Vapor Trail (5 page)

Broker had never
been to Harry’s home, but he knew roughly where it was and he had Mouse’s instructions. It was the only house on a small unnamed lake in the middle of eighty acres of fallow farmland off the Manning Trail north of town. To get there, he drove past other parcels Harry had sold off and which now sprouted new homes in developments named Oak Grove Marsh or Pine Cone Ridge.

Wearing Diane’s death date engraved in 7s on his arm, Harry hit Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the bigger casinos in the Midwest—he gamed across the board: blackjack, poker, slots.

And since her death he just couldn’t seem to lose no matter how hard he tried. Ten, twelve years ago he’d started investing his winnings in farmland outside Stillwater just ahead of the housing boom.

Getting closer, Broker mulled over the standard lecture about the foolishness of gambling and how it usually ended with stating the exception that proves the rule: Of course, some people do win.

Harry didn’t have to be a cop. He certainly didn’t need the pension.
Broker figured he liked to pack a gun and have the authority to pull people over and stick a badge in their face. Possibly he kept the job just to spite John Eisenhower, who had tried various ways to get him to move on.

Broker consulted the directions, pulled off Manning, and drove down a gravel road hemmed by red oaks and overgrown fields. The dull space inside where he carried Diane Cantrell’s death began to ache. So what was it going to be? Manhandle a blubbering drunk to Detox?

Or High Noon?

Maybe it was being back in touch with the pent-up momentum from all the years of wary hostility, worrying about Harry. Maybe it was just being back in harness. Whatever it was, Broker was leaning forward, working an edge.

He came to a plain mailbox with the name
Cantrell
handwritten on it in slanted block letters. He turned down the gravel drive that snaked off into the woods.

Halfway down the drive he hit the brakes and pulled sharply to the side of the road going into a turn.

Twenty yards ahead, in the belly of the turn, a silver Acura TL type S skewed at an angle, the left front fender punched in against the trunk of an oak tree. Broker glanced at the sheet Mouse had given him. The make, model, and the license matched. Harry’s personal car. The passenger-side door was sprung open. Broker stopped his truck, got out, and approached cautiously, circled, saw that the driver’s-side door was dented, striated with impact, and jammed. The air bag had deployed.

He checked the road, the surrounding brush. No sign of Harry.

He leaned into the interior through the open passenger side and saw a few dribbles of what looked like dried blood on the driver’s seat and smeared on the air bag.

Dried. It would be hours old.

He then studied the crash site and saw how the locked wheels had carved deep trenches in the gravel when Harry lost control overdriving the turn.

Broker looked back in the car. Like a drunken red flag, the keys were still in the ignition. On a hunch, he reached in and twisted them, to engage the electrical system. The digital clock on the dashboard blinked on and off, repeating the same number over and over: 6:42. Then the clock flickered, went dim, and then opaque.

He left the keys in the car and carefully inspected the road leading away from it. Squatting, moving slowly on his haunches, he searched for a blood trail.

A careful minute later he found a small ant war seething over a pizza crust. He returned to the car, leaned inside, and carefully inspected the smear on the air bag.

It had a dried anchovy stuck in it.

Okay. The carnage appeared more involved with cuisine than bloodshed. He got back in the truck and drove toward the house, parked, and got out.

Harry lived in a modest, comfortable rambler with stout vertical cedar planks for siding and a broad wraparound cedar deck. The door to the three-stall garage was open. A fishing boat sat on a trailer in one stall; the other two parking spaces were empty. Broker walked up and looked in the boat. It looked as if it had never been used.

He left the garage, went up the steps onto the deck to the door, which was also open. He peered in through the screen. Quiet. Empty. He rang the bell. Then rapped on the doorjamb.

“Yo? Anybody home?”

Getting no answer, he walked around the house on the deck. A good-size lawn in need of cutting inclined down to the lakeshore. There was a small dock with a rowboat tied off on a piling; a picnic table and a Weber grill sat on a patio. Several bullet-scarred
cast-iron targets in the shape of pigs lay on the picnic table. Another was propped up on a stand. Broker estimated it was fifty yards from the picnic table to the house; extreme pistol range for anyone except an expert.

He turned toward the house and looked into the windows. In the living room, he saw a flat white Broadway Pizza box lying on the carpet next to the couch. A sliding patio door led from the living room to the deck. Like the front door, it was open. This time Broker slid back the screen and stepped in.

“Hey? Anybody home?”

He walked a quick circuit of the house and found clothes hung on doorknobs and strewn in the hallway. He stepped over a pile of damp towels and entered the bathroom. Little wads of crumbled toilet paper littered the sink, dotted with blood. A wisp of bloody fingerprint marked the mirror glass of the cabinet door. A disposable Bic razor lay in the bottom of the sink.

The garbage can overflowed in the kitchen; dirty dishes piled the sink. The refrigerator contained nine bottles of Pabst, a piece of cheese green with mold, and three slices of pepperoni pizza on a plate.

Harry’s contradictory patterns were evident in the littered house; underneath the surface debris the fundamentals—the carpets, counters, bathroom tile—were scrupulously clean.

The bedroom had rumpled sheets, an overflowing ashtray, an empty Scotch bottle. . . . His eyes stopped at the framed wedding picture on the bureau. Diane. Harry. And Broker. Another woman whose name he did not remember. The maid of honor.

He turned away from the bedroom and went down the stairwell to the basement, which looked like the nuts-and-bolts aisle in Home Depot. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were thick with a variety of cardboard and plastic containers. Except these boxes weren’t for nuts and bolts; they held primers, powder, bullets,
casings, and reloading dies. There had to be thousands of rounds of ammo here, in every conceivable caliber.

In the old days in St. Paul, Harry was famous for experimenting with pistol loads and trying them out on stray dogs.

A broad workbench spanned the area, with four reloading presses bolted to it. Two gun safes sat along the wall next to the shelves. Perhaps as a clue to Harry’s current state of mind, the heavy doors on both safes were ajar.

Broker did not profess to know a whole lot about firearms. But he knew there were reloaders and there were serious shooters, and then there were wildcatters like Harry. And he knew that the small orange press on the right side of the bench was for sizing lead bullets and that the RCBS reloader next to it was for precision loading. These devices identified Harry as ultra-hard-core.

Broker walked up and perused the stacked boxes of reloading dies on the shelves. His eyes stopped on a box that read 338/378 K T. He vaguely understood this was a maverick caliber that was not commercially produced.

Curious, he went to the gun safes and looked in the first one. It contained all shotguns. He went to the second and saw a dozen rifles in the rack. His eyes immediately sought out the longest one; sleek and black with a distinctive muzzle brake perforating the end of the barrel.

This had to be the .338. Harry would have painstakingly assembled this rifle himself.

One look at the target knobs on top of the big Leupold field scope, and he was sure. The range finder was dotted in increments of 100 yards out to 1,200.

Broker lifted the big rifle and ran his palm along the custom fiberglass stock. He saw the Can Jar trigger with the two-ounce let-off and the bulky safety switch from a 1917 Enfield, the highly modified Enfield action.

This was Harry’s idea of a good time. Go out on a calm day and punch holes in a pie plate at 1,000 yards. He’d always filled the sniper slot in the SWAT team. That’s what the Marine Corps had trained him to be. And that’s how he’d spent his time in the war.

Broker eased the rifle back in the safe and pushed both the doors until they clicked shut.

He went back up the stairs and returned to the living room, stooped, and inspected the pizza box. A yellow VISA receipt lay among a debris of chewed crusts. He recognized Harry’s scrawled signature. It was dated 18:04 yesterday afternoon. Three empty bottles of Pabst were strewn at the foot of the couch along with a TV remote.

If the clock in the Acura had indeed jammed upon impact, that gave Harry thirty-eight minutes to make it from Broadway Pizza in downtown Stillwater to his driveway. Entertaining Lymon Greene’s suspicions for a moment, Broker speculated that Harry could have driven to St. Martin’s on the way home, parked his car, climbed into some kind of disguise, gone into the church, shot the priest, got back in the car, continued on home eating his pizza with one hand, steering with the other—and put his car into a tree. It was theoretically possible.

Darin Kagin’s silent chattering face flickered on CNN at the edge of his vision. The TV had been left on, the sound muted. Broker reached over and tapped the remote button. The TV zapped off with an electronic sizzle.

He looked around one more time. No Harry.

He picked up Harry’s phone and dialed Anne Mortenson’s number from Mouse’s instruction sheet. No answer. Then he tried the public library number and was transferred to the reference desk.

“Anne Mortenson?”

“Yes?”

“This is Phil Broker with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. I’m looking for Harry Cantrell. Can you help me?”

There was silence on the line for a beat, two. “Yes, he called this morning and asked to borrow my car.” Her voice was level and direct.

“And?”

“Pardon me?” Anne said.

“Did he borrow your car?” Broker said.

“Yes. His broke down. So I drove over and picked him up. He dropped me off at home; it’s only a few blocks to work.”

“Did you happen to see his car?”

“Ah, no. He met me at the end of his drive by the mailbox.” For the first time there was a slight waver in her steady voice. Concern, like a dropped stitch. “Is this official or personal?”

“Welll . . .” Broker drew the word out.

Anne’s voice regained its strength. “It’s official, I imagine. Harry is under a cloud. It’s about his drinking.”

“Okay, you’re right. I need to find him.”

Anne cleared her throat. “When he’s been drinking, I usually don’t encourage that behavior in any way. But on Wednesday mornings Harry visits his mother in the Linden Hills nursing home. I made an exception for that.”

Broker hid his dismay. Initially, she had sounded smarter than that. “Linden Hills near downtown, on Green Street.”

“That’s it. He brings her flowers. She doesn’t recognize him anymore, but she recognizes roses. That’s Alzheimer’s for you. He left here over an hour ago. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him.”

Broker pulled a pen from his chest pocket, poised to write on Mouse’s instruction sheet. “I need a description of your car.”

“Yes, it’s a new Subaru Forester, red, mono color, no cladding.
The S model.” Anne gave him the plate number. As he wrote it down, she thought out loud, “Do you think maybe I made a mistake?”

Broker didn’t want to give her a straight answer. “The sooner I find him, the better,” he said. Then, after a quick thank you, he hung up and dashed for his truck.

Leaning forward in his seat, he pushed the Ranger over the speed limit, ran stop signs, and passed on the shoulder. Broker came into town hot and swung into the nursing home lot. He scanned the aisles of cars. No red Forester. He went inside, stopped at the reception desk, and inquired.

A nurse walked him down a hall into a private room. An elderly woman sat up behind a tray that was positioned across the bed. She was very involved in staring at a bouquet of roses.

“Every Wednesday morning Harry brings her flowers,” the nurse said.

“How long ago did he leave?” Broker asked.

The nurse led Broker back into the hall and chatted with another nurse. She turned to Broker. “He was in and out, just making a delivery. So it was quite a while ago.”

Back in the parking lot, Broker raised his eyes to the canopy of elms and cottonwoods where millions of leaves hung absolutely still, pressing down. His body suddenly crossed a threshold, and his sweat came all at once. Mopping his wrist across his brow, he stared across the hills, at the gingerbread facades on the houses, the quaint steeples, the river, the bridge.

Missed him.

Broker hated offices,
so he moved fast through Washington County Investigations—a grid of gray cubicles with six-foot privacy walls that housed General Investigations, Fraud, and Narcotics. Art Katzer’s empty office and a receptionist’s desk were located at the head of the room. Interrogation rooms lined one wall; more cubicles made up the other.

He was looking for Mouse.

Several cops stirred around desks in white shirts and ties. They wore round leather backings with five-pointed county stars on their belts, along with holstered .40-caliber pistols. They were mostly older, mostly developing bellies. This being the far reaches of the Twin Cities’ eastern suburbs, they were all white.

Several took a sideways look at Broker, then dropped their eyes. John’s outsider.

Mouse’s bulk was unmistakable at the end of the room next to the coffeepot. Their eyes made solid contact on the order of an eight-ball break shot.

“I got something for you,” Mouse said.

Then the phone on Broker’s hip rang. He picked up and heard Jack Malloy’s voice. “Is this personal, or are you working?” Jack asked.

“Can you stay put? I need a sec,” Broker said.

“You are working,” Malloy said.

“Yep. For John Eisenhower.”

Broker came up to Mouse and took him by the arm and walked him through the security door into the hall. He held up a finger to shush Mouse and turned back to the phone. “Victor Moros was a caretaker priest at St. Martin’s in Stillwater. Are you with me so far, Jack?” Broker said.

“Yes, we heard this morning that Moros died. But the details are coming very slowly.”

“Are we cool, Jack? Like way off the record here?”

“You’re going to have give me cause, but we’re cool.”

“Good. Then I can tell you that the details are slow in coming because he was shot to death last night, in his confessional.”

“Oh, my God—
here
. . .” Malloy’s voice staggered. It was silent on the line for a moment, and Broker didn’t need paranormal powers to divine what Malloy meant when he blurted:
here
.

“It gets a lot worse, Jack. We have to keep this strictly between us,” Broker said. “You still with me?”

“Sure.”

“He had a St. Nicholas medallion stuffed in his mouth,” Broker said.

Jack Malloy groaned. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the Saint. Great, so now it’s really come here. We’ve had charges made, threats; but not a death. The press . . .”

“No press; not yet. We’re sitting on the case. But I need a fast read on Moros’s background, and it has to be absolutely discreet.”

Malloy exhaled, steadied, and said, “I’m on it. Meet me here, at the rectory, at ten tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be there.”

Broker hung up and turned to Mouse, who was pushing the last crumbs of a doughnut into his mouth. “Okay—he’s not home; his car was piled up against a tree in his driveway.”

Mouse chewed, swallowed, and looked around for a place to get rid of his foam coffee cup. Broker took the cup from his hand. The door to Investigations snapped open; a young cop started out into the hall. Broker handed him the empty cup. The young cop looked at Broker, then at Mouse, and went back inside.

“And I talked to Annie Mortenson. She sounds way too straight for our boy,” Broker said.

Mouse nodded sagely. It was a look he cultivated and played well with his battered features, weary blue eyes, and his bristly gray flattop haircut. “I figure Annie’s his last resort; he keeps her around for formal occasions. She knows which fork to use, like that. So I figured this is a case where you go to the last resort first.”

“Well, he got her to pick him up and lend him her car to take roses to his dear old mom who’s in the nursing home,” Broker said. “Except he’d already split from the nursing home by the time I got there.”

“Down deep, when it comes to a dog like Harry taking flowers to his mother, even a sensible woman will melt into your basic enabler,” Mouse said.

“His place was open, so I went in and looked around. He’s got enough guns and ammo in his basement to rearm the Taliban,” Broker said.

Mouse squinted his way into something like a smile. “Okay, so he’s a hazard to navigation. Maybe he should be off the streets. Just so happens I found him.”

“Goddammit, Mouse, why didn’t you—” Broker said.

Mouse raised a finger to his lips, then pointed to the door to
Investigations, which appeared to be open a crack. He shook his head. “Cops. Snoopy bastards,” he whispered. “Worse gossips than junior high girls.”

They walked down the hall, left the sheriff’s office, and stood in the lobby. Mouse yanked his thumb back toward the unit. “I run the north team; Harry runs the south team, right? Harry’s lead detective used to be Benish, who got transferred to Fraud. But they stay in touch.

“So Benish comes up to me an hour ago and says, ‘Tell Broker that Harry is playing cards at Ole’s Boat Repair.’ He also says Harry don’t see the need to rush going to treatment. It ain’t like they’re going to move St. Joseph’s in the next two weeks.”

Broker allowed a faint smile. “Sounds like Harry. He figures to use every minute of his suspension to party. So he knows I’m on the job and about Moros and . . .”

“Sure; if Benish didn’t tell him, there’s half a dozen other people who could,” Mouse said.

“So where’s this Ole’s?”

“Take Highway Ninety-five south toward Lakeland. About two miles this side of the slab, on the east side of the road there’s this sailboat repair shop that went out of business.”

Broker squinted, placing the location. “The slab” was cop talk for Interstate 94. “Yeah, okay. Tell me about the game,” Broker said.

Mouse shrugged. “No sweat. It’s a regular game in the back room. No actual bread on the table. It’s all chips and markers. They settle up someplace else. Some hustlers cruise by and give it some flavor; but nothing heavy, they all know who Harry is. Mostly it’s local guys with leisure time who like to rub shoulders with mildly criminal types. Harry is a regular; he uses it as a listening post.”

Broker and Mouse stared at each other for several beats. Finally, Broker said, “It’s too easy.”

“Yeah,” Mouse said.

Broker extended his hand.

“What?” Mouse said.

“Gimme your cuffs. Just in case.”

Broker sat for several minutes in his idling truck as the A/C hummed up to speed and put a sheet of artificial cool between him and the day.

Okay. C’mon. Let’s do it.

He left town and drove south on Highway 95. It had been more than a decade since he rode with a pair of manacles hanging from his belt. The thought of a take-down grapple to the pavement in this heat . . . Broker shook his head, leery. The fact was, he assumed the worst. It smelled like a setup; Harry making an overture like this, setting a time and place.

He stared out the windshield, and the day glared back. Crazy-making hot. The cars and trucks went by like brightly painted blisters. Even buttoned up in air-conditioning, he could feel the sweat puddle on his scalp.

Carefully, he reviewed the last time he’d seen Harry. At the Washington County Fair, last summer. A sweltering night perfumed with animal barns and sweat and cotton candy. Broker had been with his daughter, Kit, standing in line for the pony ride when Harry walked up.

He’d just looked at Broker, tried to smile, and said, “I heard you were married. Cute kid.”

So they attempted to get a conversation going, but their small talk hobbled like stragglers through the no-man’s-land yawning between them. When Harry awkwardly started to tousle Kit’s reddish hair, Broker instinctively reached over and pulled her out of his reach.

“Must be reflexes, huh?” Harry had said. So the time machine had kicked in and they were back to it. They’d exchanged poison looks while his daughter unconsciously wrinkled her smooth broad forehead, soaking up the ambient hostility.

Harry half-turned as he was walking away. “You never had anything to lose before, did you, Broker?”

Broker once had heard a counselor describe alcoholism as a progressive disease, implying that just because you stopped putting alcohol in your mouth, it didn’t mean the condition was cured. It continued to grow inside like an invisible vampire. Take a drink after ten years, and the vampire sitting on your chest was ten years older and stronger than he was the last time you saw him.

Broker figured the thing he had with Harry was like that.

He came up to his turnoff and spotted the building. Weeds grew in the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Fading blue lettering spelled Ole’s Boat Repair on dirty white cinder block, and the showroom windows were boarded with plywood. An ancient sailboat was beached, unmasted and rudderless, on a trailer. The tires on the trailer were flat.

Broker drove around back and saw a dozen cars, SUVs mostly, and a brand-new shiny red Subaru Forester with a license plate that matched the numbers and letters on the clipboard on the seat next to him.

He parked, got out, and encountered the deeply locked-down feeling that was Diane waiting for him in the heat. Dark hair worn in a flip. The soft breathy voice.

Did you see her? She looks like Jackie Fucking Kennedy with tits.
Harry’s studied reaction the night he met her.

Years ago, the sensation would close off the light and last for whole days; now he processed it fast, working through the doubt and remorse to a bedrock determination.

He could never bring himself to say he’d done the right thing.
But he was confident he’d done what he had to do. So he took a deep breath through his nose to steady himself, walked up to the back door, and knocked.

The door opened a crack. A tubby guy with senatorial white hair and a melanoma golf tan peeked out.

“You have an invite? This is strictly an invitations-only party,” the guy said.

“Phil Broker for Harry Cantrell. I need to talk to him,” Broker said.

The guy squinted. “Oh yeah?”

Broker shifted his weight irritably from foot to foot. “Hey, c’mon. Get Harry out here.”

The guy turned and called into the dark air-conditioned interior, “Harry, there’s this guy here says . . .”

A deep, slightly slurred, but amused voice boomed, “Yeah, yeah, my fucking process server—bring him in.”

The guy at the door thumbed Broker to enter.

Broker stepped inside and squinted. He was in a huge deserted workshop with a concrete floor and half-torn wooden racks. An industrial-strength chill churned from a dripping wall-mounted A/C unit. Stratas of cigarette and cigar smoke stacked up in a shower of light. It came from an oblong pool hall light that poured down on a round table covered with a green felt tablecloth.

Six men sat around it among a clutter of cards, chips, ashtrays, and drinks. Six or seven other guys lounged at a side table that held platters of sandwich makings, an ice bucket, some bottles. An old couch, some chairs, and a refrigerator rounded out the decor. Mouse had accurately called the crowd; ten years ago, in their late thirties, they’d probably taken some chances; now they looked as if they wanted to sit down a lot and mainly talk. Most of the guys at the card table were culturally correct, drinking from plastic bottles of spring water.

“Well, well, well,” Harry said. He sat behind an ashtray, a whiskey tumbler, and a big pile of chips.

Same old Harry. He went five eleven, weighed around 175, and was fifty years old. As Broker came across the room he recalled that Harry always looked slightly smaller than he actually was. The illusion was created by the fact that Harry’s clothes always fit him so well.

Today he wore gray stonewashed jeans and a green golf shirt. But even dressed in a white bedsheet Harry would still evoke a man-in-black persona. It was the thick dark curly hair, the sideburns, and the promise of dangerous excitement cocked in the slouch of his hips. His face was slightly flat, with Cherokee cheekbones and a chin that matched his brawny bone-prominent hands. The three red 7s were engraved on his tanned right forearm.

Harry had a Lucky Strike dangling at a sporty angle between lightly clenched teeth. But his eyes betrayed his jaunty smile, looking about as easy as two chunks of indigo dye melting in tomato juice. A clip of toilet tissue was nailed to his chin by a rusty dot. He blinked and raised a hand to knuckle at a runny nose. He was busted inside. Stuff was leaking.

“Is this guy here to play or what?” someone said.

Harry’s eyes were fever brilliant but so very empty as he said, “Nah, he don’t gamble with money, but he’ll sure as fuck gamble with your life.”