by Chuck Logan
Too weary to argue, she nodded; then she got up and went into the porch and tried to talk to Kit. Broker watched Nina through the windows, saw her struggle in silent pantomime, head downcast; saw Kit embrace her mother, face upturned, nodding encouragement. Christ. It was almost like they were switching roles.
He took a deep breath, still having difficulty seeing Nina as…fragile. But she was right. She had to beat this thing with a minimum of interference.
Still…
He’d been around cops for over twenty years and watched as some of them peeled off and started to descend into themselves, drifting down this dark internal staircase. Usually it was the dead little kids-butchered, starved, abused-they encountered on the job that put them over the line. The main cop taboo was to show weakness, so they medicated with alcohol and hung tough till the pension kicked in. But once in a while a guy would find the dead kid he was trying to forget waiting in the basement at the bottom of those dark stairs, and he’d eat his gun.
Broker resolved to position himself on those stairs for her. Whatever it took.
On this one, he had to reach way back, to someone he’d known before he entered police work, or the odd string of adventures that followed his early retirement from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension eight years ago. After he got involved with Nina Pryce.
He flipped open his cell and called Harry Griffin, his old Vietnam buddy. He’d hunted with Griffin just last November…
Way up in Glacier County.
Chapter One
It was another March surprise. Yesterday the kids were playing in long sleeves and tennis shoes. Then the storm moved in last night, riding on serious cold that knocked everyone’s weather clock for a loop. Now there was a foot of fresh snow on the ground. The air temperature stuck on 18 degrees Fahrenheit, but the windchill shivered it down to 11. School policy put the kids out in the snow if the thermometer topped zero. Ten-thirty in the morning at Glacier Elementary. Recess.
The new kid was a snotty showoff, and it was really starting to bug Teddy Klumpe. Especially the way a lot of third-graders had gathered on the playground to watch her.
Just like yesterday, when she was doing skips on the monkey bars. Not just swinging, flying almost. And everyone big-eyed, checking her out, like wow. See that? Three-bar skip. Except today it so was so cold-ha-that her gloves slipped on the icy bars and she dropped off, the heels of her boots skidded in the snow, and she fell on her skinny rear end. But then she got up and studied the stretch of steel bars over her head; studied them so hard these wrinkles scrunched up her forehead. Slowly, as her breath jetted in crisp white clouds, she removed her gloves.
Boy, was that dumb. It was just too cold…
But it didn’t stop her. She mounted the wooden platform and carefully placed her gloves on the snowy planks. She blew a couple times on her bare hands, took a stance, gauged the distance, bent her knees, swung her arms back, and sprung. Parka, snow pants, bulky boots. Didn’t matter. Smoothly, she caught the third bar out.
Yuk. The thought of his bare skin touching that frozen steel made him wince. Along with the fact he was too heavy to propel himself hand over hand. But when she dropped back to the ground. Then he’d show her. Skinny, red-haired, freckle-faced little bitch.
The Klumpe kid was almost nine. Naturally powerful for his age, he packed an extra ten pounds of junk-food blubber in a sumo-like tire around his gut and his wide PlayStation 2 butt. Biggest kid in the third grade. Most feared kid. Knew the most swear words. King of the playground.
Screw her.
Teddy scouted the immediate area.
Mrs. Etherby, the nearest recess monitor, was watching the kids sliding down the hill on plastic sleds. The other monitor was on the far side of the playground, where some fourth-graders were building a snow fort.
Ten of Teddy’s classmates were standing over by the slide next to the monkey bars, making a winter rainbow of fleece red caps and blue and yellow Land’s End parkas against the oatmeal sky. All of them curiously watching Teddy and the new kid. They should be watching him take his snowboard down the hill. And repairing the bump jump when he smashed it apart. Instead, they were watching to see what he would do.
The new kid swung from the last bar, landed lightly on her feet on the far wooden platform, and blew on her chapped hands. Teddy eyed the gloves she’d left on the opposite end. As she leaped up and grabbed the bars for the return trip, Teddy walked over casually, snatched up her gloves, and stuffed them in his jacket pocket.
“Hey!” the kid yelled, swinging hand over hand.
Teddy ignored her and kept walking, around the back of a small equipment shed near the tire swings.
“Hey,” she said again, dropping to the snow and trotting after him. “Those are my gloves.” Her breath made an energetic white puff in the air. Two brooding vertical creases started between her eyebrows and shot up her broad forehead.
Teddy angled his face away from her but let his eyes roll to the edge of his sockets. Kinda like his dad did when he was getting ready to get really mad. He took a few more steps, drawing her farther behind the shed, out of sight from eyes on the playground. Then he spun.
“Liar,” he said.
She balled her cold hands at her sides and narrowed her green eyes. The creases deeper now, pulling her face tight. “Thief,” she said in a trembling voice.
Teddy saw the tension rattle on her face, turning it red. He heard the tremor in her voice. Little bitch is scared. Encouraged, he surged forward and pushed her chest hard with both hands. She went down on her butt in the snow. Then he yanked her gloves from his pocket and tossed them up on the roof of the shed, where they stayed put in a foot of snow.
“Yuk,” Teddy wiped his own gloves on the front of his jacket. “Now I got girl cooties all over me.”
She was starting to get up, working to hold back tears.
“Now you’re gonna cry. More girl cooties,” Teddy said with a grin.
“No, I ain’t,” she said in a trembling voice as she drew hard, pulling the tears back inside her eyes. She pushed up off the snow.
“Crybaby girl cooties,” Teddy taunted, and he rammed her with his shoulder and hip. Ha. Hockey check. She went down again.
“Leave me alone,” she said in the shaky voice. “I mean it, that’s two.” This time she was up faster, bouncing kinda…
Two? Teddy laughed and shoved her again. “Loser,” he taunted. It was one of his dad’s favorite words. Then he blinked, surprised because this time she surged against him, kinda strong for a girl, and kept her footing. Doing this dance thing on the balls of her feet.
“That’s three,” she said, still moving away from him but her small fists swinging up; tight, compact miniature hammers. Red with cold.
“Oh, yeah?” Teddy sneered, opening his arms, palms out, elbows cocked to shove her again. As he charged forward, he realized she wasn’t moving away anymore.
Thirty yards away, Mrs. Etherby started when she read trouble in the blur of red and green jackets that lurched around the side of the shed. Uh-huh. Definitely trouble. She’d need some help. The big kid in the green was Teddy Klumpe. She whipped off her glove better to thumb the transmit button on her playground walkie-talkie.
Then she hesitated and lost her breath…
Jesus. The smaller kid-the new girl, hat knocked off, red ponytail streaming-planted her feet and whipped her whole upper body around behind a rigid right-hand punch that landed smack on Teddy’s onrushing nose.
Fat droplets of bright poppy red blood splashed the snow. More red dribbled down Teddy’s chin as he dropped back on his rear end. Aghast, he began to sob.
Running forward, breathless, Etherby got her call off to the office receptionist:
“Madge, you’re not gonna believe this.”
Chapter Two
When Broker leaned down, the material of his tan work jacket tightened across his shoulders, stretching the pyramid logo and the type, “Griffin’s Stoneworks,” on his b
ack. The jacket Griffin had loaned him was a touch small. He wrestled a heavy oak round up on the chopping block next to the woodshed in back of the garage and grinned; never thought he’d be chopping firewood at the end of March again. He’d been splitting oak since they’d moved into Harry Griffin’s lake rental. The hardwood didn’t grow up here, pretty much it petered out in the middle of the state. Griffin imported the oak by the truckload to heat sand and water so he could mix mortar for winter work on his stone crew.
If anybody asked, Griffin would say the new guy in town was working on his crew. Mostly Broker stayed home and split wood for exercise. Stayed close to Nina. Going on three months.
But the geographic cure was working. She was slowly climbing out of the black pit. So he picked up the twenty-pound monster maul, hefted it, getting his stance, swung it up using his legs, hips, and shoulders to transfer the weight in a powerful arc over his head. Then he brought it down. The wood parted with a clean snap that echoed into the surrounding trees, out across Glacier Lake.
He put down the maul and yanked another hunk of oak from the pile next to the chopping block. Seventy degrees yesterday down in the cities. Fifty-five degrees up here. Then in midmorning the temperature nosedived, and he noticed the nuthatches and chickadees mob the bird feeder in a feeding frenzy…
Sensing the onrushing storm.
Now, a day later, Broker picked up the maul and raised his eyes to the clouds still coming in rolling gray ranks from the northwest. The clipper had roused out of the Yukon, roared across Canada, and dumped fourteen inches of snow on Glacier County just after lunch yesterday. Almost as if the Canadians were sending a cold wish of censure across the border.
On the day Dubya rolled the tanks into Iraq.
As he bent to lift the heavy round, he heard a low, shivering moan. He paused and listened carefully. Okay. Got it. Wolves. An acoustic bounce, rippling in their baying on the wind from the big woods up north. He was sizing up the knot in the wood on the block when Nina came out on the back deck and held out the cordless phone. “Can you take this?” she said.
He looked at his wife, leaned the splitting maul next to the chopping block, removed his gloves, and walked to the porch steps, raising his thick eyebrows and heaving his shoulders in a questioning gesture. Then she grimaced and darted her eyes north, sensing more than hearing the wild sigh on the wind. She narrowed her eyes. “Is that…?”
“Yeah. The pack up in the big woods, sounds like they’re active in daylight. It’s the new snow freezing last night. Crust on top makes it hard for the deer to run,” Broker said, matter-of-factly.
“Cool. Now we have wolves day and night,” she said, staring into the distance, listening to the faint rise and fall of the eerie baying. Then she recovered and thrust the phone at him. “Something happened at school.” Still no help, doing a quick handoff.
He took the phone. “Hello?”
“Mr. Broker?” said a calm but controlled voice, “this is Trudi Helseth, principal at Glacier Falls Elementary. We met when you registered your daughter, Karson.”
“Kit. She goes by Kit,” Broker said as he stared at Nina, who stood on the deck, huddled in her robe and slippers, puffing on an American Spirit. Oblivious to the cold, her green eyes flitted up to the gray clouds with apprehension, as if they were a messy ceiling about to collapse. She yanked her eyes from the sky and fixed them on the edge of the tree line where the woods started, eighty yards away. The wolves howled again on the errant shaft of wind, and she hugged herself.
Broker was watching Nina closely as he listened to the phone. Past the worst of it; now, the way she had started to key on the weather had him thinking-could be a swerve in her condition toward seasonal affective disorder. The overcast sky meant she’d have a bad day…Then Principal Helseth commanded his full attention when she said, “There was a playground incident involving Kit this morning…”
His heart sped up. “Is she…?”
“She’s fine. Just skinned her hand a little. I have her here in the office. Is it possible for you to come into the school to talk?”
“What happened?”
“I really need to see you in person. This is not something we can handle on the phone.” When Broker didn’t respond immediately, Helseth continued. “We’ll be sending Kit home with you for the rest of the day, Mr. Broker.”
“I’ll be right there.” He switched off the phone and went over to Nina, who was stuck, her tired eyes anchored to the snow-draped pines behind the house. He put his arm around her shoulder and gently guided her back toward the patio door. “C’mon. It’s cold out here.”
Jeez, Kit?
Galvanized by the understated urgency in the principal’s tone, he stayed in his work clothes, went straight to his truck, and drove toward town. The plows had been through, but there was still a hard undercoat of icy snow on the roadbed. After he skidded through a curve a little too fast, he eased off the accelerator, leaned back, and took a deep settling breath through his nose.
Center down. Wait and see. Don’t jump to conclusions.
So he let his eyes track the snowy landscape to either side of the road. Glacier County was aptly named; a white place on the map, just this long skinny ditch the last ice age had gouged into the map and filled with moraine and melt. Wedged between Thief River Falls and the Red Lake Rez. It had always been remote, and now it had pulled ahead of Broker’s native Cook County as the least populated county in the state. In the winter. The population quadrupled in summer. Broker smiled ruefully when he came around a bend and saw the construction site of another lake house going up. The flimsy yellow sticks thrusting at the pines and snow. A bundled work crew swarmed over it. Hola. Mexicans, by the swarthy faces peeking from their headgear and the amused grins. Yesterday they had been wearing shirtsleeves. But they were swinging their nail guns, working like hell. Even up here they were starting to build the fast Pac Man houses that ate the woods.
He took another deep breath. Up ahead, over the tree line, he saw the town water tower pinned against the gray sky. The city council had tacked a tinny round cupola on top and painted it red and white like a fishing bobber to promote their main resource, the chain of Glacier Lakes. The tower stood like a wish, to lure the tourists to come with their boats to fish in summer. And the snowmobile crowd in the quieter winter.
It was an uphill fight; Glacier County was off the main track. North of the lakes it consisted of a long stretch of jack pine barrens. The barrens led to the spooky Washichu State Forest and the Canadian border, where no one lived but the wolves. After Labor Day you couldn’t get a cup of Starbucks in the whole sparsely populated county. No local newspaper. Hardly any cops. The two gas stations closed at 8:00 P.M. in the winter, so you had to mind your gas gauge. Which suited Broker just fine and was, in fact, the reason he’d brought his family here.
He came into town south on County 12. Crossed the railroad tracks and went past the population sign: 682. He paused for the town’s single stoplight near the old railway depot, where 12 intersected Main Street. Turned right. The elementary school was on the west side, past the two blocks of business district; a durable two-story cube of Depression-era redbrick. Just a traprock driveway and the traffic circle that he’d wheeled around this morning when he’d dropped Kit off.
Decided to drive her every day. Didn’t want to put her on the bus.
A brown extended-cab Ford F-150 was parked skewed at the curb by the front door. Stylized cursive type in white on the door: “Klumpe Sanitation.” Same colors as the local garbage truck. Broker braked his Tundra halfway up the drive, more alert when he saw the green-and-white Glacier County Sheriff ’s Department Crown Vic parked behind the Ford. No one behind the wheel, it idled empty in a low cloud of creeping exhaust.
Another deep breath. Coincidence? Flags going up? Forcing himself to approach very slowly, he parked behind the cop car, got out deliberately, walked to the school, opened the front door, and-
“Little bitch attacked my Teddy, that�
��s what!” The shrill voice came from a woman whose gaunt beauty was almost painful to look at; early thirties, dark eyes flashing, long dark hair in motion. She wore snow boots. A ski parka lay on the floor behind her.
Biiig diamond ring.
Oh-kay. Easy does it. Broker’s eyes swept past her, taking in the fact that even undernourished, she’d up the temperature in a room. But his gaze faltered, snagged on the broken intensity of her eyes, the way they seethed in the sockets like two nests of bluebottle flies, feeding off something ugly. Her eyes buzzed at him, her facial expression flitted. Her carefully applied mask of cosmetics barely kept up.
She held a digital camera in her right hand.
The husky cop who belonged to the car outside wore green over brown. He had short-cropped sandy hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses that seemed to emerge naturally out of the tired lines of his oval face. He stood patiently, arms loosely extended, palms out; but a little up on the balls of his feet too, like he got stuck with trying to cover a particularly nasty point guard who was way too fast.
“Now, Cassie, just calm down here,” the cop said. Then he saw Broker come through the door, sized him up fast, and waved his arm to get someone’s attention in the office. Broker, having been announced, turned left, opened the office door, and went in.
There was a counter with three desks behind it, storeroom at the back, three doors on the left. A TV bolted to the wall was tuned to the Weather Channel.
The room was full of women and one tall, thick blond guy wearing a brown jacket; color and white type on the chest matching the truck outside. He seemed not all the way awake, with a stubble of beard gilding his red cheeks and jaw and his short hair sticking up. Broker made his own fast assumption and figured the guy belonged to the woman in the hall; they both had the same manic twitch to their eyes. His blue eyes were several notches lower in velocity than the woman’s; about the ratio that separates a bluebottle from a hatched larva. Both of them unpleasant to the touch.