Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

But she wasn’t capricious. She needed some proof that he belonged on the list. Angel took her work seriously; she was prepared to go pretty deep undercover to get her confirmation.

Aubrey kept a blocky digital Nikon camera in his gym bag. He’d whip it out and grab snaps when the opportunity presented itself. She watched his camera follow a six-year-old girl in a blue bikini as she walked into the lake.

He was close enough for Angel to hear the precise snap of the shutter.

Angel had been moving in on him for more than an hour. Unaware that she was getting closer, he trolled his watery brown eyes up and down the crowded beach. Looking for strays, maybe. Except he had not approached any children. Occasionally, he just took some pictures. Once he walked down the beach, past the roped-off swim area, and snapped a group of scuba divers when they came ashore for a break; then he talked to them and wrote something down.

Hmmm.

So much for the idea that Dolman’s remains might be in the ground close by and that someone, like maybe his killer, might visit the grave. Harry was right. Broker was miscast in the investigator’s role.

On his way back into town he turned on NPR and listened to a discussion on homeland defense. Somebody from the Pentagon was explaining how the beltway road nets around major cities had been designed by the Defense Department. If the cities were nuked, the beltways allowed military convoys to travel around them, not through.

On the theory that it was sometimes better to drive around, not directly through, problems, Broker decided to take a little road time to think. He turned on Highway 36, went west to 694, and lost himself in the traffic, speeding along on the freeway loop around the metro.

Instead of a nuked city, he was driving around Harry’s question: would he do it again?

If it was your wife and your kid, would you do it again?

As he thought back over that lousy day, he told himself it had been a case of bad timing. He’d run a red light on Summit Avenue on his way to the dentist’s house. If he had stopped for that light, by the time he arrived at the house the dentist might have been dead.

There would have been questions, sure. But Harry would have bluffed his way through. And even if he had been brought up on charges, Diane would still be alive. That’s what Harry had meant when he told Broker to leave and come back in five minutes.

Broker had talked this over many times with his old partner, J. T. Merryweather. J. T. compared it to the war. It was friendly fire. It went with the territory. You always assumed that friendly fire would hit somebody else.

In the middle of this meditation his stomach growled like a reminder that life goes on. He hadn’t eaten today. He pulled off at the next exit, went into a Perkins, and ate a late breakfast of sausage, pancakes, and eggs.

When he arrived back in Stillwater, he parked in the LEC front lot, went in, buzzed into the sheriff’s office and the nearly deserted unit. Summer. Everybody found reasons to get out early. Lymon was not in sight.

Marcy flagged him and handed him a sheaf of paper. “Lymon’s interview with the secretary who found the body,” she said.

Broker took the report to the empty cube, sat down, read it, and stared at the telephone. Probably he should call Milt’s voice mail to see if he had any messages. He smiled cynically. Nina calling from Italy, perhaps. All is forgiven.

First he entered the voice mail number. The recorded voice told him to tap in Milt’s number, then asked for the security code. Finally, the computer voice informed him he had one new message. He pressed 1 to hear it.

One new message left today at 1:34.

“Broker, this is Janey. .”

Broker took a deep breath. Wonderful. It was old home week.

“I know this is sudden, but I really need to talk to you.”

He thumped 3 twice, speeded up the message, deleted it, and sank back in the chair.

Janey.

Jane Carli Hensen, maiden name Halvorsen, Norwegian-Italian ancestry. Whatever she’d once been, now she was a stay-at-home mom. Her daughter, Laurie, would be six now.

Broker, Janey, and her future husband, Drew, had known each other when they all worked at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She was in public relations, Drew was a police artist, and Broker was a field agent who was seldom seen in the bureau’s offices on University Avenue in St. Paul.

She probably still read two or three mysteries a week. In the old days investigators used to run cases by her and only stared at her legs as an afterthought.

She’d had flings with various cop types, including a long, serious one with Broker; then she married the quietest guy around, Drew, who quit BCA and became a successful commercial illustrator who specialized in children’s books. Now she had settled into a monstrously gabled and turreted house on Stillwater’s South Hill.

He remembered her standing in the grocery store. She’d looked hollow-cheeked, physically haunted. Excessively lean.

Sort of the way he looked, actually.

Broker shared the Norwegian connection on his mother’s side. Given to dark edges, sometimes moody, possessing a thread of melancholy that tied his inner thoughts in a tightly controlled bundle. And always the potential for storms of repressed emotion.

Speaking of threads. . it would be sensible to avoid Janey, because she used to have this knack for unraveling his little carnal loose ends and giving them a tug.

He stood up and lost his train of thought when he stared down the rows of deserted cubes at a bulletin board that hung on the wall. In huge rushed letters someone had printed: THE SAINT LIVES: HARRY 2, PEDOPHILES 0.

Broker was not amused. He went to the board, erased it, left the office, walked through the lobby and out the revolving doors to the parking lot. He took the Ithaca.12-gauge out of the trunk, stuffed in shells, racked the slide to put one in the chamber, set the safety, and tucked the shotgun in the passenger-seat foot well within easy reach.

In case Harry came flying out of the shadows.

He just wanted to go back to the river, eat a microwave dinner, drink a couple of beers, and put an ice pack on his head. And think of ways to get even with John.

And this was only day one.

Okay. Showtime.

Angel removed her sunglasses, tilted her hat low over one eye, and concentrated on making herself look like a poster girl for mindless sex. She willed a victim aura into her face; she imagined a neon sign blinking on her forehead: Beat Me; Fuck Me; Blow Your Nose in Me and Throw Me Away.

Angel could move real nice when she wanted to. She moved real nice across the hot sand, stood over Aubrey with one hand plopped on a hip. “Nice camera,” she said.

Aubrey looked up, brightened, and spewed language like spatters of grease. “Hi. Dig you. You like cameras?”

Angel made her eyes enlarge with wonder. “Is that real, around your neck?” she asked.

Aubrey fingered his gold chain, shrugged, then curlicued his finger up in the general direction of her chest. “What about those. Are they real?”

Angel put on her best lip-drooping bored smile. “For me to know.”

Aubrey was up on his knees now, eager; clearly, this was a guy who loved to connect. He fingered the gold chain. “You know how you test to see if gold is real?” he said.

“Not a clue,” Angel said.

Aubrey grinned. He had excellent teeth, healthy gums, and a tongue that jerked around like it could use a shot of Ritalin. His face had been handsome once, before he got soaked in fat. It reminded her of someone.

He was saying, “You bite it.” He winked. “See if it dents.”