Winter Prey

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 gotthe 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 . . .”
    “ . . . Contaminate