Winter Prey

this kind of shit?” Lucas asked. He held the paper on the flat of his open hands, peering at the type. There was no indication of where it might have come from.
    “Anybody and everybody who can afford a Macintosh computer, a laser printer, and a halftone scanner. You could set up a whole magazine with a few thousand bucks’ worth of equipment. Not the printing, just the type.”
    “Is there any way to run it down?”
    Crane shrugged. “We can try. Do the best possible copies, circulate it, see what happens.”
    “Do that,” Lucas said. “We need to see the picture.”

    Crane put the photo into an envelope and they carried it back to the garage. Carr was walking up from the car park,and they waited for him at the garage door. Inside, Crane showed him the remnants of the photo.
    “Damn,” Carr said. “That could have made us, if we’d got all of it.”
    “We’ll try to trace it, but I can’t promise anything,” Crane said.
    Carr looked at Lucas and said, “Come on outside a minute.”
    Lucas pulled his parka back on, zipped it, followed Carr through the door.
    “We got Bob Dell’s birthdate off his DMV records and ran those through the NCIC,” Carr said. “He was arrested a few times in Madison, apparently when he was going to school there. Disturbing the peace and once for assault. The disturbing the peace things were for demonstrations, the assault was for a bar fight. The charge was dropped before it got to court and apparently didn’t amount to much. I called Madison, and it was just an ordinary bar, not a gay bar or anything. The demonstrations involved some kind of political thing, but it wasn’t gay rights, whatever it was.”
    “Nothing there,” Lucas said.
    “Well, you remember what Lacey’s wife said about Dell not liking women? I called her up, and asked her what she meant, and she hemmed and hawed and finally said yeah, there were rumors among the eligible women in town that you’d be wasting your time chasing Dell.”
    “How solid were the rumors? Anything explicit?” Lucas asked.
    “Nothing she knew about.”
    “Where’s this place he works?”
    “Sawmill, about ten minutes from here,” Carr said.
    “Let’s go.”
    Carr led the way down to the sawmill, a yellow-steel pole barn on a concrete slab. A thirty-foot-high stack of oak logs was racked above a concrete ramp that led into the mill.
    Inside the mill, the temperature hovered just above freezing. A half-dozen men worked around the saws. Lucas waited in the work bay while Carr poked his headinto the office to talk to the owner. Lucas heard him say, “No, no, no, there’s no problem, honest to God, we’re just trying to run down every last . . .” And then a cut started, and he watched the saws until Carr came back out.
    “That’s Bob in the vest,” Carr said. “I’ll get him when they finish the cut.”
    Dell was a tall man, wearing jeans and a sleeveless down vest with heavy leather gloves and a yellow hard hat. He worked with the logs, jockeying them for the cut. When the cut was done, they took him outside, away from the noise of the mill. The tall man lit a cigarette and said, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
    Lucas said, “Did you have any visitors, or see anybody out around your place the night the LaCourts were killed?”
    Dell shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t see anybody. I came home, watched TV, ate dinner, and then my beeper went off and I hauled my butt up there.”
    Carr snapped his fingers. “That’s right: you’re with the fire department.”
    Dell nodded. “Yeah. I figured you’d be around sooner or later, if you didn’t catch somebody. I mean, me being a single guy and all, and just down that road.”
    “We don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Carr said.
    “You already have,” Dell said, looking back at the mill.
    “So you saw nobody that night. From the time you left work until the time you went to the fire, you saw nobody,” Lucas said.
    “Nobody.”
    “Didn’t Father Bergen stop by?” Lucas asked.
    “No, no.” Dell looked mystified. “Why would he?”
    “Aren’t you one of his parishioners?”
    “Off and on, I guess,” Dell said, “But he doesn’t come around.”
    “So you’re not close to him?”
    “What’s this about, Sheriff?” Dell asked, looking at Carr.
    “I gotta ask you something here, Bob, and I swear it’ll go no further than the three of us,” Carr said. “I mean, I hate to ask . . .”
    “Ask it,” Dell said. He’d