Vapor Trail (3 page)

Milt’s steep gravel driveway
was a clammy maze twisting up the bluff through an oak woods. Broker lost the faint light in the trees, pushed through the soggy shadows, and jogged to the top. Lathered and panting, he turned north on Highway 95.

He blinked sweat and looked around. Across the river, Wisconsin hid in a veil of mist. On the Minnesota side, fields of dew-soaked corn and hay hugged the earth like wet green fur. The air gurgling in his lungs was seven parts water, three parts alfalfa haze.

His Nikes thudded on pavement. His knees began to ache. So run through the ache. He concentrated on the first fat yellow stick of sunlight that melted into his back. On the cicadas that buzzed in the fields . . .

A horn blared.
Yikes.

Broker felt the mass of the vehicle loom behind him, heard the motor, and then the burned-rubber screech of tires skidding on hot asphalt. He jumped sideways, across the gravel shoulder into the damp weeds as the white Bronco swerved to a stop in front of him.

Panting, blinking sweat, Broker watched John Eisenhower get out. Usually John, with his tidy blond mustache, came on like a well-groomed German butcher: thick with muscle, starched, a suggestion of freshly scrubbed dots of blood. This, however, was a rumpled John Eisenhower wearing a sweated-through blue T-shirt out over baggy jeans and his pager and service pistol. Eisenhower drew himself up and inspected Broker, looked up at the sky, then back at Broker. After several beats he shook his head and said, “Running in the fucking sun. No hat.”

“How you doing, John?” Broker said.

They stared at each other for a few more beats.

“You look like you’ve been up all night,” Broker said as he studied Eisenhower’s face. This morning the sheriff’s usually ruddy complexion was gray as wrinkled newsprint. His eyelids quivered.

“I been up all night,” John said. His management style was to always find one thing to appreciate about a person. He pointed at Broker’s cropped head. “I like the hair.”

“Thanks,” Broker said. “So you still wearing white socks, with your wingtips?” John was this clean freak, anal, squared away—a real straight copper. Except when he got into his dark side. Then he was into being real tricky. When he was into his real tricky mode, he always seemed to come looking for Broker.

Like now.

“How’d you find me?” Broker squinted in the sun.

“Jeff,” John said.

“Jeff gave his word not to blow my getaway,” Broker said. Tom Jeffords was Broker’s neighbor up on the north shore of Lake Superior. He was also the Cook County sheriff.

“Gave his civilian word, not his brother sheriff word. Especially after I told him I intended to put you to work,” John said. “But he didn’t appreciate getting called at midnight.”

“Midnight, huh?”

“Yeah. Get in the truck,” John said.

Broker got in the passenger side. John reached in back, searched around, and tossed Broker a wrinkled sweatshirt. “Wipe yourself off; all the sweat is going to shrink my leather seats.”

As Broker swabbed off a surface layer of sweat, John whipped the Bronco in a tight U-turn and headed back toward Milt’s driveway.

“So who’s dead?” Broker said.

John grimaced and took a long stare into a passing cornfield. Then he jerked his thumb at a rural mailbox that zipped by. “Biggest complaint this summer is mailbox bashings. Kids get drunk and go down the road at one in the morning with baseball bats and wail on mailboxes.” John ground his teeth. “Second-biggest complaint is property line disputes.”

Broker bided his time, letting his friend unwind.

John reached under his seat, pulled up a manila envelope, and tossed it in Broker’s lap. Broker undid the tie fastener and took out a plastic evidence bag. It contained a silver medallion on a chain. The medal was three-quarters of an inch long, appeared to be silver, and was engraved with a crude icon of a man in robes with a halo. A premonition started to tickle the bottom of his mind.

“St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker. Seven fifty on the Internet,” John said.

Broker sat quietly while an icy shiver wiggled through his chest. As they turned into Milt’s driveway, Broker peered into the dark stand of oaks on either side of the road. Shadows still ruled the dawn, but they were already hot, exhausted shadows. The shadow that flickered through his heart went way past cold into layers of doubt, remorse, and something Broker didn’t readily admit to feeling.

An old fear, long dormant, had raised its head.

“I got a dead priest. A dead fucking priest in Stillwater with
that
stuffed in his mouth, with all the hooha that’s going on in the Church,” John said, jabbing his finger at the evidence bag.

“The Saint,” Broker said. But what he thought was what cops in the St. Croix River valley usually thought when the subject of the Saint came up:
This was about Harry Cantrell.

John parked next to Broker’s black Ford Ranger in back of Milt’s house and settled in to gave Broker a few moments to digest the information. Broker got out of the Bronco, walked down to the shore, kicked off his shoes and socks, went out on the dock, and dived into the St. Croix to quench his sweat.

He had learned to carefully keep his worst memories confined in compartments so they didn’t bleed into his life. Now, surfacing in the tepid river water, he suspected that John wanted him to visit one of them.

John was waiting on the stairs leading up to the deck when Broker walked back to the house. As they climbed the steps, Broker pointed to the evidence bag in John’s hand and asked the obvious question: “You think Harry is involved?”

John pursed his lips and shrugged. “I always thought Harry knew who the Saint was. Now it’s time he came clean.”

Broker motioned John into the kitchen. Quickly he put a filter into the Chemex beaker, ground the mocha java beans, dumped them in the brown inverted paper cone, and poured in boiling water from the kettle on the stove. While the coffee dripped, he ducked into the bathroom, stripped off his wet shorts, and rubbed down with a towel. He pulled on dry shorts and a T-shirt and returned to the kitchen.

John had taken over adding water to the coffeemaker. Broker
poured two cups, and they went back out on the deck and sat facing each other on wooden chairs. John placed the evidence bag containing the medallion on the patio table between them.

“So lay it out,” Broker said,

“You know St. Martin’s, the little church on the North End in Stillwater?” John said.

“Sure. I thought it was closed up.”

“Pretty much, but they stuck a new priest in there part-time just to keep it open. What they call a mission church. Father Moros was like a caretaker. Besides the janitor, the only other person there is a volunteer secretary. She’s the one who went back to the church last night looking for her misplaced checkbook. She found him a little after seven,” John said.

“Yeah?”

“He’d been shot sitting in the confessional. Twice through the screen in the booth. Then the shooter came around for a coup de grâce. Total of three rounds in the head and throat, something on the small side: .32 or .22, close range. The ME thinks just after six
P.M.
”

“How’d you nail down the time?” Broker said.

“Okay—a guy who lives next door to the church is sitting on his porch. He sees a woman go into the church at six. Or—check this—he says,
It could have been a guy dressed like a woman.
But he didn’t see her come out.”

“He hear anything?”

“The Crime Lab guys found this green residue in the wounds, like the plastic in pop bottles. Remember
The Anarchist Cookbook
?” John said.

“Homemade silencer. Great. And they put the medallion in the mouth just like the Saint did in the Dolman case?” Broker said.

“There it is. The implication being another child molester gets his just deserts. And not just any pervert; this guy’s a priest.”

Broker inclined his head. “There’s kinda a lot of that going around this season.”

“Yeah. It’s getting to be—say five Hail Mary’s and give kindly old father Murphy a hand job. The media . . .” John raised his hands and pawed at something distasteful in the air. He pronounced “the media” as if he were raising Satan.

“I get the picture. What do you want?” Broker said.

“I want you to check around to see what’s in Moros’s background. See if the shoe fits.”

“C’mon, you got people who can do that,” Broker said directly.

John met Broker’s squint with tired but very steady blue eyes. “I need a certain touch on this, just for a few days,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Where’s Harry fit in?”

John nodded. “Okay, I’m getting to that. This priest transferred into St. Martin’s two months ago from Albuquerque. So last week the secretary—the one who found him—gets this anonymous call from his old parish. The caller insists Moros got chased out of Albuquerque for molesting little girls. One of those hush-hush geographic cures the Church is not supposed to be doing anymore.

“So the secretary’s no dummy; she watches the news about the current priest hysteria. So she called it in. Since the Dolman case, Harry has this proprietary interest in anything that sounds like child abuse, so the call was routed to him. He made some inquiries and cleared it. We checked his computer last night, and his notes said, basically: this priest just transferred into a defunct church where the average age of the dozen remaining parishioners is seventy-two, with no kids. In his opinion, just another bullshit anonymous tip,” John said.

“Sounds pretty straightforward,” Broker said. “So what’s the deal?”

“I just want you to check out where Harry was last night. To eliminate him from the git-go.”

Suddenly on edge, Broker came forward in his chair. “He’s
your
sergeant. Goddammit, John; Harry and I barely say hello to each other anymore.”

John’s eyes did not waver. “Harry fell off the wagon just about the time he took the complaint call last week. Looks like he drank all weekend. He came in shit-faced Monday morning and pulled a horror show in the unit. I took his badge and gun and suspended him for fifteen days. And I got it in writing from the union, he has to go into chemical dependency treatment, in-patient. We’ve reserved a bed for him at St. Joe’s in St. Paul.”

Broker rubbed his forehead, amazed. “Jesus,” he said.

“He isn’t answering his phone. So I want you to find him and put him in that bed. In the process, you push him hard about this case and the Saint’s case. He’s on the ropes, he just may come apart and tell us something,” John said.

“I dunno, John, sounds like he’s a sick man,” Broker said.

“Fuck sick, I want you to lean on him.” John put special emphasis on the
you
.

Broker exhaled and looked past John at the solid wall of heat rising over Wisconsin. “Harry always has trouble with the first half of July,” he said.

John got up
to use the bathroom. Alone, Broker reviewed the Saint’s case that had created a sensation in the St. Croix River valley and throughout the state last summer.

“The Saint” was the nickname the media attached to a vigilante killer who, in the popular mind, stepped up to dispense punishment to Ronald Dolman. Dolman had taught first grade at Timberry Trails Elementary School. Timberry was a sprawl of housing, malls, and cul-de-sacs that had popped up like pricey toadstools on the farmland south of Stillwater.

After a thorough investigation, Dolman had been charged with molesting six-year-old Tommy Horrigan. Washington County assistant prosecutor Gloria Russell had gone after Dolman with great energy. Her method of eliciting testimony from Tommy was earnest but carefully orchestrated to avoid the appearance of leading or coaching.

But the defense attorney had skillfully questioned the veracity of Tommy the child’s testimony compared to Dolman the adult’s. The jury handed down a troubled verdict; although believing that
Dolman was probably guilty, they could not unanimously dispel reasonable doubt.

Dolman was acquitted.

Two days after the acquittal, somebody did a Mickey Spillane on Dolman. He was found shot to death in his living room with twelve pistol rounds at close range.

Like
I the Jury
, people said.

Rumors raced through the county that Washington County detective sergeant Harry Cantrell, the original lead investigator on the case, had taken upon himself to step in and correct some basic system failure. Then there was a debate about the six spent .38-caliber cartridges that had been found next to Dolman’s body. The Saint had reloaded to make his twelve-shot point. Some argued that Harry would never be so thoughtless as to leave brass lying around a crime scene. Others said that it would be just like Harry to leave the brass on purpose, to make it look like some asshole civilian.

The investigation went cold. And no one really mourned the passing of Ronald Dolman.

After Dolman’s murder, thousands of people in the Twin Cities began wearing St. Paul Saints baseball jackets to show support for the vigilante. The Saint became a mythic unsolved case and a cautionary tale in metropolitan Minnesota.

In addition to being a top cop, Harry Cantrell cut a colorful figure as a drinker, womanizer, and gambler. He loved cultivating rumors about himself; the more provocative the better. And not least among the baggage he carried was an acute reputation for meting out street justice.

When John returned, Broker was studying the St. Nicholas medallion in the evidence bag. The Saint’s calling card.

“Dolman was a thirty-eight, right? The famous mystery cartridges left on the scene,” Broker said.

John nodded. “And the priest is a smaller caliber. It’s preliminary, could be fragments. But, like I said, probably a twenty-two.”

“Is this the same medallion?” Broker said.

“Looks the same to me. I’m not about to call the state Crime Lab and get the original for a comparison. I don’t want that getting out. Not yet. It’ll be an instant made-for-TV movie when the press gets ahold of this. We need a little breathing room.” John chewed the inside of his lip. “St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children. I looked it all up again last night.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints
.”

“Quaint touch,” Broker said.

John nodded. “Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor in the fourth century. He was rich, and he donated his wealth to charity. He’s associated with the legend of the three children. He knew this guy who went broke and was on the verge of selling his three daughters into prostitution. Nicholas would sneak over to the poor man’s house when it was dark and toss in bags of gold to provide dowries for the daughters. So the children were saved.”

“What about the Santa Claus angle?”

“That came later, after his legend got mixed up with our German ancestors who wouldn’t let go of their damned evergreen.”

“Well, this guy isn’t tossing bags of gold.”

“We’d always assumed the Saint was a guy. Now we got this witness throwing in a twist: was it a woman, or a guy in drag? And in case we’re slow with the medallion—the suspect was wearing a Saints jacket.”

Broker came forward in his chair again, but slower this time. He leaned his elbows on the table and gave John his full attention. “John, did you drive out here to suggest that Harry Cantrell got drunk and dressed up like a woman to go shoot a priest?”

John raised his arms and scratched at his sweaty hair with both hands in an exasperated gesture. “When Dolman got off, a lot of people in the county said, ‘I ought to shoot the sonofabitch’—including me. Then somebody did. Some people think Harry was the Saint. Like I said, I’m not one of them. But he
knows
something. I always figured the Saint was a soccer mom who reached her bullshit limit, and she’d be damned if Dolman was going to come back to school and teach
her
kid. I always thought we should have looked closer at all the parents at that school. But we didn’t have the resources.” John shook his head. “Now I’m not so sure. I’m worried it could be someone in the county.”

“Slow down. What if your witness talks to a reporter, the neighbors? There goes your breathing room,” Broker said.

John smiled quickly. “Not likely. He’s sweating a possession charge. He’s an aging biker who sold a bag of grass to one of my undercover guys. Which put him over the line on points. He’s looking at going inside. We can deal him up. He’ll stay quiet.”

“So who knows about the medallion?”

“The Stillwater cop who answered the call. And the Stillwater mayor and his police chief. My investigator, Lymon Greene; his sergeant, Maury Seacrest.” John paused. “You know Maury.”

Broker winced. “So every cop in the metro east of the Mississippi knows. What about the secretary who found the body?”

“She’s cool; she didn’t see the medallion. We took her statement, and she and her husband agreed to go on vacation up to Mille Lacs a few days early.”

“What about the Ramsey County ME and the BCA Crime Lab guys? They processed the scene.”

“They don’t know. It stays quiet until I get back,” John said.

“Back?” Broker sat up in his chair, skeptical. “The Saint just blew into town, and you’re leaving?”

“My wife’s dad just died. So the funeral’s in Seattle.”

“That’s not immediate family, John.”

“Sorry, gotta go.”

Broker gave his old friend the barest smile. “What the hell are you doing?”

John’s expression was clearly conflicted. “I’m understaffed. My top investigator is drunk on his ass and a total embarrassment; my other sergeants are tied up in court.
I’m
going to a funeral. My deputy chief is doing the course at the Southern Police Institute.”

“Bullshit. You got Art Katzer in charge of Investigations,” Broker said.

“He took off for SWAT training.”

“When? At midnight when he heard about the priest and the medallion and Harry falling off the wagon?”

“Okay—I’m throwing the dice on this one. If I’m right and Harry knows who the Saint is, I’m betting you can get him to cough it up. If I’m wrong . . .” John shook his head.

“Yeah, right or wrong you bring in somebody expendable, who isn’t part of your department, so it can’t blow back on you,” Broker said.

John grinned tightly. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but, ah, yeah. So is that a yes or a no?”

“You’re asking a lot,” Broker said.

“I know, but I figure you can handle it. Look, there’s a national scandal about the Church, and I got a dead priest with a radio-active clue stuck in his mouth that identifies him in the popular mind as a child molester. I gotta know if this priest was dirty.” John paused. “We’re not set up to handle a high-profile murder investigation. I don’t want the state guys moving in on this before we know what we’ve got. And I don’t want a media high carnival—the archdiocese in St. Paul doesn’t need that kind of grief on top of everything else. I need someone to check out Moros’s background
without making any waves. I mean like invisible. I got Maury, but he doesn’t exactly have the contacts you do.”

Broker shrugged. “I never was a straight-ahead investigator, John. You know that.”

John let a cynical smile play across his face. “C’mon, Broker. You tell people you retired because you invested wisely in real estate on the north shore years ago. And you own a resort up there. But I know that five years ago you and Nina smuggled several tons of buried gold bullion right under the noses of the Hanoi politburo, on through Laos and Thailand and into Hong Kong.” John paused, got no denial, then began again.

“You live off credit cards. Banks in Bangkok and Hong Kong pay the bills. Last year your credit card totals were twice your declared income. The FBI keeps the IRS off your back because you helped the bureau penetrate the Russian Mafia three years ago.”

“You’re being dramatic, John,” Broker said. “But I’ll admit I’m just a little curious about where you got the stuff about the credit cards.”

John rolled his eyes. “I sit on task-force planning sessions with all this alphabet soup: FBI, ATF, DEA, IRS. People have a few drinks, and they talk. C’mon, you pirate. Do me this favor, okay?”

They went silent, and then the silence became awkward as John started to speak and wound up chewing back false starts until finally he said, “There’s a card inside on the table. It’s your birthday, right?”

“Fuck you, John.”

John chewed some more silence, then spoke. “Nina and Kit, you . . .”

“Don’t,” Broker said sharply.

John sat back and folded his heavy arms across his chest and waited. Twenty seconds. Thirty.

“Who would I report to?” Broker said.

John grinned. “Nobody. Your kind of play, totally on your own. I hire you as a Special Projects consultant.”

“No paperwork, no office, no desk,” Broker said.

John held up reassuring hands. “No paperwork, no desk. We can stay in touch by phone. You said your license was current?”

“Yeah, no problem there.”

“So I’ll get you an ID and a badge. You need a gun?”

“I still have the old forty-five. That’ll do, if it comes to that.”

John gave Broker a direct fatal look and said, “You know me, I don’t go in for dramatics, right? But we’re talking you and Harry here. If he’s drinking, you wear the gun. Okay?”

Broker nodded. “Gotcha.”

John nodded. “Okay then. We’re on. Just keep it mostly legal.”

Broker smiled thinly. “I won’t alienate any voters, John. I understand you have to get reelected.”

“Good. But we have to put it together fast. Like this morning. I have to go home and pack.”

Broker shrugged. “Let me grab a shower and get dressed. I’ll meet you at the Law Enforcement Center in half an hour.” He pointed at the medallion. “What about this?”

John put it back in the envelope. “It’s going in my safe until I get back.” They walked down the steps toward John’s truck. John shifted from foot to foot and pursed his lips. “Another thing . . .”

“What?”

“Keep an eye on this young cop who’s working the case, Lymon Greene. Give me a gut read on him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Sometimes the sheriff is the last to hear what the troops are saying down in the trenches. I want to know why Lymon and Harry are always about an inch from fist city.”

John Eisenhower got in his Bronco, fastened his seat belt, put both hands on the steering wheel. “You know what the troops call
rumors about Harry being the Saint—they call it ‘the elephant in the living room.’” He started the truck, then leaned forward feeling with his hand for the cold air to start coming through the A/C vent.

Broker shook his head. “Too hot to go elephant hunting.”

“Broker, the guy needs help. Somebody has to have a Come-to-Jesus with him. I wish it wasn’t you. But he’s got most everybody else either dazzled or buffaloed.” John shook his head. “I never liked Harry, going all the way back to the rookie school in St. Paul. He’s got the best instincts of any cop I ever knew and the worst methods of acting on them.” John paused a few beats and then stared directly at Broker. “And you know that better than anyone.”