Broken Chain Read online

  Marty fell silent. Paul’s remark hit on one of his own big worries. His wife Ellen had died years ago, and the kids had long since moved away. They had zero interest in staying on with the family farm, and had gone on to desk jobs in the city. He, too, hadn’t been able to afford help the last few years and it was a matter of time before the maintenance and daily work became too much for him. He had no idea what he was going to do when that day came, and he didn’t want to think about it right now.

  “So, Paul, what’d you call about?”

  “Oh, I was wondering what you thought about what happened on the Lyons farm the other day.”

  “I tell ya, I don’t know what to make of it. Dustin was a good man.” He shook his head. “He was just over here last week to return a power saw he’d borrowed. He seemed perfectly fine.”

  “I saw him and Carrie pretty recently myself. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. Never saw anything like this coming—not out here in St. Joe, and certainly not out of Dustin. Of course, with all the violence going on everywhere, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised it’s happening here, too.”

  “I hope this isn’t related to what’s been on the news. Maybe he had a brain tumor or something that made him do it. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end, though. Won’t bring him or Carrie back.”

  “Yeah. I’m worried about what’ll happen to his farm, too. I’d hate to see it gobbled up by BigAg, but you know that’s what’ll happen if their kids don’t come back to run it. It’ll get foreclosed on and some big outfit’ll snap it up for pennies on the dollar. That’d make the whole thing doubly tragic.”

  “Those big operations’re getting too close for comfort as it is. Here in St. Joe anyway, we’ve managed to hold on to the family farms. For now. Something like this could help ’em get a toehold in here.” Marty cleared his throat. “Well, I gotta get going. More stuff to do before the day ends.”

  “Yeah, sure. Take care, Marty.”

  “You, too. Bye.”

  Marty slipped his phone back into his pocket and frowned. He didn’t much like it when things happened without explanation. Why the hell would a guy like Dustin do what they say he did? He didn’t want to believe that crazy big-city violence was coming to his quiet little town. Like he didn’t have enough to worry about. He gazed out over his pasture and wondered how much longer he could hold on to his farm.

  Shoulders slumped, he turned and started walking back toward the house, then decided to visit Ellen. Her grave, covered in wildflowers and surrounded by a low, black, wrought-iron fence, lay beneath a tall maple in the backyard. The little gate squealed as he swung it open. He stepped inside, knelt on one knee beside her tombstone, then traced the letters of her name with his finger. Ellen Leanne Janssen.

  “Wish you were still here … I miss you so much.” He wiped a tear from his eye and stood. No matter how often he visited her, the pain never lessened. He expected it never would. Marty sighed and stepped away from the grave, shutting the little gate behind him.

  Maybe he’d be able to shake the dark thoughts from his mind with a decent lunch. And perhaps a little shot of bourbon.

  CHAPTER 4

  Daphne Mercer twisted the box fan’s knob to High, then got back to work scrubbing the grill as if her life depended on it. She’d run the AC soon enough when she opened the café. For now, she was in penny-pinching mode. If she could cut her power bill even a little by using the fan in the meantime, she would.

  It’s not like she wasn’t used to humid Minnesota summers. She was born and raised in the Twin Cities, though until recently she’d spent most of her time in air-conditioned office or restaurant jobs. But she’d never felt that she fit in there. When both her thirtieth birthday and a nasty breakup with her longtime boyfriend slammed her in the face, she took stock of her life and decided she didn’t like what she saw.

  She took no joy in the daily grind and trying to compete with people she felt were more set on status than values. She’d grown to hate the crowded, rushed feel of the city and the traffic. Not to mention the rising tide of violence. Not a day went by without some shooting or stabbing, and the rate of incidents had been increasing of late with frightening regularity.

  Life was too short to waste. She needed to simplify her life, get back to what was important to her, and find a safer place to live. So she decided to set herself up in small-town rural Minnesota.

  Daphne had worked long enough in restaurants as a waitperson—even a cook—that she figured she knew enough to run a small café. So she took a long drive one weekend earlier that summer through some beautiful farm country southwest of the Cities and stumbled across St. Joe. It looked like a Norman Rockwell painting to her, with its little town square full of small businesses and its surrounding expanse of open ag land.

  She’d noticed a closed café right on the town square with a For Rent sign in the window. The realtor handling it told her a woman named Carrie Lyons had been renting the space to run her café, but that she’d died recently. The owner needed a new tenant, and so she’d come along at the perfect time. The space already contained the needed equipment and fixtures. All she had to do was personalize it to suit her own taste.

  Daphne couldn’t believe her luck. She’d put down a deposit on the spot, received her key, and rented a room for herself and her cat Agnes at the motel-apartment combination the next block over. No more commute, no more dumb bosses trying to tell her what to do.

  In the last couple of weeks, she’d worked harder than ever before to bring her dream to life. The place hadn’t been left in the best condition. Dust covered every surface, and she couldn’t have that. The bare picture windows made it look like a truck stop, so she put up some nice white lace curtains to soften the café’s appearance and make it look homey. She put lace tablecloths and glass vases with silk flowers on each table to create a little atmosphere.

  But the worst thing was the grease. Ms. Lyons had apparently been a big believer in the meaty and the fried. Probably what killed the poor woman. The grill was caked with it. Daphne was amazed it passed health inspections, it was so bad. The grease had built up along the edges of every single surface in the kitchen—in the fan vents, on the walls, and for good measure, it had even formed a thick and rancid patina on the grill’s main cooking surface.

  She wrinkled her nose as she thought of the massive amount of animal fat that must have passed through the cooking area while Ms. Lyons had run the place. Well, those days were over. Nothing but good soy oil and meat substitutes from now on. She’d have some dairy and egg dishes for the lacto- and ovo-vegetarians. She’d have soy-based products for the strict vegans. Yep, she’d serve nothing but the healthy stuff in her café, like she’d been eating for years now. Vegetarian foods, fresh fruits and vegetables.

  That whole Mad Cow thing had made her think when the story first broke some time back, and she’d left the meat world—beef, poultry, and pork alike—behind and never looked back. She smiled as she examined the grill’s clean, shiny surface—the product of hours and hours of scrubbing and hard work. She envisioned how proud and happy she would be to make her living running a bustling small-town café of her own.

  CHAPTER 5

  Les Anderson turned his truck onto Paul Gorsham’s familiar farm property, drove up the long dirt driveway, and parked in his usual spot near the house. In all his thirty-one years of veterinary practice, he’d never heard a story like Paul had told him when he called to make an appointment. He shook his head and wondered if Paul had taken leave of his senses or if something truly new was afoot.

  He was still sitting in his truck, pondering the reason for his visit, when Paul’s wife Susan emerged from the house, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She came up to the driver’s side of the truck as Les lowered the window.

  “Hi, Susan. How’ve you been?”

  “Good, thanks, but Paul’s pretty worried about some of the stock.”

  “That’s what he was telling me. Sounded kind of odd.”

 
; “Oh, it is. You’ll see.” She pointed toward the barn. “You’ll find him in there. Good to see you again, Les.” She smiled and headed back to the house as if she had plenty to do.

  Les watched her go. Not for the first time, he wondered what his life would have been like if he’d made different choices. He’d had a huge crush on Susan back in high school but, for reasons he found inconsequential in retrospect, had asked someone else to the senior prom. Paul asked Susan to the prom, and they’d been together ever since. He’d eventually ended up with Tammie, who’d decided pretty quickly she didn’t much appreciate sharing the life of a country vet, with the midnight calls for calving and the stink of his clothes from manure and other things.

  He didn’t miss Tammie so much as he wished he’d done things differently and ended up with Susan. She was still a beautiful woman, even after all these years. Slender, but strong and healthy-looking. Her hair had grayed, but it had turned that vibrant shade of gray that actually looked really pretty on her. He shook his head, grabbed his bag, and headed over to the barn to see what Paul was so worried about.

  He knocked on the barn door. “Hey Paul, it’s me, Les.”

  “Over here, last stall in the back.”

  Les entered the barn and let his eyes adjust for a few moments. The July sun left him temporarily helpless inside the dimly light structure, reminding him he had to check with the eye doctor about those cataracts. Then he walked over to the back stall.

  Paul crouched in the straw next to a downer cow. But there was something odd about the animal. Instead of thrashing and foaming and fighting whatever ailed her, she simply lay there, quiet and still. As if she’d gone beyond caring. Something about it gave Les a strange feeling.

  He stepped into the stall and approached the cow for a closer look. When he saw her, he couldn’t believe Paul would’ve spent the money to have him come out.

  “Well, Paul, why’d you call me out here for this?” He motioned toward the cow. “It’s just old age. Nothing invented can cure that.”

  Paul looked up at him with weary eyes. “That’s the thing of it, Doc. She’s not. She’s only a year old, but she looks like an old, used-up cow.”

  Les opened his mouth, but didn’t quite know what to say. He glanced down at the cow again. The fur, brittle and dull. The eyes, bloodshot. Cloudy lenses pregnant with cataract. An old cow. He lifted her lip to look at the teeth and was stunned. The teeth showed minimal wear—like those of a yearling. He sat back on his heels in the straw and ran through his mental list of diseases, which, after all his years in practice, was pretty damned encyclopedic. And he came up empty.

  “Never seen anything like it, Paul.”

  “Me neither, that’s for sure.”

  “Is this the only one, or have there been others? When did you first notice this?”

  “Only noticed it in the past few weeks, maybe couple of months. At first I just thought I had a couple of random deaths. But then I started paying closer attention, and the thing they have in common is they all look like they’re dying of old age, but they’re not old. I don’t know what to make of it, and I sure as shit can’t afford to have this happening.” He rubbed his jaw with a trembling hand.

  Les put his hand out to try to calm Paul. “I hear ya, I do. I just have no ready answer.” He glanced down again at the cow, searching for clues and finding none. “I’m going to have to look into this some more. Keep me posted on what happens with this one, how long it takes. I’ll want to do a post on her immediately after death.”

  “But she’s—”

  “I know. Normally I’d put her out of her misery, but I don’t want to introduce anything that might skew the lab results.” Les stood and stretched his lower back. “This is odd, indeed, and I want to try to get to the bottom of it as quickly as I can.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Vic Rayburn was a man who enjoyed his job. As head of the EIS, the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, each year he got to handpick a new crop of the most promising future epidemiologists available. As he sat at his desk and scrolled through the roster of this year’s cohort on his computer, he marveled at how he’d been able to select better and better candidates each year. The real-world experience they would get in the program would mold them into experts who would be in high demand for their skills. He smiled. He was proud of his program’s graduates and what they would surely achieve during their careers.

  Now that the new cohort had completed orientation, it was time to start assigning them to their initial projects. Vic always took care to fit the assignment to the individual’s particular interests or background. He pulled up the list of current potential outbreaks from the real-time database and began to comb through it for candidate assignments.

  In his own career as a practicing epidemiologist, Vic had developed an enviable sixth sense about trends, often correctly identifying a nascent epidemic long before his colleagues. He’d begun to suspect an epidemiologic basis behind the massive uptick in violence—something more than socioeconomic factors—and so he’d been gathering raw data into his database for the past several weeks.

  He clicked a link in the report to access more detail, then scanned the various charts and graphs with a practiced eye. Viewing the trend over time, the violence appeared to have originated in the Midwest, then bloomed out across the country in all directions, seeming to follow major distribution routes. It affected both densely and sparsely populated areas, urban and rural. The violence was of all kinds: shootings, stabbings, poisonings, you name it. So it wasn’t as if access to a particular type of weapon created any pattern.

  Vic sat back in his chair and frowned. In fact, he’d recently heard a rather grisly report of a man killing his wife—and then himself—with a hay hook out in Minnesota somewhere. The problem appeared to be writ both large and small: impersonal mass shootings and personal, gruesome murders like that one.

  He accessed the news story on that incident and confirmed the details. The small town where it happened was near Minneapolis. He was almost certain one of the new recruits was from somewhere around there. A quick search of the cohort list showed that Kyle Sommers was from the area, and had attended med school at the U of M, in fact. He sent an email to Kyle to meet with him in an hour.

  Judging from the available data, Vic believed the violence would likely get far worse in the coming weeks and months, and that the root cause would be extremely difficult to pin down. He decided to give the project top priority, and to assemble a large team to investigate the problem from different angles and in different environments across the country. Some, like Kyle, would be placed in smaller rural locales, and some would be placed in more densely populated urban locales. That approach would be more likely to highlight patterns that cut across different environments than a single-site investigation, and so might lead to the true answer faster.

  Good. One project decided. Vic rubbed his hands together and started selecting the rest of the team members.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gretchen lay draped on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, head lolled back. She fanned herself with a section of newspaper while Lara played with Baa-Baa on the floor, seemingly oblivious to the stifling heat. She wondered how crappy their AC unit must be if it couldn’t cool the air in such a small space as their apartment.

  A sheen of oily sweat covered her entire body, causing her T-shirt and shorts to cling to her in a disgusting, annoying way. The oppressive heat and sticky clothes only served to aggravate her morning sickness, just when she thought she was moving out of that miserable phase of her pregnancy. Bonus, she thought.

  Lara hopped up with the boundless energy of a three-year-old when the door opened and Kyle walked in. “Woot! It’s Daddy!” She ran to him and wrapped her arms around his left knee. He reached down and picked her up.

  “Are you okay? You look like you’ve melted into the couch.”

  “The AC is a piece of crap. It’s been stifling in here all day, and I dare not open the w
indow. It’s even worse outside.”

  Kyle smiled as Lara showered him with welcome-home kisses. “Well, never fear. We’re going to leave it all behind.”

  Gretchen dropped her newspaper and sat up. “We just got here. Did something happen?”

  “Got my first assignment.” Kyle sat down next to Gretchen and let Lara jump out of his lap to go play with her stuffed sheep. “I’m part of a big team that’s been assembled to investigate the wave of violence. Pretty important assignment out of the gate, if you ask me.”

  “Wow! When? And where?”

  “Soon as I can start. Vic Rayburn—he runs the program—thinks there’s an epidemiological basis to the violence, and that it’s going to get a lot worse. So he’s putting investigators in a bunch of different cities, some small, some large.”

  “How’s that supposed to work?”

  “We’ll all manage our own investigations remotely in our assigned locations, and communicate via email and regular phone conferences. He thinks if he put the entire team in one location, we might see things as patterns that aren’t really patterns. So because the problem cuts across urban and rural locations, he wants the investigation to do so as well.”

  “Oh, I see. You didn’t say where yet.”

  “Back near Minneapolis. In a little farming town called St. Joseph, in Sibley County. It’s a good setup, I think. Small enough scale for me to manage my first investigation, and near enough to St. Paul so I can pretty easily get out to meet with the state epidemiologist as needed.”

  “Oh. Do you know how long you’ll be out there?” The thought of life without Kyle in the vile apartment wasn’t pretty.

  “No, but Vic projected it would be long enough that you and Lara can come with me.”

  “What about our stuff?”

  “He suggested we just move into one of those extended-stay hotels the next town over, at least for now. If it gets more long-term, maybe we make other arrangements. I’m in the program for two years, so I’ll have other assignments over time. Makes sense to leave this as our base of operations, since I can’t predict where my future assignments will be.”