Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  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 bluespruce 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 offbrand 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.

  1, J1 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 re
al 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 T13 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.

  ,V "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 011 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 half-stretched over a wooden form.

  John shrugged, skin wa 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.

  I'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 4 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."