Winter Prey Read Free Page B

startling blue eyes set deep under a strong brow. His hair was dark, but touched with gray, and a bit long; a sheath of it fell over his forehead, and he pushed it out of his eyes as he stood looking at the house.
    Quivering, almost—like an expensive pointer.
    His face should have been square, and normally was, when he was ten pounds heavier. A square face fit with the rest of him, with his heavy shoulders and hands. But now he was gaunt, the skin stretched around his cheekbones: the face of a boxer in hard training. Every day for a month he’d put on either skis or snowshoes, and had run up through the hills around his North Woods cabin. In the afternoon he worked in the woodlot, splitting oak with a mail and wedge.
    Lucas stepped toward the burnt house as though hypnotized. He remembered another house, in Minneapolis, just south of the loop, a frozen night in February. A gang leader lived in the downstairs apartment; a rival group of ’bangers decided to take him out. The top floor was occupied by a woman—Shirleen something—who ran an illegal overnight child-care center for neighborhood mothers. There were six children sleeping upstairs when the Molotov cocktails came through the windows downstairs. Shirleen dropped all six screaming kids out the window, breaking legs on two of them, ribs on two more, and an arm on a neighbor who was trying to stop their fall. Thewoman was too big to jump herself and burned to death trying to get down the single stairway. Same deal: the house like a skull, the firehose ice, the smell of roast pork . . . .
    Lucas unconsciously shook his head and smiled: he’d had good lines into the crack community and gave homicide the ’bangers’ names. They were locked in Stillwater, and would be for another eight years. In two days he’d done a number on them they still didn’t believe.
    Now this. He stepped back to the open door of his truck, leaned inside, took a black cashmere watch cap off the passenger seat and pulled it over his head. He wore a blue parka over jeans and a cable-knit sweater, pac boots, and expedition-weight polypropylene long underwear. A deputy walked around the Chevy Suburban that had pulled into the yard just ahead of Davenport’s Ford. Henry Lacey wore the standard tan sheriff’s department parka and insulated pants.
    “Shelly’s over here,” Lacey said, jerking a thumb toward the house. “C’mon—I’ll introduce you . . . what’re you looking at, the house? What’s funny?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Thought you were smiling,” Lacey said, looking vaguely disturbed.
    “Nah . . . just cold,” Lucas said, groping for an excuse. Goddamn, he loved this.
    “Well . . . Shelly . . .”
    “Yeah.” Lucas followed, pulling on his thick ski gloves, still focused on the house. The place might have been snatched from a frozen suburb of hell. He felt at home.

    Sheldon Carr stood on a slab of ice in the driveway, behind the volunteer tanker and pumper trucks. He wore the same sheriff’s cold-weather gear as Lacey, but black instead of khaki, with the sheriff’s gold star instead of the silver deputy’s badge. A frozen black hose snaked past his feet down to the lake, where the firefighters had augered through three feet of ice to get at the lake water. Now they were using atorch to free the hose, and the blue flame flickered at the edge of Carr’s vision.
    Carr was stunned. He’d done what he could, and then he stopped functioning: he simply stood in the driveway and watched the firemen work. And he froze. His cold-weather gear wasn’t enough for this weather. His legs were stiff and his feet numb, but he couldn’t go into the garage, couldn’t tear himself away. He stood like a dark snowman, slightly fat, unmoving, hands away from his side, staring up at the house.
    “Piece a . . .” A fireman slipped and fell, cursing. Carr had to turn his whole body to look at him. The fireman was smeared with ash and half-covered with ice. When