"I'll do that. Actually, I could do it from here, but… politics." He was apologetic. "I gotta be out there a lot the next couple of days."
Lucas nodded. "Same way in the Cities."
"How about Phil? What do you think?"
"I don't know," Lucas said. Far away, somebody started a chain saw. They both turned to look up the street toward the sound, but there was nothing visible but garage and yard lights. The sound was an abrasive underline to the conversation. "We still don't have enough time. Not really. The bowl thing hardly clears him. But who knows? Maybe a big gust of wind scoured off the roof and put that snow on LaCourt in two minutes."
"Could be," Carr said.
"This Baptist thing-that's no big deal?" Lucas asked.
"It's a bigger deal than he was making it," Carr said. "What do you know about Pentecostals?"
"Nothing."
"Pentecostals believe in direct contact with God. The Catholic Church has taught that only the Church is a reliable interpreter of God's word. The Church doesn't trust the idea of direct access. Too many bad things have come of it in the past. But some Catholics-more and more all the time-believe you can have a valid experience."
"Yeah?" Lucas had been out of touch.
"Baptists rely on direct access. Some of the local Pentecostal Catholics, like Claudia, were talking about getting together with some of the Baptists to share the Spirit."
"That sounds pretty serious," Lucas said. The cold was beginning to filter through the edges of the parka, and he flexed his shoulders.
"But nobody would kill because of it. Not unless there's a nut that I don't know about," Carr said. "Phil was upset about Claudia talking to Home Baptist, but they were friends."
"How about Frank? Was he a friend of Bergen's?"
"Frank was Chippewa," said Carr. He stamped his feet, and looked back in the direction of the irritating chain saw. "He thought Christianity was amusing. But he and Phil were friendly enough."
"Okay."
"So what are you gonna do now?" Carr asked.
"Bag out in a motel. I brought clothes for a couple of days. We can get organized tomorrow morning. You can pick some people, and I'll get them started. We'll need four or five. We'll want to talk to the LaCourts' friends, kids at school, some people out at the Res. And I'll want to talk to these fire guys."
"Okay. See you in the morning, then," Carr said. The sheriff headed for his Suburban and muttered, mostly to himself, "Lord, what a mess."
"Hey, Sheriff?"
"Yeah?" Carr turned back.
"Pentecostal. I don't mean to sound impolite, but really-isn't that something like Holy Rollers?"
After a moment Carr, looking over his shoulder, nodded and said, "Something like that."
"How come you know so much about them?"
"I am one," Carr said.
CHAPTER 5
The morning broke bitterly cold. The clouds had cleared and a low-angle, razor-sharp sunshine cut through the red pines that sheltered the motel. Lucas, stiff from a too-short bed and a too-fat pillow, zipped his parka, pulled on his gloves and stepped outside. His face was soft and warm from shaving; the air was an icy slap.
The oldest part of Grant was built on a hill across the highway from the motel, small gray houses with backyard clotheslines awash in the snow. Wavering spires of gray woodsmoke curled up from two hundred tin chimneys, and the corrosive smell of burning oak bark shifted through town like a dirty tramp.
Lucas had grown up in Minneapolis, had learned to fish along the urban Mississippi, in the shadow of smokestacks and powerlines and six-lane bridges, with oil cans, worn-out tires and dead carp sharing space on the mud flats. When he began making serious money as an adult, he'd bought a cabin on a quiet lake in Wisconsin's North Woods. And started learning about small towns.
About the odd comforts and discomforts of knowing everyone; of talking to people who had roads, lakes, and entire townships named after their families. People who made their living in the woods, guiding tourists, growing Christmas trees, netting suckers and trapping crawdads for bait.
Not Minneapolis, but he liked it.
He yawned and walked down to his truck, squinting against the sun, the new snow crunching underfoot. A friendly, familiar weight pulled at his left side. The parka made a waist holster impractical, so he'd hung his.45 in a shoulder rig. The pistol simply felt right. It had been a while since he'd carried one. He touched the coat's zipper tag with his left hand, pulled it down an inch, then grinned to himself. Rehearsing. Not that he'd need it.
Ojibway County wasn't Minneapolis. If someone came after him in Ojibway County, he'd bring a deer rifle or a shotgun, not some bullshit.22 hideout piece. And if somebody came with a scoped.30-06, the.45 would be about as useful as a rock. Still, it felt good. He touched the zipper tag again with his left hand and mentally slipped the right hand into the coat.
The truck had been sitting in the brutal cold overnight, but the motel provided post outlets for oil-pan heaters. Lucas unplugged the extension cord from both the post and the truck, tossed the cord in the back seat, cranked up the engine and let it run while he went down to the motel office for a cup of free coffee.
"Cold," he said to the hotel owner.
"Any colder, I'd have to bring my brass monkey inside," the man said. He'd been honing the line all morning. "Have a sweet roll, too, we got a deal on them."
"Thanks."
Cold air was still pouring from the truck's heater vents when Lucas returned to it, balancing the coffee and sweet roll. He shut the fan off and headed into town.
There were only two real possibilities with the LaCourt killings, he thought. They were done by a stranger, a traveling killer, as part of a robbery, picked out because the house was isolated. Or they were done for a reason. The fire suggested a reason. A traveler would have hauled Frank LaCourt's body inside, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and left. He might be days away before the murders were uncovered. With the fire, he couldn't have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes away.
A local guy who set a fire meant either a psychotic arsonist-unlikely-or that something was being covered. Something that pointed at the killer. Fingerprints. Semen. Personal records. Or might the fire have been set to distract the investigation?
The gun he'd found with Claudia LaCourt, unfired, suggested that the LaCourts knew something was happening, but they hadn't called 9-1-1. The situation may have been somewhat ambiguous… Huh.
And the girl with the missing ear might have been interrogated. Another suggestion that something was going on.
The image of the ear in the Ziploc bag popped into his mind. Carr had bent and retched because he was human, as the LaCourt girl had once been. She'd been alive at this time yesterday, chatting with her friends on the telephone, watching television, trying on clothes. Making plans. Now she was a charred husk.
And to Lucas, she was an abstraction: a victim. Did that make him less than human? He half-smiled at the introspective thought; he tried to stay away from introspection. Bad for the health.
But in truth he didn't feel much for Lisa LaCourt. He'd seen too many dead children. Babies in garbage cans, killed by their parents; toddlers beaten and maimed; thirteen-year-olds who shot each other with a zealous enthusiasm scraped right off the TV screen. Not that their elders were much better. Wives killed with fists, husbands killed with hammers, homosexuals slashed to pieces in frenzies of sexual jealousy. After a while it all ran together.
On the other hand, he thought, if it were Sarah… His mouth straightened into a thin line. He couldn't put his daughter together with the images of violent death that he'd collected over the years. They simply would not fit. But Sarah was almost ready for school now, she'd be moving out into the bigger world.