The Ten-Mile Trials (14 page)

And if Tollefson did that to the County Attorney, how much worse had he probably made Bo Dooley look on his first trip to court in the new job?

Shit!

It was only a quarter to five, but I decided I'd done enough damage for one day. I locked my office, drove to Maxine's house at a moderate speed, and still got there by three minutes to five. Maxine was on the couch, reading aloud to all her kids. She looked at the clock, surprised.

‘Finish your story,' I said, ‘I don't need any help.' I heard her voice going on about green eggs and ham – how many thousand times had she said those words? I wondered – as I walked into the bedroom and loaded up. Ben was still asleep. He stretched when I picked him up, but didn't open his eyes. I cradled him on one shoulder and slung his gear over the other.

Maxine read the last nonsense repeat by Dr Seuss as I walked by the couch. She closed the book and said, ‘I delayed his afternoon bottle a little today, Jake. I'm hoping that'll keep him more contented for the trip home.'

‘So far it's working,' I said. ‘Thanks.' I strapped him into his carrier and drove sedately north on the highway in glorious silence. Ben didn't even open his eyes for the first twenty miles, and he was only just getting down to serious knuckle-gnawing by the time I reached the Mirium turnoff. Trudy wasn't home yet, but I'd passed Formula Prep 101 and was cool with that chore. Ben and I were in the rocker, guzzling milk and beer, and listening to the news, by the time she walked in.

‘You two look pretty contented.' She smiled and put on one of those big white aprons she wears to cook. ‘I decided I'm hungry for hash browns. With a cheese omelet, how does that sound?'

‘Wonderful. Did you talk to Maxine?'

‘About a later bottle? I asked her to try it, yeah.'

‘Well, it worked tonight. I don't know how much crying Maxine had to endure this afternoon, but I got all the way home without a squeak.'

‘Good. He's wide awake now, though. Look.' Ben had drunk all the milk in his bottle and was lying still, looking around. Trudy held out a finger and he grabbed it, kicking and gurgling.

‘How about that?' I said. ‘All relaxed and enjoying the sights. Sort of . . . touristy.'

She laughed. ‘His eyes are starting to really work, I guess. Fun, huh?'

‘Ozzie Sullivan said the other day, “Another couple of weeks, he'll start telling you what you're doing wrong with the car.”'

‘Oz should really throw his oldest child down the well and leave him there for about a week.'

‘I wonder if he's tried that. I wonder if we'll ever have to?'

‘Aw,' she kissed Ben Franklin's tiny cheek, ‘of course not.' She slid her finger out of his iron grip. ‘I better get to work on those potatoes.'

‘I think we'll go out and take a look at the garden.'

Friday's wind had blown some trash in, but when I cleaned it up over the weekend I was pleased to see that it hadn't damaged the corn crop. It was almost knee high, with ten days still to go to the Fourth of July (the Minnesota measure of gardening success). The potatoes were getting pretty buggy, though. I was going to have to spray.

‘I think,' I told Ben, ‘next year we should put the peas where they'll get a little more sun.' He waved his tiny fists and kicked like he thought talking about vegetables was a ton of fun. So I told him about my plans to shore up the tomatoes on a taller stake next time. He perched on my knee and watched as I pulled a few weeds out of the carrots, and gurgled approvingly when I told him they should really be thinned by the following weekend. Mourning doves were singing their soft dirges in the barn by then, and the sun was a red disk sliding behind Dan Cassidy's windbreak. Ben fell asleep on my shoulder as I carried him back into the house. The hash browns smelled like a hungry man's dream.

SEVEN

W
ednesday morning, Rosie Doyle walked up behind me as I unlocked my door and said, ‘Ray and Kevin are waiting to talk to you, but can I sneak in ahead of them if I'm quick?'

‘Sure. Come on in.' I plunked my briefcase down by the already-blinking phone. ‘Sit. What's on your mind?' She looked a little more electrically charged than usual; her bright red hair was doing that spiraling-toward-the-moon thing it does when she gets nervous and can't keep her hands out of it.

‘I'm following up on the drugs and gear from the Marvin Street house. I thought the new equipment for the meth lab would yield the quickest results because it's all still in the packing cases. So I got the Board of Health guys to let me copy the labels as they loaded it on to the truck.'

‘I heard. Good for you.'

‘Yeah, well, that's what I thought. So I started tracking backward on the shipping stickers and bills of lading, looking for some suppliers to talk to. I thought I could squeeze their toes a little and maybe round up the buyers.' She kept rearranging the pile of papers on a clipboard rested on her knee – or not rested exactly, held captive in a nervous grip was more like it.

‘Sounds reasonable. How's it working out?'

‘Up to a point, fine. I've determined that all the equipment and supplies arrived at the railroad depot in Rutherford within a period of about ten days, early this month. Shipped from an address in Queens.'

‘Picked up here and signed for?'

‘Yes. You want to see the signature?' I didn't, but she shoved it under my nose anyway – an illegible scrawl.

‘Where's the— Don't they usually make you print your name, too?'

‘They did. Here.' Far down in the corner, in primitive block letters, Kerajic or Kreutch or maybe Klimt. The first initial could be H, I thought.

‘Not much, huh? Where's the name of the company? Is that it? Kind of smudged.'

‘Under a bright light you can see that it says Bestway Agricultural Supply Company. Which is a company that doesn't seem to exist in Queens, New York. Especially not at this address here,' she tapped it with her pencil. ‘Which I'm told by the New York Postal Authority would be somewhere in the middle of the East River.'

‘Ah. Have you talked to the Board of Health? Here, I mean.'

‘Yes. Their response is quite . . . bureaucratic. If I hand this problem back to them, they will turn it over to their investigative wing. Or arm? The person I talked to didn't seem to know where that is but she'll find out. If I want her to.'

‘Have you talked to Bo?'

‘No. I thought' – she looked at her toes – ‘that maybe I shouldn't bother him at his new job.'

I opened my mouth to say, why don't you just turn over in bed and ask him? But her closed face told me not to go there, so I said, ‘Well, I think your hunch was very good that the meth lab is the best place to start. So if you don't want to ask Bo,' – we were carefully not meeting each other's eyes by now – ‘go back to Ray and let him decide if he'd like to talk to Bo. Otherwise, ask him which federal agency he wants you to call for help. I think Bo usually took stuff he figured was too heavy for us to the DEA, but it's up to Ray now.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I was hoping to handle this for him, since he's so busy, but . . . well. I'll ask him what he wants to do. Thanks.'

‘Also, there's a lab . . . Ask the BCA, they may have already sent some samples there. The lab I have in mind analyses marijuana, tells you what strain it is. Sometimes that gives you a lead on where it came from. I'm sorry I can't be more help, but Bo's been heading up the narcotics investigations for quite a while so I haven't had to get into the details.'

‘I understand. Thanks for your time.' It was so unlike her to be formal and correct that I just nodded, at a loss for words. Rosie was deep in the weeds, no question. Watching her walk away with her back very straight, I wanted to tell her, ‘Everybody fights. It goes with the territory. Apologize, it won't kill you.' But I was two days behind entering employee hours and benefits in the spreadsheet Frank was making us keep, the budget estimates for the next half-year were due by the end of the week, and I suspected that ancillary tasks like relationship counseling should probably be left to people who knew what they were doing. When she got to the doorway, I said, ‘Tell Ray and Kevin to give me ten minutes and then come on in.'

I got all but one of my phone calls answered before they walked in together, already talking.

‘The TV reporter on the news last night said something about “the latest in a series of home break-ins,”' Ray said. ‘Mrs Anderson's not much of a newspaper reader, so she didn't know there were any other home break-ins until she heard that. Now she says it's an outrage that these people are being allowed to “run around loose”. Like we had a perfectly good leash for them and we neglected to use it!' He flopped into a chair in front of my desk and glared at my blameless phone.

‘Let me guess,' I said. ‘Mrs Anderson is the Mama's Boy's Mama?'

‘Of course,' Kevin said, ‘and being an avid cliché collector she has bought into outrage. She discovered it during the uproar over bonuses for Wall Street bankers, and now she's going to be outraged often, until the fad passes. This week, when her dimwit son went off the reservation at that camp they fobbed him off to, he got sent home just in time to get tossed on his head. Now that's an outrage, and we're to blame.'

‘People want somebody to be at fault, nothing new about that,' I said. ‘Is he out of hospital yet?'

‘This morning,' Ray said. ‘The docs are firm about it, he's fine. But of course Mama Anderson has her doubts.'

‘Yeah, well— Where are you with everything else?'

‘It still feels like I'm making this up,' Ray said, ‘but all the evidence says the burglars Kevin's chasing here in Rutherford are in some way connected to the ones Amos Healy is looking for in Phoenix.' Kevin, sitting beside him, nodded in a rare show of unanimity.

‘Because of the gun, you mean?'

‘And because the burglaries are so nearly identical.'

‘Always three or four guys with an uncanny knack for breaking into buildings,' Kevin said, ‘and getting out fast.'

‘Like in both places they're paying some local service person to tip them off when the houses are clear, huh? Did they get away with anything at the Anderson house, by the way?'

‘No. They heard the sirens coming and dropped it all in the back yard before they jumped in their cars and took off,' Kevin said. ‘It's the first break we've had – and the first time in this string of break-ins that anything's ever interrupted their routine.'

‘Including in Phoenix,' Ray said, ‘none of them have ever made a mistake, till now. They know when people are out, and they know just where to look for what they want. Amos says it's like they've got a self-help book called
How to Pillage the Village
.'

‘I like our theory better. You sending the stuff they dropped to the BCA.?'

‘Oh, you bet. Plus the sack they were carrying it in. I don't really expect to get a fingerprint, though – they've been very careful about wearing gloves.'

‘If they were fleeing the scene, though, it could happen. How are Chris and Julie coming along with that report on home services?'

‘They had a couple of houses still to go,' Kevin said. ‘I'll have it by noon.'

‘Let me know. What about the Mama's Boy?' I asked Ray. ‘Did you get him to talk?'

‘Hey, try and stop him. Mama's Boy has a story now. His father sends him out to have his first big adventure, pays his way on some kind of a quest that's supposed to make a man of him. But he screws up as usual, gets caught using some controlled substance that he managed to procure out there on the dusty trails. Gets sent home, and there's his first big adventure waiting for him in his own upstairs hall. He's talking about Kismet!'

‘Sure puts a positive spin on getting dumped on your head.'

‘Doesn't it? He says it's turned him into a true believer – the Lord's sent him a message. The boy's going to turn his life around.'

‘Well, you said yesterday it needed turning.'

‘According to his father.'

‘Did you believe him? About seeing the light?'

‘I don't know. His mama certainly does, she says he's . . .' Ray opened his little notebook, thumbed the pages, and read, ‘“At peace in a whole new way.” It's a heart-warming story.'

‘And a great way for him to change the subject from whatever he was smoking. How did he get it out there on the trail, by the way?'

Ray looked mortified. ‘I should have asked him that – but she was right there, and everybody was so dazzled by his epiphany.'

‘Uh-huh. Epiphanies'll do that. Does he remember anything at all that might be useful?'

Ray's expression grew thoughtful. ‘He said they talked funny.'

‘Is that a fact?'

‘Yeah. The three big tough guys who threw him over that stair railing yelled something to each other he couldn't understand. Does that sound familiar?'

‘I feel like I'm on some stupid Mobius strip,' Kevin said. ‘We run around and around it and keep hearing the same things over and over.'

‘Ray,' I said, ‘did Mama's Boy— What the hell's his name, anyway?'

‘Ricky.' Ray's lip curled. ‘Doesn't it figure?'

‘Yeah. Did Ricky happen to say if they were wearing velour warm-ups in disgusting colors?'

‘Now, see, there you go again, Jake! That's what Winnie asked him. Ricky said he noticed they were wearing funny clothes, but he couldn't remember any details. So I asked her, “Why are you asking him that? What's that about?” And then she told me about the men at the pawnshop.'