[Marc Kadella 04.0] Certain Justice Read online

  Forsberg turned off Kellogg on his way back to the freeway and onto Summit Avenue. Summit was old money Minnesota. It was lined block after block with very large, old, multi-room homes stretching from the St. Paul Cathedral several miles to the bluff of the Mississippi River. Forsberg had found Segal’s address and curiosity got the better of him. About two miles down Summit he found the house he wanted and pulled over to the curb. He sat across the street from it, a brick two-story sporting four fireplace chimneys. He stared for ten minutes then put the van in drive and slowly drove off.

  Gene Parlow casually strolled through the crowd of his favorite bar, Whiskey World. It was mostly a biker bar located off the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus on the downtown side.

  There was a minimally talented country band on stage doing their best Lynard Skynard interpretation. On the dance floor was a decent sized crowd doing a group line dance that Parlow didn’t recognize.

  Parlow got a shot and a bottle of Pabst at the back bar then took a seat by the pool table. He tossed down the shot of Jack then worked on his beer while watching his brother, Troy, shoot pool. Troy was not a particularly good pool player although he thought he was. A couple of minutes after Gene sat down the game ended. Troy opened the large, brown leather pouch he had chained to himself, removed a twenty dollar bill and paid his opponent. The next player was racking the balls while Troy took the chair next to Gene. The meth business being what it was, the twenty he just lost wasn’t a big deal to Troy.

  It was obvious the two men were brothers. Except for Gene’s citizen haircut, they looked alike and were dressed basically the same. T-shirt, leather vest and motorcycle boots which made them indistinguishable from the other one percenters in the bar.

  “Hey, bro,” Troy began after a fist bump with Gene. “I think I found a bike for you. A Harley that’s a little warm but should be ready in a day or two.”

  “What about a job? Am I in or not?” Gene asked referring to the meth business.

  “I’m working on it. Relax. It’ll happen. You check out your old lawyer?”

  “Yeah,” Parlow answered his younger brother. “She’s still around.”

  “Well?” Troy asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “No bitch would ever get away with fuckin’ me up the way she did you,” Troy said.

  Gene turned his head away from the pool players and looked directly at his brother. “Don’t worry about it and keep your goddamn mouth shut,” he whispered. “You hear about what happened to that lawyer the other day?”

  “Yeah, I did. Did you know her?”

  “She was the prosecutor that sent me away,” Gene continued still looking directly at Troy and speaking very quietly. “She got what she had coming.”

  “Did you do…”

  “Shut up, dummy. Don’t ask questions I ain’t gonna answer.”

  Chloe Winters got off the elevator on the sixth floor. She was in the same parking ramp in downtown St. Paul where she parked every day. She walked quickly toward her car on the almost empty floor, the only sound coming from the clicking her shoes made on the concrete surface. It was almost ten o’clock at night and she was tired, hungry and in a hurry to get home after another long day. Trial preparation could be exhausting.

  As she approached her two-year-old Camry, she was a little surprised to see a beat up Ford van parked next to it. The van wasn’t there when she had arrived in the morning. For a sparsely populated downtown parking ramp, it looked decidedly out of place.

  She hit the unlock button on her key fob to unlock the car. As she was opening the driver’s door, the side door of the van flew open and before she could move, he was on her.

  Instead of panicking, Chloe knew exactly what to do. Her assailant had her in a choke hold and was starting to squeeze when she hammered the heel of her right shoe down on the instep of his foot. She then reached back with her right hand and grabbed and squeezed his testicles as hard as she could.

  He let out a sharp, short scream and eased up on his choke hold. Chloe hammered the back of her head into his face and drilled him squarely on the nose. She pushed him back hard and slammed him into the van. He released her and she spun around to face him. With both hands, she gave him a hard shove just as his fist struck her on the side of her face.

  Chloe went down onto the concrete floor between the two vehicles. Her shove was enough to make her attacker fall backwards, trip and go down himself. After years of prison food and weight lifting, the man was small and wiry but also quick and strong. He was back on his feet and coming at her again in less than a second.

  When Chloe hit the ground she was still clutching her purse in her left hand. She quickly reached into it as the Hispanic looking monster stood up and started toward her. The first bullet hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest and the third squarely in the forehead. He flew backwards and his head made a sharp cracking noise as it hit the concrete floor and this time, he wasn’t getting up.

  Chloe’s oldest sister, Ann, had been brutally attacked and raped almost fifteen years ago. The man who did it had never been caught. This had happened when Chloe was a teenager living in Kansas City with her parents. From that moment on, Chloe became determined to never let anything like that happen to her. She worked so hard at self-defense that she eventually became an instructor for other women. When she moved to Minnesota for work one of the first things she did was obtain a conceal-carry permit for a handgun. She always made sure if she had to work late, her 9 mm automatic was in her purse. And as her assailant would testify to if he could, she was a very good shot.

  A few days later the St. Paul police told her the man she killed, by an amazing coincidence, was the man the Kansas City cops believed had raped her sister and was suspected of at least a dozen more. That night Chloe and Ann shed a lot of tears of joy on the phone and a dark cloud was dispersed from over their family.

  Angelo Suarez, the fourth client of Glenda Albright in her tampered DNA case, was not going to rape another woman ever again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The morning after his meetings with Glenda Albright and Marc Kadella, Howie Traynor left St. Andrews at 10:00. One of Tony’s retired cop pals, Tommy Evans, was on duty and he followed Howie south on Central Avenue. On Twenty Second, Howie turned into the lot for the Northeast branch of the Hennepin County Library. Evans pulled over to the curb on Central and watched as Howie went into the library building.

  A half hour went by and Howie had not come back out. Realizing this was an unusual event, Evans called Carvelli on his cell to report in. He quickly filled him in about why he called.

  “He’s at the library? What the hell could he be up to at the library?”

  “Maybe taking out books?” Evans wisecracked.

  “You see this guy as a big bookworm do you? Give him another half hour then slide in there and see what he’s up to,” Tony replied.

  “You got it,” Evans said.

  The first thing Howie did when he went inside the building was to go to the help desk and apply for a library card. The older woman behind the desk pleasantly helped him fill out the form and used Howie’s driver’s license to confirm his address. Ten minutes later he had a temporary card to use until the permanent one was mailed to him.

  He found an open computer and spent the next forty-five minutes online researching the trial of Aaron Forsberg. Never having met the man and knowing nothing about the case, Howie wanted to learn what happened to him. Halfway through the reporting he found it did jog his memory. Even though he was in prison at the time, Forsberg’s case had generated quite a bit of interest, at least locally. When he finished and knowing there was someone following him, he went over to the library’s fiction section.

  Howie spent three or four minutes roaming through the aisles more or less randomly selecting books. He found a few authors he had actually heard of and when he had gathered four books, he checked them out and left.

  Less than five minutes before he was going
to go in looking for him, Evans saw Howie leave the building. He noticed Howie was carrying several books then watched him get in his car. Evans ducked down in his seat to let Howie go by after he exited the parking lot. Howie was headed north on Central, probably on his way back to the church. Evans watched him in his side mirror until Howie had gone a full block. After a few seconds, the traffic cleared and Evans did a U turn in the middle of the block. Barely five minutes later, Howie was back in the church’s parking lot. Tommy Evans parked his car and called Carvelli again to bring him up to date.

  “You’re getting to be a regular around here, Carvelli. People are starting to talk about you and Jefferson,” an MPD detective by the name of Clark Fields smart mouthed Tony.

  Carvelli was back in the detective’s squad room again to talk to Owen Jefferson. He heard the comment, turned toward its source and saw Fields leaning back in his chair, a big grin on his face.

  Clark Fields was treading water on the job to hang on long enough to get a thirty-year pension. He was wearing his standard polyester slacks, black shoes, a white shirt and rayon tie. Tony had known him for almost twenty years and basically despised him. The reason being Fields started treading water toward retirement ever since he made detective.

  “Did you think that up all by yourself, Fields? I’ve been wrong all these years. I always thought you were both lazy and stupid. Now I see you’re really very clever. I’ll be sure to laugh at your rapier wit later,” Tony said staring down at the seriously overweight cop.

  Tony’s comment elicited a good bit of laughter from the half dozen or so other detectives in the room.

  “Fuck you, Carvelli,” an obviously embarrassed Fields said.

  “Clear a case, asshole, then you can talk to me,” Tony said then turned his back to the man and walked away.

  “Was that fun?” Jefferson asked Tony after he had taken the chair next to the detective’s desk.

  “He’s a clown and he should know better than to run his mouth to me,” an annoyed Carvelli said.

  Tony brought Jefferson up to date on the surveillance of Howie Traynor. There was nothing of substance to report including his trip to the library earlier that day. Before he finished, Marcie Sterling returned from the women’s restroom. Jefferson introduced them to each other and Marcie brought her chair from her desk around to sit next to Jefferson and join in.

  “How’s your investigation going?” Carvelli asked.

  “I don’t know,” a clearly exasperated Jefferson began. “I probably shouldn’t discuss it with you but I know you can keep your mouth shut. So far, we got nothing. A list of possibles and we’re chasing our tails checking them out. We’re not even sure he’s on our list. The fact the judge up North handled several appeals from trials that Rhea Watson did is the only connection between them that we have.

  “I was wondering,” Jefferson continued. “How do you know for sure you’re putting him to bed every night? How can you be sure he’s not slipping out the back?”

  “He could be,” Tony shrugged. “I thought of that so I put a guy in the alley to watch for it a few times. None of them ever saw him. Plus his car is on the street. Pretty unlikely he slipped out, took a bus to Bemidji, did that judge and got back by morning.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Jefferson agreed. “How much longer will you stay on him?”

  “I need talk to Vivian Donahue tonight. This is getting to be a waste of everybody’s time and her money. And I have other business to attend to and so does Madeline. The other guys, the retired cops, they’re starting to grumble a bit too about other things they want to do. Everybody’s bored. What about you two? You got anything going?” Tony asked.

  “Not much. I told you about our list, didn’t I?” Jefferson said.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “We’ve managed to eliminate sixteen names. They’re either dead or still in prison or out of state and alibied.”

  “That leaves….?”

  “Fifty-eight,” Marcie said.

  “Too many,” Carvelli said. “Hey, I’m taking off. If anything comes up…”

  “You’ll let me know,” Jefferson finished for him.

  Vivian Donahue was out on the front lawn of the mansion watching the groundskeepers work on the garden. It was late summer heading toward autumn and she wanted to be out enjoying the beautiful day.

  Vivian saw a car pull into her driveway and watched with curiosity as it approached. As it got closer she realized it was the black Audi owned by Madeline Rivers. They made eye contact as Maddy drove by and waved at each other as Maddy continued to the house and parked her car.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” Vivian said as she held out her arms to the younger woman. The women gave each other an affectionate hug. When they separated, Vivian continued by asking, “What brings you all the way out here on this lovely day?”

  With a curious look on her face, Maddy asked, “Didn’t Tony, I mean Anthony, call you?”

  Vivian laughed at her use of the name Anthony, put her right arm through Maddy’s left and started toward the main building. “You call him Tony, dear. I’ll stick with Anthony. It sounds more natural that way. And no, he didn’t call me. Why?”

  They heard the quiet rumble of Tony’s Camaro and both of them turned to watch him drive by.

  “I’ll let him tell you,” Maddy said as they continued toward the house.

  A few minutes later the three of them were seated at a table on the patio overlooking the lake and swimming pool.

  “You’ve come here to tell me you want to call off the surveillance of this Traynor person,” Vivian flatly stated before Carvelli could say it.

  “Yes,” Tony said sipping his iced tea, “We’re getting nowhere. He’s not doing anything and we both have other clients.”

  “You’ve spent enough money on this, Vivian,” Maddy added. “He’s not your problem and it’s beginning to look like his religious, whatever it is, awakening or conversion is real.”

  Vivian took the news quietly. Tony and Maddy sipped their drinks waiting for her to respond. Vivian stared out across Lake Minnetonka seeing but not really watching a two-masted sailboat silently glide by.

  “Chalk it up to being a foolish old woman…” Vivian started to say.

  “Stop it. You’re neither,” Maddy mildly chastised her.

  “Thank you, dear,” she patted Maddy’s left had. “Very well. If you think you’re wasting your time, I don’t care about the money, then end it.”

  Howie Traynor arrived home from work at his normal time later that same day. He parked in a spot in front of his building and was surprised to see the car that had followed go past and drive away. Believing he was still being watched, he kept to his normal routine and went into his building and up to his apartment.

  For the next hour, every few minutes, he would peek through the vertical blinds in the windows of the small living room. Howie believed there was someone on station in front of his building to relieve the man who followed him home. He checked every car in sight and saw no one. After an hour or so he was satisfied they were gone.

  Howie went into the small bedroom and laid down to take a nap. He decided he would break his routine and go out later around eight o’clock to see if they were really gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jeannie Peterson waited patiently on the curb at the passenger drop-off area. Her husband of almost forty years, Ross Peterson, was removing the two medium size pieces of luggage from the trunk of his car. He placed the bags on the street and slammed the trunk lid down. The trunk didn’t close and it took him two more attempts before the latch caught and locked. Jeannie stood on the sidewalk trying not to look amused while her husband fought with the old car. By the time he made the third attempt, he was cussing and she was almost laughing.

  “Maybe it’s time to buy a new car,” she said for at least the hundredth time. The twelve-year-old Taurus had seen better days.

  “It’s fine,” he snapped at her. “I’m not wasting retirement
money on a car.” He continued by saying, “I’m not going to eat dog food when I retire.” While he stated this last line, Jeannie was reciting exactly the same words in her head knowing he would say them.

  “I’ll do my best not to cook dog food for you,” she said as he set her bags next to her. “I hate having to carry luggage onto the plane.”

  “They’ll fit in the overhead. I’m not going to pay fifty bucks to check a bag. That’s ridiculous,” he grumbled as he turned to go back to the car and left his wife standing on the sidewalk. “Call me when you get there,” he practically ordered, then got in the old car and drove off without even saying goodbye.

  Jeannie Peterson could not have cared less that he didn’t say goodbye to her. In fact, she barely noticed. She was flying out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to Massachusetts to spend time with their daughter and new grandson. This was their third grandchild; one by their son and his wife and this second one by their daughter and her husband. Even though she didn’t need the help, their daughter Ellen had asked Jeannie to visit. Both offspring had moved as soon as they were old enough in order to get away from their father. Their son Mike had moved to Texas and Ellen to Massachusetts.

  Defying the old cheapskate, Jeannie checked both bags and charged it to a credit card Ross knew nothing about. She passed quickly through security and headed toward her gate. While walking down the concourse to catch the people mover she again thought to their future. Three more years until her husband reaches mandatory retirement. The old curmudgeon had no hobbies, no interests, nothing to keep him occupied. What was she going to do with him underfoot every day?

  The man found a seat in the semi-crowded courtroom of Judge Ross Peterson and sat behind two large women. There was a trial taking place and the defendant was on the stand. He listened for fifteen minutes while the young man testified to the jury. Apparently it was a homicide trial involving drugs and the twenty-something defendant was obviously lying. It was almost painful to watch as he talked himself into a quick conviction. Or at least that’s what the stranger thought.