Winter Prey

picture?” Carr was talking over his shoulder.
    “John Mueller.” Jug-ears, off-brand shoes, embarrassed.
    “He’s missing. Can’t be found.”
    “What?” Lucas grabbed Carr’s arm. “Fuckin’ tell me.”
    “His father was working late at his shop, out on the highway,” Carr said. They were standing in the street. “He’d left the kid at home watching television. When his mother got home, and the kid wasn’t there, she thought he was out at the shop. It wasn’t until his parents got together that they realized he was gone. A neighbor kid’s got a Nintendo and John’s been going down there after school a couple nights a week, and sometimes stays for dinner. They called the neighbors but there wasn’t anybody home, and they thought maybe they’d all gone down to the Arby’s. So they drove around until they found the neighbors, but they hadn’t seen him either.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Lucas said, looking past Carr at nothing. “I might of put a finger on him.”
    “Don’t even think that,” Carr said, his voice grim.

    They headed for the Mueller house, riding together in the sheriff’s truck, crimson flashers working on top.
    “You were hard on him,” Carr said abruptly. “On Phil.”
    “You’ve got four murder victims and now this,” Lucas said. “What do you expect, violin music?”
    “I don’t know what I expected,” Carr said.
    The sheriff was pushing the truck, moving fast. Lucas caught the bank sign: minus twenty-eight.
    He said it aloud: “Twenty-eight below.”
    “Yeah.” The wind had picked up again, and was blowing thin streamers of snow off rooftops and drifts. The sheriff hunched over the steering wheel. “If the kid’s been outside, he’s dead. He doesn’t need anybody to kill him.”
    A moment passed in silence. Lucas couldn’t think about John Mueller: when he thought about him, he could feel a darkness creeping over his mind. Maybe the kid was at another friend’s house, maybe . . .
    “How long has Bergen had the drinking problem?” he asked.
    “Since college. He told me he went to his first AA meeting before he was legal to drink,” Carr said. His heavy face was a faint unhealthy green in the dashboard lights.
    “How bad? DTs? Memory loss? Blackouts?”
    “Like that,” Carr said.
    “But he’s been dry? Lately?”
    “I think so. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, if a guy keeps his head down. He can drink at night, hold it together during the day. I used to do a little drinking myself.”
    “Lot of cops do.”
    Carr looked across the seat at him: “You too?”
    “No, no. I’ve abused a few things, but not booze. I’ve always had a taste for uppers.”
    “Cocaine?”
    Lucas laughed, a dry rattle: the kid’s face kept popping up. Small kid, sweet-faced. “I can hear the beads of sweat popping out of your forehead, Shelly. No. I’m afraid of that shit. Might be too good, if you know what I mean.”
    “Any alcoholic’d know what you mean,” Carr said.
    “I’ve done a little speed from time to time,” Lucas continued, looking out at the dark featureless forest that lined the road. “Not lately. Speed and alcohol, they’re for different personalities.”
    “Either one of them’ll kill you,” Carr said.
    They passed a video rental shop with three people standing outside; they all turned to watch the sheriff’s truck go by. Lucas said, “People do weird things when they’re drunk. And they forget things. If he was drunk, the time . . .”
    “He says he wasn’t,” Carr said.
    “Would he lie about it?”
    “I don’t think so,” Carr said. “Under other circumstances, he might—drinkers lie to themselves when they’re starting again. But with this, all these dead people, I don’t think he’d lie. Like I told you, Phil Bergen’s a moral man. That’s why he drinks in the first place.”

    There were twenty people at the Muellers’, mostly neighbors, with three deputies. A half-dozen men on snowmobiles were organizing a patrol of ditches and trails within two miles of the house.
    Carr plunged into it while Lucas drifted around the edges, helpless. He didn’t know anything about missing persons searches, not out here in the woods, and Carr seemed to know a lot about it.
    A few moments after Carr and Lucas arrived, the boy’s father hurried out into the yard, pulling on a snowmobile suit. A woman stood in the door in a white baker’s dress, hands clasped to her face. The image stuck with Lucas: it was an effect of pure