Unidentified Woman #15 (23 page)

“What do you want from me?”

“Let’s go outside and chat for a sec.”

“Why should I?”

I set my hand on his outer thigh about six inches above his knee and pressed down hard.

“Because it’s so much easier than the alternative,” I said.

Troop winced in pain and knocked my hand away. Afterward, he rested his hand on his thigh and rubbed gently.

“That hurts,” he said.

“I bet it hurt a lot worse last Sunday when you were shot.”

He stopped moving—except for his head, which jerked toward me.

“Do you wear sunglasses indoors because your eyes are sensitive to light or because you’re the worst poker player in the world?” I asked him.

“C’mon, Peter,” Shipman said. “We don’t want to disturb the mourners.”

She stood and I stood, and after a moment’s reflection, Troop stood as well. We turned in unison and headed for the door. Troop zipped his coat shut. And then he did something that should have tripped all of my internal alarm systems, yet didn’t, probably because I was busy tending to my own jacket—he removed the glove from his right hand.

Shipman held the door open for him. He stepped across the threshold, she followed him, and I followed her. We were immediately assaulted by frigid air and hard wind, yet Troop didn’t seem to notice. He tramped angrily down the sidewalk away from the door until he reached the edge of the parking lot.

“That’s far enough,” Shipman said.

Troop stood on the edge of the curb and gazed out at the lot. I had no idea who or what he was looking for. I thought for a moment that Mitch and Craig or even John Kispert might have been out there. If they were, I didn’t see them.

“Let’s see some ID,” Shipman said.

“You have no business harassing me.”

Troop made no move to fetch his wallet, nor did he turn to face us. Instead, he hid his hands in front of his body and tilted his head as if he were trying to locate us in his peripheral vision. He adjusted his stance, dropping his right foot back slightly, preparing to turn.

Troop’s words, the sound of his voice, and the posture of his body caused Shipman and me to react the same way. She moved slowly to his right while dropping her hand into the open bag hanging from a strap over her shoulder. I went to his left, unzipping my jacket as I went. Our field training officers would have been proud.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Troop said.

“It’s okay, Peter.” Shipman’s voice was soothing, almost maternal. “Relax. We’re just talking here.”

“You got no right.”

“Nothing bad is going to happen today.”

“I just wanted to get out of the cold.”

“Let me see your hands.”

Troop screamed—it wasn’t a word, just a bunch of consonants strung together. His ungloved right hand pulled a knife from under his left sleeve. The blade was thin but long. He pivoted toward Shipman. She lifted a Glock from her bag and brought it up swiftly with both hands.

“No, no, no,” she chanted.

Troop brought the knife up as if he were going to throw it.

She sighted on his chest.

Troop ceased moving.

By then I had a gun in my hands as well.

Like Shipman, I was in a Weaver stance, the sights of the SIG Sauer settled on his core.

“Please drop the knife.” Shipman’s words were consolatory, yet there was no mistaking the command in her voice.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Troop said.

“Please. Drop. The knife.”

I couldn’t see his eyes because of the sunglasses, and I wanted desperately to see his eyes. I was sure they would tell me what he was thinking.

Shipman screamed at him. “Drop the fucking knife.”

Troop flinched as if he were startled.

He opened his hand.

The knife slipped out.

It bounced against the concrete sidewalk at his feet.

Thank God,
my inner voice said.

“I’m sorry,” Troop said.

Shipman gasped like a woman who had been holding her breath for far too long.

“Step away from the knife,” she said.

And we heard the crack of a rifle shot.

Troop’s chest exploded outward.

We were showered with his blood.

All in the same instant.

It took a moment before Shipman and I realized what had happened. When we did, we both dove to the ground. I ended up on the asphalt parking lot. Shipman found a mound of snow. I thought I heard the sound of a car driving off in the distance, yet I would never be sure. I crawled forward until I was behind an SUV. I came up and searched the lot behind the sights of the SIG. Shipman rolled to her right, went to her feet, and dashed behind a different car. She held her Glock steady with one hand while fumbling for her phone with the other. At the same time, she turned her head to look at Troop, sprawled face first on the sidewalk. He was still wearing his sunglasses. The warmth of his body escaped through the wound in his back and mixed with the cold air, creating a mist. Instead of floating upward, though, it was snatched away by the wind.

None of the mourners had come to the heavy door or windows. They didn’t yet know what had happened. Hell, I didn’t know what had happened. I heard Shipman speaking into her cell.

“Shots fired. Officer needs assistance.”

She kept staring at Troop’s body.

To this day I have no idea what she was thinking.

*   *   *

Shipman got her task force after all.

Nine people crowded into the small conference room. Bobby stood at the head of the table. I sat against the back wall and tried to make myself invisible.

Little Canada was an inner ring suburb with a population of just under ten thousand people. It didn’t have its own police department. Instead, emergency calls were answered by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department, whose deputies were the first to arrive at the scene. That was several hours ago. Now we were all gathered in the James S. Griffin Building, headquarters to the St. Paul Police Department, located northeast of downtown. It was part of the Ramsey County—St. Paul Criminal Justice Campus, which also included the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center and the Adult Detention Center. It was a fifteen-minute trip for Detective John Luby and his partner from the Minneapolis Police Department. Everyone else just walked across the parking lot.

“Okay,” Bobby said. “What do we have? Keith.”

Keith was a firearms examiner—actually a forensic scientist who specialized in firearms and tool marks for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Minneapolis and Hennepin County had their own examiners, but St. Paul farmed the work out to the BCA.

“The bullet passed through our victim and pancaked on the concrete,” Keith said. “We tried to pull it apart, but … We can tell you it was a caliber .30-06, the same as the round that killed the victim in Minneapolis. It was so badly damaged, though, that we can’t identify the specific manufacturer or say conclusively that it was fired from the same weapon.”

“Okay, you’re no good to me. Doctor?”

The assistant Ramsey County medical examiner stood and cleared his throat as if he were about to deliver a lecture to a roomful of premed students.

“As requested, we compared our measurements of the wounds suffered by Oliver Braun—our victim in Highland Park—against the size and shape of the blade of the knife that was recovered in Little Canada,” he said. “After careful analysis, we have concluded that they are consistent.”

“Are you saying it’s a definite match?” Bobby asked.

“It’s never definite, Bobby. You know that. However, we did find a trace amount of blood on the hilt. Give me seventy-two hours and I will give you a profile.”

“Make it forty-eight.”

“Seventy-two, and that’s with someone working it full time.”

The ME sat down. He seemed disappointed there wasn’t applause.

“Okay. Deputy Sergeant?”

The deputy sergeant was a member of the General Investigations Unit of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department. The department didn’t get many murders. It investigated only those committed in the seven small contract cities like Little Canada for which it was paid to provide services, so I was a little surprised that someone with a higher rank wasn’t in the conference room acting all large and emphatic.

“We canvassed the area, interviewed the mourners,” said the sergeant. “No witnesses. The church had never installed security cameras, so there’s no film to look at either. My deputies did find a shell casing at the far end of the parking lot. Federal .30-06.”

“Ahh,” said Keith.

“We sent it to your office. You should have it by now.”

“Ahh,” said Keith again.

“Prints?” Bobby asked.

“We lifted a partial,” the sergeant said. “That’s why it took so long to get it to the BCA. Not enough points to run it through the system, though.”

“Did you find any brass at the first shooting?”

Bobby was speaking to Luby, who squirmed slightly in his chair.

“No,” he said.

“Did you look?”

“I—I don’t know. There was a lot of snow.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll get someone back out there with a metal detector.”

“Okay.”

“In the meantime, we’ve been trying to work up a history on Karl Olson, our victim,” Luby said. “So far with little success. We don’t know much more about him than what we found in his wallet. Family, friends, who he worked for, where he’s from—nothing. So far. We’ve also been trying to get a line on the kids who lived in the duplex. We know a great deal about them except, well, where they are at the present time. I went up to Deer River myself. I was able to confirm everything that McKenzie told us. Beyond that…”

“Okay. Jeannie.”

Shipman had a notebook open in front of her. She knew this moment would come and had prepared what to say. She spoke of the flyers that were found in the duplex and the garage sales that they led her to. She related her suspicions that the sales were a front for a shoplifting and burglary ring and that they were operated by two young men named Craig and Mitch—that was all the ID she had—and that Ella Elbers had been tentatively linked to them. She said she was sure that Peter Troop was also involved in the garage sales and that he had been shot in the leg during a drive-by shooting on Sunday.

“So that’s where the wound came from,” the ME said.

But, Shipman said, she had no information about the shooters or their motives.

“Could the drive-by shooter in Woodbury and the sniper in Little Canada be the same person?” the deputy sergeant asked.

“My opinion, I want to say no,” Shipman said. “Unfortunately, I have nothing to base it on except that the sniper seems very competent and the drive-by shooter not so much.”

“Let’s assume for a moment that the blood on Troop’s knife matches Braun’s…”

“Unless the good doctor tells us otherwise,” Bobby said.

“That raises the question—what the hell was Troop doing at the kid’s funeral?”

“I don’t know,” Shipman said.

“Guilty conscience,” said a second deputy. “He did say he was sorry.”

“Puhleez,” said Luby’s partner.

“My question,” said Luby. “McKenzie, what were you doing at the funeral?”

“McKenzie,” Bobby said, “speak up.”

I felt a twinge of panic when the room full of officers turned their undivided attention on me. I sat straighter in my chair.

“I’m trying to find Ella Elbers,” I said. “With permission from the commander.” I added that last part to remind Bobby that I wouldn’t be there at all if he hadn’t sent El to my condominium in the first place. “I went to the funeral in case she showed up.”

“Why would she?” Luby asked.

“She and Oliver Braun used to date. They broke up around Christmas. Braun’s friends at the funeral, none of them have seen her since.”

“Why did they break up?”

My shrug didn’t satisfy anybody.

“What else can you tell us?” Bobby asked.

I had seen the look in Bobby’s eyes before. He was wondering how much of what I had told him was the truth and how much wasn’t. He was also debating whether or not I was holding out on him, and given our past history, he was leaning heavily toward not. I needed to give him something more. If I didn’t, two things were going to happen. Thing one—his anger would probably reach biblical proportions. I didn’t mind that so much. It wouldn’t be the first time he was upset with me, and after all these years, I figured our friendship could withstand pretty much anything—after all, I was best man at his wedding and godfather to his eldest daughter, and his daughters were heirs to my estate, such as it was. But thing two—he’d cut me off from the investigation now and forever, and I didn’t want that.

I reached into my wallet and removed the sheet of paper that Smith, the security guard at my condominium, had given me. I unfolded it and set it on the conference room table. It was passed from one hand to another until it reached Bobby.

“Mitchell Bosland,” I said. “From Rochester, Minnesota. El made a reference to him on her Facebook page. He’s one of the three men operating the garage sales, as Detective Shipman said earlier. The sheet contains all of his driver’s license information.”

“McKenzie,” Shipman said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Honestly, Detective, I thought you already knew.”

What a liar you are,
my inner voice said.

From her expression, whatever earlier opinion Shipman held of me took a catastrophic nosedive. I thought she was about to give me an idea of how much it had sunk when Bobby interrupted her.

“What else?” he asked. His voice made it clear that I had better have something else.

“The second man is named Craig. I don’t have a last name, but I’m sure he’s from Rochester, too.”

“And…”

“And the third man is named John Kispert. I know nothing about him, although I’m pretty sure he operates the home and garage burglary end of things.”

I heard Shipman’s harsh whisper—“Bastard.”

“Okay,” Bobby said. He passed the sheet to Shipman and started assigning tasks to nearly everyone in the room. When he finished, he announced, “First priority—Karl Olson, Oliver Braun, Peter Troop. Somehow, somewhere their lives collided. Connect the dots, people.”