Winter Prey

quite attractive. Are you okay, by the way?”
    “Elle . . .” Lucas said impatiently, “You sound too smug for this to be a gossip call.”
    “I’ll be gone for the day and I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I found a couple of Phil Bergen’s friends. I didn’t want to put it on an answering machine.”
    “What’d they say?”
    “They say he was awkward around women but that he was certainly oriented toward them. He was not interested in men.”
    “For sure?” Lucas thought, Shit.
    “Yes. One of them laughed when I asked the question. Bergen’s not a complete ’phobe, but he has a distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality. That attitude wasn’t a cover for a secret interest, if you were about to ask me that.”
    Lucas chewed on his lower lip, then said, “Okay. I appreciate your help.”
    “Lucas, these are people who would know,” Elle said. “One was Bergen’s college confessor. He wouldn’t have talked to me if homosexuality had ever been broached in confession, so it must not have been. And it would have been.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “Dammit. That makes things harder.”
    “Sorry,” she said. “Will you be down next week?”
    “If I get done up here.”
    “We’ll see you then. We’ll get a game. By the way, something serious was happening at the sheriff’s office. Nobody had any time to speak to me, something about a lost kid . . .”
    “Oh, my God,” Lucas said. “Elle, I’ll talk to you later.”
    He hung up, started to punch in the number for the sheriff’s office, saw the blinking light on the answering machine and poked it.
    Carr’s voice rasped out of the speaker: “Davenport, where’n the heck are you? We found the Mueller kid. He’s dead and it wasn’t an accident. I’m going to send somebody over to wake you up.”
    Just before the phone hung up, Carr called to someone in the background, “Get Gene over to Weather Karkinnen’s house.”
    There was a motor sound outside. Lucas used two fingers to separate the curtain over the kitchen sink and looked out. A sheriff’s truck was pulling into the driveway. Lucas hurried to Weather’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, and he opened it and stuck his head inside. She was curled under a down comforter, and looked small and innocent.
    “Weather, wake up,” he said.
    “Huh?” She rolled, half-asleep, and looked up at him.
    “They found the Mueller kid and he’s dead,” Lucas said. “I’m going.”
    She sat up, instantly awake, and threw off the bedcovers. She was wearing a long-sleeved white flannel nightgown. “I’m coming with you.”
    “You’ve got an operation.”
    “I’ll be okay, a few hours is fine.”
    “You really don’t . . .”
    “I’m the county coroner, Lucas,” she said, “I’ve got to go anyway.” Her hair stuck out from her head in a corona and her face was still morning-slack. She had a red pillow-wrinkle on one cheek. Her cotton nightgown hid all of her figure except her hips, which shaped and moved the soft fabric. She started toward the bath that opened off her bedroom, felt him watching her, said, “What?”
    “You look terrific.”
    “Jesus, I’m a wreck,” she said. She stepped back to him, stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, and Climpt began banging on the door.
    “That’s Gene,” Lucas said, stepping back toward the hall. “Five minutes.”
    “Ten,” she said. “I mean, it won’t make any difference to John Mueller.”
    She said it offhandedly, a surgeon and a coroner who dealt in death. But Lucas was stricken. She saw it in his face, a quick tightening, and said, “Oh, God, Lucas, I didn’t mean it.”
    “You’re right, though,” he said, his voice gone hard. “Ten minutes. It won’t make any difference to the kid.”
    Lucas let Climpt in, and while the deputy looked at the damage from the night’s shooting, went back to the bathroom for a quick cleanup.
    When he came back out, Weather was coming down the hall, dressed in insulated jeans and a wool shirt, carrying the bag she’d had at the LaCourts’. “Ready?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You were lucky last night,” Climpt said. He was standing in the living room, smoking a cigarette, looking at the damage from the firefight.
    “I don’t think there was anything lucky about it,” Weather said. “Look what he did.”
    “If’d been me out there, you’d a been dead. He should of waited until you were right at the door.”
    “I’ll tell him when I see him,” Lucas said.

    John