Broker had nipped with a bolt cutter. He expertly corrected a four-wheel skid. Bad snow and he was doing sixty. He reached behind the seat, pulled out a wool blanket and shoved it at Broker. “Wrap up.”
“What?”
“Cover up. You’re in mild shock.”
Broker threw the blanket over his shoulders, shook his head, disbelieving. “Keith’s capable of a lot of things. But not killing Caren. Not up there. Christ, he
“Keith’s a bastard,” Jeff reminded him.
“Right. A cold,
Jeff ground his teeth. “James could be confused.”
Broker nodded. “Maybe they got into it again, struggled and Keith’s pistol went off. Caren got in between and slipped. That’s plausible in this weather.”
“Doesn’t add up. Kit choking,” said Jeff. Broker had told him about the incident. “What happened to that piece of money?” he asked.
Broker grimaced. “Dropped it. Now with the snow…”
“Worry about that later. One thing at a time,” said Jeff.
More radio traffic. They listened to cop blank verse and tried to piece it together.
A highway patrolman responding to Broker’s 911 call had spotted Keith’s Ford and James’s station wagon at the lodge across the highway from the park. While he waited for backup, he’d grilled the Naniboujou clerk. That’s when James’s 911 call came into the dispatcher, in Grand Marais.
But James hadn’t given them a location. By then, two cops were headed up the ridge acting on the clerk’s story.
And suddenly, the FBI pops up on the phones, into their radio net and are in phone contact with James. They worked a radio relay with the officers through Grand Marais.
The feds threw a long shadow of big-time, big-city trouble across Keith Angland.
The state trooper and a Deputy Torgerson found James, wounded, on the trail. Torgerson had put a call into Devil’s Rock First Responders when he went in after James. The medics came in by a shorter back road and stretchered James out. Angland was now the focus of the rescue. Possibly injured, suffering shock or remorse, stuck down on the lip of the Kettle. The only qualified police climbers were hours away in Duluth or up in Ontario. No time. The medics had brought a rope. Torgerson, who had a lot of water rescue time in the coast guard, went down after Keith.
James was already en route by ambulance to the clinic in Grand Marais when Jeff wheeled into C. R. Magney. Cruisers from Cook and Lake Counties and the state patrol were slewed at odd angles, motors still running. Silently rotating police flashers lashed the thickening snow and streams of exhaust. Lurid swipes of blue and red.
Before they had time to get out, the radio crackled. “At the Kettle, say again,” said Jeff.
“Jeff, we got him out. Lyle’s about froze. We’re bringing them out the back way, by the gravel pit.”
Jeff keyed the mike. “Meet you there.” He wheeled the Bronco into a fishtailing U-turn and aimed back for the highway.
“But I don’t want anything for the pain,” insisted Tom James, who had avoided physical pain all of his life and now was catching up fast. Tom made the doctor nervous; the way he sat up, supporting himself on his hands, staring at his bare legs stretched out on a gurney in the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic. And the way he held his coat in a death grip in his bloodstained hand.
The doctor removed the soaked compress the paramedics had tied on his left calf. Angland’s bullet had gouged a small trench from the fleshy muscle. There was enough concavity for him to see tiny bits of veins in the welling blood, threads from his pants.
“I’d better freeze it,” the doctor said. “This is going to hurt when I clean it out.”
“No,” said Tom. He stared into the doctor’s blue eyes and saw them waver ever so slightly. Sweat formed on the physician’s upper lip. Tom had a sudden insight that the doc was uneasy, working on someone who wasn’t numbed.
More new knowledge.
“Tell me everything you’re doing,” said Tom.
“What?” said the doctor, blinking sweat.
“I want to watch,” said Tom.
They hauled Keith Angland out strapped in a Stokes rescue stretcher. He still wore the sodden dark wool overcoat under a blanket. Ice polyps swung in his blond hair thick as Pops-icles. With his arms crossed rigidly across his chest, he looked part embalmed pharaoh, part demented yeti.
Snow blazed point blank. A group of cops huddled to form a windbreak for Lyle Torgerson. Out of stretchers. Lyle had to walk. “Damn tricky,” Lyle chattered from his blankets.
“What happened to his pistol?” asked Jeff.
“Dropped it in the Kettle,” said Torgerson.
“He say anything?” asked Jeff.
Torgerson shook his head. “Just keeps staring at his hand.”
Broker envied him. Growing up, he’d always wondered what it would be like, going down there into the Kettle.
Broker knelt to the stretcher. “Keith, what happened?”
Keith stared. Jellied eyes. His face looked like something bird-eaten and dead a month on the beach. Broker looked away, but an eloquent controlled horror in Angland’s fixed gaze seduced him back.
“Keith, it’s all right. We got you…” Jeff’s voice startled him, jogged his memory. Broker remembered a steamy afternoon in thick brush near Cam Lo; a soldier desperately trying to carry water to a buddy in his bare cupped hands.
Keith protested with a violent wrench of his ice-fringed head. Like burned-out stars, his eyes sought out Broker. Then he collapsed back into the blankets. One of the paramedics said, “We better look at that hand.”
“Huh?” Broker grunted.
“His forearm and hand’s all fucked up.” The medic peeled back the blanket, eased up Keith’s sleeve. Broker grimaced.
The claw marks started halfway up Keith’s inner left forearm and ripped down into his palm. Curls of flesh more than an inch deep, exposing muscle and tendon shriveled in gruesome ripples. Then Broker saw the shreds of red flesh splayed under Keith’s fingernails.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” muttered Jeff. He crossed himself. The medic felt for leverage on the clamped fist. Dead fingers, white as folded piano keys. The medic bore down with both hands. Finally the stiff fingers parted.
Broker studied the pattern of the wounds and revisited the fatal undertow in Keith’s eyes. Then he lowered his gaze to Caren’s gold wedding band, imbedded in a thick paste of blood in Keith’s shredded palm.
Speechless, Broker and Jeff exchanged grim stares. Then, quickly, they helped load Keith in the waiting ambulance.
As it pulled away, a cop waved Jeff to a county cruiser.
Broker followed, heard the radio squawk:
“Jeff, you gotta get to the clinic fast. We been invaded,”
yelled Madge, the Grand Marais radio dispatcher.
“Define…invaded,” gasped Jeff.
“Feds.”
24
A black helicopter had landed in Grand Marais, smack in the parking lot of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic.
On the way in, the dispatcher debriefed them. The invaders were FBI, agents from St. Paul and Duluth. The chopper was Army Reserve out of the Twin Cities, up at the Duluth Air Base for winter ice testing.
