All his life he had come up here and watched the Devil’s Kettle lash the Brule in an endless crack-the-whip against the granite walls, then disappear into the depths of the earth. It had always been a mystery. As a little boy, he believed a monster lived down there, thrashing in the raging current. When I grow up, he’d told himself, I’m gonna catch that monster.
A clump of iris turned black on the snowy rock in the center of the Brule River. The rock overlooked the pothole and was assumed to be the place where Keith Angland threw his wife to her death.
Or, more accurately, to the first stage of her death, mused Broker as he rehashed the conclusions he and Jeff had aired earlier today. He stood on the observation platform over the Kettle, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth.
Apparently she didn’t go in all the way, so Keith had to risk his own life, climb down, and shove her the rest of the way, inch by inch, while she clawed his arm to bloody ribbons.
Of course, given the terrain and the weather, this method of coup de grace virtually insured he would need assistance to climb back out. That, or take his chances getting down the icy cascade, then off the partially frozen and extremely treacherous river.
No one seemed to remember that Keith had a weapon.
Even though he’d shot James. If he was so bent on killing Caren, who was clinging to the rocks about thirty feet below, why not lean over and squeeze off one or two rounds and let gravity take it from there. Keith had a basement full of marksmanship trophies.
And why would Keith shoot a reporter and then let him get away? Keith ran marathons. James was the original couch potato.
The theory Jeff and Broker suggested was more plausible: a confused struggle in the snow on slippery footing. But two of the parties to that scenario had survived, and neither of them would talk about it.
Broker rotated his neck and shoulders. Working out the tension. You gave up this line of work, remember, he told himself.
And then-the FBI touches down like a tornado, sweeps up Keith and James, and disappears. They don’t even interrogate Jeff or me. If I was working this case I’d damn sure want to know why Caren would drive three hundred miles to see an ex-husband she hadn’t spoken to in five, six years…
Broker was finding his way out of the wind tunnel of shock and remorse. Hearing old music; the compulsion to solve something. Two days in a row he had left Kit with Jeff’s wife, Sally, and had climbed the trail up to the Kettle.
A lot of people were making the trek. A few were gawkers.
But mostly they were women paying their respects. After Duluth television sent a remote team to film on this spot, women came to lay flowers. The story rolled down a familiar nightmare alley-abused wife dies at the hand of her violent husband.
The reporter had done her homework and pieced together a story from interviews with cops and medics who had been involved in the rescue at the Kettle. She depicted Caren running for her life from her current husband to the protection of her previous husband. The TV bullshit incensed Broker deeply.
Especially the nuance of unrequited romance that connected him to the story like black crepe crime-scene tape.
The first night was the worst. Caren visited his sleepless thoughts as he lay awake listening to the rise and fall of Kit’s breathing in the crib next to him. He imagined Caren, perfectly preserved, in a time capsule of ice water, deep within the granite folds of the earth, or five miles out, gently turning in the crystalline bowels of Superior.
Her blue lips stuck on the request: Phil, I need your help.
But then, he could reduce it to a much simpler, visceral knot in his stomach: Kit turning blue, choking, and that smug weasel, James, knowing why.
The feds pulled a curtain of official silence over the death at Devil’s Kettle. After a few calls to the federal prosecutor in Minneapolis, Hustad, the new Cook County attorney, saw it was futile to build a case against Keith Angland. Tom James was unavailable, held incommunicado in federal custody.
The word drifting up the cop jungle-telegraph to Jeff was: Witness Protection for James. Caren’s death was lost-but not forgotten, the feds insisted-in the shadow of something big.
The story rolled from Duluth downstate and washed against an official stonewall at the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office and lost momentum. After a few days, the pilgrims stopped coming to the Kettle. Caren’s story, like all news stories, ended.
America shopped toward Christmas. Life went on at the decibel level of a radio commercial written for third grade comprehension.
Sound bite metaphysics.
Caren was dead.
Shit happens.
Blip.
Unconcerned, the Kettle sucked the Brule River underground as it had done since the glaciers piled up the ridge, too powerful and unapproachable to give up its secret.
Broker walked back down the trail, rolling his shoulders, working out the kinks. He snipped a soggy inch off his cigar and stuck it back in his mouth.
Jeff called that night: Quick, turn on the tube. Duluth.
Channel 13. With Kit under his arm, Broker tapped the remote. The opaque gray screen turned into the Minneapolis U.S. attorney. He stood at a podium in front of a phalanx of Cheshire-smiling feds. He said that Caren Angland had not died in vain. She had provided taped evidence-through the intercession of Tom James-to a federal investigation.
Based on that evidence, her husband, Keith, was being questioned by a federal grand jury for conspiring to murder a federal informant.
The conference veered out of control when the U.S. attorney confirmed that, yes, a human tongue had been delivered in a fake bomb to the FBI office in the St. Paul Federal Building a week ago. He termed this “a taunt from the Russian mob.” He added that the presumed-dead informant’s name and return address were on the package. And that the man’s car and some of his clothing had been found in the Saint Croix River, near Scandia, Minnesota.
Testing at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, confirmed that the tongue belonged to a male.
Then the U.S. attorney introduced a federal strike force prosecutor, a dapper, short man named Joe Sharkey, from Chicago. Sharkey explained that Keith was just one target of his investigation, and a minor one. A Chicago mobster captured talking to Keith on Caren’s tape had copped a plea and turned federal witness.
“How big is this?” asked a reporter.
“Big as Sammy Gravanno. We’re looking at an interlocking case involving the Italian and Russian Mafias.”
The report added a local follow-up, querying a spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department about Keith Angland.
“That’s a federal matter, no comment,” said a dour department media representative.
As soon as the report ended, Jeff called back. “Holy cow.
Keith trafficking in human tongues? Two flavors of Mafia?
She ever mentioned a tape?” he asked.
“This is the first I heard,” said Broker.
“She must have wanted you to see it. Why?” asked Jeff.
“Don’t know. But James does. He knew about the tape.
He had to be talking to the FBI. How else could they come out of nowhere so quick.”
“And I was right there, big as a barn, wearing a badge. If I’d of known what kind of danger Caren was in…,” mulled Jeff.
“Probable cause, at least,” said Broker.
“You bet. I’d have cuffed Keith before he cuffed me. And I would have put some people around Caren-fast.”
“But you couldn’t, because we didn’t know where she was.”
“James could have told us. But he didn’t,” said Jeff.
“Yeah, I think maybe he started out working on a story and ended up working on something else,” said Broker.
“Like what?”
“What did Kit choke on?”
“Hmm…,” said Jeff.
“It’s about money,” said Broker.
The books were all read. The tippy-cup finished. He sat in the rocking chair with the weight of the child on his shoulder.
Her vulnerable breath rose and fell against his throat, magically clean and innocent. Broker rocked and thought.
On a night fourteen years ago, in this very room, which was smaller then, just a shack, Keith Angland showed up to go hunting without his gear. No rifle, no hunting clothes.
“The strain is getting to her, you working all this hairy undercover stuff. You’re never there. You never talk to her.” And finally. “I love her and you don’t,” he’d said. “What you love is the action.” And he’d been right. Then.
In fourteen years, the world had turned upside down. Keith had been too rigid to bend with the times. He had cracked wide open and madness and murder had gushed out. And Broker…
Broker rose slowly from the rocking chair, carefully balancing the sleeping baby on his shoulder, and walked the length of the spacious living room to the windows overlooking the lake. The cabin where he and Keith had their showdown over Caren was now a three-bedroom lake home.
And it did resemble a mead hall, complete to the detail of the snarled dragon’s head over the fireplace. One huge high-peaked room, pinned with beams, sited parallel to the shore.
The wall that faced the lake was all thermal glass, banks of windows. Opposite the windows three bedrooms and a bath.
The tall fireplace dominated one end of the long room, an open kitchen filled the other. He’d never used the big fireplace and was saving that for Christmas. Kit’s toys, books, and a rocking chair sat next to an old Franklin stove raised on a dais of tile between the living room area and the kitchen.
Where they lived, by the fire.
His hideaway.
By recent occupation, Kit’s father was, by some accounts, a pirate.
Now, like a pirate, he brooded from his granite point, down on the rising northwest wind that herded white-plumed six-foot waves into his rocky cove. When the lake whipped up, he fondly remembered illustrations in romantic books for boys: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Wind-swept crags. Tempest seas.
Another issue Caren had with him. Never growing up.
Chasing adventure.
Two years ago, he had done exactly that. Now he paid his bills with a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Bangkok.
For runaround cash he used a VISA attached to a numbered account at the Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. Funds seeped via electronic interbank transfers into his account in the Grand Marais Bank, always less than $10,000 a transaction.
Rebuilding this house called for real money, so, last year, he’d declared a half million in taxable income. Broker’s nest egg was a ton of Vietnamese imperial gold bullion and ancient Cham relics, tucked in a bank vault in Hong Kong.
Broker had found it, dug it up and smuggled it out of Vietnam. His treasure hunt had also turned up a mate. And a child. Had bought him freedom. Room to get away. But it hadn’t stopped the world from coming in on him.
He carried Kit to her crib, gently lowered her to her blankets and stuffed animals.
What the hell. A man should be able to handle whatever was in front of him. Kill an enemy, field dress a deer, fix the plumbing, read a rectal thermometer and stay up, worried, all night, with a croupy baby.
Back in the kitchen, he glanced at Nina’s picture pinned to the bulletin board. You stayed on the Widow Maker without getting bucked off, this is your life.
Across the length of the dark living room, the dragon glinted in tightly wound contortions against the chimney stones. And this too is your life. And there was room in his life to find out what really happened out there at the Kettle.
He owed Caren that much. Two men could tell him: Keith Angland and Tom James.
But the privateer in him counseled that something vital had been missing from the feds’ news conference: Buried in this tragic human riddle there had to be a hell of a lot of money.