Winter Prey

hall.
    “Shelly, there’s this Pentecostal thing,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to be insulting, but there are a lot of fruitcakes involved in religious controversies. You see it all the time in the Cities. You get enough fruitcakes in one place, working on each other, and one of them might turn out to be a killer. You’ve got to think about that.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Carr said. “You believe Phil was murdered?”
    Lucas nodded. “It’s a possibility. No signs of any kind of a struggle.”
    “Phil would have fought. And I guess the thing that sticks in my mind most of all is the business about the pine. We were out playing golf one time . . .”
    “I know,” Lucas said. “He kicked the ball out.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “You told me,” Lucas said, scratching his head. “I don’t know when, but you did.”
    “Well, nobody else knew,” Carr said.
    They stood looking at the body for a moment, then Weather came up and said, “That’s the knife.”
    “No question?”
    “Not in my mind.”
    “It’s all over town that he did it,” Carr said mournfully. All three of them simultaneously turned away from thebody and started down the hall toward the living room. They were passing Bergen’s office, and Lucas glanced at the green IBM typewriter pulled out on a typing tray. A Zeos computer sat on a table to the other side, with a printer to its left.
    “Wait a minute.” He looked at the computer, then at the bookcase beside it. Instructional manuals for Windows, WordPerfect, MS-DOS, the Biblica RSV Bible-commentary and reference software, a CompuServe guide, and other miscellaneous computer books were stacked on the shelves, along with the boxes that the software came in. The computer had two floppy-disk drives. The 5.25 drive was empty, but a blue disk waited in the 3.5-inch drive. Lucas leaned into the hallway and yelled for Crane: “Hey, are you guys gonna dust the computer keys?”
    “Um, if you want,” Crane called back. “We haven’t found any computer stuff, though.”
    “Okay. I’m going to bring it up,” he said. To Carr: “I use WordPerfect.”
    With Carr and Weather looking over his shoulder, Lucas punched up the computer, typed WP to activate WordPerfect, then the F5 key to get a listing of files. He specified the B drive. The light went on over the occupied disk drive and a listing flashed onto the screen.
    “Look at this,” Lucas said. He tapped a line that said:
    Serl-9   ·   5,213   01-08   12:38a
    “What is it?”
    “He was on the computer last night—this morning—at 12:38 A . M . That’s when he closed the file. I wonder why he didn’t compose his note on it? It’s a lot easier and neater than a typewriter.” He punched directional keys to select the last file and brought it up.
    “It’s a sermon . . . it looks like . . . Sermon 1-9. That would have been for tomorrow morning if that’s the way he listed them.” He reopened the index of files and ran his finger down the screen. “Yeah, see? Here’s last Sunday, Ser1-2. Did you go to Mass?”
    “Sure.”
    “Let’s put it on Look.” He called the second file up. “Is that Sunday’s sermon?”
    Carr read for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that’s it. Right to the word, as far as I can tell.”
    “All right, so that’s how he does it.” Lucas tapped the Exit key twice to get back to the first file and began reading.
    “Look at this,” he said, pointing at the screen. “He’s denying it. He’s denying he did it, at 12:38 A . M .”
    Carr read through the draft sermon, moving his lips, blood draining from his face. “Was he murdered? Or did this just trigger something, coming face-to-face with his own lies?”
    “I’d say he was killed,” Lucas said. Weather’s hand was tight on his shoulder. “We have to go on that assumption. If we’re wrong, no harm done. If we’re right . . . our man’s still out there.”

CHAPTER

19
    The Iceman lay with his head on the pillow, the yellow-haired girl sprawled restlessly beside him. They were watching the tinny miniature television run through 1940s cartoons, Hekyll and Jekyll, Mighty Mouse.
    Bergen was dead. The deputies the Iceman had talked to—a half-dozen of them, including the Madison people—had swallowed the note. They wanted to believe that the troubles were over, the case was solved. And just that morning he’d finally gotten something definitive about the magazine photo. The thing was worthless. The