Shadow Girl

by Gerry Schmitt

  “Yes sir,” Dillon said.

  “And don’t be squawking to the media,” Thacker said. “Be sure that any questions those jackals ask, and there will be plenty, are routed through our media specialist.”

  Farmer made a face. Nobody liked Gene Hensen, their media specialist. He had an MBA in mass communications and never let you forget it. He was roundly regarded in the squad room as a horse’s ass.

  “Now,” Thacker said, focusing on Afton and Max, “what’d you guys find out from your talk with Sunny and your trip to DSN headquarters?”

  “Not much,” Max said. “Everyone seems to be as much in the dark as we are.”

  “Is it possible we’re looking at a case of domestic terrorism?” Dillon asked. “That shooting down the helo was completely unrelated to Leland Odin?”

  “Doubtful,” Thacker said. “It feels too planned, too premeditated.” He glanced at Afton. “I understand that you’ve already checked with St. Stephen’s Medical Center in Madison? Where they harvested the heart?”

  “I just spoke to their administrator,” Afton said. “A Mr. Hal Boniwell. He claims that only a limited number of medical personnel knew about the heart.” She consulted her notes. “Um . . . Dr. Smathers, the attending physician, Dr. Winchester, the surgeon who harvested the heart, two surgical nurses, and an on-staff psychologist who walked the family through the donor process.”

  Thacker shook his head. “Not good enough. Somebody knew that heart was on its way here.”

  “But how did they know it was earmarked for Odin?” Dillon wondered out loud.

  “Somebody at the university hospital tipped the shooter?” Max said.

  “Could have,” Thacker said. “We need to get a list of medical personnel who were on last night.”

  “I already tried that,” Farmer said. “It’s like pulling teeth.”

  “Try harder.”

  “What about the heart-database people?” Afton asked. “The transplant network?”

  Thacker pointed at her, snapping his fingers. “Get on that, will you?”

  “I’m not supposed to be involved in actual investigations, remember?” Afton said. “You told me I should function only as family liaison officer. And help keep Max’s notes straight.”

  “I said that? Well, let’s set that issue aside for now,” Thacker said. “The problem is, we’re up to our ass in alligators and you happen to be the only person here who has a data-entry background. That means you’re the one who’s most knowledgeable about researching this transplant-network business.” He glanced over at Max. “Max still types with two fingers like he’s trying to poke out somebody’s eyes. Dillon over there . . . well, don’t even ask.”

  “I’m on it,” Afton said.

  Afton went back to her cubicle and plopped down in her chair. Researching the transplant network wasn’t exactly a plum job, but it’s what she’d been assigned. That and keeping Max’s notes straight. Max had a laptop that he never used, preferring instead to scratch notes on legal pads, Post-it notes, and paper drink coasters. She’d found it was easier to gather up his paperwork and retype everything into a more meaningful, cohesive format. Incident report, victim, injuries, witnesses, interviews, probable cause.

  Hmm. Probable cause.

  Afton wondered why someone would purposely shoot down a helicopter that was transporting a human heart? To destroy that heart? It seemed like a roundabout way of getting to Odin. Then again, if you wanted to drive home a point, there was nothing better than a helo going boom in the night sky. And now four different law enforcement agencies were coming after the perpetrators with as much force as they could muster.

  Even though Afton thought the basic underlying motive felt shaky, she knew that motive always lay there like a slumbering beast in the dark basement of the human mind. Anger, greed, money, revenge, political ideology—they were all good contenders for being the prime motivator.

  Forcing herself to set thoughts of motive aside, Afton got busy with her research. She clicked through the website for the official transplant organization called OPTN, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. She printed out as much information as she could on that group, then switched over to organizing Max’s notes. Once that was done, she went to the website for Consolidated Sports, found their investor relations section, and printed out that information.

  Then Afton stood up, stretched, thought about what she’d fix for dinner tonight—maybe hot dogs and beans?—and headed back to Homicide. She sidled up to Max, who was just hanging up his phone, and said, “I’ve got your notes . . .”

  Suddenly, Dick Dillon, who’d stepped out to do god knew what, came racing into the room. Red-faced and bursting with excitement, he yelled out, “The University of Minnesota Police just called. They’re pretty sure they’ve located the shooter’s nest!”

  Thacker appeared in the doorway like a manic critter who’d just jumped out of a Whac-a-Mole game. “Where is it? Where’s the nest?”

  “Top floor of some place called the Huang Sheng Noodle Factory,” Dillon said. “Over on the West Bank, just off Cedar Avenue.”

  “Max, you’re lead detective,” Thacker said. “You take this.”

  “I know that location,” Afton said. “It’s right next to the Chelsea Bar.” She remembered Huang Sheng as a greasy spoon Chinese restaurant—really a greasy chopstick—that dished up passable Moo Goo Gai Pan and was frequented by U of M students. The fact that it was called a noodle factory was meaningless.

  Max jumped up from his chair, almost upending it. “If you know the area, then you’re coming along.”

  “Don’t think you two are going to cowboy in all by your lonesome,” Thacker warned. “I’m gonna get the Tactical Rescue Squad cranking on this, too. We’ll have them gear up and go in first for the initial takedown. Then we’ll need the Crime Scene guys. Then you guys can go in.” He paused. “You say it’s a noodle company? Better call INS, too. Have them meet you there. And keep me informed every damn step of the way!”

  • • •

  BY the time Afton and Max arrived, it was a full-scale bugout. Tactical’s shiny black SUVs crisscrossed the narrow back alley behind the noodle factory, and the crime squad van was there, too. Two uniformed officers and two guys in plain clothes, possibly agents from INS, were conferring with a group of people, probably the kitchen workers. A few women and some kids milled around as well.

  “I hope we didn’t miss all the fun,” Max said as they jumped out of his car. The alley was long and narrow, riddled with potholes. Rusted green Dumpsters with the words JIMBO’S SANITATION stenciled on them stood everywhere. The place smelled of rotting garbage, sour bean sprouts, and old cooking oil. Parked in close to the back door of the restaurant was a bright red BMW 550i with a gold tassel hanging from the rearview mirror.

  At the exact moment Afton and Max climbed from the car, a young man suddenly exploded from the group and ran, arms pumping like pistons, full speed down the back alley.

  “Whoa!” Max yelled out. “We’ve got a runner.”

  The younger of the two uniformed officers turned and took off after the guy and charged down the alley. He disappeared around the side of a redbrick building that had an old-timey label of Busker Czech-Style Pilsner painted on the side.

  “What’s going on?” Max asked the officer who was left behind. He had a handlebar moustache that probably skirted the bounds of regulations, and his name tag said L. JUSTER.

  “Is this the shooter’s nest?” Afton asked.

  “That’s the word I’m hearing,” Juster said.

  “Can we take a look upstairs?” Afton asked Max. No need to be blasé. She was dying to go up and see for herself. This type of investigation was brand-new to her, and she found it exhilarating as hell.

  “Let’s see if they’re ready for us,” Max said.

  “Hey, Randy,” Juster called out from behind them. “Looks like you just got your ass handed to you.”

  Randy, the young officer who’d t
aken off after the runner, was limping back all by himself. His shoulders were hunched forward and his tongue was hanging out. He looked like he’d just run the thousand-yard dash against Usain Bolt. And lost.

  • • •

  SERGEANT Gene Scheffler from the University of Minnesota Police Department met them at the second-floor landing. After handshakes and hasty introductions Max said, “What’d you find?”

  “Your tech guys are the ones who narrowed down the trajectory and pinpointed this place,” Scheffler said. “We had it figured down to about five blocks either way. But you know, we’re not exactly Imperial Stormtroopers who can go crashing in anywhere we want. We let your tactical guys have that honor.”

  “They’re up there now?” Max asked.

  Scheffler nodded. “Yup. Tactical and Crime Scene. Anyway, UMPD got here first because we were closer; our Transportation and Safety Building is just across the river. We sat on this place until your guys arrived.”

  “You think this is right?” Max asked. He was jittery and bursting with excitement. “That this is where the assassin shot from?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Scheffler said. “No doubt about it. When tactical went in first and cleared the place, they figured it out right away.”

  “The people milling around out back,” Afton said. “They all live here?”

  “I guess,” Scheffler said. “Tactical herded a few women and a bunch of kids down from the second and third floors. I think most of the men work at the restaurant downstairs. Or maybe they showed up from someplace else. Who knows?”

  “And the shooter’s nest?” Max asked.

  “Third floor, room at the end of the hall,” Scheffler said.

  “Now can we take a look?” Afton asked. She was as antsy as Max.

  “Crime Scene’s been in there for a while, so it’s probably okay,” Scheffler said. “But lemme go ask.”

  Scheffler was back a minute later. “It’s cool,” he said. “Go on up.”

  Afton and Max walked up another flight of steps, then down a hallway lit with bright lights on stanchions that the Crime Scene guys had brought in. Along the way, Afton peered into what looked like bunkrooms. They were all tiny, cramped, and dirty.

  Joe Jelenick, one of the crime scene analysts, met them at the door. He was a skinny, redheaded guy, a marathon runner who was constantly training and always anxious to discuss split times and running strategies. LSD, he’d once advised Afton when she’d expressed interest in running. Long, slow distances; that’s where it was at. He’d run Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth and the Twin Cities Marathon, and he talked constantly about running the Boston Marathon. Got misty-eyed, in fact, when he spoke about Heartbreak Hill.

  “This is it?” Max asked Jelenick. They were old friends and had worked together on any number of cases.

  Jelenick walked to the window and flapped a scarecrow hand. “We think the rocket was fired from right here. We can’t prove it, of course, but some pretty smart math geeks worked on this, and that’s what the trajectory seemed to indicate. And take a look out this window. You see how there’s a perfect view across the river to the helipad?”

  Afton and Max took turns peering out the window.

  “It is perfect,” Max said.

  “This is it. This is the place,” Afton said. The window afforded a bird’s-eye view directly across the slow-moving river, right up a leafy green riverbank to the University of Minnesota Medical Center and their private helicopter landing pad. She turned to Jelenick. “Did you find anything? Any evidence that can be linked to the shooters? Cartridges? Gunpowder residue?”

  “Candy wrappers?” Max asked. He’d once linked a fingerprint on a Snickers bar to a late-night stick-up guy.

  “The window slides up and down, slick as shit,” Jelenick said. “So it’s been greased. There are fingerprints on the frame, so we’ll take those and run them through the FBI’s IAFIS. As far as any other stuff, it was pretty clean in here.” He chuckled softly. “Well, clean if you don’t count the dust balls, mouse droppings, and various bits of crud we scraped up. We didn’t find anything that said X marks the spot, but there’s usually something left behind. Gotta be powder residue with an explosion like that, so we’ll be collecting some of that. And we did find a cigarette butt out in the hallway.”

  “Cigarette butt,” Max said. “Might not amount to much. Could belong to anybody.” He was clearly disappointed by the lack of actionable evidence.

  “Then again, it could be useful,” Afton said. “You never know.”

  “Either way,” Jelenick said, “we’ll take it all back and have it tested.” Jelenick was a testing freak. He loved his electron microscope, his DNA sequencer, and his mass spectrometer, and he had affectionately named his bloodstain and spatter viewer Bloody Mary.

  Afton stood at the window and thought about the shooter, who’d aimed his rocket launcher out this same window just last night. More than a dozen years ago, long before Poppy and Tess had arrived, she’d been knocking around the Gunflint Trail, teaching outdoor survival and guiding canoe trips. She’d worked with a guy there, an outfitter named Roy Donaldson, who’d been trained at the U.S. Army Sniper School at Fort Benning in Georgia. Roy had taken her out to a range once and taught her a few shooting basics. Schooled her in battlefield intelligence, stalking, and long-range precision firing. Ever since then she’d figured that if somebody wanted to shoot you, and they possessed the basic skills, there was nothing you could do about it. Like it or not, Kevlar vest or not, you were gonna get nailed.

  “We have to go downstairs and put the screws to those kitchen workers,” Max said. “See how much they know.”

  “If they know anything,” Jelenick said. He subscribed to the theory that witnesses were completely unreliable, and that blood spatter, gunpowder residue, and trace evidence were what broke cases and won convictions.

  11

  THE owner of the Huang Sheng Noodle Factory, a smiley, round-faced guy named Zhang, didn’t much want to talk. He crossed his arms across his bright green sport shirt, rocked back on his heels, and, for all practical purposes, zipped his lips.

  “No problem,” Max told him. “You don’t want to cooperate with us, we can arrest you right now as an accomplice to murder. Then you can cool your heels in jail for a couple of days while we sort this out.”

  “Under arrest?” Zhang’s reserve suddenly crumpled and his face pinched into a worried expression. “No, that can’t be.”

  “Sure it can,” Max said in a friendly voice. “Face it, pal, you’re going down.”

  Zhang shook his head and tried to smile back. “No.”

  Max did a Groucho Marx with his eyebrows. “Exactly which part of this don’t you understand?”

  Zhang touched a hand to his chest. “I’m a businessman. I run a restaurant.”

  “While you were whipping up a pot of Kung Pao Chicken, you were also aiding and abetting a couple of murderers.”

  “No murder,” Zhang said.

  “Don’t forget the flophouse,” Afton said.

  “Thank you,” Max said. He turned back to Zhang. “And you’re running an illegal flophouse upstairs.”

  “Hotel,” Zhang said. “It’s no secret. We advertise in the Southeast Asian Times.”

  “Okay,” Max said. “So it’s not a secret. But it’s still illegal.”

  “Wait, please, wait one minute,” Zhang said.

  “Yes?” Max said.

  “We can help each other, right?”

  “I think he wants to deal,” Afton said.

  “That’s right, a deal,” Zhang said, bobbing his head.

  “First you have to tell us everything,” Max said. “Then we’ll see what kind of, um, accommodation we’re willing to make. So . . . last night. Your so-called hotel had a couple of guests.”

  “Two people,” Zhang said. “One young, one old.” He lifted his shoulders in a gesture almost akin to an apology. “All I know is they wanted to stay one night. Top floor, end room. That’s it.”<
br />
  “But these people didn’t stay the night, did they?” Max said.

  Zhang shrugged again. “I don’t know when they left. I don’t keep track.”

  “Maybe right after that big helicopter fell out of the sky and went boom?” Afton said.

  Zhang furrowed his brow, pretending to think. “My memory is not so good, and we were very busy last night.”

  “Were these people armed?” Max asked. “Do you know if they carried weapons?”

  “Like a rocket launcher?” Afton pantomimed a rocket launcher.

  Zhang understood the reference right away. He nodded and smiled. “Bang,” he said. “Bang bang.”

  “Yeah, right,” Afton said.

  “So a young guy and an old guy,” Max said.

  Zhang frowned. “No, a young man and an old woman.”

  “An old woman?” Max said, suddenly caught off guard. He turned to face Afton. “A woman? How the hell would that figure in?”

  “The shooter’s mother?” Afton said. “He’s a dutiful son who takes mom along on jobs? Who knows?”

  “Were they Caucasian or Asian?” Max asked.

  “I think Asian,” Zhang said. “But I didn’t get a good look at the woman.”

  “And you don’t know who these people were?” Max asked. “Mr. Zhang, you’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that. We need to get some kind of identification on these two shooters and we need it right away. They killed two men and caused a huge accident that severely injured several people.”

  “How did these two people get here?” Afton asked. “Did they come in a car or did they just show up on foot?”

  “I don’t know,” Zhang said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Do you have a security camera?” Afton asked.

  Zhang looked at her as if she were nuts. “What for? Because one of my kitchen workers might steal a ten-pound block of tofu?” He wandered away, looking unhappy and put out.

  “Excuse me.” Someone tapped Afton on the shoulder. She turned to find a young Chinese man in a golf shirt and stone-washed jeans gazing at her.