Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  He used to build them in the garage in the summer," she said. She pulled on the second loafer, tossed the pac boot onto the floor on the-passenger side, stood up and slammed the car door with authority.

  And left it unlocked. "Anyway, Mom says he was always talking about the weather-'If the weather holds, if the weather turns." Like that.

  So when I was born, they called me Weather."

  "Does your mother live in town?"

  "No, no. Dad died ten years ago, and then she went, three or four years later," Weather said, with just a color of sadness. "There was nothing particularly wrong with her. She just sorta died. I think she wanted to."

  The maitre d' was a chubby man with a neatly clipped black mustache and a Las Vegas manner. "Hello, Weather," he said. His eyes shifted to Lucas' throat and refused to lift any higher. "Two? No smoking?"

  "Yeah, two," Lucas said.

  "A booth," said Weather.

  When he left them with the menus, Weather leaned forward and muttered, "I forgot about Arlen. The maitre d'.

  He'd like to get me in bed. Not actually leave Mother and the Kids, you understand, just do a little Men-hmm with the lady doctor, preferably in some place like Hurley, where we might not get caught."

  "What are his chances?"' Lucas asked.

  "Zero," she said. "There's something about the Alfred Hitchcock profile that turns me off."

  The salad came with a French dressing redolent of catsup , sprinkled with a handful of croutons.

  "I remember the news stories when you left Minneapolis.

  Very strange, all those stories about a cop. A lot of people at the ER knew you, I guess. They were all pissed. It made an impression on me."

  "I used to come in there quite a bit," Lucas said. "I'd have these street guys working for me, and they'd get messed up and not have anybody to call. I'd go over and try to fix them UP- 11

  "Why'd you leave? Tired of the bullshit?"

  "No..." He found himself opening up, told her about the internal games played in the department.

  And the lure of money: "When you're a cop, you're always running into rich assholes who treat you like some kind of servant. Guys who oughta be in jail, but they're driving around in Lexuses and Cadillacs and Mercedes," he said, toying with his wine. "People tell you, yeah, but you're doing a public service, blah blah blah, but after twenty years, you realize you wouldn't mind having a little money yourself Nice house, nice car."

  "You had a Porsche. You were famous for it."

  "That was different. A rich guy has a Porsche, he does it because he's an asshole. A cop has a Porsche, it's like a comment on the assholes," he said. "Every cop in the nt liked me driving a Porsche. It was like a fuckpartme you to the assholes."

  "God, you have a rich ability to rationalize," she said, laughing at him.

  "Anyway, what're you doing now? Just consulting?"

  "No, no. Actually, I write games. That's where I made my money.

  And I've started another little sideline that..

  "Games?"

  "Yeah. I've done it for years-now I'm doing it full time."

  "You mean like Monopoly?"' she asked. She was interested"Like Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes war games.

  They used to be mostly on paper, now it's mostly computers.

  I'm in a sernipartnership with this college kid-he's a graduate student in computer science. I write the games and he programs them."

  "And you can make a living at this?"

  "Yeah. And now I've started writing simulation software for police crisis management, for training dispatch people.

  Most of that's computers, dispatch is. And you get in a crisis situation, the dispatchers are virtually running things for a while.

  This software lets them simulate it, and scores them. It's kind of taking off."

  "If you're not careful, you could get rich," Weather said.

  "I kind of am," Lucas said gloomily. "But goddamn, I'm bored. I don't miss the bullshit part of the PD, but I miss the movement.

  And later, over walleye in beer batter: "You can't hold together a heavy-duty relationship when you're in medical school and working to pay for it," Weather said. He enjoyed watching her work with her knife, taking the walleye apart. Like a surgeon. "Then a surgical residency kills you. You've got no time for anything. You sit there and think about men, but it's impossible. You can fool around, but if you get serious about somebody, you can get torn apart between the work and the relationship.

  So you find it's easiest, if you meet somebody you might love, to turn away. Turning away isn't that hard if you do it right away, when you first meet."

  "Sounds lonely," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, but you can tolerate it if you're working all the time and you're convinced that you're right. You keep thinking, if I can just clear away this last thing, if I can just make it through next Wednesday or next month or through the winter, then I can get my life going. But time passes.

  Sneaks past. And all of a sudden your life is rushing up on you."

  "Ah... the old biological clock," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. And it's not just ticking for women. Men get it just as ad."

  "I know."

  She rolled on: "How many men do you know who decided that life was passing them by,. and they jumped out of their jobs or their marriages and tried to... escape, or something?"

  A few. More felt trapped but hung on," said Lucas.

  "And got sadder and sadder."

  :'You're talking about me, I think," she said.

  'I'm talking about everybody," Lucas said. "I'm talking about me."

  After a carafe of wine: "Do you worry about the people you've killed?"

  She wasn't joking. No smile this time.

  "They were hairballs, every one of them."

  "I asked that wrong," she said. "What I meant to ask was, has killing people screwed up your head?"

  He considered the question for a moment. "I don't know.

  I don't brood about them, if that's what you mean. I had a problem with depression a couple of years ago. The chief at the time..

  Quentin Daniel," she said.

  "Yeah. You know him?"

  "I met him a couple of times. You were saying..

  "He thought I needed a shrink. But I decided I didn't need a shrink, I needed a philosopher. Someone who knows how the world works."

  "An interesting idea," she said. "The problem isn't you, the problem is Being."

  "My God, that does make me sound like an asshole."

  "Carr seems like a decent sort," Lucas said.

  "He is. Very decent," Weather agreed.

  "Religious."

  "Very. You want pie? They have key lime."

  "I'll take coffee; I'm bloated," Lucas said.

  Weather waved at the waitress, said, two coffees, and turned back to Lucas. "Are you a Catholic?"

  "Everybody asks me that. I am, but I'm seriously lapsed," he said.

  "So you won't be going to the Tuesday meetings, huh?"

  "No."

  "But you're going over tonight, to talk to Phil." She made it a statement.

  "I really don't.

  "It's all over town," Weather said. "He's the main suspect."

  "He's not," Lucas said with a touch of asperity.

  "That's not what I heard," she said. "Or everybody else hears, for that matter."

  "Jesus, that's just wrong," Lucas said, shaking his head.

  "If you say so," she said.

  "You don't believe me."

  "Why should I? You're going to question him again tonight after Shelly gets out of the Tuesday service."

  The coffee came and Lucas waited until the waitress was gone before he picked up the conversation. "Is there anything that everybody in town doesn't know?"

  "Not much," Weather admitted. "There are sixty people working for the sheriff and only about four thousand people in town, in winter. You figure it out. And have you wondered why Shelly's going to Tuesday service when he should
be questioning Phil?"

  "I'm afraid to ask," Lucas said.

  "Because he wants to see Jeanine Perkins. He and Jeanine have been screwing at motels in Hayward and Park Falls."

  "And everybody in town knows?" Lucas asked.

  "Not yet. But they will."

  "Carr's married."

  "Yup. His wife is mad," Weather said.

  "Uh..."

  "She has a severe psychological affliction. She can't stop doing housework."

  "What?" He started to laugh.

  "It's true," Weather said solemnly. "It's not funny, buster. She washes the floors and the walls and the blinds and the toilets and sinks and pipes and the washer and drier and the furnace. And then she washes all the clothes over and over. Once she washed her own hands so many times that she rubbed a part of the skin off and we had to treat her for burns."

  "My God." He still thought it was mildly funny.

  "Nothing anybody can do about it. She's in therapy, but it doesn't help," Weather said. "A friend told me that she won't have sex with Shelly because it's dirty. I mean, not psychologically dirty, but you know-dirty. Physically dirty."

  "So Carr solves his problem by having it off with a woman in his Pentecostal group."

  "Having it off is such a romantic way to put it; British, isn't it?"

  she teased.

  "You don't act like a doctor," Lucas said.

  "You mean because I gossip and flirt?"

  "Mmmm."

  "You have to live here a while," she said with a hint of tension in her voice. She looked around the room, at the people talking over the red votive candles. "There's nothing to do but work. Nothing."

  "Then why stay?"

  "I have to," she said. "My dad came here from Finland, and spent his life working in the woods, in the timber. And sailing on the lakes.

  Never had any money. But I maxed out in everything at school."

  "You went to the high school here in Grant?"

  "Yup. Anyway, I was trying to save money to go to college, but it looked tough. Then some of the teachers got together and chipped in, and this old fart county commissioner who I didn't know from Adam called down to Madison and pulled some strings and got me a full-load scholarship. And they kept the money coming all the way through medical school. I paid it all back. I even set up a little scholarship fund at the high school while I was ,working in Minneapolis, but that's not what everybody wanted."

  "They wanted you back here," Lucas said.

  "Yes." She nodded. She picked up her empty wineglass and turned it in her hands. "Everything around here is timber and tourism, with a little farming. The roads are not much good and there's a lot of drinking. The timber accidents are terrible-you ought to see somebody caught by a log when it's rolling down to a sawmill. And with tractor accidents and people run over with boat propellers... They had an old guy here who could do enough general surgery to get you on a helicopter to Duluth or down to the Cities, and as long as he was here I didn't feel like I had to come back."

  "Then he retired."

  "Kicked off," Weather said. "Heart attack. He was sixty-three. He ate six pancakes with butter and bacon every morning, cream in his coffee, cheeseburger for lunch, steak for dinner, drank a pint of Johnnie Walker every night and smoked like a chimney. It was amazing he made it as long as he did."

  "They couldn't get anybody else?"

  She laughed, not a pleasant laugh, looked out the window at the snow"Are you kidding? Look outside. It's twenty-five below zero and still going down and the movie theater is closed in the winter."

  "So what do you do for entertainment?"

  "That's a little personal," she said, grinning, reaching across the table to touch the back of his hand, "for this stage of our relationship."

  -What?"

  CHAPTER 8

  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. "Dam 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.