Chapter 25 #2
I arrived at the beautiful hundred-year-old building that had once been Dayton’s department store.
The name may have changed but the stock was pretty much the same.
I studied the facade. Noted the security cameras above the entrance.
I tightened my grip on the bubble wrap—no one seemed to suspect anything anyway.
I took a deep breath, like a diver, before moving on.
The moment I was inside the doors I could feel it.
The sensation of being somewhere else, that I was now part of Minneapolis’s eight square miles of indoor universe, with skyway connections.
You could literally spend your whole life in there.
You could be born in one of the clinics, live in one of the apartments, eat in the restaurants, go to school there, go to work in an office, get away from things in the theaters and bars.
You could die in here and be laid to rest in the church that was in there somewhere.
And as I was thinking that, it struck me: that I was already dead. I just hadn’t been laid to rest yet.
I crossed one of the town’s streets via a skyway and entered another region, another country.
I walked into a fast-food place and took a seat at the counter, ordered a pizza that you could see being baked inside big, red, infernal ovens.
I watched the cheese melting, saw the dough rise, the slices of pepperoni sweating.
I was hungry, tired. So tired that for a moment I lost concentration, lost perspective, dropped my guard, and there it was again, the doubt: what the hell are you doing?
I pulled myself together and, like I always did, gave a clear answer.
Sat up straight in my chair. Looked into the security cameras mounted on the wall above the ovens.
—
“Your colleague was just here and I showed him the same pictures,” the security guard at the parking garage said.
“I see,” said Olav Hanson as he studied the pictures on the screen in front of them. The lighting and the picture quality were poor, and it had been thirty years since the last time. But he was in no doubt about it. The scars on the face. It was Lobo. He was alive. And he was here.
The phone rang. Joe Kjos.
“Yes?”
“The duty officer at MPD just called. Oz sent them a picture of Tomás Gomez at a parking garage and asked them to run a facial recognition program on every security camera in the city.”
“Shit! Fried Chicken? But the guy’s suspended from duty!”
“That’s exactly what the duty officer here just found out. So now he’s calling us and wondering what to do, who should he report it to.”
“Report what?”
“That Tomás Gomez has been spotted on a camera at a pizza restaurant at Track Plaza.”
“The shopping mall on Nicollet?”
“Yes.”
Olav Hanson signaled his thanks to the security guard and headed quickly for the door and over to the parking lot.
“Joe?”
“Yeah?”
“Give my phone number to the duty officer and tell him to keep me posted with any updates on Gomez’s movements. Just me. Got that?”
Olav got into his car and was about to put the Kojak light on the roof when he saw a Ford pulling into the lot. It looked like one of MPD’s cars and if he wasn’t mistaken that was Kay Myers at the wheel.
“Olav…” Joe Kjos said in that slow and annoying way he had whenever he didn’t jump when Olav said jump. “I don’t want any trouble. I have to pass this on to Myers, she’s on her way out there. So the two of you can argue afterward about whose case it is.”
“Okay,” said Olav. “But give me a twenty-minute start.”
Joe hesitated. “Isn’t this something we should be calling in SWAT for?”
“Let me be the judge of that, Joe. Just give the duty officer my number and those twenty minutes. Do we have a deal?”
“But—”
“Listen, Joe. This is a coupon case. I’m calling in a coupon, okay? God knows I’ve got plenty of them, right?”
He heard Joe swallow. The coupon system was one of MPD’s unwritten rules. In short it meant that if you covered for a colleague—and that could be anything from a minor breach of the rules to something serious—then you had a coupon you could call in next time you needed a favor.
“Twenty minutes,” said Joe Kjos and hung up.
—
Bob was sitting in Caribou Coffee in the Southdale Mall. He checked his watch and was beginning to wonder if Kay Myers had received his text message about where he was when he saw her walk in.
“There you are,” said Kay and slid into a seat. “Sorry, the techs took longer than expected.”
“What are they saying?”
“Fingerprints on the tape on the windshield. Fingerprints and shoeprints at the edge of the parking garage roof. Apart from that this is a case everybody seems to want. Too many cooks, a lot of mess.”
“You mean Hanson?”
“He’s been here and told people that since he’s the first detective on the scene the case is his until further notice. He’s not even on duty this evening.”
“Then why does he want the case?”
Kay shrugged. “I guess he’s bored, and this seems interesting. Evidently you do too.”
“Me?”
“I went to see the security guard at the parking garage and asked him to show me the footage from the roof. He told me I was the third detective with the same request. And when I sent out a BOLO I was told you’d already done that. That’s a lot of cooks, don’t you think, Bob?”
Bob shrugged. “Time is of the essence. This isn’t some ego trip for me, I just want to increase our chances of catching Gomez before he manages to disappear again. Where is Hanson now?”
“I don’t know, he must’ve gone. But tell me, if this isn’t an ego trip, why didn’t you give Assault everything you had on Gomez?”
“Didn’t I do that?”
“No. Walker got a phone call from a doctor who said you’d been to see him—he was wondering if he needed police protection.”
“Oh, right, the guy who dispenses insulin to Gomez,” said Bob as he raised his cup. “You know what, I guess it just slipped my mind.” He drank, meeting Kay’s eloquent stare over the lip of the cup.
“The question is,” said Kay, “do you know anything else about Gomez that might help us?”
Bob pursed his lips and shook his head.
“Okay, Bob. I asked you for help. What’s your thinking so far?”
Bob smiled at her. He and Kay had started in the Homicide Unit at about the same time.
Then as now there were those who believed the doors were held open for people like Kay because she was a woman and she was black, that she reflected the MPD’s aim of having the same ethnic mix as the rest of the city’s population.
But Bob had always known that she was a better investigator than he was and that if there was any justice in the world she would go further, a lot further, than him.
And yet she always came to him with cases where she was having trouble.
She said it was because his head worked in a different way from hers, that sometimes he was able to help her see cases from another and more fruitful angle.
Beyond that they had never been especially close colleagues.
Maybe because she’d been one of those slightly too serious types who always went home every time Bob and the others went to a bar to celebrate their little triumphs.
Maybe because she wasn’t the type to open up and talk about something besides work.
So it had been a surprise that after Frankie, when everything started falling to pieces, she was the one who’d been there for him.
Covered for him when he didn’t turn up for duty and told Walker they’d arranged it between them.
Driven him home from work when he hadn’t managed to sober up completely.
But still kept her distance. All she got for it was trouble she didn’t need, it was hard to see it any other way.
In the end Bob had figured that Kay Myers was quite simply a better human being than he was.
“Let’s start with the victim,” said Bob as he put down his cup. “Who is it?”
“Cody Karlstad, fifty-three years of age, co-owner of AgriWork, selling everything from combine harvesters and tractors to lawn mowers. No police record, a pillar of the community, coaches his youngest son’s baseball team in his free time.
He’s got three kids and a wife who does volunteer work at the Mindekirken, which is—”
“The Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church,” Bob completed the sentence for her.
“Exactly, that’s your people. As you can see, though there are similarities in the method—”
“—there are no obvious similarities in the choice of victims.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Dante is a parasite, Karlstad a pillar of the community.”
Cody Karlstad, Cody Karlstad. Bob knew the name from somewhere, he just couldn’t place it.
“So no suspicion he was connected to gangs or narcotics?”
“None at all,” said Kay.
Bob ran a hand down his tie. “What about weapons?”
“He had a pistol, a Glock 17, locked in the glove compartment.”
“I mean, is there any connection to gun dealing, directly or indirectly?”
“No. But he’s not exactly anti-gun either.”
“I get that when he has a pistol.”
“Yes, but I was thinking of the bumper sticker on his car.”
“Oh?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“Hanson chased me off.”
“An NRA sticker. The one with the two boxes you can tick as gun owner or victim.”
Bob nodded slowly. He had it now, where he knew the name Cody Karlstad from.
“We need more guns in the hands of the right people,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“That’s what Cody Karlstad said in the Star Tribune earlier this summer,” said Bob as he tapped something into his phone. “He’s a spokesman for the NRA-ILA, they campaign against stricter gun laws. A classic more-guns-less-crime fan. Look, this is Cody Karlstad.”
Bob held up his phone to show Kay a photo of two men in suits posing together.
“Mayor Patterson,” she said. “So Cody Karlstad got to meet people in high places.”
“No great mystery for Patterson to pose for a picture when the NRA is donating $40,000 to his campaign.”
“They did? But Patterson’s a Democrat—I thought the NRA only supported politicians on the right?”
“The NRA doesn’t care where a politician stands on agricultural policy, all they care about is where they stand on the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
They give politicians marks based on how positive they are about guns and, according to the Star Tribune, Kevin Patterson gets an A-plus there. ”
“So you think gun control is the connection?” said Kay. “That what we’ve got here is someone fighting guns with guns?”
“It looks that way.”
“Is Gomez a solitary nutcase or a member of some political terrorist group?”
Bob shrugged. “How about a solitary, noncrazy political terrorist?”
Kay was about to say something but just then her phone rang. She took the call and looked quizzically at Bob as she listened.
“Gomez has been observed on a security camera at Track Plaza,” she said. She put the phone in her pocket and stood up.