Winter Prey

kind of thing, these killings, I figured you’d probably want to hear everything.”
    “Sure.” Lucas made a note.
    They talked for another five minutes, then three patrol deputies stomped in from duty at the LaCourt house. They were cold and went straight to the coffee. Helper got up to start another pot.
    “Anything happening down at the house?” Lucas asked.
    “Not much. Guys from Madison are crawling around the place,” said one of the deputies. His face was red as a raw steak.
    “Is the sheriff down there?”
    “He went back to the office, he was gonna talk to some of the TV people.”
    “All right.”
    Lucas looked back at Helper, fussing with the coffee. Small-town fireman. He heard things, sitting around with twenty or thirty different firemen every week, nothing much to do.
    “Thanks,” he said. He nodded at Helper and headed for the door, the phone ringing as he went out. The wind bit at him again, and he hunched against it, hurried around the truck. He was fumbling for his keys when Helper stuck his head out the door and called after him: “It’s a deputy looking for you.”
    Lucas went back inside and picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
    “This is Rusty, at the school. You better get your ass up here.”

    Grant Junior High was a red-brick rectangle with blue-spruce accents spotted around the lawn. A man in a snowmobile suit worked on the flat roof, pushing snow off. The harsh scraping sounds carried forever on the cold air. Lucas parked in front, zipped his parka, pulled on his ski gloves. Down the street, the bank time-and-temperature sign said- 21. The sun was rolling across the southern sky, as pale as an old silver dime.
    Bob Jones was waiting outside the principal’s office when Lucas walked in. Jones was a round-faced man, balding, with rosy cheeks, a short black villain’s mustache and professional-principal’s placating smile. He wore a blue suit with a stiff-collared white shirt, and his necktie was patriotically striped with red, white, and blue diagonals.
    “Glad to see you,” he said as they shook hands. “I’ve heard about you. Heck of a record. Come on, I’ll take you down to the conference room. The boy’s name is John Mueller.” The school had wide halls painted an institutional beige, with tan lockers spotted between cork bulletin boards. The air smelled of sweat socks, paper, and pencil-sharpener shavings.
    Halfway down the hall, Jones said, “I’d like you to talk to John’s father about this. When you’re done with him. I don’t think there’s a legal problem, but if you could talk to him . . .”
    “Sure,” Lucas said.
    Rusty and Dusty were sitting at the conference table drinking coffee, Rusty with his feet on the table. They were both large, beefy, square-faced, white-toothed, with elaborately casual hairdos, Rusty a Chippewa, Dusty with the transparent pallor of a pure Swede. Rusty hastily pulled his feet off the table when Lucas and Jones walked in, leaving a ring of dirty water on the tabletop.
    “Where’s the kid?” Lucas asked.
    “Back in his math class,” said Dusty.
    “I’ll get him,” Jones volunteered. He promptly disappeared down the hall, his heels echoing off the terrazzo.
    Dusty wiped the water off the tabletop with his elbow and pushed a file at Lucas. “Kid’s name is John Mueller. We pulled his records. He’s pretty much of an A-B student. Quiet. His father runs a taxidermy shop out on County N, his mother works at Grotek’s Bakery.”
    Lucas sat down, opened the file, started paging through it. “What about this other kid? You said on the phone that another kid was murdered.”
    Rusty nodded, taking it from Dusty. “Jim Harper. He went to school here, seventh grade. He was killed around three months back,” Rusty said.
    “October 20th,” said Dusty.
    “What’s the story?” Lucas asked.
    “Strangled. First they thought it was an accident, but the doc had the body sent down to Milwaukee, and they figured he was strangled. Never caught anybody.”
    “First murder of a local resident in fourteen years,” Rusty said.
    “Jesus Christ, nobody told me,” Lucas said. He looked up at them.
    Dusty shrugged. “Well . . . I guess nobody thought about it. It’s kind of embarrassing, really. We got nothing on the killing. Zero. Zilch. It’s been three months now; I think people’d like to forget it.”
    “And he went to this school, and he was in classes with the LaCourt girl . . . I mean,