The St. Paul Conspiracy (37 page)

As impressive as the conference room was, the view was even better. From the twentieth floor, the windows looked west out of downtown. Mac walked over to the window, which ran from floor to ceiling. He could see the Xcel Energy Center’s large red letters and message board flashing coming events. The height of the building also allowed Mac to look levelly at the St. Paul Cathedral, up on the bluff overlooking the city to the west. It was beautiful, the white stone of the magnificent church illuminated by ground lights, contrasting against the dark-blue, cold, winter sky.

As Mac took in the view, he heard the doors open. He turned to see Alt walking back in with Ted Lindsay and another man, whom he assumed was the attorney. Introductions were made all around. Lindsay skipped Alt, and introduced his lawyer, Larry Zimmer. Mac had heard of him, although he didn’t know him. A Prominent lawyer with a big firm, the name of which Mac couldn’t remember.

The chief introduced his troops. When Flanagan introduced Mac, Lindsay walked over. “Detective McRyan, you have been busy lately, haven’t you?” he said, shaking Mac’s hand, looking him closely in the eye.

“As have you,” Mac replied stoically, not backing down.

“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” Lindsay replied evenly. “But why don’t we sit down, and you can tell us why Landy Stephens called me so upset last night.”

Mac took a seat at the conference table, opposite Lindsay. The lawyer sat to Lindsay’s right. Alt, the security guy, stood behind Lindsay, leaning against the wall with his arms folded.

Mac began. “It’s funny you should say that Ms. Stephens was so upset.”

“Oh, why would that be?”

“Well, Pat,” Mac said glancing over at Riley, “she didn’t seem too upset when we were invited into her home, did she?”

“No, she didn’t,” Riley replied.

“No. In fact she served coffee and invited us into the living room of her home.”

Lindsay smiled. “Landy is a very nice lady. But when four officers show up on her doorstep, I’m sure she was taken aback. I’m sure she felt that if she was pleasant and nice, you’d leave much sooner.”

“Perhaps,” Mac replied. “Of course, we didn’t just show up at her place. We did call and ask if we could stop by. Did she mention that?”

Lindsay didn’t reply.

Mac forged on. “Because she couldn’t have been more pleasant. So you can imagine our surprise to find out that she was so upset that we’d been to her home and that we were harassing her.”

“Detective, I can only convey to you the phone call I received from Landy,” Lindsay replied calmly. “Her late husband was a dear friend. I feel a responsibility to look after her. When she called upset, well... I felt it necessary to investigate.” Lindsay leaned forward, elbows on the table, “Especially, when she mentioned all of the questions you were asking about Jamie Jones.”

“Mr. Lindsay, I can say that we did not harass Ms. Stephens,” Mac replied. “You know it’s funny though. It didn’t take long for us to get called on the carpet about going to her house.”

“Detective, I’m a man accustomed to getting quick results.”

“I’m sure you’ve gotten to where you are because of that,” Mac replied, “But it was so quick, I mean almost as if someone saw us leaving her place.” Mac didn’t know if that was the case, but Lyman said he wouldn’t be surprised if PTA had been watching them. He threw it out there to see if Lindsay would react. He didn’t. The lawyer jumped in.

“Detective, why don’t you get to the reason you were visiting Mrs. Stephens.”

“Good idea, Counselor.” Mac replied flippantly, opening his notebook, “Mr. Lindsay, I’m going to tell you a little story, and then I’ll have some questions. Sound fair?”

Lindsay nodded.

“As you know, we recently arrested a serial killer named Dirk Knapp. He’s alleged to have killed seven women in the area around University Avenue. We captured him last week, as I’m sure you recall.”

“Yes, I do, Detective.” Lindsay replied. “As I recall, you were the officer who apprehended him. To that we owe you many thanks, since the bastard killed our Jamie.”

“Yeah, we thought he killed her, too.”

“But... you don’t think so?” Lindsay asked, his brow furrowed.

Mac shrugged his shoulders, “Maybe not. As we all know, Knapp was assassinated the next day. Looked like a pro job. So, we never got the chance to ask him about the killings.”

“Unfortunate for you guys,” Zimmer replied, “But I don’t see how this has anything to do with my client.”

“Patience, Counselor,” Mac replied dismissively, waving Zimmer off while keeping his gaze on Lindsay. “So, anyway. The morning after we caught Knapp, I went out to his place in Hudson. In the basement he had been keeping his clippings in great detail about all his handiwork. He had a display for all of his victims, except one. Who do you suppose that was?”

Lindsay sat back in his chair, folded his arms but didn’t reply.

Mac kept going. “Jamie Jones. Now we thought it odd that she’d be missing. We would’ve asked Knapp about that, but low and behold...”

“He’s dead,” Riley finished.

“Guess you should have done a better job protecting him,” Lindsay replied, pushing back just a little, but his face remaining neutral.

“No doubt about that,” Mac replied. “But I’m still curious about Jones missing from Knapp’s collection. I mean he took all the time to cut all the clippings about the other victims and to tape the news shows, but he completely ignored Jones. Well, we thought it was odd. So, I took a look at our file on Jones and noticed some differences between her and the other victims.”

“Such as?”

“Knapp’s victims were blue-collar, working women. Jones was not.”

“So what?” Lindsay replied.

“Serial killers pick out one kind of victim and stick with that,” Mac answered. “They don’t stray.”

Riles picked up the thread. “So, we took another look at Jones and found some things that caused us to look in the direction of PTA.”

“What would that be, detective?” Lindsay asked evenly, unrattled.

“While we were looking through her apartment, and we noticed Ms. Stephens’ name on a calendar on the refrigerator. She met with Ms. Jones six days before she died on Halloween.”

“That’s hardly unusual, detective. It’s no secret that James and Landy were good friends with Jamie.”

“As Ms. Stephens told us. They got together for coffee, apparently something they did every once in a while. Of course on this occasion, Ms. Stephens gave Jones something.”

“Which was?” Lindsay asked.

“A banker’s box full of PTA documents for something called...” Mac looked at Riles.

“Cross,” Riles finished.

“Is that what this is about, Detective McRyan?” Lindsay asked, “I can assure you—”

Mac cut him off, “There’s more than that, I assure you,” an intentional taunt in his voice, pushing at Lindsay. “We also know that after she met with Ms. Stephens, Jones met with Claire Daniels.” They hadn’t been able to confirm exactly when that meeting took place, but they were pretty sure it had.

“I didn’t know that,” Lindsay replied, a surprised look on his face. Mac didn’t believe him or the surprised look, but they already decided they couldn’t use Daniels much more than that at this point.

“Really?” Mac replied skeptically. “Somehow I doubt that.” Then he continued. “Anyway, between Stephens giving Jones the banker’s box and then meeting with a noted investigative reporter, well, that all seemed fairly suspicious to us. Especially since Jones didn’t fit the pattern of Knapp’s victims. Certainly you can see why this would be of concern to us.”

“Knapp must have taken a shine to Jamie somehow,” Lindsay replied.

“I’m not sure how that would be,” Riley jumped in. “I led the detail on Knapp. He ran into all of his victims through work and driving around the University Avenue area.” Riley shook his head, “In the time we followed him, he never went downtown once.”

Mac jumped back in. “And, as far as we can tell, Jones never had any reason to spend much time along the University Avenue corridor. PTA doesn’t have any facilities over there.”

“Could be a copycat,” Zimmer added, wanting everyone to know he was still in the room.

“We think that’s entirely possible,” Riley replied. “But if the Jones murder was a copycat, it wasn’t pulled off by some ham-and-egger. It was the work of a professional.”

Mac nodded, adding, “Every detail matched to what Knapp was doing. Except, of course, for the profile of the victim. Jones doesn’t fit.”

“So that got us to thinking: who else would want to take her out?” Riles said. “And it seems that the only other thing Ms. Jones had going in her life that would cause someone to pick her out, was the fact that she was the CFO for a prominent company.”

Mac finished the thought. “Maybe PTA had something to hide.”

“Our financial records are impeccable, Detective.” Lindsay replied angrily. “There is no financial malfeasance here.”

“We’ll see,” Mac replied, continuing, cocky. “But I’m not done. In PTA here, we’re not talking about just any company. We’re talking a wealthy company with tremendous assets. A company with a large security force.” Mac looked over to Alt. “People tell me that there’s more than one professional working for your firm.”

“A professional could do a copycat killing and make it look like the work of someone else, it’s one of the things they’re trained to do,” Riley added.

“Heck, a professional could have picked off Knapp from the third level of the Vincent Ramp. Isn’t that right, Mr. Alt?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Alt replied.

“Riiiight,” Mac slowly replied, then continued. “So this all leads us back to Ms. Jones and PTA. In particular, we were wondering what this banker’s box full of documents Ms. Stephens gave Ms. Jones might have to do with all of this?”

Lindsay, a confident smile appearing over his face, answered, “Is that what this is really all about, detective?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

“They sure were smooth.”

Alt, with his back to the wall, had listened to McRyan thunder away at Lindsay. He was cocky, intentionally so, which was expected. They knew that he would want to piss the boss off, get him to bite. Lindsay wouldn’t, Alt thought. Too smooth, been through something like this too many times. If the Senate Intelligence Committee never got him to buckle, why would some young Irish detective from St. Paul have any luck? Nevertheless, Alt admired the kid. He was on the right track, more than he even really knew. They had suspicions, good ones for sure, but they had no hard facts, other than the Cross file, and they didn’t have the file. McRyan would ask about the banker’s box full of documents on Cross. They knew he would. They knew his whole strategy. They were ready. This is where Lindsay would end it.

“Is that what this is really all about, detective?” Lindsay said. From where he was standing, Alt couldn’t see the boss’ face, until he turned in his chair to him.

“Webb?”

“Sir.”

“Could you grab that box of Cross documents that Jamie brought in?” Alt went back out the double doors and into Lindsay’s office. The box was sitting next to his desk. This was their cover, recreated to look like the copies Jamie had given them. He picked up the box and brought them back to the conference room and set them down on the table. As he set the box down, the lawyer was whispering in Lindsay’s ear. Lindsay replied out loud. “No, I want them to see it. I want them to see there’s nothing to it.” Then Lindsay looked across the table, “Now gentlemen, this is what Jamie brought to me, what Landy Stephens gave to her. You’re free to look through these documents to your heart’s content. I think you’ll find there’s nothing in here of concern to us.”

McRyan and Riley didn’t show much emotion, but Alt could see the disappointment. It was their body language. Their backs weren’t so straight, nor the shoulders so broad. Their bodies sagged slightly, as if a slow leak had started. Riley grabbed the ledger book and started flipping through it while McRyan thumbed through some binder-clipped documents.

Lindsay went for the jugular. “Now, what you have here is a box of documents that, for whatever reason, James Stephens had at home. They relate to what we were doing a number of years ago at our Cross facility.” Lindsay related how they put PTA surplus out in Cross and then systematically had it destroyed.

“Now, Jamie did raise the issue of why we didn’t try to sell the surplus materials. Since the weapons, communications gear, and things of that nature would be coming from PTA, they would fetch some money. We might have been able to make maybe twenty-five to thirty million if we’d done that. She thought we should have considered it.”

“Why didn’t you?” Riley asked.

“I’m a patriot, Detective Riley. If I build it for the government, they’re the ones who get it.”

“So how did you end up with surplus?”

“Sometimes, it doesn’t cost as much to produce a product as you think. In some cases we were more efficient, and sometimes we manufacture a surplus in case problems or errors arise. It happens in all industries, I think. But I didn’t exactly want to admit this to the government either,” Lindsay answered casually, then turned more serious, “Now, if putting a stop to all of this nonsense you have been engaging in will require me to do that, I certainly will.”

“Of course, we don’t really know if this is what Jamie Jones had, do we?” McRyan stated.

“This is what she brought to me,” Lindsay responded reasonably. “You can believe me or not. That’s up to you.”

“Convenient that she’s not here to verify it,” McRyan accused.

“I think that’s enough, Detective,” Zimmer shot back.

“Shut up, Counselor,” McRyan snapped back, the disappointment now out in the open.

“Would it be unusual for Mr. Stephens to have had these documents at home?” Riley asked.

“It would,” Alt replied. “Our security is very tight here. For obvious reasons, we have strict rules that company-related documents are not to leave the building.”

“So how does Stephens end up with the documents at home?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Alt replied, although he knew why Stephens had the originals at home—because they told a completely different story. “What can I say. Executives don’t always follow all the rules.”