The Ten-Mile Trials (5 page)

‘We're to call them and reinstate the order, as soon as the Health Department says the place is clean.'

‘After which, there won't be anything left here worth the trip from Saint Paul.'

‘Good point. So we better hope for stellar performances from Pokey and my smart wife, who is going to go back to work on Monday and will probably have to win this ball game for us.'

Trudy had put the baby to bed and was standing across from me at the island in the kitchen, peering into some of the sacks I'd brought in. She pulled a couple of used formula bottles out of one of the sacks and frowned at them. Ben, in the next room, let out the first whimpers of a baby getting ready to cry. Store-bought meals didn't suit his digestion as well as the ones he'd been getting from Mama, so he often cried as much after meals as before them, behavior guaranteed to make new parents pull out their hair.

I told Ray, ‘Talk to you later,' and folded up the phone. Watching my wife carefully, I said, ‘I learned a new word since I saw you in town.'

‘Oh?' She was rereading the label on the formula can.

‘Yes, I think it's magic. Watch my lips.' I pushed out my jaw and sternly said ‘
Sitz
!'

‘
Gesundheit
!' She stared at me, eyebrows forming a question.

‘That's funny,' I said. ‘Every time Darrell says that, his dog sits down.'

‘Ah,' she said. ‘So that's what you were doing at the crazy house. Watching Darrell and his K-9 dog.'

‘Yes.' Ben gave an exploratory wail, the first high note that warned of many more to come. ‘I really do want you to sit. Will you please? In the rocker, right here.' I moved it closer to the island. ‘Then I'll bring the big guy out—'

‘Jake, there's so much to do . . .'

‘No, there isn't. It's Friday night. There's really only one thing to do, which is for you to hold Ben till he falls asleep, and me to unload the rest of the gear and cook dinner while I tell you about my day. Doesn't that sound cozy?'

‘For sure,' she said. ‘You do have such cozy days.' She liked it, though – it was what she wanted to do. Ben burrowed his hot unhappy head into the hollow above her collarbone and bitched about the rotten luck that had brought him this bellyache. After a few minutes of protest, he brought forth the big belch that eased his pain. When he quit squirming and fell asleep, I started some burgers on the grill outside and reminded Trudy that the great thing about ceasing to be the family milk fountain was that it meant a lady could have a glass of wine before dinner.

‘Hey, yeah. Ooh, insane, bring it on,' Trudy said, and put Ben back in his crib. I broke out the bottle of Shiraz I'd been saving for this occasion, and we toasted her return to the land of grown-ups. Over dinner, I finally did share some details about the bizarre scene at the other end of the block from Maxine's house.

‘So much crime in one house, incredible.' She sipped and thought. ‘That couple . . . the few times I noticed them, they just looked like a pair of losers.'

‘Didn't they? I'm not very surprised about the grow house, but I'd never have guessed them for a big-time meth lab. What Ray's describing – that takes capital. And they certainly didn't look like cold-blooded killers.'

‘No. Maybe hot-headed grudge-holders, though.' She shivered. ‘I hate the thought of leaving Ben in the same town as all of that, much less the same block.'

‘You know any babysitters living in mansions? And grow houses get found in some very nice neighborhoods these days.' She knew I was right about that. Real-estate markets were churning, and good houses were available for rent. And if they can, growers rent in quiet residential neighborhoods, which are the best cover for a cannabis crop.

The meth lab was something else. Crystal meth hit Minnesota hard in the nineties, and by the turn of the century its users were swamping law-enforcement budgets in small towns, pouring into the court systems and crowding the prisons. The drug quickly took hold in rural areas and small towns because it was cheap and could be manufactured out of readily available chemicals – in country kitchens and even the trunks of cars. Hey, just follow the recipes on the Internet, the kids told each other gleefully, and you can buy the cold remedies in any drugstore. And the rush? Oh baby, sick, sick.

It flooded the brain with dopamine and enhanced sexual pleasure, so it appealed especially to the young, and was so powerfully addictive that just a few samples could hook people for life. The dependency was devilishly hard to break, and the effects catastrophic – it gave people hallucinations, rotted their teeth, and aged pretty young girls into crones with devastating speed. And they didn't care. A good hit of meth, they assured the appalled health-care providers trying to rescue them, felt like ten of the best orgasms you ever had, all at once. Narcs are not people who are easily disgusted, but I have seen a meth lab and its clientele turn seasoned officers somber and pale.

The Minnesota legislature, spurred on by their alarmed constituencies, passed laws requiring cold remedies based on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine to be kept behind the counter, sold one to a customer, and signed for by the holder of a bona fide ID. When the kids got smart and started fanning out to buy cold remedies in all the small towns around, they passed another law that drugstore chains had to keep system-wide records and check them often. The penalties for infractions were big fines and prison terms.

The new laws worked well for a while – discoveries of meth labs in Minnesota dropped like a stone in the next couple of years. The self-congratulatory tone of the news stories surrounding that achievement were quickly muted by a second discovery, close on the heels of the first: ma-and-pa meth labs were disappearing, but addicts were not. All states don't pass identical laws, and the United States has long borders and open shores. We had pushed meth manufacture out of the hands of amateurs and secured the trade for the pros. So for the last year, when the narcs brought in speed freaks with stumps for teeth, shaking with tremors and screaming with paranoid delusions, the query
du jour
became ‘Where's all this stuff coming from?'

‘It's got to be Mexico,' Frank kept saying. ‘Why can't Border Patrol do its damn job?'

Now I'd stumbled on a new twist.

‘This is starting to feel like the perfect storm,' I told Trudy that Friday night. ‘The same day I get word we're facing budget cuts and a shrinking staff, I find out one of the places the meth is coming from is down the street from my babysitter's house.'

THREE

A
fter dinner Ray Bailey phoned to say he had just secured the crime scene. ‘I sent my guys home,' he said. ‘The clean-up crew is here, and the good news is it looks like this meth lab was just being set up. These geeks in the plastic jammies say it's never been used, the gear is clean. They have to take everything out in a certain order, though, and a lot of it is volatile material. We're lucky and the neighbors are very lucky, this could have been much worse.'

‘So, you're just turning the keys over to the clean-up crew—'

‘And Rosie. The DOH guys won't let us touch anything on the property till they certify it clean – but they said since none of the seals on the supplies were broken, she could stay by their van and inventory it as they bring it out. Equipment too, they're letting her make a complete list of brand names, shipping tags, and so on. We should be able to trace a lot of this back to the sellers and put the squeeze on them for purchase orders.'

‘Good! How soon do you get back in?'

‘I asked them to call me when they're getting ready to leave. They said don't hold your breath, it's a big job, but maybe some time tomorrow'

‘OK.' I cleared my throat. ‘About tomorrow—'

‘Yeah, Pokey's autopsy. I was going to call you about that in a minute.'

‘I bet he's hell-bent to do it right away, isn't he?'

‘Oh, sure, you know how he is. It's on for ten o'clock at Med Sci. I'd like to send Clint, he hasn't done one in a while; but his kid's got Little League, he's going to groan.'

‘Which is nothing compared to the noise Frank's going to make. He spent two hours this morning getting his bowels in an uproar about the budget. No overtime, was one of his new rules – ironclad, he said.'

‘What are we supposed to do, though? I have to send somebody—'

‘What I was wondering,' I said, ‘was if maybe you could attend the autopsy? Then I'd run in to town tomorrow morning, find a judge at home, and get your two new prisoners bound over till Monday. Maybe I'll drop by the crime-scene house and check on that, and I'll check on the prisoners. The rest of the work could wait till Monday. What do you think?'

‘This is how you propose to handle the shortfall? Work the execs harder to eliminate overtime?'

‘Well, from now on we'll put our foot down with Pokey, no autopsies on the weekend. I just thought maybe on this one case, while all the brass is having shit fits about the budget, you and I might cover it and pile up some credit for an emergency.'

‘You're expecting something worse than five felonies in one small dwelling?'

‘Well . . .'

‘Looking for maybe a drug war and a nuclear attack on the same day?'

‘Never mind, Ray. It was just an idea.'

‘OK.'

‘OK what?'

‘OK, I'll do it.'

‘You're sure? It's not too much on top of—'

‘If you promise to hang up right now and not talk to me any more tonight, I'll attend the autopsy.'

‘Thanks, Ray. I really do appreciate—' I did hang up then, because I was talking to a dead phone.

Clearly, Ray Bailey was going through some kind of a bad patch. He'd never conformed to my image of a cheerleader, but it wasn't like him to be this grumpy, either. I made up my mind to find out about it as soon as time allowed, which was a prospect too distant to worry about on a Friday night.

I did some work in the garden early Saturday morning, got on the phone, and found out which judges were on call. I was sitting in the kitchen having the second breakfast that rewards extraordinary virtue when the phone rang and Pokey said, ‘Hey, Jake, that pretty girl lives in your house, she close to phone?'

‘Yes she is, I'm happy to say. Her name is Mrs Hines now. You remember that?' She was pouring me another cup of coffee and I handed her the phone

‘Hey, Pokey,' she said, smiling, and I could hear his voice warm up on the other end. Trudy and Pokey have a mutual admiration thing going. ‘Yeah, I'm going back Monday. Oh, the baby's no problem, Maxine's holding a place for him. Everybody's ready but me. Hmmm? Well, for one thing, all my clothes are too tight.' It was true. She'd put on weight, or anyway girth, carrying Ben, and for the first time since I'd known her she was wailing about having nothing in the closet to wear. Her mother was helping her move buttons and ease seams, since our clothing budget, never lavish, now totaled zero. It was one more anxiety in an already overloaded week.

Pokey managed one soothing cluck over her clothing problems and plowed right ahead with his own concerns. I heard the word ‘autopsy,' and then I thought I heard the word ‘history'. But why would he talk to Trudy about that? Whatever he said seemed to take her mind off her overstretched seams, anyway. Her face smoothed out and then grew a little frown of concentration as she listened. She said ‘Mmmm' and ‘Uh-huh' and ‘Oh?', and then ‘Well, no, you know how forensic DNA analysis works, we all have to look at the same thirteen loci, thirteen areas of junk DNA that don't code for any proteins or . . . No. Well, money and time – plus privacy concerns. Take your pick, they all end up at the rule saying we don't go nosing around, we just look in those thirteen places.'

‘If you had the funding,' she continued, ‘you could maybe take it to one of those labs doing family trees . . . Hmmm? No, I never . . . My Mom already has more family than she knows what to do with.' She chuckled, listened some more, and said, ‘Or find a lab full of genetic scientists who are looking for anomalies . . . Hmmm? I guess it could cost a bundle. Tell you what, I could ask the guys at work if anybody knows some postdocs with a grant doing studies in . . .' She finished the sentence with an impenetrable thicket of what I call ‘Black Ops code,' the science jargon she shares with Pokey and her lab crew at BCA. As far as I'm concerned, it might as well be Urdu.

But whatever it was, it cheered her up. She hung up and said, ‘Really, that Pokey's brain is a wonder, isn't it? The things he notices . . .'

‘What's he noticing today?'

‘It's that John Doe you just sent him. Most docs would just say oh well, a drifter and a druggie, who cares? But Pokey sees a lesion and starts spinning out a theory . . .' She hummed a little tune while she fed Ben and put him in another layer of clothes. She had me carry his portable crib out to a sunny patch in the garden, put him in it, and let him practice grabbing at the dangling toys while she hoed the corn.

With so many new chores to manage for the baby, we had agreed to raise only half as much garden as the last two summers. That meant we were fifty per cent short of the produce we'd been growing to pay off our debt to the Sullivan brothers for remodeling our house. Trudy had managed the complex barter by which that loan was restructured, stretching out the remainder of the debt over two more years, extending their rights to the use of my fishing boat and our ten acres of hayfield across the road, and keeping me enslaved to their hay crop twice every summer for years to come.