Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 86 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

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 blue-white 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 mail 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 stairway. 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 his feet numb, but he couldn’t go into the garage, couldn’t 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-by-fours, 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 LES?” 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.”

“The tracks come right up to where he was chopped,” Lucas said.

“Yeah—but we don’t know if he walked down to the lake on snowshoes to look at something, and then came back up and was killed, or if the killer came in and went out.”

“If they were his snowshoes, where are they now?”

“There’s a set of shoes in the mudroom, but they were so messed up by the firehoses that we don’t know if they’d just been used or what . . . no way to tell,” Lacey said. “They’re the right kind, though. Bearpaws. No tails.”

“Okay.”

“But we still got a problem,” Carr said, looking reluctantly down at the body. “Look at the snow on him. The firemen threw the tarps over them as soon as they got here, but it looks to me like there’s maybe a half-inch of snow on him.”

“So what?”

Carr stared down at the body for a moment, then dropped his voice. “Listen, I’m freezing and there’s some strange stuff to talk about. A problem. So do you want to see the other bodies now? Woman was shot in the forehead, the girl’s burned. Or we could just go talk.”

“A quick look,” Lucas said.

“Come on, then,” Carr said.

Lacey broke away. “I gotta check that commo gear, Shelly.”

Lucas and Carr trudged across a layer of discolored ice to the house, squeezed past the front door. Inside, sheetrock walls and ceiling panels had buckled and folded, falling across burned furniture and carpet. Dishes, pots and pans, glassware littered the floor, along with a set of ceramic collector’s dolls. Picture frames were everywhere. Some were burned, but every step or two, a clear, happy face would look up at him, wide-eyed, well-lit. Better days.

Two deputies were working through the house with cameras: one with a video camera, the power wire running down his collar under his parka, the other with a 35mm Nikon.

“My hands are freezing,” the video man stuttered.

“Go on down to the garage,” Carr said. “Don’t get yourself hurt.”

“There’re a couple gallon jugs of hot coffee and some paper cups in my truck. The white Explorer in the parking lot,” Lucas said. “Doors are open.”

“Th-thanks.”

“Save some for me,” Carr said. And to Lucas: “Where’d you get the coffee?”

“Stopped at Dow’s Corners on the way over and emptied out their coffeemaker. I did six years on patrol and I must’ve froze my ass off at a hundred of these things.”

“Huh. Dow’s.” Carr squinted, digging in a mental file. “That’s still Phil and Vickie?”

“Yeah. You know them?”

“I know everybody on Highway 77, from Hayward in Sawyer County to Highway 13 in Ashland County,” Carr said matter-of-factly. “This way.”

He led the way down a charred hall past a bathroom door to a small bedroom. The lakeside wall was gone and blowing snow sifted through the debris. The body was under a burnt-out bedframe, the coil springs resting on the girl’s chest. One of the portable lights was just outside the window, and cast flat, prying light on the scorched wreckage, but left the girl’s face in almost total darkness: but not quite total. Lucas could see her improbably white teeth smiling from the char.

Lucas squatted, snapped on the flash, grunted, turned it off and stood up again.

“Made me sick,” said Carr. “I was with the highway patrol before I got elected sheriff. I saw some car wrecks you wouldn’t believe. They didn’t make me sick. This did.”

“Accidents are different,” Lucas agreed. He looked around the room. “Where’s the other one?”

“Kitchen,” Carr said. They started down the hall again. “Why’d he burn the place?” Carr asked, his voice pitching up. “It couldn’t have been to hide the killings. He left Frank’s body right out in the yard. If he’d just taken off, it might have been a day or two before anybody came out. Was he bragging about it?”

“Maybe he was thinking about fingerprints. What’d LaCourt do?”

“He worked down at the res, at the Eagle Casino. He was a security guy.”

“Lots of money in casinos,” Lucas said. “Was he in trouble down there?”

“I don’t know,” Carr said simply.

“How about his wife?”

“She was a teacher’s aide.”

“Any marital problems or ex-husbands wandering around?” Lucas asked.

“Well, they were both married before. I’ll check Frank’s ex-wife, but I know her, Jean Hansen, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly. And Claudia’s ex is Jimmy Wilson and Jimmy moved out to Phoenix three or four winters back, but he wouldn’t do this, either. I’ll check on him, but neither one of the divorces was really nasty. The people just didn’t like each other anymore. You know?”

“Yeah, I know. How about the girl? Did she have any boyfriends?”

“I’ll check that too,” Carr said. “But, uh, I don’t know. I’ll check. She’s pretty young.”

“There’s been a rash of teenagers killing their families and friends.”

“Yeah. A generation of weasels.”

“And teenage boys sometimes mix up fire and sex. You get a lot of teenage firebugs. If there was somebody hot for the girl, it’d be something to look into.”

“You could talk to Bob Jones at the junior high. He’s the principal and he does the counseling, so he might know.”

“Um,” Lucas said. His sleeve touched a burnt wall, and he brushed it off.

“I’m hoping you’ll stay around a while,” Carr blurted. Before Lucas could answer, he said, “Come on down this way.”

They picked their way toward the other end of the house, through the living room, into the kitchen by the back door. Two heavily wrapped figures were crouched over a third body.

The larger of the two people stood up, nodded at Carr. He wore a Russian-style hat with the flaps pulled down and a deputy sheriff’s patch on the front. The other, with the bag, was using a metal tool to turn the victim’s head.

“Can’t believe this weather,” the deputy said. “I’m so fuck—uh, cold I can’t believe it.”

“Fucking cold is what you meant to say,” said the figure still crouched over the body. Her voice was low and uninflected, almost scholarly. “I really don’t mind the word, especially when it’s so fucking cold.”

“It wasn’t you he was worried about, it was me,” Carr said bluntly. “You see anything down there, Weather, or are you just fooling around?”

The woman looked up and said, “We’ve got to get them down to Milwaukee and let the pros take a look. No amateur nights at the funeral home.”

“Can you see anything at all?” Lucas asked.

The doctor looked down at the woman under her hands. “Claudia was shot, obviously, and with a pretty powerful weapon. Could be a rifle. The whole back of her head was shattered and a good part of her brain is gone. The slug went straight through. We’ll have to hope the crime lab people can recover it. It’s not inside her.”

“How about the girl?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. It’ll take an autopsy to tell you anything definitive. There are signs of charred cloth around her waist and between her legs, so I’d say she was wearing underpants and maybe even, um, what do you call those fleece pants, like uh . . .”

“Sweat pants,” Carr said.

“Yes, like that. And Claudia was definitely dressed, jeans and long underwear.”

“You’re saying they weren’t raped,” Lucas said.

The woman stood and nodded. Her parka hood was tight around her face, and nothing showed but an oval patch of skin around her eyes and nose. “I can’t say it for sure, but just up front, it doesn’t look like it. But what happened to her might have been worse.”

“Worse?” Carr recoiled.

“Yes.” She stooped, opened her bag, and the deputy said, “I don’t want to look at this.” She stood up again and handed Carr a Ziploc bag. Inside was something that looked like a dried apricot that had been left on a charcoal grill. Carr peered at it and then gave it to Lucas.

“What is it?” Carr asked the woman.

“Ear,” she and Lucas said simultaneously. Lucas handed it back to her.

“Ear? You can’t be serious,” Carr said.

“Taken off before or after she was killed?” Lucas asked, his voice mild, interested. Carr looked at him in horror.

“You’d need a lab to tell you that,” Weather said in her professional voice, matching Lucas. “There are some crusts that look like blood. I’m not sure, but I’d say she was alive when it was taken off.”

The sheriff looked at the bag in the doctor’s hand and turned and walked two steps away, bent over and retched, a stream of saliva pouring from his mouth. After a moment, he straightened, wiped his mouth on the back of a glove, and said, “I gotta get out of here.”

“And Frank was done with an ax,” Lucas said.

“No, I don’t think so. Not an ax,” the woman said, shaking her head. Lucas peered at her, but could see almost nothing of her face. “A machete, a very sharp machete. Or maybe something even thinner. Maybe something like, um, a scimitar.”

“A what?” The sheriff goggled at her.

“I don’t know,” she said defensively. “Whatever it was, the blade was very thin and sharp. Like a five-pound razor. It cut through the bone, rather than smashing through like a wedge-shaped weapon would. But it had weight, too.”

“Don’t go telling that to anybody at the Register,” Carr said. “They’d go crazy.”

“They’re gonna go crazy anyway,” she said.

“Well, don’t make them any crazier.”

“What about the guy’s face?” Lucas asked. “The bites?”

“Dog,” she said. “Coyote. God knows I see enough dog bites around here and it looks like a dog did it.”

“You can hear them howling at night, bunches of them,” the deputy said. “Coyotes.”

“Yeah, I’ve got them up around my place,” Lucas said.

“Are you with the state?” the woman asked.

“No. I used to be a Minneapolis cop. I’ve got a cabin over in Sawyer County and the sheriff asked me to run over and take a look.”

“Lucas Davenport,” the sheriff said, nodding at him. “I’m sorry, Lucas, this is Weather Karkinnen.”

“I’ve heard about you,” the woman said, nodding.

“Weather was a surgeon down in the Cities before she came back home,” the sheriff said to Lucas.

“Is that Weather, like ‘Stormy Weather’?” Lucas asked.

“Exactly,” the doctor said.

“I hope what you heard about Davenport was good,” Carr said to her.

The doctor looked up at Lucas and tilted her head. The light on her changed and he could see that her eyes were blue. Her nose seemed to be slightly crooked. “I remember that he killed an awful lot of people,” she said.

The doctor was freezing, she said, and she led the way toward the front door, the deputy following, Carr stumbling behind. Lucas lingered, looking down at the dead woman. As he turned to leave, he saw a slice of nickeled metal under a piece of crumbled and blackened wallboard. From the curve of it, he knew what it was: the forepart of a trigger guard.

“Hey,” he called after the others. “Is that camera guy still in the house?”

Carr called back, “The video guy’s in the garage, but the other guy’s here.”

“Send him back here, we got a weapon.”

Carr, Weather, and the photographer came back. Lucas pointed out the trigger guard, and the photographer took two shots of the area. Moving carefully, Lucas lifted the wallboard. A revolver. A nickel-finish Smith and Wesson on a heavy frame, walnut grips. He pushed the board back out of the way, then stood back as the photographer shot the gun in relation to the body.

“You got a chalk or a grease pencil?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, and a tape measure.” The photographer groped in his pocket, came up with a grease pencil.

“Shouldn’t you leave it for the lab guys?” Carr asked nervously.

“Big frame, could be the murder weapon,” Lucas said. He drew a quick outline around the weapon, then measured the distance of the gun from the wall and the dead woman’s head and one hand, while the photographer noted them. With the measurements done, Lucas handed the grease pencil back to the photographer, looked around, picked up a splinter of wood, pushed it through the fingerguard, behind the trigger, and lifted the pistol from the floor. He looked at the doctor. “Do you have another one of those Ziplocs?”

“Yes.” She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.

“Six shells, unfired,” he said. “Shit.”

“Unfired?” Carr asked.

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s the murder weapon. The killer wouldn’t reload and then drop it on the floor . . . at least I can’t think why he would.”

“So?” Weather looked up at him.

“So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand. She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble,” Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: “You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway.”

“I’ll get it going,” Carr said. Then: “I n-n-need some coffee.”

“I think you’re fairly hypothermic, Shelly,” Weather said. “What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy was walking up the driveway. “I got those tarps, Sheriff. They’re right behind me in a Guard truck.”

“Good. Get some help and cover up the whole works,” Carr said, waving at the house. “There’ll be guys in the garage.” To Lucas he said, “I got some canvas sheets from the National Guard guys and we’re gonna cover the whole house until the guys from Madison get here.”

“Good.” Lucas nodded. “You really need the lab guys for this. Don’t let anybody touch anything. Not even the bodies.”

The garage was warm, with deputies and firemen standing around an old-fashioned iron stove stoked with oak splits. The deputy who’d been doing the filming spotted them and came over with one of Lucas’ Thermos jugs.

“I saved some,” he said.

“Thanks, Tommy.” The sheriff nodded, took a cup, hand shaking, passed it to Lucas, then took a cup for himself. “Let’s get over in the corner where we can talk,” he said. Carr walked around the nose of LaCourt’s old Chevy station wagon, away from the gathering of deputies and firemen, turned, took a sip of coffee. He said, “We’ve got a problem.” He stopped, then asked, “You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

“Dominus vobiscum,” Lucas said. “So what?”

“You are? I haven’t been in the Church long enough to remember the Latin business,” Carr said. He seemed to think about that for a moment, sipped coffee, then said, “I converted a few years back. I was a Lutheran until I met Father Phil. He’s the parish priest in Grant.”

“Yeah? I don’t have much interest in the Church anymore.”

“Hmph. You should consider . . .”

“Tell me about the problem,” Lucas said impatiently.

“I’m trying to, but it’s complicated,” Carr said. “Okay. We figure whoever killed these folks must’ve started the fire. It was snowing all afternoon—we had about four inches of new snow. When the firemen got here, though, the snow’d just about quit. But Frank’s body had maybe a half-inch of snow on it. That’s why I had them put the tarp over it, I thought we could fix an exact time. It wasn’t long between the time he was killed and the fire. But it was some time. That’s important. Some time. And now you tell me the girl might have been tortured . . . more time.”

“Okay.” Lucas nodded, nodding at the emphasis.

“Whoever started the fire did it with gasoline,” Carr said. “You can still smell it, and the house went up like a torch. Maybe the killer brought the gas with him or maybe he used Frank’s. There’re a couple boats and a snowmobile out in the back shed but there aren’t any gas cans with them, and no cans in here. The cans’d most likely have some gas in them.”

“Anyway, the house went up fast,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. The folks across the lake were watching television. They say that one minute there was nothing out the window but the snow. The next minute there was a fireball. They called the firehouse.”

“The one I came by? Down at the corner?”

“Yeah. There were two guys down there. They were making a snack and one of them saw a black Jeep go by. Just a few seconds later, the alarm came in. They thought the Jeep belonged to Phil . . . the priest. Father Philip Bergen, the pastor at All Souls.”

“Did it?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. They said it looked like Phil was coming out of the lake road. So I called him and asked him if he’d seen anything unusual. A fire or somebody in the road. And he said no. Then, before I could say anything else, he said he was here, at the LaCourts’.”

“Here?” Lucas eyebrows went up.

“Yeah. Here. He said everything was all right when he left.”

“Huh.” Lucas thought about it. “Are we sure the time is right?”

“It’s right. One of the firemen was standing at the microwave with one of those prefab ham sandwiches. They take two minutes to cook and it was about ready. The other one said, ‘There goes Father Phil, hell of a night to be out.’ Then the microwave alarm went off, the guy got his sandwich out, and before he could unwrap it, the alarm came in.”

“That’s tight.”

“Yeah. There wasn’t enough time for Frank to have that snow pile up on him. Not if Phil’s telling the truth.”

“Time is weird,” Lucas said. “Especially in an emergency. If it wasn’t just a minute, if it was five minutes, then this Father Phil could have . . .”

“That’s what I figured . . . but doesn’t look that way.” Carr shook his head, swirled coffee around the coffee cup, then set it on the hood of the Chevy and flexed his fingers, trying to work some warmth back in them. “I got the firemen and went over it a couple of times. There just isn’t time.”

“So the priest . . .”

“He said he left the house and drove straight out to the highway and then into town. I asked him how long it took him to get from the house, here, to the highway, and he said three or four minutes. It’s about a mile, so that’s about right, with the snow and everything.”

“Hmp.”

“But if he had something to do with it, why’d he admit being here? That doesn’t make any gol-darned sense,” the sheriff said.

“Have you hit him with this? Sat him down, gone over it?”

“No. I’m not real experienced with interrogation. I can take some kid who’s stolen a car or ripped off a beer sign and sit him down by one of the holding cells and scare the devil out of him, but this would be . . . different. I don’t know about this kind of stuff. Killers.”

“Did you tell him about the time bind?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet.”

“Good.”

“I was stumped,” Carr said, turning to stare blankly at the garage wall, remembering. “When he said he was here, I couldn’t think what to say. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you.’ He wanted to come out when we told him the family was dead, do the last rites, but we told him to stay put, in town. We didn’t want him to . . .”