Deadly Stillwater (24 page)

Lich waved Mac over to the bed on the left and pointed to the end posts. “See the scrapes here?” Lich said, pointing at the right post of the headboard and then to the left side. “Then, on the other side, the same thing. Then down on the footboard, the side posts, same thing.”

“Yet,” Mac said, waving to the head and footboards, “the rest of the rails are pristine, unscratched.”

“Right,” Lich said, and then turned to the other bed. “And we have exactly the same thing over here. You know what I think?” Dick asked, a twinkle in his eye.

“Hit me with it,” Mac said.

Lich moved to the end of the bed on the right. “Girls are on the beds, arms cuffed to the posts for the headboard and either cuffed or manacled to the footboard,” he said, pointing with his pen at the headboard and then back down to the footboard.

“And the scratches are from the cuffs moving up and down on the posts, the girls struggling to get free,” Mac added.

“
Right
,” Lich said, nodding.

“The girls were here, man,” Mac said, with conviction now. “I can
feel
it. Upstairs, the house has been cleaned top to bottom. The techs are processing it, but they’re finding nothing. These guys are so careful, they even remove the cleaning supplies and the trash. All of that stuff is gone.” Mac spoke with a modicum of admiration. “They’re ready even when we get a break.”

“My gut tells me your gut is right,” Lich said in agreement.

“I’m right,” Mac said, walking out of the bedroom, down the hall and back to the family room at the bottom of the steps. “They used this,” Mac said, waving his arms around, “as a safe house. They take Shannon on Sunday, drive out to River Falls, dump the one van, transfer into the other, drive back here and chain her to the bed in the basement. Then they can take an hour, run up to Clearwater to place the call, then come back nice and easy-like. Whole thing takes maybe three to four hours.”

“They stay here overnight,” Lich said, picking up on the thread. “So they’re close to St. Thomas and are in position to take Carrie the next day.”

“And then,” Mac said, pacing now, his left hand grabbing the back of his neck while he gestured with his right hand, “They bring Carrie back here after they dump the van over in south Minneapolis.”

“Precisely,” Lich said.

Mac laughed.

“What?”

“You said, ‘precisely.’”

“Fuck you,” Lich went back to the task at hand. “Monday night one of the kidnappers drives over to Ellsworth to make the call and then drives back.”

“Then they take the girls and put them underground, but it’s someplace that isn’t
that
far from here,” Mac said. “So while we’re running around down in Ellsworth and dragging Drew Wiskowski in for questioning, they’re putting together that video.”

“Which they put under the stands at the football field sometime overnight,” Lich added. “After which they come back here.”

“Exactly,” Mac said. “The house gives them a good central staging area, so they can be close to town and operate, yet they’re not too far from wherever the girls are buried.”

“I shouldn’t smile,” Lich said, smiling. “But we’re on it, man. This is something. We just have to lay in wait.”

“
If
they come back,” Mac said, doubt creeping onto his face. “This place has been cleaned, is clean,” he said as he climbed the basement steps. “What if they’re not planning on coming back? The ransom call comes tomorrow at six. What if we’ve missed them?”

“Only one way to find out,” Lich said following.

“I know. We’ve got to sit on it,” Mac answered.

21

“
What do you mean ‘ripped out?’”

7:45 PM

The small monkey wrench thrown into the day’s plans was having an unintended but pleasant effect. After exchanging vehicles with Dean in Cambridge, a small town nearly an hour north of the Twin Cities, Smith and Monica had started driving back into town when she spoke.

“There’s a little motel.”

“Looks like they have a vacancy,” Smith added, turning right off of Highway 65 and into the dirt parking lot of the 65-Hi Suites. They had several hours to kill before a midnight meeting. There were ten rooms at the motel and five cars in the parking lot: just enough that they wouldn’t be memorable to the motel clerk, and just few enough that there was minimal risk they would be remembered by a guest.

His first two weeks out of prison, Smith stayed in Chicago and went on a binge, hooking up with a different woman every night. Some nights it was a woman he picked up in some bar. A divorcée, a woman looking for a fling, he wasn’t real particular. If he couldn’t find a woman at a bar, a hooker in a cheap hotel room would do. The quality didn’t really matter. He was working off fifteen years of pent-up sexual frustration, so any woman did it for him.

After Chicago, he moved to the Twin Cities and joined up with Dean, David, and their sister Monica to start the planning. He was immediately attracted to her. Monica was in her mid-forties, but the years were being very kind to her. Twice divorced, Monica was a petite woman with creamy skin, short, jet-black hair in a stylish cut, deep green eyes, a tiny, slightly upturned nose, and full ruby lips. And she was smart as a whip. A CPA, she worked the books for a number of years for area jewelers. That was where, three years ago, she crossed paths with Lyman Hisle. He didn’t know her, but she knew him.

Monica was in a jewelry store on Ford Parkway, balancing the books, when Hisle walked into the store, dressed in a two-thousand-dollar French suit and two-hundred-dollar Italian shoes. He spent ten thousand dollars in fifteen minutes without blinking an eye, money that Hisle had made off of people like her father.

Anger raged within her as Lyman Hisle whipped out his American Express card and spent the money as if it were nothing, as if he were buying groceries or a DVD. From that point forward, she never let the rage go. As far as she was concerned, Lyman Hisle had killed her father. He didn’t pull the trigger, her father did that. But Hisle drove him to do it. For ten years she suppressed the anger, shoving it to the back of her mind. She’d been able to cope with the damage Hisle’s work did to her father, the drinking, the pills, the loss of all the money, and finally the suicide. But seeing Hisle, seeing him spend all that money so cavalierly, brought it all back.

She was looking for the same kind of payback Smith was looking for. As the planning for the kidnappings began, she and Smith spent many hours together, scouting sites and observing targets. Their passion for revenge ignited the same within them, as though the two feelings fed off of one another. Within a month they were sleeping together. In another month, Smith and Monica knew they would escape together when everything was over. He was in love with her, and she said the feeling was mutual. Monica was married twice and divorced twice. Both times she had married unworthy men, weak men, men she couldn’t trust. Her brothers told her that Smith was none of those things. He was strong. He’d been a man in prison. He was a man they could trust, a man who wanted what they wanted and possessed what they didn’t: the ability and the connection to pull it off.

Now it was 8:27 PM, and they were lying in a musty motel room with an air conditioner working overtime to cool the room. They lay naked on the bed, her head just under his chin, the sheets and blankets on the floor and the sweat from the sex cooling on their bodies. Smith reached over and grabbed the remote for the TV. He turned to Channel 6, which was running a special bottom-of-the-hour report about the kidnappings. For the first time, Smith saw the videotape played by the media.

“I didn’t think they would release that to the public,” Monica said.

“I’m not sure I did either.”

“Are you worried about that?”

“Not particularly. The video snippets are short. The land is mostly private. I’m sure they’re hoping that somebody will recognize the road or some marking in the background. I don’t see that happening.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have put so much into the video.”

“You might be right,” Smith answered mildly. “I wanted to build the anxiety for Flanagan and Hisle before we showed the girls going under. I wanted them to see the process, let the pressure and suspense build. I wanted them fully motivated to pay. In the end, perhaps less would have been more.”

They listened to the rest of the report.

“Nothing about the house,” Monica said. “Perhaps the coast is clear.”

“Maybe,” Smith answered, lightly scratching her upper back. “The media has been on most breaks in the case, but they’re not on this one. Either the police have done a good job of keeping this one quiet, or they don’t think we were at the house.”

“What do you think is the case?” she asked, running her fingers through his chest hair.

“You cleaned the house well?”

“Yes. It’s clean.”

“They might think we were there. But they’re not finding anything, which means they’re no closer to finding us. And besides, we’re not going back,” he said, cupping her breast in his hand and stopping her questions with a kiss.

* * * * *

Jupiter Jones grabbed a Red Bull out of his Sub-Zero refrigerator and a bag of chips out of the walk-in pantry. He loaded up his coffee maker for a night’s worth of fuel. Frequent jolts of energy would be needed for what looked to be an all-nighter. The video of the kidnappers burying the girls alive had his utmost attention. If the video didn’t hit you, you weren’t human. He couldn’t imagine the impact on the chief or Lyman Hisle.

He tied his Hefner robe shut over his shorts, slid his feet into his flip-flops, and went back to his home computer lab. The FBI techs – who were good – very good – had gone over the video all afternoon and found nothing that seemed helpful beyond identifying the van as a Chevy Astro, 2001 edition, based on elements of the dashboard design. Jupiter didn’t believe there was nothing else there. There was always,
always
, something to be found, something that could help. To do that required patience, a keen eye for detail and, most importantly, top-of-the-line equipment – all of which he had. His equipment was better than anything law enforcement owned. Mac had called Jupiter in on more than one occasion as a secret weapon. Mac often said that Jupiter should be in one of those “Break in Case of Emergency” cases. Jupiter thought Mac was right.

Having watched the video a number of times, Jupiter had a feel for it now, knowing what it showed and how it flowed. Nothing jumped out at him initially, but then again, if something like that were there, the FBI or the police would have found it. No, what he was looking for wouldn’t be obvious, if not flat-out hidden. But it was there somewhere. You just had to know how to find it, or get lucky enough, and then extract it.

He needed to break the video down frame-by-frame. Jupe took a sip from his Red Bull, grabbed a handful of chips and started at the beginning: the van driving through the field.

* * * * *

Mac wiped sweat off his forehead as he sat on a dining room chair, looking out the front window of the Hall house and across the street at the rambler. The crime scene techs found nothing inside the house: no prints, no hairs, no odd fibers, no nothing. The house was clean. Or, as Mac bitterly stated, “It’s a safe house for these bastards because it’s clean.”

It took three hours, but Burton and the FBI found the owner, Gavin Harvey, who was out on his boat on Lake Minnetonka. Arriving dressed in a bright orange swimsuit and an unbuttoned blue and white Hawaiian shirt, not to mention half in the bag, Harvey turned over a manila folder with a thin set of rental documents for the house.

The renter was Ramona Jones. No picture identification was in the file. Simply a one-page, two-month agreement and a notation of $2,000 cash paid up-front. It was nothing unusual, according to Harvey. This was one of his lesser rental properties, and he was contemplating selling because he couldn’t regularly rent it. When Jones came along with $2,000 cash and a two-month rental request, it was “a no brainer,” Harvey said. “Otherwise the joint sits empty.”

Harvey’s description of the woman wasn’t helpful either. “Small, petite, she was attractive, had long blonde hair, nearly down to her ass. I took a little run at her, if you know what I mean,” Harvey said, smiling crookedly and winking at Mac. “But she blew me off.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Lich cracked.

“Where was she from?” Mac asked, suppressing a chuckle.

“I don’t know, beyond what’s on the rental sheet,” Harvey said, the booze on his breath causing Mac to wince and take a step back. Good thing this guy has a lackey driving him.

The rental sheet revealed a nonexistent address in Duluth. Harvey said that he had spoken to Jones once over the phone, met her once in person to have her sign the lease, collected the money, and gave her the keys. Harvey hadn’t stopped by since.

Neighbors were questioned, but nothing useful was coming of it. People saw the vans, but they couldn’t give consistent answers as to colors, makes, models, or plates. Men were seen, but nobody seemed to know how many or what they looked like beyond being big. Nobody spoke to the men or ever saw their faces. They were seen pulling in and out of the garage, black-clad torsos with hats and sunglasses on. Otherwise, they were never seen and never did anything to draw attention.