“I want to hear your opinion.”
J.T. occupied himself with fastidiously straightening his silverware. Keith Angland was not J.T.’s favorite topic in the best of times.
“You want to know what I think, huh?” he said.
“Yep.”
J.T. squinted. “How do you want the race card? Face up or face down?”
Broker shrugged. “Up, wild, I don’t care.”
“Okay. The last thing Chief Sweeney did when he left office was send Keith to the FBI Academy…”
“Uh-huh.”
“He was different when he came back from Quantico. The consensus was, the management courses went to his head.”
Broker nodded. Keith’s attendance at the prestigious FBI academy spanned the former chief’s term of office. The new mayor appointed a new police chief.
J.T. continued. “So Keith comes back and thinks he’s going to set the world on fire. He locks horns with Dobbs right from the start. At first, they like, tried coexistence. Keith still ran Narcotics.”
“Pretty successfully, I heard,” said Broker.
“Yeah, that’s why Dobbs wanted him there, he had all this good shit he could get from his new fed buddies after being the honor student out there.”
“Sounds good so far. Where’s the problem?”
“The promotion board comes up. Dobbs skips Keith and promotes Janey to captain.”
Broker said, “Back when I was in patrol, I knew Janey.
She’s sharp.”
“No one disputes that. But Keith had the higher score. So he started a serious rumor that Janey banged the chief to get her promotion.”
“The usual department bullshit,” said Broker. His stomach churned, and he had that tiresome sensation of rowing through clotted human forms in an iron boat-office politics.
“Okay, I can see where this is going. The next promotion test, you make captain and he doesn’t. So what’d he say then? You screw Dobbs, too?”
J.T. fired back with precision, “Keith Angland made public remarks that were reported in the media. Racist remarks. He tried to racially polarize the department.”
“You’re giving me a speech,” said Broker slowly.
J.T. carefully shuffled his razor blade features. “You asked.”
He looked away. “I hate this goddamn thing,” he whispered.
“If he could do it, anybody could do it. That’s what’s got everybody on edge. And all that fuckin’ money…”
Broker came forward in his chair, on the verge of detailing Keith’s strange behavior in the transport room. The whole James scenario. But no-what happened in that holding cell, beyond the range of the microphones, was meant to be private. His alone. So he said, “When this started, Caren called, left a message on my machine. Said Keith was in a lot of trouble. Know what my immediate reaction was?”
“Sure, you thought ‘good, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.’”
Broker exhaled. “Was he really that bad?”
J.T. inspected a forkful of pasta. “Nah, he was that good, but he was a prick. What the hell did Caren see in him?”
“He was going to be mayor…”
“Governor,” quipped J.T. In a softer voice, “Is it true, about the claw marks on his arm? The skin under his fingernails?”
“Yeah,” said Broker.
“Hate this thing,” said J.T. He reached across the table and placed his palm, flat down, on Broker’s nervously tapping fingers. “Quit that. Here, eat your food. It’s getting cold.”
44
The snow sifted down, fine as salt, and turned to vapor when it touched the shiny black interstate. After saying good-bye to J.T., Broker drove north, then west, on the freeway loop that belted the Cities. Exile in a cabin with his baby had strengthened a weak spot in his personality. He had been forced to learn patience.
Patience suggested: Go deeper.
So he drove and thought. He’d written Caren off as a frustrated country club Republican. Wrong.
He’d thought that Keith, buried under a landslide of federal charges, would come clean about Caren, describe a messy confrontation on the icy rocks. But Keith had taunted him, and the eavesdropping feds, about the missing bodies of his alleged victims. Taking credit.
He massaged the dull ache seizing up in his left shoulder.
Didn’t bounce as well as he used to. Why stage a fight and whisper about James and the money.
Why was he wearing her ring? What was that sermon about the Russian cross?
The early afternoon traffic was almost lulling; tires turned like prayer wheels. He fell into the shifting rhythms, cruising through the northern suburbs on U.S. 694: New Brighton, Fridley, Brooklyn Center. At the 94 interchange he turned south through Minneapolis, jogged east to 35 and took it to the bottom leg of the loop, turning east on 494 in Richfield.
Broker thinking, thinking, tapping his right hand on the wheel. Trying to decipher Keith. The broad shadow of a commercial jetliner drifted over the freeway, flaps down, on approach to Minneapolis-St. Paul International. Broker drove through the sweeping shadow, looking for the trap-door that descended down into Keith’s mad thoughts.
He saw Keith’s mind as a labyrinth of austere stonework.
Like a Gothic cathedral, it had tortured figures imprisoned in stained glass, relentlessly vertical buttresses. Gargoyles.
God and Satan. Right and wrong. No middle ground to take up the slack.
The road turned north, curving around St. Paul. He left the freeway at Highway 5 and took the road to Stillwater.
Didn’t tell J.T. what happened in the cell. Would he tell Jeff?
He pulled into his motel, parked and walked into the lobby. The desk clerk handed him two messages. Jeff had called. The second note was from the Washington County Jail. He went to his room and called the jail.
A deputy had called Cook County and received this number. He told Broker that Keith Angland would not be receiving visitors other than his attorney. The assault earned him a move to lockdown status. Did Broker want to press charges?
No charges. The deputy thanked him and hung up. There would be no more communication with Keith. Before calling Jeff, Broker took off his coat, lay down on the bed and stared at the uniform pattern of holes in the ceiling tiles. Nothing emerged Rorschach-like from their monotony.
He heaved off the bed and reached for the telephone on the desk. Jeff would have to wait. This was between him and Keith.
“How’s Kit?” he asked when Jeff was on the line.
“Coming down with a cold. What happened?”
“Keith baited me, practically admitted to the murders of Caren and Gorski and dared everyone within earshot to prove he did it. Then he accused me of having an affair with Caren and jumped me. It took two deputies and Garrison to wrestle him down and cuff him.”
“How are you?”
“Sore. I’m getting too old to grapple with psychos.”
“That bad, huh?”
Not lying. Omission. “He’s wearing her wedding ring on his frostbitten little finger. They took off the first joint. It’s pretty gruesome.”
Jeff said, “Garrison did some follow-up after talking to you.
Two Duluth agents picked up the Subaru this morning. They filled me in on their theory about how the Russians made their approach to Keith. Didn’t know his mom was Russian.”
“Yeah. Garrison walked me through it. And I gave him the letters. But we’ll never see James, they’re too taken with themselves and their big case.”
“Maybe,” said Jeff. “Maybe not.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ve got a sympathizer out there. Got a call with a message specifically for you, to use at your discretion. Looks like the feds might trip on their trench coats. That fake bomb with the tongue in it? Widely reported in the press to be the property of a missing FBI informant. That tongue?”
“What about it?”
“It’s a woman’s tongue.”
“What?”
“No kidding. A person called me, who shall remain anonymous because I gave my word-but they could work in the state crime lab-they heard it from somebody in the Hennepin County coroner’s office, who got it straight from a big mouth at the FBI lab at Quantico. The feds ran DNA tests on the tongue and guess what-it had two of these DNA markers-amelogenin markers, I think they’re called.