Read Vapor Trail for Free Online

the Saint was a soccer mom who reached her bullshit limit, and she’d be damned if Dolman was going to come back to school and teach her kid. I always thought we should have looked closer at all the parents at that school. But we didn’t have the resources.” John shook his head. “Now I’m not so sure. I’m worried it could be someone in the county.”
    “Slow down. What if your witness talks to a reporter, the neighbors? There goes your breathing room,” Broker said.
    John smiled quickly. “Not likely. He’s sweating a possession charge. He’s an aging biker who sold a bag of grass to one of my undercover guys. Which put him over the line on points. He’s looking at going inside. We can deal him up. He’ll stay quiet.”
    “So who knows about the medallion?”
    “The Stillwater cop who answered the call. And the Stillwater mayor and his police chief. My investigator, Lymon Greene; his sergeant, Maury Seacrest.” John paused. “You know Maury.”
    Broker winced. “So every cop in the metro east of the Mississippi knows. What about the secretary who found the body?”
    “She’s cool; she didn’t see the medallion. We took her statement, and she and her husband agreed to go on vacation up to Mille Lacs a few days early.”
    “What about the Ramsey County ME and the BCA Crime Lab guys? They processed the scene.”
    “They don’t know. It stays quiet until I get back,” John said.
    “Back?” Broker sat up in his chair, skeptical. “The Saint just blew into town, and you’re leaving?”
    “My wife’s dad just died. So the funeral’s in Seattle.”
    “That’s not immediate family, John.”
    “Sorry, gotta go.”
    Broker gave his old friend the barest smile. “What the hell are you doing?”
    John’s expression was clearly conflicted. “I’m understaffed. My top investigator is drunk on his ass and a total embarrassment; my other sergeants are tied up in court. I’m going to a funeral. My deputy chief is doing the course at the Southern Police Institute.”
    “Bullshit. You got Art Katzer in charge of Investigations,” Broker said.
    “He took off for SWAT training.”
    “When? At midnight when he heard about the priest and the medallion and Harry falling off the wagon?”
    “Okay—I’m throwing the dice on this one. If I’m right and Harry knows who the Saint is, I’m betting you can get him to cough it up. If I’m wrong . . .” John shook his head.
    “Yeah, right or wrong you bring in somebody expendable, who isn’t part of your department, so it can’t blow back on you,” Broker said.
    John grinned tightly. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but, ah, yeah. So is that a yes or a no?”
    “You’re asking a lot,” Broker said.
    “I know, but I figure you can handle it. Look, there’s a national scandal about the Church, and I got a dead priest with a radio-active clue stuck in his mouth that identifies him in the popular mind as a child molester. I gotta know if this priest was dirty.” John paused. “We’re not set up to handle a high-profile murder investigation. I don’t want the state guys moving in on this before we know what we’ve got. And I don’t want a media high carnival—the archdiocese in St. Paul doesn’t need that kind of grief on top of everything else. I need someone to check out Moros’s backgroundwithout making any waves. I mean like invisible. I got Maury, but he doesn’t exactly have the contacts you do.”
    Broker shrugged. “I never was a straight-ahead investigator, John. You know that.”
    John let a cynical smile play across his face. “C’mon, Broker. You tell people you retired because you invested wisely in real estate on the north shore years ago. And you own a resort up there. But I know that five years ago you and Nina smuggled several tons of buried gold bullion right under the noses of the Hanoi politburo, on through Laos and Thailand and into Hong Kong.” John paused, got no denial, then began again.
    “You live off credit