‘To every damn patrol car in the city,’ Bob muttered half to himself before taking over at the keyboard and punching in the mail address to the duty officer at MPD central.
Clicked Send, said thanks, then headed over toward the shopping mall to wait for Myers.
I got off the bus at the Nicollet Mall. There were always people in this shopping street, even on the coldest winter day. I passed restaurants and bars with music coming from the open doors. I walked by two Latino men standing by a kiosk and sharing a cigarette.
‘Hola,’ I said.
‘Hola,’ they answered in unison.
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 theatres 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 which 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 signalled his thanks to the security guard at the parking garage and headed quickly for the door and over to the parking lot and his car.
‘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 parking 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.’
‘OK,’ 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, OK? 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 favour.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said Joe Kjos and hung up.
Bob was sitting in Caribou Coffee on 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 Gomez his insulin,’ 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.
‘OK, 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 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 then 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 that he was.