Electing To Murder (29 page)

As expected, the detective waiting for them was standing underneath the entrance awning for the apartment building named the Waterview Tower. Herdine’s guy was a detective named Darwin Ring, who if he wasn’t a spitting image of Bobby Rockford, had to be some sort of relative, Mac thought. Ring was big, very black and when he smiled, there was a Michael Strahan like gap in his bright white front teeth. However, unlike Bobby Rock, Ring was an exceedingly snappy dresser with a sharp, perfectly tailored downtown black pinstripe suit, silver monogrammed dress shirt, accented with a vibrant purple tie and spit shined Kenneth Cole lace-up dress shoes. Ring topped it all off with a black classic center dent fedora and a long black umbrella that he leaned on. He was right out of Central Casting. Mac liked him before he met him.

“Detective Ring, I presume,” Mac said, extending his hand. “Mac McRyan, St. Paul.”

“Michael Mackenzie McRyan, you mean?” Ring replied with a hearty laugh and a booming voice. “I guess we’ll just have to call you 3M.”

Wire laughed uncontrollably.

Mac smiled, “I like it, Detective, I like it lot.” Then he looked to his temporary partner, “Detective Ring, this is Dara Wire.”

“Ahh,” Ring answered, his two hands swallowing her one. “You are the pretty unaffiliated cop my friend Herdine mentioned. It is my pleasure indeed.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Wire answered with a big smile.

Pleasantries were exchanged for another minute and then Wire moved to business, “Detective Ring, I assume your colleagues filled you in why we’re down here.”

“They did indeed, Ms. Wire. This is a most peculiar case, I must say, and quite interesting,” Ring replied while opening his umbrella. “Let us go stand in the median and I can describe to you the events that transpired here this past Wednesday night.”

Ring led them across the westbound side of East Juneau to the median which was ten feet wide. He faced the apartment building entrance. “So here’s what happened. Gabriel Martin exits the Waterview Tower there and he crosses the westbound side of the street like we just did and gets to the median here and pauses.”

“How do you know he pauses?” Wire asked.

The detective opened a Milwaukee Police Department file and pulled out some still photos. “Because we have traffic camera photos of Martin standing here to wait for traffic to pass.” Wire and McRyan each looked at the photo. A man is standing in the median under a streetlight. Rain is falling and he’s looking in the direction of oncoming traffic. Mac looks to the west and see’s the traffic camera high up on the light pole, one camera looking to the north on Water Street and the other looking east on Juneau towards their position.

“Anyway, traffic passes and Martin quickly walks across the two lanes to his car parked on Juneau here.” Ring pulled out his cell phone and opened a video file. “The rest you should see for yourself.” The detective hit play and Wire and Mac leaned in to watch.

“Whoa!” Mac recoiled from the video.

“Oh my God,” Wire yelped, raising her hands to her face.

As Martin reached his car and opened the door, a Chevy Suburban comes from the west and runs him over. The Suburban ran over Martin, the car door and didn’t stop, just kept going and out of camera view.

“The Suburban didn’t slow down a lick,” Mac added. “There was no attempt to evade or anything.”

“No there was not,” Ring replied. “The driver was either completely oblivious, looking in a different direction or down or to the left or …”

“… It was intentional,” Wire finished. “If the driver was distracted or looking in a different direction, the truck wouldn’t be on such a straight path …”

“… Nor would it have accelerated like that,” Mac finished. “That’s a hit, plain and simple.”

“I agree,” Ring answered.

“I take it you never found the driver?” Wire asked.

“Nor the Suburban,” Ring replied. “I got the video footage you just looked at. I tracked the license plate and it was for a Suburban reported stolen at literally the same time this accident happened. The owner was at the Menomonee Falls police station filing the report when Martin was run down. In any event, we used some traffic cams to track the Suburban for a number of blocks until it got out of downtown to the north but then we lost it.”

“How about GPS?”

“Tried that but we lost track of it on that as well up around Lac Du Cours Lake north of town here.”

Mac shook his head and gave a knowing smile. “It’s probably at the bottom of that lake. There was a panel van that we were tracking last night that was involved in the shooting outside my family’s pub. We tracked the van to the bottom of the Mississippi River south of St. Paul. I bet they did the same here.”

Ring jotted down some notes. “I’ll have to check on that. See if we find it there. Not that it’ll do much good at this point.”

“You never know, forensics is an amazing thing,” Mac added.

“Did you get a look at the driver at all?” Wire asked.

The detective shook his head, “Wish we did, my lady. The driver was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low and the collar of his coat was pulled up so the face is obscured so we didn’t really get a good look at his face.”

“Was there a passenger?”

Ring nodded. “That’s yet another reason why I think it’s a hit, because even if the driver was distracted …”

“… The passenger sees Martin and stops him.”

“In this case, the passenger directs the driver,” Mac stated. “I assume no good facial views of the passenger either?”

Ring shook his head, “Dressed in the same uniform. They were a team.”

“How about witnesses? Were there any?” Wire asked, looking around. It was a busy street near the bar district.

“Kind of,” Ring replied. “The security guard for the tower heard the collision and was the one who called it in. There were two other witnesses walking on the street but they were a good hundred yards away when Martin was run down. They gave us a description of the Suburban but not much else. So there wasn’t much there.”

“How about Martin? Anyone have a reason to want to kill him?”

“That’s what was incredibly odd,” Ring answered. “I figured we’d find someone with motive when we started digging through his life but turns out, the guy didn’t have much going.”

“Let me guess,” Mac started. “He had work and not much else.”

“Correct.”

Mac and Wire looked up and down the street again, taking the scene in. Wire held her gaze to the west while Mac asked, “So Martin didn’t live here, right?”

“No,” Ring answered. “He was visiting a friend here, a Ms. Ginger Bloom. Turns out she was his assistant at DataPoint.”

“Fishing off the corporate pier?” Mac asked.

Ring smiled, “You know they say that is a really bad idea, that it can go really bad.”

“It certainly did in this case,” Wire noted.

“You could say that, Ms. Wire, you could,” Ring replied with a smile. “In any event, Mr. Martin was here until just after 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday and then when he left, he was killed.” The detective looked at his file and sighed sadly. “You know. This Martin guy didn’t look like he ever did anything wrong. Good citizen, worked hard, maybe even a workaholic, and yet he gets steamrolled in the middle of a busy street and I can’t understand why. What did he do?”

“Detective Ring,” Wire answered, “that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“And,” Mac finished, “we’re thinking the answer is at DataPoint. Think you could help us?”

Ring nodded, “Let me make some calls.”

M
ac was on his phone as he, Wire and Ring walked out of the Starbucks with fresh coffees. It was a Saturday morning and Ring made some calls to arrange for key personnel to appear at DataPoint. While there was a Saturday manufacturing shift working, the key players they wanted to talk to were not in. They would be by the time Ring led them there.

Mac hung up his phone, “Paddy confirms, same shoe tread in St. Paul as we found out at Checketts’s place. Also same size, this was not a suicide,” Mac reported.

“We should let Kaufman and Herdine know,” Wire suggested as they walked down the street.

“I gave him Herdine’s number so that’s going to be taken care of. Bit by bit we’re getting somewhere here,” Mac said enthusiastically.

As she approached the Acadia, Wire looked back west down Juneau and stared for a moment. “Why don’t you drive,” she suggested, flipping the keys to Mac as they approached the Acadia. “You seem to know the town better anyway.”

Mac took the keys and jumped behind the wheel and turned the ignition and adjusted the rearview mirror up some and noted Ring approaching in his dark blue Crown Victoria from behind. Once Ring was past, McRyan pulled away from the curb and fell in behind for what Ring said would be a ten-minute drive to DataPoint. Wire, meanwhile, sat slouched down in the passenger seat and with the finger controls on the center console, adjusted the passenger-side rearview mirror so that she could look back. After a minute she saw it. She casually pulled a small notepad out of the pocket of her leather jacket and started writing down the plate number.

“Silver Traverse six or seven back, right?” Mac said, taking a gander in the rearview mirror. “I assume that is what’s got you a little spooked?”

Wire looked back to McRyan with an astonished look on her face. “How long have
you
been on it?”

“I noticed it once or twice when we were driving into the city from Whitefish Bay if only because the license plate has the numbers 422. And then again when we were walking the scene with Ring which is when you noticed it, right, you were gazing back down the street for an extra stretch?”

“Yes,” Wire said with a grin. She was realizing not much got by McRyan. “What’s the significance of 422?”

Mac shrugged, “Nothing really. My high school football and baseball number was four and my hockey number in high school and college was twenty-two, so I tend to notice those numbers for some reason. Why did you notice it?”

“Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid,” Wire answered. “I’m certain there were at least two two-man teams watching Montgomery’s apartment in DC when I was scoping the area and then after what happened in St. Paul, I seem to constantly be looking back to see if anyone is following.”

“Me too,” McRyan replied casually, his right hand draped loosely over the wheel. If they were being watched, might as well look relaxed and unsuspecting. “I operate on the theory these days that only the paranoid survive. I had a case where it turned out the people we took down had been following us for a while. Shit, they’d bugged Sally’s house as it turned out so Lord only knows what they heard us doing, Sally can be … kind of loud,” he said with a devilish grin.

Wire just laughed.

“Anyways, I’m always a little paranoid now when I get on a murder case with some complexity to it. I figure someone is watching from somewhere.”

Wire nodded, having done undercover work while in the bureau. “I noticed it when Ring first explained how the Suburban took out Martin. I looked back that way and saw the Traverse. Then a minute later I took another look and noticed the two guys sitting in the front seat and I got a feeling, you know.”

McRyan nodded. “Women’s intuition.”

“Why if it’s a woman does it have to be intuition?” Wire asked, mildly perturbed.

“Just is.”

“What is it for a man, then?”

“Spidey Sense,” Mac answered. “Ring’s taking a right turn here so let’s see if we’re right and the Traverse follows.”

McRyan followed Ring west on Wells Street as they crossed the Milwaukee River, heading into an area of older warehouse buildings. Ten seconds after the turn, the Traverse came around the corner. “Do you have the full plate now?” McRyan asked, checking his rearview mirror.

“I do,” Wire answered. “I’ll have Ring run it when we get to DataPoint.”

“Looks like we’re there.”

DataPoint was located west of the Milwaukee River in a non-descript four-story warehouse building with a simple DataPoint sign on the front. Mac dropped the Acadia into a guest parking space in the front next to Ring.

Ring led them through the front doors into DataPoint’s offices. Once inside, to their immediate right was a waiting area. To the left was a rounded reception desk unmanned since it was Saturday. Standing at the reception desk was a short and stocky woman dressed in a black pant suit and navy blue open collar blouse. She had a Milwaukee police badge on her belt. Ring walked up to her, spoke briefly and turned to them, “Detective McRyan, Ms. Wire, meet my partner Jill Brosel.”

“Hello,” Brosel said as she shook hands. “Let’s step over here.” The four moved into the small conference room to the left of the reception desk. It was likely a conference room used for job interviews as it was small, maybe ten feet by eight feet, with a small round conference table and four chairs and a little mini-fridge in the corner with a glass door. Inside was water and sodas. “Water,” Wire uttered with some desperation as she helped herself to an Ice Mountain and handed one to Mac. She then moved to the window and peeked through the shades and scanned the area. She looked back to McRyan and nodded. The silver Traverse was still lingering.

Ring, ever observant, saw the look the two of them shared and asked, “What’s out there?”

“We’ve got ourselves a tail,” Mac replied as he walked over to the window to look for himself. The Traverse was parked across the street in the second row of the parking lot for the company across the street at about ten o’clock. Two men sitting in the front seat of the SUV. Mac pulled out his cell phone and focused on the Traverse, zooming as best he could with the camera function on his cell phone. The best he could do was two white men in dark coats and baseball hats pulled down low over their eyes.

Mac showed the picture to Ring. “Look familiar?”

Ring snorted and shrugged. Two white men, baseball caps pulled down low. They looked kind of generic. “Could be the guys who took out Martin?” hardly convinced but mildly intrigued.

“Let’s start finding out,” Wire replied as she handed Ring a slip of paper with the plate number.