Vapor Trail pb-4 Read online

  Her disguise hid skimpy shorts, a sports top, lean runner’s legs, and a flat tummy. Angel set the awkward stage shoes aside and pulled a pair of Nikes from the shopping bag, pulled them on, and laced them tight.

  The shopping bag contained a backpack. Promptly, she stuffed the pack with the sunglasses, the shopping bag, the clothes, padding, the wig, the paper bag containing the pistol and the plastic bottle silencer, which was now ragged with three holes. She removed a damp washcloth from a Ziploc bag and wiped off the cosmetics and lipstick, carefully replaced the cloth, closed the plastic bag, and dropped it in the pack.

  Then, ritually, she left the signature.

  Okay. Take one last quick look around. Angel cocked her head. There was this narrow stained-glass window over the askew confessor’s chair. Except it wasn’t real stained glass. It was Contact paper, like from Menard’s.

  “Fake,” Angel said as she slipped on the pack.

  Then she ducked from the confession booth and paused in the hallway to make sure she was alone in the church. No one in sight. Not a sound. Just a faint blur of gunpowder smeared in the air.

  Like incense.

  She walked under the blind plaster eyes of Jesus and Mary, went down the hallway on the left side of the altar, and exited through the back door. The walls of the church and the rectory shielded her from the street. She crossed the backyard patio and disappeared down a brushy knob and came out on a gravel road. It only took a few minutes to trot through the dusty North End streets. Soon the Nikes thudded on city pavement.

  Angel opened up her stride.

  A jogger gliding in Patagonia shorts and top, she slipped anonymously past the whispering sprinklers on the chemically enhanced emerald lawns with their little signs: Warning-Unsafe for Children and Pets. She ran past the gleaming SUVs parked in the broad driveways and the meticulously painted gingerbread trim of the old North Hill homes.

  Another one down. Four to go.

  Chapter Two

  Now who the hell was calling before five in the morning?

  Groggy, Broker grabbed the ringing phone beside the bed, brought it to his ear, and mumbled, “What?”

  “Broker.” The brusque male voice in the phone receiver sounded like a cop’s voice. A cop who’d been up all night. A cop Broker knew.

  “John? That you?” Broker said.

  “Yeah. C’mon, wake up.”

  Broker blinked, looked around, and tried to focus his eyes. All he saw was black, as if he were suspended in warm ink. He shook himself and sat up. When you got a call in the dark at his age, it meant:

  “Somebody’s dead,” he said as the careful knitting around his heart drew tight. Dad?

  “Yeah, somebody’s dead,” John Eisenhower said. “Relax, it’s nobody we know.”

  Broker sat up straighter. “So what. .?”

  John talked over him. “Remember all those times I saved your life?”

  “Bullshit, you never saved my life,” Broker protested.

  “Okay, what about those times I saved your job when we were in St. Paul together?”

  John had a point there; they’d come up together in the St. Paul department, and more than once he’d run interference when Broker had tangled with the bureaucrats. “Okay, okay. What’s up?” Broker yawned.

  “Is your license current?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I need a big favor,” John said.

  “When?”

  “Starting at about daylight,” John said.

  “Great.” Broker knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “You know where I’m at?”

  “Guy like you comes into my county, I make it my business to know where you’re at. That’s why I’m the sheriff.”

  Phil Broker was keeping to the back roads this summer. He had to figure a few things out. That said, Milton Dane’s river house was still a nice place to start the day, even after an early wake-up call from the Washington County sheriff.

  Even when you’re estranged from your wife.

  Even-count ’em and weep-on your forty-eighth birthday.

  Broker sat up on Milt’s king-size bed, so his sweat dribbled down his bare chest and pooled in his belly button. Real smart. He had not turned on the air-conditioning, preferring to sleep with the windows open. He’d been hoping for a breeze off the river. There was no breeze. Just the ceiling fans stirring the humidity in slow circles.

  Now it wasn’t even dawn yet, and the relative humidity had to be way over seventy. Yesterday the humidity had topped eighty, which was tropical.

  Broker sat for a while and stared out banks of tall, east-facing windows as the darkness ebbed away, and, slowly, the St. Croix River came into focus, motionless as a painted floor. Gray mist draped the bluffs on the Wisconsin side. Still no breeze.

  It would be another green furnace of a day.

  It was mid-July, and Broker was in between relationships and houses. His own home was up in Devil’s Rock on Lake Superior, a twenty-minute drive from the Canadian border. But the house was haunted with too many memories of his marriage and especially of his five-year-old daughter, Kit. Her stuffed animals lay undisturbed where they’d dropped from her fingers when she’d visited him in May. At first he’d left the toys where they’d fallen because they were random reminders. Days passed and then weeks, and they started to look like tiny bodies at a crime scene. So he locked the house, traveled south to the Cities, and agreed to look after Milt’s place on the river north of Stillwater. He’d guided Milt on what had turned out to be an extreme canoe trip a year ago October. Now Milt, an attorney, had taken Jolene Sommer, a former client of his, to Italy to see Florence.

  Broker had never been to Tuscany, but his estranged wife had received her mail there. Major Nina Pryce and their daughter had taken up residence in Lucca, a walled medieval town on the road less traveled between Pisa and Florence.

  He didn’t know why Nina was there. She didn’t wear a uniform anymore. The nature of her work was classified. And then she and Kit had just disappeared.

  Broker got up from the king-size bed and passed beneath a throng of African masks and Asian dragons that peered down from the walls and the post-and-beam ceiling. Milt had transformed the upper level of the river house into a bachelor heaven; the walls were decorated with his vacation booty. The master bedroom opened on the kitchen. The kitchen patio doors led to the broad deck.

  So now, as on every recent morning, he padded into the kitchen and confronted the rectangular cyclops eye of the laptop on the table. The screen saver fluttered gently in the thin light; a winter scene to mock the current heat wave, snowflakes trickling down against a hillside of snow-frosted pine trees. He clicked onto the Internet icon, went into the message center, and selected GET MESSAGES.

  He typed in his password: LUDDITEONE.

  And got the prompt at the bottom of the screen: NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER.

  Broker exhaled and disconnected from the Net. No communication from Nina since Kit returned to Italy in May. Not one call, e-mail, or letter. She and Kit had vanished down into a secure government rabbit hole. Broker suspected it was the culmination of a process that had started right after 9/11.

  Initially, after the attack, and despite their personal issues, Nina had called regularly explaining that her duties might, and then would, make it impossible to keep Kit with her in Europe.

  Fine. Broker was more than ready to take over his end of their shared child care. Then, right after Kit’s visit in May, the messages became ambiguous. Kit’s transfer to her father’s care was put off. Then communication had abruptly stopped.

  Broker didn’t exactly have a lot of recourse to penetrate the silence. There was no one he could talk to about his wife’s situation. The unit that Nina had triumphantly gender-crashed herself into did not officially exist.

  “Fucking Delta.” Broker swore softly.

  So he drew the only conclusion he could from the silence: whatever Nina was doing at the moment, his daughter was somehow included in it.

>   Not knowing was worse than knowing. It has been bad enough when he admitted to Nina he had strayed with Jolene Sommer. Nina was quick to thrust back with a confession of her own weak moment with a Ranger officer.

  Make that a young Ranger officer. Squeaky young. Smooth young. The kind of young that didn’t have to compensate for the torn rotator cuff, the stressed knees, the back injury, and various shrapnel deposits. Carefully, Broker lined up forty-eight years of knotted scar tissue, stood up, and walked to the bathroom. Some things still worked. A kidneyful of pee crashed into the bowl. He flushed, washed his hands, and threw some water on his face. Then he turned and studied himself in the mirror on the door.

  So this was forty-eight.

  One hundred eighty pounds shrunk tight on a six-foot frame looked back at him. He was still holding his own against the sags of gravity; still hollow-cheeked, tucked in here, a dangle there. He had his love handles down to an inch of pinch. No second helpings. No dessert. His usually thick dark hair was cut high and tight, more than summer short; a monk’s vow of discipline. His eyebrows remained his defining feature, joining in a bushy line over his gray eyes. A pale white, raised centipede of stitched scar tissue crawled out of his hairline, angled down his forehead, and curled around his left temple. Two more puncture scars were less obvious on his left arm: one high on the biceps, the other just above the elbow. He wiggled his fingers and his toes to test the numbness. He’d been stabbed in the arm and had almost frozen to death, and he carried frostbitten nerve endings as a reminder. That was last year’s adventure; that’s when he met Milt and Jolene. Her husband, Hank, had saved his life,and Broker had not been able to return the favor.

  Continue onward.

  Broker squinted out the windows at the false dawn and figured he could work a run in before John showed up. He pulled on shorts, socks, and shoes. He went into the kitchen, filled the teakettle, set it on the stove, switched the burner to the lowest setting, and filled an electric grinder with coffee beans. Then he drank a glass of water and tied a red bandanna around his forehead for a sweat rag.

  Five miles and forty minutes would bring him back to coffee water nearly at a boil. As he laced his shoes, he glanced at the Gary Larson Far Side birthday card lying on the kitchen table. It had appeared inserted inside the screen door yesterday morning. On the front there was a circus scene of a dog riding a unicycle on the high wire with a cat in its mouth and a vase balanced on its head. The dog was trying to keep a hula hoop and three juggling balls in motion.

  He reread the caption:

  High above the hushed crowd, Rex tried to remain focused. Still, he couldn’t shake one nagging thought: he was an old dog and this was a new trick.

  The card was signed: Janey.

  In a burlesque of his wife’s disappearance, he had bumped into an old girlfriend at the Cub grocery in town last week. Lean and tanned, Janey Hensen had dropped two dress sizes since the last time he’d seen her.

  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 cliche 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. “Second-biggest 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.