Winter Prey

involvement?”
    “Davenport . . .” Carr said, a warning in his voice.
    “ What? ” Bergen was back on his feet now, face flushed, furious.
    “Yes or no,” Lucas pressed.
    “No. Never.”
    Lucas couldn’t tell if Bergen was lying or telling thetruth. He sounded right, but his eyes had cleared, and Lucas could see him calculating, weighing his responses. “How about the booze? Were you drinking that night, at the LaCourts’?”
    The priest turned and let himself fall back into the chair. “No. Absolutely not. This is my first bottle in a year. More than a year.”
    “There’s something wrong with the time,” Lucas said. “Tell us what’s wrong.”
    “I don’t know,” Bergen said. He dropped his head to his hands, then ran his hands halfway up to the top of his head and pulled out at the hair until it was again standing up in spikes. “I keep trying to find ways . . . I wasn’t drinking.”
    “The firemen. Do you have any trouble with them?”
    Bergen looked up, eyes narrowing. “Dick Westrom doesn’t particularly care for me. I take my business to the other hardware store, it belongs to one of the parishioners. The other man, Duane . . . I hardly know him. I can’t think what he’d have against me. Maybe something I don’t know about.”
    “How about the people who reported the fire?” Lucas asked, looking across the room at Carr. Carr was still holding the bottle of Jim Beam as though he were presenting evidence to a jury.
    “They’re okay,” Carr said. “They’re out of it. They saw the fire, made the call. They’re too old and have too many physical problems to be involved.”
    The three of them looked at each other, waiting for another question, but there were none. The time simply didn’t work. Lucas searched Bergen’s face. He found nothing but the waxy opacity.
    “All right,” he said finally. “Maybe there was another Jeep. Maybe Duane saw Father Bergen’s Jeep earlier, going down the lake road, and it stuck in his mind and when he saw a car go by, he thought it was yours.”
    “He didn’t see a Jeep earlier,” Carr said, shaking his head. “I asked him that—if he’d seen Phil’s Jeep go down the lake road.”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said, still studying the priest. “Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
    Carr looked at Bergen. “I’m dumping the bottle, Phil. And I’m calling Joe.”
    Bergen’s head went down. “Okay.”
    “Who’s Joe?” Lucas asked.
    “His AA sponsor,” Carr said. “We’ve had this problem before.”
    Bergen looked up at Carr, his voice rasping: “Shelly, I don’t know if this guy believes me,” he said, tipping his head at Lucas. “But I’ll tell you: I’d swear on the Holy Eucharist that I had nothing to do with the LaCourts.”
    “Yeah,” Carr said. He reached out and Bergen took his hand, and Carr pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let’s call Joe, get him over here.”

    Joe was a dark man, with a drooping black mustache and heavy eyebrows. He wore an old green Korean War-style olive-drab billed hat with earflaps. He glanced at Lucas, nodded at Carr and said, “How bad?”
    “Drank at least a fifth,” Carr said. “He’s gone.”
    “Goddammit.” Joe looked up at the house, then back to Carr. “He’d gone more’n a year. It’s the rumors coming out of your office, Shelly.”
    “Yeah, I know. I’ll try to stop it, but I don’t know . . .”
    “Better more’n try. Phil’s got the thirst as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen.” Joe stepped toward the door, turned, about to say something else, when Bergen pulled the door open behind him.
    “Shelly!” he called. He was too loud. “Telephone—it’s your office. They say it’s an emergency.”
    Carr looked at Lucas and said, “Maybe something broke.”
    He hurried inside and Joe took Bergen by the shoulder and said, “Phil, we can handle this.”
    “Joe, I . . .” Bergen seemed overcome, looked glassily at Lucas, still on the sidewalk, and pulled Joe inside, closing the door.
    Lucas waited, hands in his pockets, the warmth he’d accumulated in the house slowly dissipating. Bergen was a smart guy, and no stranger to manipulation. But he didn’t have the sociopath edge, the just-below-the-surface glassiness of the real thing.
    Thirty seconds after he’d gone inside, Carr burst out.
    “Come on,” he said shortly, striding past Lucas toward the trucks.
    “What happened?”
    “That kid you talked to, the one that told you about the