What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright (most read books txt) 📗

“She owes him a favor,” Schroeder said. “For saving her life.”

Another one, Nina thought, but didn’t say.

“Not that big of a favor,” she said aloud.

Schroeder merely shrugged.

“There’s nothing I can give you,” Nina said. “McKenzie’s computer and his notes, his phone—I turned all of that over to Bobby.”

“He was doing a favor for someone, wasn’t he?”

“A guy McKenzie played hockey with named Dave Deese.”

“What favor?”

“It was personal. Something to do with Dave’s DNA and the people he’s related to. I don’t have any details. I didn’t even know that much until last night.”

“Where does Deese live?”

“St. Paul. He has a business. Deese, Inc. That’s all I know.”

“That’s all I need.”

“Greg, tell Riley not to do this.”

“Do what?”

“You know what.”

“Honestly, Nina, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Shipman was troubled by the video of the blonde. She watched it three more times after she returned to her desk in the Griffin Building and it still didn’t make sense to her. She wrote notes to herself on a yellow legal pad.

Was the message meant to lure McKenzie to RT’s Basement?

Envelope was not signed.

Was the note signed?

How else would McKenzie know who sent it?

Shipman grabbed her landline and called the security desk at my building. Jones answered, although she didn’t know that at the time. Like me, she had a hard time telling the guards apart.

“When McKenzie came down to get the message, did he ask who left it for him?” Shipman asked.

“Huh?”

“Let’s not start that again.”

“Yes, Detective,” Jones said. “He did.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just a sec.”

Jones must have covered the mouth of the phone because Shipman couldn’t hear what was being said. After a few moments, Jones started speaking again.

“After McKenzie read the note he asked, ‘Who sent it? Did you get a name?’ And we said we did. We said it was delivered by a small woman with short blond hair who said her name was Elliot. Like we told you.”

“Thank you.”

Shipman went back to her notes, crossing out the last two and rewrote them.

The note was not signed. If it had been signed, McKenzie would not have asked security who sent it.

Security told McKenzie small woman with blond hair delivered note.

The blonde said her name was Elliot, but that was an afterthought. She hadn’t intended to leave her name.

Is it possible sender was smart enough to know that cell phone or landline or email could be captured and traced; yet not sophisticated enough to use a burner phone?

Is it possible she was too dim-witted to realize that whoever delivered the message would be filmed by condo security cameras? That guards would ask for a name?

Shipman understood, of course, that it could have happened exactly that way. She knew what Bobby knew and I knew and the vast majority of people working in law enforcement knew; that most criminals were pretty dumb. That’s why they were criminals. Yet this didn’t seem dumb to her. It seemed deliberate, like the blonde was meant to be seen by the cameras.

Something else nagged at her.

If the note was unsigned, how could the sender be sure McKenzie knew who sent it without leaving a name?

Was McKenzie expecting a note?

Shipman crossed out the last line. She told herself that if I had been expecting a message telling me where to meet someone at eight P.M., I wouldn’t have made a date with Nina Truhler for seven P.M. Shipman continued writing.

If sender had wanted to remain anonymous, why give her name when asked? Did she panic and simply say the first thing that came to her mind?

Shipman circled the last sentence several times and picked up her phone. She called the SPPD impound lot located just south of Holman Field, the airport along the Mississippi River that served downtown St. Paul, and told the man who answered what she needed. He said he’d call right back.

Shipman set her notes aside, slid the flash drive into her computer, and resumed translating and interpreting my notes.

What happened next.

MONDAY, MAY 18 (EVENING)

Normally, it would have taken me thirty-five minutes to drive home from Northfield—I have a get-out-of-speeding-tickets-free card after all. Only by the time I reached it, the Twin Cities was in full-blown rush-hour mode so it took me nearly double that time. Along the way I thought about Elliot. Was she really the young woman with the ponytail as I suspected or was I merely being overly suspicious? I’ve been accused of that before. Still, I felt something wasn’t quite right. Blonde or brunette, Elliot seemed more interested in what I could do for her family than what she could do for me. That’s why I decided not to give her the benefit of the doubt and wait for someone to call.

Instead, the moment I returned to my condominium I sat down at my computer and Googled “Elliot Carleton College.” I was given a whopping twenty-seven results. After eliminating all of the last names, I was left with six first names.

I went to Carleton’s website and clicked on the “directory” link, but it refused to grant me access to student information unless I had an account with the school. It did, however, reveal names of its faculty and staff—Elliot Kohn was an administrative assistant and Elliot Prall was an instructor of both German and Russian languages.

I continued surfing and discovered that Elliot Moua had received a “Congratulations” on Facebook from the Carleton College Mathematics and Statistics Department for his paper “Graphical Inference with Convolutional Neural Networks,” which received an honorable mention in the Undergraduate Statistics Research Competition sponsored by the American Statistical Association and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics. Good for him.

Elliot James had a LinkedIn page, even though he wouldn’t graduate for another two years, that he used to help promote his summer job tutoring college athletes in computer science and mathematics.

Elliot Robey, also a woman, was named Female Athlete of the Week in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference for winning six first-place titles—four individual and two relays—at