Winter Prey

looked almost sleepy.
    Lucas said, “Duane Helper finds out somehow that Lisa LaCourt has a picture of him with the Harper kid. He’s seen the original, so he knows that his skin grafts are showing. But he doesn’t know that the photo in the paper is so bad that his grafts are washed out of the picture. Or maybe he does know, but he’s scared to death that once a cop seesthe newsprint copy, we’ll find a better one.
    “Anyway, Westrom shows up for his shift at the firehouse and goes upstairs to bed. Helper climbs on his sled, goes on down to the LaCourts’. Someplace along the line, he sees Father Bergen, probably as Bergen leaves the LaCourts’.
    “He kills the LaCourts, looks for the photo, doesn’t find it, sets the place to burn—Crane tells me that he used the water heater to delay the fire—and he heads back to the firehouse. That’s a three-minute trip on a snowmobile if you hurry.”
    “And dammit, we should have thought about that fire delay, about a fireman knowing that kind of stuff.”
    Climpt picked it up: “He gets back, parks the sled, pulls off his snowmobile suit, wakes up Westrom for dinner . . .”
    Weather: “ . . . He sees a car go by, any car, and says, ‘There goes Father Bergen.’ Westrom sees the lights, has no reason to think it’s not Father Bergen, later has it confirmed that it was . . .”
    “And it all gives Helper what he thought would be the perfect alibi,” Lucas said. “He’s in the firehouse, with a witness, when the alarm goes off. With the storm, he figures the priest won’t know exactly how long it took him to get from one place to another, so that covers any little time problems. And he’s right. He’s only messed up because Shelly sees that the snow is too deep on Frank LaCourt’s body, and then Crane finds the delay mechanism on the water heater.”
    Climpt: “He killed Phil because Phil kept insisting that the LaCourts were alive when he left, just like they were. And if they were alive, then the firemen had to be wrong . . . and if we looked at the firemen . . .”
    “We still couldn’t have resolved it,” Lucas said. “We needed the picture.”
    “But we figured him out,” Carr growled. “Now how’re we gonna get the sonofabitch?”

CHAPTER

24
    Duane Helper—the Iceman—sat at the picnic table with the two lab techs, halfheartedly playing three-handed stud poker for dimes.
    “Goddamn Jerry’s had four hands in a row, Duane, ya gotta do something.” The older of the two crime-lab people dealt the cards. They had almost finished the LaCourt house, they said. They’d wrung it out. Two more days, or three, and they’d be done. When they were gone, and the possibility of more developments began to fade, and the killing stopped, interest in the case would dwindle. He had to reach the Schoeneckers, but he’d thought about it. Before they came back, they’d almost surely call to talk. Bergen dead, Harper dead.
    He’d done it.
    The Iceman listened and played his cards.
    A truck pulled into the parking area, doors slammed. Climpt came in, stamping snow off his boots. The Minneapolis cop, Davenport, was behind him, shoulders hunched against the cold. He hadn’t shaved, and looked big-eyed, too thin.
    Outside, in the early-morning light, snow swirled aroundthe fire building. The storm had begun in earnest just before dawn, thunder booming through the forest, the snow coming in waves. Almost nothing was moving on the highway except snowplows.
    “Wicked out there,” Climpt said. His face was wet with snow. He took off his gloves and wiped his eyebrows with the back of his hand. “Understand you got some coffee.”
    “Help yourself,” said the Iceman. He pointed at an oversized coffee urn on a bench behind the lab people. “You out at the house?”
    “Yeah. They’re giving up for the day, tying everything down, getting back to town before the snow gets too bad,” Lucas said. He looked at the techs. “Crane says to get your asses back there.”
    “Want to get my ass back to Madison,” said the older of the two techs.
    “Find a warm coed,” said the younger one. “One more hand.”
    Davenport peeled off his parka and brushed off the snow. He nodded to the Iceman, took a cup of coffee from Climpt, and sat on the end of the picnic table bench.
    “Anything new on the prints?” he asked.
    “Nope. We’re pretty much cleaned up,” said the older tech. He dealt a round of three cards. “We’ve shipped in a few