Vapor Trail

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.

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.

“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 grace. 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