Free Winter Prey by John Sandford Page A

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 thelights, 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.
    His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He shookoff the thought and looked out the window.
    Grant’s Main Street was a three-block row of slightly shabby storefronts, elbow to elbow, like a town in the old west. The combinations that would have been strange in other places were typical for the North Woods: a Laundromat-bookstore-bar, an Indian souvenir store-computer outlet, a satellite dish-plumber. There were two bakeries, a furniture store, a scattering of insurance agents and real estate dealers, a couple of lawyers. The county courthouse was a low rambling building of fieldstone and steel at the end of Main. A cluster of sheriff’s trucks sat in a parking lot in back and Lucas wheeled in beside them. A Bronco with an unfamiliar EYE3 logo was parked in a visitor’s slot by the door.
    A deputy coming out nodded at him, said, “Mornin’,” and politely held the door. The sheriff’s outer office was behind a second door, decorated with curling DARE antidrug posters and the odors of aging nicotine and bad nerves. A reporter and a cameraman were slumped in green leatherette chairs scarred with cigarette burns and what looked like razor cuts. The reporter was working on her lipstick