Winter Prey

on the Harper kid. What was wrong out there? Why’d you want the autopsy?”
    Climpt looked at the note, then handed it back to Lucas. “The boy was sittin’ on the floor with his dick in his hand, for one thing. I never actually tried hanging myself, but I suspect that right near the end, you’d know something was going wrong and you’d start flapping. You wouldn’t sit there pumpin’ away until you died.”
    “Okay.” Lucas nodded, grinned.
    “Then there was the floor,” Climpt continued. “There aren’t many men’s room floors I’d sit on, and this wasn’t one of them. The gas station gets cleaned in themorning—maybe. There’s a bar across the highway and guys’d come out of the bar at night, stop at the station for gas, the cold air’d hit ’em and they’d realize they had to take a whiz. Being half drunk, their aim wasn’t always so good. They’d pee all over the place. I just couldn’t see somebody sitting there voluntarily.”
    Lucas nodded.
    “Another thing,” Climpt said. “Those damn tiles were cold. You could frostbite your ass on those tiles. I mean, it’d hurt.”
    “So you couldn’t add it up.”
    “That’s about it,” Climpt said.
    “Got any ideas about it?”
    “I’d talk to Russ Harper if I was gonna go back into it,” Climpt said.
    “They talked to him,” Lucas said, flipping through the stack of paper. “The state guys did.”
    “Well . . .” His eyes were on Lucas, judging: “What I mean was, I’d take him out back to my workshop, put his hand in the vise, close it about six turns and then ask him. And if that didn’t work, I’d turn on the grinder.” He wasn’t smiling when he said it.
    “You think he knows who killed his boy?” Lucas asked.
    “If you asked me the most likely guy to commit a sneaky-type murder in this county, I’d say Russ Harper. Hands down. If his son gets killed, sneaky-like . . . that’s no coincidence, to my way of thinkin’. Russ might not know who killed him, but I bet he’d have some ideas.”
    “I’m thinking of going out there tonight, talking to Harper,” Lucas said. “Maybe take him out back to the shop.”
    “I’m not doin’ nothing. Invite me along,” Climpt said, stretching his legs out.
    “You don’t care for him?”
    “If that son-of-a-bitch’s heart caught on fire,” Climpt said, “I wouldn’t piss down his throat to put it out.”

    Climpt said he’d get dinner and hang around his house until Lucas was ready to go after Harper. Helen Arris had alreadygone, and much of the department was dark. Lucas tossed the Jim Harper file in his new file cabinet and banged the drawer shut. The drawer got off-track and jammed. When he tried to pull it back open, it wouldn’t come. He knelt down, inspecting it, found that a thin metal rail had bent, and tried to pry it out with his fingernails. He got it out, but his hand slipped and he ripped the fingernail on his left ring finger.
    “Mother—” He was dripping blood. He went down to the men’s room, rinsed it, looked at it. The nail rip went deep and it’d have to be clipped. He wrapped a paper towel around it, got his coat, and walked out through the darkened hallways of the courthouse. He turned a corner and saw an elderly man pushing a broom, and then a woman’s voice echoed down a side hallway: “Heck of a day, Odie,” it said.
    The doctor. Weather. Again. The old man nodded, looking down a hall at right angles to the one he and Lucas were in. “Cold day, miz.”
    She walked out of the intersecting corridor, still carrying her bag, a globe light shining down on her hair as she passed under it. Her hair looked like clover honey. She heard him in the hallway, glanced his way, recognized him, stopped. “Davenport,” she said. “Killed anybody yet?”
    Lucas had automatically smiled when he saw her, but he cut it off: “That’s getting pretty fuckin’ tiresome,” he snapped.
    “Sorry,” she said. She straightened and smiled, tentatively. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what I didn’t mean. Whatever it was, I didn’t mean it when I saw you at the school, either.”
    What? He didn’t understand what she’d just said, but it sounded like an apology. He let it go. “You work for the county, too?”
    She glanced around the building. “No, not really. The board cut out the public health nurse and I do some of her old route. Volunteer thing. I go around and see people out in the country.”
    “Pretty noble,” Lucas