Winter Prey

murdered.”
    “C’mon in. How’d you know about me?”
    Lacey stepped inside, looked around. Books, a few wildlife watercolors on the walls, a television and stereo, pile of embers in the fireplace, the smell of clean-burning pine. “Sheriff read that story in the Milwaukee Journal ’bout you in New York, and about living up here. He called around down to Minneapolis and they said you were up here, so he called the Sawyer County sheriff and found out where you live. And here I am.”
    “Bad night,” Lucas said.
    “You don’t know the half of it,” said Lacey. “So cold.”

    Carr’s taillights blinked, then came up, and he slowed and then stopped, turned on his blinkers. Lucas closed up behind, stopped. Carr was on the highway, walking around to the front of his truck.
    Lucas opened his door and stepped out: “You okay?”
    “Got a tree down,” Carr yelled back.
    Lucas let the engine run, shut the door, hustled around Carr’s truck. The cold had split a limb off a maple tree and it had fallen across the roadside ditch and halfway across the right traffic lane. Carr grabbed the thickest part of it, gave it a tug, moved it a foot. Lucas joined him, and together they dragged it off the road.
    “Cold,” Carr said, and they hurried back to their trucks.
    Weather, Lucas thought. Her image popped up in his mind as he started after Carr again. Now that might bean efficient way to warm up, he thought. He’d been off women for a while, and was beginning to feel the loss.

    Grant appeared as a collection of orange sodium-vapor streetlights, followed by a Pines Motel sign, then a Hardee’s and a Unocal station, an LP gas company and a video-rental store with a yellow-light marquee. The sheriff turned right at the only traffic light, led him through the three-block-long business district, took a left at a half-buried stop sign and headed up a low hill. On the left was a patch of pines that might have been a park.
    A white clapboard church stood at the top of the hill, surrounded by a grove of red pine, with a small cemetery in back. The sheriff drove past the church and stopped in the street in front of a small brick house with lighted windows.
    Lucas caught a sign in his headlights: RECTORY. Below that, in cursive letters, R EV . P HILIP B ERGEN . He pulled in behind Carr, killed the engine, and stepped down from the truck. The air was so cold and dry that he felt as though his skin were being sandpapered. When he breathed, he could feel ice crystals forming on his chin and under his nose.
    “That logging truck almost did us,” Lucas said as Carr walked back from his Suburban. Gouts of steam poured from their mouths and noses.
    “Gol-darned fool. I called back and told somebody to pull him over,” Carr said. “Give him a breath test, slow him down.” And as they started across the street, he added, “I’m not looking forward to this.”
    They scuffed through the snow on the rectory walk, up to the covered porch. Carr pushed the doorbell, then dropped his head and bounced on his toes. A man came to the door, peered out the window, then opened it.
    “Shelly, what happened out there?” Bergen held the door open, glanced curiously at Lucas, and said, “They’re dead?”
    “Yeah, um . . . let’s get our boots off, we gotta talk,” Carr said. “This is our new deputy, Lucas Davenport.”
    Bergen nodded, peered at Lucas, a wrinkle forming on his forehead, between his eyes. “Pleased to meet you.”
    The priest was close to fifty, a square, fleshy Scandinavian with blond hair and a permanently doubtful look on his pale face. He wore a wool Icelandic sweater and black slacks, and was in his stocking feet. His words, when he spoke, had a softness to them, a roundness, and Lucas thought that Bergen would not be a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but a mother’s-milk sort.
    Lucas and Carr dumped their pac boots in the front hallway and walked in stocking feet down a short hall, past a severe Italianate crucifix with a bronze Jesus, to the living room. Carr peeled off his snowmobile suit and Lucas dumped his parka next to a plain wood chair, and sat down.
    “So what happened?” Bergen said. He leaned on the mantel over a stone fireplace, where the remnants of three birch logs smoldered behind a glass door. A Sacred Heart print of the Virgin Mary peered over his shoulder.
    “There was an odd thing out there.” Carr dropped the suit on the floor, then settled on the edge of an overstuffed chair. He put