I purposely included Marshall’s name and information about him and the Kings so he would know that I already knew more than he wanted to tell me. I had hoped that would convince Marshall to answer my questions and send me on my way. I miscalculated. Twenty minutes later he replied with this message:
Don’t fuck with us!
To which I replied:
Do you kiss your daughter with that mouth?
Detective Shipman shook her head as she added even more notes to her yellow legal pad. “You just can’t help yourself, can you, McKenzie,” she said to herself. “What a fucktard.”
NINE
The police sergeant sitting behind the bulletproof partition at the entrance to the James S. Griffin Building worked a lever that opened a metal drawer.
“Identification please,” he said.
The State of Minnesota requires that licensed private investigators carry an identification card with them at all times that clearly states the license holder’s name, company logo if any, address, and the PI’s photograph and physical description. Greg Schroeder had that, of course, plus the word PRIVATE printed across the top and INVESTIGATOR printed across the bottom, both in block letters reversed out of black. That was on one side of his wallet. On the other side was a gold coplike badge with Private Detective embossed across it. The Private Detective and Protective Agent Services Board doesn’t require a badge. In fact, I think it frowns on it. Schroeder, however, liked to carry one for dramatic effect.
Schroeder slid his wallet into a metal drawer. The drawer was retracted so that it could be accessed on the other side of the glass. The sergeant opened the wallet, perused the contents carefully, put it back into the drawer, and returned it to Schroeder. He didn’t seem impressed.
Afterward, he made two phone calls before passing the detective up to the second floor where Major Crimes was located. Schroeder stepped off the elevator and was confronted by a large desk that effectively blocked his path. The woman sitting behind it smiled brightly as he approached.
“Mr. Schroeder?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Identification, please.”
He showed it to her.
“Just a moment, please.”
Schroeder nodded as she left her post and disappeared behind a secured door on his right. There was another on his left. The elevator had closed behind him, of course, leaving Schroeder with the impression that he was sealed inside a bandit trap. He wasn’t going anywhere. After several moments, the door on his right opened and both the woman and Bobby Dunston stepped out. The woman went behind her desk. Bobby moved directly to where Schroeder was standing. Schroeder immediately offered his hand.
“Commander,” he said.
“Mr. Schroeder.”
Bobby had thought long and hard before he made the call. Greg Schroeder was correct when he told Nina that the police and private investigators often worked together. Not side by side, of course. More like a PI might go to the cops and ask for information on a case the cops weren’t actively working; maybe even something in their cold files. In return, the PI would be ready, willing, and able to assist the police should ever the need arrive. In fact, he had better be. If word got out that a PI wasn’t playing nice, he might as well set up practice in North Dakota for all the help he was going to get in the Cities. Bobby finally called Schroeder Private Investigations to see if he was willing to play nice. He identified himself and asked to speak to Greg. Gloria, the receptionist, said that Mr. Schroeder wasn’t in, would Bobby care to leave a message. Bobby said that he was sure that Gloria could contact him.
“Do so immediately,” he said. “Tell him to call me at the Griffin Building. Tell him I’ll be waiting.”
He waited exactly six minutes before Schroeder returned his call and arranged a meeting.
Bobby shook Schroeder’s hand and, without speaking, ushered him through the doorway and down a corridor until they reached the large room where the investigators working in the Homicide and Robbery Unit were located. Bobby led Schroeder into the room and past several desks toward his cramped office. Detective Shipman stood as they approached.
“Boss,” she said.
“In a moment,” Bobby said.
He gestured for Schroeder to enter his office. After he did, Bobby closed the door behind them.
“Have a seat, Greg.” Bobby circled his desk while Schroeder took the chair directly in front of it. “I’m going to call you Greg because I know we’re going to be friends.”
“We are?”
“You’re working the McKenzie shooting, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Myself.”
“Don’t lie to me again.”
Schroeder lifted his hand and let it fall.
“What I’m trying to decide is if we’re both on the same side, Greg,” Bobby said. “You’re off to a bad start.”
“McKenzie is a friend of mine. We’ve worked together in the past. He even hired me a couple of times to keep watch on his lady love.”
“You say ‘worked together.’ I remember him telling me a story about a case you were both involved in concerning Riley Muehlenhaus, ’cept you were hired by the grandfather, Walter, and he had been working for Riley. How did that play out, by the way?”
“She’s alive and for the record, she doesn’t use the name Muehlenhaus. It’s Riley Brodin-Mulally now.”
“Nina Truhler told me the same thing,” Bobby said.
“When?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Ah. Well, if you already knew who I was working for why did you ask?”
“It was a test to see how forthcoming you were going to be.”
“I’ll tell you everything I can as long as it doesn’t compromise my client,” Schroeder said.
“Fair enough. Go ’head.”
“McKenzie’s friend, Dave Deese?”
“My friend, too.”
“He’s clean.”
“I kinda knew that.”
“I didn’t,” Schroeder said.
“What else?”
“I’ve only been working the case for a couple of hours.”
“You will tell me if you learn anything that I don’t already know, though, right?”
“Quid pro quo; isn’t that how it works? I give you something and you give me something in return?”
“I can play that game,” Bobby said. “About an hour ago a man entered Rickie’s and threatened Nina Truhler with bodily harm if she and McKenzie didn’t learn to keep their big mouths shut. She responded by punching him in his big mouth.”
“Is she okay?”
“Shaken, but not stirred.”
“Should I tell you a secret, Commander? I’ve always liked her.”
“Me, too.”
“She’s way too good for McKenzie.”
“We at least agree on one thing.”
“I offered her protection,” Schroeder said. “She turned it down.”
“Offer again.”
“No, I think I’ll do what McKenzie had me do the last time. Send guys to keep an eye out and not tell her. Can she identify the man who threatened her?”
“No.”
“What is it she and McKenzie are supposed to keep quiet about?”
“She doesn’t know,” Bobby said. “I told her next time she should gather more intel before she hits the guy.”
“McKenzie was shot because of something he knew. That’s apparent now. It would be nice if he woke up and told us what it was.”
“From your lips to God’s ear.”
“Anything else, Commander?”
“That covers it for now.”
“For now?”
“It’s possible that I might reach out to you again. It depends on how the situation evolves. McKenzie might wake up in five minutes and tell us everything.”
“Or he might not, in which case…”
“Don’t be unpleasant,” Bobby said.
; “You’ll want to get a jump on this. What is it they say about the first forty-eight hours?”
“I have a detective tracing his movements for the past few days.”
“The pretty little thing who stood up when we passed her desk?”
“Oh, please, go out there and call her that, but only after I’ve had time to get some popcorn so I can enjoy the show.”
Schroeder started laughing, I don’t know why.
“Greg, if you learn anything you had better tell me and to hell with the quo,” Bobby said.
“Yes, Commander.”
“Don’t mess with me. Please. Not over this. Absolutely not over this.”
“We’re good,” Schroeder said.
The two men rose and shook hands. Bobby went to the door and opened it. He stood in his doorway and watched Schroeder leave. Once Schroeder had exited the large room he glanced at Shipman and gave her a come-hither gesture.
“Boss,” she said when she reached his side.
Before she could say anything more, however, Sarah Frisco slammed down her phone, stood up from her desk and waved a sheet of notepaper in the air like it was the winning Powerball ticket.
“We have a shooting on the Green Line,” she said. “Uniforms have stopped the train at Dale and University. Two victims, condition unknown. Suspect in the wind.”
“You and Eddie,” Bobby said. “No, everybody.”
“Boss,” Shipman repeated.
“Not you. You’re already working a case. Tell me something interesting when I get back.”
Shipman watched her fellow investigators head for the door, all the while telling herself that Bobby was being unfair. She not only should be investigating the shooting, she should be lead.
“This is all McKenzie’s fault,” she shouted across the empty room.
* * *
Shipman returned to my notes.
What happened next was this.
* * *
I stared at the message I had sent to Marshall Sohm on my computer screen, thinking that wasn’t the smartest thing I had ever done. Honestly, all I wanted was a name. Something King. That’s it. Why was the family being so secretive about it? Were they afraid that once I—once Dave Deese—proved paternity I would sue for an inheritance?
Paternity.
Maternity.
“McKenzie, you’re an idiot.” I didn’t need my inner voice to tell me that. I said it out loud.
I returned to the website of the Spooner Advocate and clicked on the obituary link. Only this time instead of typing King, I typed Mary Ann Sohm. Bingo.
Mary Ann Sohm, 62, of Shell Lake, Wisconsin, died Tuesday, September 11, in the arms of her beloved husband Marshall, Sr. and surrounded by her family at the Shell Lake Health Care Center following a courageous battle with cancer. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 14, 1948, to Porter and Emma (Schullo) King. She was married in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 8, 1972 to Marshall Sohm, Sr. They moved to Shell Lake in 1984 where they farmed for years. Mary Ann will be dearly missed by all who knew her as a hardworking, loving, and dedicated wife and mother. She is survived by her children Marshall, Jr. (Krystal), Jerome (Tonya) and Cynthia (Rob); grandchildren Steven, Linda, Elliot, Martin, Robert, Olivia, and Debra. Mary Ann was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Gerald. Visitation will be from 4 to 7 P.M. on Thursday, Sept. 13, at the Skinner Funeral Home in Shell Lake with a prayer service at 6:30 P.M., and for one hour before the funeral on Friday at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Shell Lake, with Father John Piza officiating. Burial will be at Northern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery.
What made me smile was the line Mary Ann was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Gerald.
I immediately typed Gerald King into a search engine and discover that, damn, there were a lot of Gerald Kings in the world. I narrowed the search to Minnesota and then to Minneapolis. I searched everywhere that I could and discovered nothing that linked a single Gerald to the other Kings or to Mary Ann. One item that appeared in the Bayfield County Journal in May 2000 caught my eye, though:
CAR OF MISSING MINNEAPOLIS MAN DISCOVERED IN BUFFALO BAY MARINA PARKING LOT IN RED CLIFF
It was because of the headline and the 120-word story that followed that I eventually wrote four lines in my notes:
Chief Neville—Bayfield
LT Rask
IRS requires six-year limit on keeping record for closed business; sixteen years ago; can’t prove Anna worked there
Dave isn’t going to like this
* * *
Only, I didn’t provide further details. Shipman scrolled my notes up and down and couldn’t find an explanation for what I had written. She actually yelled at her computer screen. “What? You write precise details for one thing but not the other?”
The reason I didn’t write expansive notes—and again, you need to remember I was writing them for myself and not for someone like Shipman to read—was because I was hungry. I was also a little bored. A computer is an astonishing tool. Certainly it’s a more efficient and reliable source of intel than going to courthouses and searching records or visiting the morgues of daily and weekly newspapers and looking up old stories on microfiche. Only I had been staring at my own PC for most of the morning and my neck and shoulders ached and my head throbbed and my leg twitched from inactivity. So I wrote what I wrote. I knew exactly what my notes meant and if Shipman didn’t, well she could just follow my footsteps. I mean, do your job, woman!
Which she did.
* * *
A quick computer search told Detective Shipman that “Chief Neville—Bayfield” referred to Chief Jeremy Neville who supervised the tiny police department in the city of Bayfield, a thriving tourist town located on the south shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin. She called the number she found. The woman who answered directed her call to the chief. Shipman identified herself and explained why she was calling.
“Is McKenzie going to be all right?” the chief asked.
“I don’t know. The last I heard he was still in a coma.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I like McKenzie. He did me a favor when he was up here a couple years ago. It doesn’t surprise me that he got himself shot, though. We hadn’t had a serious crime up here in decades. He arrived and the bullets started flying everywhere. It was very disconcerting.”
“My information, he called you Tuesday,” Shipman said.
“Yes, about a twenty-year-old cold. It wasn’t even ours.”
“Can you tell me…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twenty years ago, twenty-one actually, the department received a call—I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Houghton, Michigan. According to the records that I accessed for McKenzie, the department received a call that a car had been abandoned in a marina parking lot for over three weeks. The marina is located in Red Cliff, an unincorporated town seven miles north of us. We provided service to Red Cliff back then. Now, you need to remember that it was a marina. A vehicle sitting in the lot for a long period of time wasn’t unusual. People would often park their cars, jump on their boats, and sail off onto Lake Superior for a couple of weeks at a time. Except it was getting late in the season and most people were starting to take their boats out of the water for storage.
“We received the call and sent an officer to check on the car and discovered that a BOLO had been issued for it by the Minneapolis Police Department. The car belonged to a businessman named Gerald King who had gone missing three weeks earlier. We alerted the MPD and they sent up a team to impound the car and tow it back to the Cities. All we did was secure the vehicle until they arrived.
“Later, we were asked by the MPD to accompany an investigator who canvassed the marina; interviewed the people who worked there or who had boats in the marina; some who actually lived on their boats during the summer. He flashed King’s photograph to everyone we could find, although there weren’t that many. Like I said, it was toward the end of the season and most of the regulars were gon
e. He flashed the photo and asked if anyone could remember speaking to King, seeing King. No one did. At least no one admitted it. And that was that. That’s all I could find in the supplementals. That’s all I could tell McKenzie.”
“You said that an investigator from the MPD did the canvassing,” Shipman said. “Who? Do you have a name?”
“Ah, it’s right here. A sergeant named Clayton Rask.”
* * *
Shipman was a little afraid of Lieutenant Rask. Truth be told, I was a little afraid of him myself. She sat across from LT in his office in Room 108, which was actually a suite of offices that served the Minneapolis Police Department’s assault, robbery, narcotics, forgery/fraud, sex crimes, and homicide units, among others, located in the Minneapolis City Hall–Hennepin County Courthouse. Rask had been running the Homicide Unit for as long as I could remember. He didn’t move up and he didn’t move sideways. Instead, he devoted his entire law enforcement career to catching killers. He was very good at it.
“McKenzie,” he said. “There have been times when I wanted to shoot him myself. Once, though, he did me a favor. I can’t tell you what the favor was. It’s—sensitive. That favor buys him a lot of slack with me, though. Don’t think he doesn’t know it, either.”
“I understand, LT.”
If you had a relationship with him, you didn’t call him Lieutenant or Rask and certainly not Clayton. You called him LT.
What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel Page 13