Winter Prey

sheriff’s cold-weather gear as Lacey, but black instead of khaki, with the sheriff’s gold star instead of the silver deputy’s badge. A frozen black hose snaked past his feet down to the lake, where the firefighters had augered through three feet of ice to get at the lake water. Now they were using atorch to free the hose, and the blue flame flickered at the edge of Carr’s vision.
    Carr was stunned. He’d done what he could, and then he stopped functioning: he simply stood in the driveway and watched the firemen work. And he froze. His cold-weather gear wasn’t enough for this weather. His legs were stiff and his feet numb, but he couldn’t go into the garage, couldn’t tear himself away. He stood like a dark snowman, slightly fat, unmoving, hands away from his side, staring up at the house.
    “Piece a . . .” A fireman slipped and fell, cursing. Carr had to turn his whole body to look at him. The fireman was smeared with ash and half-covered with ice. When they’d tried to spray the house, the wind had whipped the water back on them as sleet. Some of the firemen looked like small mobile icebergs, the powerful lights glistening off them as they worked across the yard. This one was on his back, looking up at Carr, his mustache white with frost from his own breath, face red from the wind and exertion. Carr moved to help him, hand out, but the fireman waved him away. “I’d just pull you down,” he said. He clambered awkwardly to his feet, struggling with a frozen firehose. He was trying to load it into a pickup truck and it fought back like an anaconda on speed. “Piece a shit . . .”
    Carr turned back to the house. A rubber-encased fireman was helping the doctor climb through the shattered front door. Carr watched as they began to pick their way toward the back bedroom. The little girl was there, so burnt that God only knew what had happened to her. What had happened to her parents was clear enough. Claudia’s face had been partly protected by a fireproof curtain that had fallen over her. A fat bullet hole stared out of her forehead like a blank third eye. And Frank . . .
    “Heard anything from Madison?” Carr called to a deputy in a Jeep. The deputy had the engine turning over, heater on high, window down just far enough to communicate.
    “Nope. It’s still snowin’ down there. I guess they’re waitin’ it out.”
    “Waitin’ it out? Waitin’ it out?” Sheldon Carr was suddenly shouting, eyes wild. “Call the fuckers back and tell them to get their asses up here. They’ve heard of four-by-fours, haven’t they? Call them back.”
    “Right now,” the deputy said, shocked. He’d never heard Sheldon Carr say anything stronger than gol-darn.
    Carr turned away, his jaw working, the cold forgotten. Waiting it out? Henry Lacey was walking toward him, carefully flatfooted on the treacherous slab of ice that had run down into the yard. He was trailed by a man in a parka. Lacey came up, nodded, said, “This is Davenport.”
    Carr nodded: “Th-th-thanks f-f-for coming.” He suddenly couldn’t get the words out.
    Lacey took his elbow. “Have you been out here all the time?”
    Carr nodded numbly and Lacey tugged him toward the garage, said, “My God, Shelly, you’ll kill yourself.”
    “I’m okay,” Carr ground out. He pulled his arm free, turned to Lucas. “When I heard you were up here from the Cities, I figured you’d know more about this kind of thing than I do. Thought it was worth a try. Hope you can help us.”
    “Henry tells me it’s a mess,” Lucas said.
    He grinned as he said it, a slightly nasty smile, Carr thought. Davenport had a chipped tooth, never capped, the kind of thing you might have gotten in a fight, and a scar bisected one eyebrow. “It’s a . . .” Carr shook his head, groping for a word. “It’s a gol-darn tragedy, ” he said finally.
    Lucas glanced at him: he’d never heard a cop call a crime a tragedy. He’d never heard a cop say gol-darn. He couldn’t see much of Carr’s face, but the sheriff was a large man with an ample belly. In the black snowmobile suit, he looked like the Michelin tire man in mourning.
    “Where’s LES?” Lucas asked. The Division of Law Enforcement Services did mobile crime-scene work on major crimes.
    “They’re having trouble getting out of Madison,” Carr said grimly. He waved at the sky. “The storm . . .”
    “Don’t they have four-by-fours? It’s all highway.”
    “We’re finding that