“Dick Westrom?”

“That’s me,” the counterman said.

“Lucas Davenport. I’m . . .”

“The detective, yeah.” Westrom stood up and leaned across the counter to shake hands. He was big, fifty pounds too heavy for his height, with blond hair fading to white and large watery cow eyes that looked away from Lucas. He tipped his head at another chair at the other end of the counter. “My girl’s out getting a bite, but there’s nobody around . . . we could talk here, if that’s all right.”

“That’s fine,” Lucas said. He took off his jacket, walked around the counter and sat down. “I need to know exactly what happened last night, the whole sequence.”

Westrom had found Frank LaCourt’s body, nearly tripping over it as he hauled hose off the truck.

“You didn’t see him right away, laying there?” Lucas asked.

“No. Most of the light was from the fire, it was flickering, you know, and Frank had a layer of snow on him,” Westrom said. He had a confidential manner of talking, out of the side of his mouth, as though he were telling secrets in a prison yard. “He was easy to see when you got right on top of him, but from a few feet away . . . hell, you couldn’t hardly see him at all.”

“That was the first you knew there were dead people?”

“Well, I thought there might be somebody inside, there was a smell, you know. That hit us as soon as we got there, and I think Duane said something like, ‘We got a dead one.’ ”

Westrom insisted that the priest had passed the fire station within seconds of the alarm.

“Look. I got nothing against Phil Bergen,” Westrom said, shooting sideways glances at Lucas. “Shelly Carr was trying to get some extra time out of me last night, so I know where he’s at. But I’ll tell you this: I was nukin’ a couple of ham sandwiches . . .”

“Yeah?” Lucas said, a neutral noise to keep Westrom rolling.

“And Duane said, ‘There goes Father Phil. Hell of a night to be out.’ Duane was standing by the front window and I saw Phil going by. Just then the buzzer went off on the microwave. I mean right then, when I was looking at the taillights. I says, ‘Well, he’s a big-shot priest with a big-shot Grand Cherokee, so he can go where he wants, when he wants.’ ”

“Sounds like you don’t care for him,” Lucas said. And Lucas didn’t care for Westrom, the eyes always slipping and sliding.

“Well, personally, I don’t. But that’s neither here nor there, and he can go about his business,” Westrom said. He pursed his lips in disapproval. His eyes touched Lucas’ face and then skipped away. “Anyway, I was taking the sandwiches out, they’re in these cellophane packets, you know, and I was just trying to grab them by the edges and not get burned. I said ‘Come and get it,’ and the phone rang. Duane picked it up and he said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and punched in the beeper code and said, ‘It’s LaCourts’, let’s go.’ I was still standing there with the sandwiches. Never got to open them. Phil hadn’t gone by more’n ten seconds before. Shelly was trying to get me to say it was a minute or two or three, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t more’n ten seconds and it might have been five.”

“Huh.” Lucas nodded.

“Check with Duane,” Westrom said. “He’ll tell you.”

“Is Duane a friend of yours?”

“Duane? Well, no. I like him okay. We just don’t, you know . . . relate.”

“Do you know of anything that Father Bergen might have against the LaCourts?”

“Nope. But he was close to Claudia,” Westrom said, with a distinct spin on the word close.

“How close?” Lucas asked, tilting his head.

Westrom’s eyes wandered around Lucas without settling. “Claudia had a reputation before she married Frank. She got around. She was a pretty thing, too, she had big . . .” Westrom cupped his hands at his chest and bounced them a couple of times. “And Phil . . . He is a man. Being a priest and all, it must be tough.”

“You think he and Claudia could have been fooling around?” Lucas asked.

Westrom edged forward in his chair and said confidentially, “I don’t know about that. We probably would have heard if she was. But it might go way back, something with Father Phil. Maybe Phil wanted to get it started again or something.” Westrom’s nose twitched.

“How many black Jeeps in Ojibway County?” Lucas asked. “There must be quite a few.”

“Bet there aren’t, not in the winter. Not Grand Cherokees—those are mostly summer-people cars. I can’t think of any besides Phil’s.” He looked at Lucas curiously: “Are you a Catholic?”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause you sound like you’re trying to find an excuse for Phil Bergen.”

Lucas’ notebook cover said, “Westrom, Helper.” He drew a line through Westrom, started the Explorer, headed out Highway 77 to the fire station.

In the daytime, with sunlight and the roads freshly plowed, the half-hour trip of the night before was cut to ten minutes. From the high points of the road, he could see forever across the low-lying land, with the contrasting black pine forests cut by the silvery glint of the frozen lakes.

The firehouse was a tan pole barn built on a concrete slab, nestled in a stand of pine just off the highway. One end of the building was dominated by three oversized garage doors for the fire trucks. The office was at the other end, with a row of small windows. Lucas parked in one of four plowed-out spaces and walked into the office, found it empty. Another door led out of the office into the back and Lucas stuck his head through.

“Hello?”

“Yeah?” A heavyset blond man sat at a worktable, a fishing reel disassembled in the light of a high-intensity lamp. A thin, almost transparent beard covered his acne-pitted face. His eyes were blue, careful. A small kitchen area was laid out along one wall behind him. At the other end of the room, a broken-down couch, two aging easy chairs and two wooden kitchen chairs faced a color television. Lockers lined a third wall, each locker stenciled with a man’s last name. Another door led back into the truck shed. A flight of stairs went up to a half-loft.

“I’m looking for Duane Helper,” Lucas said.

“That’s me. You must be Davenport,” Helper said. He had a heavy, almost Germanic voice, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing jeans with wide red suspenders over a blue work shirt. His hand was heavy, like his body, but crusted with calluses. “A whole caravan of TV people just came out of the lake road. The sheriff let them in to take pictures of the house.”

“Yeah, he was going to do that,” Lucas said.

“I heard Phil Bergen is the main suspect.” Helper said it bluntly, as a challenge.

Lucas shook his head. “We don’t have any suspects yet.”

“That’s not the way I heard it,” Helper said. The television was playing a game show and Helper picked up a remote control and punched it off.

“Then what you heard is wrong,” Lucas said sharply. Helper seemed to be looking for an edge. He was closed-faced, with small eyes; when he played his fingers through his beard, the fingers seemed too short for their thickness, like sausages. Lucas sat down across the round table from him and they started through the time sequence.

“I remember seeing the car, but I didn’t remember it was right when the alarm came in,” Helper said. “I thought maybe I’d walked up and looked out the window, saw the car, and then we’d talked about something else and I’d gone back to the window again and that’s when the alarm came in. That’s not the way Dick remembers it.”

“How sure are you? Either way?”

Helper rubbed his forehead. “Dick’s probably right. We talked about it and he was sure.”

“If you went to the window twice, how much time would there have been between the two trips?” Lucas asked.

“Well, I don’t know, it would have only been a minute or two, I suppose.”

“So even if you went twice, it wasn’t long.”