Nina shook her head in a quandary of pain and anger. Broker clamped a hand on her shivering shoulder. “You’re not alone anymore, okay?”
She set her lips to keep them from quivering. “We’re going to take LaPorte down,” she said.
Broker narrowed his eyes. “We’ll see. I’m on my way to lay the opening move on Fret.”
Nina collapsed into his arms in a tremendous release of anxiety and laughed. Quickly she sobered. “Where do you keep a pick and shovel?” she asked, squaring her shoulders. “You can’t dig with that hand and your dad can’t and I sure as hell won’t let Irene do it.”
Broker knelt and patted the stiffening fur. “Wait for Mike. He’ll want to pick the spot.”
19
The north shore dawn rolled the fog in off the big water and glossed the black granite boulders with glacier sweat and it was the first day of June. Broker stood on the waterfront across from the police station and sipped coffee and waited for Tom Jeffords. Lyle was inside the cop shop running Fret on the computer.
Jeffords showed up in sweats, running shoes, and a light windbreaker. Unshaven, he nodded as he eased from his Chevy pickup. He reached out his hand for Broker’s coffee cup and took a sip. “Lyle says we got big city bullshit before breakfast?”
“Fucker killed Mike’s dog.”
“Lyle told me. Why, Phil?”
“Remember that kid who stayed with Kim and I? Nina Pryce.”
“Sure. Your army brat surrogate kid sister, the celebrity.”
“She grew up,” Broker said laconically. “This guy says he’s a cop followed her up here from New Orleans. Played real rough with her.”
“Lyle’s got him for burglarizing your house and assault. The dog will be impossible to prove. He could claim self-defense. You want to press the breaking and entering?”
“Not yet. Want to talk to him first.”
“This headed in the direction of me doing you a favor?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Jeffords turned Broker’s injured hand in his fingers, winced and said mildly, “You started smoking again.”
They went into the station and Lyle handed them a sheet of fax paper. “He’s dirty. Administrative leave from NOPD, implicated in narcotics and two homicides. Case dropped. Circumstantial. No witnesses. Sound familiar?” Lyle handed over a plastic card. “He also had this in his wallet. Registered PI with New Orleans.”
“Big deal,” said Jeffords, “you can send away to a magazine and get one of those.”
Lyle held up the map. “All this trouble over a piece of paper.”
Jeffords unrolled the map. “Hmmm. This is the coast of…Vietnam.” He took out a sheet of paper that had been rolled inside the map. The murky graphic could have been a close-up of a rock formation in a lunar crater. “What’s this?”
Broker had avoided taking a good look at the contents of Nina’s briefcase up until now. He shrugged, but he felt his stomach tighten and the part of his mind that was an intricate museum of facts drew a connection to a picture he’d seen in a
“Maybe at the hospital,” said Jeffords.
“Could Lyle run copies on the QT while we talk to this guy?”
“I can do that,” said Lyle. “One other thing. I had Gloria at the motel pull his phone bill. He made two calls to New Orleans and received one back. All the same number. Listed to a Cyrus LaPorte.”
Broker instinctively disliked former New Orleans detective sergeant Bevode Fret. Not just because he wore a men’s cologne that had little girls in its ads. Or because he oozed casual superhero violence out of a Nietzschean comic book. When Broker walked into the detention room where they were holding Fret, the southern cop nodded and smiled at him in sinister welcome.
Like he was proud of the brawny backwoods mojo that enabled him to lure a big dangerous animal into killing range. Like he was in control.
The Louisianan sat at a small table under bright electric lights. His lanky frame was relaxed on a folding chair as, tentatively, he sipped from a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He had a bandage on his big jaw and a puffy bruise down his left cheek. He had meticulously combed his duck-butt hair. The charcoal gray, athletic-cut tropical suit he wore must have cost eight hundred bucks. With a twinge of disgust, Broker noticed the prominent day-old suck mark on his neck under his left ear.
“You gonna charge me?” he asked as Broker and Jeffords entered the interrogation room.
“How’s B amp;E and felony assault sound?” said Jeffords.
“Where’s the felony? She had the shotgun, bro, not me. I ain’t carrying. Got no permit up here.”
Broker did not mention the marks on Nina’s throat or the dog. That would be a personal discussion he’d have later. He said, “You came through my door at four A.M. You didn’t knock.”
“Door was open.”
“Door was locked,” said Broker.
Fret shrugged. “Opened for me. I just walked in. Was going to collect some things that didn’t belong to her and quietly be on my way. She jumped me.”
Jeffords folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Broker sat down in the other chair, facing Fret.
Fret grinned. “Give me my rights and my phone call. I ain’t saying do-do.”
Broker and Jeffords stared at him. His muddy hazel eyes did not waver. His grin broadened. “Didn’t think so. This ain’t the kind of situation we want getting more complicated than it already is for you guys or my client.”
“Tom, could Sergeant Fret and I could talk privately?” asked Broker.
“Sure, just keep the door open.”
Fret grinned again, showing alligator rows of teeth. “You the local badass? Going to trip me down some stairs?”
“Talk,” repeated Broker. Jeffords nodded and left them alone. “I’m a cop,” said Broker.
“Yeah, so I gathered when I saw the army bust into your house in Stillwater. Checked you out…” A little honey humor ran with the mud in Fret’s eyes and he let Broker fill in the blanks. Fret knew he had history with LaPorte and Nina and they were talking between the lines. “You’re the kind of cop who don’t wear a uniform. So if you’re a cop why you been driving that cunt around?”
“Her name’s Nina Pryce,” said Broker.
“Yeah, the nasty little cunt who wormed her way into my client’s social circle and then robbed some items.”
“What’re you getting at?” asked Broker.
“She took some stuff. I take it back. Everything’s copacetic. Oh yeah,” Fret loosened his features and like some lightbulb coming on in the dungeon of his mind, he recollected, “my client has a soft spot for the…girl. That’s why he didn’t charge her down home. Yet.”
“We checked your phone calls. You work for Cyrus LaPorte.”
“
“And he has a soft spot for Miss Pryce?”
Fret smiled and shifted into a lazy intimate tone of voice, a personal touch that southerners seemed to own as a birthright and that Broker resented because it was absent in himself. “It’s like this,” said Fret reasonably. “Mr. LaPorte and the girl’s daddy were in the army together. Some fuckin’ thing way back. She blames General LaPorte for her daddy’s shortcomings, you could say. She’s messed up her life behind this shit and the general don’t necessarily want to lean on her. He’d be willing to let it go if he gets his stuff back and some kind of understanding she leaves him alone.” Fret knit his thick blond eyebrows in a convincing display of concern.
