What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel

by David Housewright

  “You expect he was gonna do the research you wanted on his phone?” he asked.

  Chopper waved at the dozen computer terminals that were scattered throughout his office.

  “He can’t use the boss’s computer?” Herzog said. “When did you start voting Republican?”

  “Hey,” the geek said. “You want to look at this, what?”

  Chopper wheeled himself around the desk. The geek pulled away the chair he was using to give him plenty of room. He leaned down until his head was level with his employer’s and pointed at the computer screen some more.

  “Jenna King is one of the Kings. Charles King, her brother, he owns KTech Industries, creates artificial intelligence designs. AI, man. AI. AI is like…”

  “I know what artificial intelligence is,” Chopper said.

  “These people are going to rule the world.”

  Chopper was looking at Herzog when he asked “How much are the Kings worth?”

  “Hundreds of millions of dollars,” the geek said. “Maybe more. Maybe billions.”

  “You don’t just shoot a billionaire.”

  “Why would you do that?” the geek wanted to know. “AI, man. AI.”

  “Why would someone want us to do that, better question?” Herzog said.

  “We could ask Jenna,” Chopper said.

  “Think she’d talk to us? Think we could get within a mile of her up at Lake Minnetonka? Puh-leez. We can’t even walk through a shopping mall without being followed.”

  “She doesn’t live on Lake Minnetonka,” the geek said. “Her brother does, but Jenna, Jenna King, right? She has a place on Summit Hill in St. Paul.”

  Chopper gestured at Herzog.

  “Whaddya think?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” Herzog asked in return.

  “If she thought she was in danger, if she thought Jamal and the doc-tor were fucking with her; that might be enough to convince her to tell us ’bout McKenzie. She might tell us a lot.”

  “How we gonna convince her of that; convince her that we’re her friends?”

  “Do you have Jamal’s number?” Chopper asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I think we call him and tell him that we changed our minds. Tell ’im we thought about it and decided we’re out of the thug life. See what he does.”

  “If you’re right, if Jamal and the doctor were tryin’ to make us their bitch—you know, they might go over t’ her place and do her themselves. Jamal in particular, he’s pretty ambitious.”

  “Maybe we should go over there and watch,” Chopper said. “You know, just in case.”

  “Be the cavalry riding to the rescue?”

  “Buffalo Soldiers, that’s us.”

  * * *

  Greg Schroeder was sitting in his office overlooking U.S. Bank Stadium when his phone rang.

  “Schroeder,” he said.

  “This is Brian Wilson. You busy?”

  “No.”

  “Still want to interview Jenna King?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m in Brooklyn Park…”

  By the way, Harry hated Brooklyn Park. That’s the suburb the FBI moved to about ten years ago. Granted, the ultra-modern five-story building was so much better than the hovel they had worked out of in downtown Minneapolis. Still, Brooklyn Park. The chance of being a victim of either a violent or property crime was one in twenty-nine; its crime rate was higher than 93 percent of the cities and towns in Minnesota. Probably the reason why the FBI’s campus was surrounded by an iron fence. Anyway …

  “I’m still in Brooklyn Park,” Harry said. “I can swing by your office or I could give you Jenna’s address in St. Paul and we can meet there.”

  “Why don’t you come here, first,” Schroeder said. “Do you know where I’m located?”

  “I do. ETA in about thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  * * *

  The admin summoned Dr. Lillian Linder the moment that Nina entered the waiting area outside of the SICU at Regions Hospital. Less than a minute later, Lilly was by her side.

  “So far so good,” she said. “We’ve been slowly reducing the drugs in McKenzie’s system. All his vitals are exactly where we want them to be.”

  “How long will it take for him to regain consciousness?”

  “Like I told you before, it depends on the individual. It could take a couple of hours. It could take all night.”

  “Can I see him?” Nina asked.

  “Of course. In fact, it’s been shown that hearing the voices of family members helps patients come out of a coma sooner; it exercises the circuits in their brains. What I want you to do—tell McKenzie who you are. Hold his hand and stroke his skin; that can be a great comfort to him. Talk to him about your day; talk to him as you normally would. Remember, though. He can hear you. If you tell him he’s a soulless jerk…”

  “I’ll wait until he’s fully awake.”

  “Good idea.”

  Lilly led Nina into the room where they had been keeping me since Tuesday night; the glass wall had been rolled back. By then they had extubated me; the medical term for removing the tube they had pushed down my throat to help me breathe and the one they had shoved up my nose to draw out stomach contents. Lilly gave Nina a stool that she rolled as close to the bed as she could. She took my hand and brushed the hair off my forehead.

  “McKenzie, it’s Nina,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m your wife. We’ve been in love since the beginning of time…”

  * * *

  Always watch the eyes, Detective Jean Shipman had been taught at the academy and by supervising officers when she was a rookie. Watch the eyes when questioning a suspect or whenever anyone was holding a gun. The eyes were always the tip-off.

  Marshall Sohm’s eyes told her that he was anxious. They told her that he was angry. They also told her that he had been drinking. The combination made her wish that she had brought backup, Mason Gafford or Eddie Hilger, even Sarah Frisco. Only this was her case and she was going to solve it if it killed her—although she sincerely hoped that it wouldn’t. That’s why she adjusted the Glock she wore behind her right hip beneath her blazer when she settled on the sofa in Marshall’s living room.

  Marshall sat in a chair on the other side of a coffee table from her. Shipman was glad for the table. It would give her a couple of extra seconds if everything went sideways, she decided.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee?”

  “Thank you,” Shipman said.

  Marshall left the room and went into his kitchen. That gave Shipman a chance to get up and examine the large collection of photographs that had been arranged on the living-room wall. They were all family photos—Marshall and a woman that Shipman guessed was his wife, an older couple that could have been his parents, group photos of a dozen or more relatives gathered together, more couples with and without children, two men and a woman with arms wrapped around each other. Most of the pics, though, were of Elliot taken at various stages of her life, from infancy to college. In some she was alone, in others she was posed with her parents, in still others she was accompanied by Emma King. The shots Shipman found most riveting, though, were of a very young woman with long blond hair holding an infant that seemed to have been taken decades earlier plus a more recent photo of the same woman with her arms hugging Emma’s shoulders from behind. In that one her hair had been cut short. Shipman recognized her instantly. It was the same woman she had seen in the video taken at my building.

  She heard Marshall approaching and quickly returned to her perch on the edge of the sofa. He entered the room carrying two mugs. He crossed over to where Shipman was sitting and offered her one of them.

  “I didn’t ask if you wanted cream or sugar,” he said.

  “Black is fine,” she said.

  He grunted as if he disagreed and returned to his chair. He made himself comfortable and took a long sip from his own mug. Shipman didn’t think it contained coffee.


  “You accused my daughter of murder,” he said, getting right to it, no chitchat, no Minnesota Nice.

  “No,” Shipman said. “I did not. But Elliot does know who delivered the message to McKenzie’s building the night he was shot. So do you.”

  Marshall stood up straight; his eyes narrowed. Shipman’s right hand went to the butt of her Glock. With her left hand, she pointed at a photograph on the wall. Marshall’s head turned. He couldn’t have known which pic Shipman was pointing at, yet he said, “Sonuvabitch,” just the same.

  “I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” Shipman said. “I just want to get the answers to some questions in case McKenzie doesn’t wake up and answer them himself.”

  “McKenzie.”

  “You spoke to him.”

  Marshall slouched against the back of his chair.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “When you called that night, the night he was shot, did you tell him to come here?”

  Marshall nodded.

  “He sat right where you’re sitting now,” he said.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that I wanted him to go away.”

  “He refused, didn’t he?”

  “He was polite about it, but yeah, he refused.”

  “Did you threaten him?” Shipman asked.

  “What? No. God no. I don’t—I don’t … We’re not that kind of people. What happened to him later; that had nothing to do with us, what we were talking about.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because…”

  Marshall took another pull from his coffee mug.

  “Because,” he repeated.

  “Because what?”

  “Because I told him the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth, what they say in court. Once I told him what happened there was no reason—ah, fuck.”

  “What truth?”

  Marshall shook his head.

  “So long ago,” he said. “It should have been forgotten. It would have been forgotten if not for McKenzie.”

  “Mr. Sohm…”

  “Look. It’s about family and none of your damn business.”

  Shipman’s eyes went back to the wall. So many photographs of Marshall’s wife and parents and daughter and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and of his cousins, but not one photo of anyone who could have been identified as Gerald King. Her instincts—okay, they were good instincts, I admit it, although, you know what? I had figured it out, too, sitting on the same damn sofa as she was. That’s why Marshall revealed his truth to me.

  Shipman’s instincts told her to say, “Gerald King.”

  Marshall flinched as if he had heard a loud noise.

  “Is that what you and McKenzie discussed?” Shipman asked. “Gerald King?”

  Marshall squirmed in his seat.

  “What do you know about it?” he asked.

  “Only what the Minneapolis Police Department told me. That he disappeared twenty-one years ago. He disappeared before Emma was born, didn’t he? He disappeared, if I’m not mistaken, before Elliot was born.”

  “My wife had just told me that we were expecting. I remember being so happy…”

  “What happened to Gerald King?”

  “If you spoke to the Minneapolis cops, you know what happened to him. He got tired of being Gerald King and ran away from home. They found his car at a marina on Lake Superior. I think he took a boat to Canada and was eaten by wolves.”

  “That’s one theory,” Shipman said.

  “You want another? Gerald fucking King was a sick pervert who assaulted his female employees, who raped them, and one of the woman he raped was McKenzie’s mother and McKenzie’s father found out about it and he hid in the backseat of Gerald’s car and when Gerald was about to drive home after work, McKenzie’s father strangled him and drove the car to Gitche Gumme and threw the body into the lake never to be seen again. How’s that for a theory?”

  “I like it. Do you have another?”

  Marshall stared at her for a few beats while he wondered what he could say that would make Shipman go away without causing any more trouble. He decided to tell her what he told me in just the way he told me.

  “I’m just speculating here,” he said. “Just telling a story.”

  “That’s right,” Shipman said.

  “I’m not confessing to any crimes; I’m just making shit up.”

  “I understand.”

  “I think Gerald King raped his own daughter.”

  Marshall took a long pull from his coffee mug before continuing.

  “I think he raped Jenna,” he said. “After Charles and Porter went away to college and he was all alone with her. I think he raped her and she became pregnant and Gerald found out and he decided he was going to beat the baby out of her and during the fight he slipped and hit his head on the edge of a kitchen counter. Or maybe Jenna hit him with a baseball bat; Charles was always leaving his shit lying around. Or maybe she pushed him and he fell down a flight of stairs. Whatever, it was self-defense.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Shipman said. “Why didn’t she call the police?”

  “I think—this is just me talking here—I think that the family didn’t trust the system. That the police, the courts could have just as easily decided that Jenna was a little whore who killed her father when he tried to—when he tried to discipline her and charge her with murder. Being a cop you know, you know personally, that never ever happened, especially twenty years ago, putting it on the woman, the girl, right? Instead of taking that chance, though, the family—I think maybe a cousin just happened to come by while all this was going on. The cousin had studied agriculture at the University of Minnesota and decided afterward to stay in Minneapolis to work and get married instead of going back to the family farm in Wisconsin. He came over to visit, came over to check on Jenna because his mother was always worrying about her because Jenna’s own mother had died four years earlier and she knew that Jenna’s father was a complete asshole. I think the cousin called his mother after he discovered what had happened and his mother and his father drove all the way from Shell Lake, a two-hour drive. Maybe they parked Gerald’s car in the attached garage and with the door closed so no one could see, they put Gerald’s body in the backseat and his father took it back to Shell Lake and buried it on the farm and afterward they drove Gerald’s car to a marina they knew on Lake Superior not all that far from where they lived and after that everyone pretended that nothing happened. Except that it did happen and even though Jenna and her cousin are the only ones alive who know what happened, not her brothers and certainly not her daughter, and they don’t ever talk about it to anyone much less to each other, it’s haunted Jenna every day of her life which is why she sometimes suffers from depression, why sometimes she does drugs. ’Course, what do I know?”

  Marshall finished his drink while Shipman watched.

  “You told all of this to McKenzie?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he liked the first theory best—that Gerald King ran away from home, adding that he did it because he knew sooner or later people were going to find out about what he was doing to his female employees. He said if anyone asked, that’s the story he’d go with.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He also apologized. He said he was sorry for imposing on me and my family and he was sorry for dredging up an uncomfortable chapter in our lives but it didn’t change anything as far as he was concerned. He was still going to help Charles.”

  “Then what?”

  “He shook my hand and left.”

  “Did he tell you that Jenna had delivered a message before you called him?”

  “No.”

  “Or what it said?”

  “No.”

  “Or that he was going to RT’s Basement?”

  “I didn’t know anything about that until I read it in the paper.”

  Shipman had
a few choice words for me at that point, only she didn’t speak them out loud.

  “Do you know where I can find Jenna King?” she asked instead.

  “Why? So you can accuse her of murdering her father?”

  “So I can find out what happened to McKenzie. Mr. Sohm, the killing that may or may not have occurred in Minneapolis twenty-one years ago—that’s not my case; that’s not my jurisdiction.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Marshall.

  “She has a small house in St. Paul,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  Jenna King was sitting in a stuffed chair in her living room and staring at nothing while she contemplated the universe and her place in it. It was not a happy place, she told me later.

  She heard her front doorbell and decided to ignore it. The chimes were replaced by a hard knocking. She decided to ignore that, too. Only the knocking became incessant. She leapt angrily from the chair and crossed the room to the hallway. She disregarded the spy hole and instead just yanked the heavy door open. Jenna didn’t even look to see who was standing behind it before she shouted, “What do you want?”

  Jamal Brown was standing on her long porch. He smiled at her.

  “Baby, you okay?” he asked. “You sound stressed.”

  Jenna attempted to shut the door but Jamal used his foot and a shoulder to keep it open.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked.

  “I told you that I didn’t want to see you again.”

  “I know you were upset about the other night, saying things you didn’t mean.”

  “I meant what I said.”

  Jenna tried to push the door closed again to no avail.

  “Baby, let me in,” Jamal said. “You know I have what you need.”

  Jenna kept pushing the door. Jamal pushed back. After a few seconds, Jenna gave up. Jamal entered the small house and quickly closed the door behind him. He tried to embrace the woman; called her “baby” again. Jenna shrugged his arms away and stepped deeper into her living room. Jamal followed her. He had always liked her house; ninety years old in the heart of Summit Hill as close to the James J. Hill House as it was to the Minnesota governor’s residence—hardwood floors, built-in cabinets, ceramic tiles, glass knobs, coved ceilings, fireplace, porch. He had even entertained the idea of living there; brought it up to Jenna during one of their late-night sessions. She wouldn’t even consider the possibility.