Winter Prey

“He was a good priest. He was the best.”
    “Yeah, he was,” Carr said, patting the attorney on the shoulder.
    Lacey was walking through the halls, hands in his pockets, peering in through open doors. When he saw Carr, he said, “There you are. Two FBI men just arrived. A couple more may be coming from Washington—a serial-killer team.”
    “Oh, boy.” Carr hitched up his pants. “Where are they?”
    “Down in your office.”
    Carr looked at Lucas. “Maybe they’ll do some good.”
    “And maybe I’ll get elected homecoming queen,” Lucas said as they started down the hall.
    Lacey looked at him. “Did you know your new girlfriend was the homecoming queen?”
    “ What? ” There was no longer any point in being obtuse about his relationship with Weather.
    “That’s right,” Lacey said enthusiastically. “Around homecoming time, people still talk about the dress she wore on the float. It was like one of those real warm days and she had this silver dress. Oh, boy. They called her . . .” He suddenly snapped his mouth shut and flushed.
    “Called her what?”
    Lacey looked at Carr and Carr shook his head. “You can’t get your foot any deeper in your mouth than it already is, Henry. You might as well tell him,” he said.
    “Um—Miss Teen Tits of Ojibway County,” Lacey said feebly.
    “Glad you told me—gives me an edge on her,” Lucas said.
    “I hope you got an edge on the feebs,” Lacey said gloomily. “About two minutes with them, I felt like I had big clods of horseshit on my shoes and straw sticking outa my ears.”
    “Dat’s da feebs,” Lucas said. “That’s what they do best.”

    They talked for an hour with the two advance agents, Lansley and Tolsen. The two would have been hard to tell apart except that Lansley was the color of well-sanded birch plywood while Tolsen was polished ebony. They both wore gray suits with regimental neckties, long, dark wintercoats with leather gloves, and rubbers on their wingtips.
    “ . . . think there’s some prospect that our man may be a traveler . . .”
    Lucas, sitting behind Lansley, who was talking, looked past him at Carr and shook his head. No chance it was a traveler: none.
    And after a while: “ . . . name of the game is cooperation, and we’ll do everything we can . . .”
    Lucas broke in: “What we really need is computer support.”
    Tolsen was quick and interested. “Of what nature?”
    “There are only about seven thousand permanent residents in this county. We can eliminate all women, all children, anyone with dark hair. Our man is obviously psychotic and may have a history of violence. If there’s some way your computers could interface with the state driver’s license bureau, process Ojibway County drivers and crosscheck the blond-male population with the NCIC records . . .”
    Lansley and Tolsen took notes, Lansley using a hand-sized microcomputer. They came up with some ideas of their own and left in a hurry.
    “What the heck was all that about?” Carr asked, scratching his head.
    “They’ve got something to do,” Lucas said. “It might even help if we need help three weeks from now.”
    A deputy knocked, stuck his head in the door. “Harper’s out. Put up his gas station with Interstate Bond.”
    “That really frosts my butt,” Carr said.
    “Go home and get some sleep. Or check into a motel. You look so bad I’m seriously worried,” Lucas said.
    “That’s a thought—the motel,” Carr said distractedly. “What’re you going to do?”
    “Go someplace quiet and think,” Lucas said.

    Weather got home a few minutes after six, came in with a deputy, and found Lucas staring into a guttering fire. “This is Marge, my bodyguard,” she said to Lucas. The deputywaved and said, “You got it from here,” and left. Weather shed her coat and boots, came over to sit beside him. He put an arm around her shoulder. “You ought to throw another log on,” she said.
    “Yeah . . . goddammit, there are fewer people in this county than there are in some buildings in Minneapolis. We oughta be able to pick him out. There can’t be that many candidates,” Lucas said.
    “Still think Phil Bergen was murdered?”
    “Yeah. For sure. I don’t know why he was killed, though. Did he know something? Was he supposed to distract us? What?”
    “Schoeneckers’?”
    “Not a goddamn thing,” Lucas said.
    “Could they be dead?”
    “We’ve got to start considering the possibility,” Lucas