Among the forty were sixteen women and among those was—
Jenna King, 31, president of Social King, Inc., the fast-growing start-up that helps companies large and small actively manage their social media presence across multiple sites. Headquartered in St. Paul, she launched her firm with only $10,000 in funding loaned to her by her brother Porter. King admits to being an overachiever. She double-majored and double-minored in business subjects at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. She has attended executive management training at the Aspen Institute, the Menninger Foundation, and the Stanford School of Business Executive Leadership Program. When not working, she makes personal time for her daughter and the violin. King summed up her business style thus: “Never stay still. Always keep moving forward. Patience is a virtue and one that I am sorely lacking.”
What made me stop and stare were five separate lines. The first—headquartered in St. Paul. Emma attended high school in St. Paul. The second—She double-majored and double-minored in business subjects at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Was it possible that her daughter attended Mom’s alma mater? The third—she makes personal time for her daughter and the violin. But not husband. Four—Jenna King, 31. The article was published six years ago, which would make Jennifer thirty-seven years old today. Emma was twenty. Which meant Jenna was only sixteen or seventeen when Emma was born. That would explain why there was no husband mentioned. Emma was the result of a teenage pregnancy. Which would also explain the name. King is Jenna’s name; that’s what she gave Emma instead of a father. Which would make Jenna an impressive woman, I told myself, excelling in school, starting a business, and raising a child while barely more than a child herself.
If, my inner voice reminded me, this particular Jenna King was Emma’s mother.
There were just too many coincidences to blow off. Unfortunately, the article had been published half a dozen years ago and did not include a photograph. I kept searching and found only one other related story, and that was three brief paragraphs appearing in the business section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune announcing that a large technology firm located in Seattle had bought St. Paul–based Social King, Inc. for $12,621,000, a very specific number, I thought, wondering how they came up with it. That was two years ago. Since then, nothing. No more newspaper or magazine articles. No Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Tinder, Reddit, Snapchat; no Skype. I had the presence of mind to access the website of the Minnesota Judicial Branch which allowed me to search through most of the court records in the State of Minnesota Court Information System. No Jenna King in Orono or St. Paul had ever received so much as a parking ticket, or was involved in a civil, family, and probate case, or had a judgment filed against her.
Again, I stopped and went “Hmm…”
For a woman of her age and background to be nearly erased from the internet required effort.
Which brought me to the fifth line in the profile that fired my imagination—“her brother Porter.”
“Porter King,” I said aloud.
I Googled the name. Unlike his sister, Porter was everywhere. Mostly, though, his name popped up in his capacity as director of marketing for KTech, Inc., a Golden Valley tech company that provided “practical artificial intelligence” to the business world. The company’s website claimed KTech “unifies problem solving, learning, and memory capacity” with its reasoning engines and humanlike memory systems.
Okay, this is where I became distracted. Instead of sticking with the problem at hand, I started reading about the company. Basically, KTech’s mission in life was to eliminate the biggest drawback of using artificial intelligence—for all of its advantages, AI simply cannot emulate the creativity and reasoning ability of the human brain. An example that was used, someone says “I dropped a lead weight on top of a glass table and it shattered.” The human brain would know immediately that it was the glass that shattered and not the lead weight because we understand the world we live in and how things work. AI would not. It only knows what it’s taught and who’s going to teach an AI that lead is harder than glass? Another example: “I’ll be done in a second.” Because we also understand how language is used, most people would know that in this case “a second” meant “very soon”; that it wasn’t supposed to indicate a precise measurement of time. An AI unit would take the phrase literally.
KTech, though, promised its clients to provide AI and automation software that would overcome this confusion. It even promised the automotive industry that it would not only teach driverless vehicles the rules of the road, but the unwritten rules as well, such as staying in the right-hand lane on the freeway when driving at the posted speed limit.
I didn’t know if I believed them or not, but somebody surely must have because KTech was valued at $8.1 billion according to Twin Cities Business. Or not. Which brought me back to Porter King.
According to TCB:
KTech lost 5.2 percent of its stock price on the second day of volatile trading as investors reacted to the unexpected absence of Charles King, the company’s founder and CEO, at the company’s annual meeting Tuesday.
KTech directors and executive staff scrambled Thursday to put concerned investors and clients at ease.
“The man has a bad case of the flu, ” said King’s brother Porter King, Director of Marketing. “He’ll be fine in a few days. We know people were disappointed that he was unable to attend the annual meeting. They would have been more disappointed, though, if they had caught his virus.”
It was Porter King who had grabbed the mic at the meeting held Tuesday in the ballroom of the Marquette Hotel in downtown Minneapolis and at once beamed gung-ho optimism and bullishness for the company’s future. Yet his buoyant attitude and Paul Bunyon–like plaid shirt and jeans weren’t enough to calm the anxious crowd.
“People hear flu and they immediately think coronavirus,” said Martin Brandon, 42, a banker working in South St. Paul. “Charles King is more than just the CEO,” said Steve Zibell, 77, a retired lawyer from Shoreview. “He is KTech. I don’t know if this company has a plan to move forward without him or even if it could.”
“Wow,” I said aloud. Charles K. of Orono was Charles King, often referred to as King Charles by detractors and supporters alike. “He couldn’t possibly be Dave Deese’s half brother, could he?” I continued surfing and discovered that Charles King was a helluva businessman and not the least bit media-shy:
CHARLES KING ANNOUNCES PLAN TO SYNC OUR BRAINS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
CHARLES KING WARNS THAT ADVANCED AI WILL SOON MANIPULATE SOCIAL MEDIA
KING CHARLES’S SPAT WITH THE SEC IS OVER BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
THE BILLIONAIRE WHOSE COMPANY MAKES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS FOR VEHICLES AND ROCKETS BLASTS WHAT HE CALLS “DUMB TECHNOLOGY”
CHARLES KING’S TWEETS MATTER. JUST ASK THE SEC
KTECH’S MARKETING STRATEGY PROVES IT’S TIME FOR CEOS TO GET SOCIAL
KTECH IPO GENERATES OVER $6.3 BILLION FOR AI SOFTWARE COMPANY
CHARLES KING BUYS AI START-UP, CLAIMS “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ISN’T THE FUTURE, IT’S HERE ALREADY”
CHARLES KING SELLS REALMONEY TO ONLINE RETAIL GIANT
REALMONEY, CHARLES KING’S ONLINE PAYMENT SYSTEM, APPROACHES PAYPAL NUMBERS
MINNEAPOLIS INVESTMENT BANKER LAUNCHES MONEY TRANSFER SERVICE
King’s origin story was well documented. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in economics and went to work as an investment banker for one of the country’s more recognized financial institutions. He left the bank, evidently on good terms, because it gave him a loan to help establish RealMoney, a company that supported online money transfers and served as an electronic alternative to credit cards, checks, and money orders. RealMoney soon became big enough to cause PayPal to look over its shoulder if not challenge it outright. He then sold the company for the proverbial undisclosed amount of cash and bought Palmer, Inc., which he quickly renamed and turned into a leadi
ng player in the field of artificial intelligence.
Only not everything was sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows in King’s world. A week ago he missed a court-ordered meeting with members of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Last fall, King had sent out a barrage of tweets that implied that he was actively pursuing funding to take KTech private. He later said that he was merely venting his frustration with the company’s board of directors. The subsequent swings in KTech’s stock price, however, caused the SEC to object, claiming the tweets were false and misleading, that they transmitted inaccurate “material” information to KTech shareholders, and that King’s conduct was reckless. King settled the dispute by promising that in the future he would receive preapproval for any social posts about KTech from a committee that he would set up. Except, King never set up a committee and continued to fire off tweets. The SEC asked a judge to hold King in contempt. The judge scheduled a hearing to consider both sides of the argument. King didn’t show up and didn’t explain his absence. Add that to the fact that he was a no-show for his company’s annual meeting, and you have a business community wondering out loud if this was simply the flamboyant King being King or if it was symptomatic of a more serious problem.
Meanwhile, I now had certain knowledge that Charles was Dave Deese’s half sibling, along with Porter and Jenna King. I was sure Dave would be happy to hear it. Would the King family be happy to hear from him, though? Deese had done all right for himself. Only these guys were Silicon Valley millionaires, even if they didn’t actually live in Silicon Valley. Plus, they had a media presence. Lord knows what TMZ and the other gossipmongers would have to say if they heard about this. It was no wonder Elliot Sohm and Emma King were cautious about what they told me when we met.
’Course, I had yet to uncover a single reference to King’s parents; not a word identifying the King patriarch—Charles’s, Porter’s, Jenna’s, and apparently Dave’s father—and that, after all, was the favor I was asked to perform.
The obvious move would be to look up the birth records of Charles, Porter, and Jenna King. In Minnesota, anyone can get a noncertified copy of a public birth record of anyone else. It’ll cost you all of thirteen bucks. Except, to acquire the record—in person or by mail—I would need to provide answers to the specific questions found on a noncertified birth record application such as the first, middle, and last name of the child, the child’s date of birth, city of birth, and county of birth—this assuming that the child was actually born in Minnesota—plus the first, middle, and last name of the child’s parents including their last names before the marriage. In other words, to get the information that a birth certificate would give me, I needed to have the information that the birth certificate would give me.
I decided to make a phone call instead.
* * *
“What do you want?” H. B. Sutton asked instead of saying hello.
“A very good evening to you, too, H,” I said.
“It’s past business hours.”
Her voice was cold and hard and utterly humorless and hearing it always made me want to turn up the thermostat; this despite the fact that H. B. was actually a very pleasant woman and usually good company—once you got to know her. Or, rather, once she got to know you well enough to crack open a door in the wall she built around herself. I blamed her flower children parents for the wall. After knowing her for about three years, she reluctantly confided to me what the H. B. stood for.
“Heavenly-love Bambi,” she said.
“Lord Almighty.”
“Try growing up with a name like that, especially while wearing the peasant blouses and skirts my parents dressed me in, the flat sandals. Try going to high school or college; try getting a job.”
“Do you even speak to your parents?”
“Only during the summer solstice.”
Which partially explained why H. B. lived on a houseboat moored to a pier on the Mississippi River next to Harriet Island in St. Paul; why she worked alone as a personal financial advisor out of the houseboat.
I asked her once why she didn’t go to court and have her name changed.
“Would I be the same person if I had been named Elizabeth or Joan?” she asked.
“You certainly would have had to endure a lot less teasing; a lot less discrimination in school and the workplace.”
“Says the man whose parents named him after Mount Rushmore.”
“Hey, I was conceived in a motor lodge while they were taking a vacation in the Badlands,” I told her. “And it could have been worse. It could have been Deadwood.”
H. B. laughed at that, one of the few times I had heard her laugh. From that moment to this, we’ve been pals.
“Sorry for calling so late,” I told her. “I lost all track of time.”
“S’okay. What do you need?”
“Information.”
“About your investments?” H. B. asked. “You do read those quarterly statements I send you, right?”
“Just the bottom of the first page where it tells me that despite buying expensive condominiums and cars and pianos and such for the past ten years, I’m currently worth three times as much money as I started with. How is that even possible?”
“Because I’m very good at my job?”
“The rich get richer…”
“McKenzie, you called?”
I could picture the frown on her face. I knew that Elliot Sohm, with her dimples, big bright eyes, and easy smile would be cute when she was sixty because H. B., with her dimples, big bright eyes, and somewhat reluctant smile was cute at sixty. She was all of five two and one hundred and ten pounds dripping wet, not that I’ve ever seen her dripping wet.
“What do you know about Charles King?” I asked.
“Very charismatic, very smart. He knows crap about artificial intelligence technology but he sure knows how to hire people who do. Why? Are you concerned about his sudden disappearance, too?”
“Should I be?”
“You do have about five percent in his company.”
“I own five percent of an eight-point-one-billion-dollar tech firm?”
“No, McKenzie. You have about five percent of your net worth invested in an eight-point-one-billion-dollar tech firm.”
“Oh. That’s different. Wait a minute. I thought you were a big proponent of index funds.”
“Why do I bother? McKenzie, eighty-some percent of your account is in index funds; the rest is in active investing. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me. Read the damn statements. God, McKenzie.”
“About King. Not showing up for his company’s annual meeting and the hearing with the SEC last week, is that really a big thing?”
“King Charles is a lot like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates before them. They’re not only the CEOs of their companies; they’re the face of their companies. When something happens that puts them in the news and they’re always in the news—the day Jack Dorsey announced that he was moving to Africa, Square lost nearly five percent of its stock price. Twitter, that he helped build before Square, it lost money, too. So yeah, King being out of sight for the past few days has had a negative impact on KTech’s stock price. McKenzie…?”
“H.?”
“Are you involved in this somehow?”
“No.”
“Does this have something to do with one of your adventures, one of those favors that you do?”
“No, no, no. King’s name came up while I was looking into something else, is all.”
“Cuz, knowing what’s going on with King Charles, that’s the kind of insider information that could make someone very, very wealthy.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, if I learn anything, H., I’ll let you know.”
“Please,” she said.
“Before I go—what do you know about Jenna King?”
“Used to own Social King, a social media firm—apparently the Kings n
ame everything after themselves. Social King did all right for a while. I stayed away from it, though.”
“Why?”
“I heard that Charles was calling the shots for his sister. I wasn’t sure how true that was, but it was enough for me to keep my distance. I’m not a big fan of absentee landlords.”
“The company was eventually sold.”
“Yes, it was. Which was another thing, knowing a company is being built just so it could be sold to the highest bidder—it makes me question its valuations and projections.”
“I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about but I’m rich because of you so…”
“It’s nice to be appreciated, McKenzie.”
“Whatever happened to Jenna King, do you know?”
“I only know the rumors which, by the way, I always listen to but rarely act upon.”
“What rumors?”
“That she had personal issues.”
“Such as?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Haven’t you heard, McKenzie? We’re suffering through an opioid epidemic.”
* * *
Detective Jean Shipman’s phone rang. She tore herself away from my notes to answer the call. It was the man from the impound lot. He told her that he had searched my Jeep Cherokee and didn’t find any notes in unaddressed envelopes or otherwise. Shipman thanked him and noted the fact on her yellow legal pad.
She wrote down a second note as well and circled it several times.
Opioids?
EIGHT
Nina loved music almost as much as I did. Actually, she probably loved it more but hey, it’s not a competition.
She was sitting in her office, leaning back in her chair with eyes closed and listening to Mary Louise Knutson, a Minnesota pianist that she had hired many times in the past. Knutson was playing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” soft and low on her Call Me When You Get There CD and Nina was thinking that I had been right all those times I had told her that she should go back to playing piano professionally.
What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel Page 11
