Winter Prey Read Online Free PDF

asked. “The bites?”
    “Dog,” she said. “Coyote. God knows I see enough dog bites around here and it looks like a dog did it.”
    “You can hear them howling at night, bunches of them,” the deputy said. “Coyotes.”
    “Yeah, I’ve got them up around my place,” Lucas said.
    “Are you with the state?” the woman asked.
    “No. I used to be a Minneapolis cop. I’ve got a cabin over in Sawyer County and the sheriff asked me to run over and take a look.”
    “Lucas Davenport,” the sheriff said, nodding at him. “I’m sorry, Lucas, this is Weather Karkinnen.”
    “I’ve heard about you,” the woman said, nodding.
    “Weather was a surgeon down in the Cities before she came back home,” the sheriff said to Lucas.
    “Is that Weather, like ‘Stormy Weather’?” Lucas asked.
    “Exactly,” the doctor said.
    “I hope what you heard about Davenport was good,” Carr said to her.
    The doctor looked up at Lucas and tilted her head. Thelight on her changed and he could see that her eyes were blue. Her nose seemed to be slightly crooked. “I remember that he killed an awful lot of people,” she said.

    The doctor was freezing, she said, and she led the way toward the front door, the deputy following, Carr stumbling behind. Lucas lingered, looking down at the dead woman. As he turned to leave, he saw a slice of nickeled metal under a piece of crumbled and blackened wallboard. From the curve of it, he knew what it was: the forepart of a trigger guard.
    “Hey,” he called after the others. “Is that camera guy still in the house?”
    Carr called back, “The video guy’s in the garage, but the other guy’s here.”
    “Send him back here, we got a weapon.”
    Carr, Weather, and the photographer came back. Lucas pointed out the trigger guard, and the photographer took two shots of the area. Moving carefully, Lucas lifted the wallboard. A revolver. A nickel-finish Smith and Wesson on a heavy frame, walnut grips. He pushed the board back out of the way, then stood back as the photographer shot the gun in relation to the body.
    “You got a chalk or a grease pencil?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, and a tape measure.” The photographer groped in his pocket, came up with a grease pencil.
    “Shouldn’t you leave it for the lab guys?” Carr asked nervously.
    “Big frame, could be the murder weapon,” Lucas said. He drew a quick outline around the weapon, then measured the distance of the gun from the wall and the dead woman’s head and one hand, while the photographer noted them. With the measurements done, Lucas handed the grease pencil back to the photographer, looked around, picked up a splinter of wood, pushed it through the fingerguard, behind the trigger, and lifted the pistol from the floor. He looked at the doctor. “Do you have another one of those Ziplocs?”
    “Yes.” She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.
    “Six shells, unfired,” he said. “Shit.”
    “Unfired?” Carr asked.
    “Yeah. I don’t think it’s the murder weapon. The killer wouldn’t reload and then drop it on the floor . . . at least I can’t think why he would.”
    “So?” Weather looked up at him.
    “So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand. She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble,” Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: “You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway.”
    “I’ll get it going,” Carr said. Then: “I n-n-need some coffee.”
    “I think you’re fairly hypothermic, Shelly,” Weather said. “What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy