"Yeah."

"Might loosen it up. Russ's always got something around."

"All right." Lucas turned to Lacey, who had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the house. "Henry, why don't you sit out here by the truck. Get the shotgun and just hang back."

Lacey nodded and walked back toward the Suburban.

"I'll try to get a little edge on him right away," Lucas told Climpt as they started up the driveway. "I won't pull any real shit, but you can act like you think I might."

Woodsmoke drifted down on them, an acrid odor that cut at the nose and throat. Two feet of pristine snow covered the front porch. "Looks like he doesn't use the front door at all," Climpt said.

As they walked around the side of the house, they heard the gun rack rattle as Lacey unlocked the shotgun and took it out, then the ratcheting sound of a twelve-gauge shell being pumped home. At the back door, Lucas could hear the sounds of a television-not the words but the rhythms.

"Stand down at the bottom where he can see you," Lucas told Climpt. He went to the top of the stoop and knocked on the door, then stepped to the side. A moment later the yellow porch light came on, and then a curtain pulled back. A man's head appeared behind the window glass. He looked at Climpt, hesitated, made a head gesture, and fumbled with the doorknob.

"We're okay," Lucas muttered.

Harper pulled open the inner door, saw Lucas, frowned. He was an oval-faced man, with a narrow chin, thick, short lips, and scar tissue on his forehead and under his eyes. His eyes were the size of dimes, and black, like a lizard's. He was unshaven. He pushed open the storm door, looked down at Climpt and said, "What do you want, Gene?"

"We need to talk to you about the death of your son, and we need to look through Jim's stuff again," Climpt said.

Harper's thick lips twisted. "You got a warrant?"

"Yeah, we got a warrant."

After another long moment Harper said, "Now what the fuck are you fuckin' with me for, Climpt?" The question came in a low voice, rough and guttural, angry but unafraid.

"We're not fuckin' with you," Lucas snapped back. He hooked the storm door handle with his left hand and jerked it open. Harper pulled back an inch, then settled in a fighting stance, ready to swing. He was round-shouldered but hard, with hands that looked granite-gray in the bad light. Lucas took his right hand out of his pocket, a bare hand with a.45. "Swing on me and I'll beat the shit out of you," he said. "And if I start to lose I'll blow your fuckin' nuts off."

"What?" Harper stepped back, dropping his right hand.

"You heard me, asshole."

"Oh, yeah," Harper said. He straightened, let the left hand drop. "You're the big city guy, uh? Big city guy, big city asshole gonna blow my nuts off." He took another step back, the anger spreading from his eyes over his face, ready to go again.

"Come on, motherfucker," Lucas said. He lifted the.45 out to the side. "You put your own boy out on the corner givin' blowjobs to fat guys, there's nobody in this county'd blame me if I spread your brains all over the house. So you wanna do it? Come on, come on…"

"You're fuckin' nuts," Harper said. But his voice had changed again, uncertainty near the surface, and his eyes shifted past Lucas to Climpt. "Why are you fuckin' with me, Gene?"

"The LaCourt girl, the one who was killed, had a picture of your boy, naked, with a grown-up male," Climpt said.

Lucas dropped the gun to his side, moved forward, one foot inside, shoulder against the door, forcing Harper back. "She showed it around and then the family was wiped out," he said. "We want to look at Jim's things, see if there's anything that might indicate who it was."

"Sure as shit wasn't me."

"We're looking for a guy who's blond and a little fat," Lucas said. He stepped through the storm door into a mudroom, crowding Harper, who backed through an inner door into the kitchen. Climpt was a step behind. "You don't have any friends that look like that, do you?"

Climpt called out to the truck, "Henry, c'mon."

"I want to see that warrant," Harper said, backing farther into the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of onions and bad meat and old soured milk.

"Henry's got it," Climpt said. Harper looked past Lucas as Lacey walked up. Lacey pulled a paper out of his pocket and handed it to Lucas, who handed it to Harper. While Harper looked at it, Lucas decocked the.45. At the latching sound, Harper looked up and said, "Smith and Wesson. Is that the.40 or the.45?"

"The.45," Lucas said.

"I'd have gone with the.40," Harper said as the two deputies came in behind Carr. He'd gone into the asshole-cooperative mode, an almost imperceptible groveling learned in prisons.

"Right," said Lucas, ignoring the comment. He put the pistol back in his coat pocket. "Where's the kid's room?"

"You don't think I know about guns? I…"

"I don't give a fuck what you know," Lucas snapped. "Where's the kid's room?"

Harper muttered shit, crumbled the warrant in his hand and threw it on the floor, turned and led them through a narrow archway into the living room. The TV was tuned to professional wrestling, and a cardboard tray, stained orange from the sauce of an instant spaghetti dinner, sat on a round oak table with an empty crockery coffee cup. Harper brushed past it, into a hallway. The first door on the right was open, into a bathroom; the next door, to the left, was half-open, and Harper pulled it closed. "That's mine. Nothin' of Jim's in there."

At the last door, on the right, he stopped and gestured with his thumb: "That was Jim's."

Lucas pushed the door open. Jim Harper had been dead for more than two months, but his room was like he'd left it: a pair of dirty jeans, a t-shirt and pair of underpants tossed in a corner, now covered with dust. The bed was unmade, a discolored flat-sheet and an olive-drab Army blanket tangled on a yellowed fitted sheet. The pillow was small, gray, dotted with what might have been blood. Lucas looked closer: blood, all right, but only in small spots, as though the kid had acne and picked at the sores. Clothes were pinched in the drawers of the single bureau, and two of the drawers hung open.

"The cops already been through it, messed it up," Harper said over Lucas' shoulder. "Didn't find anything."

Lucas looked back down the hall at Lacey. "Henry, why don't you and Mr. Harper here go sit and watch some TV? Gene and I'll look around."

"Hey…" Harper said.

"Shut up," said Lucas.

"They turned the room over and didn't find anything," Lucas said to Climpt. "If you were a kid, hiding something, where'd you put it?"

"What I've been thinking is, Russ's such an asshole, why would a kid hide anything from him? Nothing the kid could do would bother him much."

Lucas shrugged. "Maybe he'd hide something just so he could keep it."

"That's a point," Climpt said. After a moment: "I always hid stuff in the basement. Maybe in a closet if it was just overnight and small-dirty magazines, that sort of thing. I suppose the attic, if they got one."

"Let's do a quick run through this, then maybe look around a little."

The house was an old one, with hardwood planked floors covered with patches of linoleum, and lath-and-plaster walls. Lucas dug through the kid's closet, shaking out a stack of magazines and comic books, checking shoes and the few shirts hanging inside. There were no loose floorboards and the plaster wall was cracked but intact. Climpt tossed the bureau again, pulling out each drawer to turn it over, checked the heat register, found it solid. In ten minutes they'd decided the room was clean.

"Attic or basement?" asked Climpt.

"Let's see how much trouble the attic is."

The attic access was through a hatch in the bathroom. Standing on a chair, Lucas pushed up the hatch and was showered with dust and asbestos insulation. He pulled it shut again and climbed down, brushing the dirt out of his hair.