Wolf Hour

7 The Homicide Unit, October 2016

Bob Oz crossed Government Plaza. Glanced up at the Humphrey statue that always seemed to him to look more like Bob Hope and entered the city hall. His steps echoed as he passed through the venerable hall with its statue of Aquarius, through the security channel and then over to the elevators where three people stood waiting for him.

‘Hi, Bob,’ said one of them. He turned. It was a woman in a navy-blue skirt and jacket — the battledress of the legal profession. She smiled. Thirty, maybe, though he never found it easy to guess the age of Asian people.

‘Hi...’ He couldn’t recall her name. ‘The coffee good?’

She looked down in slight surprise at the paper Starbucks cup she was holding. ‘Er, it’s OK. I never heard back from you.’

Was it Ellen? Or Helen? Or a Chinese name?

‘You know what, I lost your number,’ said Bob. ‘Maybe...’

‘Maybe?’

He smiled. There was a ping and the elevator doors slid open. ‘Maybe you could send it to me.’

Helen. Yes, it was Helen. The enemy. The defence attorney. Lilac underwear.

‘How? You didn’t give me your number either.’ She entered the elevator and turned to face Bob, who was still standing outside. She raised her index finger and pointed upward quizzically.

Bob shook his head. ‘Thanks, Helen, but I’m going down.’

She gave him a big smile, flipped her hand round, and as the elevator door slid closed switched fingers and showed him the middle one. Bob brushed his hand over his tie. So, not Helen then. But he was sure he was right about the underwear.

Bob took the next elevator to the fifth floor and stepped out into the Homicide Department’s new offices. Until recently the fifth had been used to house prisoners on remand, and despite the complete refurbishment and all the glass and the light furniture, Bob couldn’t shake the feeling that the place was a prison. Maybe it was the narrow windows that let in so little daylight, maybe it was the cell-like offices flanking either side of the open-plan office landscape. He walked past the last office, still in the process of being refurbished, said to be the cell occupied by the ‘Ghost of City Hall’. The decorator working inside turned toward Bob as he passed. He looked like a ghost himself in there behind the glass wall, in his white overalls and with the white cap, gloves and face mask. All that was visible was a pair of brown eyes, and what Bob interpreted as a smile. He smiled back.

Bob headed for his workspace at the far end of the open office landscape, looking neither to right nor to left of him. He made it over almost every hurdle but of course tripped up at the last one.

‘Aaa-ss!’ Detective Olav Hanson’s pronunciation of Bob’s surname had a lot of air in it, and a descending note that made it sound like a cross between an apology and a puncture. Hanson had apparently been just one knee-tackle away from playing in the NFL, and though Bob Oz didn’t wish fame and fortune on Hanson he would have preferred that to having the giant blond jerk as part of his life. Hanson was in his fifties and had been with the Homicide squad longer than anyone. There were rumours about why Hanson had never been promoted, but for Bob there was no mystery about it: as an investigator Olav Hanson was useless. Unfortunately that wasn’t valid grounds for dismissal in the state. Nor was being an asshole. Fortunately.

‘Walker was in here looking for you,’ Hanson bellowed, loud enough to be sure everyone in the vicinity heard what he was saying. ‘You’re to go and see him asap, Aaa-ss.’

‘Thanks, Hands-On,’ said Bob without breaking his stride.

‘Asap, as in as soon...’ Hanson’s voice fell away behind him.

Bob slumped down behind his desk. From the chaos of paper piles, crime scene photographs, torn-out notebook pages, chocolate wrappers and chewed pencils in front of him you might have got the impression Bob Oz had far too much to do. The exact opposite was the truth. Since the break with Alice, Walker had been taking Bob off his involvement in active investigations one by one until now he was down to none. Walker’s grounds had been what the personnel report called ‘unstable conduct’, MPD’s psychologist referred to as a failure of anger management, and Walker called giving Bob a break until he pulled himself together again. In the meantime he was handed assignments usually given to newcomers in the unit, such as collating data for other detectives, fact-checking and interviewing witnesses in cases assigned to other investigators.

Bob checked MPD’s website to make sure the BOLO for Tomás Gomez had been sent out as he had ordered. No results so far. He pulled the note from his coat pocket and called a number on the red landline telephone. While waiting for it to be picked up he looked at the photograph of Alice that was still pinned to the privacy wall, alongside the Vikings fixture list.

‘Hi, Kari, this is Bob. Can you help me trace a doctor? Name is Jakob Egeland. He’s an MD. Thanks, Kari, you’re a... sorry, I can’t come up with a euphemism that’s sexually neutral enough. What? Me? A dinosaur? Come on.’

Bob hung up. Stretched his legs and folded his hands round the back of his head. Looked at the clock. Then the picture of Alice. If he called her using the landline, maybe she would pick up. No, no, fuck it, no! He pulled up the Star Tribune’s website and learned that the number of bison in Minnesota was on the increase. Read an article about the National Rifle Association’s annual conference which was being held this year in Minneapolis and was due to open in four days. A report on the Vikings’ last game, a victory. They were looking good so far, so good Bob figured they would be able to defend their title as the best team in the NFL never to have won the Super Bowl. Nothing else of interest there. His gaze settled once more on the red telephone.

Don’t ring Alice. Do not ring Alice.

He felt himself itching all over. He glanced at his neighbour’s desk, at the handcuffs lying on top of a pile of documents as a paperweight. He felt like he wanted to arrest somebody, anybody at all. Something had to happen, anything at all or else he’d go out of his mind. He regretted now that he’d quit smoking after meeting Alice. The day after she threw him out, he’d bought his first pack in twelve years, but they tasted like shit. She’d even taken that from him. He itched inside, in places he could never reach.

Bob got to his feet so abruptly that the chair was still rolling toward the next desk as he marched out.

Superintendent Brenton Walker stood looking out of the window of his narrow office. The sun blinked from the glass facades of the skyscrapers surrounding them here in downtown that made city hall look like a little sandcastle. He liked this office and this view. He’d miss it.

From behind he heard a knock on the door.

‘Boss?’ said a voice.

Walker liked Bob Oz. He was a good investigator too. There were others who were smarter, but when Oz was at the top of his game there was no one who worked harder. He was like a wolverine, once he got his teeth into something he didn’t let go. Mostly that was a good thing. But over the last twelve months, Oz had brought Walker more trouble than results.

‘I didn’t send you to Jordan because I want you to take the case,’ said Walker. ‘I sent you because all my other investigators are tied up. And since the victim turns out not to be dead it’s a first-degree assault and not a murder. Now I’m getting calls from the Assaults Unit saying you’ve sent out a BOLO without informing them.’

He half turned toward Oz, who was standing just inside the door like he wanted the shortest possible route back out of there again. Oz coughed.

‘In my view it was more important to get the message out there than have it come from the right unit, chief. Anyway it’s quite possible the guy actually will die.’

Walker didn’t answer, just swayed silently on his heels. In truth, a small part of him did wish that Marco Dante would die. Not just because he sold weapons to the kids in Jordan and made it more easy for them to kill each other but because the success rate for clearing murder cases in Minneapolis was on its way down toward fifty per cent, and even if the fall in the clear-up rate was part of a national trend, MPD’s chief of police would need someone or something to point the finger at when it came to explaining the drop. If Dante died then at least the right man had been killed, and Walker could add that to the right side of the statistics. He tried to ignore the thought. Couldn’t. Did it mean that the young man who had joined the police in hopes of making a difference was turning into the kind of egocentric careerist he had sworn he would never be? Walker’s family had been part of the black working class who had to move from the Rondo district in Saint Paul when the council decided to run the new freeway through the well-established part of the city. Walker’s father had been among the leaders of the protests and there were those who thought Brenton Walker had something of the same type of activist in him, despite his conventional and conflict-free career as a senior police officer. And they were right to suppose he had inherited his father’s sense of anger at the inherent injustice of society. Over time it became difficult for him to hide these personality traits, and there were those in the unit who referred to the broad-shouldered, shaven-headed superintendent as ‘the socialist’. In the beginning he’d taken it as a badge of distinction. But now?

‘OK,’ said Walker. ‘So then you know this case belongs to Aggravated Assault.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Bob.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Attempted murder. You shoot someone from your own apartment and you’re asking to be caught.’

‘And when was the last time you came across a killer who was rational?’

‘But everything else about it seems so professional. It’s as though he’s giving us some kind of start. As if he feels he has protection.’

‘Protection? What kind of protection?’

Bob shrugged. ‘There are only two kinds. One of the gangs. Or...’

Walker gave Bob a warning look. He was aware that in the past Oz had asked Internal Affairs to investigate the rumour that a serving member of the force was taking drug money in return for steering murder investigations away from certain leading gang members. But everyone knew these rumours about a person they called the Milkman were about as accurate — and about as old — as all those tales about the Ghost of City Hall. When it emerged that it was Bob Oz who had tried to alert Internal Affairs, the only effect was to reinforce his reputation among his colleagues as a paranoid drunk and a potential snitch. On top of that he knew Oz’s nickname in the unit: Kentucky Fried. Not exactly original, but the thought behind it was clear enough: Bob Oz was a chicken who refused to carry a gun, and in a crisis he would push armed colleagues ahead of him.

Walker sighed. ‘How are the, er... anger management sessions going? You are attending?’

‘Oh yes.’

Walker assumed Oz was lying. ‘And are you improving?’

‘Hard to say, chief. Takes time, something like that, they say.’

Walker nodded in the direction of the window. ‘We could use you, you know.’

‘Mm.’

‘The way you used to be,’ said Walker as he studied his own reflection.

‘Was there anything else, chief?’

Walker sighed. ‘No.’

‘So then, Aaa-ss,’ said Olav Hanson as he rolled out on his chair from behind his desk, ‘you get promoted? No? Demoted? In that case I’d like a coffee, three sugars please.’

A snort of laughter from Detective Joe Kjos behind his privacy divider. Kjos was Hanson’s number one fan and his personal supplier of canned laughter.

Bob strode on by, unable to come up with a suitable response as the baying laughter followed him back to his desk. No sooner had he sat down than the phone rang. It was Kari.

‘There’s no Dr Jakob Egeland in Minneapolis. But there is one in Saint Paul. The address is—’

‘Thanks, Kari, but call Aggravated Assault, it’s their case now.’

‘Oh yeah? Who should I talk to there?’

‘Good question. Give me the address, Kari, I’ll talk to them.’

He wrote it down on his notepad, hung up, picked up the receiver again and called the number for Aggravated Assault. While he was waiting he heard Hanson say something, and then Kjos’s hearty and almost happy laughter. Bob took a deep breath. Why the hell didn’t they answer? There wasn’t exactly a sudden surfeit of aggravated assaults taking place today. More laughter. Fuck. Bob felt like he wanted to break something and realised he had lifted the receiver high above his head. He lowered it and counted in a low voice as he repeated inside his head: Think before you speak, think before you act. Tell yourself you can control your anger. That was about as much as he had learned in the two sessions of anger management he had actually attended. He repeated the words. Then, with infinite care, he replaced the receiver in its cradle.

And breathed out.

Smiled.

Sat quite still for several seconds.

Then tore the page from the notepad and hurried toward the door.