by Chuck Logan
Dried. It would be hours old.
He then studied the crash site and saw how the locked wheels had carved deep trenches in the gravel when Harry lost control overdriving the turn.
Broker looked back in the car. Like a drunken red flag, the keys were still in the ignition. On a hunch, he reached in and twisted them, to engage the electrical system. The digital clock on the dashboard blinked on and off, repeating the same number over and over: 6:42. Then the clock flickered, went dim, and then opaque.
He left the keys in the car and carefully inspected the road leading away from it. Squatting, moving slowly on his haunches, he searched for a blood trail.
A careful minute later he found a small ant war seething over a pizza crust. He returned to the car, leaned inside, and carefully inspected the smear on the air bag.
It had a dried anchovy stuck in it.
Okay. The carnage appeared more involved with cuisine than bloodshed. He got back in the truck and drove toward the house, parked, and got out.
Harry lived in a modest, comfortable rambler with stout vertical cedar planks for siding and a broad wraparound cedar deck. The door to the three-stall garage was open. A fishing boat sat on a trailer in one stall; the other two parking spaces were empty. Broker walked up and looked in the boat. It looked as if it had never been used.
He left the garage, went up the steps onto the deck to the door, which was also open. He peered in through the screen. Quiet. Empty. He rang the bell. Then rapped on the doorjamb.
"Yo? Anybody home?"
Getting no answer, he walked around the house on the deck. A good-size lawn in need of cutting inclined down to the lakeshore. There was a small dock with a rowboat tied off on a piling; a picnic table and a Weber grill sat on a patio. Several bullet-scarred
cast-iron targets in the shape of pigs lay on the picnic table. Another was propped up on a stand. Broker estimated it was fifty yards from the picnic table to the house; extreme pistol range for anyone except an expert.
He turned toward the house and looked into the windows. In the living room, he saw a flat white Broadway Pizza box lying on the carpet next to the couch. A sliding patio door led from the living room to the deck. Like the front door, it was open. This time Broker slid back the screen and stepped in.
"Hey? Anybody home?"
He walked a quick circuit of the house and found clothes hung on doorknobs and strewn in the hallway. He stepped over a pile of damp towels and entered the bathroom. Little wads of crumbled toilet paper littered the sink, dotted with blood. A wisp of bloody fingerprint marked the mirror glass of the cabinet door. A disposable Bic razor lay in the bottom of the sink.
The garbage can overflowed in the kitchen; dirty dishes piled the sink. The refrigerator contained nine bottles of Pabst, a piece of cheese green with mold, and three slices of pepperoni pizza on a plate.
Harry's contradictory patterns were evident in the littered house; underneath the surface debris the fundamentals—the carpets, counters, bathroom tile—were scrupulously clean.
The bedroom had rumpled sheets, an overflowing ashtray, an empty Scotch bottle. . . . His eyes stopped at the framed wedding picture on the bureau. Diane. Harry. And Broker. Another woman whose name he did not remember. The maid of honor.
He turned away from the bedroom and went down the stairwell to the basement, which looked like the nuts-and-bolts aisle in Home Depot. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were thick with a variety of cardboard and plastic containers. Except these boxes weren't for nuts and bolts; they held primers, powder, bul
lets, casings, and reloading dies. There had to be thousands of rounds of ammo here, in every conceivable caliber.
In the old days in St. Paul, Harry was famous for experimenting with pistol loads and trying them out on stray dogs.
A broad workbench spanned the area, with four reloading presses bolted to it. Two gun safes sat along the wall next to the shelves. Perhaps as a clue to Harry's current state of mind, the heavy doors on both safes were ajar.
Broker did not profess to know a whole lot about firearms. But he knew there were reloaders and there were serious shooters, and then there were wildcatters like Harry. And he knew that the small orange press on the right side of the bench was for sizing lead bullets and that the RCBS reloader next to it was for precision loading. These devices identified Harry as ultra-hard-core.
Broker walked up and perused the stacked boxes of reloading dies on the shelves. His eyes stopped on a box that read 338/378 K T. He vaguely understood this was a maverick caliber that was not commercially produced.
Curious, he went to the gun safes and looked in the first one. It contained all shotguns. He went to the second and saw a dozen rifles in the rack. His eyes immediately sought out the longest one; sleek and black with a distinctive muzzle brake perforating the end of the barrel.
This had to be the .338. Harry would have painstakingly assembled this rifle himself.
One look at the target knobs on top of the big Leupold field scope, and he was sure. The range finder was dotted in increments of 100 yards out to 1,200.
Broker lifted the big rifle and ran his palm along the custom fiberglass stock. He saw the Can Jar trigger with the two-ounce let-off and the bulky safety switch from a 1917 Enfield, the highly modified Enfield action.
This was Harry's idea of a good time. Go out on a calm day and punch holes in a pie plate at 1,000 yards. He'd always filled the sniper slot in the SWAT team. That's what the Marine Corps had trained him to be. And that's how he'd spent his time in the war.
Broker eased the rifle back in the safe and pushed both the doors until they clicked shut.
He went back up the stairs and returned to the living room, stooped, and inspected the pizza box. A yellow VISA receipt lay among a debris of chewed crusts. He recognized Harry's scrawled signature. It was dated 18:04 yesterday afternoon. Three empty bottles of Pabst were strewn at the foot of the couch along with a TV remote.
If the clock in the Acura had indeed jammed upon impact, that gave Harry thirty-eight minutes to make it from Broadway Pizza in downtown Stillwater to his driveway. Entertaining Lymon Greene's suspicions for a moment, Broker speculated that Harry could have driven to St. Martin's on the way home, parked his car, climbed into some kind of disguise, gone into the church, shot the priest, got back in the car, continued on home eating his pizza with one hand, steering with the other—and put his car into a tree. It was theoretically possible.
Darin Kagin's silent chattering face flickered on CNN at the edge of his vision. The TV had been left on, the sound muted. Broker reached over and tapped the remote button. The TV zapped off with an electronic sizzle.
He looked around one more time. No Harry.
He picked up Harry's phone and dialed Anne Mortenson's number from Mouse's instruction sheet. No answer. Then he tried the public library number and was transferred to the reference desk. "Anne Mortenson?"
"Yes?"
"This is Phil Broker with the Washington County Sheriff's Department. I'm looking for Harry Cantrell. Can you help me?"
There was silence on the line for a beat, two. "Yes, he called this morning and asked to borrow my car." Her voice was level and direct.
"And?"
"Pardon me?" Anne said.
"Did he borrow your car?" Broker said.
"Yes. His broke down. So I drove over and picked him up. He dropped me off at home; it's only a few blocks to work."
"Did you happen to see his car?"
"Ah, no. He met me at the end of his drive by the mailbox." For the first time there was a slight waver in her steady voice. Concern, like a dropped stitch. "Is this official or personal?"
"Welll . . ." Broker drew the word out.
Anne's voice regained its strength. "It's official, I imagine. Harry is under a cloud. It's about his drinking."
"Okay, you're right. I need to find him."
Anne cleared her throat. "When he's been drinking, I usually don't encourage that b
ehavior in any way. But on Wednesday mornings Harry visits his mother in the Linden Hills nursing home. I made an exception for that."
Broker hid his dismay. Initially, she had sounded smarter than that. "Linden Hills near downtown, on Green Street."
"That's it. He brings her flowers. She doesn't recognize him anymore, but she recognizes roses. That's Alzheimer's for you. He left here over an hour ago. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him."
Broker pulled a pen from his chest pocket, poised to write on Mouse's instruction sheet. "I need a description of your car."
"Yes, it's a new Subaru Forester, red, mono color, no cladding.
The S model." Anne gave him the plate number. As he wrote it down, she thought out loud, "Do you think maybe I made a mistake?"
Broker didn't want to give her a straight answer. "The sooner I find him, the better," he said. Then, after a quick thank you, he hung up and dashed for his truck.
Leaning forward in his seat, he pushed the Ranger over the speed limit, ran stop signs, and passed on the shoulder. Broker came into town hot and swung into the nursing home lot. He scanned the aisles of cars. No red Forester. He went inside, stopped at the reception desk, and inquired.
A nurse walked him down a hall into a private room. An elderly woman sat up behind a tray that was positioned across the bed. She was very involved in staring at a bouquet of roses.
"Every Wednesday morning Harry brings her flowers," the nurse said.
"How long ago did he leave?" Broker asked.
The nurse led Broker back into the hall and chatted with another nurse. She turned to Broker. "He was in and out, just making a delivery. So it was quite a while ago."
Back in the parking lot, Broker raised his eyes to the canopy of elms and cottonwoods where millions of leaves hung absolutely still, pressing down. His body suddenly crossed a threshold, and his sweat came all at once. Mopping his wrist across his brow, he stared across the hills, at the gingerbread facades on the houses, the quaint steeples, the river, the bridge.
Missed him.
Chapter Eight
Broker hated offices, so he moved fast through Washington County Investigations—a grid of gray cubicles with six-foot privacy walls that housed General Investigations, Fraud, and Narcotics. Art Katzer's empty office and a receptionist's desk were located at the head of the room. Interrogation rooms lined one wall; more cubicles made up the other.
He was looking for Mouse.
Several cops stirred around desks in white shirts and ties. They wore round leather backings with five-pointed county stars on their belts, along with holstered .40-caliber pistols. They were mostly older, mostly developing bellies. This being the far reaches of the Twin Cities' eastern suburbs, they were all white.
Several took a sideways look at Broker, then dropped their eyes. John's outsider.
Mouse's bulk was unmistakable at the end of the room next to the coffeepot. Their eyes made solid contact on the order of an eight-ball break shot.
"I got something for you," Mouse said.
Then the phone on Broker's hip rang. He picked up and heard Jack Malloy's voice. "Is this personal, or are you working?" Jack asked.
"Can you stay put? I need a sec," Broker said.
"You are working," Malloy said.
"Yep. For John Eisenhower."
Broker came up to Mouse and took him by the arm and walked him through the security door into the hall. He held up a finger to shush Mouse and turned back to the phone. "Victor Moros was a caretaker priest at St. Martin's in Stillwater. Are you with me so far, Jack?" Broker said.
"Yes, we heard this morning that Moros died. But the details are coming very slowly."
"Are we cool, Jack? Like way off the record here?"
"You're going to have give me cause, but we're cool."
"Good. Then I can tell you that the details are slow in coming because he was shot to death last night, in his confessional."
"Oh, my God—here . . ." Malloy's voice staggered. It was silent on the line for a moment, and Broker didn't need paranormal powers to divine what Malloy meant when he blurted: here.
"It gets a lot worse, Jack. We have to keep this strictly between us," Broker said. "You still with me?"
"Sure."
"He had a St. Nicholas medallion stuffed in his mouth," Broker said.
Jack Malloy groaned. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the Saint. Great, so now it's really come here. We've had charges made, threats; but not a death. The press . . ."
"No press; not yet. We're sitting on the case. But I need a fast read on Moros's background, and it has to be absolutely discreet."
Malloy exhaled, steadied, and said, "I'm on it. Meet me here, at the rectory, at ten tomorrow morning."
"I'll be there."
Broker hung up and turned to Mouse, who was pushing the last crumbs of a doughnut into his mouth. "Okay—he's not home; his car was piled up against a tree in his driveway."
Mouse chewed, swallowed, and looked around for a place to get rid of his foam coffee cup. Broker took the cup from his hand. The door to Investigations snapped open; a young cop started out into the hall. Broker handed him the empty cup. The young cop looked at Broker, then at Mouse, and went back inside.
"And I talked to Annie Mortenson. She sounds way too straight for our boy," Broker said.
Mouse nodded sagely. It was a look he cultivated and played well with his battered features, weary blue eyes, and his bristly gray flattop haircut. "I figure Annie's his last resort; he keeps her around for formal occasions. She knows which fork to use, like that. So I figured this is a case where you go to the last resort first."
"Well, he got her to pick him up and lend him her car to take roses to his dear old mom who's in the nursing home," Broker said. "Except he'd already split from the nursing home by the time I got there."
"Down deep, when it comes to a dog like Harry taking flowers to his mother, even a sensible woman will melt into your basic enabler," Mouse said.
"His place was open, so I went in and looked around. He's got enough guns and ammo in his basement to rearm the Taliban," Broker said.
Mouse squinted his way into something like a smile. "Okay, so he's a hazard to navigation. Maybe he should be off the streets. Just so happens I found him."
"Goddammit, Mouse, why didn't you—" Broker said.
Mouse raised a finger to his lips, then pointed to the door to
Investigations, which appeared to be open a crack. He shook his head. "Cops. Snoopy bastards," he whispered. "Worse gossips than junior high girls."
They walked down the hall, left the sheriff's office, and stood in the lobby. Mouse yanked his thumb back toward the unit. "I run the north team; Harry runs the south team, right? Harry's lead detective used to be Benish, who got transferred to Fraud. But they stay in touch.
"So Benish comes up to me an hour ago and says, 'Tell Broker that Harry is playing cards at Ole's Boat Repair.' He also says Harry don't see the need to rush going to treatment. It ain't like they're going to move St. Joseph's in the next two weeks."
Broker allowed a faint smile. "Sounds like Harry. He figures to use every minute of his suspension to party. So he knows I'm on the job and about Moros and . . ."
"Sure; if Benish didn't tell him, there's half a dozen other people who could," Mouse said.
"So where's this Ole's?"
"Take Highway Ninety-five south toward Lakeland. About two miles this side of the slab, on the east side of the road there's this sailboat repair shop that went out of business."
Broker squinted, placing the location. "The slab" was cop talk for Interstate 94. "Yeah, okay. Tell me about the game," Broker said.
Mouse shrugged. "No sweat. It's a regular game in the back room. No actual bread on the table. It's all chips and markers. They settle up someplace else. Some hustlers cruise by and give it some flavor; but nothing heavy, they all know who Harry is. Mostly it's local guys with leisure time who like to rub shoulders with mildly criminal types. H
arry is a regular; he uses it as a listening post."
Broker and Mouse stared at each other for several beats. Finally, Broker said, "It's too easy."
"Yeah," Mouse said.
Broker extended his hand.
"What?" Mouse said.
"Gimme your cuffs. Just in case."
Broker sat for several minutes in his idling truck as the A/C hummed up to speed and put a sheet of artificial cool between him and the day.