Winter Prey

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 andturned 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. Thelight on her changed and he could see that her eyes