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 a torch 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 they'd tried to spray the house, the wind had whipped the water back on them as sleet. Some of the firemen looked like small mobile icebergs, the powerful lights glistening off them as they worked across the yard. This one was on his back, looking up at Carr, his mustache white with frost from his own breath, face red from the wind and exertion. Carr moved to help him, hand out, but the fireman waved him away. "I'd just pull you down," he said. He clambered awkwardly to his feet, struggling with a frozen firehose. He was trying to load it into a pickup truck and it fought back like an anaconda on speed. "Piece a shit…"
Carr turned back to the house. A rubber-encased fireman was helping the doctor climb through the shattered front door. Carr watched as they began to pick their way toward the back bedroom. The little girl was there, so burnt that God only knew what had happened to her. What had happened to her parents was clear enough. Claudia's face had been partly protected by a fireproof curtain that had fallen over her. A fat bullet hole stared out of her forehead like a blank third eye. And Frank…
"Heard anything from Madison?" Carr called to a deputy in a Jeep. The deputy had the engine turning over, heater on high, window down just far enough to communicate.
"Nope. It's still snowin' down there. I guess they're waitin' it out."
"Waitin' it out? Waitin' it out?" Sheldon Carr was suddenly shouting, eyes wild. "Call the fuckers back and tell them to get their asses up here. They've heard of four-by-fours, haven't they? Call them back."
"Right now," the deputy said, shocked. He'd never heard Sheldon Carr say anything stronger than gol-darn.
Carr turned away, his jaw working, the cold forgotten. Waiting it out? Henry Lacey was walking toward him, carefully flatfooted on the treacherous slab of ice that had run down into the yard. He was trailed by a man in a parka. Lacey came up, nodded, said, "This is Davenport."
Carr nodded: "Th-th-thanks f-f-for coming." He suddenly couldn't get the words out.
Lacey took his elbow. "Have you been out here all the time?"
Carr nodded numbly and Lacey tugged him toward the garage, said, "My God, Shelly, you'll kill yourself."
"I'm okay," Carr ground out. He pulled his arm free, turned to Lucas. "When I heard you were up here from the Cities, I figured you'd know more about this kind of thing than I do. Thought it was worth a try. Hope you can help us."
"Henry tells me it's a mess," Lucas said.
He grinned as he said it, a slightly nasty smile, Carr thought. Davenport had a chipped tooth, never capped, the kind of thing you might have gotten in a fight, and a scar bisected one eyebrow. "It's a…" Carr shook his head, groping for a word. "It's a gol-darn tragedy," he said finally.
Lucas glanced at him: he'd never heard a cop call a crime a tragedy. He'd never heard a cop say gol-darn. He couldn't see much of Carr's face, but the sheriff was a large man with an ample belly. In the black snowmobile suit, he looked like the Michelin tire man in mourning.
"Where's LES?" Lucas asked. The Division of Law Enforcement Services did mobile crime-scene work on major crimes.
"They're having trouble getting out of Madison," Carr said grimly. He waved at the sky. "The storm…"
"Don't they have four-by-fours? It's all highway."
"We're finding that out right now," Carr snapped. He apologized: "Sorry, that's a tender subject. They shoulda been halfway here by now." He looked back at the house, as if helpless to resist it: "Lord help us."
"Three dead?" Lucas asked.
"Three dead," Carr said. "Shot, chopped with some kind of ax or something, and the other one… shoot, there's no way to tell. Just a kid."
"Still in the house?"
"Come on," Carr said grimly. He suddenly began to shake uncontrollably, then, with an effort, relaxed. "We got tarps on 'em. And there's something else… heck, let's look at the bodies, then we'll get to that."
"Shelly, are you okay?" Lacey asked again.
"Yeah, yeah… I'll show Davenport-Lucas?-I'll show Lucas around, then I'll get inside. Gosh, I can't believe this cold."
Frank LaCourt lay faceup on a sidewalk that led from the house to the garage. Carr had one of the deputies lift the plastic tarp that covered the body and Lucas squatted beside it.
"Jesus," he said. He looked up at Carr, who'd turned away. "What happened to his face?"
"Dog, maybe," Carr said, looking sideways down at the mutilated face. "Coyotes… I don't know."
"Could have been a wolf," Lacey said from behind him. "We've had some reports, I think there are a few moving down."
"Messed him up," Lucas said.
Carr looked out at the forest that pressed around the house: "It's the winter," he said. "Everything's starving out there. We're feedin' some deer, but most of them are gonna die. Shoot, most of them are already dead. There're coyotes hanging around the dumpsters in town, at the pizza place."
Lucas pulled off a glove, fumbled a hand-flash from his parka pocket and shone it on what was left of the man's face. LaCourt was an Indian, maybe forty-five. His hair was stiff with frozen blood. An animal had torn the flesh off much of the left side of his face. The left eye was gone and the nose was chewed away.