Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  --"MOW The corn-knife might kill, but that wasn't why he'd brought it.

  The corn-knife was simply horrifying. If he needed a threat to get the picture, if he needed to hurt the girl bad but not kill her, then the corn-knife was exactly right.

  Standing atop the snow, the Iceman felt like a giant, his head reaching nearly to the eaves of the garage as he worked his way down its length.

  He saw Frank come to the window and peer out, and he stopped. Had Claudia seen him after all? Impossible. She'd turned away, and she'd run, but he could hardly see her, even with the garage and yardlights on her. He'd been back in the dark, wearing black. Impossible.

  The Iceman was sweating from the short climb up the bank, and the struggle with the brush. He snapped the releases and pulled the bindings loose, but stayed balanced on the shoes. He'd have to be careful climbing down into the trench. He glanced at his watch. Time time time...

  He unzipped his parka, pulled his glove and reached inside to touch the wooden stock of the Anaconda. Ready.

  He was turning to step into the trench when the back door opened and a shaft of light played out across the porch.

  The Iceman rocked back, dragging the snowshoes with his boots, into the darkness beside the woodshed, his back to the corrugated metal garage wall.

  Frank was a dark silhouette in the light of the open door, then a three-dimensional figure shuffling down the snow trench out toward the garage. He had a flashlight in one hand, and played it off the side of the garage.

  The Iceman eased back as the light crossed the side wall of the garage, gave Frank a few seconds to get farther down the path, then peeked around the corner. Frank had gotten to the garage door, opened it.

  The Iceman shuffled up to the corner of the garage, the gun in his left hand, the corn-knife in his right, the cold burning his bare hands.

  Frank snapped on the garage lights, stepped inside. A moment later, the lights went out again. Frank stepped out, pulled it tight behind him, rattled the knob. Stepped up the path. Shone the flashlight across the yard at the propane tank.

  Took another step.

  The Iceman was there. The corn-knife whipped down, chunked. Frank saw it coming, just soon enough to flinch, not soon enough to avoid it.

  The knife chocked through Frank's parka and into his skull, the shock jolted through the Iceman's arm. A familiar shock, as though he'd chopped the blade into a fence post.

  The blade popped free as Frank pitched over. He was dead as he fell, but his body made a sound like a stepped on snake, a tight exhalation, a ccccuuuhhhhh, and blood ran into the snow.

  For just a second then, the wind stopped, as though nature were holding her breath. The snow seemed to pause with the wind, and something flicked across the edge of the woods, at the corner of the Iceman's vision. Something out there... he was touched by an uneasiness. He watched, but there was no further movement, and the wind and snow were back as quickly as they'd gone.

  The Iceman stepped down into the trench, started toward the house.

  Claudia's face appeared in the window, floating out there in the storm.

  He stopped, sure he'd been seen: but she pressed her face closer to the window, peering out, and he realized that he was still invisible.

  After a moment, her face moved back away from the window. The Iceman started for the house again, climbed the porch as quietly as he could, turned the knob, pushed the door open.

  "Frank?" Claudia was there, in the doorway to the kitchen. Her hand popped out of her sleeve and the Iceman saw the flash of chrome, knew the flash, reacted, brought up the big.44 Mag.

  "Frank?" Claudia screamed. The.357 hung in her hand, by her side, unready, unthought-of, a worthless icon of selfdefense. Then the V of the back sight and the i of the front sight crossed the plane of her head and the.44 bucked in the Iceman's hand. He'd spent hours in the quarry doing this, swinging on targets, and he knew he had her, felt the accuracy in his bones, one with the target.

  The slug hit Claudia in the forehead and the world stopped.

  No more Lisa, no more Frank, no more nights in the Holiday Inn with the mirrors, no memories, no regrets. Nothing. She didn't fly back, like in the movies. She wasn't hammered down. She simply dropped, her mouth open. The Iceman, bringing the Colt back to bear, felt a thin sense of disappointment. The big gun should batter them down, blow them up; the big gun was a Universal Force.

  From the back room, then, in the silence after the shot, a young girl's voice, not yet afraid: "Mom? Mom? What was that?"

  The Iceman grabbed Claudia's parka hood, dragged her into the kitchen and dropped her. She lay on the floor like a puppet with the strings cut.

  Her eyes were open, sightless. He ignored her. He was focused now on the back room. He needed the picture. He hefted the corn-knife and started back.

  The girl's voice again. A little fear this time: "Mom?"

  CHAPTER 2

  Lucas Davenport climbed down from his truck. The light on the LaCourt house was brilliant. In the absolutely clear air, every crack, every hole, every splinter of glass was as sharp as a hair under a microscope. The smell of death-the smell of pork roast-slipped up to him, and he turned his face toward it, looking for it, like a stone-age hunter.

  The house looked oddly like a skull, with its glassless windows gaping out at the snowscape. The front door was splintered by fire axes, while the side door, hanging from the house by a single hinge, was twisted and blackened by the fire. Vinyl siding had melted, charred, burned. Half of the roof was gone, leaving the center of the ruin open to the sky. Pink fiberglass insulation was everywhere, sticking out of the house, blowing across the snow, hung up in the bare birch branches like obscene fleshy hair. Firehose ice, mixed with soot and ash, flowed around and out of the house like a miniature glacier.

  On the land side of the house, three banks of portable stadium-style lights, run off an ancient gas-powered Army generator, poured a hundred million candlepower of bluewhite light onto the scene. The generator underlined the shouting of the firemen and the thrumming of the fire truck pumps with a ferocious jackhammer pounding.

  All of it stank.

  Of gasoline and burning insulation, of water-soaked plaster and barbecued bodies, diesel fumes. The fire had moved fast, burned fiercely, and had been smothered in a hurry.

  The dead had been charred rather than cremated.

  Twenty men swarmed over the house. Some were firemen , others were cops; three or four were civilians. The snow had eased, at least temporarily, but the wind was like a razor, slashing at exposed skin.

  Lucas was tall, dark-complected, with startling blue eyes set deep under a strong brow. His hair was dark, but touched with gray, and a bit long; a sheath of it fell over his forehead , and he pushed it out of his eyes as he stood looking at the house.

  Quivering, almost-like an expensive pointer.

  His face should have been square, and normally was, when he was ten pounds heavier. A square face fit with the rest of him, with his heavy shoulders and hands. But now he was gaunt, the skin stretched around his cheekbones: the face of a boxer in hard training. Every day for a month he'd put on either skis or snowshoes, and had run up through the hills around his North Woods cabin. In the afternoon he worked in the woodlot, splitting oak with a mall and wedge.

  Lucas stepped toward the burnt house as though hypnotized. He remembered another house, in Minneapolis, just south of the loop, a frozen night in February. A gang leader lived in the downstairs apartment; a rival group of 'bangers decided to take him out. The top floor was occupied by a woman-Shirleen something-who ran an illegal overnight child-care center for neighborhood mothers. There were six children sleeping upstairs when the Molotov cocktails came through the windows downstairs.

  Shirleen dropped all six screaming kids out the window, breaking legs on two of them, ribs on two more, and an arm on a neighbor who was trying to stop their fall. The woman was too big to jump herself and burned to death trying to get down the single stair
way. Same deal: the house like a skull, the firehose ice, the smell of roast pork....

  Lucas unconsciously shook his head and smiled: he'd had good lines into the crack community and gave homicide the 'bangers' names. They were locked in Stillwater, and would be for another eight years. In two days he'd done a number on them they still didn't believe.

  Now this. He stepped back to the open door of his truck, leaned inside, took a black cashmere watch cap off the passenger seat and pulled it over his head. He wore a blue parka over jeans and a cable-knit sweater, pac boots, and expedition-weight polypropylene long underwear. A deputy walked around the Chevy Suburban that had pulled into the yard just ahead of Davenport's Ford. Henry Lacey wore the standard tan sheriff's department parka and insulated pants.

  "Shelly's over here," Lacey said, jerking a thumb toward the house.

  "C'mon-I'll introduce you... what're you looking at, the house?

  What's funny?"

  "Nothing."

  "Thought you were smiling," Lacey said, looking vaguely disturbed.

  "Nah... just cold," Lucas said, groping for an excuse.

  Goddamn, he loved this.

  "Well... Shelly..."

  "Yeah." Lucas followed, pulling on his thick ski gloves, still focused on the house. The place might have been snatched from a frozen suburb of hell. He felt at home.

  Sheldon Carr stood on a slab of ice in the driveway, behind the volunteer tanker and pumper trucks. He wore the same sheriff's cold-weather gear as Lacey, but black instead of khaki, with the sheriff's gold star instead of the silver deputy's badge. A frozen black hose snaked past his feet down to the lake, where the firefighters had augered through three feet of ice to get at the lake water. Now they were using a torch to free the hose, and the blue flame flickered at the edge of Carr's vision.

  Carr was stunned. He'd done what he could, and then he stopped functioning: he simply stood in the driveway and watched the firemen work.

  And he froze. His cold-weather gear wasn't enough for this weather.

  His legs were stiff and V, his feet numb, but he couldn't go into the garage, couldn't J" RIM tear himself away. He stood like a dark snowman, slightly fat, unmoving, hands away from his side, staring up at the house.

  "Piece a..." A fireman slipped and fell, cursing. Carr had to turn his whole body to look at him. The fireman was smeared with ash and half-covered with ice. When they'd tried to spray the house, the wind had whipped the water back on them as sleet. Some of the firemen looked like small mobile icebergs, the powerful lights glistening off them as they worked across the yard. This one was on his back, looking up at Carr, his mustache white with frost from his own breath, face red from the wind and exertion. Carr moved to help him, hand out, but the fireman waved him away. "I'd just pull you down," he said.

  He clambered awkwardly to his feet, struggling with a frozen firehose.

  He was trying to load it into a pickup truck and it fought back like an anaconda on speed. "Piece a shit..."

  Carr turned back to the house. A rubber-encased fireman was helping the doctor climb through the shattered front door. Carr watched as they began to pick their way toward the back bedroom. The little girl was there, so burnt that God only knew what had happened to her. What had happened to her parents was clear enough. Claudia's face had been partly protected by a fireproof curtain that had fallen over her. A fat bullet hole stared out of her forehead like a blank third eye. And Frank...

  "Heard anything from Madison?" Carr called to a deputy in a Jeep. The deputy had the engine turning over, heater on high, window down just far enough to communicate.

  "Nope. It's still snowin' down there. I guess they're waitin' it out."

  "Waitin' it out? Waitin' it out?" Sheldon Carr was suddenly shouting, eyes wild. "Call the fuckers back and tell them to get their asses up here. They've heard of four-byfours , haven't they? Call them back."

  "Right now," the deputy said, shocked. He'd never heard Sheldon Carr say anything stronger than gol-darn.

  Carr turned away, his jaw working, the cold forgotten.

  Waiting it out? Henry Lacey was walking toward him, carefully flatfooted on the treacherous slab of ice that had run down into the yard.

  He was trailed by a man in a parka.

  Lacey came up, nodded, said, "This is Davenport."

  Carr nodded: "Th-th-thanks f-f-for coming." He suddenly couldn't get the words out.

  Lacey took his elbow. "Have you been out here all the time?"

  Carr nodded numbly and Lacey tugged him toward the garage, said, "My God, Shelly, you'll kill yourself."

  "I'm okay," Carr ground out. He pulled his arm free, turned to Lucas.

  "When I heard you were up here from the Cities, I figured you'd know more about this kind of thing than I do. Thought it was worth a try.

  Hope you can help us."

  "Henry tells me it's a mess," Lucas said.

  He grinned as he said it, a slightly nasty smile, Carr thought.

  Davenport had a chipped tooth, never capped, the kind of thing you might have gotten in a fight, and a scar bisected one eyebrow. "It's a..

  ." Carr shook his head, groping for a word. "It's a gol-darn tragedy, " he said finally.

  Lucas- glanced at him: he'd never heard a cop call a crime a tragedy.

  He'd never heard a cop say gol-darn.

  He couldn't see much of Carr's face, but the sheriff was a large man with an ample belly. In the black snowmobile suit, he looked like the Michelin tire man in mourning.

  "Where's LEST' Lucas asked. The Division of Law Enforcement Services did mobile crime-scene work on major crimes.

  "They're having trouble getting out of Madison," Carr said grimly. He waved at the sky. "The storm..

  "Don't they have four-by-fours? It's all highway."

  "We're finding that out right now," Carr snapped. He apologized: "Sorry, that's a tender subject. They shoulda been halfway here by now."

  He looked back at the house, as if helpless to resist it: "Lord help us."

  "Three dead?" Lucas asked.

  "Three dead," Carr said. "Shot, chopped with some kind of ax or something, and the other one... shoot, there's no way to tell. Just a kid."

  "Still in the house?"

  "Come on," Carr said grimly. He suddenly began to shake uncontrollably, then, with an effort, relaxed. "We got tarps on 'em.

  And there's something else... heck, let's look at the bodies, then we'll get to that."

  "Shelly, are you okay?" Lacey asked again.

  "Yeah, yeah... I'll show Davenport-Lucas?-I'll show Lucas around, then I'll get inside. Gosh, I can't believe this cold."

  Frank LaCourt lay faceup on a sidewalk that led from the house to the garage. Carr had one of the deputies lift the plastic tarp that covered the body and Lucas squatted beside it.

  "Jesus," he said. He looked up at Carr, who'd turned away. "What happened to his face?"

  "Dog, maybe," Carr said, looking sideways down at the mutilated face.

  "Coyotes... I don't know."

  "Could have been a wolf," Lacey said from behind him.

  "We've had some reports, I think there are a few moving down."

  "Messed him up," Lucas said.

  Carr looked out at the forest that pressed around the house: "It's the winter," he said. "Everything's starving out there. We're feedin' some deer, but most of them are gonna die. Shoot, most of them are already dead. There're coyotes hanging around the dumpsters in town, at the pizza place."

  Lucas pulled off a glove, fumbled a hand-flash from his parka pocket and shone it on what was left of the man's face. LaCourt was an Indian, maybe forty-five. His hair was stiff with frozen blood. An animal had torn the flesh off much of the left side of his face. The left eye was gone and the nose was chewed away.

  "He got it from the side, half-split his head in two, right through the hood," Carr said. Lucas nodded, touched the hood with his gloved finger, looking at the cut fabric. "The doc said it was some kind of knife or
cleaver," Carr said.

  Lucas stood up. "Henry said snowshoes..

  "Right there," Lacey said, pointing.

  Lucas turned the flashlight into the shadows along the shed. Broad indentations were still visible in the snow. The indentations were half drifted-in.

  "Where do they go?" Lucas asked, staring into the dark trees.

  "They come up from the lake, through the woods, and they go back down," Carr said, pointing at an angle through the jumble of forest.

  "There's a snowmobile trail down there, machines coming and going all the time. Frank had a couple sleds himself, so it could have been him that made the tracks. We don't know."