defiant. "I been beat around before, so go ahead. I'll get my fuckin' lawyer."
"Yeah, you put a fuckin' lawyer out there and I'll pin this fuckin' picture on the bulletin board at the goddamn Super Valu with the note that you sold Jim's ass," Climpt said. "They'll find your fuckin' skin hanging from a tree out here, and you won't be in it."
"Go fuck yourself," Harper snarled. There was blood on his upper lip, trickling down from his nose.
Climpt pulled back his hand but Lucas blocked it. "Let it go," he said.
Outside, as they were loading into the trucks, Lacey said, "Where's Harper?"
"Probably fixin' some dinner," Climpt said. Then, "He's okay, Henry, don't get your ass in an uproar."
Lacey shook his head doubtfully, then said, "Can I see that Polaroid again, just for a minute?"
Lucas handed it to him and Lacey turned on his truck's dome light and peered at the photo.
"Check this, right here," Lacey said. He touched the edge of the photograph with a fingernail. Lucas took it.
"It looks like a sleeve."
"Sure does," said Lacey, holding the photo four inches from his face. "Now, this here is a Spectra Polaroid. Spectras come with a remote control, a radio thing, so it might of been that there were only the two of them. But if that's a sleeve, and if there's somebody else behind the camera…"
"The camera angle's downward," Lucas said. "That'd be high for a tripod."
"So there must be a bunch of them," Lacey said.
"Yeah, probably," Lucas said, nodding. "We already know he was with a heavy white guy and here's a woman."
"Damn-if it's a bunch of people, it's gonna tear this county up," Climpt said.
"I'd say the county's already torn up," Lucas said.
Climpt shook his head: "This'd be worse'n the murders, a bunch of people screwing children. Believe me, around here, this'd be worse."