Winter Prey

around a curve. He’d have to go back for her. And soon. Plan it this time. Think it out.

    Weather saw the snowmobile slow and fall back. Forest Road flashed past and she came up on the highway. He must have read her taillights. She’d seen the road-crossing sign in her headlights, realized she wouldn’t have time to stop, to warn him, and had frantically pumped her brakes, hoping he’d catch on.
    And he had.
    Okay. She saw his taillight come up, just a pinprick of red in the darkness, and touched the preset channel selector on her radio. Duluth public radio was playing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
    Now about Davenport.
    They really needed to talk again. And that might take some planning.
    She smiled to herself. She hadn’t felt like this for a while.

CHAPTER

4
    Lucas followed Carr down the dark, snow-packed highway. A logging truck, six huge logs chained to the trailer, pelted past them and enveloped them in a hurricane of loose snow. Carr got his right wheels in the deep snow on the shoulder, nearly didn’t make it out. A minute later, a snowplow pushed glumly past them, then a pod of snowmobiles.
    He leaned over the steering wheel, tense, peering into the dark. The night seemed to eat up their headlights. They got past the snowplow and the highway opened up for a moment. He groped in the storage bin under the arm rest, found a tape, shoved it in the tape player. Joe Cocker came up, singing “Black-Eyed Blues.”

    Lucas felt like he was waking from an opium dream, spiderwebs and dust blowing off his brain. He’d come back from New York and a brutal manhunt. In Minneapolis, he’d found . . . nothing. Nothing to do but work for money and amuse himself.
    In September he’d left the Cities for two weeks of muskie fishing at his Wisconsin cabin east of Hayward. He’d never gone back. He’d called, kept in touch with his programmers,but could never quite get back to the new office. The latest in desktop computers waited for him, a six-hundred-dollar swivel chair, an art print on the wall beside the mounted muskie.
    He’d stayed in the north and fought the winter. October had been cold. On Halloween, a winter storm had blown in from the southern Rockies. Before it was done, there were twenty inches of snow on the ground, with drifts five and six feet high.
    The cold continued through November, with little flurries and the occasional nasty squall. Two or three inches of new snow accumulated almost every week. Then, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, another major storm swept through, dumping a foot of additional snow. The local papers called it Halloween II and reported that half the winter snowplow budget had been used. Winter was still four weeks away.
    December was cold, with off-and-on snow. Then, on January second and third, a blizzard swept the North Woods. Halloween III. When it ended, thirty-four more inches of snow had been piled on the rest. The drifts lapped around the eaves of lakeside cabins.
    People said, “Well you shoulda been here back in . . .” But nobody had seen anything like it, ever.
    And after the blizzard departed, the cold rang down.
    On the night of the third, the thermometer on his cabin deck fell to minus twenty-nine. The following day, the temperature struggled up to minus twenty: schools were closed everywhere, the radio warned against anything but critical travel. On this night, the temperature in Ojibway County would plunge to minus thirty-two.
    Almost nothing moved. A rogue logging truck, a despondent snowplow, a few snowmobile freaks. Cop cars. The outdoors was dangerous; so cold as to be weird.
    He’d been napping on the couch in front of the fireplace when he first heard the pounding. He’d sat up, instantly alert, afraid that it might be the furnace. But the pounding stopped. He frowned, wondered if he might have imagined it. Rolled to his feet, walked to the basement stairs, listened. Nothing. Stepped to the kitchen window. He saw thetruck in the driveway and a second later the front doorbell rang. Ah. Whoever it was had been pounding on the garage door.
    He went to the door, curious. The temperature was well into the minus twenties. He looked through the window inset in the door. A cop, wearing a Russian hat with the ear flaps down.
    “Yeah?” Lucas didn’t recognize the uniform parka.
    “Man, we gotta big problem over in Ojibway County. The sheriff sent me over to see if you could come back and take a look at it. At least three people