'I'll be gone for the day and I wanted to talk to you,' she said. 'I found a couple of Phil Bergen's friends. I didn't want to put it on an answering machine.'
'What'd they say?'
'They say he was awkward around women but that he was certainly oriented toward them. He was not interested in men.'
'For sure?' Lucas thought, Shit.
'Yes. One of them laughed when I asked the question. Bergen's not a complete 'phobe, but he has a distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality. That attitude wasn't a cover for a secret interest, if you were about to ask me that.'
Lucas chewed on his lower lip, then said, 'Okay. I appreciate your help.'
'Lucas, these are people who would know,' Elle said. 'One was Bergen's college confessor. He wouldn't have talked to me if homosexuality had ever been broached in confession, so it must not have been. And it would have been.'
'All right,' Lucas said. 'Dammit. That makes things harder.'
'Sorry,' she said. 'Will you be down next week?'
'If I get done up here.'
'We'll see you then. We'll get a game. By the way, something serious was happening at the sheriff's office. Nobody had any time to speak to me, something about a lost kid…'
'Oh, my God,' Lucas said. 'Elle, I'll talk to you later.'
He hung up, started to punch in the number for the sheriff's office, saw the blinking light on the answering machine and poked it.
Carr's voice rasped out of the speaker: 'Davenport, where'n the heck are you? We found the Mueller kid. He's dead and it wasn't an accident. I'm going to send somebody over to wake you up.'
Just before the phone hung up, Carr called to someone in the background, 'Get Gene over to Weather Karkinnen's house.'
There was a motor sound outside. Lucas used two fingers to separate the curtain over the kitchen sink and looked out. A sheriff's truck was pulling into the driveway. Lucas hurried to Weather's bedroom. The door was unlocked, and he opened it and stuck his head inside. She was curled under a down comforter, and looked small and innocent.
'Weather, wake up,' he said.
'Huh?' She rolled, half-asleep, and looked up at him.
'They found the Mueller kid and he's dead,' Lucas said. 'I'm going.'
She sat up, instantly awake, and threw off the bedcovers. She was wearing a long-sleeved white flannel nightgown. 'I'm coming with you.'
'You've got an operation.'
'I'll be okay, a few hours is fine.'
'You really don't…'
'I'm the county coroner, Lucas,' she said, 'I've got to go anyway.' Her hair stuck out from her head in a corona and her face was still morning-slack. She had a red pillow-wrinkle on one cheek. Her cotton nightgown hid all of her figure except her hips, which shaped and moved the soft fabric. She started toward the bath that opened off her bedroom, felt him watching her, said, 'What?'
'You look terrific.'
'Jesus, I'm a wreck,' she said. She stepped back to him, stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, and Climpt began banging on the door.
'That's Gene,' Lucas said, stepping back toward the hall. 'Five minutes.'
'Ten,' she said. 'I mean, it won't make any difference to John Mueller.'
She said it offhandedly, a surgeon and a coroner who dealt in death. But Lucas was stricken. She saw it in his face, a quick tightening, and said, 'Oh, God, Lucas, I didn't mean it.'
'You're right, though,' he said, his voice gone hard. 'Ten minutes. It won't make any difference to the kid.'
Lucas let Climpt in, and while the deputy looked at the damage from the night's shooting, went back to the bathroom for a quick cleanup.
When he came back out, Weather was coming down the hall, dressed in insulated jeans and a wool shirt, carrying the bag she'd had at the LaCourts'. 'Ready?'
'Yeah.'
'You were lucky last night,' Climpt said. He was standing in the living room, smoking a cigarette, looking at the damage from the firefight.
'I don't think there was anything lucky about it,' Weather said. 'Look what he did.'
'If'd been me out there, you'd a been dead. He should of waited until you were right at the door.'
'I'll tell him when I see him,' Lucas said.
John Mueller's body had been dumped in an abandoned sandpit off a blacktopped government road in the Chequamegon National Forest, fifteen miles from his home. A half-dozen sheriff's vehicles were jammed into the turnoff, and the snow had been beaten down by people walking into the pit.
'Shelly's freaked out,' Climpt said, talking past a new cigarette. 'Something happened at Mass today.'
'They found Bergen?'
'Yeah, I guess. He was there.'
They could see the sheriff standing alone, like a fat dark scarecrow, just inside the sandpit. 'This is his worst nightmare,' Weather said.
Climpt nodded. 'All he wanted was a nice easy cruise up to retirement, taking care of people. Which he's pretty good at.'
They parked and started up toward a cluster of cops at the edge of the sandpit. A civilian in an orange parka stood off to the side, next to a snowmobile, talking to another deputy. Carr saw them coming and walked down the freshly trampled path to meet them.
'How are you?' Carr asked Weather. 'Get any sleep?'
'Very little,' Weather said. 'Is the kid…'
'Right there. We haven't called his folks yet.' Carr looked at Lucas. 'How long will it take to catch this guy?'
'That's not a reasonable question,' Weather snapped.
But Lucas looked up the rise to the cluster of cops around the body. 'Three or four days,' he said after a few seconds. 'He's out of control. Unless we're missing some big connection on this kid, there wasn't any reason to kill him. He took a hell of a risk for no gain.'
'Will he kill more people?' Carr asked. His voice was a compound of anger, tension, and sorrow, as though he'd worked out the answer.
'He could.' Lucas nodded, looking straight into Carr's dry, exhausted eyes. 'Yeah, I'd say he could. You better find the Schoeneckers. If they're involved, and they're someplace where he could get at them…'
'We got bulletins out all over the south, from Florida to Arizona. We're interviewing their friends.'
Weather was moving on toward the body, and Lucas trailed after her. Carr hooked his elbow. 'You gotta figure a way to make something happen, Lucas.'
'I know,' Lucas said.
John Mueller's body had been found by the snowmobiler in the orange parka. He'd seen two coyotes working over the spot and assumed they'd killed a deer. He'd stopped to see if it was a buck and still had antlers. He chased off the dogs, saw the boy's coat, and called the sheriff's department. The first deputy at the scene had shot a coyote and covered the boy with a plastic tarp.
'Bad,' Weather said when she lifted the tarp. Around them, the talking stopped as everybody looked at them crouched over the body. 'Is that him?'
Lucas studied the child's half-eaten face, then nodded. 'Yeah, that's him. I'm almost sure. Jesus Christ.'
He walked away, unable to handle it. He hadn't had that problem since his third week on patrol: cops looked at dead people, end of story.
'You all right?' Climpt asked.
