by Matt Goldman
I pulled out of the Edina PD parking lot and onto 50th Street. I was too late to help Ansley deal with Brian Kelly at the hospital. I called her. No answer. I drove to Bunny’s, unbundled, sat at the bar, and ordered a burger. I couldn’t help but scan the place for Emerald Eyes, but my favorite nurse wasn’t there. I ate my burger and tried Ansley again. No answer. I rebundled for the cold and left.
You practically need a Ph.D. to find a parking spot at the University of Minnesota. After driving around for fifteen minutes, I discovered a ramp with vacancies four blocks from the hospital. I parked the Volvo on the ramp’s roof, grabbed my hat, mittens, and scarf from the backseat, pulled up the hood on my snorkel parka, and walked against a stiff wind out of the north.
I texted Ansley when I got to the hospital. I waited for a reply. It didn’t come. I approached the receptionist at the hospital’s information desk who looked more like a bouncer. Black, two-eighty, shaved head. Guess that’s the way it is with hospitals now. You’re on the list or you’re out on your ass.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see Ansley Bell. She’s a medical student.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“She is.”
“Name?”
“Nils Shapiro.”
“It’ll be a moment. Take a seat.”
I sat in the waiting area and stared at the elevators. The doors opened and people stepped off, but none of them were Ansley. Fifteen minutes later, a chubby-cheeked young man in a lab coat approached. He had dark hair on top of his head, but the sides were shaved. Maybe he thought it made his head look thinner. It did not. He had a stethoscope around his neck and fidgeted with it the way a newlywed does with a wedding ring. “Are you Nils?”
“I am.”
“I’m Ansley’s friend, David. She left.”
“I thought she was working a 9:00 to 9:00.”
“She was scheduled to, but she had a family emergency. She told me to tell you if you showed up.”
“Why wouldn’t she have just called or texted?”
David shrugged and what little neck he had disappeared into his lab coat.
“Did she leave with anyone?”
“Yeah. A skinny guy with a weird mustache wearing a long down quilted coat.”
“Did she say when she’d be back?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Thanks.”
I walked away and tried calling again. No answer. I texted. No return. If Ansley didn’t want to leave the hospital with Brian Kelly, she didn’t have to. She either wanted to go or somehow felt compelled to go. I looked at my phone. My text had been delivered but still no response.
Ansley asked me to come to the hospital. But instead I stopped at home and then the Edina police station and got myself fired off the case. I was out of work, Ansley wasn’t where she was supposed to be, and the receptionist wouldn’t validate my parking. That cold wind out of the north was the least of my problems.
20
I took University Avenue back to Northeast and parked in front of Ansley’s duplex. Brian Kelly’s rental car wasn’t out front. Ansley’s Subaru wasn’t in the garage. I let myself in the back door and climbed the staircase and tried the door into the kitchen. It was unlocked. Maybe Brian Kelly had finally grown impatient enough to do what I had done, pick an easy-to-pick lock and snoop around. Only he forgot to lock up as he went.
The kitchen, dining room, and living room looked neat and undisturbed. So did the bedroom and bathroom. The front door was still locked. I felt her bathroom towel—bone dry. But that didn’t mean much when the humidity was zero. She could have used it an hour ago.
I walked back through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen and was reaching for the back door when I saw it on the side of the refrigerator. A sheet of paper with the heading USMSLE Study Group Schedule. If Brian Kelly had seen that, even he could figure out where Ansley Bell spent her days. I walked back into the living room and sat in the leather sectional. It seemed my only option was to drive back to campus and wait for Ansley to return to the hospital. Chances were, she was having coffee with Brian Kelly and listening to whatever message he was hired to deliver.
But why didn’t she text me where she was going? Especially when she asked me to come down to campus because that detective showed up. I got up and left the way I came, then drove back to the university and parked in the same crap ramp, then walked the same cold four blocks into the same biting wind out of the north. I approached the same bouncer/receptionist, and before I could say anything, he said, “She ain’t back yet.”
“What about David, that kid who came down and talked to me earlier?”
“Have a seat.”
Fifteen minutes later, David approached. “Hey, Nils. Ansley’s not back yet.”
“I know. Can you tell me where she parks so I can see if her car is still there?”
“All the med students park in the hospital ramp. Second floor on the wall facing the river. I have a white Toyota 4Runner with Colorado plates. If her car is in the ramp, it should be around there somewhere.”
“Thanks.”
I walked across the street to the hospital ramp and climbed the stairs to the second level. I would have parked there myself if three and half years of parking tickets on this campus hadn’t scared the shit out of me. The concrete floor was splotched with dried salt and the black icebergs that form in wheel wells then fall out to make the ugliest place even uglier. On the west side of the ramp, I saw Dave’s white 4Runner. Ansley’s Subaru occupied a space five spots away. I felt the hood. It was cold. I returned to the medical school to hear the bouncer behind the receptionist’s desk say, “She still ain’t here.” I took a seat in the waiting area.
My phone rang. It was Ellegaard.
“I’m sorry about what happened with McGinnis. Come over to the house for dinner tonight. We’ll talk after.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Ansley Bell disappeared.”
“You’re not on the case anymore, Shap.”
“This isn’t about the case.”
“Aw, jeez, Shap. What’d you do?”
“Not what you’re thinking, Ellie. Or maybe what you’re thinking. I like her, and I’m concerned about her safety right now. So, thanks for the invite, but I can’t make dinner.”
“E-mail me your invoice tomorrow. I’ll walk it over to accounting and get you paid right away.”
“I appreciate it. Thanks, buddy.”
“The Lowry at 8:00 for breakfast. Okay?”
“Yeah, but I have a funeral later tomorrow morning.”
“Shap, you realize McGinnis fired you today, don’t you?”
“Maybe I’m working for someone else.”
“Who?”
“You know I can’t say who. See you at breakfast, buddy.”
I hung up and was about to put the phone in my pocket when I opened the Find Friends app and there, on the map, was a blinking dot that said Ansley Bell. I zoomed in. She was in the Loring Pasta Bar, a restaurant in Dinkytown.
I bundled up, told the receptionist/bouncer to have a nice evening, walked back outside and over to Coffman Union, where I took a footbridge over Washington Avenue and into the quad. I walked past the old buildings with columns where the university started in the 1800s. I cut in front of Northrop Auditorium then passed the bookstore and a new building I’d never seen before. Half a block later, I stood outside the Loring Pasta Bar and checked my phone. Ansley Bell was still in there, or at least her phone was. I stepped inside.
The Loring Pasta Bar is an open space of exposed brick three stories high and filled with street lamps and framed photographs and plants entwined with year-round Christmas lights. Any place with year-round Christmas lights is a place I want to be. I usually see them in dive bars, strung along cheap sheet paneling where they cast their twinkly glow on the tap handle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, where Pabst is drank for what it is instead of ironically, like in some other bars.
The Loring Pasta Bar, though, is
far from a dive. An early dinner crowd half-filled the place. Students crowded the bar for happy hour. That’s where I saw Brian Kelly sucking on a mug of something foamy and light colored while chatting up some coeds, who seemed far from interested. An iron staircase led up to a balcony of romantic tables for two. I glanced up and it appeared empty, so, like a sniper, I climbed up to the highest vantage point to scout my target.
Ansley Bell sat with a man at a round table in the middle of the restaurant, under a potted tree wrapped in white lights. The man was in his late twenties and appeared tall and thin and had the general all-American good looks of an Olympic volleyball player. I walked to the middle of the balcony and stood nearly straight above them. A waiter brought their dinner, and I sat down to think.
Either the man below me was Ansley Bell’s brother, the biological child of her adoptive parents maybe, or a cousin or a family friend. Or, more likely, Brian Kelly lied about who he was working for and the man below was his real client. I considered the possibility that dumb Brian Kelly had outsmarted me. Never trust a private investigator.
I walked back downstairs, pulled a waiter aside and told him I’d like to send the skinny creep at the bar a double Macallan straight up. For an extra twenty, the waiter agreed to include a note and tell Kelly it came from a leggy blonde. I wrote it on a cocktail napkin.
Saw your handsome face at the bar! Had to get to the library. Call me sometime!
Then I Googled the number to a porn-addiction hotline, wrote it on the note, and put a heart over the “i” in “sometime” to give it that special touch.
I took one more look at Ansley Bell from across the restaurant. She was too far away to make out her expression. But whoever volleyball boy was, he didn’t take away her appetite. I texted her. Heard you had a family emergency. Hope all is okay. Just left the hospital. Let me know if you still want to get together tonight.
A few seconds later, Ansley picked up her phone from the table, read the text, then put the phone in her purse and reached a hand across the table toward volleyball boy. I walked out of the Loring Pasta Bar and trekked back to the parking ramp.
I pulled out of the ramp and drove down to the East River Parkway. I continued south, past the University of St. Thomas and St. Kate’s, and crossed over the Mississippi River at the Ford Parkway Bridge, not far from Minnehaha Falls, which, in winter, trickles over giant ice formations. The falls are fed by the same creek that runs behind Maggie Somerville’s house. I drove west on Minnehaha Parkway, the frozen creek snaking back and forth under me, past lakes Nokomis and Hiawatha, along an urban green space with separate paths for walking and biking. And even though it was ten degrees below zero and nothing was green, Minneapolitans walked their dogs, both human and canine breath crystalizing in the arctic air. Runners ran, their faces shielded behind balaklavas. And cyclists—crazy fucking cyclists—pedaled their fat-tire bikes into the Novocaine wind.
I considered calling Ellie and accepting that dinner invitation, but I wasn’t much up for company. I passed under 35W and Nicollet Avenue. Here the creek had little footbridges over it, each lit by an old-fashioned street lamp. It was goddamn romantic. I hit 50th Street and five minutes later pulled into my garage.
I got halfway between the garage and house when I saw a hole in my rear door where the window used to be. Shattered glass bejeweled the stoop. I started back to the car to get my gun, but stopped when I saw a shovel lying near the rear gate. Whoever went into my house had come out, and they’d used the shovel to flatten their tracks.
I crunched across the stoop, opened the shitbox’s back door, and stepped into my tiny mudroom. Hats and gloves and scarves covered the floor, the canvas boxes they’d been stored in dumped in the corner. The jackets that had been hung on hooks also lay on the floor, their pockets pulled out and their sleeves inside out.
My breath fogged in front of my face. I wanted a board to replace the window and give my little furnace a respite from trying to heat the entire state of Minnesota. Then the smell hit me. It took a moment to realize what it was. Red wine. Big and heavy with pronounced tones of desperation and vengeance and a delicate undertone of heartache.
21
I stepped into the kitchen. The refrigerator lay facedown, coil-side up. The dust in the coils reminded me of the dust on Maggie Somerville’s dead body, and for a moment I wondered if we got it wrong assuming it was vacuum cleaner dirt. Then I remembered the carpet fibers from Andrew Fine’s building matching those at the crime scene.
The kitchen cabinets were all open. Pots and pans and food littered the floor. The sugar and flour canisters lay empty, their whiteness dumped over the countertops. Either someone thought I had something worth looking for, or a bear tore through my house.
Three wine bottles lay broken on the counters. Red wine seeped into the grout of the tile countertop. The wine had already started to turn—the air was pungent.
The intruder violated the living room, bedroom, and bathroom, as well. Furniture lay turned over with drawers pulled out and contents strewn all over the place. The TV lay screen-down—its back cover had been taken off. Cushions and my mattress suffered knife wounds, and their insides spilled all over the place. The little laundry-chute door in the bathroom had been ripped off. My shampoo had been dumped out of the bottle and onto the floor—not in the tub, not in the sink, not even in the toilet—onto the floor.
I didn’t know if I should clean or call the police or light a match.
Someone had been looking for something, but I had nothing of value except a bottle of Irish that I found intact on the kitchen counter. I took it into the living room, grabbed a couple of mangled cushions, arranged them into a sad excuse for a chair, and sat with the bottle.
I checked my phone. 6:14. No calls. No texts. The day had been a complete fuckery. Yelled at by the FBI, fired by McGinnis, I found Ansley Bell with a volleyball player, and someone turned my house inside out. I was sitting in messes both literal and figurative, and the warm buzz of whiskey wasn’t helping. My phone rang. Micaela’s face peeked out at me from the screen with her blue eyes, fair skin, and smattering of freckles, all framed by a tangle of strawberry blonde.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Nils. What’s going on?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Tell me.”
I told her.
“Jesus, Nils. That’s awful. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What were they looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “And I’m calling my cleaning crew from the office. They’ll get your place pulled together in a few hours.”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I have to call the police. The place can’t be picked up until they’ve come and gone. I need their report for my insurance claim. But thank you.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner. I’m taking you out and that’s that.”
“A guy does need to eat.”
“Be there in an hour.”
I hung up with Micaela and called Gabriella Núñez and told her what had happened. She said she’d meet me at the house in twenty with a couple of uniforms and CSU. They arrived in fifteen and went to work. I explained to Gabriella I was gone most of the day, but the place was fine when I was last home around 11:30 A.M. The uniforms went out to knock on doors in case a neighbor saw something.
Gabriella and I righted a couple of chairs near the kitchen table and sat.
“What do you think they were looking for, Shap?”
“I honestly don’t know. I have nothing of value. To anyone.”
“Any idea who it could have been?”
“A junkie looking for drugs?”
“Too systematic of a search for that.”
“Look at me, Gabriella. I’m not fucking kidding. There was no reason for anyone to break in here unless they knew I have a gun and thought they could steal it.”
�
�Is your gun in the house?”
“No. It’s in the car.”
“Jesus Christ, Shap. You can’t leave it in the car.”
“It’s not sitting on the dash. It’s well-hidden.”
“Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know that.”
“Someone out there thinks I have something that I don’t. The problem is, I have no idea what that something could be or who that someone is.”
“Could it have anything to do with your Somerville case?”
“It’s not mine anymore. I got fired off it today.”
“Who’d you piss off?”
“The Edina Chief of Police and the FBI.”
“Meeting didn’t go so well this morning, huh?”
“We got a bit snippy with each other.”
“Do you have anything they’re looking for?”
“I’ve told you—no.”
“I’m calling Ellie. He needs to know about this.”
“Please do.”
Micaela texted that she was waiting outside.
“I got to go, Gabriella.”
“Keep your phone on. We’ll board up your back door and lock up when we’re finished.”
“Thanks.” I checked my phone one more time for texts and e-mails. Nothing from Ansley Bell. It was 7:40, and our 9:00 get-together, as far as I was concerned, was off.
Micaela Stahl drove a Range Rover that had the word “autobiography” in the model name, and made no apology for it. I opened the passenger door, stepped onto the running board, and climbed into the seat. Needing a stepladder to get into your ex-wife’s $200,000 car so she can take you to dinner doesn’t do much for a man’s ego. But I was grateful to see her and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
She wore a gray Arc’teryx puffer coat and white knit hat that capped her long frizzy hair like the nub of a badminton birdie. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and put a cashmere glove on my hand.
“Thanks.” I buckled myself in, and she slipped the gear selector into drive. There’s nothing more beautiful than a woman’s face lit by a car’s instrument panel. I caught a gleam off her lips, and her face sparkled with a million baby diamonds. Makeup. When Micaela wore makeup, I was in for a hell of a night.
