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out.’ Then the microwave alarm went off, the guy got his sandwich out, and before he could unwrap it, the alarm came in.”
    “That’s tight.”
    “Yeah. There wasn’t enough time for Frank to have that snow pile up on him. Not if Phil’s telling the truth.”
    “Time is weird,” Lucas said. “Especially in an emergency. If it wasn’t just a minute, if it was five minutes, then this Father Phil could have . . .”
    “That’s what I figured . . . but doesn’t look that way.” Carr shook his head, swirled coffee around the coffee cup, then set it on the hood of the Chevy and flexed his fingers, trying to work some warmth back in them. “I gotthe firemen and went over it a couple of times. There just isn’t time.”
    “So the priest . . .”
    “He said he left the house and drove straight out to the highway and then into town. I asked him how long it took him to get from the house, here, to the highway, and he said three or four minutes. It’s about a mile, so that’s about right, with the snow and everything.”
    “Hmp.”
    “But if he had something to do with it, why’d he admit being here? That doesn’t make any gol-darned sense,” the sheriff said.
    “Have you hit him with this? Sat him down, gone over it?”
    “No. I’m not real experienced with interrogation. I can take some kid who’s stolen a car or ripped off a beer sign and sit him down by one of the holding cells and scare the devil out of him, but this would be . . . different. I don’t know about this kind of stuff. Killers.”
    “Did you tell him about the time bind?” Lucas asked.
    “Not yet.”
    “Good.”
    “I was stumped,” Carr said, turning to stare blankly at the garage wall, remembering. “When he said he was here, I couldn’t think what to say. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you.’ He wanted to come out when we told him the family was dead, do the last rites, but we told him to stay put, in town. We didn’t want him to . . .”
    “ . . . Contaminate his memory.”
    “Yeah.” Carr nodded, picked up the coffee he’d set on the car hood, and finished it.
    “How about the firemen? Would they have any reason to lie about it?”
    Carr shook his head. “I know them both, and they’re not particular friends. So it wouldn’t be like a conspiracy.”
    “Okay.”
    Two firemen came through the door. The first was encased in rubber and canvas, and on top of that, an inch-thick layer of ice.
    “You look like you fell in the lake,” Carr said. “You must be freezing to death.”
    “It was the spray. I’m not cold, but I can’t move,” the fireman said. The second fireman said, “Stand still.” The fireman stood like a fat rubber scarecrow and began chipping the ice away with a wooden mallet and a cold chisel.
    They watched the ice chips fly for a moment, then Carr said, “Something else. When he went by the fire station, he was towing a snowmobile trailer. He’s big in one of the snowmobile clubs—he’s the president, in fact, or was last year. They’d had a run today, out of a bar across the lake. So he was out on the lake with his sled.”
    “And those tracks came up from the lake.”
    “Where nobody’d be without a sled.”
    “Huh. So you think the priest had something to do with it?”
    Carr looked worried. “No. Absolutely not. I know him: he’s a friend of mine. But I can’t figure it out. He doesn’t lie, about anything. He’s a moral man.”
    “If a guy’s under pressure . . .”
    Carr shook his head. Once they’d been playing golf, he said, both of them fierce competitors. And they were dead even after seventeen. Bergen put his tee shot into a group of pines on the right side of the fairway, made a great recovery and was on the green in two. He two-putted for par, while Carr bogied the hole, and lost.
    “I was bragging about his recovery to the other guys in the locker room, and he just looked sadder and sadder. When we were walking down to the bar he