“How about the people who reported the fire?” Lucas asked, looking across the room at Carr. Carr was still holding the bottle of Jim Beam as though he were presenting evidence to a jury.

“They’re okay,” Carr said. “They’re out of it. They saw the fire, made the call. They’re too old and have too many physical problems to be involved.”

The three of them looked at each other, waiting for another question, but there were none. The time simply didn’t work. Lucas searched Bergen’s face. He found nothing but the waxy opacity.

“All right,” he said finally. “Maybe there was another Jeep. Maybe Duane saw Father Bergen’s Jeep earlier, going down the lake road, and it stuck in his mind and when he saw a car go by, he thought it was yours.”

“He didn’t see a Jeep earlier,” Carr said, shaking his head. “I asked him that—if he’d seen Phil’s Jeep go down the lake road.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, still studying the priest. “Maybe . . . I don’t know.”

Carr looked at Bergen. “I’m dumping the bottle, Phil. And I’m calling Joe.”

Bergen’s head went down. “Okay.”

“Who’s Joe?” Lucas asked.

“His AA sponsor,” Carr said. “We’ve had this problem before.”

Bergen looked up at Carr, his voice rasping: “Shelly, I don’t know if this guy believes me,” he said, tipping his head at Lucas. “But I’ll tell you: I’d swear on the Holy Eucharist that I had nothing to do with the LaCourts.”

“Yeah,” Carr said. He reached out and Bergen took his hand, and Carr pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let’s call Joe, get him over here.”

Joe was a dark man, with a drooping black mustache and heavy eyebrows. He wore an old green Korean War-style olive-drab billed hat with earflaps. He glanced at Lucas, nodded at Carr and said, “How bad?”

“Drank at least a fifth,” Carr said. “He’s gone.”

“Goddammit.” Joe looked up at the house, then back to Carr. “He’d gone more’n a year. It’s the rumors coming out of your office, Shelly.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll try to stop it, but I don’t know . . .”

“Better more’n try. Phil’s got the thirst as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen.” Joe stepped toward the door, turned, about to say something else, when Bergen pulled the door open behind him.

“Shelly!” he called. He was too loud. “Telephone—it’s your office. They say it’s an emergency.”

Carr looked at Lucas and said, “Maybe something broke.”

He hurried inside and Joe took Bergen by the shoulder and said, “Phil, we can handle this.”

“Joe, I . . .” Bergen seemed overcome, looked glassily at Lucas, still on the sidewalk, and pulled Joe inside, closing the door.

Lucas waited, hands in his pockets, the warmth he’d accumulated in the house slowly dissipating. Bergen was a smart guy, and no stranger to manipulation. But he didn’t have the sociopath edge, the just-below-the-surface glassiness of the real thing.

Thirty seconds after he’d gone inside, Carr burst out.

“Come on,” he said shortly, striding past Lucas toward the trucks.

“What happened?”

“That kid you talked to, the one that told you about the picture?” Carr was talking over his shoulder.

“John Mueller.” Jug-ears, off-brand shoes, embarrassed.

“He’s missing. Can’t be found.”

“What?” Lucas grabbed Carr’s arm. “Fuckin’ tell me.”

“His father was working late at his shop, out on the highway,” Carr said. They were standing in the street. “He’d left the kid at home watching television. When his mother got home, and the kid wasn’t there, she thought he was out at the shop. It wasn’t until his parents got together that they realized he was gone. A neighbor kid’s got a Nintendo and John’s been going down there after school a couple nights a week, and sometimes stays for dinner. They called the neighbors but there wasn’t anybody home, and they thought maybe they’d all gone down to the Arby’s. So they drove around until they found the neighbors, but they hadn’t seen him either.”

“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said, looking past Carr at nothing. “I might of put a finger on him.”

“Don’t even think that,” Carr said, his voice grim.

They headed for the Mueller house, riding together in the sheriff’s truck, crimson flashers working on top.

“You were hard on him,” Carr said abruptly. “On Phil.”

“You’ve got four murder victims and now this,” Lucas said. “What do you expect, violin music?”

“I don’t know what I expected,” Carr said.

The sheriff was pushing the truck, moving fast. Lucas caught the bank sign: minus twenty-eight.

He said it aloud: “Twenty-eight below.”

“Yeah.” The wind had picked up again, and was blowing thin streamers of snow off rooftops and drifts. The sheriff hunched over the steering wheel. “If the kid’s been outside, he’s dead. He doesn’t need anybody to kill him.”

A moment passed in silence. Lucas couldn’t think about John Mueller: when he thought about him, he could feel a darkness creeping over his mind. Maybe the kid was at another friend’s house, maybe . . .

“How long has Bergen had the drinking problem?” he asked.

“Since college. He told me he went to his first AA meeting before he was legal to drink,” Carr said. His heavy face was a faint unhealthy green in the dashboard lights.

“How bad? DTs? Memory loss? Blackouts?”

“Like that,” Carr said.

“But he’s been dry? Lately?”

“I think so. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, if a guy keeps his head down. He can drink at night, hold it together during the day. I used to do a little drinking myself.”

“Lot of cops do.”

Carr looked across the seat at him: “You too?”

“No, no. I’ve abused a few things, but not booze. I’ve always had a taste for uppers.”

“Cocaine?”

Lucas laughed, a dry rattle: the kid’s face kept popping up. Small kid, sweet-faced. “I can hear the beads of sweat popping out of your forehead, Shelly. No. I’m afraid of that shit. Might be too good, if you know what I mean.”

“Any alcoholic’d know what you mean,” Carr said.

“I’ve done a little speed from time to time,” Lucas continued, looking out at the dark featureless forest that lined the road. “Not lately. Speed and alcohol, they’re for different personalities.”

“Either one of them’ll kill you,” Carr said.

They passed a video rental shop with three people standing outside; they all turned to watch the sheriff’s truck go by. Lucas said, “People do weird things when they’re drunk. And they forget things. If he was drunk, the time . . .”

“He says he wasn’t,” Carr said.

“Would he lie about it?”

“I don’t think so,” Carr said. “Under other circumstances, he might—drinkers lie to themselves when they’re starting again. But with this, all these dead people, I don’t think he’d lie. Like I told you, Phil Bergen’s a moral man. That’s why he drinks in the first place.”

There were twenty people at the Muellers’, mostly neighbors, with three deputies. A half-dozen men on snowmobiles were organizing a patrol of ditches and trails within two miles of the house.

Carr plunged into it while Lucas drifted around the edges, helpless. He didn’t know anything about missing persons searches, not out here in the woods, and Carr seemed to know a lot about it.

A few moments after Carr and Lucas arrived, the boy’s father hurried out into the yard, pulling on a snowmobile suit. A woman stood in the door in a white baker’s dress, hands clasped to her face. The image stuck with Lucas: it was an effect of pure terror.

Mueller said something to Carr and they talked for a moment, then Carr shook his head. Lucas heard him say “Three of them up north . . . .”

The father had been looking around the yard, as though his son might walk out of the woods. Instead of the boy, he saw Lucas and stepped toward him. “You sonofabitch,” he screamed, eyes rolling. A deputy caught him, jostled him, stayed between them. Faces in the yard turned toward Lucas. “Where’s my boy, where’s my boy?” Mueller screamed.