Winter Prey

thought, and again, Can’t fuck this thing up.
    Crane came in, blowing steam, stamping his feet, walked behind Lucas to a coffee urn. “He used the water heater to start the fire,” he said to the back of Lucas’ head.
    “What?”
    Lucas turned in his chair. Crane, still wrapped in his parka, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. “The hot water faucet was turned on over the laundry tub, and a lot of premix was splashed around the water heater. The heater’s a mess, of course, but it looks like there might be traces of charred cotton coming out of the pilot port.”
    “Say it in English,” Lucas suggested.
    Crane grinned. “He splashed his premix around the house, soaked a rag in it and laid it across the burner in the water heater. He had to be careful to keep it away from the pilot light. Then he turned on the hot water faucet, let the water dribble out. Not too fast. Then he left. In a few minutes, the water level drops in the tank, cold water refills it . . .”
    “And the burner lights up.”
    “Boom,” said Crane.
    “Why would he do that?”
    “Probably to make sure he could get out. We figure there were fifteen gallons of premix spread around the place. He might’ve been afraid to toss a match into it. But it does mean he must’ve thought about burning the place. That’s not something that would occur to you while you were standing there . . . if it happened at all.”
    “If it did happen, that means there’d be a delay between the time he left and the time the fire started, right?”
    “Right.”
    “How much?”
    “Don’t know,” Crane said. “We don’t know the condition of the water tank before he turned the water on—how hot the water already was. He didn’t turn the faucet on very far, just a steady dribble. Could have been anything from four or five minutes to twenty minutes.”
    More delay, Lucas thought. More time between the killings and the moment the Jeep passed the fire station. There was no hope for a minor error anymore, a time mixup. The priest could not have been at the LaCourts’.
    “ . . . through the surviving files . . .” Crane was talking about the search for the missing photograph.
    “It wouldn’t be in a file,” Lucas said abruptly. “They would have stuffed it someplace where they could get atit—someplace both casual and safe. Where if somebody needed to see it, they could just pick it up and say, ‘Here it is.’ ”
    “Okay. But where?” Crane asked.
    “Cookie jar—like that.”
    “We’ve looked through most of the stuff in the kitchen and their bedroom, the stuff that survived. We haven’t found anything like it.”
    “Okay.”
    “We’ll take it apart inch-by-inch,” Crane said. “But it’s gonna take time.”

    Lucas made two phone calls and took one. The first call went to a nun in the Twin Cities, an old friend, a college psychology professor. Elle Kruger: Sister Mary Joseph.
    “Elle, this is Lucas. How’re things?”
    “Fine,” she said promptly. “I got Winston’s preproduction beta-copy of the new Grove of Trees. I ran it with Sister Louisa over the weekend, and we froze it up right away, some kind of stack-overflow error.”
    “Dammit, they said they fixed that.” Grove of Trees was an intricate simulation of the battle of Gettysburg that he’d been working on for years. Elle Kruger was a games freak.
    “Well, we were on Sister Louisa’s Radio Shack compatible,” she said. “There’s something goofy about that machine, because I ran the same disk on my Compaq and it worked fine.”
    “All right, I’ll talk to them. We ought to be compatible with everything, though,” Lucas said. “Listen, I’ve got another problem and it involves the Church. I don’t know if you can help me, but there are people being killed.”
    “There always are, aren’t there?” she said. “Where are you? And how does it involve the Church?”
    He sketched the problem out quickly: the priest, the missing time, the question about the man at the end of the road.
    “Lucas, you should go through the archdiocese of Milwaukee,” Elle said.
    “Elle, I don’t have time to fool around with Church bureaucracy, and you know what they’re like when there’s a possible scandal involved. It’s like trying to get information out of a Swiss bank. This guy—priest—Bergen is about our age, and I bet you know people who know him. All I’m asking is that you make a couple of calls, see if you can find some friends of his. I