Homefront. Part 15

"You positive someone came in your house?" Nygard asked.

Broker exhaled. Saw where Nygard was going. "Not for sure. The toy could have been in the truck, the truck wasn't locked. The bowl with the antifreeze could have been on the deck with cat food in it."

"Okay," Nygard said carefully, "without getting too far into exactly who you are-'cause it ain't really my business-" He stared at Broker for several seconds. "What I want to head off here is you and Jimmy going back and forth with this feud until you b.u.mp into each other at the gas station and somebody winds up in an ambulance."

"I just want to be left alone," Broker said.

"Don't take this wrong," Nygard said, "but to stop this fight that's brewing here, somebody gotta step up and be the adult." The comment, coming from the younger man, struck Broker as quietly bristling with hair-shirt Scandinavian piety.

"Sheriff-" Broker started to protest.

Griffin interrupted, "Hear him out, Broker." Broker relented, raised his hands, gloved palms open, let them fall.

"Okay, then," Nygard said. "Griffin and I are thinking you and me should take a drive, fill you in on some background about Jimmy Klumpe and Ca.s.sie Bodine. Might help you manage this situation better."

Broker nodded. "Uh-huh. This teacher at the school cautioned me about 'rubbing up against the local soap opera.' Is this what you're getting at?"

"I guess," Nygard said. Then he turned and walked back up the trail.

Broker looked at Griffin. "You two are in cahoots."

"Yep," Griffin said. He plucked the bunny off the ski pole and thrust it in his parka pocket. "Somebody's got to sew this up so Kit don't notice. That wouldn't be you or Nina." He pulled the pole from the snow and handed it to Broker. They walked back toward the house. Nygard went through the garage and got in his truck, started the engine.

"So what's Nygard know about me?" Broker asked, placing the ski pole with its twin in the garage.

"Ask him," Griffin said, "You think he can smooth over all this bulls.h.i.t?"

"Yep."

"Hey, Griffin, somebody broke into my house-"

"You a.s.sume."

"Bulls.h.i.t. This guy had a plan. He took my kid's toy, then he took the cat. s.h.i.t, man; there's tracks leading off the deck into the woods, doubled back." Broker flung his arm toward the trail behind them. "I spent an hour working out his pattern. He came in on skis, through the woods. Yesterday afternoon there was all kinds of folks coming down that trail on skis."

"On skis, huh? You sure?" Griffin stopped, thought a moment, then turned deliberately. "Maybe you're a little stressed right now and not thinking too clearly. In the scheme of things, this really where you want to make a stand? Defend your homestead, put down roots, plant a garden?" He puffed on his smoke, looked away. "Ain't why you're here. h.e.l.l, man. I can get you another cat. You go on with Nygard. I'll hang back, keep an eye on the house."

Broker ducked into the kitchen, kissed Kit good night, and told Nina he was going into town with Harry. She protested mildly when he took her fresh carafe of coffee and three travel mugs. He left her heating water for another pot and staring at Hardball Hardball on the TV screen, where Chris Matthews was talking twenty times faster than General Wesley Clark about the invasion of Iraq. on the TV screen, where Chris Matthews was talking twenty times faster than General Wesley Clark about the invasion of Iraq.

Griffin took his cup of coffee and parked his Jeep down the road. Broker got in Nygard's Ranger and doled out coffee as Nygard drove up 12, away from town, continued north, and shifted the Ranger into four-wheel drive as they went beyond where the snowplow had stopped. They followed a single set of tire tracks dwindling in a foot of snow. Soon it was pitch black, no yard lights, just a light snow sparkling in the high beams. Nygard slowed as a doe and two fawns meandered across the road.

"Jack Pine Barrens, big fire in here, oh, twenty years ago," Nygard said, waving his hand at the darkness. "Hardly anybody lives up here anymore." After another three minutes, Nygard addressed the silence in the Ranger. "Okay. The way you put Jimmy on his a.s.s got my attention. So I called Griffin, and then I called this copper in St.-"

"Who?" Broker asked.

"Jack Grieve, sergeant in narcotics. We met when I went through the academy. We keep in touch. He comes up summers to fish. Stays with me."

"I know Jack," Broker said. "Good no-bulls.h.i.t cop."

"Asked him if he knew of a Phil Broker," Nygard continued. "'Why do you ask?' Jack says. Got him staying in my county, I says." Nygard turned and looked directly at Broker for emphasis. "'Won't get anything direct from me about Broker,' Jack says. Fair enough. How 'bout indirect, I says. 'But that would be gossip,' Jack says." Nygard paused to sip his coffee. Waited.

Broker accepted Nygard's workmanlike preamble. "So we're off the record," he said.

Nygard grunted affirmatively. "h.e.l.l, man; we're driving into the Washichu. Pretty soon we'll be clear off everything everything."

"You mind if I smoke?" Broker asked, pulling out his cigars.

"Crack the window," Nygard said. He probed his pocket and withdrew a toothpick, which he held in his fingers like a cigarette before putting it between his lips.

Broker dialed down the window several inches, lit the rough wrap, and waited.

Now Nygard was direct. "Basically Jack said you were always more an adventurer than a cop. Paid your dues in St. Paul, made sergeant fast, and developed a real taste for undercover work. Then you worked a deal with BCA. And here Jack says something happened. A supervisor made a mistake; let you take the bit in your teeth, go too deep, and stay there. You got out eight years ago. Married this heavy-duty lady in the Army. Rumor is, every once in a while, you do things that don't get written down. For the feds. Got this little resort up on Lake Superior. But Jack says that ain't really where you get your money."

"That it?" Broker said, staring ahead, rolling the cigar across his mouth.

"Yeah, except Jack said to give you a lot of room. Said the rumors put you and your wife smack in the middle of whatever really happened at the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant last July. 'Nuff said."

Now the darkness crowded in closer to the road. The spindly jack-pine muskeg gave way to thicker pines and ghostly stands of birch. They drove through a tunnel of overhanging branches.

Broker stared into the darkness. "Years ago we'd come up here and hunt. Bunch of young cops. When Griffin first bought the old place on the lake. Great place for whitetails, n.o.body else around. Hardly any shots on opener except us. But..." His voice trailed off.

"Spooky," Nygard said.

"Yeah."

Nygard rolled his toothpick across his lips. "A few Indians come here around this time of year, tap the paper birches. And not many of them..."

Abruptly he pointed into the high beams. "There, on the right. See him?"

Broker caught a fleeting impression of the large gray wolf before it danced back into the trees.

"There's two packs in here now; got the woods divided up. Maybe thirty animals." He settled back. "Any rate, Indians got a story about these woods. Two early settlers thought they found gold nuggets in a stream and set to fighting and eventually shot each other. Turned out to be fool's gold. A Sioux hunting party found the dying men. According to the story, even both gut-shot, they were still struggling over a bag of rocks. The Sioux considered it so strange that men would kill for stones they named the place Washichu, which became their terms for whites."

Broker nodded. "Means something like 'unnatural,' doesn't it?"

"Exactly," Nygard said. "Got so only one family lived up here, the Bodines. Ca.s.sie's family lived on a farm deeper in. Her cousins lived on another farmstead right up here. Where we're headed." He slowed as the forest on the pa.s.senger side thinned into an overgrown field. He turned into a drifted-over road. When the snow breasted his front b.u.mper, he stopped, backed up and put the Ranger in neutral, set the emergency brake, and left the high beams on. He glanced at Broker. "Hope those are good boots. We gotta walk."

They got out, and Nygard switched on a heavy-duty flashlight.

Plodding through knee-deep drifts, they outdistanced the headlights, and up ahead, the swinging motion of Nygard's torch illuminated the carca.s.ses of old cars, cast-off debris of all kinds. Then they came upon piles of fresh wreckage; scorched wood siding, shingles, a blackened, half-burned mattress and bedsprings clotted with snow.

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. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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. "f.u.c.kin' 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. Ca.s.sie'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. "h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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-"

"a.s.sholes," 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 f.u.c.kers." 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. Ca.s.sie and her brother tried to break the mold, sort of, after their folks basically killed themselves."

"Suicide?" Broker said.

"Suicide by alcohol. Drunks. Ca.s.sie 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, pa.s.sed 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 Ca.s.sie 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. Ca.s.sie's got her ear on the real estate market...then this meth house business blew up.

"See, Ca.s.sie, 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 b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs 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. h.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.t. Among other things.

"When Ca.s.sie 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 h.e.l.l broke loose, the Sweitzes went ballistic. Medical examiner was searching the house like crazy, trying 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 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-Ca.s.sie 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 partic.i.p.ation. 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 p.i.s.sed he hasn't cleaned it up. Whole town's scared s.h.i.tless the c.r.a.p 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 Ca.s.sie 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."