The Big Law (1998) Read online

  CHUCK LOGAN

  THE

  BIG LAW

  For Kelly Logan

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Chuck Logan

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  December 11; 11:33 A.M.

  The box came in the UPS morning delivery at the rear entrance of the Warren E. Burger Federal Building at the corner of Kellogg and Robert, in downtown St. Paul. It measured eighteen inches by sixteen inches, and was six inches deep. It weighed about twelve pounds. A red label slapped diagonal to the address announced: CONTENTS REFRIGERATED. A retired cop in a security company blazer manned the guard station. He placed the box on the X-ray machine belt.

  First, the label caught his attention.

  Then the quilt of mismatched stamps. And the address: "For FBI Special Agent Lorn Garrison"—like real personal. And the office number of a federal and local joint task force investigating narcotics traffic in the county; it was an office number not given out to the public. Very alert now, he ran the box and focused on his video monitor.

  He was trained to look for five objects inside packages: detonators, power sources, switches, chemicals, and wires that connected them.

  He saw shapes in the monitor screen that could be all five. He stopped the conveyor, picked up his phone, and alerted the main security office. In a calm forceful voice, he ordered everyone in the immediate area to exit the building.

  People spilled into the intersection of Jackson and Fourth Streets, among them a supervisor in the IRS offices. He'd heard someone at the guard station say the word bomb. So he called his office on his cell phone and said, "I think there's a bomb." Other office workers lined up to use his cell phone and notify their offices.

  In sixty seconds the stairwells thundered with people whose imaginations thundered with visions of Oklahoma City. There was still no official order to evacuate. Hundreds of federal employees were now out stamping in the cold on Jackson, Fourth, and Robert Streets and on Kellogg Boulevard.

  A photographer for the St. Paul paper, returning from an assignment, drove down Fourth Street, got stuck in a crowd of people milling in the intersection of Fourth and Robert, and asked what was going on.

  "There's a bomb scare."

  The photographer called his photo desk and omitted the word scare. Then he left his car in the middle of the street and jockeyed for a good shooting position. He conjured an image of the building perfectly captured at the precise moment it collapsed. He saw it in his mind's eye and also on the covers of Time and Newsweek. With equal clarity, he saw his photo credit. Only one thing bothered him. The cruddy overcast day had wet cement for light. He loved to light and pose everything just so. How do you pose a building?

  All over downtown, phones and pagers buzzed. Fire trucks rolled. Police barricades went up.

  At 11:40 the FBI office at the building formally requested the St. Paul Police Department's bomb squad to investigate a suspicious package. They checked the switchboard and the mail room. There had been no bomb

  threats. They held back on the order to evacuate.

  The city did not have a dedicated bomb unit, but in fifteen minutes, two pickup squad members arrived in the white "ice cream truck" with their bomb disposal wagon in tow. At twelve noon they took control of the site. After confirming that everyone was out of the rear entry area, one cop remotely toggled a wheeled robot down the truck ramp. The other cop Velcroed on ninety pounds of Kevlar navy blue armor, inserted a thick steel chest plate in the suit's breast pocket, pulled on a sloped visored helmet, activated the internal cooling system, struggled into a pair of cumbersome mittens, and clanked through the door.

  If this was the big one, the suit would maybe allow the coroner to have an intact corpse to poke. The guy wearing the suit knew this.

  He approached the X-ray machine and made a visual inspection. Two shadows on the video screen caught his attention. The detonator cap was inert, missing a portion, and the connecting wires were, in the lingo of his dark trade, "shunted," meaning crossed. Not an open circuit.

  In case the bomb squad was having a bad day, the creator of the apparatus had stuck thin lead foil strips on the "explosive" bundle to painstakingly spell out: SMILE IF YOU EAT SHIT.

  "Bomb hoax," the bomb tech radioed his partner.

  But, following procedure, and just in case, they remotely disrupted the package. The man in the suit used a sixteenfoot pole with a pincer to move it off the X-ray machine and place it on the floor. Then they toggled in the robot and blew the box apart using a twelve-gauge water cannon on the robot's arm.

  After the robot's video camera inspected the debris, the man in the suit went in again, made a visual sweep, and issued an official all clear. He paused in the doorway and removed his helmet. A knot of fast-moving men left the police cordon and approached him.

  Perusing the stern faces and spit-shined wing tips, the bomb cop queried, "You FBI?" The agents nodded. "Who's Lorn Garrison?" he asked.

  "I'm Garrison," said a tall, saturnine senior guy. Maybe fifty-five.

  The bomb cop handed Garrison a sopping wet portion of cardboard with the address on it. Expressionless, he said, "You've got mail."

  Garrison peered through the door at the scattered box. A white cloud seeped from some of the debris.

  Garrison sniffed. "Is that smoke?"

  The bomb cop shook his head. "Vapor. It's safe—physically. I don't know about psychologically."

  The agents exchanged glances. Going in, Garrison tapped his finger on the typed return address on the crumpled wet cardboard that bore a St. Paul postmark, dated yesterday:

  ALEX GORSKI

  3173 HARRIET PLACE

  ST. PAUL

  One of the agents groaned; he had installed two electronic receivers, a camera, and a telephone tap at that location two weeks before and had been monitoring it ever since. Gorski was a key informant who had been recruited in New York, and then moved to Chicago. Garrison had brought him to St. Paul on a special assignment involving a huge shipment of powdered cocaine.

  St. Paul was small-time to Garrison, compared to Atlanta and New Orleans. But it turned out to be the big time for Gorski, who had disappeared three days ago.

  Garrison cautiously skirted the pieces of the box and its strewn contents. His shoes made soggy squeegee crackles and pops. The device had been packed in those green Styrofoam peanut things, and they were everywhere. As was a coil of wire. A taped bundle of double-A batteries. The switch still had a price sticker on it from Ace Hardware. Ditto for the small digital clock.

  The white vapor seeped from chunks of dry ice in a large transparent plastic bag that spilled from a cedar cigar box. The foil message was intact on the side of the box.

  Garrison did not smile.

  His attention was riveted to a reddish gray oblong shape jammed in the bottom of the bag. It reminded him of something he had last seen back home, after Thanksgiving on a shelf in his refrigerator. The chemical ice steamed on exposure to the air.

  Someone behind Garrison gagged and cleared their throat.

  "Steady," said Garrison. He took a ballpoint from his coat pocket and poked the bag open more.

  Several chunks of dry ice oozed out onto the terrazzo floor. So did a slightly blackened, intact human tongue trailing tentacles of ligament.

  Garrison carefully removed his suit jacket and laid it on top of the X-ray machine. Then he leaned forward to inspect the shriveled organ lying on the cement floor in a clutter of fuming ice. As he squatted to make a closer examination, a young agent stifled a gag reflex and muttered in back of him: "Jesus, they cut out his tongue?"

  Lorn mentored the younger man without turning. "Y
ou're a city bo—" Garrison paused and enunciated clearly. "City guy, aren't you, Terry?" Terry was what they used to call a high-yellow Negro back home in Kentucky. His hair was tinged with a reddish hue, and he had orange freckles. Garrison reminded himself. You hadda watch it these days.

  The younger man shrugged. "Yeah, so?"

  "If you were country, you'd know your organ meats better. That tongue was ripped out, root and branch. See the ligaments there. It's a message."

  "Alex Gorski's talking days are over."

  "That's a roger."

  "You ever have anybody send something like this to the office before?" asked Agent Terry.

  "No," said Lorn Garrison as he stood up with the careful posture of an athletic man past a certain age. He cocked an eyebrow at Terry. "But these Russian guys aren't your normal hoods, now are they."

  There was an attempt to squash the "tongue rumor" through all the agencies involved in the event, but—something like this—people were bound to talk, and by happy hour, the word started to crackle. The routine story about the bomb scare was spiced with an unconfirmed rumor about enclosed body parts delivered to the FBI. CNN picked the story up from local TV that night, and it appeared, page one, in both the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers in the morning.

  The local FBI was furious, and no one was more pissed than Lorn Garrison, who was three months from retiring to his home county in Kentucky and running for sheriff. Some sumbitch was sticking their tongue out at the bureau, and they would pay.

  2

  Interstate 35 started in Laredo, Texas, curved up the breadbasket of the country, ran a few blocks past the St. Paul Federal Building and ended, 144 miles north of St. Paul, in Duluth. Beyond Duluth, North 61 was the only road in and out of the North Shore of Lake Superior. Mileposts commence at the Duluth city limits and pace Highway 61 for 150 miles, northeast, to the Pigeon River on the Ontario border. Some locals hold to the notion that you leave the climate and culture of the lower forty-eight behind when you pass through Grand Marais at Milepost 109. North of Grand Marais, the terrain was claimed by loggers, trappers, dog mushers, and Indians who fancied they would be at home on the Alaskan frontier.

  This rocky wilderness shore also attracted pilgrims like Phil Broker, who grew up here, left twenty-five years ago, and had returned for the winter.

  Broker decided that his baby daughter, Kit, would learn to walk north of Grand Marais. And she had. Now she had seen her first wolf, a little past Milepost 127.

  Except the spot this wolf picked to cross the road was occupied by a speeding pulpwood truck that chopped him, dragged him, and rolling-pinned him flat.

  Broker, driving home from his weekly grocery shopping at the IGA in town, saw the truck swerve, straighten, and roar past. A hundred yards later, he stopped the green Cherokee Sport, got out, and stared at the mature black wolf, its dusty gray fur presented with the usual roadkill trimmings. From her car seat, fourteen-month-old Kit watched, big graygreen eyes under a flip of copper curls.

  Not like her stuffed Wolfie toy, not like the friendly talking wolf on Sesame Street.

  And not like Daddy, with his shaggy black eyebrows that grew straight together above his olive-gray eyes, who growled "Grrrrr" when she pulled on them.

  Just the thing they leave out of the children's books—real dead. And now, he thought, she gets to see the inside and the outside at the same time.

  It should have been a Daddy thing: her first wolf, first deer, first bunny, glimpsed in the cathedral hush of snowdraped balsams or out on the frozen lake—Shh, quiet, see it, there, that shape against the snow. But there wasn't any snow, and Christmas was two weeks away.

  The freeze clamped down each night and lost its edge by afternoon. No ice jostled the shore. No crystalline lattices tethering the ledge rock with abstract webs. The forecasters on Duluth TV swirled their hands around Arctic air masses, the West Coast storms. They predicted an unusually mild season.

  It was the year of El Niño. The year his daughter turned one. The second year since the adventure, from which he and Nina had returned rich, pregnant, married. And the second year since he'd quit police work.

  The year Nina went back to the army.

  Along with the weather, his personal world was upside down. His wife traveled "down range" to Bosnia, where she ran an MP company stationed in a grim haunted town outside of Tuzla called Brcko.

  While Nina chased Serbian war criminals, he got stuck on stateside baby watch, changing diapers. So he'd brought Kit up here, to the old home ground, to teach her

  Daddy things on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield, the oldest exposed granite in the world.

  Broker stared one last time at the pile of mangled fur, then walked back to his truck, got in and said, "How you doing, Kit, we're almost home." Kit, very involved in an Arrowroot animal cookie, said nothing.

  Broker put the Jeep in gear, continued up the road and scanned the sodden brown birch leaves that carpeted the forest.

  Kind of hard to teach Kit to be a hardy survivor—a Broker—if winter wouldn't come.

  He turned off at a weathered sign that spelled BROKER'S BEACH RESORT and drove down the access road. A natural amphitheater hollowed the granite bluff and overlooked a cove. Resort cabins were tucked into the stone terraces. All closed now. Electricity and water turned off. His folks, who ran the cabins, were in Arizona for the winter. Just him and his daughter staying in his lake home on a point that formed the south arm of the cove.

  He turned his truck and backed up to the porch. As he unstrapped Kit from the car seat and placed her on the porch, the phone rang inside. He ignored it, popped the rear hatch, and began lining up bags of groceries. Car to porch. Then open the door and ferry them to the kitchen. All tasks were modified and extended by the factor of minding Kit. The ringing stopped.

  He worked one-armed so his other arm could anchor her. He hovered in his task, ready to pull her back from a fall, or from digging in one of the bags. Or from sticking something in her mouth.

  As he transferred the grocery bags, he talked in a calm voice. "Careful. Look out for the edge." Specifically, he meant where the top porch step dropped off. But his intent was larger, to sketch an awareness of boundaries. And of dangers, which, as a former cop, he saw everywhere. "Easy," Broker said endlessly. "Watch it. Look out."

  He unlocked the door and ferried bags into the kitchen and placed them on the table. Kit charged from the table to the door and back with more speed than balance.

  The phone started ringing again. He continued to ignore it, busy tucking half gallons of milk and frozen baby food in the fridge. Four rings. Let the tape pick it up. He paused. It could be his folks or Nina calling long-distance. Better check for messages. He left the groceries and went to the phone. Kit stood at his knee, squinted up as he picked up the receiver, watched him tap in the voice mail code and listen.

  She cocked her head, furrowed her brow, pursed her tiny lips. This was the first time she had seen her dad's face go tight with surprise.

  The woman's voice was clenched, almost wrung dry of personality. But he knew her immediately. Only one woman called him "Phil." They'd been married a long time ago, before he had grown into "Broker."

  "Phil, Keith's got himself in a lot of trouble and I need your help."

  The single, cryptic sentence seemed to exhaust her. Caren, his ex-wife, mumbled her number and hung up.

  3

  Tom James had faithfully reported the news for twenty years and was forty-one when he started craving sugar in the morning. It was right after his wife left him, not long after he was demoted to the East Neighborhoods Bureau of the St. Paul paper.

  He ripped the wrapper off his second Snickers and washed it down with black coffee.

  Tom read a lot. Because he was a writer he was skeptical of what he read—unless he wrote it, in which case he never tired of reading it. But he was quick to see where a descriptive scenario could be applied broadly to enhance his copy.

  Looking out over the news
room this morning, he had the unsettling experience of applying a descriptive scenario to his own life. Last night he'd read a Newsweek article about serotonin, the neurotransmitter your body produced or didn't produce—according to the article—depending on your relative social status. If you were on top of the heap, looking down, you had high levels of serotonin in your system and all the zillions of little chemical tabs and slots aligned and inserted just fine. You were therefore calm, alert and easy to get along with. Like he was, last year, when he was a general assignment reporter.

  But if a general assignment reporter's fortunes went down in the world—if he were exiled to a suburban beat of endless school board meetings—his serotonin levels would crash and he would suffer depression, aggression and surges of impulse. And in—say—the smug eyes of the twenty-fouryear-old Hispanic female-type person who now sat at his old desk in GA, he would be a loser. He'd have to get his serotonin levels adjusted, in prescription drug form. With Prozac. Tom looked around. He figured that half the over-forty newsroom staff was sucking down Prozac.