They sat down on a chilly gray overcast afternoon bundled in fleece and parkas at the picnic table in the backyard, overlooking the color-drained St. Croix River valley. Kit stood motionless, hugging herself on the back porch. Watching them through the windows.
They made up their minds in less time than it takes to play a game of checkers. Broker did most of the talking. Nina, in the grip of the thing that had captured her, refused to speak its name.
“You trust me on this?” Broker asked. She nodded and continued to nod as he frankly ticked off the signs. They both had been brushing up on the relevant chapters in the DSM-IV. She had lost interest or pleasure in nearly all activities. He saw insomnia, decreased energy, and fatigue, along with a diminished ability to think or concentrate, irritability, and guilty preoccupations with past failings. And she’d basically ignored her daughter and her husband. He finished up by saying, “We gotta get you away from-”
She nodded again and said, “People.”
“What about the doc at Bragg you check in with?” he asked.
Nina shook her head vehemently. “Not a word about…this thing. He knows how serious the shoulder is. Time’s not a factor. I’m not exactly under discipline anymore, am I? I’m technically a ‘contractor.’” She managed a bitter twitch of a smile.
“Okay, so we agree,” he said.
“We agree. No doctors, no drugs, no hospital,” Nina said flatly. “If anything goes on the record, I’ll never work on the teams again. I’ll do this on my own.”
Broker understood. He had once dated an FBI shrink, a profiler. She had diagnosed him as a fugitive from modern psychology whose emotional development had been arrested when he read Treasure Island at age eleven. But he recalled her observation that an otherwise healthy person could tough their way through severe depression, given enough time and seclusion.
“We should send Kit to stay with your folks. It’ll be hard on her to lose dance class, swimming. At least with them she can keep up with piano,” Nina said, grimacing.
“No.” Broker was adamant. “She’ll handle it. We’ll all three go away. Up north. Someplace safe where no one knows us. It’s better if we work through it together.”
Too weary to argue, she nodded; then she got up and went into the porch and tried to talk to Kit. Broker watched Nina through the windows, saw her struggle in silent pantomime, head downcast; saw Kit embrace her mother, face upturned, nodding encouragement. Christ. It was almost like they were switching roles.
He took a deep breath, still having difficulty seeing Nina as…fragile. But she was right. She had to beat this thing with a minimum of interference.
Still…
He’d been around cops for over twenty years and watched as some of them peeled off and started to descend into themselves, drifting down this dark internal staircase. Usually it was the dead little kids-butchered, starved, abused-they encountered on the job that put them over the line. The main cop taboo was to show weakness, so they medicated with alcohol and hung tough till the pension kicked in. But once in a while a guy would find the dead kid he was trying to forget waiting in the basement at the bottom of those dark stairs, and he’d eat his gun.
Broker resolved to position himself on those stairs for her. Whatever it took.
On this one, he had to reach way back, to someone he’d known before he entered police work, or the odd string of adventures that followed his early retirement from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension eight years ago. After he got involved with Nina Pryce.
He flipped open his cell and called Harry Griffin, his old Vietnam buddy. He’d hunted with Griffin just last November…
Way up in Glacier County.
Chapter One
It was another March surprise. Yesterday the kids were playing in long sleeves and tennis shoes. Then the storm moved in last night, riding on serious cold that knocked everyone’s weather clock for a loop. Now there was a foot of fresh snow on the ground. The air temperature stuck on 18 degrees Fahrenheit, but the windchill shivered it down to 11. School policy put the kids out in the snow if the thermometer topped zero. Ten-thirty in the morning at Glacier Elementary. Recess.
The new kid was a snotty showoff, and it was really starting to bug Teddy Klumpe. Especially the way a lot of third-graders had gathered on the playground to watch her.
Just like yesterday, when she was doing skips on the monkey bars. Not just swinging, flying almost. And everyone big-eyed, checking her out, like wow. See that? Three-bar skip. Except today it so was so cold-ha-that her gloves slipped on the icy bars and she dropped off, the heels of her boots skidded in the snow, and she fell on her skinny rear end. But then she got up and studied the stretch of steel bars over her head; studied them so hard these wrinkles scrunched up her forehead. Slowly, as her breath jetted in crisp white clouds, she removed her gloves.
Boy, was that dumb. It was just too cold…
But it didn’t stop her. She mounted the wooden platform and carefully placed her gloves on the snowy planks. She blew a couple times on her bare hands, took a stance, gauged the distance, bent her knees, swung her arms back, and sprung. Parka, snow pants, bulky boots. Didn’t matter. Smoothly, she caught the third bar out.
Yuk. The thought of his bare skin touching that frozen steel made him wince. Along with the fact he was too heavy to propel himself hand over hand. But when she dropped back to the ground. Then he’d show her. Skinny, red-haired, freckle-faced little bitch.
The Klumpe kid was almost nine. Naturally powerful for his age, he packed an extra ten pounds of junk-food blubber in a sumo-like tire around his gut and his wide PlayStation 2 butt. Biggest kid in the third grade. Most feared kid. Knew the most swear words. King of the playground.
Screw her.
Teddy scouted the immediate area.
Mrs. Etherby, the nearest recess monitor, was watching the kids sliding down the hill on plastic sleds. The other monitor was on the far side of the playground, where some fourth-graders were building a snow fort.
Ten of Teddy’s classmates were standing over by the slide next to the monkey bars, making a winter rainbow of fleece red caps and blue and yellow Land’s End parkas against the oatmeal sky. All of them curiously watching Teddy and the new kid. They should be watching him take his snowboard down the hill. And repairing the bump jump when he smashed it apart. Instead, they were watching to see what he would do.
The new kid swung from the last bar, landed lightly on her feet on the far wooden platform, and blew on her chapped hands. Teddy eyed the gloves she’d left on the opposite end. As she leaped up and grabbed the bars for the return trip, Teddy walked over casually, snatched up her gloves, and stuffed them in his jacket pocket.
“Hey!” the kid yelled, swinging hand over hand.
Teddy ignored her and kept walking, around the back of a small equipment shed near the tire swings.
“Hey,” she said again, dropping to the snow and trotting after him. “Those are my gloves.” Her breath made an energetic white puff in the air. Two brooding vertical creases started between her eyebrows and shot up her broad forehead.
Teddy angled his face away from her but let his eyes roll to the edge of his sockets. Kinda like his dad did when he was getting ready to get really mad. He took a few more steps, drawing her farther behind the shed, out of sight from eyes on the playground. Then he spun.
“Liar,” he said.
She balled her cold hands at her sides and narrowed her green eyes. The creases deeper now, pulling her face tight. “Thief,” she said in a trembling voice.