Vapor Trail

grass. He thought of the picture of Tommy Horrigan sitting all alone on Gloria Russell’s bookshelf. What did Tommy have to associate with being six? For sure, something far less secure than swinging on the resolute unbending arm of Grandpa Abner.

His cell phone rang. He popped it on.

“So did the priest deserve it?” Harry said.

“No, Moros was hounded out of Albuquerque by gossip. The local cops cleared him,” Broker said.

“That’s what I thought. So you and John have a real problem. .”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “The Saint has returned with bad target information.”

Broker shivered. Mocking the heat, a cold needle of adrenaline jabbed through his heart. “You know this how?”

“I keep this personal log of anonymous tips, stuff too flimsy to file a formal Initial Complaint Report. I clear them and delete them off my computer. But last week I found a pile of printouts in this drawer in a desk. Somebody had gone into my computer and retrieved my notes from the trash. Moros was on top of the stack.” Harry paused a beat. “I always had a problem emptying my trash. .”

“Harry?” Broker was on his feet, squeezing the chunk of Samsung plastic in his hand as if he could force Harry’s voice back into the circuits. But the line was dead.

Chapter Twenty-five

Goddamn you, Harry-where are you?

Frustrated, Broker scanned the neighborhood. Just the still foliage of the trees and the shadows on the deserted streets. Harry probably wasn’t on foot. .

Moving now toward the car. What about Annie Mortenson? She had been lying about helping Harry. . But by the time he reached the car, he’d decided he needed more help than Annie could provide. Annie didn’t really know Harry.

Harry had only wrecked Annie’s car. But he’d wrecked Gloria Russell’s marriage.

Ten minutes later, Broker was inside the government center, taking the elevator to the third floor. The receptionist, who had been hostile to him earlier, saw him coming, and her expression froze. Her eyes went wide, then filmed over, unfocused.

Broker had seen this response before, as a young operator in MACV-SOG doing fast ugly missions with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. He remembered sweeping into Vietnamese hamlets, the villagers numbing their faces into empty smiles. Their eyes had escaped inward as fear bred the hope they could make themselves invisible.

When he slowed to take a good look at her, it struck him that she was a low-rent version of Gloria Russell. The same gym-rat tan. The same muscle tone. The same shortish hair, only hers was dishwater blond.

He continued down the hall and into Gloria’s office.

A slender guy in a blue shirt and tie was talking to her. He had a sheaf of manila folders in his hand.

“Sorry, but I got to talk to Gloria,” Broker said.

“Is this. .?” the guy said.

“Yeah, this is Broker,” Gloria said.

“I can come back.” The guy turned and left the room.

Gloria pushed a Washington County edition of the Pioneer Press across her desk. “You see the paper?” she said.

Broker shook his head.

She handed it to him and said, “The story stripped down the right side.”

Broker scanned the headline: “Priest Found Dead in Stillwater Mission Church.” Under Sally Erbeck’s byline, the lead sentence read: “Foul play has not been ruled out in the death of Father Victor Moros.”

“The gossip jumped buildings this morning. Now I know why you want to deal Tardee up; he saw a woman in a Saints jacket go into the church about the time the priest died,” Gloria said. “You could have told me yesterday.”

“I just talked to Harry,” Broker said, evading her remark.

Gloria tensed visibly. “How is he?”

“Drunk. He has these two forward gears when he’s drinking. One is lucid. The other is. .”

“I know, dangerously crazy.”

“So, can we talk straight?”

“Sure, Lymon filled me in. The priest was murdered in his confessional. He had a St. Nicholas medallion in his mouth.”

“And?”

“And. . you’ve determined that the priest was not a pedophile. So somebody is playing games with the Saint’s calling card.”

“You know what Harry says?”

Gloria raised one hand in the stiff, dismissive gesture Gena Rowlands made famous in A Woman Under the Influence. “By all means, lay it on me.”

“Harry says the Saint is back with bad target information. He says somebody in-house has been retrieving his notes from the computer trash and has put together an erroneous list of child abusers.”

Gloria was careful not to bristle too much. “Ah, Jesus. I’ll make it simple for you. Harry Cantrell is brilliant but erratic. He had quite a juggling act going, but now he’s dropped his balls, as it were. Now he’s grabbing at straws. I know the man. We, ah, had a thing. .”

“I heard.”

“I broke it off. Hell hath no fury like an old macho scorned.”

“He’s teasing me on the telephone. He won’t give me a name.”

Gloria cocked her head. “Okay, let me tell you about Harry. Do you know how we initially got onto Dolman?”

Broker shook his head.

“Sometimes cops go out to schools and talk to teachers about reporting child abuse, what to look for, stuff like that. So a year ago last spring Harry goes out to Timberry Trails Elementary and talks to the staff.

“There’s this one paraprofessional who’s got this chest like a shelf, right? This dish. So after he gives his talk, Harry starts putting the moves on her. Naturally, being the snake that he is, he uses the elements in his talk as an entree.

“And this lady has a pile of these storybooks at her desk that kindergartners have written about themselves, and Harry is paging through them as he’s doing his thing. The kids draw self-portraits on the front of the books and write their names. The teachers help them with the text. And he comes across this book that looks different from the others. Instead of a happy smiley face, the face is all colored in. So he holds it up and asks, ‘What’s this?’

“And the lady answers, ‘Oh, that’s Tommy Horrigan; he always draws himself with his back turned.’ Harry opens the book and reads things Tommy has written, ‘The leaves are coming back’ or ‘Mommy plants tulips.’ He sees that Tommy does not put himself in his story.

“So Harry asks to meet Tommy Horrigan, and the rest is history.” Gloria shook her head. “Harry starts out trying to get laid and winds up detecting the trail of a child abuser.”

Broker looked her square in the eye. “And you started out with Harry, building a case against Dolman. And you wound up getting laid.”

Gloria pursed her lips, looked at the wall, and said, “You know, it really bothered me that a guy that old, with such lousy personal politics, could be so damn. .” She mugged a smile, turned back to Broker, and said, “Is this what you came for?”

“You asked to have Harry taken off the case,” Broker said.

“Had to. When I took on Dolman, my marriage was on life support. The thing I had with Harry basically pulled the plug. But it was interfering with the work.”