happened out there at the Kettle.
He owed Caren that much. Two men could tell him: Keith Angland and Tom James.
But the privateer in him counseled that something vital had been missing from the feds’ news conference: Buried in this tragic human riddle there had to be a hell of a lot of money.
28
In the morning, after Kit was changed and fed, he dressed her in layers of Polarfleece, mittens, a scarf, hat and stuck her feet in lined, black rubber boots decorated with raised reliefs of chunky dinosaurs.
Outside, the day was overcast, crisp. They barely cast shadows. The thermometer on the porch pointed to twenty-six degrees. First, he carried her through the motions of filling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds.
“Dees,” piped Kit.
“Right, gotta feed the dees.” She liked to watch the chickadees zoom around the feeder he’d planted outside her bedroom window.
Then, he opened the door to the workshop, let Kit waddle inside, shut the door, turned on the light and checked the bench and the floor for stray pieces of hundred-dollar bills.
Nothing.
Squatting, he tugged Kit’s scarf down, so her face was more than an eye slit and said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why Tom James gave you a hundred-dollar bill to choke on, do you?” Kit exuded a trickle of foggy breath. He picked her up and carried her outside.
“Okay. Here’s the thing. I dropped that chewed lump of money around here just before it snowed and we’re going to find it. Ordinarily, I’d shovel the snow, but today we’re going to do something different.”
Broker went into the garage and returned with a regular rake and a leaf rake. Kit sat down and began pawing at the snow. She raised a snowy mitten and tentatively touched it to her red tongue.
Broker raked; he figured the piece of currency would look like a clip of frozen broccoli.
“I don’t really expect to find it. But if I did find it, and if I find Tom James, I’d show it to him and ask him how he thinks it got stuck in your throat.”
Kit pushed another handful of snow at her mouth. Broker paused and studied her round face.
“It’s called making a start,” he explained. There was a person in there, but some of the books said kids didn’t have memories from this age. She wouldn’t remember choking.
She wouldn’t remember Tom James.
When her mother came home at Christmas she probably wouldn’t remember her, either. At least not right off. Broker went back to sifting and searching with his rake. Kit continued to eat snow.
That’s how Jeff found them when he drove up. He got out of his Bronco and said, “Why didn’t I think of that instead of spending five hundred bucks on a Toro.”
“Very funny.”
“I give.”
“This is where she spit out that hunk of hundred-dollar bill.”
Jeff squinted. “As I recall, you were the lousiest investigator of the bunch. What you were good at was letting Keith talk you into carrying a raw steak into a den full of starving lions.
That was more your speed.”
“I wouldn’t have lost it except I had to run in the house when you started yelling.”
Jeff cleared his throat, walked over and picked up Kit.
“This kid is freezing to death. Her lips are blue.”
“Don’t change the subject. She’s tough. Just eating snow.”
“So, what if you find it?” asked Jeff.
“It’s money.”
“Well, sure it’s money,” said Jeff.
Broker stopped raking and stood up. “Keith is accused of doing some heavy-duty crime. Where’s the motive? The Mafia doesn’t give out merit badges. It had to be for a lot of money.”
“Hmmm,” said Jeff.
“And what did Kit choke on?”
“I can only handle one hypothetical at a time,” said Jeff.
He turned, walked with Kit in his arms along the house, down to the end of the point. High waves had swept the snow from the ledge rock. Garlanded with lichens, the shiny black granite gleamed like the skulls of sperm whales. Broker came up behind him and said, “We have to find James.”
“We, huh?” Jeff repositioned Kit in his arms and said in her ear, “Once, a long time ago, your great- grandfather and my grandfather had a fishing boat and they shipped out of this cove. It was during Prohibition and times were pretty rough. Sometimes your great-grandfather would talk my grandfather into sailing their boat up to Canada, to Thunder Bay, and picking up a load of contraband whiskey. Then they’d land it here and sell it to people who’d drive up from as far as the Cities.
“They didn’t smuggle all the time, just when times were hard. ‘A little here and there,’ Grandpa used to say. And it was always the Broker who talked the Jeffords into going on the little adventures. Like what your dad is trying to pull on me right now. That’s how it goes, Kit. North of Grand Marais.”
He turned to Broker. “So where should
Broker smiled. “People will talk to you. You have such an honest face. And nobody has ever heard you swear.
Make some calls. Find out what’s on that tape.”
“I can do that,” said Jeff.
Down the street from Grand Marais’s one stoplight, Cook County housed its sheriff’s department in a flat- topped, one-story cement bunker made of opaque glass brick and dirty cornmeal-colored cinder blocks. Like
Broker, with Kit slung in the crook of his elbow, walked under the stark sign that said COOK COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT, opened the door and entered a grim antechamber.
Wanted posters hung on a bulletin board. A brochure on a plastic chair invited:
The smudged wall of bullet-proof glass that fronted the dispatcher’s station was the only window you could see through in the whole place. An exhausted plastic Christmas wreath drooped in one corner of the window.
Madge, the robust dispatcher, buzzed him in. He handed Kit to her. “Teach this kid to type will you, she needs to learn a trade to fall back on.”
“So you already got her college picked out, eh?” asked Madge.
“You kidding. She’s going to be a waitress in Two Harbors.
Probably marry some strong-back guy who cuts pulp and lives in a trailer. That way I don’t have to waste money on piano and ballet lessons.”
He continued down the cramped corridor and entered Jeff’s office, which looked more like a storeroom: second-hand steel desk, industrial shelves piled with equipment and stacks of cardboard boxes.
A topographical wall map of Cook County filled an open space between the shelves. The crude poster on the wall behind Jeff’s desk was an early-generation computer graphic stamped out of a dot-matrix printer, the images formed by overprinted letters in the shape of a scoped rifle.
The slogan under it announced:
LONG DISTANCE: THE
NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE
RAMSEY COUNTY SWAT
But Jeff never had the spit-shined swagger required for extended SWAT work, and the poster was more joke than nostalgia. Notations and telephone numbers were slowly filling it up.
“God, at least paint this place,” said Broker.
