Vapor Trail (10 page)

So much for the idea
that Dolman’s remains might be in the ground close by and that someone, like maybe his killer, might visit the grave. Harry was right. Broker was miscast in the investigator’s role.

On his way back into town he turned on NPR and listened to a discussion on homeland defense. Somebody from the Pentagon was explaining how the beltway road nets around major cities had been designed by the Defense Department. If the cities were nuked, the beltways allowed military convoys to travel around them, not through.

On the theory that it was sometimes better to drive around, not directly through, problems, Broker decided to take a little road time to think. He turned on Highway 36, went west to 694, and lost himself in the traffic, speeding along on the freeway loop around the metro.

Instead of a nuked city, he was driving around Harry’s question: would he do it again?

If it was your wife and your kid, would you do it again?

As he thought back over that lousy day, he told himself it had been a case of bad timing. He’d run a red light on Summit Avenue on his way to the dentist’s house. If he had stopped for that light, by the time he arrived at the house the dentist might have been dead.

There would have been questions, sure. But Harry would have bluffed his way through. And even if he had been brought up on charges, Diane would still be alive. That’s what Harry had meant when he told Broker to leave and come back in five minutes.

Broker had talked this over many times with his old partner, J. T. Merryweather. J. T. compared it to the war. It was friendly fire. It went with the territory. You always assumed that friendly fire would hit somebody else.

In the middle of this meditation his stomach growled like a reminder that life goes on. He hadn’t eaten today. He pulled off at the next exit, went into a Perkins, and ate a late breakfast of sausage, pancakes, and eggs.

When he arrived back in Stillwater, he parked in the LEC front lot, went in, buzzed into the sheriff’s office and the nearly deserted unit. Summer. Everybody found reasons to get out early. Lymon was not in sight.

Marcy flagged him and handed him a sheaf of paper. “Lymon’s interview with the secretary who found the body,” she said.

Broker took the report to the empty cube, sat down, read it, and stared at the telephone. Probably he should call Milt’s voice mail to see if he had any messages. He smiled cynically. Nina calling from Italy, perhaps. All is forgiven.

First he entered the voice mail number. The recorded voice told him to tap in Milt’s number, then asked for the security code.
Finally, the computer voice informed him he had one new message. He pressed 1 to hear it.

One new message left today at 1:34.

“Broker, this is Janey . . .”

Broker took a deep breath. Wonderful. It was old home week.

“I know this is sudden, but I really need to talk to you.”

He thumped 3 twice, speeded up the message, deleted it, and sank back in the chair.

Janey.

Jane Carli Hensen, maiden name Halvorsen, Norwegian-Italian ancestry. Whatever she’d once been, now she was a stay-at-home mom. Her daughter, Laurie, would be six now.

Broker, Janey, and her future husband, Drew, had known each other when they all worked at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She was in public relations, Drew was a police artist, and Broker was a field agent who was seldom seen in the bureau’s offices on University Avenue in St. Paul.

She probably still read two or three mysteries a week. In the old days investigators used to run cases by her and only stared at her legs as an afterthought.

She’d had flings with various cop types, including a long, serious one with Broker; then she married the quietest guy around, Drew, who quit BCA and became a successful commercial illustrator who specialized in children’s books. Now she had settled into a monstrously gabled and turreted house on Stillwater’s South Hill.

He remembered her standing in the grocery store. She’d looked hollow-cheeked, physically haunted. Excessively lean.

Sort of the way he looked, actually.

Broker shared the Norwegian connection on his mother’s side. Given to dark edges, sometimes moody, possessing a thread of melancholy that tied his inner thoughts in a tightly controlled bundle. And always the potential for storms of repressed emotion.

Speaking of threads . . . it would be sensible to avoid Janey, because she used to have this knack for unraveling his little carnal loose ends and giving them a tug.

He stood up and lost his train of thought when he stared down the rows of deserted cubes at a bulletin board that hung on the wall. In huge rushed letters someone had printed: THE SAINT LIVES: HARRY 2, PEDOPHILES 0.

Broker was not amused. He went to the board, erased it, left the office, walked through the lobby and out the revolving doors to the parking lot. He took the Ithaca .12-gauge out of the trunk, stuffed in shells, racked the slide to put one in the chamber, set the safety, and tucked the shotgun in the passenger-seat foot well within easy reach.

In case Harry came flying out of the shadows.

He just wanted to go back to the river, eat a microwave dinner, drink a couple of beers, and put an ice pack on his head. And think of ways to get even with John.

And this was only day one.

Okay. Showtime.

Angel removed her sunglasses, tilted her hat low over one eye, and concentrated on making herself look like a poster girl for mindless sex. She willed a victim aura into her face; she imagined a neon sign blinking on her forehead: Beat Me; Fuck Me; Blow Your Nose in Me and Throw Me Away.

Angel could move real nice when she wanted to. She moved real nice across the hot sand, stood over Aubrey with one hand plopped on a hip. “Nice camera,” she said.

Aubrey looked up, brightened, and spewed language like spatters of grease. “Hi. Dig you. You like cameras?”

Angel made her eyes enlarge with wonder. “Is that real, around your neck?” she asked.

Aubrey fingered his gold chain, shrugged, then curlicued his finger up in the general direction of her chest. “What about those. Are they real?”

Angel put on her best lip-drooping bored smile. “For me to know.”

Aubrey was up on his knees now, eager; clearly, this was a guy who loved to connect. He fingered the gold chain. “You know how you test to see if gold is real?” he said.

“Not a clue,” Angel said.

Aubrey grinned. He had excellent teeth, healthy gums, and a tongue that jerked around like it could use a shot of Ritalin. His face had been handsome once, before he got soaked in fat. It reminded her of someone.

He was saying, “You bite it.” He winked. “See if it dents.”

Angel folded her arms protectively across her chest but couldn’t quite manage to stifle a grin. “You keep your teeth to yourself.”

“So what’s up?” Aubrey asked, the voice more reasonable. Curious. And distancing. “Do you always talk to total strangers on a beach?”

Angel shrugged. “Just thought I’d tell you . . . that stuff you’re loading into the Camels. I can smell it clear down the beach. So can they.” She jerked her head at the lifeguards. “I wouldn’t be doing it in plain view if I was you.”

Aubrey studied her. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Angela.”

He reached up and patted her calf. “Thanks for the heads up. Now, why don’t you run along.”

Feigning a vast indifference, Angel shrugged, turned, and walked back to her towel.
Okay, now don’t look over there. Nothing obvious. Let him think. Let him look up and down the beach. Is he bright enough to realize that he’s just talked to the nicest little piece of chicken at Square Lake today?

Angel watched Aubrey stand up, dust off sand, and pull on a pair of baggy shorts. Then a T-shirt, flip-flops, and a long-billed cap. She almost approved of the way he folded his towel, taut square corners. He tucked the towel away, shouldered his bag, and
started up the beach to her left and disappeared from the corner of her peripheral vision.

She was careful not to turn and follow him with her eyes. There were always other days. Maybe she’d come on too forward, walking over there and striking up a conversation. Maybe the dope angle wasn’t the most effective gambit. Too overt.

Wrong.

A thick shadow fell across her legs.

“So Angela, what’s your story?” Aubrey asked. He had circled around in back of her and come up on her right.

Angel lowered her eyes.
With more clothes on, he doesn’t look half bad. In fact he has this cleft chin in his deeply tanned face that bears a resemblance to . . . what’s his name? The actor who’d been married to Bo Derek. Or maybe it’s his manner, which is less intense and is, well, curious.
“My story?” she repeated, working to make her voice self-conscious.

He laughed. “I mean, who are you and where are you from, you know . . .”

“Oh.” Angel managed to raise a blush to her cheeks. “I’m a teacher; I teach in an elementary school up in Thief River Falls. It’s summer vacation, so I’m down here visiting my sister in Stillwater and” —Angel raised a hand to her lips as if to stifle a giggle— “well, actually, she’s pretty straight.”

“How straight is straight?” he asked.

“Born-again, Evangelical washed-in-the-blood, baptized-in-the-Holy-Ghost straight.” Angel arched her eyebrows and showed the whites of her eyes.

Aubrey squatted down on his haunches, his forearms braced on his quads. “So you’re not exactly picking up on any dope smoke wafting through your sister’s house?”

“You got that right,” Angel said.

“Do you come down here much?”

“Not much. We’re originally from South Dakota.”

Aubrey nodded. “Where about?”

“Rapid City.”

“Sure, Interstate Ninety. Mount Rushmore. I did a shoot at the Sturgis rally and in Wall, you know, tracing the famous bumper sticker back to the source: Wall Drug, South Dakota.”

Angel nodded. “The Badlands. I find the Badlands distinctly creepy.”

Aubrey bobbed his head in agreement. “Theodore Roosevelt said the Badlands look like Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry sounds.”

Looking impressed, Angel said, “That’s sort of nice.”

“Actually, I heard David McCullough say that on C-SPAN, he wrote a book about TR.”

Suddenly Angel blurted, “John Derek.”

“Huh?”

Angel became animated. “The actor. He’s who you look like, I mean your face, here.” Her finger drifted out and up and hovered, almost touching the cleft in his chin. It was very difficult for Angel to actually touch a man’s body anywhere. The funny thing was, in her other life she had to contend with physical cravings that went in the exact opposite direction.

Aubrey grinned and slapped his stomach. “I should drop a few pounds, I know.” He squirmed closer on his sandals and extended his hand. “Aubrey Jackson Scott. But they call me A. J.”

“Howdy, A. J.,” Angel said. She managed the handshake without grimacing, but just beneath her skin she imagined all the capillaries writhing like blue maggots.

“So . . . life’s pretty dull around the old sister’s house, huh?” A. J. mused.

In a self-conscious reflex, Angel let one of her hands wander up and fluff her hair, then she toyed with a curl near her forehead. And she thought how things had never been exactly dull around
her sister’s house. Actually, things at her sister’s house had been terrifying, and very very sad.

His voice brought her back to the present. “So, ah, do you like to get high, Angela?”

“I’ve been known to imbibe,” Angel said.

Encouraged, he sidled a little closer. “Tell you what. How about we go someplace and smoke a joint, then go to a nice dark air-conditioned sports bar and get a burger?”

“I saw you taking pictures of the scuba divers. Are you really a photographer?” Angel knit her brow and put a wary lilt in her voice.

“Hey, absolutely. I string for the
Pioneer Press
and the
Star Tribune.
And I do a lot of stuff for the weeklies in the valley.”

“And you have, like, a studio and equipment and everything?”

“Of course.” He reached in his bag and withdrew the heavy Nikon D1. “This is not exactly kid’s stuff I have here.”

And Angel thought,
Oh, I bet it is exactly kid’s stuff, you greasy fat fuck.
But she smiled, lowered her eyelids, and said, “And so? What . . .you’re going to invite me over to your studio under the pretense of taking my picture and get me stoned, huh?”

A. J. shook his head and held out his hands in a genial protest. “Hey. No pressure on this end. Don’t believe in it. You want to hang for a while and smoke a number, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

“Well, I guess you don’t look
too
much like Charles Manson,” Angel said.

A. J. stood up and held his hand out to help her to her feet. “Okay, c’mon.”

Angel put her hand out to him and shut her eyes tight when she felt his grip on her fingers. As he hoisted her up, she repeated to herself,
Just remember, kiddo, you’re not here.

She folded her towel around her sun lotion. She’d left her beach
bag in the car for obvious reasons. He asked where she’d parked, and she pointed up the grassy slope in back of the beach. So they walked side by side through the picnic tables and barbecue grates and up the stairs made of green treated timbers.

Near the top of the steps he smoothly cupped her elbow, to steady her balance, and she did not recoil because she was almost totally invisible now.

Angel had seriously, desperately asked God to help her when she was eleven years old. She had called on God—she’d never say
Him
again, not ever—with all her heart. And God must have been somewhere else, or maybe God was deaf or asleep, because God had not done a single thing to help her.

So she had learned to make herself invisible, lying rigid with her wrists crossed over her heart like thin iron bars.

Sometimes she’d pretended she was the wall next to the bed.

As they walked to the parking lot and he continued to steer her with his hand on her arm, she moved smoothly with his touch. Hold up a mirror, you wouldn’t see her
. Uh-uh.

Gone girl gone.