In the daytime, with sunlight and the roads freshly plowed, the half-hour trip of the night before was cut to ten minutes. From the high points of the road, he could see forever across the low-lying land, with the contrasting black pine forests cut by the silvery glint of the frozen lakes.
The firehouse was a tan pole barn built on a concrete slab, nestled in a stand of pine just off the highway. One end of the building was dominated by three oversized garage doors for the fire trucks. The office was at the other end, with a row of small windows. Lucas parked in one of four plowed-out spaces and walked into the office, found it empty. Another door led out of the office into the back and Lucas stuck his head through.
'Hello?'
'Yeah?' A heavyset blond man sat at a worktable, a fishing reel disassembled in the light of a high-intensity lamp. A thin, almost transparent beard covered his acne-pitted face. His eyes were blue, careful. A small kitchen area was laid out along one wall behind him. At the other end of the room, a broken-down couch, two aging easy chairs and two wooden kitchen chairs faced a color television. Lockers lined a third wall, each locker stenciled with a man's last name. Another door led back into the truck shed. A flight of stairs went up to a half-loft.
'I'm looking for Duane Helper,' Lucas said.
'That's me. You must be Davenport,' Helper said. He had a heavy, almost Germanic voice, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing jeans with wide red suspenders over a blue work shirt. His hand was heavy, like his body, but crusted with calluses. 'A whole caravan of TV people just came out of the lake road. The sheriff let them in to take pictures of the house.'
'Yeah, he was going to do that,' Lucas said.
'I heard Phil Bergen is the main suspect.' Helper said it bluntly, as a challenge.
Lucas shook his head. 'We don't have any suspects yet.'
'That's not the way I heard it,' Helper said. The television was playing a game show and Helper picked up a remote control and punched it off.
'Then what you heard is wrong,' Lucas said sharply. Helper seemed to be looking for an edge. He was closed- faced, with small eyes; when he played his fingers through his beard, the fingers seemed too short for their thickness, like sausages. Lucas sat down across the round table from him and they started through the time sequence.
'I remember seeing the car, but I didn't remember it was right when the alarm came in,' Helper said. 'I thought maybe I'd walked up and looked out the window, saw the car, and then we'd talked about something else and I'd gone back to the window again and that's when the alarm came in. That's not the way Dick remembers it.'
'How sure are you? Either way?'
Helper rubbed his forehead. 'Dick's probably right. We talked about it and he was sure.'
'If you went to the window twice, how much time would there have been between the two trips?' Lucas asked.
'Well, I don't know, it would have only been a minute or two, I suppose.'
'So even if you went twice, it wasn't long.'
'No, I guess not,' Helper said.
'Did you actually see Bergen's Jeep come out of the lake road?'
'No, but that's the impression I got. He was moving slow when he went past, even with the snow, and he was accelerating. Like he'd just turned the corner onto 77.'
'Okay.' Lucas stood up, walked once around the room. Looked at the stairs.
'What's up there?'
'There's a bunk room right at the top. I live in the back. I'm the only professional firefighter here.'
'You're on duty twenty-four hours a day?'
'I have time off during the day and early evenings, when we can get volunteers to pick it up,' Helper said. 'But yeah, I'm here most of the time.'
'Huh.' Lucas took a turn around the room, thumbnail pressed against his upper teeth, thinking. The time problem was becoming difficult. He looked at Helper. 'What about Father Bergen? Do you know him?'
'Not really. I don't believe I've spoken six words to him. He drinks, though. He's been busted for drunk driving, but…' He trailed off and looked away.
'But what?' Helper was holding something back, but he wanted Lucas to know it.
'Sheriff Carr's on the county fire board,' Helper said.
'Yeah? So what?' Lucas made his response a little short, a little tough.
'He's thick with Bergen. I know you're from the outside, but if I talk, and if it gets back to Shelly, he could hurt me.' Helper let the statement lie there, waiting.
Lucas thought it over. Helper might be trying to build an alliance or drive a wedge between himself and Carr. But for what? Most likely he was worried for exactly the reason he claimed: his job. Lucas shook his head. 'It won't get back to him if it doesn't need to. Even if it needs to, I can keep the source to myself. If it seems reasonable.'
Helper looked at him for a moment, judging him, then looked out the window toward the road. 'Well. First off, about that drunk driving. Shelly fixed it. Fixed it a couple of times and maybe more.'
He glanced at Lucas. There was more to come, Lucas thought. Helper mentioned the ticket-fixing as a test. 'What else?' he pressed.
Helper let it go. 'There're rumors that Father Bergen's… that if you're a careful dad, you wouldn't want your boy singing in his choir, so to speak.'
'He's gay?' Gay would be interesting. Small-town gays felt all kinds of pressure, especially if they were in the closet. And a priest…
'That's what I've heard,' Helper said. He added, carefully, 'It's just gossip. I never gave it much thought. In fact, I don't think it's true. But I don't know. With this kind of thing, these killings, I figured you'd probably want to hear everything.'
'Sure.' Lucas made a note.
They talked for another five minutes, then three patrol deputies stomped in from duty at the LaCourt house. They were cold and went straight to the coffee. Helper got up to start another pot.
'Anything happening down at the house?' Lucas asked.
'Not much. Guys from Madison are crawling around the place,' said one of the deputies. His face was red as a raw steak.
'Is the sheriff down there?'
'He went back to the office, he was gonna talk to some of the TV people.'
'All right.'
Lucas looked back at Helper, fussing with the coffee. Small-town fireman. He heard things, sitting around with twenty or thirty different firemen every week, nothing much to do.
'Thanks,' he said. He nodded at Helper and headed for the door, the phone ringing as he went out. The wind bit at him again, and he hunched against it, hurried around the truck. He was fumbling for his keys when Helper stuck his head out the door and called after him: 'It's a deputy looking for you.'
Lucas went back inside and picked up the phone. 'Yeah?'
'This is Rusty, at the school. You better get your ass up here.'
Grant Junior High was a red-brick rectangle with blue-spruce accents spotted around the lawn. A man in a snowmobile suit worked on the flat roof, pushing snow off. The harsh scraping sounds carried forever on the cold air. Lucas parked in front, zipped his parka, pulled on his ski gloves. Down the street, the bank time-and- temperature sign said – 21. The sun was rolling across the southern sky, as pale as an old silver dime.
Bob Jones was waiting outside the principal's office when Lucas walked in. Jones was a round-faced man, balding, with rosy cheeks, a short black villain's mustache and professional-principal's placating smile. He wore a blue suit with a stiff-collared white shirt, and his necktie was patriotically striped with red, white, and blue diagonals.
'Glad to see you,' he said as they shook hands. 'I've heard about you. Heck of a record. Come on, I'll take you down to the conference room. The boy's name is John Mueller.' The school had wide halls painted an institutional beige, with tan lockers spotted between cork bulletin boards. The air smelled of sweat socks, paper, and pencil- sharpener shavings.
