Winter Prey

by John Sandford

And Weather Karkinnen. If she saw the photo, she'd know him for sure.

  Dammit.

  He rolled down the window a few inches, flipped the cigarette into the snow.

  He'd once seen himself in a movie. A comedy, no less.

  Ghostbusters. Silly scene-a jerk, a nebbish, is possessed by an evil spirit, and talks to a horse. When the cabriolet driver yells at him, the nebbish growls and his eyes burn red, and the power flares out at the driver.

  Good for a laugh-but the Iceman had seen himself there, just for an instant. He also, had a force inside, but there was nothing funny about it. The force was powerful, unafraid, influential. Manipulating events from behind the screen of a bland, unprepossessing face.

  Flaring out when it was needed.

  He had a recurring dream in which a woman, a blonde, looked at him, her eyes flicking over him, unimpressed.

  And he let the force flare out of his eyes, just a flicker , catching her, and he could feel the erotic response from her.

  He'd wondered about Weather. He'd stood there, naked under his hospital gown, she examined him. He'd let the fire out with her, trying to look her into a corner, but she'd seemed not to notice. He'd let it go.

  He often thought about her after that encounter. Wondering how she saw him, standing there; she must've thought something, she was a woman.

  The Iceman looked out at the frozen snowscape in his headlights.

  The Mueller kid.

  Weather Karkinnen.

  CHAPTEr 7

  An hour after dark, the investigation group gathered in Carr's office.

  Climpt, the investigator, and two other men had worked the LaCourts' friends and found nothing of significance. No known feud, nothing criminal. The Storm Lake road had been run from one end to the other, and all but two or three people could account for themselves- at the time of the killings; those two or three didn't seem to be likely prospects. Several people had seen Father Bergen loading his sled on his trailer.

  "What about the casino?" Lucas asked Climpt.

  "Nothing there," Climpt said, shaking his head. "Frank didn't have nothing to do with money; never touched it.

  There was no way he could rig anything, either. He was in charge of physical security for the place, mostly handling drunks. He just didn't have the access that could bring trouble."

  "Do the tribe people think he's straight?"

  "Yup. No money problems that they know of. Didn't gamble himself.

  Didn't use drugs. Used to drink years back, but he quit. Tell you the truth, it felt like a dead end."

  "All right... Rusty, Dusty, how about that picture."

  "Can't find anybody who admitted seeing it," Rusty said.

  "We're talking to Lisa LaCourt's friends, but there's been some flu around, and we didn't get to everybody yet."

  "Keep pushing."

  The next day would be more of the same, they decided.

  Another guy to help Rusty and Dusty check Lisa's friends.

  "And I'll want you to start interviewing Jim Harper's pals, if you can find any."

  The sheriff's department's investigators shared a corner office. One did nothing but welfare investigations, worked seven-to-three, and was out of the murder case. A second had gotten mumps from his daughters and was on sick leave. The third was Gene Climpt. Climpt had said almost nothing during the meeting. He'd rolled an unlit cigarette in his fingers, watching Lucas, weighing him.

  Lucas moved into the mumps-victim's desk and Helen Arris brought in a lockable two-drawer file cabinet for papers and personal belongings.

  "I brought you the Harper boy's file," she said. She was a formidable woman with very tall hair and several layers of makeup.

  "Thanks. Is there any coffee in the place? A vending machine?"

  "Coffee in the squad room, I can show you."

  "Great." He tagged along behind her, making small talk.

  He'd recognized her type as soon as Carr sent him to her for his ID.

  She knew everybody and tracked everything that went on in the department. She knew the forms and the legalities, the state regs and who was screwing who.

  She was not to be trifled with if you wanted your life to run smoothly and end with a pension.

  She wouldn't be fooled by false charm either. Lucas didn't even try it: he got his coffee, thanked her, and carried it back to the office, left the door open. Deputies and a few civilian clerks wandered past, one or two at a time, looking him over. He ignored the desultory parade as he combed through the stack of paper on the county's first real homicide in six years.

  Jim Harper had been found hanging from a pull-down towel rack in the men's room of a Unocal station in Bon Plaine, seventeen miles east of Grant.

  The boy was seated on the floor under the rack, a loop of the towel around his neck. His Levi's and Jockey shorts had been pulled down below his knees. The door had been locked, but it was a simple push-button that could be locked from the inside with the door open and remain locked when the door was pulled shut, so that meant nothing.

  The boy had been found by the station owner when he opened for business in the morning.

  Harper's father had been questioned twice. The first time, the morning after the murder, was perfunctory. The sheriff's investigators were assuming accidental death during a masturbation ritual, which was not unheard of. The only interesting point on the preliminary investigation was a scrawled note to Carr: Shelly, I don't like this one.

  We better get an autopsy. -Gene.

  Climpt. His desk was in the corner, and Lucas glanced at it. The desk was neatly kept, impersonal except for an aging photograph in a silver frame. He pushed the chair back and looked closer. A pretty woman, dressed in the styles of the late fifties or early sixties, with a baby in her arms. Lucas called Arris, asked her to find Climpt, and went back to the Harper file.

  After an autopsy, a forensic pathologist from Milwaukee had declared the death a strangulation homicide. Russ Harper , the boy's father, was interviewed again, this time by a pair of Wisconsin state major-crime investigators. Harper didn't know anything about anything, he said. Jim had gone wild, had been drinking seriously and maybe smoking marijuana.

  They were unhappy about it, but had to let it go. Russ Harper was not a suspect-he had been working at his gas station when the boy was murdered, and disinterested witnesses would swear to it. His presence was also backed by computer-time-stamped charge slips with his initials on them.

  The state investigators interviewed a dozen other people , including some Jim's age. They'd all denied being his friend. One had said Jim didn't have any friends. Nobody had seen the boy at the crossroads gas station.

  On the day he was killed, nobody had seen him since school.

  "Hear you want to talk to me?"

  Climpt was a big man in his middle fifties, deep blue eyes and a hint of rosiness about his cheeks. He was wearing a blue parka, open, brown pac boots with wool pants tucked inside, and carried a pair of deerhide gloves. A chrome pistol sat diagonally across his left hip bone, where it could be crossdrawn with his right hand, even when he was sitting behind a steering wheel. His voice was like a load of gravel.

  Lucas looked up and said, "Yeah, just a second." He pawed through the file papers, looking for the note Climpt had sent to Carr. Climpt peeled off his parka, hung it on a hook next to Lucas', ambled over to his own desk and sat down, leaning back in his chair.

  "How'd it go?" Lucas asked as he looked through the file.

  "Mostly bullshit." The words came out slow and country.

  "What's up?"

  Lucas found the note, handed it to him: "You sent this to Shelly after you handled that death report on the Harper kid. What was wrong out there? Why'd you want the autopsy?"

  Climpt looked at the note, then handed it back to Lucas.

  "The boy was sittin' on the floor with his dick in his hand, for one thing. I never actually tried hanging myself, but I suspect that right near the end, you'd know something was going wron
g and you'd start flapping. You wouldn't sit there pumpin' away until you died."

  "Okay." Lucas nodded, grinned.

  "Then there was the floor," Climpt continued. "There aren3t many men's room floors I'd sit on, and this wasn't one of them. The gas station gets cleaned in the morning-maybe. There's a bar across the highway and guys'd come out of the bar at night, stop at the station for gas, the cold air'd hit 'em and they'd realize they had to take a whiz.

  Being half drunk, their aim wasn't always so good. They'd pee all over the place. I just couldn't see somebody sitting there voluntarily."

  Lucas nodded.

  "Another thing," Climpt said. "Those damn tiles were cold. You could frostbite your ass on those tiles. I mean, it'd hurt."

  "So you couldn't add it up."

  "That's about it," Climpt said.

  "Got any ideas about it?"

  "I'd talk to Russ Harper if I was gonna go back into it," Climpt said.

  "They talked to him," Lucas said, flipping through the stack of paper.

  "The state guys did."

  "Well..." His eyes were on Lucas, judging: "What I mean was, I'd take him out back to my workshop, put his hand in the vise, close it about six turns and then ask him.

  And if that didn't work, I'd turn on the grinder." He wasn't smiling when he said it.

  "You think he knows who killed his boy?" Lucas asked.

  "If you asked me the most likely guy to commit a sneakytype murder in this county, I'd say Russ Harper. Hands down. If his son gets killed, sneakylike... that's no coincidence , to my way of thinkin'. Russ might not know who killed him, but I bet he'd have some ideas."

  "I'm thinking of going out there tonight, talking to Harper ," Lucas said.

  "Maybe take him out back to the shop."

  "I'm not doin' nothing. Invite me along," Climpt said, stretching his legs out.

  "You don't care for him?"

  "If that son-of-a-bitch's heart caught on fire," Climpt said, "I wouldn't piss down his throat to put it out."

  Climpt said he'd get dinner and hang around his house until Lucas was ready to go after Harper. Helen Arris had already gone, and much of the department was dark. Lucas tossed the Jim Harper file in his new file cabinet and banged the drawer shut. The drawer got off-track and jammed.

  When he tried to pull it back open, it wouldn't come. He knelt down, inspecting it, found that a thin metal rail had bent, and tried to pry it out with his fingernails. He got it out, but his hand slipped and he ripped the fingernail on his left ring finger.

  "Mother-" He was dripping blood. He went down to the men's.room, rinsed it, looked at it. The nail rip went deep and it'd have to be clipped. He wrapped a paper towel around it, got his coat, and walked out through the darkened hallways of the courthouse. He turned a corner and saw an elderly man pushing a broom, and then a woman's voice echoed down a side hallway: "Heck of a day, Odie," it said.

  The doctor. Weather. Again. The old man nodded, looking down a hall at right angles to the one he and Lucas were in. "Cold day, miz."

  She walked out of the intersecting corridor, still carrying her bag, a globe light shining down on her hair as she passed under it. Her hair looked like clover honey. She heard him in the hallway, glanced his way, recognized him, stopped.

  "Davenport," she said. "Killed anybody yet?"

  Lucas had automatically smiled when he saw her, but he cut it off"That's getting pretty fuckin' tiresome," he snapped.

  "Sorry," she said. She straightened and smiled, tentatively. "I didn't mean... I don't know what I didn't mean.

  Whatever it was, I didn't mean it when I saw you at the school, either."

  What? He didn't understand what she'd just said, but it sounded like an apology. He let it go. "You work for the county, too?"

  She glanced around the building. "No, not really. The board cut out the public health nurse and I do some of her old route. Volunteer thing. I go around and see people out in the country."

  "Pretty noble," Lucas said. The line came out sounding skeptical instead of wry. Before she could say anything, he put up a hand.

  "Sorry. That came out wrong."

  She shrugged. "I owed you one." She looked at his hand.

  He was holding it at his side, waist height, clenching the towel in his fist. "What happened to your hand?"

  "Broke a nail."

  "You oughta use a good acrylic hardener," she said. And then quickly, "Sorry again. Let me see it."

  "Aw...

  "Come on."

  He unwrapped the towel and she held his finger in her hand, turned it in the weak light. "Nasty. Let me, uh... come more under the light."

  She opened her bag.

  "Listen, why don't I... Is this gonna hurt?"

  "Don't he a baby," she said. She used a pair of surgical scissors on the nail, trimming it away. No pain. She dabbed on a drop of an ointment and wrapped it with a Band-Aid.

  "I'll send you a bill."

  "Send it to the sheriff, I got it on the job," he said. Then: "Thanks."

  They stopped at the door, looked out at the snow.

  "Where're you going?" Lucas asked.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. No rings. "Get something to eat."

  "Could I buy you dinner?" he asked.

  "All right," she said simply. She didn't look at him. She just pushed through the door and said all right.

  "Where?" following her onto the porch.

  "Well, we have six choices," she said.

  "Is that a guess?"

  "No." A grin flickered across her face and she counted the restaurants off on her fingertips. Lucas noticed that her fingers were long and slender, like a pianist's were supposed to be. Or a surgeon's.

  "There's Al's Pizza, there's a Hardee's, the Fisherman Inn, the Uncle Steve's American Style, Granddaddy's Cafe, and the Mill."

  "What's the classiest joint?"

  "Mmm." She tilted her head, thought about it, and said, "Do you prefer stuffed ducks or stuffed fish? On the wall, I mean, not the menu."

  "That's a hard one. Fish, I guess."

  "Then we'll go to the Inn," she said.

  "Do you play piano?"

  "What?" She stopped and looked up at him. "Have you been asking about me?"

  "Huh?" He was puzzled.

  "How did you know I play?"

  "I didn't," he said. "I was just thinking your hands...

  they look like a pianist's."

  "Oh." She looked at her hands. "Most of the pianists I've known have heavy hands."

  Z31 "Like a surgeon's hands, then," he said.

  "Most surgeons' hands are ordinary."

  "Okay, okay." He started to laugh.

  "Ordinary. They are."

  "Why are you grumping at me?" Lucas asked.

  She shrugged. "We're just getting over being awkward.

  4 It's always hard on a first date."

  "What?" he asked, following down the sidewalk. He had the sense that something had just flown past him.

  The restaurant had been built from two double-wide trailers set at right angles to each other, both covered with vinyl siding disguised as weathered wood. A neon Coors sign hung in the window. Lucas pulled into the parking lot and killed his light, trailed a few seconds later by Weather in her Jeep.

  "Elegant," he said.

  She pivoted her feet out of the Jeep, pulled off her pac boots. "I want to change shoes... elegant, what? The restaurant ?"

  "I think the vinyl siding combined with the sparkle of the Coors sign gives it a certain European ambiance. Swiss, I'd say or possibly Old Amsterdam."

  Wait'll you find out that each table has its own red votive candle, personally lit by the maitre d', and a basket of cellophane-wrapped crackers and breadsticks," Weather said.

  "Hey, it's a gourmet joint," Lucas said. "I expected nothing less.

  And a choice of wines, I bet."

  11yup."

  And they both said, simultaneously, "Red or white," and laughed.

 
Weather added, "If you ask for rose, they say fine, and you see the bartender running into the back with a bottle of white and bottle of red."

  "Where'd you get your name?" Lucas asked.

  "My father was a sailboat freak. Homemade fourteenfoot dinghys and scows.