His eyes roved the newsroom and settled on Korne, who was now employing her terroristic smile to motivate the Copy Desk. Individual threads on her lumpy wool skirt popped in his vision. He’d read about this adrenaline enhancement, an acuity that men of action experienced.
It was risky.
Thirty-three days ago he had wagered his November rent money on one hand of blackjack at the Mystic Lake Casino.
And won. He’d tried to repeat the performance with his December rent three days ago and lost.
He had two Snickers bars in his stomach. And two stolen twenty-dollar bills in his pocket. What would it be like to bet his job on one story?
Purposefully, he stood up and walked across the newsroom, steering past the gaggle of loud young reporters. Their chatter dipped as he went by, as if they’d suddenly encountered a funeral cortege and remembered their manners.
He continued on to the desk of Layne Wanger, the cops reporter. Wanger, fifty-five, reflected light off his bald head, steel-rimmed glasses and starched white shirt like a death ray. Wanger was working on the “tongue” story. And he was in a foul mood. Nobody would confirm the rumor.
Tom smiled. Wanger would kill for the tip he had just received.
“Yeah, Tom, what is it?” Wanger banged keys hunt and peck and kept his eyes pinned on his computer screen.
Wanger considered Tom harmless. Possibly tragic. Tom had the physical persona of a handsome cocker spaniel, eager but needy; his manner elicited Samaritan impulses from total strangers. It was his most lethal tool as a reporter.
“Last summer I did a story on this cop’s wife,” Tom began.
“Huh?” Wanger continued to type.
“Keith Angland’s wife,” said Tom.
Wanger paused. “What about her?”
“I did this story about her restoring an old Victorian house in Afton and I’m thinking about a follow-up. But her husband’s still in hot water, right?”
Wanger pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I’d back off on the wife.”
“You would, huh?”
Wanger spun in his chair and gave Tom his full attention.
“There’s talk his marriage is in the toilet with his career. I hear he’s been drinking.”
“Ah, I see what you mean,” said Tom. But Wanger had already rotated back to his screen and had resumed banging keys.
Briskly, Tom continued into the lobby, went up the stairs to the next floor and into the library. Without speaking to any of the staff, he walked directly to a file cabinet, paged through the
He returned to his desk and picked up his assignment-a meeting of the Woodbury school board that was to discuss the school lunch menu. Right.
Tom pulled on his coat. The Neighborhoods bureau hunched over their keyboards like turtles, heads pulled into their shoulders. Ida was still out of sight. Good. That woman had radar like a bat and would pick up on his mood change.
Avoiding eye contact, Tom strolled from the newsroom.
He purposely did not take a company car.
Sometimes, like now, he imagined himself walking in spotlights. Like when he first pushed through the doors of a casino with money in his pocket and knew that somewhere in the smoky room, among the swirling gaming lights, he had just locked eyes with Lady Luck.
4
U.S. 94 going east out of St. Paul looked like a dirty, frozen kitchen sink. Twelve degrees packed the cinder clouds. No sun, no wind and no snow. Tom tensed behind the wheel, running bald tires, ready for a skid. Invisible black ice vapors coughed from thousands of tailpipes and shellacked the frost-etched asphalt. Not the time to get snared in a fender bender.
Questions.
Bomb hoaxes and rumors of human tongues. The feds had denied that a tongue was found in the fake bomb. But Wanger was taking the rumor seriously. So how in the hell was St. Paul Police Lieutenant Keith Angland mixed up in mailing tongues?
And…
Who leaked to him? Probably the FBI. Sending him into the grass to thump around and scare out some snakes. Because he’d been to the house, had interviewed the wife.
Whoever it was, they didn’t know he had been canned from GA and wasn’t supposed to cover federal investigations.
Tom was on a short leash, but fortunately, he licked the hand that held the leash.
He pulled his nine-year-old used Volkswagen Rabbit to the shoulder, cranked open his window, flipped on his company cell phone and punched in numbers.
“Ida Rain.” She answered on the first ring, her best husky telephone voice.
“Ida, it’s Tom. My car quit on me. I won’t make the school board meeting.” He held his phone out toward the whoosh-ing traffic. “It’s the battery. I need a new one,” he said, lowering his voice, “you know, like you told me when it barely turned over this morning,” he added.
“Okay,” she said quietly, “I’ll cover for you. You think you’ll have it fixed by tonight?” she asked with a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Sure. See you.” He smiled. Lick lick. Ida would look out for him.
He rolled up the window and shivered. The Volkswagen had one of those famous no-heat German heaters. The company leased new Fords that had good heaters but also radio antennas, and Keith Angland might spot it lurking around his house.
Tom palmed the manila envelope on the seat next to him:
Photos fanned out under his fingers. Angland took a good picture, and he’d been in the paper a lot the last few years.
Various awards. Honor graduate, FBI Academy. But those accolades came under the old police chief.
He put the photos aside and consulted his
He pulled back into traffic, drove east, sorted the pictures of Angland’s wife out and left them on top of the pile. Tom believed a wife would talk when a marriage was going down, even a cop’s wife. You just had to catch them at the right moment, be a good listener and have patience to wait for the verbal slip that, with the right coaxing and pleading, dropped a detail on which a story could turn.
The wife’s picture cut a rectangle of green whimsy against the winter day, taken against a sweep of summer sunshine and foliage.
Tall and outdoorsy, tanned tennis legs in cutoff jeans, she wore a work-stained pebble gray T-shirt on top,
For the camera, she had arranged a row of tall window frames on sawhorses and was removing layers of old bubbled paint with a putty knife. A red bandanna turbaned her tightly curled dark hair.
He fingered another picture, the family shot, that showed her with her husband. No kids. No pet. Keith Angland resembled a blond, two-hundred-pound falcon instantly ready to tuck and dive after a mouse in a square mile of cornfield.
