'You're gonna ruin my desk and I'll take it out of your paycheck,' Carr grumbled.
'Sorry,' Lacey said.
'Now what the heck was all that about? Down there with George?' Carr asked Lucas as he settled into his swivel chair.
'There's a rumor around-just a rumor-that Phil Bergen's gay. That why I asked him last night if he'd ever had any homosexual contacts.'
'That's the worst kind of bull,' Carr blurted. 'Where'd you hear that gay stuff?'
'Look: I keep trying to figure why he says he was at the LaCourts' when the LaCourts were dead,' Lucas said. 'Why he won't back off of it. And I got to thinking, what if he was somewhere else down the road, but can't say so?'
'Dammit,' Carr said. He spun and looked out his window through the half-open venetian blinds. 'You got a dirty mind, Davenport.'
'Are you thinking about anybody in particular?' Lacey asked. Lucas repeated the three names. Lacey stared at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, edged forward in his chair, and looked at the sheriff. 'Um, Shelly, listen. My wife knows Bob Dell. I once said something about he's a good-looking guy, just kidding her, and she said, 'Bob's not the sort that goes for women, I kinda think.' That's what she said.'
'She was saying he's gay?' Carr asked, turning, pulling his head back, staring owlishly at his deputy.
'Well, not exactly,' Lacey said. 'Just that he wasn't the type who was interested in women.'
'This is awful,' Carr said, looking back to Lucas.
'It would explain a hell of a lot,' Lucas said. 'If people down there know that this Bob Dell is gay… maybe Bergen was down there, got caught in a lie, and then couldn't back off of it. Look at his drinking. If he's innocent, where's all the pressure coming from?'
'From this office for one thing,' Carr said. He climbed out of his chair, took a meandering walk around the office, a knuckle pressed to his teeth. 'We've got to check on Dell,' he said finally.
'See if you can get his birthdate. Query the NCIC and Milwaukee, if that's where he's from,' Lucas said. 'And think about it: if this is Bergen's problem, then he's in the clear on the murder.'
'Yeah.' Carr spun and stared through his window, which looked out at a snowpile, a drifted-in fence and the backs of several houses on the next street. 'But he wouldn't be clear on the gay thing. And that'd kill him.'
They all thought about it for a minute, then Carr said, 'Gene Climpt will meet you out at the Mill restaurant at noon.' He passed Lucas a warrant.
Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his coat pocket. 'Nothing at all on John Mueller?'
Carr shook his head: 'Nothing. We're looking for a body now.'
Lucas spent the morning at the LaCourts'. An electric heater tried to keep the garage warm, but without insulation, and with the coming and going of the lab crew, couldn't keep up. Everybody inside wore their parkas, open, or sweaters; it was barely warm enough to dispense with gloves. A long makeshift table had been built out of two-by-fours and particle board, and was stacked with paper, electronic equipment, and a computer with a printer.
The crew had found a badly deformed slug in the kitchen wall. Judging from the base and the weight, allowing for some loss of jacketing material, the techs thought it was probably a.44 Magnum. Definitely not a.357. The gun Lucas found the night of the killings had not been fired.
'The girl was alive when her ear was cut off, and also some other parts of her face apparently were cut away while she was alive,' a tech said, reading from a fax. 'The autopsy's done, but there are a lot of tests still outstanding.'
The tech began droning through a list of other findings. Lucas listened, but every few seconds his mind would drift from the job to Weather. He'd always been attracted to smart women, but few of his affairs had gone anywhere. He had a daughter with a woman he'd never loved, though he'd liked her a lot. She was a reporter, and they'd been held together by a common addiction to pressure and movement. He'd loved another woman, or might have, who was consumed by her career as a cop. Weather fit the mold of the cop. She was serious, and tough, but seemed to have an intact sense of humor.
Can't fuck this up with Weather, he thought, and again, Can't fuck this thing up.
Crane came in, blowing steam, stamping his feet, walked behind Lucas to a coffee urn. 'He used the water heater to start the fire,' he said to the back of Lucas' head.
'What?'
Lucas turned in his chair. Crane, still wrapped in his parka, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. 'The hot water faucet was turned on over the laundry tub, and a lot of premix was splashed around the water heater. The heater's a mess, of course, but it looks like there might be traces of charred cotton coming out of the pilot port.'
'Say it in English,' Lucas suggested.
Crane grinned. 'He splashed his premix around the house, soaked a rag in it and laid it across the burner in the water heater. He had to be careful to keep it away from the pilot light. Then he turned on the hot water faucet, let the water dribble out. Not too fast. Then he left. In a few minutes, the water level drops in the tank, cold water refills it…'
'And the burner lights up.'
'Boom,' said Crane.
'Why would he do that?'
'Probably to make sure he could get out. We figure there were fifteen gallons of premix spread around the place. He might've been afraid to toss a match into it. But it does mean he must've thought about burning the place. That's not something that would occur to you while you were standing there… if it happened at all.'
'If it did happen, that means there'd be a delay between the time he left and the time the fire started, right?'
'Right.'
'How much?'
'Don't know,' Crane said. 'We don't know the condition of the water tank before he turned the water on-how hot the water already was. He didn't turn the faucet on very far, just a steady dribble. Could have been anything from four or five minutes to twenty minutes.'
More delay, Lucas thought. More time between the killings and the moment the Jeep passed the fire station. There was no hope for a minor error anymore, a time mixup. The priest could not have been at the LaCourts'.
'… through the surviving files…' Crane was talking about the search for the missing photograph.
'It wouldn't be in a file,' Lucas said abruptly. 'They would have stuffed it someplace where they could get at it-someplace both casual and safe. Where if somebody needed to see it, they could just pick it up and say, 'Here it is.' '
'Okay. But where?' Crane asked.
'Cookie jar-like that.'
'We've looked through most of the stuff in the kitchen and their bedroom, the stuff that survived. We haven't found anything like it.'
'Okay.'
'We'll take it apart inch-by-inch,' Crane said. 'But it's gonna take time.'
Lucas made two phone calls and took one. The first call went to a nun in the Twin Cities, an old friend, a college psychology professor. Elle Kruger: Sister Mary Joseph.
'Elle, this is Lucas. How're things?'
'Fine,' she said promptly. 'I got Winston's preproduction beta-copy of the new Grove of Trees. I ran it with Sister Louisa over the weekend, and we froze it up right away, some kind of stack-overflow error.'
'Dammit, they said they fixed that.' Grove of Trees was an intricate simulation of the battle of Gettysburg that he'd been working on for years. Elle Kruger was a games freak.
'Well, we were on Sister Louisa's Radio Shack compatible,' she said. 'There's something goofy about that machine, because I ran the same disk on my Compaq and it worked fine.'
'All right, I'll talk to them. We ought to be compatible with everything, though,' Lucas said. 'Listen, I've got another problem and it involves the Church. I don't know if you can help me, but there are people being
