Winter Prey

have made a Marlboro commercial, Lucas thought. “Everybody feels sorry for me. Sort of wears on you after a while, thirty years,” Climpt said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Anyway, what I was gonna say . . . I’m thinking I might kill this asshole for what he did to that LaCourt girl and now the Mueller kid. If we get him, and we get him in a place where we can do it, just sort of turn your head.” His voice was mild, careful.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said, looking out the window.
    “You don’t have to do it—just don’t stop me,” Climpt said.
    “Won’t bring your daughter back, Gene.”
    “I know that,” Climpt rasped. “Jesus Christ, Davenport.”
    “Sorry.”
    After a long silence, listening to the snow tires rumble over the rough roadway, Climpt said, “I just can’t deal with people that kill kids. Can’t even read about it in the newspaper or listen to it on TV. Killing a kid is the worst thing you can do. The absolute fuckin’ worst.”

    The drive to Milwaukee was long and complicated, a web of country roads and two-lane highways into Green Bay, and then the quick trip south along the lake on I-43. Domeierhad given him a sequence of exits, and he got the right off-ramp the first time. The doughnut place was halfway down a flat-roofed shopping center that appeared to be in permanent recession. Lucas parked and walked inside.
    The Milwaukee cop was a squat, red-faced man wearing a long wool coat and a longshoreman’s watch cap. He sat at the counter, dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee, charming an equally squat waitress who talked with a grin past a lipstick-smeared cigarette. When Lucas walked in she snatched the cigarette from her mouth and dropped her hand below counter level. Domeier looked over his shoulder, squinted, and said, “You gotta be Davenport.”
    “Yeah. You’re telepathic?”
    “You look like you been colder’n a well-digger’s ass,” Domeier said. “And I hear it’s been colder’n a well-digger’s ass up there.”
    “Got that right,” Lucas said. They shook hands and Lucas scanned the menu above the counter. “Gimme two vanilla, one with coconut and one with peanuts, and a large coffee black,” he said, dropping onto a stool next to Domeier. The coffee shop made him feel like a metropolitan cop again.
    The waitress went off to get the coffee, the cigarette back in her mouth. “It’s not so cold down here?” Lucas asked Domeier, picking up the conversation.
    “Oh, it’s cold, six or eight below, but nothing like what you got,” Domeier said.
    They talked while Lucas ate the doughnuts, feeling each other out. Lucas talked about Minneapolis, pension, and bennies.
    “I’d like to go somewhere warmer if I could figure out some way to transfer pension and bennies,” Domeier said. “You know, someplace out in the Southwest, not too hot, not too cold. Dry. Someplace that needs a sex guy and’d give me three weeks off the first year.”
    “A move sets you back,” Lucas said. “You don’t know the town, you don’t know the cops or the assholes. A place isn’t the same if you haven’t been on patrol.”
    “I’d hate to go back in uniform,” Domeier said with an exaggerated shudder. “Hated that shit, giving out speeding tickets, breaking up fights.”
    “And you got a great job right here,” the waitress said. “What would you do if you didn’t have Polaroid Peter?”
    “Polaroid who?” asked Lucas.
    “Peter,” Domeier said, dropping his face into his hands. “A guy who’s trying to kill me.”
    The waitress cackled and Domeier said, “He’s like a flasher. He drops trow in the privacy of his own home, takes a Polaroid picture of his dick. Pretty average dick, I don’t know what he’s bragging about. Then he drops the picture around a high school or in a mall or someplace where there are bunches of teenage girls. A girl picks it up and zam—she’s flashed. We think he’s probably around somewhere, watching. Gettin’ off on it.”
    Lucas had started laughing and nearly choked on a piece of doughnut. Domeier absently whacked him on the back. “What happens when a guy picks up the picture?” Lucas asked.
    “Guys don’t,” Domeier said morosely. “Or if they do, they don’t tell anybody. We’ve got two dozen calls about these things, and every time the picture’s been picked up by a teenage girl. They see it laying there on the sidewalk, and they just gotta look. And if we got twenty-five calls, this guy must’ve struck a