Broken Ice--A Novel Page 14

  “You’re shittin’ me, right?”

  “I use the internet. I have no idea how it works.”

  “VPN, dude. You can make it look like you’re anywhere.” The table of Southwest High kids emptied behind me. “Hey, I should get to school. I’ll text you if I find out anything else that’s worth some money. Thanks for the hot chocolate and stuff.”

  Ernesto Cuellar got up and disappeared into the pile of kids. My favorite barista, sporting pink and yellow hair, dropped a napkin on my table. It said Margaret Glaspy.

  21

  I texted Jameson White that I needed more time. He said he had all day and so did the bacteria in my shoulder, so I should quit dillydallying and get shit done. Half an hour later, I sat across from Minneapolis PD Inspector Gabriella Núñez in her first precinct office. She’d let her black hair grow since I’d last seen her, which thickened the French braid behind her head. Her big, round black eyes had no creases around them. She had just turned thirty-nine but looked twenty-nine, probably because she’d never married, had no kids, and her parents and siblings lived in San Diego. She ran ten miles every morning regardless of what Minnesota’s weather had to say and ate a hamburger and fries for every lunch.

  Gabriella Núñez kept her office as clean and neat as her life. Simple furniture with straight lines. Nothing on her desk but a computer terminal and phone. A dozen pictures and accolades hung on the walls. OCD, if pointed in the right direction, can be a good thing.

  “Nice digs,” I said. “One of us has come a long way.”

  “I had lunch with Ellegaard last month. I saw your offices. City Center. Administrative assistant. Junior investigator. You’re doing okay.” She stood. “I want to show you something.” She went to the wall and liberated a framed photograph from its hook and handed it to me. Thirty-two Minneapolis Police cadets taking their oath. Black pants. Blue shirts. White gloves. Ellegaard stood in the back row. Gabriella and I stood in the front row. I looked twelve years old.

  Gabriella smiled. She didn’t smile often, but when she did, you had to squint. She said, “Seen that lately?”

  “No. Mine’s in a box somewhere.”

  “You and Ellie should hang one in the reception area of your office.” I handed it back to her, she returned it to its hook then straightened it. “You ever wonder what would have happened if the mayor hadn’t laid us off right after we graduated?”

  “I know what would have happened. You’d have bossed me around the next seventeen years.”

  “Yeah, I would have.” She sat behind her desk. “So what’s so urgent?”

  “I have reason to believe there’s a Minneapolis kid who’s in contact with Linnea Engstrom. He lives by Powderhorn Park.” I didn’t need to catch her up on the case or why I was in a sling. She’d heard what happened. Word spreads fast in the biggest small town in the world.

  “Why do you think the kid knows where she is?”

  I told her about my run-in with Ernesto Cuellar yesterday and our friendly breakfast this morning.

  “Do you think this Joaquin Maeda is holding Linnea against her will?”

  “No. But I’d still like to find her.”

  “Do you think Linnea’s in danger?”

  “No idea. Her father was murdered yesterday. Same kind of arrow that stuck me. All I know is Joaquin’s message to me was to stop looking for Linnea and that she was okay.”

  “So how can I help?”

  “You can tell me what Miguel Maeda did to get himself deported.”

  Gabriella wasn’t smiling now. She shook her head then logged on to her workstation. The keyboard clicked. The blue-white screen danced in her dark eyes. She exhaled something unpleasant, then said, “Tagging.”

  “What?”

  “Miguel Maeda was arrested for tagging. It fell under Gang Task Force, and if you’re not a citizen, that’s an automatic ticket home.”

  “For tagging?”

  “He was caught with known gang members. There’s no leeway in that situation.”

  “What about his cousin Joaquin Maeda? Does he have a record?”

  Gabriella’s fingers drummed the keyboard. “He’s been picked up a few times. A couple of curfew violations and a loitering. One shoplifting charge, but it was dropped. Not bad for a kid in that neighborhood.”

  “Can you send a uniform to press Joaquin? See if he knows where Linnea is?”

  Gabriella looked at me hard. “Listen, Shap. We’ve worked our asses off building police goodwill in that neighborhood. All the problems we have in North Minneapolis, we don’t want to start that with the Latinos.”

  “You won’t even press a kid?”

  Gabriella Núñez gave me a did you seriously just ask me that stare. She would be the next chief of police, not because she played the game well, but because she was that good of a cop. It was not my opinion but common knowledge. She said, “If we press Joaquin Maeda he’ll know something’s up and go deep underground. That’ll make your job a hell of a lot harder if not impossible. St. Paul PD will press him if you ask them to, but I wouldn’t.”

  She was right, of course.

  “I know you’ll do whatever you want, Shap. But don’t make trouble in a neighborhood that doesn’t want it. Kids like Ernesto Cuellar, he’s an example of all the good that can happen when families and school and police and community programs and churches work together. So whatever you do, leave it as you found it. Pack out what you packed in.”

  She saw I understood then leaned forward and almost whispered, “There’s a reason you’re not a cop, Nils. Do what you do best. You’ll get your answers. Just be careful and keep your mouth shut. You lose your license and you’ll take Ellie with you.”

  Joaquin Maeda wasn’t the only one sending coded messages. Gabriella Núñez just told me to break the rules. If I got caught, she wouldn’t help me. I could live with that. I would not involve Ellegaard. I would not even tell Ellegaard. He couldn’t have a Stone Arch Investigations principal going rogue. Leaning hard on Ernesto Cuellar was my last idea, but I let it go. The kid had a future. No matter how slim the risk, involving him could jeopardize that future. I wouldn’t even ask Ernesto for Joaquin’s address.

  I was on my own. It felt like old times.

  Jameson White met me at the coat factory. He cleaned my wound and counted my antibiotics and lectured me about not missing any more appointments with him. Micaela had taken him off the market for two weeks. I was his sole responsibility, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who let shit slide. I promised we’d return to three changes a day and shook his giant hand when he left.

  I created a fake Instagram account under the name of Selena Espinoza using a young woman’s likeness I screen-grabbed from a website that made me click a box confirming I was eighteen or over. Then the fictitious Selena Espinoza followed Joaquin Maeda on Instagram. That morning, he’d posted a Call of Duty WWII cover with four tiny bullet holes in the Y.

  I went to Best Buy and bought a new voice-activated digital recorder. It was smaller than a pack of gum and its battery lasted longer than a going-out-of-business sale at a Persian rug store. It wasn’t hard to find Joaquin Maeda’s address online. The only challenge would be getting into the house during broad daylight with little time to plan. Joaquin should be in school, but I had no idea about parents, grandparents, siblings, or dogs.

  I stopped at Settergren’s Hardware in Linden Hills, said hello to my favorite Münsterländers, who greeted me with wagging tails and leaning bodies while I listened to the storeowner tell me people and tulips were confused by the warm weather. Both were out in their yards despite the March blizzard that was sure to come. He wasn’t putting away the shovels anytime soon.

  I walked out of the hardware store and looked each way down Forty-Third Street. I was an easy target if an archer wanted to make me one. If the police had any idea who that archer was, I would have disappeared until they caught the person. Even if Gary Kozjek was the shooter, I had no idea if he’d been taken into custody. But without
knowing who might be hunting me, my options were to hide or to live my life. It wasn’t a hard choice.

  I returned to the coat factory and changed into a pair of navy Dickies work pants with a matching blue shirt featuring an embroidered patch over the left pocket. The patch, in a cursive script, read DAVE. I topped it off with my navy baseball cap and a pair of wire-framed dummy eyeglasses. I whipped up a few brochures and business cards on my MacBook then headed back out.

  Joaquin Maeda lived on Tenth Avenue South in a sage-green, two-story home so narrow it only had one window on each floor facing the street. The front yard was dormant brown and not made of grass but of mowed-down weeds. It measured about ten by ten feet square. A few broken concrete steps, stained with rust from the rebar inside, led up to a weathered aluminum storm. I pressed the doorbell and heard a ring from 1930. A dog barked, and a woman between fifty and seventy answered the door. She wore a floral print dress of pastel flowers on a beige field over her heavy, shapeless body. Her gray hair was pulled back tight. She peered at me over half-moon readers.

  “Yes?” she said in a heavy Spanish accent.

  “Good morning. My name is Dave Peterson. I work for Minneapolis Radon Control. We specialize in radon detection and mitigation.” I tried to sound as if I’d memorized a sales pitch. “As I’m sure you know, radon is a problem in many Minneapolis basements, which can act like a vacuum and suck radon gas from the surrounding soil into the house through cracks in the foundation.” I held up the brochure. She opened the storm door and took it. The dog barked again. She looked over the brochure and the business card.

  “What do you want?”

  “I would like to place this radon detection kit in your basement.” I showed her the kit I’d purchased at Settegren’s Hardware. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll set up the kit in your basement. It has to sit there for several hours, then I’ll pick it up later this evening.”

  “How much?”

  “There is no expense to the homeowner.”

  “Free?”

  “Yes. Detection is free. If we find radon, we work with the city and your insurance company to pay for mitigation, which involves installing a pump under your foundation to relieve the pressure so gas no longer enters the home. I’m sure you’re well aware of how long-term exposure to radon increases risk of lung cancer. I just spoke to the Gomez family next door and put a kit in their basement.”

  Everything I said was true except my name wasn’t Dave Peterson, I didn’t work for Minneapolis Radon Control—that company doesn’t exist—nor would any insurance company or city be paying for mitigation if the kit detected the radioactive gas. The woman looked at the brochure, then looked at me. I have a face people trust. The Gomezes next door trusted it. So do TSA agents and the Costco employees who compare your receipt to the contents of your cart. They never even look under my hay-bale-size package of paper towels. They just make a checkmark on my receipt and let me go. They all trust a boyish-looking white guy with no tattoos or piercings who serves a big pile of polite garnished with a smile. Having one arm in a sling didn’t hurt either.

  “Okay,” said the woman. She opened the door, and I stepped into a tiny foyer.

  The Maeda house was neat and clean and comfortable-looking. As the exterior suggested, it was only one room thick. There was a coat closet to my right and the living room straight ahead and what I assumed was the kitchen behind that. Maybe a family room, as well. It occurred to me that the Maeda household might not be like every other house I knew with teenagers. The video game console might not be in the basement. It might be in the back den or in Joaquin’s bedroom, wherever that was. I had to improvise a contingency plan.

  I shook her hand. “Dave Peterson. Nice to meet you.”

  “Chrissia Maeda.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Chrissia. Would you like to come downstairs and watch me set up the kit?”

  “It’s okay. No thank you.”

  “Depending on the layout downstairs, I may leave a few tiny test buttons upstairs. I’ll let you know if that’s the case.”

  “Okay.”

  “This will only take five minutes. I’ll be right up.”

  “Okay.” She smiled.

  I found the basement stairs off the kitchen and descended the narrow, steep staircase. It was a typical Minneapolis old home basement. Nine-by-nine-inch linoleum tiles, ancient and backed with asbestos but harmless as long as they stayed glued to the cement floor. Cinder block walls painted yellow. A low open ceiling, not more than seven feet high with exposed floor joists riddled with corrugated conduit. And payday, a ratty afghan-covered couch facing a sixty-inch flat-screen on an IKEA TV bench holding an Xbox, game controllers, and a Bluetooth headset, all charging and ready for action.

  I set the kit on the TV bench—it would create a nice diversion—then removed the recorder from my pocket, covered its LED lights with electrical tape, turned it on, and looked for a place to hide it. The braces in the floor joists overhead were wide enough. I turned on the recorder, placed it atop a brace, sat on the couch, and said, “Hey, Mickey. I’m in a house on Tenth Street. I’ll be over as soon as I can.” I retrieved the recorder and listened. My voice sounded clear. I rehid the recorder in the ceiling, went back upstairs, and told Chrissia Maeda everything was set and I’d be back after dinner.

  22

  I got in the car and tuned the radio to WCCO in time to catch the top-of-the-hour headlines. No mention of Gary Kozjek. Something wasn’t right.

  Leah Stanley called and said a man was waiting for me at the office. I had nothing to do, so I stopped by. I saw him from the corridor through the glass door. Raynard Haas sat in the reception area wearing black pants tucked into knee-high black boots and a black jacket festooned with buckles and zippers. His round, cobalt-blue plastic frames glowed under the fluorescent overheads. A thick portfolio rested on the floor. I wondered why he didn’t leave it in the car. Maybe he thought his work was too precious to be left alone. I entered, and he said, “Thank you, Mr. Shapiro, for coming in to see me.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Haas?”

  “I’m worried about Ben.”

  “My office?”

  “Please.”

  I hadn’t been in my actual office in weeks. Someone kept it clean and someone else had stolen my Nerfoop, probably Ellegaard trying to spit-shine our corporate image. I sat behind my desk. The chair was too low. My desk came up to my chest. I tried to adjust it, but it wouldn’t budge. I suspected Leah Stanley of swapping chairs. Raynard Haas sat in the chair across from me, but he was so short we looked at each other eye to eye.

  I said, “I would imagine Ben’s going through a bit of hell right now.”

  “Yes,” said Raynard. “How could he not be? His mother was killed.”

  “And you think there’s some way I can help?”

  “That’s my hope. Whatever Ben says about Haley Housh, I think her death hit him pretty hard. He’d convinced himself he didn’t love her, that their relationship was just physical. But he’s a sensitive kid. I think he felt it more than he’d like to admit.”

  “Okay…”

  “Then adding his mother’s death on top of that … I’m worried about Ben’s ability to cope. He may have to take some time away from school, which could jeopardize his acceptance to Stanford.”

  “I doubt that, considering the circumstances. But even so, would that be the worst thing in the world?”

  “No, of course not. The worst thing in the world has already happened. Ben lost his mother. They were very close.”

  He picked up the Kevin Garnett bobblehead from my desk and turned it in his white, soft hands—his nails and cuticles were flawless. I pictured Raynard Haas in a nail salon, his feet soaking in a tub while he regaled the manicurist with the dramatic events of his week. “I’m feeling a bit helpless when it comes to comforting Ben. I guess I’m just hoping to hear you have some leads in the case. I could relay that to him, and maybe he’d feel like there’s some l
ogic in the world, after all. That maybe something is being done to right the wrongs.”

  “Which case are you talking about?”

  He looked at me, puzzled, as if I’d just asked the most stupid question in the history of Mankind. “The double murder in my ex-wife’s house.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Haas. I’m not working on that case. You’d have to talk to Woodbury Police.”

  “But it’s tied to the Linnea Engstrom case. Her father was killed. Didn’t the Engstroms hire you to help find her?”

  “I am looking for Linnea Engstrom, but I don’t know if her disappearance is connected to the murders on Crestmoor Bay. And I’m sorry, but whatever I’ve learned about that I’m not able to share.”

  “Huh,” he said. “I just assumed…” He trailed off and rubbed his bald head. “You know, I’m a guy from a small town in Northern Wisconsin. I know a little bit about architecture and design, but I guess I’m still naive when it comes to how the world works.”

  “I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself. Unless you’d worked with a private investigator, you wouldn’t know how much we value discretion.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You really think catching the person who killed Winnie would help Ben’s emotional state?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m just a dad trying to help his kid. Grasping at straws, really.”

  “Where’d you grow up in Northern Wisconsin?”

  “Hurley.”

  “I know it well.”

  “No one knows Hurley.”

  “Liberty Bell Chalet has the best pizza in the world.”

  He smiled. “There’s no close second. Just don’t ever say that to anyone from New York.”

  “My family’s right across the border in Bessemer.”

  “Yupers.” He smiled. “They’re good people.”

  “I wish I could help you, Raynard. But even if I do find Linnea Engstrom, I don’t know what good that’ll do Ben.”

  “You’re probably right. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I don’t know why I thought you’d be working on Winnie’s and Roger Engstrom’s murders. And I sure do hope you’re close to finding Linnea. That family doesn’t need another tragedy.” I said nothing. It got too quiet for too long. “Right, right,” said Raynard. “You can’t say anything. Didn’t mean to pry.”