Winter Prey

pants and a three-part parka, a Day-Glo orange hunter’s hat, ski mitts and heavy-duty pac boots. He looked more like an out-of-shape lumberjack than a priest. “Phil, how’r you feeling?”
    “You ought to know,” Bergen said harshly, stripping his mitts off and slapping them against his leg as he came down the hall. “The talk all over town is, Bergen did it. Bergen killed the LaCourts. I had about half the usual congregation at Mass this morning. I’ll be lucky to have that tomorrow.”
    “Phil, I don’t know . . .” Carr started.
    “Don’t BS me, Shelly,” Bergen said. “The word’s coming out of this office. I’m the prime suspect.”
    “If the word’s coming out of this office, I’ll stop it—because you’re not the prime suspect,” Carr said. “We don’t have any suspects.”
    Bergen looked at Lucas. His lower lip trembled and he shook his head, turned back to Carr: “You’re a little late, Shelly; and I’ll tell you, I won’t put up with it. I have a reputation and you and your hired gun”—he looked at Lucas again, then back to Carr—“are ruining it. That’s called slander or libel.”
    Carr took him by the arm, said, “C’mon down to my office, Phil.” To Lucas he said, “Go down there to the end of the hall, ask for Helen Arris.”
    Helen Arris was a big-haired office manager, a woman who might have been in her forties or fifties or early sixties, who chewed gum and called him dear, and who did the paperwork in five minutes. When they finished withthe paper, she took his photograph with a Polaroid camera, slipped the photo into a plastic form, stuck the form into a hot press, slammed the press, waited ten seconds, then handed him a mint-new identification card.
    “Be careful out there,” she said, sounding like somebody on a TV cop show.

    Lucas got a notebook from the Explorer and decided to walk down to Grant Hardware, a block back toward the highway. This would be a long day. If they were going to break the killings, they’d do it in a week. And the more they could get early, the better their chances were.
    A closet-sized book-and-newspaper store sat on the corner and he stopped for a Wall Street Journal; he passed a t-shirt store, a shoe repair shop, and one of the bakeries before he crossed in midblock to the hardware store. The store had a snowblower display in the front window, along with a stack of VCRs and pumpkin-colored plastic sleds. A bell rang over the door when Lucas walked in, and the odor of hot coffee hung in the air. A man sat on a wooden stool, behind the cashier’s counter, reading a People magazine and drinking coffee from a deep china cup. Lucas walked down toward the counter, aging wooden floor creaking beneath him.
    “Dick Westrom?”
    “That’s me,” the counterman said.
    “Lucas Davenport. I’m . . .”
    “The detective, yeah.” Westrom stood up and leaned across the counter to shake hands. He was big, fifty pounds too heavy for his height, with blond hair fading to white and large watery cow eyes that looked away from Lucas. He tipped his head at another chair at the other end of the counter. “My girl’s out getting a bite, but there’s nobody around . . . we could talk here, if that’s all right.”
    “That’s fine,” Lucas said. He took off his jacket, walked around the counter and sat down. “I need to know exactly what happened last night, the whole sequence.”
    Westrom had found Frank LaCourt’s body, nearlytripping over it as he hauled hose off the truck.
    “You didn’t see him right away, laying there?” Lucas asked.
    “No. Most of the light was from the fire, it was flickering, you know, and Frank had a layer of snow on him,” Westrom said. He had a confidential manner of talking, out of the side of his mouth, as though he were telling secrets in a prison yard. “He was easy to see when you got right on top of him, but from a few feet away . . . hell, you couldn’t hardly see him at all.”
    “That was the first you knew there were dead people?”
    “Well, I thought there might be somebody inside, there was a smell, you know. That hit us as soon as we got there, and I think Duane said something like, ‘We got a dead one.’ ”
    Westrom insisted that the priest had passed the fire station within seconds of the alarm.
    “Look. I got nothing against Phil Bergen,” Westrom said, shooting sideways glances at Lucas. “Shelly Carr was trying to get some extra time out of me last night, so I