Time to get the letters out.
When he emerged, he cleaned Kit’s lunch off the floor, and her face, gave her a fresh tippy cup of milk and carried her to her room. When he returned, Nina had traded her towel for a pair of old Levi’s and the black alligator T-shirt.
She sat at the kitchen table and read through a pile of articles he’d torn from the Duluth paper and saved for her. They sketched Caren’s death, Keith’s arrest, James’s role in turning over the incriminating tape and the cases against Chicago crime figures that proceeded from the tape.
Broker went to his study, removed the letter from his desk, and brought it to the table.
“Okay, homework’s done.” She pushed an envelope down the table. “Here’s mine.”
He took hers, handed over the one in his hand and sat across the table. Nina had poured cups of fresh coffee. The afternoon had turned gray and windy. A fine sleety snow pecked the windows. Superior brooded, humpbacked with black swells.
Broker opened the letter. “The type is the same,” he said.
“I make it Courier, ten point,” Nina said without looking up.
Broker read:
Dear Ms. Pryce, or should I say Dear Ms. John, I just thought you should know. While you’re over there freezing your famous butt in the Balkans your husband is augmenting his baby-sitting duties by living a B movie behind your back. He’s seeing his ex-wife, Caren Angland, and I mean seeing.
Now these kinds of things can go two ways; there’s the Bridges of Madison County theory of adultery, where nobody gets hurt unless they drop a heavy metaphor on their foot, or there’s the Presumed Innocent scenario, where they do.
Phil Broker is currently sweating out the latter story line. As the enclosed press clipping will verify, he got caught with Caren by husband, Keith. Keith flipped out and killed her dead.
Merry Christmas and keep up the good work,
An admirer.
Broker looked up. Nina’s smoldering eyes were waiting for him. Fast reader.
She asked, “Are you and Kit in danger?”
“No,” said Broker.
“Who wrote this garbage?”
Broker pointed to the articles. “I’d say Tom James.”
Nina scanned the articles, looked up. “The reporter?”
“The witness,” said Broker.
“Why? What’s he got against Kit?”
Broker explained the fight in the yard, James and Kit in the workshop, Kit choking on the money, James running.
Then finding another hundred in the Subaru.
He pointed to the articles. “What they don’t say in there is the tape shows Keith getting a two-million-dollar payoff, in a suitcase. In hundreds. And the suitcase has disappeared.”
“So let’s go have a talk with James,” said Nina.
“Can’t, he’s in Witness Protection. He used Caren’s tape for trading material. Interesting, huh,” said Broker. “Caren comes to see me with this tape. And gets killed.” Broker held up his left hand and counted off fingers:
“No one has questioned me. She had a reason for wanting me to see the tape.
“Why did Keith crawl down into that pothole. Why not just point down and shoot Caren.
“When they pulled Keith out, he had inch-deep claw marks raked down his left forearm into his palm. Caren’s flesh was rammed under his fingernails. Her wedding ring was clutched in his fist.”
Nina exhaled. “Trying to save her or pound her in?”
Broker nodded. “Rescue is my interpretation. But he wouldn’t say anything. So why’s he keeping quiet?”
Nina screwed up her lips, lowered her eyes, needing to deal with something concrete. She placed the letters and envelopes side by side. “If these were run off on the same printer…”
“I thought of that; James has been in FBI or U.S. Marshals’
custody since he left the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic. If he wrote the letters, he did it on their equipment. But the new laser printers are pretty slick. They don’t leave signatures like typewriters or dot-matrix printers.”
“A specific machine could have an anomaly that we can’t spot. But maybe a forensic documents expert could.”
Broker nodded. “I’ll give them to Jeff. He can pass them on to the feds. Except the feds are real blind where James is concerned.”
“James is a reporter, reporters have editors,” said Nina.
“Ah,” said Broker.
“So-one of his editors might recognize something in the way these are written, some idiosyncrasy.”
“You’re pretty smart.”
“Nah, just smarter than you,” she said. Then more seriously, “You sure this is a spin-off from Caren, not some baby raper you put in jail, coming back on you?”
“I’m sure. Sixteen years I busted people. This is the first time I’ve got a threatening letter. But there’s only one way to be sure.”
“How’s that?”
“Find James.”
Nina got up, came over and patted his cheek. “Poor cave fish. You don’t find people in Witness Protection. That’s the whole idea.”
“Bullshit. This guy lets babies steal his money. He leaves hundred-dollar bills lying around. This is a guy who makes mistakes.”
35
Nina rode at his side, girding, getting ready to go back. Kit snoozed in her car seat. Trees stood at attention on the right.
Superior was an endless parade field to the left. Nina wore her uniform. Broker was driving her to Duluth, to catch a plane.
“We never talked about what you’re doing,” he said.
“We’re not supposed to talk about what I’m doing,” said Nina.
Broker drove in silence for a few minutes. “Special assignment,” he speculated aloud, “they’ve finally decided to go after some mass killers. You’re back here to be briefed.”
She smiled thinly. “I envy you your mystery. And a good old-fashioned motive like money.”
“What’s it like?” he asked.
She smiled wryly. “The Serbs look like people; they talk, walk, laugh, just like us…” She glanced in the back-seat, to make sure Kit was asleep. Under her breath, she mused, “But they don’t eat fish caught in the Sava River anymore.”
“What?”
“The Sava runs past my duty station, Brkco. The Serbs established a death camp there. They’d march Muslims out, stand them against a wall and shoot them. You can still see the shot patterns on the walclass="underline" AKs, full automatic, pulls up and to the right.
“They threw the bodies in the river. The Sava runs into the Danube, so the bodies bobbed up in Belgrade and upset people having their morning coffee. The word was put out.
Hey, stop dumping bodies in the river.
“The Serbs in Brkco, being practical fellows, got out their chainsaws and dismembered the bodies before dumping them in the river. But pieces still floated down to Belgrade.
“Fix the problem, they said in Belgrade. So the local Serbs put away the chain saws and, with workmanlike initiative, took the bodies to the meat packing plant in town. They literally ground them up in the sausage machines. Then they dumped the “meat” in the river. Bodies and body parts stopped floating into the Danube at Belgrade, but nobody eats sausage in Brkco anymore and nobody eats fish out of the Sava River.
“That’s what it’s like. And while this was going on, I was doing the moral equivalent of watching O.J. or Seinfeld, like everybody else. But after you’ve been there awhile, and hear the stories, see some mass graves and see your two-thou-sandth rape victim, you get the impression that society is just a scab formed over a nightmare.”
She looked him straight in the eye. “In ’45, my dad helped liberate one of those camps in Germany, and you know what-between you and me, I really hope some of the fuckers I’m going after resist arrest.”
“I asked,” said Broker.