Winter Prey

duties: this was her year to be county coroner, an unpleasant job rotated between the doctors in town. She’d made all the necessary notes for a finding of homicide by persons unknown. She’d write the notes into a formal report to the county attorney and let the Milwaukee medical examiner do the rest.
    There was nothing holding her. But standing in the shed, drinking coffee, listening to the cops—even the cops coming over to hit on her, in their mild-mannered Scandinavian way—was something she didn’t want to give up right away.
    And she wouldn’t mind talking to Davenport again, either, she thought. Where’d he go to? She craned her neck, looking around. He must be outside.
    She flipped up her hood, pulled it tight, put on her gloves. Outside, things were more orderly. Most of the fire equipment was gone, and the few neighbors who’d walked to the house had been shooed away. It still stank. She wrinkled her nose, looked around. A deputy was hauling a coil of inch-thick rope up toward the house, and she asked, “Have you seen, uh, Shelly, or that guy from Minneapolis?”
    “I think Shelly’s up to the house, and the other guy went with a bunch of people down to the lake to look at the snowmobile trail, and they’re talking to snowmobile guys.”
    “Thanks.”
    She looked down toward the lake, thought about walking down. The snow was deep, and she was already cold again. Besides, what’d she have to contribute?
    She went back to the garage for another cup of coffee, and found that it was gone, Davenport’s Thermoses empty.
    Davenport. God, she was acting like a teenager all of a sudden. Not that she couldn’t use a little . . . friendship. She thought back to her last involvement: how long, a year? She counted back. Wait, jeez. More than two years. God, it was nearly three. He’d been married, although, as he said charmingly, not very, and the whole thing was doomed fromthe start. He’d had a nice touch in bed, but was a little too fond of network television: it became very easy to see him as a slowly composting lump on a couch somewhere.
    Weather sighed. No coffee. She put on her gloves, went back out and trudged toward her Jeep, still reluctant to go. In the whole county, this was the place to be this night. This was the center of things.
    But she was increasingly feeling the cold. Even with her pacs, her toes were feeling brittle. Out on the lake, the lights from a pod of snowmobiles shone toward the house. They’d been attracted by the fire and the cops and by now, undoubtedly, the whole story of the LaCourt murders. Grant was a small town, where nothing much happened.

    The Iceman sliced across the lake. A half-dozen sleds were gathered on the ice near the LaCourt house, watching the cops work. Two more were cruising down the lakeshore, heading for the house. If the temperature had been warmer, a few degrees either side of zero, there’d have been a hundred snowmobiles on the lake, and more coming in.
    Halfway across, he left the trail, carved a new cut in the soft snow and stopped. The LaCourt house was a half mile away, but everything around it was bathed in brilliant light. Through a pair of pocket binoculars he could see Weather’s Jeep, still parked in the drive.
    He grunted, put the glasses in a side pocket where they’d stay cold, gingerly climbed off the sled and tested the snow. He sank in a foot before the harder crust supported his weight. Good. He trampled out a hole and settled into it, in the lee of the sled. Even a five-mile-an-hour wind was a killer on a night like this.
    From his hole he could hear the beating of a generator and the occasional shouts of men working, spreading what appeared to be a canvas tent over the house. Their distant voices were like pieces of audible confetti, sharp isolated calls and shouts in the night. Then his focus shifted, and for the first time, he heard the other voices. They’d been there, all along, like a Greek chorus. He turned, slowly, until hewas facing the darkness back along the creek. The sound was unearthly, the sound of starvation. Not a scream, like a cat, but almost like the girl, when he’d cut her, a high, quavering, wailing note.
    Coyotes.
    Singing together, blood songs after the storm. He shivered, not from the cold.

    But the cold had nearly gotten to him twenty minutes later when he saw the small figure walking alone toward the red Jeep. Yes. Weather.
    When she climbed inside her truck, he brushed the snow off his