Electing to Murder

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Where is the first shooter?”

Mac accelerated south down Cretin Avenue, a patrol unit falling in behind him with the rollers going and siren pushing everyone to the side. At Berkley, Mac turned hard left and accelerated down the block.

“Second to last on the left,” Sally directed.

Mac pulled up in front of the house. He reached in the center console and grabbed a flashlight and pulled his Sig from his belt. “Stay in the truck.” Sally nodded, terrified.

The patrol unit following him pulled in right behind Mac. Another unit approached from the east, having come down Finn Avenue from St. Clair. Sirens in the far distance would provide additional reinforcements in a few minutes.

The four uniforms on the scene were out of their cars, weapons drawn and flashlights in hand and turned on. McRyan quickly scanned McCormick’s house. The lights were turned off with the exception of a dim light in the sunroom on the house’s left side. Mac turned to the uniform cops and tilted his head towards the house. The uniforms all nodded and Mac led them up the front steps and pulled open the front screen door. Two uniform cops went in and to the left and two others went straight ahead up the stairway to the second floor.

Mac moved inside, his Sig pointed straight ahead, his left hand folded underneath his right holding the flashlight. He heard “clears” being yelled by the uniforms as they searched the house. The detective moved to his right and into the dining room. Immediately, he noted the silhouettes of the two bodies, one lying on the floor to the left of the dining room table and the other at the front end, tangled with a dining room chair. The body at the front had a bullet hole between his eyes. Adam Montgomery. Mac put his light on the body laying to the left of the dining room table and immediately recognized McCormick with two gunshots to his chest. He leaned down to check for a pulse and didn’t feel one.

Where was Kate Shelby? Where was the Judge?

More “clears” were bellowed throughout the house but no reports of bodies. He panned the dining room with his flashlight left to right. To his right there was a blood smear on the far wall of the dining room, running down to the floor. Panning the light down, there was a pool of blood on the wood floor. As he inspected the blood pool he could see a void, where a body might have been, leaning against the wall, sitting on the floor.

The uniform officers searching the house returned to the front foyer, reporting the house was clear, no additional bodies found. Mac led everyone back out the front door as two more patrol units arrived.

“Okay, listen up.” Mac pointed to one officer, “Call it in, two homicides. We need crime scene and the coroner right away and more units.” To the second officer: “I want a large perimeter around the house, the whole yard. Get the tape up fast. Shots fired in this neighborhood will draw the media double quick. We need to keep people back. So once the tape is up, let’s get the cruisers blocking the approaches.” The two officers nodded and double timed it to their squad car. To the other two patrol officers he ordered, “Start a quick canvas and see what people heard and saw. We’ve got people out on their front steps now, lights are coming on, let’s get to people quick. If anyone saw anything, I want to talk to them or I want them talking to Lich, Riley, Rock or another detective. They’re all on their way.” The two officers nodded, with one taking McCormick’s side of the street and the other the far side.

Sally jumped out of the Yukon and came running up to him, panic written all over her face. Mac took a deep breath and looked down briefly. She saw it and her eyes began to water and her hands went to her mouth. He holstered his gun and walked up to her. “I’m sorry. Sebastian McCormick is dead.”

“And Kate? What about Kate, and the Judge? What about the Judge?”

“They’re not in there, Sally.”

A look of partial relief washed over her face.

“That doesn’t mean they’re still alive, honey,” Mac cautioned. “Why don’t you see if you can reach either of them on the phone?”

Mac took out his own cell phone, turned his back to the street and dialed Chief of Police Charlie Flanagan, who lived half a mile away. “Chief, we’ve got a scene developing. You’re going to want to be here.” Mac gave him a quick rundown and the address. As he hung up, he heard dueling squeals of tires behind him. He turned around to see Lich, Rockford and Riley arriving on the scene. Right behind them were detectives Frank Franklin, a/k/a Double Frank and two of Mac’s cousins, Shawn and Patrick, in plain clothes.

“Holy cow, Dick! You really called the cavalry,” Mac quipped, noting the massive backup arriving.

Lich stopped and spread his arms, “Partner, you had that ‘calling all cars’ tone in your voice,” Dick replied, his arms spread open as if to say “what?” “So tell me, what the hell happened?” Lich asked, handing Mac a pair of rubber gloves.

“I’m working on it,” Mac answered and gave them a quick rundown on the phone call with the Judge, the shots fired call a few minutes later, his dash to the scene and his quick search of the house. He finished with, “We’ve got two bodies inside. One is McCormick.”

“Is the other that Kate Shelby?” Lich asked.

“Thankfully, no,” Mac answered. “The other is Adam Montgomery.”

That caught Lich’s attention. “Stroudt’s business partner? The guy we haven’t been able to get a hold of or find? Are you sure?”

Mac nodded.

“What did those two stumble into?”

“I don’t know,” Mac answered. “But Judge Dixon does and if he’s still alive, he and I are going to have a f*ckin’ direct conversation about it.”

“Detective McRyan?”

Mac turned to see the uniform cop that was setting up the perimeter calling him from the left side of the house. “I think there is something you should see.”

“Rock and Riles, take the plain clothes and hit the door to doors. There are a couple of uniforms who have started. See if anyone is worth talking to. Keep everyone out from inside until crime scene gets here.”

Mac and Lich left Rock and Riley to organize the door-to-door and followed the uniform cop, named Skrypek, around to the back of the house, down the back sidewalk, past the two-car detached garage and into the alley. “What do you have, Pecker?” Lich asked.

“Detectives, it looks like something went down in the back alley here.” Skrypek pointed his flashlight at three shell casings on the far side of the alley by another garage.

The detectives walked over. Lich leaned down while Mac put his light on the casings. Dick pulled a ballpoint pen out of his coat pocket and picked the casing up with the pen’s tip, “Look like ones for a Sig just like yours, Mac.”

“If you look down the alley to the west here,” Skrypek pointed to some debris, “on the right side you can see where the privacy fence was taken out. I talked briefly to the homeowner who said he heard the loud pop of gunfire, at least a couple of shots, and then a crashing sound. He looked out the back window in time to see an SUV back out from a large hole in his fence and then drive down here towards McCormick’s house. He said after the SUV drove down the alley, there was a minute of quiet and then he heard squealing tires and that was it. Then he called 911. It was a few minutes later and he heard our sirens.”

Mac stood behind the shell casings and looked back down the alley towards the fence. Then he looked back to his left to McCormick’s house and then he looked to his right between two houses and out to St. Clair Avenue. “I wonder,” he mumbled as he slowly started walking towards St. Clair. Just short of the large two-story house on the left was a garden that ran to the property line. He shined his light on the garden, now just dirt, and noted three fresh footprints moving in the direction of St. Clair, large footprints, perhaps a size eleven or twelve. “See that?”

Lich nodded.

“Mark this area off, Officer Skrypek,” Mac ordered and then kept walking through the houses and down to St. Clair Avenue. He quickly looked both directions but didn’t see anything of note but when he looked back towards McCormick’s house, he could see straight through to the back door. Then he started thinking about what he saw inside the house, the blood spot on the far dining room wall and the spot on the floor as well as the void. He thought about the call he and Sally received from the Judge and then about the person Sally said the Judge wanted him to meet and a scenario started forming in his head.

Lich could see the wheels turning in his partners head. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that there’s another shooter I hadn’t thought of.”

His partner looked at him quizzically. “I’m not following.”

“I got the call from the Judge, right?”

“Yeah, so.”

“He must have had someone else in the car with him and that someone is our second shooter.”

“Explain it, please?” Mac’s partner was not following yet.

“Okay. The shooter, I’m going to call this person the ‘Second Shooter,’ is with the Judge and parks here on St. Clair. They jump out of the car,” Mac started walking fast back towards McCormick’s. “They’re walking through here to go to the back door.”

“Why?”

“Caution maybe,” Mac speculated. “They know that McCormick is meeting with or might be meeting with Montgomery.”

“So?”

“After what happened to Stroudt, this person decides to be careful. They will come to McCormick’s from the back.” Mac walked past the shell casings.

“What about the casings?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute.” Mac kept walking to the house but then stopped ten feet short. He visualized the two bodies inside. From the back of the house, the dining room was to the left. In the dining room, one body was to the right of the table, McCormick, and the other was on the end, Montgomery. “I bet that’s what happened,” he uttered.

“What? What happened?” Lich asked, still not fully reading his partner’s mind.

Mac took his Sig out, walked up to the back door, opened it and went inside, walked up the three steps to the landing and then left into the kitchen and then right to the archway into the dining room. He pointed the Sig at the space where Montgomery was sitting and said, “Pop.” Then Mac moved a step right, pointed and said “Pop. Pop,” at McCormick.

Lich was picking up on it now. “First shooter comes in from the back and takes these two just like that.”

“Right,” Mac answered. “So we have accounted for Montgomery and McCormick.”

“So what’s with the second shooter you’re talking about?”

“I’m guessing but I haven’t been able to account for Kate Shelby yet and I know she was here.”

“So where is she?” Lich asked.

“I’m thinking,” Mac was really hoping, “she got away because of the second shooter. If you were the first shooter, you take Montgomery and McCormick. Assume that Shelby was down at that end of the table when the shooter comes in.”

“Okay.”

“So what does she do?”

“She runs for it.”

“Towards the front door, right?”

“If she was at that end of the table, yes.”

Mac backed out of the dining room, went back through the kitchen to the hallway that split the house down the middle. “Second shooter also comes in the back. Second shooter has heard or seen the shots. Second shooter comes down this hall. Shelby is at the front door.” Mac walked down the hallway, gun up, scanning left, looking through the spindles of the stairway banister. He stopped at the end of the banister. “Second shooter gets here, Dick, and puts a shot or two into the first shooter.”

Lich had it now. “The shots throw the first shooter back into the dining room wall, leading to the blood smear and pool of blood on the floor.”

“Right.”

“So if the first shooter was shot, where is he?”

“Or she.”

“Whatever,” Lich replied. “Where is the first shooter? We don’t have a body.”

Mac thought about it for a second and then asked: “Partner, why don’t the Second Shooter and Shelby stay? The threat is gone, right?”

At first Lich squinted at Mac, not getting it. Then a small smile creased his face. “The first shooter has friends.”

“Exactly,” Mac answered. “Exactly. The second shooter and Shelby have to get out of here. They run out the back. First shooter’s buddies are coming down the alley in the SUV …”

“So the second shooter pops the SUV.”

“And then runs to their car on St. Clair and they’re gone,” Mac finished and then his eyes brightened. “And that explains what happened to the body.”

“I don’t follow yet,” Lich said.

“Remember, the neighbor down the alley said after the SUV took out his fence it drove down here towards McCormick’s and then a minute later there was a squealing of the tires, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s going on in that minute?”

Now Lich got it, snapped his fingers and pointed at Mac, “They were removing the body.”

“I think so,” Mac replied. “They removed the first shooter’s body. They couldn’t leave the body behind.”

“No, they have to go throw it in the river somewhere,” Lich answered.

“Maybe.”

* * *

Wire had checked her rearview mirror for the last ten minutes as she’d weaved her way through St. Paul and away from McCormick’s home. Now on Rice Street, she was motoring north, the brightly lit white State Capitol building shrinking away in the distance behind her. Sensing they were free of a tail for the time being, she allowed herself to breathe a little easier and think about the last ten minutes and the loss of Sebastian. Shelby was feeling it too, lying against the back right window, weeping quietly. The Judge was also quiet, alternatively looking out the rear window for a tail and giving directional suggestions. With the capitol disappearing from view, he said: “I think we’re clear.”

“Maybe,” Wire answered. She thought she’d gotten away from the scene without being seen, but she couldn’t be sure. There was enough commotion and shots fired that their escape could have drawn someone’s attention, perhaps a plate number and or description of the Acadia. Wire had no way of knowing for sure. She wasn’t plugged into the police radio system. So that was one problem. The other problem was, at this point, she didn’t know who they could trust. Wire approached the intersection of Rice and Larpenteur Avenue.

“Take a right,” the Judge suggested.

“You see something?” Wire asked pensively.

“No,” the Judge answered calmly. “Just being extra careful is all.”

Wire turned right on Larpenteur and checked the mirror herself. No vehicles turned to follow. She exhaled and the events of the last fifteen minutes started taking a toll on her. With the adrenaline wearing off, she started to shake a little. She gripped the wheel tightly but it didn’t help. Champps Restaurant, with a packed parking lot, was just ahead of them on the left. Wire turned left into the parking lot, circled around to the far side of the lot that backed up to the exit ramp from Interstate 35E and backed into an open space so she could see the entrance and any approaching vehicles. She turned off the lights but left the engine running.

“You okay, Dara?” the Judge asked, putting his hand on Wire’s sleeve.

“I just need a minute to clear my head,” she answered as she leaned back, tilted her head up and exhaled. Her heart was racing. She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing. The Judge intuitively understood what she was doing and stayed quiet, only the hum of the car heater and the traffic from the interstate behind them provided some ambient noise.

She’d fired her weapon two times in her bureau career and in both instances the adrenaline of the confrontation gave way to the shock of shooting another man. Her body was shaking and it would continue to do so for a few moments. Like with those prior shootings, she ran the whole scenario back through her mind, every step of it, both because it wouldn’t leave her mind but also because, in this instance, she kept wondering if there was anything she could have done to stop it, to have saved Sebastian. They had tried to call, she got there as quickly as she could and she wouldn’t have approached the house any other way than how she did. She was just a little too late.

After a minute she decided it would be best to occupy her mind so she turned to the task at hand.

“Kate, didn’t you guys get our calls?”

Shelby sniffled and shook her head.

“They must have been jamming it then.”

“Jamming it?” the Judge asked, confused.

“Yes. Whoever these guys were, they were jamming the cell phone signal into the house. If you have the right equipment, you could sit out in the street and jam the signal to the house and they were tracking Montgomery somehow, they had to be, that’s the only explanation I can come up with how they ended up at Sebastian’s house.” That gave Wire another thought. “Judge, Connolly has three bodies on him. He’s dropping bodies and he doesn’t seem to care. Who is doing this for him? Where is he getting these guys? Is he using government resources?”

Dixon was skeptical and shook his head, “This isn’t the government. Could be a contractor, but it’s not our government. I don’t think that for a minute.”

“Doesn’t have to be the government sanctioning it, Judge,” Wire answered. “But it still could be government agents of some kind, CIA, NSA, who knows.”

The Judge shook his head, certain, “I don’t buy it. These guys are private. They’re working for Connolly.”

“Fine, he’s not using federal agents to kill people but seriously, Judge, what in the hell did Stroudt and McCormick stumble onto in Kentucky that I didn’t see?”

“Perhaps whatever is in this backpack,” Shelby answered from the backseat. She sat up, sniffled and wiped away a tear with the back of her right hand and then unzipped the backpack that she and Wire had taken from McCormick’s.

The Judge’s cell phone rang and he looked at the display. “It’s Sally Kennedy.” He looked over to Wire and asked, “Should I answer?”

“Not yet, Judge. I need to think this through. Let’s see what’s in the backpack first.”

Shelby pulled out the laptop, which was still powered up but was at the password screen, something they didn’t have. “I can’t get into the laptop without the password,” she said. “We’ll need some help.”

“What else is there?” the Judge asked.

Shelby held up a cell phone.

“That’s a burner phone,” Wire said. “Cheap one he probably bought at a convenience store with a set number of hours. Is that the only one he had in there?”

Kate rummaged through the backpack and shook her head. “That’s the only phone.” She pulled out an Altoids tin and opened it up. Inside she found a SIM card. “I bet he kept his SIM card, though, for his contacts.”

“So I bet he dumped his cell phone because it had GPS,” Wire said. “So I wonder how they tracked him to St. Paul?” The cell phone had been the first thing she thought of.

“Perhaps they were sitting on Sebastian’s house?” the Judge offered.

“Maybe,” Wire answered skeptically. “I suppose they could have thought that if Stroudt’s intent was to come here and contact Sebastian, maybe Montgomery would try and do the same thing. But …”

“… That’s really betting on the come,” the Judge finished. “Montgomery could appear anywhere and if anything it would have been bucking the odds huge to think he’d follow Stroudt.”

“Perhaps that’s what Montgomery was thinking as well,” Wire added. “No, they tracked him in some other way. What else is in the backpack?”

Shelby pulled out a camera, an Olympus. “Maybe this will tell us what they saw.”

“Let me see,” Wire answered. She took the camera from Shelby, turned it on and started looking through the photos. “These are definitely from Hitch’s cabin in Kentucky,” she reported. “They were in the position I wanted to take pictures from.”

The Judge leaned over, “There’s Connolly walking in,” he said with disgust. “That bastard, I’m going to fry his ass if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Who is this man?” Wire asked, pointing to a rotund balding man in a black suit coat and white dress shirt.

“I don’t recognize him,” the Judge answered and then pointed to another man on the right hand side of the picture. “How about this guy?” Dixon pointed to a younger blondish man, holding something up in his hand while standing by a silver metal briefcase.

“Don’t know who that is, Judge,” Wire answered. “I only know Connolly.”

There was a fourth man in the photos, besides security. “How about the Prince of Darkness here?” The Judge pointed at a man dressed in all black including a black fedora. Wire scrolled through the photos but there was never a good picture of the man. His head was always either tilted down or he was standing in the shadows. “I can only make out part of his face,” the Judge said, pulling the camera close to his eyes. Then he handed it back to Wire. “Advance through the photos, Dara, see if we can get another look at him.”

“I remember the guy,” Wire answered. “If only because I never got a good picture of him myself in all of the chaos when people were running out of the back of the cabin and I rolled video and took pictures. The ones I took of him didn’t show much.”

Wire advanced through all of the photos but there was never a clear picture of the man’s face, only partial profiles or even shots of his back but never a straight on photo. The man was always in the shadows, behind everyone, his hat pulled down over his eyes. It didn’t help that Montgomery never seemed to focus on the man. Instead he was focused on Connolly and the rotund bald man.

Dara got to the last picture in the roll.

“What’s that a picture of?” Dixon asked. It looked like a limousine in the distance with a man opening the door.

Wire glanced at the photo. “I’d kind of forgotten about this. There was another limousine that arrived. Whoever was in it never got out because before he or she did, all hell broke loose.”

“So we have another player out there somewhere,” the Judge mused, stroking his chin, calmer now, analyzing their problem.

Wire backed through ten photos to where the younger blond man held something in his hand and showed it to Connolly and the rotund man. In the next photos he was turned, back to the camera, showing the man in the shadows it as well.

“What is he holding?” Wire asked, squinting at the small camera screen. She enlarged the photo on the display but couldn’t make out what he was holding. “I can’t really make that out. His hand covers most of it. Looks like an iPod, almost.”

She showed the Judge, who took a closer look. “I don’t know what that is. Maybe if it were bigger we could get a better idea,” the Judge said.

“I think Montgomery was going to use the laptop and its bigger screen to show us the photos but before he could …” Kate suggested from the back and then she started to tremble again. “Before he could, that man came from out of nowhere and started shooting.”

The Judge looked over to Wire, “The man you shot. Did you recognize him?”

Wire shook her head. “I didn’t look at him long, Judge, but I didn’t recognize him. I checked him quick but he didn’t have any identification on him. Maybe the police will figure out who he is.”

“Speaking of which, perhaps we need to get with them now,” the Judge offered.

Wire wasn’t so sure. “Judge, we have no idea how deep this goes, who these guys have contacts with, who we can trust.”

The Judge nodded, “I hear you but there is one man I know we can trust.”

“We can trust Mac,” Kate added meekly, still in shock. “We can trust him.”

“Yes we can,” the Judge said assuredly. “And he will know who he can trust. We have to go in, Dara. We’re sitting ducks out here.” Dixon reached for his cell phone and hit the number for Sally Kennedy.

* * *

From the flashing lights stationed in front of McCormick’s house emerged the chief. Charlie Flanagan was a tall and angular man, who walked with an elegant gait befitting of a man with a bright white shock of hair. Most of the time the chief looked aristocratic in his pinstripe suits and flowing trench coats, but he acted and sounded anything but.

The chief had been the top lawman in St. Paul for eleven years, an impressive stretch of service for a big city chief. This was particularly the case because the chief was not an especially adroit politician and he refused to play the games politicians loved to play. He was not, and proudly was not, a politician in a policeman’s job. He was a policeman in a political job. Flanagan was a St. Paul cop for thirty-six years. He never forgot whom he was the chief of and that was the police. He was beloved and respected by the force. His men would do anything for him because they knew the chief would have their backs. It was that loyalty and devotion that had kept him in his position for so many years.

The chief, sans his usual suit and tie and his white hair having a mildly Einsteinish look to it late in the evening, approached McRyan, who was standing on the front steps of the house. The chief was like a father to Mac, having been with him when his father Simon was shot and killed in a fluke hunting accident. Since that day, the chief fulfilled Simon’s role as a father figure. The two could read each other like father and son and the chief heard it in Mac’s voice when he called.

“How bad?”

Mac ran his right hand over his face and answered: “Two dead inside, one the deputy campaign manager for the Thomson campaign, Sebastian McCormick. The other is Adam Montgomery.”

“The blogger you’ve been trying to track down?” the chief asked. Mac had brought the chief into the loop earlier in the day on the case after their meeting with Dixon.

“Have you talked to the Judge?”

“That’s how I ended up here,” Mac answered, then related the phone call from Dixon, which brought Mac to the scene.

The chief nodded to the inside of the house, “How did it all go down in there?”

McRyan gave the chief the quick rundown and his theory on how McCormick and Montgomery ended up dead. He finished with: “We have a large blood pool against a wall in the dining room but no body to go with it.”

“So someone’s missing,” the chief answered, nodding his head. “You said Dixon called you and that brought you here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is the Judge now?”

Mac shook his head. “I don’t know, Chief,” he said quietly.

The chief exhaled and closed his eyes, wondering if the Judge ended up on the wrong end of this. “Is his the missing body?”

“I don’t know, Chief. We have calls into all the hospitals about gunshot wounds. I suppose he could have gotten himself to a hospital and we just don’t know about it yet but …”

“… but what?”

“I don’t think that’s how it went down.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“It’s not.”

Mac and the chief turned to see Sally. “I have the Judge on the phone.”

* * *

They tied it off at McCormick’s and then in an instant they were back to square one.

Kristoff rubbed his temples, the stress headache expanding by the minute. And now Foche was gone. This would be the first time in twenty years that he would not have him by his side while he was operating, and what he now knew was that he was not the only one operating here.

“You’re absolutely sure it was a woman who fired at you?” Kristoff asked the driver.

“I saw the ponytail swing as she turned and she moved and ran like a woman but also like a pro. She was law enforcement, military, something along those lines. She popped three at us, bing, bing, bing, like it was no big deal.” Not to mention the three she put into Foche.

Kristoff was running scenarios through his head as to whom she could be working for and his biggest worry was that it was someone with the Thomson campaign. If that were the case, the campaign now had in their possession the evidence to potentially burn his boss, to potentially burn them all.

Moriarity, who was riding shotgun up front, turned to Kristoff in back, “I have Ginger on the line. She says the laptop is still on the move.”

“To where?”