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

“How long have you owned the car?”

“Four years.”

Rask spread his hands in a do-you-get-it gesture.

“That’s not evidence of murder, of course, but it was enough for me to expand the investigation,” he said. “Starting with the kids. I couldn’t place Charles and Porter in Chicago the night of the disappearance, but I could early the next morning. It’s an awfully long drive from there to here and then back again. There was no evidence that Jenna had ever left the house after she came home from school. We checked the phones and found that she had made one call to her aunt Mary Ann Sohm in Shell Lake, Wisconsin, that had lasted about five minutes. We interviewed both parties separately and they agreed—Jenna had called because she was worried when her father failed to come home from work. Her aunt told her not to worry, that he would turn up; he always did.

“Next we interviewed the people who worked for him. At first we got the usual answers, especially from the men—he was a nice guy, a demanding but fair boss, and so on and so forth. The more we pressed though—it turned out that he was a lying sonuvabitch who had been abusing his female employees for years, especially the young, single, and vulnerable women; blackmailing them, forcing them to exchange sexual favors for their jobs.”

“How many?”

Rask held up four fingers.

“That’s the number that would talk to us on the record,” he said. “Who knows how many more were keeping quiet because of fear or embarrassment or I don’t know what. Who knows how many more had been abused who were no longer working there?”

Shipman thought—Anna Theresa Chastain? Was she one of them? Is this what McKenzie meant when he wrote “Dave isn’t going to like this”?

“No one said anything?” she asked aloud.

“This was long before the hashtag MeToo Movement, Detective. Back in those days, women were rarely believed when they accused a man who wasn’t a stranger of sexual assault, rarely taken seriously unless there was plenty of physical evidence, like strangulation marks on their throats. Even then it was always their fault because of the way they were dressed or because they had a drink in a bar or because—ah. You know the story. Us.” Rask tapped his chest. “Law enforcement. We had a lot to do with that, too, God forgive us. It wasn’t just us though. It was the politicians, the entertainment industry, the porn industry; it was—when King first started preying on his female employees back in the seventies, people like Phyllis Schlafly were working to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, saying things like ‘sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.’”

“I don’t care about the circumstances,” Shipman said. “The women should have done something.”

“Not everyone gets to carry a gun, Detective. In any case, I believe that someone did do something. A woman. Or perhaps her husband or boyfriend, father, brother, cousin. I think Gerald King was executed by one of his vics or someone close to one of his vics and his body was disposed of, probably in Lake Superior.”

“Why Superior, though? There are ten thousand lakes in Minnesota.”

“McKenzie asked the same question, only he said there were 11,842 lakes in Minnesota.”

“Leave it to him to know the exact number. Still, why not one of the 11,842 lakes? Or dump his body in the Mississippi River? Or the Minnesota? Or the St. Croix? Or bury him in one of our—what is it—fifty-nine state forests? Why drive two hundred and thirty-five miles to Red Cliff, Wisconsin? And why Red Cliff? Superior is a big fricking lake. You could toss his body anywhere.”

“I don’t know,” Rask said. “If I did, I would have closed King’s case twenty years ago. That’s what I told McKenzie. I also told him that I didn’t particularly care one way or the other. Not then and not now. I know I’m supposed to care. Care deeply. You can’t choose the victim; one of the first things they teach you at the academy. The law works for everybody or it doesn’t work for anybody. But of all the murders I caught and haven’t solved—I promise I don’t lose sleep over this one.”

“What about the King kids? What did they do when Daddy didn’t come home?”

“Nothing. Here in Minnesota, a missing person is considered alive and well. It’s only after the person is missing for a continuous period of four years that he will be presumed dead and probate can begin. So, for four years the King children continued to live as if their father was still alive; as if he’d walk back in through the front door at any moment. Porter and Charles moved back to the Cities; both enrolled at the University of Minnesota. They lived in their house in Linden Hills with their sister Jenna, went to school, paid the bills—they had access to the old man’s accounts and apparently they found a man to run Gerald’s business as if Gerald was on vacation, paying the kids their fair share of the profits as they went along. After four years, a judge declared Gerald dead and they finally collected their inheritance, sold the business, and moved on from there.”

“From what I’ve read, they seemed to have done pretty well for themselves,” Shipman said.

“Except now Charles King is missing.”

Victoria Dunston was lying on her bed and reading a textbook when she heard a knock on her bedroom door. The door opened and her sister stepped inside without waiting for a reply.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

Katherine crawled onto the double bed and sprawled alongside Victoria.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“Then eat.”

“I better wait for dinner. You know Mom.”

Victoria did know her mother and knew that she had never once objected when her daughters grabbed an apple or banana or a handful of grapes when they came home from school. Cookies and chocolate bars, however, were a different matter. She glanced at her watch. It was a good two