Homefront pb-6

by Chuck Logan

  The light hit a snarl of yellow tape flapping in the night, and webbed orange plastic emergency fence strung on a perimeter of engineer stakes.

  Thirty feet ahead, a sign blocked the road: “Hazardous Waste Site. Keep Out. Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “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, tr
ying 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.

  “I called Beltrami County to get some advice, the State Health. Was waiting on some Beltrami cops and firemen who had the training, who had protective suits. That’s when the call came in.”

  Nygard grimaced, swallowed the last of his coffee, and said, “The way we reconstructed it, we figured the Bodines musta snuck back in after we left, to collect their stash. And got careless with fire, somehow ignited all that volatile mess. Got trapped in the building about ten that night when it burned. Marci died the next day in the hospital, respiratory failure.”

  Broker continued to listen patiently, seeing an obvious payback scenario. He pictured a posse of citizens marching on the house like the peasant mob in Frankenstein, tying the Bodines to stakes and setting the fire. Questions occurred about the emergency response, the fire department, whether the fire marshal suspected arson. The autopsy results? But this wasn’t a give-and-take conversation, so he kept them to himself. Instead he asked, “What about the babysitter, Sandy?”

  Nygard inclined his head down the road in the direction of the pyre of wreckage. “One of the four.”

  After a moment, Broker hunched his shoulders and shivered slightly, even though the heater was going full blast; his street nightmares were confined to the time when he was single, before he had a child. He didn’t ask, but Nygard probably had kids. “So what you’re saying is-Cassie and her husband have local sympathy when they go a little crazy paranoid and overprotective about their own kid.”

  “Wouldn’t call it sympathy, exactly. Small town’s cruel. More like audience participation. Watching to see what’s next.” Nygard put the Ranger in gear and carefully backed out onto the road. They drove in silence until they exited the thickest part of the woods.

  “Not a good place to break down,” Broker finally said.

  “You got that. Next place to gas up is sixty miles, South Junction, Manitoba.”

  When they came out into the jack-pine barrens, Nygard said, “Next stop is closer to town. See, there’s a second act.”

  “How do you mean?” Broker said.

  Nygard gestured out the window. “The next couple miles is all swamp, empties into Little Glacier two miles north of the big lake.” He lapsed into quiet for a while, then slowed and pulled over next to a barely visible turnoff snaking off into the swamp. “When Pollution Control showed up to do water tests, they talked to the older Bodine children. Kids told them their parents had been dumping the cook waste in the swamp at the end of this trail for years.” Nygard pointed off the road, to the right. As they continued down the road, the snow tapered off.

  “You see, Jimmy had sunk his windfall into buying half the lakefront on Little Glacier. Divided it into lots and started building a model lake house. Bank got so excited they connived with the county board, rerouted some of the Homeland Security money to put up another cell-phone tower.”

  More silence ate up the road. Broker looked out the window into the pitch-dark, lonelier now, more empty without the snow falling. Just the spindly black trees. They came to the end of the open barrens, and Nygard turned right down a hilly road. A few minutes later they drove out from the tree cover and stopped overlooking an expanse of faintly shining water hemmed by granite bluffs.

  “Pretty,” Broker said. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw the blond wink of a naked lumber frame.

  “Jimmy’s model house. Construction stopped when the pollution folks found the water table full of junk that leached out of the meth dump up in the swamp. Bank called in his construction loan. He bet everything he had on this development. Now he has to come up with the money to clean it up before he continues construction.”

  Nygard craned his neck toward the south. “And people are pissed he hasn’t cleaned it up. Whole town’s scared shitless the crap will travel over to the big lake. Kill the summer trade. Any rate, Jimmy lost his boat, his sled, and one of his garbage trucks. Had to lay off half his help. Now he drives routes twelve hours, six days a week to cover the county. They’re still holding on to Jimmy’s dad’s house on the lake. Don’t know how they’re making their other payments. The Sweitz family retained a lawyer, trying to sue over their daughter’s death.” Nygard laughed without humor. “People call this place the Skeleton House. Kind of a local monument to Cassie Bodine’s vanity and overreaching. But any rate, there it is. What you stepped into.” Nygard looked away, deliberately leaving it there without editorializing.

  He turned around and headed back for the main road. “Getting late, let’s get you home.”

  Broker and Griffin stood in the driveway and watched Nygard’s taillights fade off around a turn in the road.

  “Story from hell, huh,” Griffin said. “So what do you wanna do?”

  Broker heaved his shoulders. “Guy’s got enough problems. Hell, I’ll let it go if he will.” The fact was, Broker felt a tremendous sense of relief. The stops on Nygard’s night tour had moved him off his tight loop of anger. Gave him some perspective.

  “Okay, but you may have to toss Klumpe a softball, some little gesture. You handle that? I can talk to him,” Griffin said.

  “Whatever. Let me know.” Broker cuffed Griffin on the shoulder. “Say. Maybe I’ll drop by the lodge and help out tomorrow. Nina’s feeling better, and I’m the one who’s starting to go nuts. I need to get out of the house, man. Work up a sweat. Shoot the shit.”

  “Cabin fever, I can dig it,” Harry said.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Broker said.

  “Great, see you in the morning,” Griffin said. Despite Broker’s swing into elevated banter, he watched him closely in the harsh yard light. “Now go home to your crazy but very sexy wife,” he said, waving good night, walking to his Jeep.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Harry Griffin drove toward his house nearer to town, on the south end of the lake, something Broker said sticking in his mind. He just couldn’t see Jimmy coming in stealthy through the woods on skis. Jimmy was strictly a tub-of-guts, snowmobile kind of guy.

  Have to think about that. Then he turned his attention to Broker. Edgy, sure, but above all, a measured control freak. Throwing that choke hold on Jimmy in a schoolyard in front of the sheriff? That was looking like a loose cannon. Very un-Broker-like.

  Harry knew that Broker believed in walling off his ghosts and personal monsters in a system of compartments. Well, it looked like the locks on his control method were starting to go.

  In Harry’s estimation, Broker had been running damn near thirty years of rope. And now he had reached the end of his tether. In fact, Broker’s life had come to resemble a proof of the old Chinese adage: be careful what you wish for. You might get it. He had wanted to reunite his splintered family ever since Nina returned to active duty after Kit was born. Now he had. And look what it was doing to him.

  The quiet snow-cloaked woods slid by, his asylum and buffer to a world spinning out of control. Being in proximity to Broker the last three months had started to pry at Harry’s own system of controls. The life choices he’d made.

  He had walked away from
the madness. Broker and Nina were still out there trying to fix it.

  And Broker had that judgmental cop streak; never actually came out and said it, but sometimes Griffin got the feeling Broker thought he had turned tail and run.

  Griffin swung into his driveway, drove past the pole barn that housed a rock splitter and the long attached shed with bins for fieldstone and masonry sand. Coming up on the house, he smiled and shook his head when he saw Susan Hatch’s tan Honda CRV parked at his back door.

  Susan, his on-again, off-again girlfriend. Broker said she’d taken him aside at school this morning. Damn. The woman was more curious than a cat. Her ex-husband had taken their daughter to visit his parents in Bemidji, where he now lived. Susan had the night off.

  He went inside, removed his boots and parka on the mud porch, and entered the main living area; one long vaulted room with a kitchen at one end and a massive stone fireplace at the other. A stairway led to another level below, built into the bluff overlooking the lake.

  Susan rose from a chair by the hearth to greet him. She’d built up the fire, burned some incense, and made herself comfortable, stripping out of her school clothes and pulling on the shiny threadbare black silk kimono he’d picked up in Bangkok a long time ago. He could almost feel her earnest energy throb across the room; big brown eyes wide open, ears alert for new information.

  Susan glided through the firelight playing off the pine paneling with a swish of silk on bare skin. Her eyes and the way she moved always said it the same way: Old wolf like you is never gonna get another chance like this…

  She capitalized on her lean, angular physicality, a type Griffin had always found irresistible; what she lacked in padding she made up for in extra-fast-fire nerve clusters packed close to the surface. She had discovered that Harry Griffin, tight-lipped, rugged to a fault in all the other areas of his life, had a pillow-talk Achilles’ heel.