Storm Prey

then to Shell Lake; a convoy. The snow wasn’t deep, but had taken on a cold, gray midwinter edge, stark against the near-black evergreens and barren broadleaf trees. They filled the time catching up with each other’s lives; and Lucas was pleased that she seemed happy with hers.
    “The kid is just way more than I ever expected,” she said. “I’m getting so I hate to go to work.”
    “How many years you got in?”
    “Eighteen—I’m a long way from retirement. James says if I want to quit, I can. It’s not like we need the salary.”
    “But what would you do? Is being a mom enough?”
    “That’s what I keep asking myself. Right now, it’s yeah—it’s enough. The question is, will it be enough in two years, when he goes to school?”
    “And you don’t want to get your ass shot before he grows up,” Lucas said. “You want to be here to see that.”
    “Yeah.” They looked out the windshield for a while, then she said, “But you’re not exactly backing off, and you’ve got Sam.”
    “Might be different for a guy,” Lucas said. “Work is ... what we do. Like mom is what women do. Not to be a pig about it.”
    “I’ll deny it if you ever tell anybody I said it,” Marcy said, “but I know what you mean.”
     
     
    IN SIREN, Lucas said, “You can still see where the tornado came through.”
    An F3 tornado had ripped the town in 2001, a half-mile wide at points, with winds up to two hundred miles an hour.
    “I have a friend from Georgia,” Marcy said. “He was up here when it happened, saw some TV stuff about how the Siren warning siren didn’t go off. He says, ‘There was no sy-reen in sy-reen.’ ”
     
     
    COMING INTO SPOONER, Lucas said, “I’ve got to take it easy through here—the place is a speed trap. They already got me once.”
    Marcy got on the phone and called the Washburn sheriff. When she got off, she said, “They’re walking the warrants up to the judge.”
    Shell Lake was five miles south of Spooner, and the Law Enforcement Center just off the highway. They collected Shrake, Jenkins, Franklin, and Stone in the parking lot, trailed inside, and hooked up with the sheriff, a bluff, former highway patrolman with a clipped gray mustache, pale green eyes, and a nonuniform rodeo belt buckle. “Dick’ll be back in a minute with the warrants. I told the judge we’d have something coming up to him ... You folks want coffee? We’ve got a Coke machine down the hall.”
    Stephaniak said that Ike Mack was working—the sheriff had sent one of his office workers down to the store to take a look. “I suggest I have one of my boys go along and serve him copies of the warrant, and ask him out to the house. We’ll give ourselves about a fifteen-minute jump on him, so we can see what’s what out there.”
    Marcy said, “Sounds good to me,” and Lucas nodded.
    Shrake asked, “Is Ike going to be a problem?”
    “I don’t think so. He’s ... tired. He’s turned into an old guy. I think he mostly wants to be left alone. With his stolen bike parts, of course.”
    “But if Joe’s out there ...”
    “That would be a whole ’nother problem. Though, I can’t say I remember Joe as being all that violent. Not that I doubt these things you got going. But I never saw it in him.”
    “I can’t think of another way our woman would have gotten strangled,” Marcy said. “We’ll know for sure tomorrow. We’ve got a rush DNA going.”
    “Well. People change. Maybe they get desperate,” Stephaniak said. “Now. Look at this. I printed this out this morning, and as far as I know, it’s up-to-date.”
    He pushed an eleven-by-fourteen photo across his desk, and the Minnesota cops clustered around: a satellite view of an isolated house sitting off a blacktopped road. The photo had been taken in late September, with the trees in full autumn colors.
    In the center of the photo, they could see the roof of a house, surrounded by a farmyard, more dirt than grass. A woodlot bordered the west edge of the house’s lot, with farm fields on the south and east, and the road on the north. Another building, probably a garage, stood on the west side of the house, with a narrow, silvery metallic roof extending out the back of it—probably a covered woodshed, or lean-to. Another, even smaller building stood on the south side of the house. An old chicken coop, or something like it, Lucas thought.
    “Small place, nine acres. Two-story house, nothing much to look at. The garage there is