Vapor Trail

by Chuck Logan

  He hadn’t consciously planned this; consciously, he was just buying some smokes. But now he knew that he was following a need to get close to the origin of this whole thing. So he stepped on the gas and raced past clusters of large framed homes. Then he topped a rise and saw the strip malls and monotonous condo barracks of Timberry sprawled below him.

  He pulled over, consulted his Hudson’s street map guide, got his bearings, and drove on. Ten minutes later he was in more open country. Then he pulled into the entrance to Timberry Trails Elementary School, where he was surprised to find a line of yellow school buses along the entry road.

  Summer school, maybe?

  Eight- and nine-year-olds wearing red safety patrol belts were walking out the front door, taking up positions at the buses. Broker parked, stubbed out his cigar, and popped a Certs in his mouth. As he approached the school entrance, it was as if they’d opened a faucet. Children squirted out the front door in a blur of color and squeals. They sluiced past him wearing shorts and T-shirts.

  He stood motionless as they swept past. Little nudges and tugs, like a happy rush of water. Open faces, innocent bright eyes.

  Trusting.

  He shook his head to clear out the sunspots and entered the building, crossed an atrium, and went into the administrative office. There was a basket on the reception desk containing red clip-on visitors’ badges. Broker picked one up, weighed it in his hand.

  The receptionist eyed him, smiling less and less the more she looked. “Are you a parent?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Broker said. “My daughter is in preschool.” In Italy. Broker dropped the visitors’ badge and took out the Washington County ID and showed it to the receptionist. “Maybe I could have a word with the principal?”

  “I . . . guess . . .” The receptionist turned and called through a doorway, “Marian, we have a police officer here . . .”

  The principal was a short, vigorous woman in her early sixties. She came to the door and sized up Broker. Her expression steadied down, but she continued to smile.

  “Come in,” she said. “Marian Hammond.”

  “Phil Broker.” They shook hands.

  “You don’t look well, Mr. Broker. Can I get you a glass of water?” Marian said as she closed the door.

  “I’m fine. It’s the heat.”

  “No, it’s the heat plus. I’m in the people business, and you look like trouble. May I see some identification, please,” Marian said promptly.

  Broker showed his new ID card.

  Marian scrutinized the ID. “Okay, so why is a detective in my school?”

  “I thought school was out.”

  “Special summer event day. Why are you here, Mr. Broker?”

  “I’m a temporary officer assigned to clearing out old files. I have a few questions about the Ronald Dolman case.”

  Marian raised her hand to her throat as Dolman’s name glided across the room like a dark-finned shadow. She dropped her hand and balled her fists. “What kind of questions?”

  “The boy involved . . .”

  Marian nodded. “Tommy Horrigan. He was six then; he’s seven now.”

  “Is he still . . . ?”

  “Of course not; his parents moved out of state, and they requested no forwarding address be given out.”

  “Okay. There’s no nice way to ask this one. Was Dolman buried in the county?”

  Marian was probably a grounded, compassionate woman. But she curled her lip, showed her teeth, and did not conceal the flash of disgust. “I’d have thought you people would know about that. Ronald Dolman was cremated, and his remains were thrown in the trash.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brother, was J. D. Salinger ever full of shit.

  Angel frowned as a mob of shouting eight-year-old boys rocketed past. Defiant, she refused to even wince when their churning bare feet pecked her with sand. She watched them tear along the crowded beach and yowl and smile goofy breathless grins when they trampled the sand castles that two quiet, serious-looking seven-year-old girls were constructing at the water’s edge.

  See, it’s all right there. The rampant Y chromosome and testosterone.

  Give me a break. No way boys could concentrate long enough to save anybody from running off a cliff. Much less find them in a field of rye. Look at them, tearing around. Probably, they’ll go off somewhere and light farts. Little fuckers.

  Holden Caulfield, no, thank you.

  Angel carefully picked grains of boy sand from her well-oiled arms, dusted off her towel, and then continued to rub SPF 40 sunscreen on her legs. She wore a broad sun hat, which left her face in shadow, and wide sunglasses. The tight wig was a bother in all this heat.

  But necessary.

  It was a sweltering late afternoon, the beach at Square Lake was packed with people, and Angel was far from invisible. No, today she had slipped free from her constraining sports bra and let out a little cleavage. Usually, she would wear a one-piece suit, but today was an exception. Today she was showing some skin.

  Aubrey Jackson Scott spent his afternoons on this beach, and since the heat spell fell on them like hot dishwater she’d observed him here several times. Now she thought she had a plan that might work. So she’d bought the new suit.

  He appeared to be omnivorous and might like a gal who was hanging out here and there. Angel got the impression that his appetites strayed all over the pasture and couldn’t be fenced in. He did kind of remind her of a goat.

  And he was a borderline exhibitionist. Which was sad, purely on the basis of evaluating his body type. He’d clearly been in shape once and let himself go. About thirty pounds over the line. Aubrey wore the briefest of swimsuits, a European job a bit skimpier than a Speedo, which sometimes nearly disappeared in the dross of his belly, or skinnied up between the cheeks of his butt. Once in the last hour Angel had watched two teenage lifeguards put their heads together and consult in his direction, presumably about his appearance.

  Angel could imagine their discourse: Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Right. That epitaph had graced a lot of tombstones.

  So they let Aubrey jiggle his overweight gut and rear end around the beach. With a heavy gold chain around his neck, he had to be the greasiest man Angel had ever seen. His body hair was matted in streaks. The man actually oozed. He looked as if he’d acquired his deep-fried tan from a full immersion dip in a vat of boiling fat at McDonald’s.

  Maybe he’d been discreet once, but he’d passed the point of control. Aubrey was definitely surplus population. Somebody had to come along with a pooper-scooper and remove him from the scene.

  Letting it all hang out wasn’t his only problem. From a distance of twenty feet, Angel watched Aubrey remove tobacco from the tip of a non-filter cigarette, then tamp something in the cavity. He lit up, took a deep drag, and held it in. She could distinctly smell the thick oily marijuana in the heavy air. She shook her head. The guy looked as if he lived in a cannabis haze of sensation. Men, women, boys, girls. You name it. He’d probably tried it with his vacuum cleaner.

  But she wasn’t capricious. She needed some proof that he belonged on the list. Angel took her work seriously; she was prepared to go pretty deep undercover to get her confirmation.

  Aubrey kept a blocky digital Nikon camera in his gym bag. He’d whip it out and grab snaps when the opportunity presented itself. She watched his camera follow a six-year-old girl in a blue bikini as she walked into the lake.

  He was close enough for Angel to hear the precise snap of the shutter.

  Angel had been moving in on him for more than an hour. Unaware that she was getting closer, he trolled his watery brown eyes up and down the crowded beach. Looking for strays, maybe. Except he had not approached any children. Occasionally, he just took some pictures. Once he walked down the beach, past the roped-off swim area, and snapped a group of scuba divers when they came ashore for a break; then he talked to them and wrote something down.

  Hmmm.

  Chapter Seventeen
/>   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.

  Chapter Eighteen

  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 dis
appeared 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.”