“Smell it?” Nygard asked.
Broker sniffed the air and caught a lingering reek of cold smoke-soaked solvents. Not even the new snow could cover it.
“Acetone, freon, methanol, xylene, anhydrous, hydrochloric acid, and sulphuric. Residues still pooled in the basement. The warm weather we had before the snow got it to stinking again,” Nygard said.
A house had been here, an old four-square two-story farmhouse. Snow blanketed the wreckage, but Broker could discern the signature pattern of a gas explosion; walls blown out and collapsed in a mangle of burned timbers and shingle into the cratered basement. More debris ringed the site than even an explosion could scatter-several generations of cast-off auto parts, tractor parts, cannibalized snowmobiles, a rusted kid’s playground set tipped on its side.
“No sense in getting too close to it,” Nygard said. “PCA came out and put up the fence and the sign. That was a year ago. We ain’t exactly first on their list up here. They did some spot tests on the water table.” Nygard toed a clump of snow, let the flashlight play over a scatter of scorched Sudafed blister packs. “Fuckin’ meth lab blew up.”
“Read about this, but never seen it; after my time,” Broker said, shaking his head. “When I was on the street, the bikers brought speed overland from L.A. in the crank cases of their Harleys. Nothing blew up.”
“You’re showing your age,” Nygard said. “That was kid’s stuff compared to the stuff they cook in these labs. It’s ninety-five, a hundred percent pure. Smoking crack gets you high for twenty, thirty minutes; smoke this stuff, and the boost can last twelve hours. And it’s cheap. A high school dropout with a recipe off the Internet can go out, spend a hundred bucks on ingredients at the drugstore and hardware store, siphon off some anhydrous ammonia from a nurse tank in some farmer’s field, and cook a batch worth two thousand dollars in twenty minutes.”
“How many were in here when-”
“Four,” Nygard said. “Four dead. All of them Bodines. Cassie’s cousins. Five, if you count Marci Sweitz. She was three and a half-”
Nygard’s voice clipped short saying that last part. He abruptly turned and trudged back up the road. Broker followed him, stepping in the sockets of their inbound footprints. They got in the warm truck. Broker opened the thermos and poured the last of the coffee. Then he reached for another cigar, to chase the smell of the ruin. He lit it and said, “Tell me.”
Nygard bit through his toothpick, discarded it, produced another, chewed on it. “Hell, you see how it is up here. I got one full-time deputy for the whole county in the off season. We pretty much patrol the south end-the town, the highway, the big lake. Couple times things got tense, I’ve asked Harry to come along as a special deputy. He can be a pretty handy fella. But I guess you know that.” Nygard turned his face, but Broker couldn’t read his eyes in the dark. “Anyway…the goddamned Bodines…”
“There’s a kind of family you run into, being a cop,” Broker speculated. “Kind of folks who put a big dent in your budget.”
“I hear you. If you got out the arrest records going back forty years, you’d find the name Bodine on twenty percent of them. Real-”
“Assholes,” Broker said, finished his thought.
“Amen. Always were involved in smuggling, going back to Prohibition. Never robbed here, though. Know what? In the old days, when there was more of them, they’d go up through the woods into Manitoba on actual raids, rip off whole farms. They come out of Canada originally, French Canuck, some metis thrown in; story is, they came from voyageur stock. Bunch of powerful stumpy little fuckers.” Nygard shook his head. “Twenty years ago we’d have Canadian Mounties down here poking around, joint operations.
“Well, by the time I got the job, it calmed down to this bunch living out here in a trash house, we called it. Played at farming, cutting pulp wood, ran a few cows. Didn’t have a lot of contact, they had the school board convinced they were home-schoolers. Like I said, people don’t really come up this way much. Cassie and her brother tried to break the mold, sort of, after their folks basically killed themselves.”
“Suicide?” Broker said.
“Suicide by alcohol. Drunks. Cassie and her brother, Morg, would come to my house when the drinking got too bad. My dad took care of them. One night, after a real ugly scene, they said they weren’t going back, so the sheriff went out next morning and found Irv and Mellie Bodine dead. Been drinking, passed out, had turned on the oven, forgot to light the pilot. I guess…” He faced forward and watched the road. “They lived at my house till they finished high school.
“Her brother, Morg, went into the Navy. Always was an ace mechanic. No problem him finding a job when he got out. But he wanted the money faster and got caught up in a cocaine scam. Spent a year in Stillwater. He’s back now. Keeps to himself. Got a tractor restoration shop set up on the old farm. Does pretty good with it. He’s the only person who lives up there now. Him and the wolves.”
Nygard sighed. “Then Cassie had to marry Jimmy, got pregnant. Probably married him ’cause he was homecoming king senior year.” He turned to Broker. “She was the queen. Was town bad girl for a while, then straightened up, got a job at the real estate office about the time the lakefront took off. So she married Jimmy, and he’s going nowhere, driving a garbage truck for his dad. And drinking too much.”
Nygard cleared his throat. “Three years ago Jimmy’s folks got killed taking an icy turn too quick. Hit a freakin’ moose. All of a sudden Jimmy’s got the garbage company and has all this insurance money. Cassie’s got her ear on the real estate market…then this meth house business blew up.
“See, Cassie, she’s gotta go into Bemidji a couple times a month and get her legs waxed at the Spa, whatever. But she’d agreed to watch the neighbor’s toddler. So she called her cousin, Sandy, over to babysit the kid. Her boy, Teddy, was in school.” Nygard shook his head. “I didn’t really know what to look for then when it came to meth use. Now I do.” He grimaced and tapped a fingernail against his teeth. “Sandy was twenty going on fifty, way too skinny, and her teeth were gray, turning black, rotting out. Joke around town was how she was giving too many blow jobs to the regulars in back of Skeet’s Bar.”
Nygard turned in his seat. “We were starting to see meth show up, but I figured it was the Mexicans; the work crews putting the new houses up on the lake. Hell, I busted two of them actually selling it. I was sure it was Mexicans bringing it up from the Cities.”
“If they were putting out volume in that house, where were they unloading it?” Broker said.
“Over on the Red Lake Rez, mostly, that’s how we put it together.” Nygard flopped back in his seat, stared straight ahead at the snow gently boiling in his headlights, and continued talking.
“Sandy took her babysitting seriously, up to a point, I guess; because when she drove to the trash house to score some meth from her brothers, she left little Marci out in the yard by the swing set.” Nygard smiled briefly. “Didn’t want to take that cute little kid into a filthy place like that, huh? Problem was, there was this big burn pile of cook waste next to the swings, and Marci got playing with it and apparently chewed on some coffee filters they’d used to strain that shit. Among other things.
“When Cassie came home from Bemidji, there was an ambulance in the driveway. The EMTs were up in a bedroom working on Marci. She was hemorrhaging, blood all over the floor. Pulmonary edema. Raced her to Bemidji.”
“Did you question the cousin?” Broker asked.
“Couldn’t find her. She had made the 911 call, then ran once the EMTs arrived, before my deputy got in the house. All hell broke loose, the Sweitzes went ballistic. Medical examiner was searching the house like crazy, trying to find the poison.”
Nygard paused, sipped his coffee, kept staring at the snow. “Then 911 got this tip; that they were cooking meth at the Bodines’, and how Sandy had been out there with Marci. How Marci had been seen by the swing set playing in the trash. How there were six kids in that house, and how somebody should get them out.
“Got a court order, no questions asked, and went out there. The adults spotted us coming and split into the woods. Left the kids. Went in there, and I had never seen anything like that. Knee-deep garbage, backed-up toilets, a crop of maggots all over a two-week-old dead dog, human feces. And all this makeshift paraphernalia: Pyrex dishes, hot plates, gas cans with tubes running out of them, battery casings, Mason jars full of gunk. Ether. One room was stacked with empty Heet and Drano containers. Paint thinner cans. Stuff was all mixed in with leftovers and cans of spoiled food. My first meth lab. I couldn’t make sense of it, and we had to get those kids to town, to have them examined.
