A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  Teachwell seemed confused. I repeated the order. He set the book carefully on the chair as he rose.

  “Turn around.” Teachwell hesitated. “Now.”

  The man turned.

  “Hands against the fireplace.”

  Teachwell did as he was told, extending his hands until the palms rested on the fireplace mantel. Without prompting, he moved his legs back and spread them apart. Just like in the movies. I closed the cabin door and removed my other mitten and glove with my teeth. I frisked Teachwell from top to bottom, all the while making sure he could feel the muzzle of the gun against his spine. Satisfied, I stepped back and ordered the businessman to the chair.

  “Hands behind your head,” I added.

  Teachwell locked the fingers of both hands behind his neck and repeated the question he had asked earlier. “Who are you?”

  “McKenzie. St. Paul Police Department.”

  “You’re a long way from home, Officer McKenzie.”

  “You, too.”

  I brushed the hood back and removed my ski mask. The ice that had frozen to my eyebrows and lashes was melting now and I wiped the moisture away with my sleeve.

  “Mr. Teachwell, you’re under arrest.” Bobby’s going to love this, I told myself. I recited his rights. When I finished I said, “Now, where’s the money?”

  “What money?”

  “Mr. Teachwell, I have never been so cold in my life,” I told him, although I was feeling much better now that I could see the fire and feel the warmth of the cabin. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m a little scared.” I waved the nine through the air and shouted. “Where in hell is the money!”

  Teachwell’s voice didn’t reply, but his eyes did. They glanced at a spot behind my right shoulder. It was a fleeting gesture, yet it was enough. I turned cautiously. Two large, blue, hard-sided suitcases on a bed. I backed away from Teachwell, watching him even as I crossed the cabin, found the handle of one suitcase with my free hand and pulled it off the bed—it must have weighed fifty pounds. I was surprised by its weight. I dragged the suitcase to the kitchen area. It required both hands to hoist the suitcase on top of the table, which meant I had to set down the gun. Teachwell was far enough away that I decided to risk it. He didn’t move.

  After regaining my weapon, I unlatched the suitcase and slowly lifted the cover. My ears filled with a loud rushing sound that was like air escaping from a leaking tire. I swallowed hard and the sound stopped. I purposely blinked my eyes once, twice, three times, closed them for a few seconds, opened them again. There were countless stacks of bills held together with rubber bands in the suitcase. Under each rubber band was a torn piece of note paper on which Teachwell had written an amount; $10,000, $20,000, $50,000. I reached out and gingerly touched the green bills before pulling my hand back.

  “Mr. Teachwell?” I’m sure he heard the admiration in my voice. “How much money did you steal?”

  “Six million, two hundred and fifty-seven thousand, one hundred and sixty-nine dollars.” His voice was confident and clear, a man proud of his accomplishment.

  “Wow,” I said.

  And then, “Wow,” again.

  I slowly closed the suitcase. It hurt my eyes to look at that much cash in one place.

  “Mr. Teachwell, I’m impressed.”

  “Officer …” Teachwell hesitated, his eyes moving from me to the gun I held loosely in my hand. I waited for it.

  “I’ll give you half,” he announced. Teachwell started to rise from the chair, but I gestured him back down again with the Heckler & Koch.

  “I’ll give you half,” he repeated. “That’s three million, one hundred twenty-eight thousand, five hundred eighty-four dollars and fifty cents.”

  “No way.” I didn’t dispute his math, only his reason.

  “Think of it. Think of all that money.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s all arranged,” Teachwell continued. “Tomorrow we’re all set to cross the border at Rainy River. From there we go to Winnipeg. In Winnipeg we catch a flight to Quebec. In Quebec we hop a freighter that winds through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and down the east coast. It stops once in New York. We don’t even get off the boat. The next stop is Fortaleza, Brazil. From there, Rio de Janeiro. A man with three million, one hundred twenty-eight thousand, five hundred eighty-four dollars and fifty cents in Rio, you’d live like a god.”

  I unsnapped the other pocket of the snowmobile suit and produced my cell phone.

  “Think of what you could buy. Think of what you’re giving up!”

  I didn’t want to think. Thinking would only lead to trouble. If I started thinking … It certainly was warm in Rio and I wouldn’t mind being treated like a god—it sure beat driving a squad up and down the streets of St. Paul for a living. And after what I had gone through—the ugly accusations, the missed promotions, the publicity—I sure deserved it.

  “Take a suitcase. Any suitcase. Just take a suitcase and walk away.”

  Just take a suitcase … . The bills were unmarked. Untraceable. If I helped Teachwell escape, who would know?

  Stop it, McKenzie! I shouted at myself and shook the thought from my head. Then I had another thought.

  “The money is insured, right?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you could turn me in and collect a reward and a finder’s fee. Only cops can’t collect rewards or finder’s fees.”

  Not St. Paul cops.

  Damn, I told myself. I also told myself, It’s been a long time coming.

  I activated the cell phone and pressed eleven numbers in quick succession with my thumb. I did it before I could talk myself out if it.

  “St. Paul Police Department, Sergeant Hodapp,” a voice answered.

  “Sarge, it’s McKenzie.”

  “Mac, I thought you were taking the day off.”

  “About that. Sarge?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I quit.”

  1

  Stacy Carlson was nine years old and she was dying. Her parents told me so while I watched her playing happily on the front lawn of their home, and the news hit me so hard I nearly lost my breath.

  “Does she know?”

  “We haven’t told her,” Molly Carlson said. “But, yes, I think she knows. We took her to enough doctors, even took her to the Mayo Clinic.”

  “What did the doctors tell you?”

  “Leukemia,” Richard Carlson answered from across the living room, answered as if he wished to spare his wife the pain of speaking the word. “They say her body is producing too many white blood corpuscles. They say her spleen and lymph glands are enlarged. They say she needs a bone marrow transplant or she’ll die. Only, neither of us is compatible and finding a donor outside the family, that’s a twenty thousand to one shot. Leastwise, that’s what they say.”

  Carlson was a big man, big in every direction, 275 at least and not all of it was fat. His eyes were a pale green and what little hair he had was gray. All the other times I had seen him he had worn the faded jeans and T-shirts of a working contractor—a guy who not only designed and sold lake homes, but who also dug foundations and hammered nails. Today he was wearing his Sunday best: black boots, designer jeans, a checkered shirt with imitation pearl snaps, and a belt with a garish buckle declaring his fidelity to Winston Cup racing. He lived in a three-story house that he had built himself in a neighborhood where all the other houses were close to the ground. Somehow he had managed to build it without uprooting the dozen magnificent oak, maple, and birch trees that surrounded it. It was because of the house and trees that I had hired Carlson to build my own lake home.

  “You want me to find a donor for Stacy?” I asked.

  “We want you to find our other daughter, Jamie,” Carlson said.

  “Jamie,” repeated Mrs. Carlson. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. She was wearing a powder-blue dress printed with yellow flowers. She was eighteen inches shorter and 150 pounds lighter than her husband, but her hair was
just as gray. She sat in a chair, her hands folded neatly in her lap, and watched Stacy through a large bay window. She never took her eyes off the girl.

  “We had—we have another daughter. Jamie. She left us seven years ago. Stacy was only two back then. We had her late. She was—a present. Anyway, Jamie left us and never came back. We tried to find her, even thought about hiring a private investigator. Then we figured, well, that’s the way Jamie wanted it. Only now …”

  “Jamie might be a compatible donor,” I volunteered. “Jamie might be able to save Stacy’s life.”

  Molly nodded. “Family members are best. And Jamie has a rare blood type, B-negative, same as Stacy. The doctors say, the first thing you need to be a compatible donor is the same blood type.”

  A missing person. Missing persons made me nervous. Most missing persons are missing because they want to be and rarely does anything good come of finding them. Still, Stacy Carlson was nine years old and she was dying. Her hair was long and blond and tied in a ponytail. Her eyes were vibrant green, her smile was bright enough to melt snow. I couldn’t possibly imagine the pain and anguish Molly and Richard Carlson must have suffered as they watched their daughter, knowing she was literally dying before their eyes. When I was in the sixth grade I lost my mother to a brain tumor literally overnight. My father died just five months ago, yet his passing too was fairly quick, although we had both seen it coming. This was something else. Losing a child, slowly …

  “Tell me about Jamie,” I said.

  “You’ll try to find her?” Molly asked, her face bright with hope.

  “I can’t promise anything, but yes, ma’am, I’ll try.”

  Molly squeezed my hands like it was a done deal. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You understand, right? Richard told you I’m not a private investigator? I don’t have a license. I don’t have legal standing.”

  “He said you used to be a policeman.”

  “Yes. For eleven years in St. Paul.”

  “He said you help people.”

  “Sometimes. When I can.”

  “I appreciate this, Mac,” Carlson said. In all my previous dealings with Carlson, he had spoken loudly. I figured he always spoke that way, big men sometimes do. Yet in his own home his voice was small. It was what my mother had called “an indoor voice.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” he added. “Only, I’m not asking for charity. I know you usually do these things for free, but I’m a man who likes to pay his own way. Just ask anybody in Grand Rapids. Money’s not a problem.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Money’s not a problem with me, either. I have plenty.”

  “I pay my own way,” Carlson insisted.

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “I know you’ve been thinking about extending the deck at your place, maybe screening off part of it.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Carlson nodded.

  “You spell your name S-O-N, right?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your name. S-O-N or S-E-N?”

  “S-E-N is Danish. I’m Swedish,” Carlson answered with a certain pride.

  I made a note of it on a yellow legal pad I stole from my girlfriend’s office. “How do you spell your daughter’s name?”

  “J-A-M-I-E.”

  “Middle name?”

  “Anne,” he said, then added, “with an E.”

  I wrote it down. “Jamie Anne Carlson. Pretty name.”

  “Thank you.” Molly smiled slightly and looked down at her hands, still folded in her lap.

  Carlson sat in an old, stuffed chair that had carried too much weight for too long and stared at a spot on the wall that no one else could see, leaving his wife to answer my questions.

  “It was the year Jamie graduated from high school,” Molly said. “Right after the Fourth—the weekend after the Fourth—she just took the clothes that would fit into one suitcase and left. We thought she would come back when her money ran out. She didn’t. When she didn’t come back by September, we went to the police. They said they couldn’t help us. They said since she wasn’t a minor and since there wasn’t any indication of foul play—that’s the phrase they used, foul play—well, they said they couldn’t do anything.”

  “We thought of looking for her ourselves,” Carlson said. “Hiring a private detective. But I guess we didn’t see any point in it. Besides, we always thought she’d call. We always thought she’d come home.”

  “Why did she leave?” I asked. “Was she unhappy?”

  “She didn’t seem unhappy,” Molly said.

  “Did you have a fight, a serious disagreement of some kind?”

  “No. I don’t remember a fight. Truth is—truth is, Mr. McKenzie, we don’t know why she left. One day she was living here perfectly fine, talking about going to the community college in the fall. Next day she was gone.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No!” Molly was adamant. It was the first time she had raised her voice. “My Jamie wasn’t like that.”

  “Something made her leave,” I reminded her.

  “I guess she just wanted to see some of the world.”

  “The world.” Carlson spat the word like it was an obscenity.

  Molly stared at him for a moment before continuing.

  “She didn’t like it here. She said there was nothing for someone her age to do.”

  Carlson shook his head in disbelief.

  “Plenty to do,” he insisted. “It’s not like Grand Rapids is some hick town.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Molly. “We like it, but … Mr. McKenzie, Jamie was young and she was pretty, she was smart and she was bored. She wanted to leave here and she knew we disapproved, knew we would try to talk her out of it … .”

  “Maybe so, but she didn’t have to just up and go like that. Without saying good-bye. Without even leaving a note. That ain’t right.”

  And she hasn’t tried to contact you again, not once in seven years, I thought but didn’t say.

  “No, it isn’t right,” I agreed.

  “Where do you think Jamie went?” I asked.

  “The Cities,” Molly said. “Where else?”

  In Minnesota? There was no place else, I agreed silently.

  “Do you know Jamie’s social security number? It’ll help me find her.”

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. “I know she had one—the government gave her one when she was born. It’s probably around here somewhere.”

  I took a white card from my wallet. I had five hundred printed about a year ago with just my name and phone number. I think I had given out twenty so far.

  “If you can find her social security number, call me.”

  “R. McKenzie,” Molly read slowly. “What does the R stand for?”

  Usually when people ask that question, I simply answer, “My first name.” For some reason I told Molly the truth.

  “Rushmore.”

  “Rushmore? I never heard that before.”

  “My parents took a vacation to the Badlands of South Dakota. They told me I was conceived in a motor lodge near Mount Rushmore, so that’s what they named me. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea at the time. Anyway, it could have been worse. I could have been Deadwood.”

  Both Carlson and Molly thought that was pretty funny. ’Course, they had never had to raise their hands when teachers called “Rushmore” on the first day of school.

  “Driver’s license?” I asked.

  “Jamie had one. I don’t know the number or anything.”

  I made note of that on the legal pad, too. The Department of Motor Vehicles would be one of my first stops.

  “You said she was talking about going to a two-year college. What major?”

  “She wanted to be a paralegal and work in a law office.”

  I made a note of that, then said, “I could use a photograph of her.”

  “I’ll get it.” Molly rose from the chair and we
nt into an adjacent dining room.

  Carlson watched her leave, then said, “You might wanna try talking to Merci Cole,” his voice dropping several decibels.

  “Who?”

  If I had trouble hearing Carlson, his wife did not. A moment later, she was standing under the arch that separated the living room from the dining room.

  “Merci Cole? Why do you say that?”

  “Who’s Merci Cole?” I asked, writing her name on the yellow pad.

  “She was a friend of Jamie’s,” Molly answered, still watching her husband.

  “Friend,” Carlson muttered under his breath. It was another word he didn’t seem to like. “I didn’t say they were friends.”

  “Maybe not a friend.” Molly turned away from her husband. “But they knew each other. Merci ran with a wild crowd—not Jamie’s type of people at all. I don’t think Merci received much supervision at home. She didn’t have a father, she was born illegitimate. Her momma worked all the time at the paper mill. She died—when did she die?”

  “Two years, three months ago,” Carlson said. Molly seemed surprised that he knew the answer.

  “They became friendly when they were both up for queen at that festival they had at the end of the school year,” Molly added. “Spring Fling. They both lost. People said it was because they were both tall with blond hair and green eyes. They split the vote and the girl with dark hair won. The girls spent a great deal of time together during the contest. They seemed to have this, I don’t know, rapport.” She turned toward her husband. “But I don’t know why you think Merci had anything to do with Jamie leaving.”

  “I didn’t say she did.”

  “Well, then …”

  “Well, then—they both left at nearly the same time.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t know, maybe they ran into each other.”

  “Merci was a thief,” Molly said.

  This time Carlson didn’t argue. Instead, he found his spot on the wall and stared some more. Molly sighed in resignation and went back to watching her daughter through the window.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Anybody.”

  “Merci was a waitress at the diner near the mill,” Carlson said. “Leastwise she was until she and the Steele boy, Richie, ran off with money they stole from the till. Didn’t take the deputies long to catch ’em, neither. They didn’t even get as far as Duluth. Oh, they swore they were innocent, said they didn’t steal anything, said they were running away to get married. But the money was sure enough missing and they were sure enough leaving in a hurry. After she was arrested, Merci used her one phone call to contact Jamie. Jamie used her savings to bail Merci out.”