Vapor Trail (16 page)

Angel glided at the edge
of the group of parents who were putting down blankets and unfolding camp chairs on the grass next to a fenced-in baseball diamond. She wore a sleeveless blouse, clam diggers, and sandals as she sauntered across the steamy playing field.

Just another mom.

That’s what the prospect probably thought.

Look at him, just the nicest guy. Gathering the kids around him on the sidelines. Hands and eyes. Six-year-olds. Boys and girls in yellow T-shirts and baseball caps.
Tigers,
the script on the shirts said. Watch his hands and his eyes. The way they move among the young bodies.

George Talbot was a T-ball coach. Thirty-seven years old. Mid-management at 3M. He was husky, jowly, with a heavy four-o’clock shadow and ruddy cheeks.

Watch his hands and eyes.

He had fast little eyes behind a constant smile. And quick small hands. Dainty hands. At odds with his thick muscular legs.

Angel scanned the parents. Maybe one of them had made the
call. Saw something. The complaint had been vague and anonymous.
Don’t trust him around the kids. Something about the way he is with the children.

The boys and girls were paired off and struggled to catch the soft baseballs in their oversized mits. And Angel was thinking that some parents could be playing dirty politics.
My kid isn’t in the first lineup. My kid is always in the outfield. My kid isn’t getting enough playing time
. So get the coach. So make an anonymous phone call. Smear him.

Look at him, hopelessly normal. Handing out batting helmets to the first kids in the batting order. Remember, not all men are bad. Patience, Angel; you must be sure. Very serious stuff. Got to be sure. And keep moving.

Her eyes scanned the playing field, the cars parked along the street. She was looking for I-am-a-cop antennae sticking up on an unmarked car. She had to be careful.

Nothing specific in the news about the dead priest. Not a peep about A. J. Scott.

No mention of the medallions.

They were getting tricky on her.

Have to be careful.

After the game George drove down Greeley and joined the kids and their parents at Nelson’s Ice Cream Parlor. Hot, crowded around the flimsy plastic tables in the parking lot; the ice cream dripped. George wiped the spill from a boy’s thigh. Close quarters, all sweaty and jostling.
Did the hand linger? Did the knuckles drift across the boy’s crotch?

Angel, watching from across the parking lot, could not be sure.

Reasonable doubt.

Though accelerated, her system of fact-finding and punishment wasn’t arbitrary. The more she watched George Talbot roughhouse and joke with his boys, the less certain she was.

Good touch or bad touch?

She was leaning toward not charging George.

Good touch.

She was thinking maybe George would get to live his ordinary comfortable life. She was thinking that if she knew George, she’d tell him to eat smaller portions and get more exercise.

The matter was clinched half an hour later as she trailed George home. He lived north of town, in an area so recently opened to development that the houses were on huge one-acre lots. The rules of rural vigilance applied here. Any car that came down this road would be noticed. Living out here, George could keep a loaded shotgun.

And the house itself was not friendly to approach; it sat three hundred yards off the road next to a small pond. Angel observed a golden retriever, tongue hanging out, race down the long driveway to meet George as he drove in. Going past, Angel saw a basketball hoop on the garage. Two girls, short, dark haired, playing badminton.

From the corner of her eye she saw the mom come out; George’s soul mate with dark hair, also in need of exercise. Her last impression of George Talbot was that he’d changed his name. With his dark complexion and the animated way he and his wife talked with their hands and touched each other as he got out of his car, he could be Italian or Greek.

Angel continued down the road. Too open around the house, and to get inside she’d have to get past the dog. Angel didn’t know how to neutralize a frisky seventy-pound golden retriever.

No way I would harm an animal.

Uh-uh.

And then it’s summer; the wife and kids are around . . .

No, he presented too many problems for her minimal surveillance skills. And these problems make it easier to err on the side of reasonable doubt.

George Talbot, you are free to go.

* * *

Letting George off the hook left a void in her evening. So she went home, changed into her running duds, and hit the steamy streets. The heat buoyed her, carried her, had become the chrysalis for her mission. Like infection, it concentrated the poison and drew it to the surface. Now she felt it pooling all around her, in the humid dark, in her sweat, as her shoes thudded on the concrete.

And it was literally all around.

As she ran a circuit of streets at dusk, she watched the light drain out of the sky, to be replaced by an artificial light flickering from living rooms.

Murder kenneled in the television sets. Along with assault, rape, things blowing up; tits and ass on prime time.

Kids in there with their upturned faces getting fat eating munchies were learning that killing was just another point-and-click solution. When she was little, the boys played with toy guns and fought with their fists. Now the kids weren’t allowed to have toy guns, and they shot each other with 9 mms.

Face it,
Angel thought,
I am nothing more than all of you carried one step farther.

I am as normal as breathing the electronically tinted air coming off all those video tubes.

Whatever.

Focus.

She was getting close to the end of her spree. She had to start tying up the loose ends. She made a mental note to do a little research on a certain someone. To find out if they were right- or left-handed.

Angel flung out her arms and thrust her chest forward, sprinted through an imaginary finish line.

Yes.

Broker talked to J. T.
on his cell as he drove, explaining his predicament. J. T. mostly listened. Then Broker hung up and traveled the back roads south into Lake Elmo. Ordinarily he’d enjoy this drive; escaping the malls, the subdivisions, the freeways. The last few miles to J. T.’s farm, Broker traveled on a timeless two-lane county road. Just rolling fields broken up by tree lines and the silhouettes of silos and barns floating on the horizon in the haze of heat.

Pretty country, except Broker’s eyes kept wandering to his rearview mirror, where he could see the face of the grinning driver of the red Stillwater Towing truck that had loaded his shit-afflicted Ranger on its flat tilt bed.

The sign by the mailbox said: Royal Kraal Ostriches. J. T. Merryweather ran about two hundred birds on one hundred acres. Besides the pens for the stock, J. T. had fields in alfalfa, oats, and corn. He had a big red barn and a comfortable farmhouse in the shade of a huge willow tree. Today the long willow branches hung like a limp hula skirt.

Broker directed the tow truck driver to unload the Ranger next to a manure spreader J. T. had parked by the barn. He paid the driver and watched the truck turn back on the county road and disappear.

Then he walked toward the toolshed in the lower level of the barn. He passed a bird pen, and several of the eight-foot-tall hens bobbed along in the heat; a gaggle of long legs, long necks, big popped-out curious eyes, and droopy gray feathers.

Broker selected two short-handled shovels and a hoe and stepped back outside. He was fighting the sinking thought that the whole truck cab was a write-off.

Goddamn Harry.

He went around the barn and spotted a green tractor hitched to a box kicker and the red rails of a hay wagon marooned out on an alfalfa field.

Then he spotted a golf cart scooting along the side of the field, heading in toward the barn. Broker waited in the barn shadow, priming the handle of the hand pump, then bending to the stream of cold artesian water and slaking his thirst. He straightened up and inhaled the heat-fermented malt from the bins of oats, the stacked alfalfa bales. He watched the barn cats scuttle through the stanchions of an old windmill tower.

J. T. Merryweather wheeled his golf cart up to the barn, got out, walked toward Broker, and flung an arm at the sky.

“Farmer’s nightmare: burned on top and wet on the bottom. Not a good day to have a hay crop cut and lying in the field. Goddamn humidity is 83 percent. Just won’t dry out.” Broker followed J. T.’s gaze, squinting up at the orange smear in the haze.

J. T. wore a black Stetson, was six feet tall, and was cooked black on black by the sun. He was field-hand lean, leaner than he’d been in years. Farmwork and fresh air agreed with him more than the desk he’d used as a captain running St. Paul Homicide.
His face was large and generous, but his tight brown eyes had always preferred the mysteries of the sky to the predictable people beneath it. So he took early retirement and started up this farm.

They shook hands.

Broker looked around. “Where’s Denise and Shammy?” J. T.’s wife and daughter were not in sight.

“Denise took Shammy to the Cities, club team tournament.”

Broker nodded. The daughter practiced basketball like a religion.

“Okay, let’s go have a look,” J. T. said. He couldn’t suppress a grin.

“Not funny, goddammit. Look at that.” Broker jabbed his finger at the shattered mirror.

“Six hundred yards, you say.” J. T. mulled it over.

“More like six hundred fifty. I walked it off,” Broker said.

“The man always could shoot,” J. T. said.

Broker dug in his pocket and showed J. T. the .338 round. “He gave me this as a taunt when it all started, like I told you on the phone. The drunk sonofabitch could have killed me!”

J. T., who, like Harry, had a basement full of reloading presses, took the rifle bullet from Broker and turned it over in his fingers. “That’s a 378 Weatherby Magnum necked down to 338. Weatherby’s a low-end elephant gun. Basically this shell casing is too big for the bullet, got way too much powder behind it. I’m surprised the whole mirror frame didn’t explode. And if he would have clipped you anywhere around the head, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because your head would be this fine red mist floating over a strawberry bog in Wisconsin.”

“Spare me the hymn to gun freaks, okay?”

“Just saying . . . he hit what he wanted to hit. Six hundred yards is an easy shot for a guy like Harry. He’s just fuckin’ with you.” J. T. tossed the bullet back to Broker, who caught it, stuck it in his pocket, and turned toward his truck.

Grumbling, he opened the passenger door, and the full aroma of the sun-ripened cow dung rolled over him.

J. T. spotted the badge-and-gun sign, the arrow pointing down, and began to howl.

Broker ignored his glee and started shoveling out clots of manure. J. T. went around to the other side with the other shovel. “Eureka,” J. T. crowed as he gingerly lifted Broker’s .45 on his shovel. A moment later they found the badge.

J. T. brought out a five-gallon can full of kerosene and dumped in the gun and badge. He turned back to the truck. “Forget the shovel. Get on the horn and call your insurance agent; call it vandalism, whatever. You’re going to have to replace everything, the seats, the dash. I doubt you’ll ever get the smell out.”

“Can’t hire a couple farm kids to scrub it out, huh?”

J. T. snorted. “Shee-it. They are no more farm kids. Average age of the American farmer is fifty-seven.” J. T. toed the dirt. “You know, I was you, I’d think of changing trucks. You don’t have a lot of luck with Fords.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, two years ago August, Popeye kicked your last Ranger to junk; now this,” J.T . said.

True, J. T. had made the mistake of driving Broker’s truck into a pen with Popeye, his four-hundred-pound aggressive stud. Popeye had pulverized the truck with kicks and damn near killed J.T. when he made a break for it. Now Popeye was gone. J. T. had sent for the fatal ride on the big truck.

“It ain’t like you’re on a fixed income,” J. T. said. “What do you think about the Toyota Tundra?”

Broker waved his hand in a disgusted gesture. They left the truck and took the can of kerosene over to an outside workbench next to the toolshed. J. T. went in the shed and came out with two wire brushes and a handful of small glass jars.

Broker fished out the badge, unpinned it from the leather backing, and hurled the round hunk of leather at the nearby burning barrel. No way the leather would ever clean up. He scrubbed at the badge with the wire brush.

Meanwhile J. T. methodically took the .45 apart and put the various pieces in the glass jars. He took out a Leatherman tool and patiently began to remove the smallest screws.

“Whoa. I’ll never be able to get that back together,” Broker said.

“I’ll give you a loaner,” J. T. said. When he had the pistol totally disassembled, he poured clean kerosene into the jars.

They scrubbed their hands under the pump with Boraxo, then went over to the picnic table in the hot shade of the willow. J. T. went in the house and came out with a frosted pitcher of iced tea. He took out his pipe. Broker reached for a cigar, then, still hot and shaky from his walk in the sun, decided not to.

J. T. lit his pipe and poured iced tea. He took a sip and stared at the dusky waves of heat rolling over his fields. “Got a call this morning. Bubble Butt Reardon’s dead. Dehydrated. Heat stroke. Just like Corey Stringer. Cutting his lawn . . .”

“Aw, Christ.” Broker stared at the cold glass of tea in his hand. Reardon had been a notoriously overweight St. Paul detective.

J. T. lifted his iced tea. “Push fluids.”

“Amen.”

After a moment J. T. said, “You know, I never believed that bullshit about Harry being the Saint. Harry is a compulsive planner. That’s his training. Look how he set up that shooting gallery for you today. At the very least, he would have waited a year till all the fuss over the Dolman trial died down.” J. T. clicked his teeth and grimaced. “But I believe he’s capable of letting it slide if he did know who the killer was. John E. is right-on in that respect.”

“You worked with him, after I left St. Paul,” Broker said.

“Yeah. In Homicide, before he split for Washington County.” J. T. laughed. “And I kinda felt like Sidney Poitier playing Virgil Tibbs in
In the Heat of the Night
. You know, harnessed to redneck Rod Steiger. Harry was just this impossible bigot. But he was up front about it.”

“You didn’t get along.”

“Didn’t like each other from the jump—and said so. But we
functioned
because we respected each other, you follow?”

“He’s good; give him that.”

“Look, he’s an asshole. But he’s our asshole so he’s worth saving,” J. T. said. “But Harry all the way sober? I don’t know if we’re ready for that.”

“This ain’t funny, J. T. Look what he did to my truck.”

“I told you, man. You got bad luck with Fords.”

“Harry is a menace, J. T.; don’t sugarcoat it.”

“True, he’s hard to take. I wouldn’t want him around my family,” J. T. said. “I certainly wouldn’t want him talking to my teenage daughter. But I’ll tell you a dirty little secret: if my kid was in Columbine High School that day, you better believe I’d have wanted Harry to be the first cop on the scene.”