FIRST CASE - Novella (McRyan Mystery Series Prequel) (5 page)

Drew’s Saloon was a corner bar that occupied half of an old two-story brown brick building with Vittolo’s, an Italian restaurant, occupying the other side that fronted Dale Street. They were separate establishments. Behind the saloon and restaurant was a shared parking lot, which Mac cruised. Burrows’s red Chevy Silverado was among the twelve vehicles scattered about what looked to be thirty parking slots.

“He’s here,” Lich said as Mac pulled the Crown Vic into an open parking spot. Mac checked his watch, 6:09 p.m. The sun was just a glimmer in the western sky. It would be dark in a matter of minutes.

“Where’s our backup?” Lich wondered.

“Right there,” Mac answered with a smile as a patrol car pulled up to the curb running along the parking lot. McRyan jumped out and quickly walked over to the squad car. One of the patrol cops was Mac’s cousin Shawn, who powered down his window, smiled and greeted his cousin: “Look at you in the
suit
,” Shawn needled as he exchanged knuckles with Mac. “So what do you need from us, cuz?”

Mac gave Shawn and his partner, Victor Montonez, a picture of and the rundown on Burrows, including size, criminal record and general volatility. “So he might be trouble, boys. Lich and I will go in the back. You and Victor stroll in the front and hopefully the show of force will make him come nice and easy.”

Mac and Lich allowed Shawn a minute to pull around the front and then casually made their way through the back door. Once inside the back door, they walked down a narrow, inclined, ten-foot hallway into the bar proper. Inside the bar, there was a distinct walkway down the middle to the front door. To their left were a series of booths running the length of the wall to the front window where Mac could make out Saloon in reverse stenciled in cursive on the front window. To their right was the bar, which ran the length of the wall with a break in the middle with an opening that led into Vittolo’s. The gap into Vittolo’s caught Mac by surprise. He didn’t think there was a connection between the two establishments.

“I don’t like where he’s sitting,” Mac whispered to Lich.

Martin Burrows was sitting on a stool next to the throughway into the restaurant. He was carrying on a conversation with two other men and had his back to Mac and Lich. However, he was facing the front entrance and Mac could see his shoulder muscles tense up when his cousin Shawn and Montonez walked in the front door. The patrol cops locked in on Burrows immediately who stepped away from his bar stool and turned to the back of the bar and saw Mac and Lich.

Mac had his right hand holding his suit coat back to reveal his service weapon and his badge on his belt. He held his left hand up, “Martin Burrows, I’m detective McRyan with the St. Paul Police Department. I need to talk to you.”

Mac locked in on Burrows’s eyes. Burrows peeked to his left, into the opening into Vittolo’s. Mac didn’t have anyone covering that way and he could tell from the look on Burrows’s face that he knew it too. “Martin, stay calm. Don’t do something stupid,” Mac warned.

Burrows bolted.

“Ahh shit, that’s something stupid,” Mac muttered as he gave chase into Vittolo’s, his cousin falling in behind him.

Burrows was out the front door of the restaurant and burst into the rush hour traffic on Dale Street, just barely avoiding a collision with a Grand Am coming north on Dale and then dodging between a Camry and Dodge Ram pick-up truck traveling south. Mac was out the front door two seconds later. He held his left hand out to halt traffic coming north while Shawn did the same with southbound traffic, leaving them a lane across Dale. Montonez and Lich jumped into the patrol car.

Across Dale, Mac burst ahead of Shawn and gave chase after Burrows, who was twenty-five yards ahead of them running down the sidewalk. Free from dodging cars, Mac quickly closed the gap on Burrows, cutting down ten yards in one block. Burrows crossed another street and then, sensing Mac was closing in, looked back, saw that he was and veered hard right into a narrow alley. When Mac reached the entry to the alley, he slowed some and carefully turned the corner, looking for an ambush.

There was no ambush.

Instead, Burrows was running up the alley, dumping garbage cans, fifteen yards ahead now.

“Burrows!” Mac yelled as he sprinted forward, easily dodging and hurdling the dumped cans, sirens getting closer. “Burrows, stop!” Mac yelled as he quickly closed the gap on Burrows. “This will not end well for you!”

Mac was within five yards now, halfway up the alley. Burrows knew it and moved right and grabbed a two-foot-long two-by-four lying by a garbage can, turned and started to swing it. Mac, anticipating the blow, went in low and put his shoulder into Burrows’s mid-section, tackling him off his feet before he could finish his swing.

Mac rolled him quickly onto his stomach, put his right knee into Burrows’s back, and grabbed his left arm. Shawn, who’d been trailing behind, reached the scene and slapped a cuff on the right wrist and then the left.

Burrows looked like a tied up calf.

Mac, the effort of the two-block sprint catching up to him, looked Burrows in the eye and mocked, between deep breaths, “What were you thinking… running… like that? Do… Do…. Do I look like I’m out of… shape… to you?”

Burrows coughed and spit, “No.”

“That’s right,” Mac answered sarcastically. “I ran the Twin Cities marathon last fall. You were not going to get away from me. Only someone guilty of
murder
would do something that stupid.”

Burrows eyes popped out of his head, “Oh my God. Did I really kill him?”

I
t took him three hours to alibi out on the murder of Gordon Oliver. Five minutes of interviewing him, forty-five minutes to get a video file e-mailed from Mystic Lake Casino and another two hours to review the video. Between midnight and two a.m. Martin Burrows sat on a stool at a blackjack table at the casino in Prior Lake, a suburb twenty miles southwest of Minneapolis, a good half-hour drive from the site of Gordon Oliver’s murder.

Martin Burrows wasn’t their guy.

Nonetheless, for Martin Burrows it was the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good news for Burrows was that he had an iron-clad alibi for Gordon Oliver’s murder.

The bad news, as best Mac could tell, Burrows lost at least three hundred dollars. According to security at the casino, Burrows accused the dealer of cheating him and confronted him in the casino parking lot. That confrontation was broken up by casino security.

The ugly was that the Prior Lake police were looking for Burrows because he followed the blackjack dealer from the casino to his apartment and beat him, and beat him badly, in the parking lot. Burrows thought he’d killed the dealer when Mac accused him of murder.

As Mac scrolled through the video to confirm the alibi, things got interesting at 2:45 a.m. when Burrows was clearly getting agitated, standing and pointing at the dealer. At 3:07 a.m., Burrows looked to have lost eighty dollars on a hand he’d doubled down on. He slammed down his chips and pointed at the dealer again. This brought security to the table and Burrows was escorted out of the casino. The dealer’s shift ended at 5:00 a.m. Apparently Burrows waited in the parking lot and followed the dealer to his apartment in Prior Lake and beat him badly. The dealer was alive and in stable condition at the hospital.

Burrows ran because he thought Mac and Company were there to arrest him for the beat down on the dealer. He knew nothing about the murder of Gordon Oliver.

Once in the interrogation room and when Mac and Lich were certain that Burrows’s alibi would hold, the man broke down. His marriage was falling apart, his hours were way down at his job and everything seemed to be spiraling out of control. Mac felt some sympathy for him.

The Prior Lake police would be stopping by to pick up Burrows for his pending legal issues in Scott County. Before they did, Mac took a moment with him, sitting on the edge of the table, next to Burrows’s chair: “Martin, you’ve got some anger issues, dude. Going after Oliver, threatening to kill him, all that. I know he was sleeping with your wife and your marriage is falling apart, but I gotta tell you, I met your wife today. She’s definitely not worth throwing your life away over. You’re a young guy and you’ve got a lot of years left. Now you’re going to do some time for what you did to that dealer, and you should. The man will make it but you did some damage. While you’re doing your time, get yourself some help. Maybe have your attorney make some anger management counseling part of whatever sentence you end up with. Because if you don’t get that temper of yours under control, the next time you lose it you might end up killing someone and you will have thrown your life away.”

* * * * *

It was a few minutes after ten when Mac and Lich strolled into McRyan’s Pub, the other McRyan family business. The two grabbed stools at the bar and were served Grain Belt Premiums by a retired detective now bartender. Mac took a long pull from the bottle and exhaled and looked at his watch. He had a meeting in an hour a few miles away.

“So your first case, what do you think so far?” Lich asked, taking a pull from his beer.

“I’m thinking we spent the day interviewing and talking to a lot of people and our one good lead went in the shitter an hour ago,” Mac replied with disgust.

“Happens,” Lich replied lightly, having seen it a hundred times.

“I’ve been thinking though,” Mac said, taking another drink. “Oliver seems to have had two things in his life, his job at the law firm and chasing skirts. He did those two things and that seems to be it.”

“What’s that tell you?” Lich asked.

“That we’ll find our murderer out of one of those two things. It’s either something he’s been working on or…”

“…someone he’s been working on,” Lich said. “He’s working a case or he’s workin’ a broad.”

“That’s right, workin’ a broad,” Mac said, shaking his head, a perturbed look on his face.

“What?” Lich said, seeing the look.

“I hate guys like Oliver.”

“Womanizers?”

“Predators. I’ve known guys like him for years. Played hockey with them, went to college and law school with them. I’ve seen friend’s wives and girlfriends pursued by guys like Gordon Oliver. They like women in relationships. They like to pursue them. They like the challenge of it.”

“It’s like Charlie Sheen,” Lich said.

“How so?” Mac asked.

“He said he paid for prostitutes, not because he wanted them to stay but because he wanted them to leave. It’s the same thing here. Oliver gets the married woman. She’s not going to stay. It’s like Cassidy Burrows said. No strings attached.”

Mac disagreed. He turned and faced Lich. “Dick. That doesn’t make it right.”

“I’m not saying it does,” Lich answered defensively.

“You’re not exactly disapproving,” Mac retorted and took a long drink of his beer. “It’s just flat out wrong. It can ruin peoples’ lives. Look at that Mathis woman at the law firm. She wouldn’t have pursued Oliver. But he pursued her like it was a conquest. That could have ruined a relationship that she’d been in for years. Same thing with Cassidy Burrows. He was acting without thinking about any of the consequences attached to those actions.”

“Is that why you gave Burrows that pep talk back at the station? Because of Gordon Oliver?”

Mac shrugged. “I don’t know. The guy has issues but his remorse seemed genuine. I suspect he’s going to have plenty of time to think about what he did and I thought it couldn’t hurt to encourage him to get some help, that’s all.”

“Ah, that catholic upbringing is showing through, lad. Father Flynn at the Cathedral would be proud of you, boyo,” Lich said in his best Irish brogue.

Mac checked his watch, took one last sip of his beer and dropped a ten on the bar.

“Time for one more?” Lich asked. “I’ll buy.”

Mac shook his head, “I’ve got to make one more stop before I go home.”

M
ac met Meredith Hillary at a hockey party his junior year at the University of Minnesota. Mac was excelling on the ice for the Golden Gophers, playing on the second line, starting to see power play time, playing a physical and fearless brand of hockey that made him a huge fan favorite at Mariucci Arena. He was certain to be voted captain at the end of the season. He was a big man on campus, knew it, strutted around like one and enjoyed the benefits of it.

Meredith Hillary was impossible to miss at the party. She was hauntingly attractive with dark green eyes, a bright smile with long legs to match her long black wavy hair. And she was smart, studying to go to law school, which Mac had been giving thought to as well. Mac had a new girlfriend at the time but Meredith was unattached and once she met him, she pursued him and it didn’t take long for Mac to let her catch him. He was in love and thought she was too.

Meredith came from money. Her father was a senior executive at General Mills and her mother was a renowned vascular surgeon. They both made their way up from humble beginnings and now enjoyed the fruits of their labor and the status they had attained. Meredith was bound and determined to do the same. She wanted the professional success and the status that would come with it; the wealth, the big house, the fancy cars, the beautiful children who went to expensive private schools and colleges. She wanted the good life and she wanted the trophy husband to go with it.

Michael McKenzie “Mac” McRyan seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

He wasn’t going pro as a hockey player but he was handsome, ambitious, smart if not borderline brilliant, graduating magna from the University of Minnesota and heading to law school. They married after their second year of law school together. Mac had a six-figure job lined up post law school which meshed well with her similar job offer from a large firm.

Mac was happily on board with the plan that Meredith had set in motion.

Then his two cousins, his two best friends, the co-best men at his wedding, were murdered in the line of duty. Mac felt the calling of the family business and changed the plan.