As Kay walked back to her desk, she wondered which had been more important for Walker to convey, the promise or the warning. On her way she glanced into the office that was being decorated. The painting wasn’t finished yet, paint pots still standing there, but the painter obviously had the day off. On a chair she saw something that looked like a furry brown rodent but was probably a mitten. She almost asked at reception if they knew when the painter would be back, but she didn’t. Approaching her desk she saw Olav Hanson pulling on his jacket as he hurried out from behind the divider separating their desks.
‘Where’s the fire?’ she asked Joe Kjos, who she could see was playing poker on his computer screen.
‘The video centre,’ he said. ‘Gomez has been seen at the US Bank Stadium.’
Kay grabbed her jacket and ran toward the elevators.
‘Hey!’ she called as the doors were about to shut. ‘Wait for me!’
A hairy arm shot out between the shiny surfaces and the elevator doors slid back open.
She stepped in, nodded her thanks to the man with the hairy arms and fixed her eyes on Olav Hanson, who was standing at the back of the elevator. She moved next to him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Gomez?’ she asked quietly.
‘I tried, but you weren’t at your desk,’ he said, his voice equally low.
She nodded slowly and tried to read his flushed face. ‘Well, I’m here now, Hanson.’
‘Good,’ he said.
By the time Kay and Olav Hanson jumped out of the car by the Viking ship outside the US Bank Stadium three police cars had already arrived.
‘Well?’ said Hanson to the police officer who stood waiting for them.
‘He isn’t here.’
‘Which cameras picked him up?’
‘All the external ones round the whole stadium. It looks like he did the circuit twice before he lit out.’
‘Twice?’ said Kay. ‘He’s planning something.’
Kay looked at the two TV buses parked outside one of the entrances. She spoke the thought aloud almost before she’d finished thinking it:
‘Patterson.’
‘What?’ Hanson stared at her.
‘Patterson is due to open the NRA conference here tomorrow. Gomez is going for the mayor.’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘I think Gomez is crazy,’ she said and pulled out her phone. ‘Think about it. There’s a pattern here. He starts small and gets bigger. Like ripples in a lake.’
‘Who’re you calling?’
Before Kay could answer she got a reply.
‘Minneapolis City Hall.’
‘This is Detective Kay Myers, MPD. Can I speak to the person in charge of security at the mayor’s office?’
As she waited, she saw Hanson had just taken an incoming call.
‘New sighting of Gomez,’ he said to her. ‘Not far away.’
I heard the sirens getting closer. The street I was standing on consisted of low, two-storey buildings on both sides. On the sidewalk across from me was a man wearing a fur cap with a cart and a sign that said he was selling kielbasa starowiejska — Polish sausages. When I was here earlier checking out the area I had bought one of those U-shaped sausages from him. It came served with kapusniak, a kind of sauerkraut, and it was delicious. Behind the cart was the entrance to a movie theatre with a large, vertical sign in red neon, RIALTO. The sirens were closer now. One or two of the cars had turned them off. Maybe they thought they could surprise me. I breathed in the smell of sausages, boiled cabbage, exhaust fumes and testosterone. Then I crossed the street.
Officer Fortune drove and listened to the female voice in his earpiece as it gave him a running appraisal of where the facial recognition program had last located Gomez. He knew she could also switch to an individual security camera to see where Gomez was headed as long as he was in frame.
‘Thanks, we’re there now,’ said Fortune as he came to a screeching halt at the kerb beside a steaming sausage cart and the startled street seller. Fortune turned to the two detectives in the back seat and saw that both had drawn their service pistols.
‘The camera has just seen him enter this building here, but we... eh, I guess we should wait for SWAT?’
‘No,’ the detectives replied in unison as they opened the doors and jumped out.
When Betty Jackson, the ticket seller at the Rialto, saw the two people with their guns and MPD badges approaching her booth she got a feeling of déjà vu. She was the only member of staff who had worked at the theatre since way back in the seventies, when the king of Minneapolis pornography, Ferris Alexander, took over the run-down Rialto and started showing blue movies there. The place wasn’t licensed to show porn, but the police raided only when the city council specifically demanded it, because so many of their own were regulars there. Ferris Alexander’s porn empire finally collapsed, and he ended up doing time on tax evasion charges, but the Rialto managed to survive without him, and in spite of the fact that theatres specialising in pornography all over the country had to close, as home movies and the internet gradually took over the market. The Rialto didn’t make much money, but it was enough to keep the wheels turning. And there were no longer any applicable laws the authorities could make use of to close down movie theatres like they could do in the seventies. The most they could do was insist the theatres be located outside certain designated porn-free zones of the city. The Rialto showed mainly Swedish, Danish and German pornography from the sixties and seventies, mostly classics and some underground. Things you wouldn’t find on the net. But nothing extreme, no animals, underage, defecation, no hard S&M. Straightforward fucking. Generally for the same audience of white men aged sixty plus, probably family men who didn’t want to watch porn on the internet at home. Or just lonely men who didn’t recognise their dream woman among the slick pornography on the internet. Here they could still see Scandinavian girls with pubic hair and no silicone, the way they remembered girls from their own youth. A mixture of the smutty from the days before pornography became a legitimate business, and innocence from a time when a shred of modesty still existed. So this was in every way a respectable theatre showing adult movies, with a geographical location that put it in a grey area, as half the building lay within the city council’s porn-free zone and the other half outside it. The part containing the screen was, unfortunately, within. But Betty soon realised it had nothing to do with this. She saw a slight uncertainty in the eyes of the two officers as they realised exactly what kind of establishment they were about to enter.
‘Excuse me,’ said the black policewoman as Betty tried to recall the last time she’d heard someone from MPD open a sentence so politely, ‘did this person just come in here?’
The woman had lowered her pistol. She held up a cell phone in front of the ticket booth.
Betty looked at the picture on the screen. Normally she didn’t look at the patrons, they didn’t like it. Instead she concentrated on the hands that shoved the money in through the little window. Only if they looked like a child’s hands rather than an adult’s did she look up and decide whether to turn them away or ask to see some ID. But the person in the photograph had done something that was almost unheard of: he had actually spoken to her. Told her she ought to try the Polish sausages being sold right outside. As though he wanted her to look up and see him. And since Betty, in her seventy-eighth year, no longer suspected men of trying to hit on her, she had looked up. It was the same man as the one she now saw on the screen the policewoman was holding up in front of her. No doubt about it.