Electing to Murder

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“We have a theory.”

Two forty-one a.m. The Judge yawned as he stood on the tarmac at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, as the governor’s campaign jet taxied to the waiting motorcade. Given the night’s events, the media was being kept far away. This would not be a photo-op.

The cabin door opened on the 737 and the governor emerged from the plane. Governor James Thomson did not cut the quintessential presidential look. While the governor’s father had been a tall lanky Scotsman, his mother was a short black-haired German. The governor clearly obtained his physical stature and look from his mother. He was a stocky man, not quite five feet ten inches tall with a few too many pounds around the mid-section. His salt and pepper hair was tightly cropped to his round head which displayed the cauliflower ears he earned during college wrestling days at the Augsburg College when he wrestled at 150 pounds. He’d put a good fifty pounds on since then. There were no Hollywood good looks with the governor. Rather, he was cut from the working class, the son of a teacher and secretary who put himself through college. He was a man who started and built a small direct mail business into a thriving corporation and sold it for millions all the while working his way up in politics, having started at the city council level, then to the state house and eventually the Minnesota governor’s mansion. It was a background that allowed him to connect with middle-class voters. The governor had the common touch. He was one of them, even with his millions. They had been hard earned. He was the embodiment of the American work ethic, the American dream.

The Judge had predicted to his skeptical democratic friends that once Thomson’s biography was known nationally, voters would connect with him. He won the Democratic nomination and then campaigned with discipline, consistency and energy that had put him within grasp of the White House.

They’d run a good campaign, a smart campaign, a pretty clean campaign, but would that be enough?

Thomson reached the bottom of the steps and the Judge moved towards him.

“Nice press conference, Joyce.” Only the governor could get away with calling the Judge by his real first name.

“I thought it captured the moment.”

“If the moment was for you to look pissed, you’re right.”

“I am pissed,” Dixon railed. “Somebody is going to pay.”

“And somebody will.”

A light drizzle was falling so the two men quickly dove into a limousine. “So what do we know?” the governor asked.

The Judge reported what he knew, reviewing the call from McCormick, the Judge and Wire’s race to his house, the murder of McCormick and Montgomery, the shooting at the bar and what they’d learned since, which wasn’t much.

“Is McRyan working the case?”

“He is, Governor. You know him?”

“I’ve met him. I know the family’s name. The reputation is well earned. McRyan’s the best around these parts, bureau included. Give him time and he’ll figure it out.”

* * *

Mac yawned and stretched. He was a night owl normally and rarely needed more than four or five hours most nights. It was a trait that served him well in college and law school when pulling an all nighter was a way of life. He once went three days sleeping a total of four hours when grinding through college finals. All As on the exams. Of course, once finals week was over he slept for the next two days. But that’s the way it was with him. Go for four or five days full tilt and then his body would make him shut down for a day or two and refuel.

So at 3:30 a.m. a yawn didn’t mean he was fading, it was simply an interruption.

He glanced across the conference table and Wire was the same. She was methodically working through one of the other notebooks, jotting down notes as she worked through, occasionally taking a sip of her coffee. Mac was curious as to why she was an ex-FBI agent and would need to get that story.

So he turned his attention back to the notebook. It was apparent to Mac that Montgomery never went anywhere without a notebook and if the inspiration struck him, he wrote down whatever idea it was he had. There were several articles outlined or written in long-hand. Interspersed with the articles were notes of phone calls, references to other articles, web and blog sites, the odd phone number and random names. As Mac got to each name, he would do a web search of the name to see what popped. Most of the time the names were political, representatives (Mac recognized most senators), staff people, media members and other bloggers. In some cases, the name didn’t bring up anything. In other circumstances, such as a name like Anderson, Smith, Martin or Johnson, the web results were so massive that with the lack of any other identifying information, it would take hours to go through the entirety of the results. Nothing was really popping but Mac was keeping a list on his laptop, just in case.

As he got to the end of the last notebook, Mac ran across the names Peterson and Checketts, but nothing else was written. Mac typed Peterson and politics into Google and had just north of 45,000,000 results. He clicked through three or four pages but nothing really looked good.

There was a knock on the door to the conference room. Mac looked up to see Jupiter standing in the doorway. “What’s up?”

“Mac, I overheard you say something about being tracked earlier.”

“That’s right. Someone was tracking Montgomery and then it seemed they were able to track Ms. Wire and company as well. You have something?”

“Well, I think I know how they did it. Montgomery’s laptop has LoJack on it.”

“The tracking system?” Mac asked.

Jones nodded.

Wire’s eyes closed and she shook her head. “A tracking system. I wonder if they found that while going through The Congressional Page offices.”

“Congressional Page offices?” Mac asked. “When were you there?”

“When I was in DC earlier today,” Wire looked at her watch, “Make that yesterday, I was at Stroudt’s condo, then The Congressional Page and finally Montgomery’s with an Alexandria homicide detective.”

“Carl Court?” Mac asked.

Wire nodded and asked, “You talk to him?”

“I did. The good detective said a pretty brunette with political connections had been snooping around.”

Wire grinned and then got back to business: “The files of The Congressional Page and Stroudt’s home were completely cleaned out. Because Montgomery’s building had pretty good security, it didn’t look like his home had been raided. I bet if we look further, we’ll find out that The Congressional Page had LoJack tracking on all of their laptop computers for some reason and whoever broke into those offices, found a record, bill, contract or something along those lines that showed that the computers had the tracking on them.”

“And I bet whoever was tracking Montgomery, did so because they hacked into that system and from there they were able to track him down here to St. Paul,” Mac added.

“And us,” Wire replied. “We had the laptop, Detective. That’s probably how they continued to track us to the pub. They were tracking the laptop. I got away from Sebastian’s with it and they got back on us by tracking it.”

“Well, now, if they’re still tracking it, they know we have it and from here it isn’t going anywhere.”

“That isn’t the only thing that’s interesting on this computer, Mac, let me show you what he’s been searching on the Internet recently.” Jones opened up his own laptop.

“What’s that?”

“A company named DataPoint Electronics. Among their other products, they manufacture and distribute electronic touch screen voting machines.” Jones pulled up the website for the company on his own laptop and clicked the tab marked e-voting machines.

“Can you tell what he was reviewing on the website?” Wire asked.

“Affirmative. The information on the company website is pretty basic, kind of voting machines for dummies, so to speak. That having been said, he seems to have been spending a lot of time on the operating system for the voting machines, the components, how they operate and in particular how a vote is tabulated. DataPoint Electronics produces a paperless electronic voting system.”

“By paperless, do you mean there is no paper ballot?” Mac asked with a furrowed brow, looking at the screen.

“That’s right. There is a paper report printed off the machine with the vote tabulation, but a voter does not complete a paper ballot like we’re accustomed to here in Minnesota. It’s an e-voting machine. You use the touch screen on the voting machine to make your votes. The votes are then tabulated essentially onto the memory card. The votes are tallied on the memory card and a paper report is printed as verification.”

Mac nodded and then moved over to his own laptop and one of Montgomery’s notebooks.

“So when was it he was looking at this website?” Wire asked.

“The last week or so, he started last Saturday it looks like, went through a number of the pages of the website and then he was back on them again pretty hot and heavy Tuesday and Wednesday again. And again, the biggest numbers of visits were to the pages that contain the information on the memory cards.”

“So the way these machines work is that the voter makes their selection and the vote is then tabulated onto the memory card which contains the results for the machine.”

“Right.”

Wire nodded. “It’s interesting and all, but I’m not sure what those searches have to do with the meeting.”

“Maybe it’s because the bald guy is the president of DataPoint,” Mac declared.

“What?” Wire asked surprised. “Seriously?”

Mac turned around his laptop which showed a picture of Peter Checketts, the president of DataPoint Electronics. “Look familiar?”

Wire held up a blown up photo from the meeting next to the laptop screen, “Sure looks like him.” She looked to Jones who nodded as well.

“So the owner of a voting machine company is at a late night meeting in Nowheresville, Kentucky, with the campaign manager for Vice President Wellesley. Nothing suspicious about that,” Wire uttered facetiously. “Cripes.”

“So they’re behind and they’re going to manipulate the machines to win?” Mac asked, disbelief in his voice.

“You have a better explanation?” Wire inquired.

Mac turned to Jones. “So Jupe, I know voting machines aren’t exactly your bailiwick, but let’s assume for the moment that Checketts, Connolly and these other two men are talking voting machines and let’s go with the worst case scenario, they’re trying to manipulate the machines somehow in their favor. How could they go about doing it?”

“I’d have to get into these machines a little more, Mac,” Jupe answered. “There might be any number of ways you could do it. I know I’ve read some conspiracy theories in the past about voting machine manipulation.”

“I’ve seen those as well,” Wire responded.

“So have I,” Mac added. “I saw a special on HBO once on how you could potentially manipulate voting machines by putting some sort of virus on the machine and they showed how the vote could be changed. Which was fascinating and scary all that the same time. But in the final analysis, I was never that worried about it being that big a deal.”

“Why?” Jupe asked. “Sounds bad to me.”

“Me too,” Wire added, looking at the laptop.

“It is,” Mac answered. “But I wasn’t that phased by it because under their scenario you could only manipulate one machine at a time.”

“And to make any meaningful impact on an election, or at least a presidential election, you would have to manipulate hundreds, if not thousands of machines,” Wire added, understanding Mac’s train of thought.

“That takes time, resources and people,” Jupiter noted. “Couldn’t be done, or at least would be really really hard to do something like that machine by machine. The operational security on something like that would be a bitch.”

“Not under the HBO scenario,” Mac answered. “But that’s not what we have here, I don’t think. I think Connolly, or whoever else might be involved, has taken this a step or two further. Checketts’s presence suggests they’re going to manipulate the machines at the source, at DataPoint.”

“Going to? It’s five days to the election,” Wire stated. “If they’re manipulating the machines at the source, it’s already done.”

McRyan and Jones both shook their heads in dismay and sat back in their chairs.

“She’s right,” Jupe said.

“Yeah she is,” Mac agreed, leaning back in the chair, his fingers laced behind his head.

As if the night hadn’t been enough, the case just escalated again.

Mac pushed himself out of his chair and walked over to the windows for the conference room. He casually closed the shades and then walked to the door and looked out. Chief Flanagan was still around, talking to Riley. Mac caught the chief’s eyes and tilted his head towards the conference room. The chief walked into the room and Mac closed the door.

“What do you have?”

“I think we might know what this is all about now. At a minimum we got a big piece of the puzzle.” Mac put the picture of Checketts on the whiteboard. “This is Peter Checketts. He is the president and owner of DataPoint Electronics in Milwaukee.”

“The picture is from the meeting in Kentucky, Chief Flanagan,” Wire added.

“So we have two of the four men from that meeting, at least other than the private security men, right?” the chief asked.

“Right,” Wire answered. “We still haven’t figured out who the other two guys are, but that’s not the interesting part of this.”

“What is?”

“DataPoint Electronics,” Mac answered.

“Which is what?”

“Among other things, a voting machine company,” Wire answered.

That caught the chief’s attention. “Go on,” he said quietly.

Mac explained their theory that the meeting had something to do with manipulating voting machines. He finished with: “Why else would Connolly, Checketts and these two other men meet?”

The chief sighed and sat down and thought about what he’d heard for the past few minutes. Flanagan shook his head, “So you two have the vice president’s campaign manager and the president of a voting machine company at a clandestine late night meeting in backwater Kentucky a week before the election.” Flanagan just looked at the picture and shook his head, the magnitude of what they were looking at dawning on him. The chief also knew what they had sounded good, but that wasn’t enough. “You may be right, it’s a good theory, makes some sense, but you’re way ahead of yourselves. You have no proof.”

“Chief, the picture, the meeting, these guys are up to something,” Jones said.

“They are for sure,” Wire answered. “But the chief’s right. We have a theory, but we have little to no proof. We’d get laughed out of court.”

“Yeah, but we’re not in court,” Mac said. “We’re conducting a homicide investigation and this gives us more to go on. But I’m thinking one other thing, Ms. Wire.”

“That we need to call the Judge?”

“Yes.”

Wire nodded. “And get the campaign to work on figuring out where DataPoint machines are and when they got there. If you’ll excuse me, I need to make a call.” Dara got up from the table and opened the door to find Detective Franklin ready to knock. Wire walked by Double Frank, who came into the room.

“What’s up, Double Frank?” Mac asked.

“Mac, we’ve hit every hospital in town and all the ‘off-the-books’ guys we are aware of and we haven’t found the guy.”

“Okay, Frank, it was worth a shot.”

“Okay, Mac,” Double Frank turned to leave but then stopped and turned, “but …”

“But what, Detective?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Not tonight it’s not. What is it?”

“As we’ve been asking around tonight, a couple of docs said they’ve heard rumors of a new provider out there. Nobody knows his name, it’s something of a mystery I guess, but supposedly he has high-end surgical skills. Problem is nobody we’ve talked to has a name. I was thinking if there was anyone who might know who this new guy is …”

Mac knew where this was going. “Looks like I need to find a payphone.”