Electing To Murder (7 page)

“Stroudt arrives here 10:00 a.m. from St. Louis and checks into The Snelling at 2:00 p.m.,” Mac used the black dry erase marker and extended the black line further right, with a few more hash marks, “2:45–3:00 p.m. Stroudt calls for a pizza and …”

“… he is killed sometime between then and 4:00 p.m.”

They stood and looked at the whiteboard in silence for a few minutes. Mac, arms folded, stared quizzically at the whiteboard, lightly shaking his head.

Lich knew the look; he’d seen it a thousand times before. “Spit it out.”

“So these guys fly into Nashville on Tuesday night. They have a casual steak dinner, go back to the hotel and have a couple of drinks. Then the next day they get up and start heading up into Kentucky, towards Cadiz. So far, it’s your standard business trip, right?”

Lich nodded.

“So what happens on Wednesday night that causes these guys to all of the sudden drive to St. Louis this morning?”

“Did they have return flights to Washington out of Nashville?”

“Yes,” Mac answered. “They were scheduled to fly out this morning at 10:22, both of them. They would have been back in DC in a little under two hours. We know where Stroudt ended up going. He purchases a plane ticket this morning to come up to the Twin Cities. Montgomery did not make that flight in Nashville and I haven’t tracked him down to any other flight. So again, what happens last night that causes them to change their plans?” Mac flipped through several pages of his notes. He stopped on a page. “Hmpf.”

“Hmpf what?”

“You know what these guys do?”

Lich shook his head.

“They’re political writers.”

“Reporters?”

“Kind of. I traced the corporate name on the credit card used for the flight to Nashville to their business which is TCP Enterprises. TCP stands for The Congressional Page. That’s a political blog that Stroudt and Montgomery operate. They write some articles, a few of which I found with an Internet search. It’s mostly on stuff happening on Capitol Hill and some campaign finance reform stuff.”

“Interesting,” Lich said. “Given we’re in the height of the silly season.”

“Exactly,” Mac answered, walking up to the board, looking at the timeline. “So these guys are into politics and a week before the election they are flying into Nashville and the next night they’re driving through the Kentucky countryside and this morning they split up, one comes up here and the other one makes like a submarine and runs silent and deep.”

“When did they purchase the tickets to Nashville to begin with?”

“That’s not a bad question, partner,” Mac responded and flipped through his notes. “The tickets to Nashville were purchased on …” McRyan’s eyes lit up, “Tuesday morning.”

“So in other words,” Lich speculated, “If I’m catching your drift, you’re thinking that these guys might have got onto something.”

“Might have,” Mac nodded. “It’s at least a theory that would explain the timeline and behavior. It’s a normal trip until last night and then something suddenly causes them to change their itinerary. The original plan was not to end up in St. Louis this morning. They had tickets back to DC. Another thing that’s odd, if you decide you need to fly up here to the Twin Cities, why not just go back to Nashville and see if you could change the ticket?”

“Maybe there wasn’t a flight here from Nashville as quickly as they wanted and there was from St. Louis.”

“That’s possible,” Mac answered. “We should check that out. Of course, another possibility might be they were trying to avoid someone.”

“That’s a bit of an intuitive leap, don’t you think?” Lich said skeptically.

“I have Stroudt’s dead body that says otherwise,” Mac retorted. “And why is Montgomery so hard to find now? His cell phone isn’t turned on or he certainly isn’t answering it. He wasn’t on the flight back from Nashville. No record of him being on a flight anywhere and he dumped the rental car in St. Louis. It’s as if he literally disappeared.”

“Or given how you’re suddenly thinking,” Lich replied, “he figuratively disappeared. Maybe he’s dead too?”

Mac raised his eyebrow. “Might explain why he’s not reachable. Why we can’t get a sniff of this guy. Or …”

“Or …”

“Montgomery is scared of what they saw last night and he’s hiding. If Stroudt gets to St. Louis to take the flight, chances are Montgomery is the one who got him there. Then Montgomery goes into …”

“… hiding.”

“Yeah. It’s an alternative explanation. He splits up from Stroudt, sending him up here to the cities. He goes into hiding and is not interested in coming out—at least not yet.”

Lich sighed and shook his head. “I know you like to see conspiracies everywhere and the good Lord knows you’ve been right a few times, but come on, Mac. I mean, if these guys are worried about someone tracking them, then why would Stroudt use a credit card to buy a flight to the Twin Cities? Why use a credit card to rent a car? You are not exactly hiding when you do that.”

Mac sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Agreed. But then why pay cash for a trashy hotel?” Mac asked. “It’s like he wasn’t hiding and then all of a sudden decides to hide. Why else go to The Snelling?”

“Usual reasons. Drugs. Sex.”

“I look for conspiracies, you always look for sex.”

“I obviously have my priorities in order.”

“No,” Mac answered chuckling, “I just think with my upper unit and you with your lower unit.”

“Whatever,” Lich answered dismissively.

“But seriously, Dicky Boy,” Mac pressed, “it’s as if sometime between when he landed and then checking into The Snelling, he changed what he was doing. He landed around 10:00 a.m. and gets to The Snelling sometime after 2:00 p.m. That’s four hours. Where are Stroudt’s cell phone records?”

Lich grabbed them off his desk and handed them to Mac. Mac picked up the cell phone record he’d printed off for Montgomery. “There, those two spoke to each other for five minutes from 12:08 to 12:13 p.m.,” Mac said, jotting it down on the whiteboard as he said it. “So he speaks with Montgomery and he says we have to ‘go to ground’ but Stroudt acts too late. Whoever is tracking him is already on him, sees his opportunity at The Snelling and now we have a dead body.”

Lich shrugged. “Pure speculation.”

“Speculation is my middle name,” was Mac’s ready reply. “We need to find us some facts, but it’s not a bad theory.”

“If you do say so yourself.”

“I do.”

Lich’s phone rang. “Yes, this is Detective Lich. Okay, how do I get into the system?” Lich wrote feverishly into his notebook. “Right, thanks.” Dick finished writing.

“So what was that?”

“Stroudt rented a car when he got to town today.”

Mac picked up right away, “But it wasn’t at The Snelling.”

“Exactly. It was moved.”

“And you know this how?”

“GPS tracking in the car.”

“Where did the car end up?”

“Parking lot outside the Penalty Box in Roseville.” The Penalty Box was a sports bar that was just a few miles north of The Snelling, located across the street from Rosedale Mall.

“He rented it at the airport, right?”

“Yes.”

“And we have our four-hour gap between when he landed and he got to the hotel. Will the GPS tell us everywhere he went?”

“It will.”

* * *

Heath Connolly sat in his plane seat, sipped his martini and looked over the polling data spread across his lap. On paper, the situation was under control.

The vice president was feeling good about his chances. He said he could feel it in the crowds, the surge of momentum. He said it repeatedly, “I can feel the surge out there. The momentum is with us.”

And the vice president wasn’t necessarily wrong. He was closing really well in the light red states like Missouri, New Mexico and West Virginia, all states Vice President Wellesley would need to win. There was momentum there and further visits wouldn’t be necessary. Of course, those were states Connolly fully expected to win in the end.

There was also some small momentum in Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Virginia, the states where the election would ultimately be won or lost. The Super PAC advertising was a non-stop barrage that the Thomson campaign simply couldn’t match. Yet despite the vice president’s feeling of momentum, they still trailed and Connolly’s own internal polls showed that.

But they were close enough. The plan was coming together.

The Plan.

It made him think of one of his political heroes—Joe Kennedy.

Joe Kennedy was an odd political hero for Heath Connolly. He hated the Kennedys, hated what they had stood for, hated their politics, hated their self-righteousness, hated their sense of entitlement, hated their status as political royalty, but he admired the hell out of the family’s patriarch Joe Kennedy.

When it came to politics, when it came to winning, Joe Kennedy would leave nothing to chance. He would spend whatever it took to win an election. He would look for every advantage possible to win an election and he wouldn’t just exploit it, he’d drive a semi-truck through it and then put the truck in reverse and back over it. Joe Kennedy once got another Joe Russo on the ballot in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s first congressional race in 1946. Why? To split the vote with the Joe Russo his son was already running against. The voters were confused about which Russo to vote for and the vote split allowed JFK to sneak through and win his first election. It was low, it was dirty, it was brilliant, it was Joe Kennedy at his conniving best and Connolly loved it.

That set the stage for 1960. Kennedy v. Nixon was dead even going into the last week, akin to the current Thomson v. Wellesley. Much has been made of the televised 1960 presidential debate and how Kennedy looked so youthful and good on television and that Nixon looked and sounded so bad on television and that this played the pivotal role in the election. It may have played a role, but what Connolly admired and what he believed in is what Joe Kennedy did.

The story was that Joe Kennedy made a deal with the Chicago mob and Sam Giancana in particular, to turn the vote in Chicago in Senator Kennedy’s favor. Frank Sinatra served as a go between, brokering the deal. Joe Kennedy denied it and historians have never been sure if a deal was struck. Joe Kennedy admitted he met with Giancana, but that was it and he claimed he never asked Sinatra to do it, but Connolly didn’t buy it.

Joe Kennedy made that deal.

That deal won the election.

John F. Kennedy became president.

What Connolly admired and learned from that little piece of history was that in a close election, you had to do whatever you could to win.

He was doing the same.

Kristoff and Foche just needed to finish their job and the rest would take care of itself.

M
ac took a look at his watch: 11:28 p.m. He mixed some sugar into his oversized maroon University of Minnesota coffee cup, took a sip, and winced at the taste. The coffee the break room had to offer at midnight was less than stellar and Mac was a bit of a coffee snob. He opened the refrigerator and rummaged around and found some half-and-half. He screwed off the cap, smelled the creamer once, smelled it again, and decided it was good enough. He added it to the coffee and attempted to kill its battery-acid-like taste.

Mac possessed a minority ownership stake in a coffee chain called the Grand Brew and it was about to change his life. The business had exploded in the last two years. The chain was now up to nearly two hundred coffee shops spread across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, with plans for more expansion on the board.

The Grand Brew was started by two of Mac’s childhood friends. They needed $10,000 to get over the financing finish line for their first coffee house. Mac’s father had set up a college fund for him. But when Mac turned into a star high school athlete and went to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, the $57,408 Simon McRyan saved for his son’s college education wasn’t needed, at least for tuition, books or lodging. Mac accessed the fund from time to time in college for some spare money when needed and he also accessed it to pay for some of his law school tuition. However, when he graduated law school, the fund still had a little over $23,000 sitting in it. When his two buddies needed the extra ten grand, Mac agreed to provide it in return for fifteen percent of the business.

It was a good deal.

Each year, Mac received a dividend from the business. In the last three years, the dividend made his detective’s salary look like an allowance. Two large food corporations had been sniffing around looking to buy Grand Brew Enterprises. Both had now put legitimate offers on the table. Just before Mac arrived at The Snelling, he’d been meeting with his two friends. They told him that by this time tomorrow, he would be a multi-millionaire, all on a little $10,000 investment to help two buddies he’d known since he was six years old when they all walked to their first-grade class together. It would be a life altering event and his mind had wandered a bit in the last six hours thinking about it, wondering how much longer he would be a cop if it were to happen. If his friends were right, after tomorrow, he could do whatever he wanted with the rest of his life. What would that be? He liked what he did. It was rewarding work and it was the family business, but would he want to continue it going forward? Would he have the same passion, urgency, angst and commitment the job required? Would he need something else?

Mac shook his head. This could all wait. He refocused on the matter at hand and rolled his desk chair up to his desktop computer.

Lich was exhausted and went home. The case could wait, he said. He was probably right, but with Sally working late into the night, and Mac being a night owl anyway, he decided to keep working the case for a while longer. The case piqued his interest more than normal. On a case like this, he was less an investigator and more of a hunter, and the hunt was on. The game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say.

The squad room was quiet, with only a few night shift cops hanging around. A television in the corner was tuned to CNN. The volume was loud enough for Mac to hear a replay of the day’s political conversation. The presidential election was essentially down to four states based on current polling, the same four states that Sally had spent the last three months talking about. For the last month, Sally was working around the clock and he’d barely seen her. She had a passion for the politics that he hadn’t seen before and suspected this wouldn’t be her last foray into the political arena.