Winter Prey by John Sandford Page B

“Well you shoulda been here back in . . .” But nobody had seen anything like it, ever.
    And after the blizzard departed, the cold rang down.
    On the night of the third, the thermometer on his cabin deck fell to minus twenty-nine. The following day, the temperature struggled up to minus twenty: schools were closed everywhere, the radio warned against anything but critical travel. On this night, the temperature in Ojibway County would plunge to minus thirty-two.
    Almost nothing moved. A rogue logging truck, a despondent snowplow, a few snowmobile freaks. Cop cars. The outdoors was dangerous; so cold as to be weird.
    He’d been napping on the couch in front of the fireplace when he first heard the pounding. He’d sat up, instantly alert, afraid that it might be the furnace. But the pounding stopped. He frowned, wondered if he might have imagined it. Rolled to his feet, walked to the basement stairs, listened. Nothing. Stepped to the kitchen window. He saw thetruck in the driveway and a second later the front doorbell rang. Ah. Whoever it was had been pounding on the garage door.
    He went to the door, curious. The temperature was well into the minus twenties. He looked through the window inset in the door. A cop, wearing a Russian hat with the ear flaps down.
    “Yeah?” Lucas didn’t recognize the uniform parka.
    “Man, we gotta big problem over in Ojibway County. The sheriff sent me over to see if you could come back and take a look at it. At least three people murdered.”
    “C’mon in. How’d you know about me?”
    Lacey stepped inside, looked around. Books, a few wildlife watercolors on the walls, a television and stereo, pile of embers in the fireplace, the smell of clean-burning pine. “Sheriff read that story in the Milwaukee Journal ’bout you in New York, and about living up here. He called around down to Minneapolis and they said you were up here, so he called the Sawyer County sheriff and found out where you live. And here I am.”
    “Bad night,” Lucas said.
    “You don’t know the half of it,” said Lacey. “So cold.”

    Carr’s taillights blinked, then came up, and he slowed and then stopped, turned on his blinkers. Lucas closed up behind, stopped. Carr was on the highway, walking around to the front of his truck.
    Lucas opened his door and stepped out: “You okay?”
    “Got a tree down,” Carr yelled back.
    Lucas let the engine run, shut the door, hustled around Carr’s truck. The cold had split a limb off a maple tree and it had fallen across the roadside ditch and halfway across the right traffic lane. Carr grabbed the thickest part of it, gave it a tug, moved it a foot. Lucas joined him, and together they dragged it off the road.
    “Cold,” Carr said, and they hurried back to their trucks.
    Weather, Lucas thought. Her image popped up in his mind as he started after Carr again. Now that might bean efficient way to warm up, he thought. He’d been off women for a while, and was beginning to feel the loss.

    Grant appeared as a collection of orange sodium-vapor streetlights, followed by a Pines Motel sign, then a Hardee’s and a Unocal station, an LP gas company and a video-rental store with a yellow-light marquee. The sheriff turned right at the only traffic light, led him through the three-block-long business district, took a left at a half-buried stop sign and headed up a low hill. On the left was a patch of pines that might have been a park.
    A white clapboard church stood at the top of the hill, surrounded by a grove of red pine, with a small cemetery in back. The sheriff drove past the church and stopped in the street in front of a small brick house with lighted windows.
    Lucas caught a sign in his headlights: RECTORY. Below that, in cursive letters, R EV . P HILIP B ERGEN . He pulled in behind Carr, killed the engine, and stepped down from the truck. The air was so cold and dry that he felt as though his skin were being sandpapered. When he breathed, he could feel ice crystals