Winter Prey

his memory.”
    “Yeah.” Carr nodded, picked up the coffee he’d set on the car hood, and finished it.
    “How about the firemen? Would they have any reason to lie about it?”
    Carr shook his head. “I know them both, and they’re not particular friends. So it wouldn’t be like a conspiracy.”
    “Okay.”
    Two firemen came through the door. The first was encased in rubber and canvas, and on top of that, an inch-thick layer of ice.
    “You look like you fell in the lake,” Carr said. “You must be freezing to death.”
    “It was the spray. I’m not cold, but I can’t move,” the fireman said. The second fireman said, “Stand still.” The fireman stood like a fat rubber scarecrow and began chipping the ice away with a wooden mallet and a cold chisel.
    They watched the ice chips fly for a moment, then Carr said, “Something else. When he went by the fire station, he was towing a snowmobile trailer. He’s big in one of the snowmobile clubs—he’s the president, in fact, or was last year. They’d had a run today, out of a bar across the lake. So he was out on the lake with his sled.”
    “And those tracks came up from the lake.”
    “Where nobody’d be without a sled.”
    “Huh. So you think the priest had something to do with it?”
    Carr looked worried. “No. Absolutely not. I know him: he’s a friend of mine. But I can’t figure it out. He doesn’t lie, about anything. He’s a moral man.”
    “If a guy’s under pressure . . .”
    Carr shook his head. Once they’d been playing golf, he said, both of them fierce competitors. And they were dead even after seventeen. Bergen put his tee shot into a group of pines on the right side of the fairway, made a great recovery and was on the green in two. He two-putted for par, while Carr bogied the hole, and lost.
    “I was bragging about his recovery to the other guys in the locker room, and he just looked sadder and sadder. When we were walking down to the bar he grabbed me, and he looked like he was about to cry. His second shot had gone under one of the evergreens, he said, and he’d kicked it out. He wanted to win so bad. But cheating, it wrecked him. He couldn’t handle it. That’s the kind of guy he is. He wouldn’t steal a dime, he wouldn’t steal a golf stroke. He’s absolutely straight, and incapable of being anything else.”
    The fireman with the chisel and mallet laid the tools on the floor, grabbed the front of the other fireman’s rubber coat, and ripped it open.
    “That’s got it,” said the second man. “I can take it from here.” He looked at Carr: “Fun in the great outdoors, huh?”

    The doctor was edging between the wall and the nose of the station wagon, followed by a tall man wrapped in a heavy arctic parka. The doctor had light hair spiked with strands of white, cut efficiently short. She was small, but athletic with wide shoulders, a nose that was a bit too big and a little crooked, bent to the left. She had high cheekbones and dark-blue eyes, a mouth that was wide and mobile. She had just a bit of the brawler about her, Lucas thought, with the vaguely Oriental cast that Slavs often carry. She was not pretty, but she was strikingly attractive. “Is this a secret conversation?” she asked. She was carrying a cup of coffee.
    “No, not really,” Carr said, glancing at Lucas. He gave a tiny backwards wag of his head that meant, Don’t say anything about the priest.
    The tall man said, “Shelly, I hit every place on the road. Nobody saw anything connected, but we’ve got three people missing yet. I’m trying to track them down now.”
    “Thanks, Gene,” Carr said, and the tall man headed toward the door. To Lucas, he said, “My lead investigator.”
    Lucas nodded, and looked at Weather. “I don’t suppose there was any reason to do body temps.”
    The doctor shook her head, took another sip of coffee. Lucas noticed that she wore no rings. “Not on the two women. The fire and the water and the ice and snow would mess everything up. Frank was pretty bundled up, though, and I did take a temp on him. Sixty-four degrees. He hadn’t been dead that long.”
    “Huh,” said Carr, glancing at Lucas.
    The doctor caught it and looked from Lucas to Carr and asked, “Is that critical?”
    “You might want to write it down somewhere,” Carr said.
    “There’s a question about how long they were dead before the fire started,” Lucas said.
    Weather was looking at him oddly. “Maddog,