Winter Prey

out right now,” Carr snapped. He apologized: “Sorry, that’s a tender subject. They shoulda been halfway here by now.” He looked back at the house, as if helpless to resist it: “Lord help us.”
    “Three dead?” Lucas asked.
    “Three dead,” Carr said. “Shot, chopped with some kind of ax or something, and the other one . . . shoot, there’s no way to tell. Just a kid.”
    “Still in the house?”
    “Come on,” Carr said grimly. He suddenly began to shake uncontrollably, then, with an effort, relaxed. “We got tarps on ’em. And there’s something else . . . heck, let’s look at the bodies, then we’ll get to that.”
    “Shelly, are you okay?” Lacey asked again.
    “Yeah, yeah . . . I’ll show Davenport—Lucas?—I’ll show Lucas around, then I’ll get inside. Gosh, I can’t believe this cold.”

    Frank LaCourt lay faceup on a sidewalk that led from the house to the garage. Carr had one of the deputies lift the plastic tarp that covered the body and Lucas squatted beside it.
    “Jesus,” he said. He looked up at Carr, who’d turned away. “What happened to his face?”
    “Dog, maybe,” Carr said, looking sideways down at the mutilated face. “Coyotes . . . I don’t know.”
    “Could have been a wolf,” Lacey said from behind him. “We’ve had some reports, I think there are a few moving down.”
    “Messed him up,” Lucas said.
    Carr looked out at the forest that pressed around the house: “It’s the winter,” he said. “Everything’s starving out there. We’re feedin’ some deer, but most of them are gonna die. Shoot, most of them are already dead. There’re coyotes hanging around the dumpsters in town, at the pizza place.”
    Lucas pulled off a glove, fumbled a hand-flash from hisparka pocket and shone it on what was left of the man’s face. LaCourt was an Indian, maybe forty-five. His hair was stiff with frozen blood. An animal had torn the flesh off much of the left side of his face. The left eye was gone and the nose was chewed away.
    “He got it from the side, half-split his head in two, right through the hood,” Carr said. Lucas nodded, touched the hood with his gloved finger, looking at the cut fabric. “The doc said it was some kind of knife or cleaver,” Carr said.
    Lucas stood up. “Henry said snowshoes . . .”
    “Right there,” Lacey said, pointing.
    Lucas turned the flashlight into the shadows along the shed. Broad indentations were still visible in the snow. The indentations were half drifted-in.
    “Where do they go?” Lucas asked, staring into the dark trees.
    “They come up from the lake, through the woods, and they go back down,” Carr said, pointing at an angle through the jumble of forest. “There’s a snowmobile trail down there, machines coming and going all the time. Frank had a couple sleds himself, so it could have been him that made the tracks. We don’t know.”
    “The tracks come right up to where he was chopped,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah—but we don’t know if he walked down to the lake on snowshoes to look at something, and then came back up and was killed, or if the killer came in and went out.”
    “If they were his snowshoes, where are they now?”
    “There’s a set of shoes in the mudroom, but they were so messed up by the firehoses that we don’t know if they’d just been used or what . . . no way to tell,” Lacey said. “They’re the right kind, though. Bearpaws. No tails.”
    “Okay.”
    “But we still got a problem,” Carr said, looking reluctantly down at the body. “Look at the snow on him. The firemen threw the tarps over them as soon as they got here, but it looks to me like there’s maybe a half-inch of snow on him.”
    “So what?”
    Carr stared down at the body for a moment, then dropped his voice. “Listen, I’m freezing and there’s some strange stuff to talk about. A problem. So do you want to see the other bodies now? Woman was shot in the forehead, the girl’s burned. Or we could just go talk.”
    “A quick look,” Lucas said.
    “Come on, then,” Carr said.
    Lacey broke away. “I gotta check that commo gear, Shelly.”
    Lucas and Carr trudged across a layer of discolored ice to the house, squeezed past the front door. Inside, sheetrock walls and ceiling panels had buckled and folded, falling across burned furniture and carpet. Dishes, pots and pans, glassware littered the floor, along with a set of ceramic collector’s dolls. Picture frames were everywhere.