Wolf Hour

25 Night-Vision, October 2016

Olav Hanson took another cast with the rod. Saw nothing, could just hear from the reel that the line had run out. He was no fisherman, never would be. But he could cast a long way, and that was something. Pity he was alone here with no one else to see — or more properly hear — the line as it sizzled toward the far bank of the river. The line was still travelling when he felt his phone vibrating. It made him jump. The same way he’d been jumping every time the phone rang following his conversation with Die Man yesterday. But right now he was fishing, so to hell with Die Man, every man had a right to one place where he’s his own boss. He let the phone ring three more times before he took it out. He read the name on the display: Joe Kjos.

‘Yeah?’

‘Hi, Olav, where are you?’

‘Never mind. What is it?’

‘You asked me to tell you if anything new came up about Tomás Gomez.’

‘So?’

‘Why, can I ask?’

‘None of your business. What you got?’

‘Something came in just now, a man shot in the parking lot at the Southdale Mall. There’s a couple of patrol cars there and from what I’m hearing Kay Myers thinks it could be Tomás Gomez. Rifle shot from a distance.’

Olav Hanson began reeling in as fast as he could. ‘Any detectives on the scene yet?’

‘No. Myers is on the phone right now, but she’s going up there directly after.’

Southdale wasn’t too far away, about midway between where he was and city hall. He might make it.

‘See if you can delay her a little, Joe.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘But... why you want me to do that?’

‘I want this case.’

‘You?’

Olav knew why Joe was asking; Olav wasn’t exactly known for taking on more cases than he strictly had to.

‘Yeah, me,’ said Olav Hanson and hung up.

There were no indications in Gomez’s apartment that he had been back. The couch was still pulled halfway out onto the floor. Bob was sitting on it while checking the cheese melting in the oven. He’d found the landlord Gregory Dupont’s phone number, picked up a set of keys from him and bought a semi-cooked pizza in a box from a 7-Eleven.

What do you think you’re doing?

What was it about the Gomez case that had him sitting here now, risking the little that was left of his career? It wasn’t the victim. Was it Gomez himself, the points of similarity? Was it because he knew how Gomez was feeling? That Gomez had actually done something he had imagined doing himself, and even felt close to doing, waging an all-out war, with no thought of the consequences for himself? But if it was true that he identified with Gomez, then why was it so important for Bob to stop him, of all people? Because it would be the same as stopping himself?

The phone rang. He checked the screen and took it.

‘You saying yes to coffee after all?’

‘No,’ said Kay Myers. ‘I need to talk with you.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’ve had a sort of execution-style killing at Southdale Mall. I think there are clear similarities to the attempt on Dante’s life, I want to know if you see it the same way.’

‘I thought I was suspended.’

‘Of course we can’t put you on the case, but there’s nothing irregular about consulting with someone who has relevant information and insight into a case.’

‘And if I say no?’

‘See you at Southdale,’ said Kay Myers and hung up.

Bob stepped out into the cool evening air. He looked across the parking lot. Or parking lots, for it was divided up into several sectors that surrounded the shoebox-like buildings in the centre.

The asphalt was still wet following a shower of rain. Bob headed toward the centre of the parking lot where he saw blue lights flashing up into the sky like Morse signals. But the only sound was the even rumble from Highway 62, which could take you all the way from here into the next county. If that was where you wanted to go. If you thought things might be better there.

Olav Hanson was standing by the band of crime scene tape surrounding the Chevy Silverado. He held up his palm when he saw Bob approaching.

‘You’re suspended, Aaa-ss. Go home.’

‘Myers called me in,’ said Bob without looking at his colleague. The doors of the Chevy were open with crime scene techs swarming around it. They looked like beekeepers in their all-white suits. The body had already been moved from the scene.

‘Myers isn’t here yet, so I’m handling this case and I’m telling you we don’t need your help, Aaa-ss.’

Bob registered the strips of white tape and the bullet holes high in the windshield as he took in the scene. Parking garage on the other side of the road. From the angles it was obvious that’s where the shots came from. Somewhere high up, probably the roof.

‘Did you check to see if they have CCTV cameras over there?’

‘We’re not idiots, but we do things one at a time. Right now we’re trying to find people who might have been here.’

‘Been here? And seen what? A bullet going through a windshield? If they didn’t get in touch with the police then, what makes you think they’ll want to talk to you now?’ Bob had promised not to let himself be provoked when he saw Hanson there, but the repetition of that Aaa-ss had started up the rushing sound again. ‘You need to do things in the right order, Hanson, don’t you get that? You need to check the—’

‘Officer!’ Hanson waved his hand at one of the uniformed officers. ‘Remove this person from my crime scene, would you please?’

Bob turned and walked away. Crossed the road between cars blaring horns.

At the entrance to the large parking facility he saw the first of the CCTV cameras.

The security room was on the ground floor, a strange oblong shape, with a low ceiling, like something left over after the architects had drawn in the other things they needed. Bob showed the ID card to the two men sitting there. One introduced himself as the duty officer. He had skin with deep, large pores that made him look as if he was composed of pixels. He said he knew there had been a murder out on the parking lot and he had no objection to showing Bob footage from the cameras.

‘I’d like to see the roof,’ said Bob.

‘We don’t have a camera there,’ said the security guard. ‘We have IP cameras, so the weather’s too rough for them, especially in the winter. But we’ve got all the floors covered.’

‘Can we go to five thirty and play back all recordings from all cameras at high speed? Simultaneously, I mean. We don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Sure, but that stuff is old school.’ The security guard grinned his satisfaction. ‘Check this.’

He typed in a few commands on his keyboard.

‘We got two cameras for each field,’ he said. ‘One that’s on all the time and an IPCC-9610 camera that’s motion-activated. It has night-vision and—’

‘Very impressive, but like I said, we don’t have much time.’ Bob glanced across at the blue lights in the parking lot.

‘OK, OK, then we’ll use the IPCC camera here.’ The guard tapped in a few more commands. ‘See? We skip the pauses, it’s non-stop action and the camera automatically zooms in and follows anything that’s moving. Check this woman here, for example.’ He pointed to one of the tiny images in the mosaic that covered the screen.

‘Does the elevator go all the way up to the roof?’ asked Bob.

‘That and the interior staircase stop at the top floor. From there, there’s a separate staircase up to the roof.’

‘Perfect. Can we limit what we’re seeing to the elevator and the stairway door on the top floor?’

‘Sure. Check this.’ The guard tapped away with an alacrity that made Bob realise he’d made at least one person happy this week.

The camera followed people and cars as they came and went. As soon as Bob was satisfied a recording didn’t show what he was looking for he would ask the guard to fast-forward to the next one. After a dozen of these forward jumps the guard suppressed a yawn.

‘Sorry, it’s been a lo—’

‘Stop!’ Bob said. ‘Switch to normal speed here.’

The guard tapped on the keyboard and Bob looked at the person coming out from the stairway door. Someone wearing a top with the hood pulled up and shades. He was carrying an oblong package swathed in bubble wrap.

‘There you are...’ whispered Bob. He felt his heart beating a little faster.

The person stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the roof, turned and looked round.

‘Freeze it there!’

The guard’s reaction was instant.

‘You want him close up too?’

‘Please,’ said Bob.

Despite the fact that the face on the screen was in partial shadow beneath the hood, and the eyes hidden behind the sunglasses, Bob Oz was in no doubt. This was the man in the composite. This was Tomás Gomez.

‘Can you mail me that picture?’

‘Sure.’ The guard clicked on the Share icon. ‘Where to?’

‘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.

‘Let’s start with the victim,’ said Bob as he put down his cup. ‘Who is it?’

‘Cody Karlstad, fifty-three years of age, co-owner of AgriWork, selling everything from combine harvesters and tractors to lawnmowers. No police record, a pillar of the community, trains his youngest son’s baseball team in his free time. He’s got three kids and a wife who does voluntary work at the Mindekirken, which is—’

‘The Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church,’ Bob completed the sentence for her.

‘Exactly, that’s your people. As you can see, though there are similarities in the method—’

‘—there are no obvious similarities in the choice of victims.’

‘That’s putting it mildly. Dante is a parasite, Karlstad a pillar of the community.’

Cody Karlstad, Cody Karlstad. Bob knew the name from somewhere, he just couldn’t place it.

‘So no suspicion he was connected to gangs or narcotics?’

‘None at all,’ said Kay.

Bob ran a hand down his tie. ‘What about weapons?’

‘He had a pistol, a Glock-17, locked in the glove compartment.’

‘I mean, is there any connection to gun dealing, directly or indirectly?’

‘No. But he’s not exactly anti-gun either.’

‘I get that when he has a pistol.’

‘Yes, but I was thinking of the bumper sticker on his car.’

‘Oh?’

‘You didn’t see it?’

‘Hanson chased me off.’

‘An NRA sticker. The one with the two boxes where you can tick off as gun owner or victim.’

Bob nodded slowly. He had it now, where he knew the name Cody Karlstad from.

‘We need more guns in the hands of the right people,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s what Cody Karlstad said in the Star Tribune earlier this summer,’ said Bob as he tapped something into his phone. ‘He’s a spokesman for the NRA-ILA, they campaign against stricter gun laws. A classic more-guns-less-crime fan. Look, this is Cody Karlstad.’

Bob held up his phone that showed a picture of two men in suits posing together.

‘Mayor Patterson,’ said Kay. ‘So Cody Karlstad got to meet people in high places.’

‘No great mystery for Patterson to pose for a picture when the NRA are donating 40,000 dollars to his campaign.’

‘They did? But Patterson’s a Democrat — I thought the NRA only supported politicians on the right?’

‘The NRA don’t care where a politician stands on agricultural policy, all they care about is where they stand on the Second Amendment of the Constitution. They give politicians marks based on how positive they are about guns and, according to the Star Tribune, Kevin Patterson gets an A plus there.’

‘So you think gun control is the connection?’ said Kay. ‘That what we’ve got here is someone fighting guns with guns?’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Is Gomez a solitary nutcase or a member of some political terrorist group?’

Bob shrugged. ‘How about a solitary, non-crazy political terrorist?’

Kay was about to say something but just then her phone rang. She took the call and looked quizzically at Bob as she listened.

‘Gomez has been observed on a security camera at Track Plaza,’ she said. She put the phone in her pocket and stood up.