Winter Prey

it’ll hurt your mouth.”
    “Let me help,” he said.

    She had him haul a grill from the basement to the back deck, which she’d partially shoveled off. He stacked it with charcoal and started it. At the same time she put a pot of water on the stove. A bag of oversized, already-shelled shrimp went into a colander, which she set aside. Herbs and a carton of buttermilk became salad dressing; a lump of cheese joined a pile of mushrooms, celery, walnuts, watercress, and apples on the cutting board. She began slicing.
    “I won’t ask if you like mushrooms; you’ve got no choice,” she said. “Oh—get the wine going. It’s supposed to breathe for a while.”
    The outside temperature had been rising through the afternoon, and was now approaching zero. A breeze had sprung up and felt almost damp compared to the astringent drynessof the air at twenty below. Lucas put his boots back on and tended the charcoal; the cold felt good on his skin, taken only a few seconds at a time.

    The salad was tart and just right. The shrimp were killers. He ate a dozen of them, finally tearing himself away from the table long enough to put the steaks on.
    “I haven’t eaten like this since . . . I don’t know when. You must like cooking,” Lucas said as he stood inside the glass doors, looking out at the grill.
    “I don’t, really. I took a class at the high school called Five Good Things,” she confessed. “That’s what they taught me. How to make five good things. This is one of them.”
    “That’s a class I need,” Lucas said, slipping back outside with a plate. The steaks were perfect, she said. Red inside, a little char on the outside.
    “No Mueller kid?” she asked.
    He shook his head, and the feel of the evening suddenly warped. “I can’t think about it right now,” he said.
    “Fine,” she said hastily, picking up his mood. “It’s a terrible business anyway.”
    “Let me tell you a couple of things,” he said. “But it can’t go any further.”
    “It won’t.”
    He outlined what had happened. The priest and the time problem, the homosexual question and Harper, the Schoeneckers’ search.
    She listened solemnly and finally said, “I don’t know Phil Bergen very well, but he never struck me as gay. The few times I’ve talked to him, he seemed almost shy. He was reacting to me.”
    “Well, we don’t know for sure,” Lucas said. “But it would explain a lot.”
    “So what’s happening with the Schoeneckers?”
    “Carr’s meeting with the sexual therapist right now to see if they can match any calls with the Schoeneckers’ kids—the kids never actually came in, but they get alot of anonymous calls that never develop into anything. The calls are taped, so there might be something. And we’re checking credit cards, trying to find out where they are. They just took off, supposedly to Florida.”
    “If all this is true, the town’ll be a mess,” Weather said.
    “The town’ll handle it. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before,” Lucas said. “The big question is, how out-of-control is the killer? What is he doing?”
    “Hey, you’ll give me nightmares,” she said. “Eat, eat.”
    Lucas gave up halfway through his steak and staggered off to an overstuffed couch in front of the fireplace. Weather put an ounce of cognac in each of two glasses, pulled open the drapes that covered the sliding glass doors to the deck, and dropped into an E-Z Boy that sat at right angles to the couch. They both put their feet on the scarred coffee table that ran the length of the couch.
    “Blimp,” Lucas said.
    “Moi?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
    “No, me. Christ, if somebody dropped a dictionary on my gut, I’d blow up. Look at that.” Lucas pointed out the doors, where a crescent moon was just edging up over the trees across the lake.
    “I feel like . . .” she started, looking out at the moon.
    “Like what?”
    “Like I’m starting out on an adventure.”
    “I wish I was,” Lucas said. “All I do is lay around.”
    “Well, writing games . . . You said the money was pretty good.”
    “Yeah, like you came up here to make a lot of money.”
    “Not quite the same thing,” she said.
    “Maybe not,” Lucas said. “But I’d like to do something useful. That’s what I’m finding out. When I was a cop, I was doing something. Now I’m just making money.”
    “For now you’re a cop again,” she said.
    “For a couple of weeks.”
    “How about going back to