Winter Prey

in the strange bedroom. When he woke again, it was eight o’clock. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then staggered down the hall to the bathroom, shaved, half-fell into the shower, got a dose of icy water for his trouble, huddled outside the plastic curtain until the water turned hot, then stood under it, letting the stinging jets of water beat on his neck.
    Harper. They had to put the screws on Harper. So far, he was the only person who might know something. He stepped out of the shower, looked in the medicine cabinet for shampoo. There wasn’t any, but there were two packs of birth control pills. He picked them up, turned them over, looked at the prescription label. More than two years old. Huh. He’d hoped he’d find that they’d been taken out the day before. Vanity. He dropped them back where he’d found them. Of course, if she hadn’t been on the pill for two years, she probably didn’t have much going.
    He looked under the sink, found a bottle of Pert, got back in the shower and washed his hair.
    Harper wasn’t the only problem. There was still the time discrepancy. Something happened there. Something was going on with the priest. He didn’t seem to fit with the child-sex angle. There’d been a notorious string of cases in Minnesota of priests abusing parish children, but in those cases, the men had invariably acted alone. The standing of a priest in a small community would almost seem automatically to preclude any kind of ring.
    “Aw, no,” Lucas sputtered.
    He should have seen it. He stepped out of the shower, mopped his face and walked down the hall to the kitchen,found the telephone. He got Carr at his office.
    “You get any sleep?” he asked.
    “Couple hours on the office couch,” Carr said. “We got a search warrant for Judy Schoenecker’s place. You can take it out there.”
    “I’d like to take Gene along. He was pretty good with Harper.”
    “I understand Russ might have a sore nose this morning,” Carr said.
    “It’s the cold weather,” Lucas said. “Listen, how many people live down Storm Lake Road, beyond the LaCourts’ house? How many other residences?”
    “Hmp. Twenty or thirty, maybe. Plus a couple resorts, but those are closed, of course. Nobody there but the owners.”
    “Could you get a list for me?”
    “Sure. The assessor’ll know. We can get his plat books. What’re you looking for?”
    “I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Lucas said.
    When he hung up, he realized he was freezing, hustled back to the bathroom, and jumped into the shower. After two more minutes of hot water, he toweled off, dressed, and let himself out of the house.

    Carr was munching on a powdered doughnut hole when Lucas got in. He pointed at a white paper bag and said, “Have one. Why do you want those names down the road?”
    “Just to see what’s down there,” Lucas said, fishing a sweet roll out of the bag. “Did you get them?”
    “I told George—he’s the assessor—I told him we needed them ASAP, so they should be ready,” Carr said. “I’ll take you down.”
    George was tall and dark, balding, with fingers pointed like crow-quill pens. He pulled out a plat map of the lake area and used a sharp-nailed index finger to trace the road and tick off the inhabitants, right down to the infants. Three of the houses were lived in by single men.
    “Do you know these guys?” Lucas asked Carr, touching the houses of the three single men.
    “Yup,” Carr said. “But the only one I know well is Donny Riley, he’s in the Ojibway Rod and Gun Club. Pretty good guy. He’s a retired mail carrier. The other two, Bob Dell works up in a sawmill and Darrell Anderson runs the Stone Hawk Resort.”
    “Are they married? Divorced, widowed? What?”
    “Riley was married for years. His wife died. Darrell’s gone off-and-on with one of the gals from the hospital, but I don’t know much about him. Bob is pretty much a bachelor-farmer type.”
    “Any of them Catholics?” Lucas asked.
    “Well . . .” Carr looked at the assessor, and then they both looked at Lucas. “I believe Bob goes to Sunday Mass.”
    “Does he come from here?”
    “No, no, he comes from Milwaukee,” Carr said. “What’re we pushing toward here?”
    “Nothing special,” Lucas said. “Let’s go back upstairs.” And to the assessor he said, “Thanks.”
    Lacey was sitting in Carr’s office, his feet on the corner of the sheriff’s desk. When they came in, he