Winter Prey

in the basement. Maybe in a closet if it was just overnight and small—dirty magazines, that sort of thing. I suppose the attic, if they got one.”
    “Let’s do a quick run through this, then maybe look around a little.”
    The house was an old one, with hardwood planked floors covered with patches of linoleum, and lath-and-plaster walls. Lucas dug through the kid’s closet, shaking out a stack of magazines and comic books, checking shoes and the few shirts hanging inside. There were no loose floorboards and the plaster wall was cracked but intact. Climpt tossed the bureau again, pulling out each drawer to turn it over, checked the heat register, found it solid. In ten minutes they’d decided the room was clean.
    “Attic or basement?” asked Climpt.
    “Let’s see how much trouble the attic is.”
    The attic access was through a hatch in the bathroom. Standing on a chair, Lucas pushed up the hatch and was showered with dust and asbestos insulation. He pulled itshut again and climbed down, brushing the dirt out of his hair.
    “Hasn’t been open in a while,” he said.
    “Basement,” said Climpt. They headed for the basement stairs, found Lacey digging through a freestanding wardrobe in the living room while Harper slumped in a chair.
    “Anything?” Lucas asked.
    “Nope.”
    “We’ll be down the basement,” Lucas said.
    Harper watched them go, but said nothing. “I wish that fucker’d give me a reason to slam him up alongside the head,” Climpt said.
    The basement smelled of cobwebs, dust, engine oil, and coal. The walls’ granite fieldstone was mortared with crumbling, sandy concrete. Two bare bulbs, dangling from ancient fraying wire, provided all the light. There were two small rooms, filled with the clutter of a rural half-century: racks of dusty Ball jars, broken crocks, an antique lawnmower, a lever-action .22 covered with rust. A dozen leg-hold jump traps hung from a nail, and hanging next to them, two dozen tiny feet tied together with twine.
    “Gophers,” Climpt said, touching them. They swayed like a grisly wind chime. “County used to pay a bounty on them, way back, nickel a pair on front feet.”
    A railroad-tie workbench was wedged into a corner with a rusting vise fitted at one end. A huge old coal furnace hunkered in the middle of the main room like a dead oak, stone cold. A diminutive propane burner stood in what had once been a coal room, galvanized ducts leading to the rooms above. The coal room was the cleanest place in the basement, apparently cleaned when the furnace was installed. At a glance, there was no place to hide anything.
    Lucas wandered over to the coal furnace, pulled open the furnace door, looked at a pile of old ashes, closed it. “This could take a while,” he said.
    They took fifteen minutes, Climpt repeating, “Someplace where he could get it quick . . . .” They found nothing, and started up the steps, unsatisfied. The basement hadtoo many nooks and crannies. “If one of those fieldstones pulled out . . .” Lucas started.
    “We’d never find it: there must be two thousand of them,” Climpt said.
    And Lucas said, “Wait a minute,” went back down the stairs and looked toward the propane burner.
    “If that’s the coal room, shouldn’t there be a coal chute?” he asked.
    “Yeah, there should,” Climpt said.
    They found the chute door set in the wall behind the propane burner, four feet above the floor and virtually invisible in the bad light. Lucas reached back, unlatched the door and felt inside. His hand fell on a stack of paper.
    “Something,” he said. “Paper.” He pulled it out. Three glossy sex magazines and two sex comics. He handed them to Climpt, reached back inside for another quick check, came up with a small corner of notebook paper, blank, that might have been used as a bookmark. Lucas stuck the paper in his pocket.
    “Porn,” said Climpt, standing under one of the hanging light bulbs. They shook out the magazines, found nothing inside.
    “Check ’em,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for a picture of a kid on a bed.”
    They flipped through the magazines, but all of the pictures were obviously commercial and involved women. The Mueller kid had described the photo he’d seen as rough, printed on newsprint.
    “Nothing much,” Climpt said. “I mean, a lot of pussy . . . Goddamn Shelly’d have a heart attack.”
    Lucas went back to the coal chute for a final check, reached far inside, felt just a corner of a