The key worked on the door into the garage. The door between the garage and the house was unlocked. Lucas led the way in, found the inside of the Schoeneckers' house almost as cold as the outside. They walked through quickly, checking each room.
'Gone,' Lucas said from the master bedroom. The closets and dressers were half-empty. A stack of wire hangers lay on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. 'Packed up.'
'And not coming back in a hurry, either,' Climpt said from down the hall. 'Look at this.'
Climpt was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet. Lucas looked. The bowl was empty, but stained purple with antifreeze. 'They winterized.'
'Yup. They'll be gone a while.'
'So let's go through it,' Lucas said.
They began with the parents' bedroom and found nothing at all. The second bedroom was shared by the Schoeneckers' daughters. Again, they came up empty. They worked through the bathroom, the living room, the dining room, took apart the kitchen, spent half an hour in the basement.
'Not a goddamned thing,' Climpt growled, scratching his head. They were back in the living room. 'I never seen a house so empty of anything.'
'Not a single videotape,' Lucas said. He walked back down the hall to the master bedroom, checked the television there. A tape player was built into the base. In the living room, a bigger television was hooked into a separate tape player. 'They've got two videotape players and no tapes.'
'Could rent 'em,' Climpt said.
'Even then…'
'Did those boxes in the basement… just a minute,' Climpt said suddenly, and disappeared down the basement steps.
Lucas wandered through the still, cold house, then went to the garage, opened the door, and looked in. Climpt came back up the stairs, carrying two boxes, and Lucas said, 'They've got two cars. The garage is tracked on both sides.'
'Yeah, I believe they do.'
'How often do families go on vacations and take two cars when there are only four of them?' Lucas asked.
'Look at this,' Climpt said. He held the boxes out to Lucas. One was the carton for a video camera. The other was a carton for a Polaroid Spectra camera. 'A video camera and no videotapes. And last night Henry Lacey said that Polaroid was taken with a Spectra camera.'
'Jesus.' Lucas ran his hand through his hair. 'Okay. Tell you what. You go through that file cabinet with the bills, get all the credit card numbers you can find. Especially gas card numbers, but get all of them. I'm going back to the girls' room. I can't believe teenagers wouldn't leave something.'
He began going through the room inch by inch, pulling the drawers from all the dressers, looking under them, checking bottles and boxes, paging through piles of homework papers dating back to elementary school. He felt inside shoes, lifted the mattress.
Climpt came in and said, 'I got all the numbers they had, I think. They had Sunoco and Amoco gas cards. They also bought quite a bit of gas from Russ Harper, which is pretty strange when you consider his station is fifteen miles from here.'
'Keep those slips,' Lucas said as he dropped the mattress back in place. 'And check and see if there's any garbage outside.'
'All right.'
A half-dozen books sat upright on top of the bureau, pressed together by malachite bookends shaped like chess knights. Lucas looked at the books, turned them, held them page-down and flipped through them. An aluminum-foil gum wrapper fell from the Holy Bible. Lucas picked it up, unfolded it, found a phone number and the name Betty written in orange ink.
He put the book back, walked into the living room as Climpt came in from outside. 'No garbage. They cleaned the place out, is what they did.'
'Okay.' Lucas picked up the phone, dialed the number on the gum wrapper.
The call was answered on the first ring. 'This is the Ojibway Action Line. Can I help you?' The voice was female and professionally cheerful.
'What's the Ojibway Action Line?' Lucas asked.
'Who is this?' The voice lost a touch of its good cheer.
'A county sheriff's deputy,' Lucas said.
'You're a deputy and don't know what the Ojibway Action Line is?'
'I'm new.'
'What's your name?'
'Lucas Davenport. Gene Climpt is here if you want to talk to him.'
'Oh, no, that's okay, I heard about you. Besides, it's not a secret-we're the crisis line for county human services. We're right in the front of the phone book.'
'All right. Can I speak to Betty?'
There was a moment of silence, then the woman said, 'There's not really a Betty here, Mr. Davenport. That's a code name for our sexual abuse counselor.'
CHAPTER 12
Lucas parked in Weather's driveway, climbed out of the truck, and trudged to the porch, carrying a bottle of wine. He was reaching for the bell when Weather pulled the door open.
'Fuck dinner,' Lucas said, stepping inside. 'Let's catch a plane to Australia. Lay on the beach for a couple of weeks.'
'I'd be embarrassed. I'm so winter-white I'm transparent,' Weather said. She took the bottle. 'Come in.'
She'd taken some trouble, he thought. A handmade rag rug stretched across the entry; that hadn't been there the night before. A fire crackled in the Volkswagen-sized fireplace. And there was a hint of Chanel in the air. 'Pretty impressive, huh? With the fire and everything?'
'I like it,' he said simply. He didn't smile. He'd been told that his smile sometimes frightened people.
She seemed both embarrassed and pleased. 'Leave your coat in the closet and your boots by the door. I just started cooking. Steak and shrimp. We'll both need heart bypasses if we eat it all.'
Lucas kicked off his boots and wandered through the living room in his stocking feet. He hadn't seen it in the dark, the night before, and in the morning he'd rushed out, thinking about Bergen…
'How'd the operation go?' he called to her in the kitchen.
'Fine. I had to pin some leg bones back together. Nasty, but not too complicated. This woman went up on her roof to push the snow off, and she fell off instead. Right onto the driveway. She hobbled around for almost four days before she came in, the damn fool. She wouldn't believe the bone was broken until we showed her the X rays.'
'Huh.' Silver picture frames stood on a couch table, with hand-colored photos of a man and woman, still young. Sailboats figured in half the photographs. Her parents. A small ebony grand piano sat in an alcove, top propped up, sheet music for Erroll Garner's 'Dreamy' on the music stand.
He went back into the kitchen. Weather was wearing a dress, the first he'd seen her in, simple, soft- shouldered; she had a long, slender neck with a scattering of freckles along her spine. She said, smiling, 'I'm going to make stuff so good it'll hurt your mouth.'
'Let me help,' he said.
She had him haul a grill from the basement to the back deck, which she'd partially shoveled off. He stacked it with charcoal and started it. At the same time she put a pot of water on the stove. A bag of oversized, already- shelled shrimp went into a colander, which she set aside. Herbs and a carton of buttermilk became salad dressing; a lump of cheese joined a pile of mushrooms, celery, walnuts, watercress, and apples on the cutting board. She began slicing.
