A mile and a half later, I was on I-94 and heading west toward Minneapolis. Anderson had kept a respectful distance, so I couldn’t see his face when I took the Cretin-Vandalia exit and drove south. I was sure that he was alarmed, though.
He stayed with me until I turned right on Berkeley Avenue. Anderson continued driving straight. That didn’t surprise me. Making that final turn would have revealed his presence. Besides, he must have known where I was going.
I took a left on Mount Curve Boulevard and parked in front of Hannah Braaten’s house in nearly the exact spot Anderson had parked in the day before. A few minutes later I was standing outside Hannah’s front door. I rang the bell and waited. The temperature had dropped to about twenty-two degrees, and my bare hands were in my pockets. I hopped around a little bit so Anderson wouldn’t notice I was studying the street. I saw the nose of his Tahoe peeking around the corner where Stanford Avenue met Mount Curve.
The door was pulled open and Esti Braaten appeared.
“Mr. McKenzie?” She sounded surprised to see me.
“Ms. Braaten,” I said. “May I speak with your daughter?”
She hesitated.
“It’s important,” I added.
Esti opened the door and I slipped inside. She led me down a short, narrow foyer and into a living room that looked as if people actually lived there.
“Excuse the mess,” Esti said. “We weren’t expecting company.”
She picked up a sweater that was not unlike the one she was wearing and a copy of Enchanted Living Magazine with a cover photograph of a beautiful woman—not Hannah—dressed in silver armor and grasping a sword. Esti glanced around for a place to set them and ended up dropping both pretty much where they had been in the first place.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” I said. I glanced around. There wasn’t a Christmas decoration in sight.
“What do you want?”
Hannah must have heard our voices.
“Mom, who is it?” she called from another room.
A moment later, she appeared beneath the arch that separated the living room from the dining room. She was wearing a gray form-fitting T-shirt that proclaimed her allegiance to the Minnesota Lynx women’s basketball team and gray sweatpants. There was moisture around her collar and under her armpits that suggested she had indeed been sweating.
“McKenzie,” she said. “How did you know where I live?”
“I’m psychic.”
“Now that’s a joke I’ve never heard before.”
“I apologize for the intrusion, but a couple of interesting things have happened since we met yesterday,” I said.
“Such as?”
“A psychic medium contacted me, one of your competitors, I assume—”
“We don’t compete,” Hannah said. “Most of us get along quite well.”
“In any case, Ryan Hayes went looking for a second opinion. His father came through during the reading with the same offer as before—my head in exchange for a boatload of cash.”
Hannah seemed jolted by my story.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last night.”
“I don’t know what to say. The psychic, did she actually tell Ryan that his father … that his father wanted you dead?”
“You make it sound like the Colonel’s eleven herbs and spices. Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“It’s just—she shouldn’t have given a reading like that.”
How do you know it’s a she? my inner voice wanted to know.
“I agree,” I said aloud.
“Sometimes we speak without thinking,” Hannah said in support of the colleague. “We’re translating, after all, not … Well.”
“The psychic did apologize to me.”
“I’m sorry, too, McKenzie, but all this has nothing to do with me. Quite frankly, I resent you showing up like this, uninvited. I’ve worked hard to keep my private life private going back to my modeling days. I will not tolerate personal intrusions.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. One more thing before I leave, though—the other interesting thing that happened, that’s still happening. Suddenly, I’m being followed.”
Hannah’s smile went away. “By whom?” she asked.
“A private investigator named Karl J. Anderson. You wouldn’t happen to know a private investigator named Karl J. Anderson, would you?”
Hannah gave me nothing in return for the name. Esti wasn’t as good a liar. She flinched just enough to verify that she knew the man. ’Course, I had already seen them talking, so …
“No, I don’t know him,” Hannah said.
“Why would we?” Esti asked.
“He thinks I hired him to research my sitters,” Hannah said. “Isn’t that right, McKenzie? You suggested before that I—all right, all right. Like I said, you’re not the first to accuse me.”
“We don’t know any private investigators,” Esti said.
I decided not to call them liars to their faces. What would that accomplish?
“Just checking,” I said. “All things considered, you can imagine why I might be concerned.”
“Yet you don’t seem concerned,” Hannah said.
Just another day in the life …
“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Is it possible for you to call up anyone during a reading?”
“Are you asking if I can contact Leland Hayes for you?”
“Yes.”
“Probably not. There almost always needs to be some sort of personal connection between the sitter and the spirit. Even so, you can’t control who comes through, who wants to deliver a message. Sometimes a sitter will ask to speak to a specific individual, but the individual won’t come to the phone, if you’ll accept that poor analogy.”
“Okay.”
“I once attempted to reach the spirit of Harry Houdini during a Halloween event held at the University Club in St. Paul. Unfortunately, he was a no-show.”
Hannah was smiling when she said that as if she had enjoyed the experience.
“Maybe Ryan Hayes hired this man, this private investigator,” Esti said.
“There’s one way to find out,” I said. “Let’s go ask him.”
“Ask him?”
“He’s parked outside.” I bowed my head at both women. “Ladies.” Then I headed for the door.
Mother and daughter glanced at each other, passing a telepathic message the way that some close relatives do, and followed me.
I opened the front door and stepped out onto the stoop. I was wearing my leather jacket, so the cold didn’t bother me right away. It hit the Braatens hard, though, and they wrapped their arms around themselves for protection. Still, they trailed behind me down the steps to the sidewalk.
The Chevy Tahoe was parked on Stanford, its nose pointed at Mount Curve Boulevard. I walked toward it. Hannah and Esti followed behind. We took only a dozen steps or so before the SUV moved onto the boulevard, hung a left, and drove away.
“That was rude,” I said.
“Was that him?” Hannah asked.
Who lies like this besides small children and politicians? my inner voice asked.
“That was him,” I said.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
In that moment I wondered: Could Hannah be telling the truth?
I turned toward Esti. She continued to shiver against the December cold.
Would a mother keep secrets from her daughter? I flashed on Shelby Dunston and her relationship with Victoria and Katie. Of course she would.
“You guys should go back into the house,” I said. “I’ll let you know if any other interesting things happen.”
* * *
I returned to the condominium before 11:00 A.M. Detective Anderson did not follow me—as far as I knew.
I parked in my designated spot in the underground garage and pulled a hand-cran
ked flashlight from the glove compartment. It gave me a dim light, which is where the hand-cranking part came in. I pulled a lever out of the base that looked like the handle on a fishing reel and wound it about fifty times until the flashlight produced an intense beam. Afterward, I slipped out of the Mustang and began inspecting its wheel wells, bumpers, and undercarriage. It took a few minutes before I found it, a small black magnetized metal box attached to the rear axle. I didn’t bother to open the box; I knew what was inside.
My first thought was to drop the GPS transmitter into the trash, yet where was the fun in that? Instead, I wandered through the garage until I found Frank Fogelberg’s silver Lexus GS. I attached the transmitter to his rear axle, wondering at the time if Fogelberg ever went anywhere interesting and whether Anderson would approve.
* * *
I had wanted to ask Smith and Jones to keep a lookout for Anderson’s Chevy Tahoe, but they hadn’t begun their shift yet, and I didn’t have the same kind of rapport with their morning counterparts. I’d catch them later, I decided, and took the elevator to the seventh floor.
The condominium was empty, of course. Nina had left for Rickie’s long before, as was her habit.
I had a secret room hidden behind a bookcase between the fireplace and the south wall of the condo. I say secret even though I’ve shown it to just about everyone who’s ever been in the place. I do like my gadgets, and you have to admit, this one was pretty cool. It was a major reason why I let Nina talk me into moving there from St. Paul.
To access the room, you needed to nudge the corner of the bookcase just so until you heard a click and then swing it outward to reveal an eight-by-ten carpeted chamber. I tripped a sensor when I entered, and an overhead light flicked on to reveal a safe filled with $50,000 in tens and twenties, credit cards, a driver’s license and passport with my photograph but someone else’s name, and a gun cabinet with six weapons, four of them registered. It also contained my hockey sticks and equipment bag. I brought them out of the room and set them near my desk.
Friday night was hockey night. For twenty-six weeks out of the year, I played pickup with an army of friends and acquaintances at the Charles M. Schulz–Highland Arena in St. Paul. We started at 10:00 P.M., played to 11:15, and retired to a neighborhood bar to talk it over. I usually arrived home just in time to greet Nina after she closed Rickie’s, and since we were both often too jazzed to sleep, there was no end to the mischief we would engage in. Once we actually waxed our hardwood floors.
It was true that I loved Shelby Dunston and always have. Yet I wasn’t in love with her, something that both she and Bobby understood if no one else. I didn’t see her everywhere I went or hear her laugh in other people’s laughs or sense her presence when I stood near someone else. I didn’t feel euphoric or weak in the knees when she was near, I had no compulsion to share my thoughts or feelings with her, and I didn’t need her warm embrace to get me through the day, didn’t need to touch her physically and emotionally like I did with Nina. I rarely put her happiness above mine.
On the other hand, Nina had a very deep and personal relationship with her jazz club. I doubted she ever went more than a few hours without thinking about it. I knew from personal experience that she never went more than a few days at a time without feeling the urge to connect with it either in person or through calls, texts, and emails with her people, which made vacations seem less vacationlike.
It was something I had accepted a long time ago because truthfully, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. You simply could not separate one from the other, and having learned a few more bits and pieces of Nina’s background, I had a better understanding of why that was so. It was like Scarlett O’Hara and Tara, her plantation in Gone with the Wind—Rickie’s was what gave Nina strength.
So exactly who had the commitment issues in this relationship, I wanted to know.
I was thinking about that while I retaped my hockey sticks and watched the afternoon debates on ESPN. Around 3:00 P.M., I wandered down to the lobby to chat with the boys about Anderson’s Chevy Tahoe. I emerged from the elevator, turned toward the desk, and halted.
Detective Jean Shipman was leaning against the desk and chatting with both Smith and Jones. Shipman worked Homicide in the St. Paul Police Department’s Major Crimes Division. She was “young, beautiful, and smart as hell”—at least that’s how Bobby once described her to me. She had been Bobby’s partner before they made him a commander, and she remained his cohort of choice on those occasions when he stepped away from his role as a practicing bureaucrat and actually did some investigating.
There was another detective with her, one I didn’t know, and a uniform from the Minneapolis Police Department. The uniform was a formality. The cops in St. Paul and Minneapolis might labor in separate jurisdictions, yet they are more than willing to help each other out, happy to search for a suspect or a car, check out an address, gather intel and report back to the other agency. Only that didn’t mean a detective was welcome to cross the river and flash her badge anytime she damn well pleased. She first had to notify the Minneapolis Police Department and, if the case was hot, arrange for one of its officers to accompany her.
Shipman saw me standing there. The expression on her face suggested that she was as shocked to see me as I was to see her.
“McKenzie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
She glanced at Smith as if she were seeking confirmation.
“He lives in the condominium next to Frank Fogelberg,” he said.
“Please tell me you’re not involved in any of this,” Shipman said.
“Involved in any of what?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Mr. Fogelberg,” Jones said. “He was shot to death in St. Paul a couple of hours ago.”
NINE
“I almost didn’t tell her. I came thisclose to shrugging my shoulders, saying, ‘I’m sorry to hear that,” and walking away. I couldn’t do it, though. My genetic makeup, my upbringing, my training as a cop, my inner voice, whatever you want to call it, simply wouldn’t allow me to do that. So, even though it opened me up to much-deserved ridicule, derision, contempt, and accusations of criminal behavior, I said, “Jeannie, we need to talk.”
Shipman hated it when I called her by her first name, hated me, truth be told. Yet something in my demeanor must have softened her heart, because she stroked my shoulder and in a soft voice said, “I need my partner to sit in on the conversation.”
* * *
I ushered the detectives to my condominium where we sat on stools around the island in the kitchen area. I had offered them drinks. Shipman’s partner was named Mason Gafford, and he had worked in the Family and Sexual Violence Unit of Major Crimes before being recruited into Homicide by Commander Dunston a couple of months ago. He seemed inclined to accept my offer, yet refused when Shipman refused. As for myself, I felt the desperate need for a slug of bourbon or two or ten, but decided it would be better to remain sober.
You should probably call G. K., too, my inner voice said. Only I ignored its advice. Genevieve K. Bonalay was my attorney and my friend, but I didn’t think I needed either at the moment. After all, I didn’t do anything wrong. Did I?
Shipman asked about Frank Fogelberg, and I told her and Gafford everything that I knew, including his attempts to have me evicted or at least fined, which was not in my best interests, believe me. I knew they would have found out anyway, though, because despite my personal misgivings, Shipman was very good at her job.
Afterward, I told them about the GPS tracker I found on my car and attached to Fogelberg’s Lexus earlier that morning.
Gafford stepped away from the island and made a call. Shipman looked at me as if she felt sorry for me.
“What were you thinking?” she asked.
“I was thinking how clever I was.”
A few minutes later, the detective returned.
“It was still there,” he said. “The crime scene guys tha
nked me. They said they hadn’t even thought to look.”
“The box will have my prints on it,” I said. “I didn’t open it, though. Maybe there’ll be something inside that you can use.”
“Maybe,” Shipman said.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” I asked.
“Fogelberg pulled up to a traffic light. A car pulled next to him. When the light changed to green, the driver fired at least nine rounds into him and drove off.”
“Traffic cams?”
“We know how to run an investigation, McKenzie.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”
“Other members of the unit are probably looking at footage even as we speak. I was the lucky one sent to contact the next of kin.”
“Only there isn’t any. At least none that I know of.”
Poor dumb sad sonuvabitch, my inner voice said. Maybe that’s why Frank was always so surly. He was alone in the world.
I flashed on Nina and Shelby and Bobby and their children and the dozen other people that I called friend and who called me friend in return. It didn’t make me feel any better, though.
You shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have attached the transmitter to Frank’s car.
“God, I am so sorry,” I said aloud.
“Tell us what you know,” Shipman said.
I did. I expected snickering when I got to the part where I mentioned the psychic mediums and outright laughter when I told them about Leland Hayes threatening me from the grave. Yet whatever they were thinking, both Shipman and her partner remained professional, taking down most of the information in their notebooks with the occasional question and no comments. ’Course, that might have been because Commander Dunston’s wife was involved.
“The PI, Karl J. Anderson,” Gafford said. “You never actually spoke to him, did you?”
“No, and I only saw him from a distance. I identified him by his Chevy Tahoe.”
“Who ran his plates for you?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“We have ways of making you talk.” Gafford was trying to keep it light, speaking with what he thought was a Russian accent. I wasn’t feeling it, though.
From the Grave--A McKenzie Novel Page 8