FOURTEEN

The phone jolted me awake. I jumped out of bed and raced to the prepaid cell on my bureau, stubbing my big toe in the process. It wasn’t until I was hopping on one foot and cursing loudly that I realized that my land line was ringing—Vicki Walsh didn’t have that number. I managed to get to the phone before it rolled over to my voice mail.

“Hello,” I said.

“And a good morning to you, too,” Bobby Dunston said; I recognized his voice instantly.

“What time is it?”

“Ten o’clock. Did I wake you? Poor baby. I know how much you need your beauty sleep.”

“What’s going on, Bobby?”

“You tell me. You make a big deal about me missing hockey last week and then you blow us off without so much as a phone call.”

“Sorry ’bout that. I was out with Nina.”

“That’s what we were speculating, that she dragged you off somewhere. You are so whipped, McKenzie.”

There are insults, and then there are insults. When Jason Truhler said that to me, I was prepared to clean his clock. That’s because he meant it in the most derogatory way possible, as if somehow it was unmanly to arrange your schedule to accommodate a woman. With Bobby it was like the line in the old Owen Wister novel The Virginian—“When you call me that, smile.” I could feel his grin all the way across the telephone wire. He understood as well as anyone that making personal sacrifices is exactly what a man does for the people he cares about.

“No doubt about it,” I said. “If you saw the dress Nina was wearing, you’d be whipped, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Strapless.”

“My, my, my, my, my. Where’d you guys go?”

“We had cocktails with the governor.”

“Oh la-dee-dah.”

“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

“Was Lindsey there?”

When I said earlier that Lindsey was from the neighborhood, I meant Merriam Park in St. Paul, where both Bobby and I grew up, where everybody knew everyone.

“She was,” I said, “but you know what, Bobby? She never mentioned your name.”

“I liked her sister better, anyway.”

“Listen, I’m glad you called. There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

“What?”

“Let’s say, hypothetically—”

“Hypothetically? It’s going to be one of those conversations, huh?”

“Let’s say there was a prostitution ring operating in the Twin Cities that was using the Internet to arrange trysts.”

“Trysts? Is that what they call it now?”

“Let’s say the Web site is called, oh, I don’t know, My Very First Time dot com.”

“Let’s.”

“Who would have jurisdiction?”

“We’d probably put together a joint statewide task force like we did when we took down My Fast Pass and Minnesota Nice Guys a couple years ago. You knew that, though, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It is one of those conversations. What else can you tell me? Hypothetically, of course.”

“I could tell you the name of the person who’s running it all.”

There was a long pause while Bobby waited for me to supply the name. When I didn’t he said, “And that would be?”

“What kind of deal can I get for the girls?”

“You’re negotiating with me, really? McKenzie, you know better. I can’t make any deals. That’s all up to the prosecutors.”

“I don’t want this to end like it always does, with courts pounding on the supply side without touching the demand side.”

“You know how it works as well as I do. The johns pay a fine; the girls do the time. Whenever we roll up a prostitution ring we get a thousand phone calls from lawyers saying their clients will be happy to cooperate, happy to pay any fine, happy to do community service, as long as they remain anonymous. That link we set up on the St. Paul Police Department Web site that displays photographs of all the people we arrest for prostitution? How many photos of well-to-do business owners or professionals do you see on that site? If you’re a john, the only way your photo is going to get uploaded is if you’re caught soliciting a prostitute off the street in Frogtown or the East Side.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to give me that name?”

“Yes, but not just yet.”

“McKenzie, do we need to have another talk about crossing the line?”

“Don’t worry, Bobby, I’m still on the right side. Here’s the thing, though—you and I both know that there are a dozen guys who can kill a case before it comes to trial. A cop, a prosecutor, a judge—anyone who wants to protect a friend or earn a promotion or secure political support or arrange a comfy retirement or make a couple of bucks. In this case, the woman involved is protected all the way to the top.”

“So, it’s a woman, then.”

“I have every intention of giving you her name and a lot more, but I’d like to try to do it in a way that’ll make sure the right people are prosecuted.”

“How are you going to manage that?”

“I have no idea.”

I listened as Bobby took a couple of deep breaths.

“McKenzie,” he said, “I don’t mind that you do these things, I really don’t. I just wish you wouldn’t tell me. It makes me feel like a co-conspirator.”

“As long as they put us in the same cell, that’s the main thing.”

“Good-bye, McKenzie.”

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the morning and a chunk of the afternoon waiting for Vicki Walsh to call. While I waited I vacuumed my house for the first time in about two months, upstairs and downstairs—the exertion did my back some good. I separated my dirty clothes into color-coordinated piles before deciding I could put off doing laundry for at least another week. I watched a couple of quarters of the Gophers-Hoosiers football game. I read a few chapters of E. L. Doctorow’s new book. I made lunch, ate it, and cleared away the dishes. I threw dried corn to the ducks. The prepaid cell didn’t ring.

My landline did ring, though, at just about the time I was considering new and improved methods of threatening Caitlin Brooks. The caller ID in my kitchen displayed the name Dailey.

“Hello,” I said.

“McKenzie?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Scott Dailey with the MPD. We met the other day.”

“I remember.”

“There’s a joint on the North Side called Victory 44. Know it?”

“On Forty-fourth Avenue near Camden?”

“Why don’t you come out, meet me and my partner.”

“What’s going on?”

“Say half an hour?”

“I’ll be there.”

*   *   *

Victory 44 was located just off leafy Victory Memorial Parkway, sometimes called the North Side’s Gold Coast. I don’t know why Dailey and Moulton picked it except to remind me that North Minneapolis was far more complicated than how it was usually portrayed in police reports and on the evening news.

The restaurant was far too trendy for the neighborhood. It had putty-colored walls and an open kitchen. The cooks wore baseball caps and the waitresses had tight T-shirts with the words VICTORY NEVER TASTES TOO GOOD splayed across their chests. Four large mirrors were hung on the walls along with a couple of high-end beer signs. The bar area was filled with high tables and booths with wooden benches, while the dining area was lined with black banquettes. There was no foie gras or top-shelf tequila on the menu, yet there were plenty of designer beers and an eclectic wine list. Plus, the kitchen specialized in scratch cooking. You could get a gourmet burger with skinny house-made fries and house-made ketchup, a punchy crème fraîche–chive–Grana Padano cheese dip, tempura-quality fish and chips, fish cakes Benedict, and crispy pork belly with a crunchy vegetable salad and a tarragon-garlic pistou. Drop the place in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis or on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and the hipsters would line up around the block to get in. On the North Side I’d take three-to-one that it would be gone within a year.

I found Dailey and Moulton sitting across from each other in a booth in the bar. I squeezed in next to Moulton.

“Gentlemen,” I said.

“McKenzie,” Dailey said. “What’ll you have?”

“Summit Ale,” I said. The bar didn’t serve hard liquor.

Dailey waved at the bartender and placed my order. A few minutes later the drink was placed in front of me. I took a swallow.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m primed. What can I do for you guys?”

In reply, Moulton slipped a photograph out of a large envelope and slid it across the table to me, topside down. I turned it over and looked at the image.

“You sonuvabitch,” I said.

I flipped the photo over again and turned away. I rested my hands on my thighs, closed my eyes, and bit my bottom lip. I tried to control my breathing but it was hard.

It was a photo of a man resting on a stainless steel autopsy table. At least I assumed it was a man. There was no way to know for sure. His hair, his eyes, his face, his flesh had all been consumed by fire.

“Gives a whole new meaning to the term extra crispy, doesn’t it?” Moulton asked.

“Reminds me of the blackened chicken you can get at that Cajun joint in Richfield,” Dailey said.

“Mmm, yummy,” Moulton said.

I would gladly have punched out both of them, or at least cussed them out, except the look on their faces told me that they weren’t trying to be clever so much as they were simply trying to cope with a horrifying situation. This might have been my first charred body, but it certainly wasn’t theirs.

“Who is it?” I asked.

The question was as much for distraction as anything. I was already trying to push the photograph into the vault inside my brain where I stored all of the abhorrent images I’ve witnessed in my life. I knew it would take some effort.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Dailey said.

“How would I know?”

Moulton produced a plastic evidence bag. Inside the bag was a cell phone. He fiddled with a few buttons. A moment later I heard my voice telling Denny Marcus to contact Vicki Walsh immediately, that Roberta knew everything and that I could help her if only she would call me.

“Oh, God, no, man, dammit,” I said.

“We found the cell not far from the body,” Moulton said.

“The body was dumped in the alley behind Bug’s house,” Dailey said. “We know Bug didn’t do it. Whoever did it was trying to frame him.”

“It was the Joes,” I said. “It was the fucking Joes.”

“How do you know?”

As far as I was concerned, all deals were off. I told the cops everything I knew. I named names. I said that I was searching for Vicki Walsh, that the Joes were doing the same. I said that I knew Denny Marcus had been in contact with her and that it was my guess the Joes somehow discovered the same thing.

“If Marcus knew where Vicki Walsh was, then he told the Joes,” Moulton said. “Wouldn’t have been able to help himself.”

“Before they doused him with gasoline, the Joes smashed every bone in both of his feet with a claw hammer,” Dailey said.

“It’s the family’s weapon of choice,” Moulton said.

It all made me feel like weeping. Either that or doing something rough, picking a fight with the bartender, anything, only as far as I was concerned neither was an option.

Think it through, my inner voice told me. Work it out.

I drained my beer and demanded more, wishing it were something stronger. While I was waiting, a thought occurred to me.

“What are we doing here?” I asked. I looked from Dailey to Moulton and back again. “You guys are arson, this is homicide.” I pointed at the cell phone. “This is evidence.” The head of the homicide unit in Minneapolis was named Lieutenant Clayton Rask. His office was in room 108 of the Minneapolis City Hall. I wondered aloud why I wasn’t in room 108 right now being interviewed by Rask.

“We’re going to give up the cell phone and the kid’s ID,” Dailey said. “Lieutenant Rask probably will have plenty to ask you.”

“In the meantime…” Moulton raised his hands, palms upward.

“You guys are working it off the books,” I said.

“We know the Joes’ handiwork when we see it,” Dailey said.

“We’re going to get those bastards,” Moulton said.

“This is so wrong for so many reasons,” I said.

“Are you going to help or not, McKenzie?” Dailey asked.

I thought about the kid. I had liked the way he stood up for his friend. He was all right, a good guy. He didn’t deserve to die the way he had. No one did.

“Hell yes, I’m going to help,” I said.

After the bartender served my Summit, we drank to it.

*   *   *

I placed a call the moment I returned to my car. Caitlin Brooks answered on the third ring.

“McKenzie, I keep telling you,” she said. “I don’t know where Vicki is.”

“Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“McKenzie…”

“Do you know who Denny Marcus was? He was a friend of Vicki’s. She had kept in touch with him through e-mails and text messages. Somehow the Joes found out about him.”

I heard her gasp as if she knew what was coming.

“They kidnapped him. They broke every bone in his feet with a hammer. Then they set him on fire. He was alive when they burned him—”

“Oh, please, McKenzie.”

“If he knew where Vicki was, you can be sure that he told the Joes before he died.”

I could hear Caitlin weeping over the phone.

“Please, please,” she said.

“It’s not a game anymore, Cait. This is as serious as it gets. Where is Vicki?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then God help her.”

I waited for a few moments, hoping Caitlin would give me something. All I heard was her anguished weeping.

*   *   *

It was four fifteen by the time I rolled into my driveway, and the sun was already thinking about setting. I sat in the Cherokee and pondered my options. My arrangement with Dailey and Moulton made me uncomfortable. I should call Lieutenant Rask, I told myself. He didn’t approve of me, but he’d like it even less if he found out I was conspiring with MPD officers behind his back. I could ask Bobby what to do, only I already knew what his answer would be. My biggest concern was Vicki Walsh. Muehlenhaus said he could guarantee her safety, yet the Joes had proven that wasn’t necessarily true.

Wait, my inner voice shouted. That isn’t your biggest concern.

“Shit,” I said aloud.

I took up the prepaid cell and called Jason Truhler. His phone rang six long times before he answered.

“McKenzie,” he said. “I was just about to call you. Do you have the money?”

“Shut up and listen,” I said.

“Hey, c’mon—”

“Shut. Up. And. Listen.”

My heart was pounding, and my breath was coming fast. My fear was palpable.

You’re scaring yourself, my inner voice said.

“I’m listening,” Truhler said.

“When you called yesterday about the fifty thousand, you said that if the Joes didn’t get their money they would hurt Nina and Erica. If you lie to me I will kill you. I will hunt you down and I will fucking kill you.”

“Lie about what?”

“When you said that to me, that the Joes would hurt Nina and Erica, was that them talking, did they actually say that, or was it you saying it to make sure I would come up with the money?”

“McKenzie, I’m desperate here. You don’t know how desperate.”

“Tell me the truth, damn you.”

“It was me, okay? It was me. The Joes don’t know that I was married. They don’t know that I have a daughter. You think I’d tell them that? Give me some credit.”

“Truhler, you sonuvabitch. This is serious now. People are dying.”

“What?”

“I said it before, if Nina and Erica so much as break a fingernail, I will put you in the ground, I swear to God.”

“You may not believe me, McKenzie, but I’m telling the truth.”

My heart rate started slowing to normal. I believed Truhler. The way he answered corresponded with my psychiatrist ex-girlfriend’s lie detection theories.

“Okay,” I said.

“What’s going on, McKenzie?” Truhler asked. “Who died?”

I didn’t have the energy to explain it to him.

“Have you heard from them, the Joes?” I asked.

“No.”

“Call me when you do.”

“I will.”

I deactivated the phone and leaned back in my seat. I closed my eyes and sighed slowly, all the while thinking of Nina and Erica. They were safe, I told myself. I didn’t have to worry about them. That left Vicki Walsh. I had not met her, yet for some reason it was now very important to me that I protect her. I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps it was the photo that Erica had shown me, the one where she was pretending to pull Vicki’s roses-and-wheat-colored ponytail.

The sun had finally set, and despite my T-shirt, Kevlar vest, shirt, sweater, and leather jacket, I felt a chill in the air. I thought of Denny Marcus and shivered even more. I heard myself quoting W. H. Auden to myself—apparently I had learned a lot in that long-ago poetry class:

What instruments we have agree

the day of his death was a dark cold day …

“That poor kid,” I said aloud.

My prepaid cell phone rang, and I answered it without thinking much about it.

“This is McKenzie,” I said.

“This is Vicki Walsh,” a woman’s voice told me.