Layne Wanger was the only newspaper man he’d ever trusted. Wanger would screw you, but he’d tell you first.
They hadn’t spoken in two years, but the St. Paul reporter agreed immediately to meet with him.
Wanger stood in front of the statue like a temple guard dog in charge of the past. Hardy as crabgrass, he looked like he was wearing the same suit and tie he’d worn the day he cast his last vote for Richard Nixon.
“You got your knife,” asked Broker, deadpan.
Old joke. Years back, when Wanger was fresh out of the marines, a shiny new cops reporter, he’d bought a shiny new hunting knife. And he’d brought his shiny new knife up to Broker’s cabin, joining Broker and John Eisenhower for deer season.
Never took that prized knife off. Wore it when he went to the outhouse, where he fumbled it down the hole.
They’d spent a hilarious day drinking, grappling for the knife with coat hangers, and sterilizing it in successive gasoline fires.
“Very goddamn funny,” said Wanger.
They shook hands. “So how’s it going,” asked Broker.
“Not too bad, considering the new cultural weirdness.
Damn near afraid to say ‘bullshit’ in the newsroom anymore, worried some split tail is going to accuse me of offending cows.”
The smile washed quickly off Broker’s face.
Wanger’s eyes briefly touched the Band-Aid over Broker’s bruised cheek. More serious, he said, “So what’s up?”
Broker brought his hand from his pocket, palmed the badge. “I’m back on the job, temporary with Cook County.”
“The Angland mess,” said Wanger.
Broker nodded. “We’d like to get a statement out of your former colleague, James, so we can close the case on Caren.”
“Never happen,” said Wanger. “They washed him. The feds screw up a lot of things. Witness Protection isn’t one of them. Unless he wants out, you’ll never find him.”
“So I’m learning. What kind of guy was he?”
Wanger shook his head. “Last person in the world you’d expect to get shot and wind up as a protected federal witness.”
“What’s the word that sums him up?”
Wanger, a man of exact descriptions, squinted. “Gambler.
In the worst sense.”
“How so, worse?”
“It ate him alive. Destroyed his marriage. Almost lost him his job.”
“Who’d he hang with?”
“Nobody. Everybody. He was good at that, drifting in and out of any situation.” Wanger frowned. “He couldn’t settle for being a fair-to-good reporter, he kept reaching for the gold ring. He’d always get close, then he’d get lousy breaks.
Bad luck, you could say, an interesting affliction for a guy addicted to the casinos. Last year he wandered into Mystic Lake between assignments and got lost. Lost track of time, missed his deadlines. Problem was, some busybody supervisor in Circulation was at the casino on his day off and saw James drowning at the blackjack tables.
“Problem was, he faked the story he was supposed to be covering. Word got out. He was suspended and demoted.”
“Maybe his luck changed,” speculated Broker.
“Not exactly the way I’d characterize getting shot,” said Wanger slowly, narrowing his eyes. “What you got going here?”
Broker shrugged and dangled a sentence. “Could be I have something on the case against Keith Angland.”
“Hmmm.” Wanger feigned boredom, but Broker saw his jaw muscles tense, ready to bite.
“But first, I’m curious how James got onto Caren. I need somebody who can help me get to know him real fast.”
“Ida Rain,” said Wanger. “The East Neighborhoods editor, his boss. I detect a little heat there. She took it hard when he disappeared.”
“What’s she like?”
Wanger composed his face, searching for a word. “Interesting woman, independent, reserved. Classy dresser. She must have thought James could be saved. She does that every couple years. Plays medevac. Reaches down and pulls some fuck-up out of the glue and fixes them.”
“What did she see in him?”
Wanger squinted philosophically. “You ever meet a woman who’s pretty impressive. Has her life very together in all respects, except she keeps making this one mistake over and over.”
“Yeah,” said Broker. Caren, who kept marrying cops.
She agreed to meet thirty seconds into the call. “There’s a coffee shop catty-corner to city hall, around the block from the paper. I’ll be wearing a scarf,” she said in a husky voice.
The muted autumn colors of the scarf were quietly understated in everything she wore. She stepped from a sudden snow squall wearing a slim gray wool skirt down to high-heel boots, a raw silk blouse and a bulky beige sweater. He guessed forty, with a complexion that stopped aging at thirty, lustrous reddish brown hair, smoky brown eyes, the fresh posture of a young Lauren Bacall…
And a chin that rescued her from a life sentence of beauty.
He stood at the door, pointed to her scarf. She extended a cool hand, long white fingers, tipped with burgundy-lacquered nails. “Phil Broker, wife of Nina Pryce, hello.”
He cocked his head, let the playful jibe whistle past. Shook her hand. Ida lowered her eyelids a fraction. “I just mean that Nina is a headline. Some people are headlines.”
Broker took a closer look at her and understood she could throw sex across a room like a ventriloquist. If you were in a mind to play catcher.
Which did not occur to him.
They sat down, ordered two cups of expensive coffee. “Do you know where Tom is?” she asked straight off.
“He went into Witness Protection.”
“I know that. But where is he?”
“I was hoping you might have some idea. I need to find him,” said Broker.
“So do I,” said Ida with a droll smile. “To hang up on him.
He left without saying good-bye.”
Not missing sleep over James. Not even bitter, he decided.
Disappointed and…curious and maybe a little intrigued, talking to a cop about it. “The conventional wisdom is, you can’t find them once the feds disappear them.”
“But you don’t believe that, or you wouldn’t be here,” she said, leaning forward. “Why do you need to find him?”
After you looked at her awhile, the flaw in her face became less odd and more of an artistic exaggeration. She had a definite undertow. Broker wondered if her skin was that smooth all over. He thought of the snowy, nude Dresden figurine his dad had brought back, as a war souvenir, from Germany.
He unzipped his satchel and placed a photocopy of the hate letter on the table in front of her. “I think he sent this to me.”
Her eyebrows bunched as she scanned it, her lips curdled once. She slid it back to his side of the table. “Sick,” she said.
“The person who wrote this was having a bad Stephen King experience. Why do you say Tom wrote it?”
“I have a fourteen-month-old daughter,” Broker said. “Tom James spent two minutes alone with her. The
