“I’ll see about booking a flight back home…”
“No, don’t do that.”
“I’ll use his credit card instead of yours.”
“McKenzie gave you a credit card?”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
“All this time while I’ve been thinking how fiscally responsible you were…”
“It was just before I went off to Tulane my freshman year. He gave me the card. He said he was in love with my mother but he wanted us to be friends, too. I asked him if he was trying to buy my affections. He said if they were for sale, sure, why not?”
“That jerk.”
“Depends on how you look at it. Mom…”
“No, Erica, listen. McKenzie’s going to be fine. They’ll probably bring him out of the coma before you even get to the New Orleans airport so hold off on buying a plane ticket. Besides, you have finals coming up…”
“Next week.”
“Hold off. I’ll talk to the doctor today and then we’ll know what’s going on. I’ll call you back then.”
“Mom…”
“It’s silly for you to come all the way up here, maybe compromise your studies, just to watch McKenzie walk out of the hospital.”
“Will he walk out of the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise,” Nina said.
Was that so hard? her inner voice asked.
Erica paused before responding.
“Okay, I’ll hold off until I hear from you. Mom, who shot him?”
“Who knows?”
Roger Hodapp knocked on the doorframe of the cubbyhole Bobby called an office on the second floor of the James S. Griffin Building and leaned against it, his arms folded, as if he had just dropped by to say hello. He was dressed as befitting a Deputy Chief of the St. Paul Police Department charged with overseeing the Major Crimes Division, which included Family and Sexual Violence, Property Crimes, Homicide and Robbery, Special Investigations, Gangs, Narcotics, and Vice—crisp white shirt and blue tie, matching blue slacks and blue jacket, a gold badge glimmering off his right pocket, bars recognizing his commendations for valor and merit pinned above his left, and a single gold star fixed to each shoulder. The sight caused Bobby to wonder who he was going to have lunch with that day.
“McKenzie,” Hodapp said. “Any news on his condition?”
“They put him in an induced coma to rest his heart and his brain”—Hodapp grinned at the word “brain”—“other than that, the doctor told his wife that he’s going to be fine.”
“Do we believe the doctor?”
“No reason not to,” Bobby said.
“I was the sergeant he called when he pulled the pin to take the price on Teachwell, remember? How long ago was that now? Ten years at least.”
“Yes, sir,” Bobby said.
“Back when we were both working out of Central.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember what I said at the time?”
“You said that you always knew McKenzie was a dumb ass.”
“Yet he’s been very helpful to us since he put on the cape and became Batman and no matter what I or anyone else thinks about his early retirement—he’s one of us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is the sixth shooting in St. Paul this month. Add that to the homicide up in Frogtown last week…”
“The suspect has already been arraigned.”
“And biker gang activity on the East Side last night. How’s the bouncer by the way?”
“Torn cornea. Both he and the bar owner have received threatening phone calls telling them not to cooperate with the police. They are cooperating, though, and so are a surprising number of the bar’s patrons. Apparently, starting a fight in the Haven was a serious breach of biker protocol. We’ve already identified three of the assailants, including the one who waved his piece in the air and threatened to shoot up the place.”
“My point being, the damn media has been calling it a crime wave. A columnist writing for the Pioneer Press this morning claimed the Saintly City was becoming Satan City.”
“Newspapers are declining; anything to build circulation.”
“It’s just that we don’t want it to look as if you are giving McKenzie’s shooting higher priority than all the others. You know what I mean by we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“’Course, what you do during your spare time … I don’t need to tell you any of this, though, do I? Not really why I came down here. I came down to tell you—put one of your people on the case. Don’t investigate it yourself. It’s like what they say about doctors treating family members or lawyers defending their loved ones. Sometimes their judgment gets clouded despite their best intentions. Bobby, I speak from personal experience. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand.”
“Good.”
Hodapp pushed himself upright and made to leave.
“Anything you need, you tell me,” he said.
“Thank you, Chief.”
“For what?”
Riley Brodin-Mulally wore prescription reading glasses even though she was only twenty-eight years old. She claimed that all the computer, tablet, and cell phone screens she had been forced to read off of in the past few years had trashed her eyesight. She had requested that her employees and business associates send her printed reports, but that had proved to be largely impractical although word had spread—if you want to get on the boss’s good side …
Riley was reading a printed report sent to her by the new director of Muehlenhaus Industries Agriculture Division when Mary Pat Brodin-Mulally walked into the dining room.
“More coffee?” Mary Pat asked.
“Thank you,” Riley said.
Mary Pat filled Riley’s mug before setting the coffeepot on a warmer mounted near the center of the dining-room table.
“What has you so apprehensive?” she asked.
“What makes you think I’m apprehensive?”
“The way your brow furrows when something bothers you.”
“We have far too many cows.”
Mary Pat sat across the table and started paging through the morning newspaper that a maid had left there for her to read. The brilliant green emerald set in a white gold band on the ring finger of her left hand gleamed under the chandelier.
“We?” she said.
Riley pointed at Mary Pat, pointed at herself, then waved her hand back and forth a few times, the emerald in her identical ring also catching the light.
“Yes, we,” she said. “This
