A hairy arm shot out between the shiny surfaces and the elevator doors slid back open.
She stepped in, nodded her thanks to the man with the hairy arms and fixed her eyes on Olav Hanson, who was standing at the back of the elevator. She moved next to him.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Gomez?” she asked quietly.
“I tried, but you weren’t at your desk,” he said, his voice equally low.
She nodded slowly and tried to read his flushed face. “Well, I’m here now, Hanson.”
“Good,” he said.
—
By the time Kay and Olav Hanson jumped out of the car by the Viking ship outside the U.S. Bank Stadium three police cars had already arrived.
“Well?” said Hanson to the police officer who stood waiting for them.
“He isn’t here.”
“Which cameras picked him up?”
“All the external ones around the whole stadium. It looks like he did the circuit twice before he lit out.”
“Twice?” said Kay. “He’s planning something.”
Kay looked at the two TV buses parked outside one of the entrances. She spoke the thought aloud almost before she’d finished thinking it:
“Patterson.”
“What?” Hanson stared at her.
“Patterson is due to open the NRA conference here tomorrow. Gomez is going for the mayor.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I think Gomez is crazy,” she said and pulled out her phone. “Think about it. There’s a pattern here. He starts small and gets bigger. Like ripples in a lake.”
“Who’re you calling?”
Before Kay could answer she got a reply.
“Minneapolis City Hall.”
“This is Detective Kay Myers, MPD. Can I speak to the person in charge of security at the mayor’s office?”
As she waited, she saw the officer had just taken an incoming call.
“New sighting of Gomez,” he said to her. “Not far away.”
—
I heard the sirens getting closer. The street I was standing on consisted of low, two-story buildings on both sides. On the sidewalk across from me was a man wearing a fur cap with a cart and a sign that said he was sellingkielbasa starowiejska—Polish sausages. When I was here earlier checking out the area I had bought one of those U-shaped sausages from him. It came served withkapusniak,a kind of sauerkraut, and it was delicious. Behind the cart was the entrance to a movie theater with a large vertical sign in red neon, Rialto. The sirens were closer now. One or two of the cars had turned them off. Maybe they thought they could surprise me. I breathed in the smell of sausages, boiled cabbage, exhaust fumes and testosterone. Then I crossed the street.
—
Officer Fortune drove and listened to the female voice in his earpiece as it gave him a running appraisal of where the facial recognition program had last located Gomez. He knew she could also switch to an individual security camera to see where Gomez was headed as long as he was in frame.
“Thanks, we’re there now,” said Fortune as he came to a screeching halt at the curb beside a steaming sausage cart and the startled street vendor. Fortune turned to the two detectives in the backseat and saw that both had drawn their service pistols.
