“Yeah?”

“Kennett’s people . . . we were just trying to make it something else.”

“Okay.”

“Were we wrong?”

He thought about it for a while. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

Fell went away and Lucas stared at his beer bottle, making wet O’s on the table. After the shooting in the basement, after the dictated statements and interrogations, after the press conference, he’d gone back to the team office. Most of the office staff had gone, but he’d found a computer adept, and said that he needed to look up some information on a couple of cops: Jeese and Clemson.

The computer operator had put him at a vacant terminal, showed him how to call up the files. He’d done it, read through them quickly, then punched in Fell’s name. When he’d gotten the file, he’d scanned through to the bottom, found the next of kin: Roy Fell, at an address in Brooklyn. He’d punched in Roy Fell. A file had come up. Retired, it said. Then: Retrieve Retired File? (Y/N).

Lucas had pushed the Y key. A photoscan was a simple matter of selecting the right option on a short menu, and Fell’s father’s face had come up. Heavy face, gray hair, gray mustache, a smile that looked almost painful. Six feet, two inches tall. Born 1930. Bekker had had him pegged almost exactly.

“Thick,” Lucas had said aloud.

The computer operator said, “What?”

“Nothing,” said Lucas, and he’d shut the terminal down.

Sitting at the airport now, drawing circles with the bottom of his beer bottle, Lucas thought, You can’t walk away from family. . . .

Lily arrived ten minutes later. Like Fell, she stopped by the security queue, looking for the bar. She saw him as she came in, her face ashen, tired, but controlled.

“You talked to O’Dell,” she said as she sat down.

“Yeah.”

“He fixed the whole thing.”

“Yup.”

“When did you know?” she asked.

“In Charleston. I suspected before that—everybody was too close together, everything was too convenient. But I didn’t know for sure that he wasn’t Robin Hood.”

“Do you still think Fell was an alarm?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Not positive. But I think she was simply set up by Kennett. I mean, she took those Robin Hoods at Bekker’s place. She didn’t have to: her piece was right in my ear.”

“The word is going around that Robin Hood did get Bekker.”

“What’d you expect? He got shot to death.”

Lily sat for a moment, staring at the fake grain on the tabletop. “When did you know about Dick?” she asked.

“O’Dell tried to set him up—that thing about a white-haired guy killing the politician. I didn’t know it was a setup, so even then, I was thinking about him.”

“But when . . . ?”

“When we went to Petty’s apartment and that Logan woman said whoever came to Petty’s apartment seemed to stop before he got to the elevator, and after he got off the elevator, and to take a long time getting to the door . . . .”

“Sure,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Dick.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t figure it. I assumed he couldn’t drive—that’s what everybody assumed—and saw a driver dropping him off at Midtown South. And if he couldn’t drive, it wasn’t him. If he’d been driven, by Copland or one of his other buddies, he wouldn’t have had to walk up all those steps himself. He could have sent the driver in for the stuff. So that pushed me off him for a while. Until the day on the river and you told me that he could drive. That he sometimes drove the four-by-four, and it pissed you off . . .”

“So,” she said. “I not only betrayed Petty, I betrayed Dick.”

“Ah, come on, Lily, stop sniveling. You were doing the best you could in a goddamned rat’s nest,” Lucas said.

“And everybody winds up dead,” she said.

“Hey.” There wasn’t much else to say. Lucas looked at his Rolex. “I gotta go. They’re probably boarding the plane now,” he said.

At the end of the security queue, Lucas faced her, hands in his pockets, and said, “If this was a movie, there’d be a big hot kiss right here and everything’d be all right.”

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted. “But there’s never anything after a movie,” she said. “It ends with a hot kiss and you never see the going-back-to-work part.”

“The getting-to-be-important part . . .”

“Yeah. And to tell you the truth, if there was going to be a big hot kiss, I thought Fell’d be getting it. I thought you’d be going out to the Islands with her.”

“Nah. She’s New York, I’m not. Besides . . .”

“What?”

“There really aren’t any Islands, are there?”

She looked away from him, thinking of Petty and Kennett. “No,” she said after a minute, “I guess not.”

There was another moment, and she stuck out her hand.

“Give me a fuckin’ break, Rothenburg,” Lucas said, and leaned into her and kissed her on the lips, almost, but not quite, chastely. He turned and started through the security check. “If you get another Bekker, give me a whistle. You know . . . ?”

“Yeah, yeah. Jesus,” she said, not quite believing him. A tiny smile crinkled the corner of her mouth. “I do know how to whistle.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WINTER PREY

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1993 by John Sandford

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

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ISBN: 1-101-14625-7

A BERKLEY BOOK®

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Berkley and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: May, 2002

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER

The wind whistled down the frozen run of Shasta Creek, between the blacker-than-black walls of pine. The thin naked swamp alders and slight new birches bent before it. Needle-point ice crystals rode it, like sandpaper grit, carving arabesque whorls in the drifting snow.

The Iceman followed the creek down to the lake, navigating as much by feel, and by time, as by sight. At six minutes on the luminous dial of his dive watch, he began to look for the dead pine. Twenty seconds later, its weather-bleached trunk appeared in the snowmobile headlights, hung there for a moment, then slipped away like a hitchhiking ghost.