Winter Prey

stiffened up; he knew what was coming.
    “We’ve heard some rumors in town that you might be gay, is what I guess it is.”
    Dell turned away from them, looked up into the forest. “That’s what it is, huh?” And after a minute, “What would that have to do with anything?”
    The sheriff stared at him for a minute, then looked at Lucas and said, “Sonofabitch.”
    “I never saw Father Phil,” Dell said. “Think whatever you want, I never saw him. I haven’t laid eyes on him for three weeks, and that sure doesn’t have anything to do with . . . my sex choices.”
    The sheriff wouldn’t look at him. Instead, he looked at Lucas, but said to Dell, “If you’re lying, you’ll go to jail. This is critical information.”
    “I’m not lying. I’d swear in court,” Dell said. “I’d swear in church, for that matter.”
    Now Carr looked at him, a level stare, and finally he said, “All right. Lucas, have you got anything more?”
    “Not right now.”
    “Thanks, Bob.”
    “This is gonna ruin me here,” Dell said quietly. “I’ll have to leave.”
    “Bob, you don’t . . .”
    “Yeah, I will,” Dell said. “But I hate to, because I liked it. A lot. Had friends, not gays, just friends. That’s gone.” He turned and walked away, down to the sawmill.

    “What do you think?” Carr asked as he watched him go.
    “It sounded like the truth,” Lucas said. “But I’ve been lied to before and believed it.”
    “Want to go back to Phil?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Not quite yet. We’ve got both of them denying it and nothing to show otherwise. Let’s see what my Church friend has to say. I should hear from her tonight or tomorrow.”
    “We don’t have time . . .” Carr started.
    “If this is the answer to the time conflict, then it’s not critical to the case,” Lucas said. “Bergen would be out of it.”
    “It’s a sad day,” Carr said. He looked back at the mill as Dell disappeared inside. “Bob wasn’t a bad guy.”
    “Well, he could hang on if he’s got real friends.”
    “Naw, he’s right,” Carr said. “With his job and all, he’s gonna have to leave, sooner or later.”

    Lucas met Climpt at the Mill, a restaurant-motel built on the banks of a frozen creek. The old mill pond, below the restaurant windows, had been finished with a Zamboni to make a skating rink. A dozen men sat on stools at a dining counter, and another dozen people were scattered in twos and threes at tables around the dining room. Climpt was standing by the windows with a mug of chicken broth, looking down at the mill pond, where a solitary old man in a Russian greatcoat turned circles on the ice.
    “Been out there since I got here,” Climpt said when Lucas stepped up beside him. “He’s eighty-five this year.”
    “Every day now, for an hour, don’t matter how cold it is,” a waitress said, coming up to Lucas’ elbow. The old man was turning eights, building off the circles, his hands clenched behind his back, his face turned up to the sky. He was smiling, not fiercely, or as a matter of focus, but with simple distracted pleasure, moving with a rhythm, a beat, that came from the past. The waitress watched with them for a moment, then said, “Are you going to eat, or . . .”
    “I could take a cup of soup,” Lucas said.
    The waitress, still looking down at the old man on the rink, said, “He’s trying to remember what it was like when he was a kid; that’s what he says, anyway. I think he’s getting ready to die.”
    She went away, and Climpt, voice pitched low, asked, “You got the warrant?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I brought a crowbar and a short sledge in case we have trouble getting in.”
    “Good enough,” Lucas said. The waitress came back with a mug of the chicken broth, and asked, “You’re that detective Shelly brought in, aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” Lucas said.
    “We’re praying for you,” she said.
    “That’s right,” said a man at the counter. He was heavyset, and a roll of fat on the back of his neck folded over the collar of his flannel shirt. Everybody in the place was looking at them. “You just find the sons of bitches,” he said. “After that, you can leave them to us.”

    Lucas and Climpt rode to the Schoeneckers’ house in Lucas’ truck, hoping that it’d be less noticeable than a sheriff’s van. “So what do you know about these people?” Lucas asked on the way over.
    “They’re private and quiet,” Climpt said. “Andy’s a