by Chuck Logan
And sonofabitch! There it was.
They parked in back of the county building and went to the sheriff’s office, buzzed in through dispatch, and waited. A few minutes later, Sheriff Wales came in, flushed. Dark patches of sweat staining the underarms of his uniform. From the knees down he was damp and smeared with crushed, tiny yellow flowers that smelled faintly like last night’s canola fields.
He motioned Broker through the corridors to his office, where they faced off. “You gonna help me on this, Broker?” Wales said. “Now that we got dead people lying all around.”
“You know about the fiasco last night?”
Wales nodded. “It’s all over town. But I can’t figure why they’d go after Ace.”
“Five days ago Nina’s bunch cracked an Al Qaeda finance officer in Detroit. He gave up a smuggling operation. He suggested they were bringing a nuclear device in through your county and, that they were dealing with an American named Shuster.”
Wales took it like a body blow, narrowing his eyes, incredulous. “Ace had some kinda bomb?”
“Don’t know.”
Wales recovered quick. “Yeah, well, you seen what Ace was smuggling last night.” Then he pointed his finger at Broker. “Don’t play games. We haven’t had a murder in this town for twenty years. Now I got three people shot to death in an hour’s time. And two missing, kidnapped…”
How do you know they’re kidnapped?” Broker said.
“Dale called in to nine-one-one that—”
Broker cut in, “The Qaeda guy in Detroit said they were working with a Shuster. You got one dead Shuster and another one telling you something on a phone…”
Wales chewed at the inside of his cheek, cocked his head. “You mean…Dale…,” he said slowly.
“Yeah, Dale. What if that distress call was misdirection?” Broker ventured.
Wales headed out the door, motioning to Broker to follow. “C’mon.”
“Where we going?”
“To the Shuster house, for starters.”
Wales paused at dispatch to put instructions over the radio. “Lyle, stay at the bar and keep an eye on the ME. And when the crime lab people get in from Bismarck, thank them for assisting but make it clear we want the jurisdiction. Break. Yeager, get Barry to the hospital, then stand by at the SO.” He turned to the dispatcher. “Karen, where are we?”
“Bismarck is started. They got the crime lab on the way and two investigators.”
“Okay. Who we got up at the border?”
“The Border Patrol. Hal Cotter from Pembina, Jack Lambert from Towner, and Gerry Kruse from the state.”
“Ask real polite for the BP to secure the scene. Kruse has the most training as an investigator out of that bunch. Ask him to meet me at the Shuster house.”
“Gotcha. Anything else?”
“Tell anybody who inquires we’re gathering the facts and trying to figure out what happened. No names.”
They went out the door, got in Wales’ Silverado, and drove to the east end of town, where a row of large ranch-style homes sat off separated from the other houses by sizable landscaped yards. Wales pulled up a driveway. There was a FOR SALE sign. The grass needed cutting.
They studied the front door, which was pretty sturdy. Next they went around to the side. “Should really have a warrant,” Wales said.
“Right. In Minneapolis, before 9/11, Coleen Rowley tried to get a warrant on that Moussaoui guy’s computer and FBI headquarters turned her down,” Broker said.
Wales grunted, stooped, pulled a brick from the edging of the side garden, and smacked the pane of glass on the side door. “It’s called reasonable suspicion.” He started in.
“Wait a minute, you smell something?” Broker, sniffing, lifted his head.
“Yeah, around back.”
They went around to the backyard, where a fifty-five-gallon garbage drum was smoldering. Wales kicked it over. Stacks of computer printout paper and magazines spilled on the patio. Like they’d been pitched into a fire in a hurry, in thick stacks and only the edges were burned.
Druer, the part-timer, drove into the driveway. Wales asked him to poke around in the burn-barrel debris. Then he and Broker entered the empty house and did a fast walk-through, careful not to disturb anything.
“Not much here,” Broker said.
Ace’s mom and dad left over two weeks ago for down south. Dale was living here until the place sold.”
Druer stuck his head in the door. “Norm? You better get out here,” he yelled.
They hurried out the side door and around the back. Druer raced ahead and squatted on his haunches, poking a thick scorched pile of bound, laminated pages with a pen.
“Cover’s gone. But this is a high school yearbook from ten years ago,” Druer said. He tapped the pen on one of the charred pages. “And look here.”
Broker stared at a burned page. A girl’s picture was circled. Wales swept his palm over it, ignoring the sparks and ashes, bringing it up cleaner. “Look at the eyes.”
The eyes had been blacked out.
“Holy shit. It’s Ginny Weller. She went missing in Grand Forks last month. Was never found,” Wales said.
Carefully, Druer started working through the pages, flipping them one by one with the pen. They came to another circle. Another picture with the eyes blacked out. This time it was a boy. Even at ten years’ remove, Broker recognized the hairy face of Gordy Riker.
Wales bent to the radio mike clipped to his shoulder. “Karen, check around on the whereabouts of Gordy Riker. We ran into something weird at Dale’s house. Somebody’s been blacking out eyes in his high school yearbook. Like Ginny Weller’s eyes. And Riker’s. So call the other dispatchers. Get ’em on the phones. Where’s Jimmy?”
“With Sauer, at the hospital.”
“No I ain’t,” Yeager’s voice cut in on the radio. “I’m on my way to the Shuster house. I heard you on the yearbook pictures. You got Broker there?’
“Yeah, he’s here,” Wales said.
“Ask him if he’s missing a .45, and a Washington County shield. We found them in Joe’s van,” Yeager said.
Wales turned to Broker who shrugged, held up his hands. “Was lifted out of my car yesterday.”
“I also found his wife’s purse,” Yeager said.
Broker did not shrug this time. Wales touched his shoulder and said, “Just wait till he gets here.”
Then Kruse, the state cop, pulled in, and Wales asked him to search the house. Jimmy Yeager arrived a few minutes later. His cruiser was caked with mud and rattled like half the undercarriage was about to drop off.
Yeager got out of the car, immediately walked up to Broker and checked his face, his eyes. “What I got ain’t good,” he said.
“Show me,” Broker said.
Yeager held up a plastic evidence bag. Broker recognized Nina’s purse. The gray quill-patterned ostrich-hide saddlebag he’d given her for Christmas three years ago. The bag was messy red around the edges. He took a sharp breath. Messy red from coagulating blood.
Carefully, Yeager put the plastic bag down on the hood of his cruiser and worked the purse out. With a pen he nudged the wallet open, then eased out the Minnesota driver’s license.
Nina’s picture ID on the license had the eyes blacked out.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Name, rank, serial number.
Something to brace on. Get ready. Sound went in and out. Light rippled on the wall, the wind slipping through leaves outside. Dale had parked off the road, in the shade of some trees. Her mind played tricks, defaulting to bad trips…
Seven years ago she’d been forced down on another bed by Virgil Fret, who tried to rape her. She had mocked his manhood and driven him into a fury of violence. He burned her with cigarettes, kicked her, and then punched her with his fists. His brother, Bevode, who was a lot scarier than Virgil, cut off part of her ear and gave it to Broker as a present.
But Virgil didn’t bind her hands because he liked the back-and-for
th of physical contact, the feeling of knocking her around. She’d used that to stay alive minute by minute until Broker…
She forced away the image. Nothing personal, not now. Not Broker, not Jane…
This was different from Virgil.
Unlike at the bar, now she got nothing overtly sexual off Dale Shuster, who stood in the compartment, bland and white as the Pillsbury Doughboy. It was hot in this tight space, but still Dale wore a long-sleeve blue Carhartt work shirt buttoned down to the wrists and up to his neck. The bloodless white of his skin was something you see on the inside of a seashell.
Hard to gauge reactions and focus. She thought she knew her body. Always counted on hemorrhages of adrenaline. But that old surge had turned on her, had congealed into a cold, heavy coil that pressed down on her chest. Hard to breathe with Dale studying her. His flat, patient eyes were teaching her stuff she didn’t want to know. Like how fear was a fast surface blast of pins and needles. Fear was fight or flight. Fear helped you survive. She’d swept right past fear into something deeper. More permanent. This was dread.
Dread was no way out, looking down into darkness. Getting ready to die.
To hold dread at bay she reached deep for hate. With difficulty, she forced a breath into her lungs. Let it out.
Face into the wave. Easy for you to say.
Still, she had to know.
She forced herself to look directly into Dale’s eyes and said, “What was that you gave me?”
“Ketamine. It’s a general anesthetic. Makes you paralyzed. I hit you in a large muscle group, so it came on slow. Like, say, when you have to use the bathroom. I’ll give you half a dose and you’ll be like a puppy. Easy to handle.”
Nina couldn’t help making a face.
Dale shrugged. “I have this problem with women. Ketamine helps me get over it. You didn’t eat any breakfast this morning, did you?” he asked blandly.
Nina shook off the weird question, gritted her teeth, and said, “Do you know who I am?”
He nodded. “You’re the government. You came looking for me because a Saudi named Rashid was arrested in Detroit earlier this week. He talked.”
That stunned her, and though she was still trippy from the drug, she had to know. She pushed up against the restraints. “Dale, is there a bomb?”
“Oh yes. Maybe you’ll get to see the windows rattle when it goes off. From a safe distance, of course.” Dale pushed the last bite of his doughnut into his mouth, and she noticed the milky flesh under his fingernails. A sign of a congestive heart. His blood was probably white too. Clots in his veins like maggots.
He chewed, took a final gulp of Coke, and set the can on the carpet. Then he lowered his bulk to the side of the bed. His weight depressed the mattress and she shifted toward him. Their hips touched. Almost blushing, he shyly moved away.
Nina started to tremble. It wasn’t his casual talk about a bomb that undercut her nerve. It was his creepy fit of shyness. The weird things he said.
You didn’t eat breakfast this morning?
After several false starts, she managed to say, “Rashid used the word nuclear.”
“Yes. There is a nuclear component,” Dale said.
“How”—she shook her head, concentrated, then continued—“did they get it in?”
“They?” Dale drew himself up. “They didn’t. I did. It’s my bomb. Well, actually, George and Joe made it, but it was my idea first.” His smile, though modest, showed half an inch of gum.
“George?” her voice rose.
“Yeah. You met him last night. He faked you guys out, huh?” Dale jerked his thumb at the rear of the van. “He’s right outside, parked in back. Probably smoking one of his cigars. We’re on our way to blow it up.”
She wasn’t processing this. She was losing it to the shakes. Her hip and left leg started to charley-horse, and out of reflex she stretched against the cords, causing her to arch her back, raise her hips to flex the cramped muscles. Dale averted his eyes and immediately rose from the bed.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
Nina couldn’t stop blinking, as if rapid eyelid movement could clarify the confusion. On their way… then a spasm circled her spine and she fought off a deep tremor, afraid her bladder and sphincter would let go. She had lost control and now she would lose her dignity. She would be reduced to mere fluids: sweat, tears, piss, shit, and blood. She knew if she allowed herself to think of her daughter right now she would cry.
Suddenly, enveloped in shivers, she got it. He wasn’t your ordinary sexual predator. He wasn’t some high-prairie militia whack job. They figured how to use him because…
He was crazy.
Dale edged around the bed, went to a small wicker basket by the toilet, and removed a folded sheet. Methodically he opened it, shook it out, and held it at arm’s length. It was as white as his face. He returned to the side of the bed and carefully spread it over her, pulling it up to her neck. “That’s better,” he said.
Then he reached up and closed the window and pulled the curtain shut so it was dark in the compartment.
“Movie time,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-eight
It was turning into the kind of hot July day when you want to stay inside, draw the blinds, and turn up the A/C. Broker lit another of the cigarettes from Nina’s pack. As he smoked, he continued to hold the pack in his hand, like it was a link to her. He felt the remaining cigarettes in it, resisting the urge to actually count them. About half left. In the back of his mind a scared little kid made up a game.
As long as I have her cigarettes, she’ll be all right.
As they drove in Wales’ truck, Broker wondered if these cops had been waiting for this ever since they swore an oath and strapped on a gun—a killing in their town. Now it was on them; three people shot dead in less than an hour. One of them by their hand.
Barry Sauer was in the hospital ER getting his face stitched. The Border Patrol was in charge of the site where Joe Reed had been stopped. Kruse was searching the Shuster home. Druer, the part-time deputy, was now helping Fire and Rescue organize a search party to comb through the fields and ditches along Joe Reed’s escape route. Looking for Nina and Dale. They were covering all the bases.
Norm Wales drove up in front of the Missile Park and parked next to the county car. Deputy Vinson ushered them into the bar with a stern proprietary admonition: “Now, nobody touch nothin’.”
The older men glared at him. He glared back. “I mean it, I been keeping this site clean.”
Ace and Jane lay about three feet apart. Ace was facedown, curled slightly, compact, his arms tucked under his chest. Two red rosettes had spread no more than three inches wide in the back of his T-shirt, between his shoulder blades. Jane’s position was more dynamic—pitched on her right side, her right arm outstretched. A 9-mm Beretta lay on the pine floorboards about six inches from her spread fingers. He couldn’t see Ace’s eyes, but he could see Jane’s. They were open but had become things, mere organic matter, no longer human. Hardly any blood was evident on her broad forehead, but her chest was still soggy with it. A wet copper stench hung in the musty room.
“There’s five ejected cartridge casings by the rear doorway,” Vinson said.
Broker took a deep breath, let it out. You can get used to being around the dead but you never get used to the questions they pose.
“Broker, you been around some shootings?” Norm Wales said.
“A few,” Broker said.
“What do you see?” Wales said.
Broker studied the way Jane was sprawled. She had been trying to fight, had been chopped down in the act of trying to aim her weapon. He looked at the doorway at the other end of the room, where the empty brass lay. He said, “Not much bleeding. They died fast. That guy Joe could shoot.”
“Yeah,” Yeager said. “He hit Barry twice in the Kevlar at a dead run over broken ground—from more’n twenty-five yards on the first one.”
“I’m assuming Jane was no slouch with
a handgun. But she took two in a two-inch group in the chest. Pretty fancy shooting under a lot of pressure for a blown-up Indian from Turtle Mountain,” Wales said.
“Nina told me to watch out for him,” Broker said. “Said he looked trained.”
“Trained,” Wales repeated. Like it was an especially potent word.
“She meant it as a backhanded compliment, as in trained like an operator. Like her. A peer. Maybe she was right,” Broker said. “Maybe she found exactly what she was looking for.”
Wales took a step closer and stared hard at Broker. “She’s your wife. Where you at with this thing?”
Broker had to explain something. They’d all been watching closely as he cycled, by turns intense and cool, burning an icy hole in the day. “It’s like this—Nina and I have had a few moments like this, and we made a pact that if the shit hits the fan—like now—we focus on working the problem until we know something for sure.”
“For sure,” Wales repeated.
“Yeah. Like until there’s a body.” They continued to stare at him. So he said, “Bottom line? Let’s say Dale Shuster is a bad guy. If she’s still breathing and he’s dumb enough to take her along, he better watch out.”
Wales nodded, he turned to Yeager. “Nuff said. Okay. What about Ace? Taking two in the back?”
“Don’t figure,” Yeager said. “Ace never ran from anything in his life.”
Wales shook his head. “ ’Cept maybe success.” He turned to Vinson. “You’re doing it right. Keep everybody out till the state crime guys get here.” Broker and Yeager followed him outside. He stood in silence for a few moments on the porch, staring at the equipment shed across the road. “Shuster and Sons,” he said under his breath. “I’m going to have to call Gene Shuster, tell him about his boys. Question is, tell him what, exactly?” He collected himself and faced the other men. “Okay. We plan along two tracks. Until someone convinces me otherwise I’m treating Dale’s nine-one-one call like what it appears. A murder-kidnap. So I got search parties started to go over every inch of ground on Joe’s route.” He looked directly at Broker. “You understand.”
