Winter Prey

teased.

    “You don’t act like a doctor,” Lucas said.
    “You mean because I gossip and flirt?”
    “Mmmm.”
    “You have to live here a while,” she said with a hint of tension in her voice. She looked around the room, at the people talking over the red votive candles. “There’s nothing to do but work. Nothing.”
    “Then why stay?”
    “I have to,” she said. “My dad came here from Finland, and spent his life working in the woods, in the timber. And sailing on the lakes. Never had any money. But I maxed out in everything at school.”
    “You went to the high school here in Grant?”
    “Yup. Anyway, I was trying to save money to go to college, but it looked tough. Then some of the teachers got together and chipped in, and this old fart county commissioner who I didn’t know from Adam called down to Madison and pulled some strings and got me a full-load scholarship. And they kept the money coming all the way through medical school. I paid it all back. I even set up a little scholarship fund at the high school while I wasworking in Minneapolis, but that’s not what everybody wanted.”
    “They wanted you back here,” Lucas said.
    “Yes.” She nodded. She picked up her empty wineglass and turned it in her hands. “Everything around here is timber and tourism, with a little farming. The roads are not much good and there’s a lot of drinking. The timber accidents are terrible—you ought to see somebody caught by a log when it’s rolling down to a sawmill. And with tractor accidents and people run over with boat propellers . . . They had an old guy here who could do enough general surgery to get you on a helicopter to Duluth or down to the Cities, and as long as he was here I didn’t feel like I had to come back.”
    “Then he retired.”
    “Kicked off,” Weather said. “Heart attack. He was sixty-three. He ate six pancakes with butter and bacon every morning, cream in his coffee, cheeseburger for lunch, steak for dinner, drank a pint of Johnnie Walker every night and smoked like a chimney. It was amazing he made it as long as he did.”
    “They couldn’t get anybody else?”
    She laughed, not a pleasant laugh, looked out the window at the snow: “Are you kidding? Look outside. It’s twenty-five below zero and still going down and the movie theater is closed in the winter.”
    “So what do you do for entertainment?”
    “That’s a little personal,” she said, grinning, reaching across the table to touch the back of his hand, “for this stage of our relationship.”
    “What?”

CHAPTER

8
    The dinner left Lucas vaguely mystified but not unhappy. They said good-bye in the restaurant parking lot, awkwardly. He didn’t want to leave. The talk ran on in the snow, the air so cold that it felt like after-shave. Finally they stepped apart and Weather got in her Jeep.
    “See you,” she said.
    “Yeah.” Definitely.
    Lucas watched her go, pulled his hat on, and drove the six blocks to the church. Carr was waiting in the vestibule with two women, the three of them chatting brightly, nodding. One of the women was as large as Lucas and blond, and wore a red knitted hat with snowflakes and reindeer on it. Her coat carried a button that said Free the Animals. The other woman was small and dark, with gray streaks in her hair, lines at the corners of her eyes. Carr called the dark one Jeanine as Lucas came up.
    “This is Lucas Davenport . . .” Carr was saying.
    “Lieutenant Davenport,” Jeanine said. She had soft, warm hands and a strong grip. “And our friend Mary . . .”
    Mary fawned and Lucas retreated a couple of steps, said to Carr, “We better go.”
    “Yeah, sure,” Carr said reluctantly. “Ladies, we gotta work.”
    They walked out together and Lucas asked Carr, “Did you talk to Bergen?”
    “Not myself—Helen Arris got him. I had to go back out to the house. They’re taking the place apart.”
    “How about the Harper warrant?”
    “Got it.” Carr patted his chest and then yawned. “It’s getting to be a long day.”
    “How about the Harper place? What can we do?”
    “We’re allowed to go into the kid’s room and the other principal rooms of the house, not including any office or Harper’s own bedroom if that’s separate from the kid’s. We can look at anything we believe is the kid’s, or that Harper says is the kid’s.”
    “I’d like to poke around.”
    “So would I, but the judge didn’t want to hear about it,” Carr said. “He was