carefully made his way between the shadowy furniture toward the kitchen.
Red digital numbers on the microwave stamped 5:29 A.M. in the dark. A moment later an appliance clicked on with a watery gurgle-J.T.’s preset coffeemaker. Upstairs, on the same schedule as the coffeepot, people stirred. Doors opened and closed. Water ran in pipes.
Broker went back to the living room, got his travel bag, and took it to the half bath off the kitchen. When he emerged shaved and dressed, he smelled brewing coffee and heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs.
J.T. padded through the doorway wearing jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and wool socks. He flicked on the light. “Amy’s still asleep. Denise and Shami are coming down for breakfast, so let’s take some coffee into the barn. Feed some birds.”
J.T. poured coffee into a thermos, sat down, pulled on a pair of work shoes, then got up and reached for a lined denim jacket. Broker took his coat and boots from the mud porch and soon they were walking toward the barn, testing the icy pre-dawn air in their lungs.
J.T. handed Broker the thermos and two cups, then withdrew a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his chest pocket. “Even in Minnesota, I can still smoke in my own barn,” he said as he filled his pipe and squinted into the distance over Broker’s shoulder. Broker reached for a cigar and they lit up like two truant kids.
J.T.’s eyes had acquired a new habit of focusing beyond the person he was with and resting on a point in the sky. Even a blank night sky. He used to be a close watcher of people, and they had pretty much lived up to his expectations. Now he preferred to stay far away from most of them, to get beyond them. Growing his own corn, oats, and alfalfa he’d become addicted to the constant examination of wind, clouds, humidity, and the color of air.
They walked out to the paddocks, fed the birds there, returned to the barn, and continued to scoop feed into five-gallon plastic buckets and dump them in feeding troughs in one of the two pens that sectioned off the lower level of the building. Broker moved in easily among the leggy hens who drifted away and cautiously returned after he’d dumped their feed.
The barn was new territory for Broker, with its musty scent of oats and corn fermenting in cold wooden bins and the loft above, heavy with alfalfa bales. He had grown up north of Grand Marais on Lake Superior. He knew something about fishing, hunting, logging, and iron mining. But there were few real farms in the granite bedrock of Cook County, Minnesota.
“Watch out. They peck at glasses, watches, rings, pens. Shiny stuff attracts them,” J.T. said. Broker shouldered through the birds. He wasn’t wearing a watch. He sure wasn’t wearing a ring.
Then J.T. held out an arm to bar Broker from entering the second pen. In that pen, a solitary four-hundred- pound male stood nine feet tall, with his thick black plummage flexed, tipped with white feathers. The stubby wings and tail feathers came up and he coiled his long neck at them.
“Popeye’s my big, ornery male,” J.T. said “When he gets his wings out and his tail up, never get in front of him. He’s getting ready to attack. Always stay to the side.”
“How come you have him all alone in here?” Broker asked.
“I, ah, haven’t figured out how to move him back into a paddock. Last time I tried, he cornered me and almost kicked me to death. So I’m going to wait till he’s way, way out of season to try again.”
The reinforced plywood door to the pen shuddered when Popeye threw a kick as if to echo J.T.’s remarks.
“Jesus,” Broker said.
“Yeah. Ostriches throw a mean knuckle. They’re the only birds that have two toes on their feet. Check it out.”
Broker snuck a look into Popeye’s pen. Two toes, but one was little and one was real big with a thick ugly claw on it. “Ow,” he said.
“It’s no joke. They can kill a lion with one kick. He could disembowel a man, easy.”
After all the birds were fed and watered, J.T. led Broker through his incubator and hatchery rooms, now closed down because the birds quit laying their two-pound eggs in September. J.T. and Broker climbed some stairs and entered a long, comfortable studio paneled with barn wood.
A counter ran around the room and one side held an ammo-loading press and shelves of gunsmith paraphernalia. Farther down the counter a screen saver on a Gateway PC trailed bubbles, sting rays, and an occasional shark. Two space heaters were in place as backup, but J.T. crumpled some newspaper and tossed some kindling in a Fisher woodstove next to his computer desk, and soon had a fire crackling.
The other side of the room was outfitted with more counters fanning out from an industrial Singer sewing machine and racks of leather-working tools. Sheaves of tanned ostrich leather in black, maroon, and gray-some with a scale pattern, some with quills-hung from the walls. A picture window behind the sewing machine was an ebony mirror, filled with night.
Broker took the rocking chair by the stove and J.T. sat on the stool at his work counter. J.T. tossed a leather checkbook case to Broker. “You want to trade up?” he asked.
J.T.’s first prototypes had been stiff, the stitching not sufficient to hold the leather. He’d brought in a commercial sewing machine, learned a few tricks, and started backing the ostrich with calfskin, and now the items were supple. This new one was a little slicker than the one in Broker’s hip pocket.
“Shiny leather,” Broker said.
J.T. nodded. “An experiment. Out of a South African shipment.”
Broker handed it back. J.T. tossed it aside and picked a sheaf of printer paper from the counter. He poured more coffee and relit his pipe.
The calm expression of the ostrich farmer was overprinted by the suspicious frown of J.T. Merryweather, former homicide detective.
“I downloaded this stuff from Washington County: Cliff Stovall was a fifty-six-year-old white guy, a CPA. He died of exposure complicated by self-mutilation. .”
“So they’re set on this self-mutilation theory?” Broker said.
“There it is. The coroner made notes more about what was on the outside of Stovall’s body, than what he found inside.”
“What’d he find inside?” Broker sipped coffee.
“Traces of Antabuse and a lot of alcohol. Blood level out of sight.”
“Okay, give me the outside,” Broker said.
“Thirteen significant self-inflicted wounds caused by cutting and piercing going back over twenty years.” J.T. raised his eyebrows. “In a world of seriously fucked-up individuals, this guy was a standout.”
“Nothing about foul play?” Broker said.
“Nope. Self-mutilation,” J.T. reiterated. “I’m getting pictures sent of the pre-autopsy so I can show Shami the downside of body piercing. She wants to get a nose ring.”
“So this isn’t the coroner making a diagnosis?”
“No, they pulled this guy’s medical records. He wasn’t some teenage kid taking a roll-around in the tackle box. The coroner called him an aristocrat of the cutting culture. He was a regular inpatient at the St. Cloud VA on the neuropsychiatric ward.”
Broker frowned. “I don’t buy it.”
“You want to see all the reports?”
“Screw the reports; I don’t buy it.” Broker said.
J.T. leaned forward and poked the air with the stem of his pipe for emphasis as he read from his notes. “You’re just being contrary. Stovall was an alky on Antabuse. And he took Trazadone to go to sleep and Prozac to smooth him out in the morning. The record mentions severe childhood trauma complemented by post-traumatic stress disorder. And his wife left him and filed for divorce six months ago.”
“So what are they calling it?” Broker asked.
“Misadventure.”
“Jesus, not even suicide?”
“Uh-uh. See, the way they interpret this stuff, Stovall was a mass meeting of self-destructive disorders, so borderline and numbed out, the only way he could feel things was to cut and stick himself. They figure he fell off the wagon, drank his way though an Antabuse reaction-which is hard-core because Antabuse and alcohol are a recipe for projectile-vomiting like in
