Winter Prey

almost nothing during the meeting. He’d rolled an unlit cigarette in his fingers, watching Lucas, weighing him.
    Lucas moved into the mumps-victim’s desk and Helen Arris brought in a lockable two-drawer file cabinet for papers and personal belongings.
    “I brought you the Harper boy’s file,” she said. She was a formidable woman with very tall hair and several layers of makeup.
    “Thanks. Is there any coffee in the place? A vending machine?”
    “Coffee in the squad room, I can show you.”
    “Great.” He tagged along behind her, making small talk. He’d recognized her type as soon as Carr sent him to her for his ID. She knew everybody and tracked everything that went on in the department. She knew the forms and the legalities, the state regs and who was screwing who. She was not to be trifled with if you wanted your life to run smoothly and end with a pension.
    She wouldn’t be fooled by false charm either. Lucas didn’t even try it: he got his coffee, thanked her, and carried it back to the office, left the door open. Deputies and a few civilian clerks wandered past, one or two at a time, looking him over. He ignored the desultory parade as he combed through the stack of paper on the county’sfirst real homicide in six years.
    Jim Harper had been found hanging from a pull-down towel rack in the men’s room of a Unocal station in Bon Plaine, seventeen miles east of Grant. The boy was seated on the floor under the rack, a loop of the towel around his neck. His Levi’s and Jockey shorts had been pulled down below his knees. The door had been locked, but it was a simple push-button that could be locked from the inside with the door open and remain locked when the door was pulled shut, so that meant nothing. The boy had been found by the station owner when he opened for business in the morning.
    Harper’s father had been questioned twice. The first time, the morning after the murder, was perfunctory. The sheriff’s investigators were assuming accidental death during a masturbation ritual, which was not unheard of. The only interesting point on the preliminary investigation was a scrawled note to Carr: Shelly, I don’t like this one. We better get an autopsy.—Gene.
    Climpt. His desk was in the corner, and Lucas glanced at it. The desk was neatly kept, impersonal except for an aging photograph in a silver frame. He pushed the chair back and looked closer. A pretty woman, dressed in the styles of the late fifties or early sixties, with a baby in her arms. Lucas called Arris, asked her to find Climpt, and went back to the Harper file.
    After an autopsy, a forensic pathologist from Milwaukee had declared the death a strangulation homicide. Russ Harper, the boy’s father, was interviewed again, this time by a pair of Wisconsin state major-crime investigators. Harper didn’t know anything about anything, he said. Jim had gone wild, had been drinking seriously and maybe smoking marijuana.
    They were unhappy about it, but had to let it go. Russ Harper was not a suspect—he had been working at his gas station when the boy was murdered, and disinterested witnesses would swear to it. His presence was also backed by computer-time-stamped charge slips with his initials on them.
    The state investigators interviewed a dozen other people, including some Jim’s age. They’d all denied being his friend. One had said Jim didn’t have any friends. Nobody had seen the boy at the crossroads gas station. On the day he was killed, nobody had seen him since school.

    “Hear you want to talk to me?”
    Climpt was a big man in his middle fifties, deep blue eyes and a hint of rosiness about his cheeks. He was wearing a blue parka, open, brown pac boots with wool pants tucked inside, and carried a pair of deerhide gloves. A chrome pistol sat diagonally across his left hip bone, where it could be crossdrawn with his right hand, even when he was sitting behind a steering wheel. His voice was like a load of gravel.
    Lucas looked up and said, “Yeah, just a second.” He pawed through the file papers, looking for the note Climpt had sent to Carr. Climpt peeled off his parka, hung it on a hook next to Lucas’, ambled over to his own desk and sat down, leaning back in his chair.
    “How’d it go?” Lucas asked as he looked through the file.
    “Mostly bullshit.” The words came out slow and country. “What’s up?”
    Lucas found the note, handed it to him: “You sent this to Shelly after you handled that death report