Vapor Trail (2003)

by Chuck Logan

  Working ten years deep undercover for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Broker had acquired reflexes, like sensing when he was being watched. And that's what had happened in the dairy aisle at the grocery store. Reaching for the nonfat vanilla yogurt he'd felt the short hairs on the back of his neck tickle up, and he turned around and locked into Janey's green eyes.

  Fancy meeting you, she'd said.

  Janey always was good. She could make a cliché chime with laughter and irony and secrets.

  And she had inclined her head forward so her tawny blond hair fell across her eyes in a sort of visual echo just in case he needed reminding how she used to look at him across a bedroom.

  Sixteen years ago.

  So this and that.

  And fancy running into Phil Broker, who was separated from his wife and getting skinny as he closed in on fifty. And she saw that he saw she was getting skinny with a vengeance as she braced for forty.

  It was typical of Janey to remember his birthday, and she would have followed him from the store to see where he was staying. He could almost visualize her waltzing up the stairs to Milt's deck.

  He told himself to get serious. Better that John had called than Janey.

  So he walked down the stairs and out onto the driveway and into a humid morning the color and consistency of simmering tapioca. The toe of his running shoe caught in the trap rock, and he stumbled. Getting clumsy.

  Getting old.

  Vaguely, he wondered what John Eisenhower had for him.

  But then he rallied. As he launched into his run, he lost the clumsiness and experienced a floaty moment of weightlessness and sheer bewilderment.

  You never planned on living this long, did you? So what do you do now?

  Chapter Three

  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. "Secondbiggest 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.
<
br />   "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.

  Chapter Four

  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 .38caliber 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."