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

Before she could say anything more, however, Sarah Frisco slammed down her phone, stood up from her desk and waved a sheet of notepaper in the air like it was the winning Powerball ticket.

“We have a shooting on the Green Line,” she said. “Uniforms have stopped the train at Dale and University. Two victims, condition unknown. Suspect in the wind.”

“You and Eddie,” Bobby said. “No, everybody.”

“Boss,” Shipman repeated.

“Not you. You’re already working a case. Tell me something interesting when I get back.”

Shipman watched her fellow investigators head for the door, all the while telling herself that Bobby was being unfair. She not only should be investigating the shooting, she should be lead.

“This is all McKenzie’s fault,” she shouted across the empty room.

Shipman returned to my notes.

What happened next was this.

I stared at the message I had sent to Marshall Sohm on my computer screen, thinking that wasn’t the smartest thing I had ever done. Honestly, all I wanted was a name. Something King. That’s it. Why was the family being so secretive about it? Were they afraid that once I—once Dave Deese—proved paternity I would sue for an inheritance?

Paternity.

Maternity.

“McKenzie, you’re an idiot.” I didn’t need my inner voice to tell me that. I said it out loud.

I returned to the website of the Spooner Advocate and clicked on the obituary link. Only this time instead of typing King, I typed Mary Ann Sohm. Bingo.

Mary Ann Sohm, 62, of Shell Lake, Wisconsin, died Tuesday, September 11, in the arms of her beloved husband Marshall, Sr. and surrounded by her family at the Shell Lake Health Care Center following a courageous battle with cancer. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 14, 1948, to Porter and Emma (Schullo) King. She was married in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 8, 1972 to Marshall Sohm, Sr. They moved to Shell Lake in 1984 where they farmed for years. Mary Ann will be dearly missed by all who knew her as a hardworking, loving, and dedicated wife and mother. She is survived by her children Marshall, Jr. (Krystal), Jerome (Tonya) and Cynthia (Rob); grandchildren Steven, Linda, Elliot, Martin, Robert, Olivia, and Debra. Mary Ann was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Gerald. Visitation will be from 4 to 7 P.M. on Thursday, Sept. 13, at the Skinner Funeral Home in Shell Lake with a prayer service at 6:30 P.M., and for one hour before the funeral on Friday at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Shell Lake, with Father John Piza officiating. Burial will be at Northern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery.

What made me smile was the line Mary Ann was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Gerald.

I immediately typed Gerald King into a search engine and discover that, damn, there were a lot of Gerald Kings in the world. I narrowed the search to Minnesota and then to Minneapolis. I searched everywhere that I could and discovered nothing that linked a single Gerald to the other Kings or to Mary Ann. One item that appeared in the Bayfield County Journal in May 2000 caught my eye, though:

CAR OF MISSING MINNEAPOLIS MAN DISCOVERED IN BUFFALO BAY MARINA PARKING LOT IN RED CLIFF

It was because of the headline and the 120-word story that followed that I eventually wrote four lines in my notes:

Chief Neville—Bayfield

LT Rask

IRS requires six-year limit on keeping record for closed business; sixteen years ago; can’t prove Anna worked there

Dave isn’t going to like this

Only, I didn’t provide further details. Shipman scrolled my notes up and down and couldn’t find an explanation for what I had written. She actually yelled at her computer screen. “What? You write precise details for one thing but not the other?”

The reason I didn’t write expansive notes—and again, you need to remember I was writing them for myself and not for someone like Shipman to read—was because I was hungry. I was also a little bored. A computer is an astonishing tool. Certainly it’s a more efficient and reliable source of intel than going to courthouses and searching records or visiting the morgues of daily and weekly newspapers and looking up old stories on microfiche. Only I had been staring at my own PC for most of the morning and my neck and shoulders ached and my head throbbed and my leg twitched from inactivity. So I wrote what I wrote. I knew exactly what my notes meant and if Shipman didn’t, well she could just follow my footsteps. I mean, do your job, woman!

Which she did.

A quick computer search told Detective Shipman that “Chief Neville—Bayfield” referred to Chief Jeremy Neville who supervised the tiny police department in the city of Bayfield, a thriving tourist town located on the south shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin. She called the number she found. The woman who answered directed her call to the chief. Shipman identified herself and explained why she was calling.

“Is McKenzie going to be all right?” the chief asked.

“I don’t know. The last I heard he was still in a coma.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I like McKenzie. He did me a favor when he was up here a couple years ago. It doesn’t surprise me that he got himself shot, though. We hadn’t had a serious crime up here in decades. He arrived and the bullets started flying everywhere. It was very disconcerting.”

“My information, he called you Tuesday,” Shipman said.

“Yes, about a twenty-year-old cold. It wasn’t even ours.”

“Can you tell me…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twenty years ago, twenty-one actually, the department received a call—I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Houghton, Michigan. According to the records that I accessed for McKenzie, the department received a call that a car had been abandoned in a marina parking lot for over three weeks. The marina is located in Red Cliff, an unincorporated town seven miles north of us. We provided service to Red Cliff back then. Now, you need to remember that it was a marina. A vehicle