Unidentified Woman #15

by David Housewright

  “Anything, McKenzie?” Bobby said. “Anything at all you can tell me?”

  I pretty much repeated everything his detective and the trooper had already told him.

  “In other words, you got nuthin’,” Bobby said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Bobby,” Nina called.

  “Nina?”

  “It was dark.”

  “I know it’s dark.”

  “No, no, I mean the color of the truck. It was dark. Black or dark blue. It was a Ram truck, too. I recognized the emblem on the tailgate.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Sorry, I didn’t get a license plate number.”

  Bobby looked at her with the expression of a man who was trying not to smile.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Okay. Lieutenant, would you be kind enough to send the camera footage to my office?”

  “Happy to.”

  “Thank you. Detective”—he rested a hand on the elbow of his fellow officer—“get down to Regions. Let me know about the girl’s condition. Let me know when they think we can talk to her.”

  “Sir.”

  Bobby returned to Nina’s side.

  “I bet you could use a ride home,” he told her.

  Nina nodded.

  “How ’bout me?” I asked.

  “You can come, too. Sit in the back. Try not to make any noise.”

  * * *

  Money can’t buy happiness, or so I’ve been told. On the other hand, it was because I had plenty of dough that I wasn’t particularly upset that my Audi was now a pile of rubble in the SPPD’s impound lot. Unlike most of the other drivers caught in the accident, I didn’t need to worry about replacing it. I didn’t have to wonder how I was going to get around until I did. I was concerned only with the inconvenience.

  The next morning, I kissed Nina good-bye, hopped into my backup car—a battered Jeep Cherokee—and drove to the lot located just south of Holman Field, the airport along the Mississippi that served downtown St. Paul. I had to produce two forms of ID just to inspect the vehicle, never mind removing contents or ransoming its freedom. I took several photographs of it from all sides with my smartphone and sent them to my insurance agent. Afterward, I called his office. A woman I knew as Theresa answered on the fifth ring, recited the name of the insurance agency, asked if I would hold, and then put me on hold before I could reply. She came back three minutes later and apologized.

  “It’s been crazy,” she said. “We get a lot of calls the first couple times it snows, people relearning how to drive in winter, you know? Today, though, the number of accidents—we only got four and a half inches, for goodness sake. You’d expect better from Minnesota drivers in January.”

  “About that. This is McKenzie, and my Audi…”

  “Hi, McKenzie.”

  “Hi, Theresa. Like I was saying…”

  “I was telling Pat the other day that we haven’t heard from you since, what is it, now? Four months? I said you were due.”

  “Yeah, yeah…”

  “What happened this time? Machine-gun fire?”

  “Considering the amount of business I’ve given you guys over the years…”

  “I’m not complaining. I just want to know. My kids have been asking for new McKenzie stories.”

  “This time it wasn’t my fault. I got caught in that pileup on I-94 last night.”

  “Please tell me that you didn’t cause it.”

  “Not exactly. Look, can I talk to Pat? I sent him some photos.”

  “He’s on another line, but you know what, I bet he’ll take your call.”

  Theresa put me on hold again. Thirty seconds later, Pat answered. His voice sounded tired.

  “Did you know that I have over a thousand clients?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “So why do I spend most of my time talking to you?”

  “Because we went to school together and you like me?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “I e-mailed some photos.”

  “Uh-huh … Hang on … I’m pulling them up … Oh, c’mon.”

  “Do you think it can be fixed?”

  “Your car? No, I don’t think it can be fixed. We’ll send an adjuster out to take a closer look, but geez, McKenzie, what did you do?”

  I explained. Pat sighed heavily.

  “This might become complicated if other drivers involved in the accident decide to blame you,” he said.

  “It’s not my fault. The cops said so.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you know where to download the forms. Be sure to get the case number from the police.”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “Way too often, if you ask me. You know, McKenzie, I have only about a dozen drivers who pay higher insurance premiums than you do.”

  “Gives me something to shoot for—the top ten.”

  “You might make it with this one. Two words, McKenzie, something to think about—mass transit.”

  “Always a pleasure talking to you, Pat.”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  I ended the call, just in time to receive a second one. I answered the way I always do. “McKenzie.”

  “Where are you?” Bobby Dunston asked.

  “St. Paul impound lot, why?”

  “Meet me at Regions. SICU.”

  “When?”

  He hung up without answering. I took that to mean “Right frickin’ now.”

  * * *

  The Surgical Intensive Care Unit was located on the third floor and was damn near impossible to reach by a visitor using Regions Hospital’s overly complicated elevator and corridor system. On the other hand—and I’m speaking from experience when I tell you this—if you come in through the emergency room, they can whisk you right up there.

  I talked my way past a nurse-receptionist and found Bobby leaning against a wall and looking down as if his shoes were the most interesting things he had seen in a long time. He was standing across from a recovery room. Beyond the sliding glass walls of the room I could see the figure of a woman lying on a bed, her head wrapped in white bandages, a cast extending from the elbow of one arm down far enough to enclose a couple of fingers. Cables attached her to a monitor; wavy red, green, and blue lines and ever-changing numbers kept track of her vital signs.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  Bobby pulled out a notebook. For most things he used his smartphone or one of those tablets. For others it was still paper and pen. He began reading.

  “Three broken ribs, two broken fingers, broken wrist, broken clavicle, broken scapula, one punctured lung, one bruised lung, blood in the chest cavity, they call that a hemothorax. Cracked spleen, fractured liver, dislocated kneecap, major road rash—abrasions over half her body; there’s gravel and bits of pavement imbedded in her skin. The big thing, though, she has a fractured skull. Some blood vessels ruptured. The bleeding put pressure on the brain. They had to drill holes to drain the blood and alleviate the pressure.”

  “Epidural hematoma,” I said.

  “The same thing happened to you a couple of years ago.”

  “I remember.”

  “Traumatic brain injury,” Bobby said. “The docs are concerned because they don’t know how extensive it is. Could be…”

  “Traumatic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus.”

  Bobby showed me the woman’s photo on his phone. Her face was puffy and pale, setting off the ghastly scrapes on her chin and forehead. Her blue eyes were open and staring at the camera, yet they seemed to be out of focus, as if she had no idea what she was looking at. My impression was that she had been very pretty once. I hoped she would be again.

  “Recognize her?” Bobby asked.

  “No. Should I?”

  “I don’t know. Should you?”

  “What are you thinking? That they dumped her in front of my car on purpose so I would be the one to run her over? Some kind of revenge thing?”

  “
Yeah, I thought about it. Have you?”

  “All night long. Listen, Bobby. I don’t know her, and I’m not involved in anything right now that would piss someone off.”

  “Take a good look.”

  I took Bobby’s phone, stared at the image for a few moments more. She bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Bobby’s younger daughter, Katie. I didn’t tell him that, though.

  “I don’t know her.” I returned the cell. “Who is she?”

  “Unidentified Woman Number Fifteen.”

  I that took to mean the police had been unable to put a name to her face despite running her fingerprints through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a database with over 100 million files including prints from people who served in the military or bought a gun in some states or worked a sensitive civilian job. A search through the National Crime Information Center’s missing persons files and the Minnesota Missing and Unidentified Persons Clearinghouse must have proved inconclusive as well.

  “Look at the bright side,” I said. “If she was in the morgue, instead of Unidentified Woman Number Fifteen, the toe tag would read ‘Jane Doe.’”

  “There is that.”

  “Someone must know her. Someone must miss her.”

  “Besides the three men who tossed her onto the freeway?”

  “I can only identify two of them as being men.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

  “Are you going to ask the media for help? Run her photo on the nightly news?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. McKenzie, why would they push her out of a speeding truck?”

  The obvious answer was to kill her, so that’s what I said.

  “Why not just shoot her in the back of the head, bury her in the snow? We wouldn’t find her body until spring if ever.”

  “They wanted to make it look like an accident.”

  “Better ways to do that. Besides, did they think no one would see them?”

  “They were pulling away from me at the time, so, yeah, maybe they did think that, the way the snow was falling. The guy just dropped the tailgate too soon. If the pickup hadn’t come up so close to my bumper in the first place, I doubt I would have paid any attention to it.”

  “Did they think the highway cameras wouldn’t see them?”

  “There are cameras everywhere—on the freeways, at street corners, in shopping malls, in front of stores and apartment buildings, gas stations. How often do you think about them?”

  “Not often.”

  “Bobby, are you asking these questions because you want me to answer them or are you just thinking out loud the way you do?”

  He didn’t say.

  “Anyway, when the girl comes to, you can ask her,” I said.

  “She regained consciousness before they wheeled her into surgery—the second surgery. She doesn’t remember a thing.”

  “People who suffer a head injury often don’t remember details of the accident that caused it. They call it traumatic amnesia.”

  “Just because you dated a psychiatrist back in the day doesn’t make you one. Besides, she didn’t just forget the accident, she forgot everything, and I mean everything, including her name.”

  “That sounds more serious.”

  Bobby gave me one of those looks.

  “Or not,” I added. “Listen, whatever it is, it’s probably just temporary. What do the doctors say?”

  “They say it’s probably just temporary—if she’s telling the truth.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “All I know is, she didn’t do what I would have done if I came to all busted up in a hospital emergency room, if I couldn’t remember who I was or how I got there. She didn’t panic. She didn’t scream for her mother or a doctor or a policeman or a superhero from the Marvel universe. She didn’t demand assistance or rail at her attackers or promise retribution. Instead, she accepted it all as if it was the natural order of things. As if she believed the world was a place where sooner or later they threw you off the back of a speeding pickup truck.”

  “Bobby, why am I here? Why are you telling me all this? You haven’t discussed an open case with me in years, not since I quit the cops.”

  “I might need a favor.”

  TWO

  Nina and I never argued when we were just sleeping together. There was the occasional spirited discussion concerning subjects like music and restaurant food and the use of the shootout to settle regular-season hockey games. For the most part, though, we got along extremely well—to the point where we would watch other couples bickering and shake our heads in bafflement. What is wrong with these people? we’d ask ourselves. Then we decided to live together and everything changed. Behavior that was inconsequential before suddenly became monumentally important. We started pointing fingers at each other, declaring this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad, our declarations based solely on personal preference. I quietly told friends that maybe we didn’t belong together after all, only to learn that she had told them the same thing.

  Bobby Dunston said to relax, said we were just going through a period of adjustment. We had both lived more or less alone for most of the past two decades, answering to no one, he reminded us, and we were set in our ways. Bobby’s wife, Shelby, on the other hand, decided to intervene—mostly on Nina’s behalf, which was aggravating. I had known her since college and was convinced that if I had been the one to spill a drink on her dress instead of Bobby, it’d be the two of us bickering.

  Our disagreements became acute when we started looking for a home. Nina lived in the out-of-the-way northeast St. Paul suburb of Mahtomedi, and we certainly weren’t going to move there. I had a house in much more convenient Falcon Heights, complete with a backyard pond that attracted all kinds of wildlife—ducks, wild turkey, the occasional deer. Yet that didn’t work for Nina, don’t ask me why. It soon became apparent that, given our conflicting demands, there wasn’t a suitable house, town house, condominium, apartment, or loft anywhere in all of the greater St. Paul area.

  Finally Nina told me she’d found a place, loaded me into her Lexus, and drove west. I told her this was unacceptable when we crossed the Mississippi River.

  “I will not live in Minneapolis,” I announced.

  Nina kept driving until she pulled up to an eight-floor glass and brick structure built to resemble a 1930s warehouse nestled between the northeast corner of downtown Minneapolis and the river. There was a convenience store, liquor store, pizza joint, and coffeehouse on the ground floor. Plus, it was within easy walking distance to several jazz clubs, restaurants, Orchestra Hall, a bunch of theaters including the Guthrie, the train, the Nicollet Mall, and the stadiums where the Vikings, Twins, and Timberwolves played ball—facts that Nina happily shared with me.

  “Sweetie, we’re just wasting time,” I said.

  “It won’t hurt to look,” she said.

  She must have arranged our visit ahead of time, because she guided me past the security desk without a word to the guards, over to a bank of elevators, and eventually to a seventh-floor condominium that she unlocked with a card key attached to a plastic tag that bore the name of the building.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I told her.

  I walked through the doorway. The entire north wall of the condo was made of tinted floor-to-ceiling glass with a dramatic view of the Mississippi River. If that wasn’t enough, there was a sliding glass door built into the wall that led to a balcony. I might have said, “Wow,” but I really don’t remember.

  The south wall featured floor-to-ceiling bookcases that turned at the east wall and followed it to a large brick fireplace. To the left of the fireplace was a door that led to a small guest bedroom with its own full bath. Against the west wall and elevated three steps above the living area was the most spectacular and elaborate kitchen I had ever seen, including a gas stove—it’s always better to cook with fire.

  Nina led me past the kitchen to a master bedroom that also featured fl
oor-to-ceiling windows. Adjacent to the bedroom was a huge walk-in closet complete with shelves and drawers. The closet led to a bathroom with double sinks and a glass-enclosed shower big enough for two people to play tag in. Beyond that there was a storage area with enough room to park a car.

  “Yeah, but sweetie, it’s Minneapolis,” I said.

  I followed Nina back to the living area, and she began pointing.

  “There’s a half bath and closet for guests on the other side of the kitchen. We can put a desk and computer over there and a dining room set over here and a sofa and chairs for a nice conversation pit near the glass and in the center of the room sofas and chairs facing the fireplace. A big-screen TV goes above the fireplace. Oh, we can put a grill on the balcony. I already measured; there’s plenty of room.”

  “Nina…”

  “There’s twenty-four-hour security; I know that’s important to you. There’s an underground garage, a full gymnasium on the second floor, a party room, and a garden on the roof.”

  “Nina, stop…”

  “I know you’ll like this. If we pool the money we’ll realize from selling our houses, we will not only be able to pay for the condo, but what’s left over we can put into an account that will pay our building fees for the next fifteen years.”

  “It’s beautiful, Nina. It really is. But, sweetie, I can’t live in Minneapolis.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m a St. Paul boy.”

  “Then why do you live in Falcon Heights?”

  “I told you, it was an accident. I thought I was buying a place in St. Paul. It wasn’t until I made an offer that I discovered the house was on the wrong side of the street, that I was actually moving to the suburbs.”

  “Why didn’t you withdraw the offer, then? Besides, that was almost seven years ago. You could have sold it after your father passed. You could have moved back to St. Paul. You didn’t.”

  “There’s no sense talking about it. I will not live in Minneapolis.”

  Nina smiled like she knew something that I didn’t and crossed the large living area until she was leaning against the bookcase. She folded her arms across her chest and smiled some more. I got the feeling that I had already lost the argument, yet I didn’t know why.