Missing Mark (7 page)

He was also a decade older than most of the other victims. And his car remained missing. I was weighing the significance of that clue when I dozed off on the couch to the rhythmic crunch of Shep chewing his pig ear.

t was late Saturday afternoon when I raced past the emergency vehicles parked outside the northeast corner of the Mall of America. The flashing lights reminded me of the test drills held there to pre-_pare Minnesota for terrorist attacks. If terrorists were responsible for today’s news event, they’d picked a curious target: Underwater Adventures—a large walk-through aquarium, popular with tourists and school groups.

“I expected media. I just didn’t expect you.” Nick Garnett stood in a shallow puddle, a small sunfish flopping clumsily around his ankles.

I felt a brief flash of awkwardness. Garnett was head of corporate security at the Mall of America. A former cop, a former source, and I hoped, not a former friend.

“I was on call,” I answered, “so I’m who you got.” Channel 3 rotates reporters through a weekend on-call list so if news breaks and the scheduled staff are already committed to other stories or too far away to respond, the list is activated.

Garnett and I hadn’t seen each other much since last fall when he almost bled out in my front yard protecting me from a pit bull after being wrongfully accused of murder because of my serial-killer investigation into dead Susans.

“Over here, Riley.” He waved me in ahead of a bunch of other reporters, so I clearly had read too much into his silence.

After all, Garnett was a busy man. He’d successfully recuperated from his injuries, but failed at a reconciliation with an ex-wife. Both tasks required a certain amount of privacy, so he evidently accepted that we each needed time and space to heal.

Physically, he had healed nicely and looked in prime shape. He wore a more elegant cut of suit than when he lived on a homicide detective’s salary. With a hint of gray in his hair, he looked hunky in an older-man sort of way.

Emotionally, I couldn’t tell where he was in the healing department, but I knew I wasn’t finished. Journeying back from the abyss can be complicated.

He and I shared an intimacy that came from trust, not sex—trading news scoops during our careers and never once burning each other. Surviving last fall’s bedlam should have brought us even closer; instead it left our relationship feeling undefined.

Many of life’s lessons I learn from fictional characters in books and films, but I often grasp their significance too late to implement them.

Like the end of the 1994 bus/extortion movie
Speed
, when Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, locked in each other’s arms, open their eyes to discover they’ve survived Dennis Hopper’s madness. Reeves reminds Bullock of her theory that relationships based on intense experiences never work. Looking back, I realized my liaison with Garnett echoed that movie moment. I wished I’d had the guts to blurt out the heroine’s line and say, “Okay, we’ll have to base it on sex then.”

But clever dialogue eluded me, and so did passion. I wasn’t ready then. And I wasn’t sure I was any more ready now. As a practical matter, television sweeps have no room for amour.

So I kept the conversation work-related, asking, “What happened, Nick?”

“You wouldn’t believe it,” he answered.

As he turned his head to look at me, his shirt collar fell short of covering the still-pink scars on his neck from the dog bites. On the skin of another man, I might have fantasized about undoing a button or two to inspect the marks closer, but on Garnett, guilt outweighed curiosity. That kept any unprofessional yearning under control.

“Couple of crazies came through and hammered the hell out of the glass with baseball bats,” he said. “We’ve been picking up fish for the last half hour.”

“Can I get a camera in here?” I was all business.

“Pool camera only. This is too big and public to let you go exclusive. Besides, Riley, your station wasn’t even the first one here.” He shook his head in admonishment.

Not that I wanted to make excuses, but one of my TV competitors is geographically closer, another is simply better at reacting to breaking news. Pooling tape meant one station, in this case ours, would be allowed to shoot crime-scene video, but was required to share it with everyone else.

“Fine, Nick,” I agreed, “if I can’t have it alone, just make sure no one else does.”

“Deal. The photographers are going through security and getting credentials. They should be down in a couple of minutes. Then you can have your photo op.”

I watched as a middle-aged bald man with a buff body wrapped a wet towel around what looked like a small shark with a long nose and placed it in a cooler of water with a whiskered exotic fish.

“Will they be okay?” I asked.

The man wore an Underwater Adventures name tag that read “Ahab.” If he’d been a mad sea captain in a former life, he hid it well that day. No wasted energy shaking a fist at the sea or sky.

“Some we can put in other tanks,” he said. “These we’ll transport over to the Minnesota Zoo, along with other survivors. The lucky ones.”

He put a cover on the cooler and motioned toward the back of the room at a small pile of glassy-eyed fish that, if they weren’t lying on a cement floor, would clearly be floating belly up.

“We had to prioritize,” Ahab explained. “Luckily, the scoundrels spared the saltwater creatures.”

He and a skinny woman with a Pisces tattoo on one arm loaded the cooler onto a cart and pushed it down the hall. Just before disappearing around a corner, he brushed his hand over his eyes and blinked, as if wiping a tear. I’ve seen people mourn the loss of money, career, spouse, and child. Fish grief, that’s a new one.

“He’s the aquarium director,” Garnett said. “Doesn’t want to do any media interviews right now. You guys can shoot for three minutes behind the crime-scene tape, then I’ll give a brief statement to everyone. After that, we’re kicking you all outside.”

Not a problem, we had just over an hour before the evening news. We’d need to be setting up for our live shots, plus this way I didn’t have to worry about the competition getting better shots than me, since all the stories would use mostly the same video.

“Any surveillance tape?” I asked, searching for some way to make my piece stand out from the pack. The Mall of America has one of the most comprehensive video-camera systems in the retail world. Very little happens on its turf that’s not watched by someone.

Garnett ignored my question.

“Maybe somebody’ll recognize the suspects,” I pressed. “They could call in an ID.”

It happens. Look at
America’s Most Wanted
. Happens all the time.

“I don’t think anyone will recognize these guys,” Garnett replied cryptically.

“How can you be so sure, Nick? Come on, TV can be a tool for law enforcement. Use us.”

“Television? A
tool
for law enforcement?” His voice carried more than a hint of incredulity. “Now, Riley, we both know full well… television is … is a godless abomination.”

“And we both know that that must be from Peter Finch,
Network
, 1976,” I guessed.

Garnett was also a film buff and we enjoyed playing Name That Movie Quote during normal conversation. The tradition dated back ten years to our earliest days as rookie reporter and veteran cop. He didn’t stump me too often. But now, stationed at the Mall of America, with fourteen movie screens within a hundred yards of his security office, he had an advantage. Especially since my rental wasn’t wired for cable TV.

“Actually, I think I made that line up,” he said.

“Really? Television is a godless abomination? It’s very profound. Maybe even catchy enough for T-shirts. You’re sure it’s not from
Network?”

“Pretty sure,” he nodded. “But we could rent it sometime to double check.”

“Let’s do that. My place. Loser buys the pizza.”

And with that exchange, we both knew we were okay.

Of course, the real reason I wanted the surveillance tape was because this was a slow-news Saturday. If not for this fish shtick, Channel 3 would be leading tonight’s newscast with obvious tips on lawn-mower safety after a south Minneapolis man got his foot caught in one. Actual video of thugs crashing tanks of fish would probably go national.

“So how about it? Release the tape? We both know it exists.”

“Bloomington cops will have to make the call on that,” he said. “They’re handling the investigation. Go bother them.”

Bloomington police have a substation in that corner of the Mall of America, just up the escalator from the aquarium. Most of their mall calls deal with petty crimes like shoplifting or kids violating curfew. When the fish-in-crisis call came, officers responded, but just missed the perpetrators racing out the skyway to the parking garage. It wasn’t the kind of crime they’d ever trained for. Right now they were taking witness statements and dealing with crowd control.

One of Channel 3’s photographers waved at me and Garnett motioned him through the confusion. Luis Fernandez was another fairly new photog, that’s why he worked the weekend late shift. I wished I had one of our veteran shooters. Not that they were more skilled behind a camera, but a couple were fishing fanatics and would have been helpful in identifying the victims.

“Wow.” Luis focused his camera on a pile of carp, still breathing, slow to die. Low priority for rescue. “This is some crazy business.”

Garnett led us down a fake jungle path with artificial tropical plants and trees. Various plastic and stuffed animals decorated the route un-convincingly. We arrived at a glass-walled tunnel, usually the highlight of the aquarium tour. On a good day, visitors were surrounded overhead and on each side with a million gallons of water and an extensive school of fish as well as turtles, sharks, and stingrays.

Today wasn’t a good day.

The power had been turned off to avoid electrocution. The tunnel was dark; the conveyer belt stalled. Aquarium employees waved flashlights. Luis activated his portable camera light and we all gasped at the large hole in one side of the freshwater tunnel. Water above that line, along with many of the inhabitants, had been sucked out onto the floor. Most of the water spread outward so it was now only ankle deep. On both sides of the tunnel, below the damaged tank wall, desperate fish moved slowly in cramped space.

They were the fortunate ones. Others lay on the floor, gasping for air, their gills quivering as staff members worked to rescue them.

I better understood Ahab’s tears. And while fish aren’t among the most huggable or emotional of earth’s creatures, these survivors certainly looked despondent.

“Time’s up,” Garnett said. “You newsies go back upstairs.”

We didn’t argue because I didn’t want him to regret allowing us access. And I hoped he’d share new information as it came in—with me, not the rest of the pack.

“Nick, you’re sure to get tip calls once viewers see this,” I said. “And if we get anything on our end, we’ll let you know.”

Slamming fish tanks was just the kind of prank vandals would brag about over a few beers. Garnett promised to finalize reward information before airtime.

Reporters from four TV channels, both daily newspapers, and one radio station all played the Minnesota Nice version of paparazzi and waited patiently outside the Bloomington cop shop until a communications flack stuck his head out to sneer “No comment!” before slamming the door in our faces.

((RILEY/LIVE))
POLICE ARE STUMPED BY A
FISH FRENZY AT THE MALL
OF AMERICA TODAY.

I had just fed the aquarium tape back to the station from Channel 3’s live truck and was scripting my story. For television news each line is typed about two inches wide, making for easy reading, and timing out to about a second a line. This helps the newscast producer estimate the length of any story quickly. Instead of punctuation, I generally put a series of dots to indicate a pause point during my read.