Electing to Murder

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“You caught the hesitation?”

Mac was on his phone as he, Wire and Ring walked out of the Starbucks with fresh coffees. It was a Saturday morning and Ring made some calls to arrange for key personnel to appear at DataPoint. While there was a Saturday manufacturing shift working, the key players they wanted to talk to were not in. They would be by the time Ring led them there.

Mac hung up his phone, “Paddy confirms, same shoe tread in St. Paul as we found out at Checketts’s place. Also same size, this was not a suicide,” Mac reported.

“We should let Kaufman and Herdine know,” Wire suggested as they walked down the street.

“I gave him Herdine’s number so that’s going to be taken care of. Bit by bit we’re getting somewhere here,” Mac said enthusiastically.

As she approached the Acadia, Wire looked back west down Juneau and stared for a moment. “Why don’t you drive,” she suggested, flipping the keys to Mac as they approached the Acadia. “You seem to know the town better anyway.”

Mac took the keys and jumped behind the wheel and turned the ignition and adjusted the rearview mirror up some and noted Ring approaching in his dark blue Crown Victoria from behind. Once Ring was past, McRyan pulled away from the curb and fell in behind for what Ring said would be a ten-minute drive to DataPoint. Wire, meanwhile, sat slouched down in the passenger seat and with the finger controls on the center console, adjusted the passenger-side rearview mirror so that she could look back. After a minute she saw it. She casually pulled a small notepad out of the pocket of her leather jacket and started writing down the plate number.

“Silver Traverse six or seven back, right?” Mac said, taking a gander in the rearview mirror. “I assume that is what’s got you a little spooked?”

Wire looked back to McRyan with an astonished look on her face. “How long have you been on it?”

“I noticed it once or twice when we were driving into the city from Whitefish Bay if only because the license plate has the numbers 422. And then again when we were walking the scene with Ring which is when you noticed it, right, you were gazing back down the street for an extra stretch?”

“Yes,” Wire said with a grin. She was realizing not much got by McRyan. “What’s the significance of 422?”

Mac shrugged, “Nothing really. My high school football and baseball number was four and my hockey number in high school and college was twenty-two, so I tend to notice those numbers for some reason. Why did you notice it?”

“Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid,” Wire answered. “I’m certain there were at least two two-man teams watching Montgomery’s apartment in DC when I was scoping the area and then after what happened in St. Paul, I seem to constantly be looking back to see if anyone is following.”

“Me too,” McRyan replied casually, his right hand draped loosely over the wheel. If they were being watched, might as well look relaxed and unsuspecting. “I operate on the theory these days that only the paranoid survive. I had a case where it turned out the people we took down had been following us for a while. Shit, they’d bugged Sally’s house as it turned out so Lord only knows what they heard us doing, Sally can be … kind of loud,” he said with a devilish grin.

Wire just laughed.

“Anyways, I’m always a little paranoid now when I get on a murder case with some complexity to it. I figure someone is watching from somewhere.”

Wire nodded, having done undercover work while in the bureau. “I noticed it when Ring first explained how the Suburban took out Martin. I looked back that way and saw the Traverse. Then a minute later I took another look and noticed the two guys sitting in the front seat and I got a feeling, you know.”

McRyan nodded. “Women’s intuition.”

“Why if it’s a woman does it have to be intuition?” Wire asked, mildly perturbed.

“Just is.”

“What is it for a man, then?”

“Spidey Sense,” Mac answered. “Ring’s taking a right turn here so let’s see if we’re right and the Traverse follows.”

McRyan followed Ring west on Wells Street as they crossed the Milwaukee River, heading into an area of older warehouse buildings. Ten seconds after the turn, the Traverse came around the corner. “Do you have the full plate now?” McRyan asked, checking his rearview mirror.

“I do,” Wire answered. “I’ll have Ring run it when we get to DataPoint.”

“Looks like we’re there.”

DataPoint was located west of the Milwaukee River in a non-descript four-story warehouse building with a simple DataPoint sign on the front. Mac dropped the Acadia into a guest parking space in the front next to Ring.

Ring led them through the front doors into DataPoint’s offices. Once inside, to their immediate right was a waiting area. To the left was a rounded reception desk unmanned since it was Saturday. Standing at the reception desk was a short and stocky woman dressed in a black pant suit and navy blue open collar blouse. She had a Milwaukee police badge on her belt. Ring walked up to her, spoke briefly and turned to them, “Detective McRyan, Ms. Wire, meet my partner Jill Brosel.”

“Hello,” Brosel said as she shook hands. “Let’s step over here.” The four moved into the small conference room to the left of the reception desk. It was likely a conference room used for job interviews as it was small, maybe ten feet by eight feet, with a small round conference table and four chairs and a little mini-fridge in the corner with a glass door. Inside was water and sodas. “Water,” Wire uttered with some desperation as she helped herself to an Ice Mountain and handed one to Mac. She then moved to the window and peeked through the shades and scanned the area. She looked back to McRyan and nodded. The silver Traverse was still lingering.

Ring, ever observant, saw the look the two of them shared and asked, “What’s out there?”

“We’ve got ourselves a tail,” Mac replied as he walked over to the window to look for himself. The Traverse was parked across the street in the second row of the parking lot for the company across the street at about ten o’clock. Two men sitting in the front seat of the SUV. Mac pulled out his cell phone and focused on the Traverse, zooming as best he could with the camera function on his cell phone. The best he could do was two white men in dark coats and baseball hats pulled down low over their eyes.

Mac showed the picture to Ring. “Look familiar?”

Ring snorted and shrugged. Two white men, baseball caps pulled down low. They looked kind of generic. “Could be the guys who took out Martin?” hardly convinced but mildly intrigued.

“Let’s start finding out,” Wire replied as she handed Ring a slip of paper with the plate number.

“Right away,” Ring answered as he pulled out his phone. “Let me call it in.”

Then to Brosel, “Have you talked to anyone around here?”

The detective shook her head, “Only to the CFO of the company just to get the lay of the land. Other managers have started coming in and the shock is written all over their faces. The place is half full because it’s Saturday but you can feel it in the air around here, people are in shock. They can’t believe lightning has struck twice in three days. Darwin told you about the Chief Information Officer, right?”

Wire and McRyan nodded.

“This is a relatively small company, one hundred twenty-two employees. Everyone knows everybody, pretty tight, so people were devastated by Martin’s death, and now this. They’ll have two funerals to attend next week.”

“So who do we need to talk to?”

“Depends on how you want to approach it?” Brosel asked.

Mac considered the detective’s question for a moment. People had been through a lot and he didn’t want to unnecessarily add to their suffering. However, with Checketts and Martin being murdered, it was clear something was going on at this company. In Mac’s mind, that told him that the people working there would put together two and two and start wondering so there was no harm in accelerating that process. “Detective, let’s start with the CFO and go from there.”

Brosel left the room while Ring came back in. “I’ve got someone checking into the Traverse and I’m bringing in two plain clothes guys to watch it while we’re in here. You really think they’re the guys who took out Martin?”

“Don’t know,” Wire answered. “But they are clearly following us.”

Brosel returned to the conference room with Michael Bruzinski, DataPoint’s Chief Financial Officer. Introductions were made around the room, with Ring finishing with, “We’re sorry for your loss here.” Bruzinski nodded as he sat down at the conference table. With Checketts’s death, at least for the time being, Bruzinski was in charge of the company.

Mac got right to it, summarizing what was found at Checketts’s. For the moment, he left things at a suicide. He was more interested in the financial condition of the company. “Mr. Bruzinski, were you at all aware of Mr. Checketts’s dire financial condition?”

“No,” the CFO replied. “Mr. Checketts shared nothing with me about that. You might want to ask his secretary to see if she knew anything, but I knew nothing of it.”

“So you weren’t at all aware of his debts to the casinos in Las Vegas.”

“I was not, although I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

“Why is that?”

“He liked to gamble and gamble big. He talked about killing it in Vegas all the time.”

“But did he?” Wire asked.

“I assumed he was doing all right given he always seemed to have money for the latest toys, whether it was cars, a boat for the lake and things like that,” Bruzinski replied. “He just seemed to like the action and the bigger the stakes the better. Around here, he always wanted to up the ante in our fantasy football league, wanted the NCAA basketball pool to have bigger stakes, wanted to play for big money on the golf course. I’d tell him; hey, your staff around here can’t afford to throw $100 into a basketball pool. They can’t afford to put a grand into a fantasy football league, not unless you’re going to start paying them a lot more money. But he was an adrenaline junkie and always wanted to play for more, more, more.”

Mac and Wire shared a knowing look. That explained how Checketts probably got himself into trouble in Las Vegas. The question was, did the trouble in Las Vegas have anything to do with his murder, and more so, with the election. Mac nodded to Wire to find out.

“Mr. Bruzinski,” Dara asked, “is DataPoint under any financial stress?”

“No, not at all,” the CFO replied. “We are doing quite well. We’re having one of our best years this year.”

“Oh, why is that?”

“The voting machine side of our business has had a banner year. We just filled a massive order for new machines for six different states, so we’re doing really really well. The machines went out about four months ago. We had an immediate glitch with the machines in three states that we had to fix at our cost, but otherwise, things are great. I can show you the books.”

Mac was taking notes and he looked up at the mention of new voting machines and the recent problem in three states. He looked to Wire whose eyes had narrowed. She caught it as well.

“What states had the problem?” Wire asked.

“Here in Wisconsin, which was a little embarrassing, as well as Iowa and Virginia.”

Mac snorted and shook his head lightly. There were new voting machines in Iowa, Wisconsin and Virginia, all of which were key states in the last days of the election, where, along with Ohio, the election would ultimately be decided. He looked over to Wire, who was jotting all this down. Bruzinski noticed this as well.

“You seem interested in the states. Why is that? And you were introduced as being from St. Paul, why would you have any interest in this?”

“We’re interested in anything that can help explain what happened to Mr. Checketts. We’re interested in anything that can explain what happened to your CIO,” Wire answered.

“Gabe Martin? I thought his death was a hit and run.”

“It’s looking more and more like a homicide,” Ring stated out loud what he’d thought since Wednesday.

“Gabe was murdered? But Mr. Checketts took his own life. You’re still saying there’s a connection?”

“One was killed on Wednesday and one is dead today, so yes, we think there could be. Don’t you?” Wire answered, perhaps getting ahead of herself and drawing a frown from McRyan, who apparently hadn’t been ready to go there just yet. They’d only worked together for ten hours now, so they weren’t totally in synch.

“Are you saying Mr. Checketts didn’t commit suicide?” Bruzinski asked. “An officer at the scene at Mr. Checketts house who called me told me it looked like a suicide.”

“Umm …” Wire started.

Ring covered it, “From what I’ve been told from our people at the scene, there is at least some question about it. The medical examiner will have to complete the autopsy, of course, but there is conflicting evidence and so we’re covering our bases. There were some murders in St. Paul last night that Detective McRyan thinks might have some connection to Mr. Martin and Mr. Checketts and he’s here to run those down.”

McRyan gave Ring a wink, “nicely handled.”

If it were possible for the man, Bruzinski was shocked yet again. “Why would anyone want to murder him? It must have something to do with these debts in Vegas.”

“It could be a suicide, it could have something to do with the debts, it could have something to do with DataPoint, we don’t know yet,” Mac answered. “We’re trying to figure that out. We’re trying to figure out if Checketts committed suicide or was murdered. We’re trying to figure out why someone would kill your CIO, Mr. Martin a few days ago. We’re trying to figure out if there is a connection between the two. Is there anything those two were mixed up in that could lead to this?”

Bruzinski shook his head and rubbed his face with his right hand, trying to wipe the stress away. “Not that I can think of. I mean, I ran the numbers for the company and talked with Mr. Checketts daily and basically ran things when he wasn’t around, but I never really knew much about his private life, and I knew Gabe even less. You should talk to Ginger Bloom though. She was the secretary for both of them.”

“And it is Ms. Bloom who was seeing Mr. Martin?” Wire asked.

“That’s right, although we didn’t necessarily know that at the time he was killed.”

* * *

Vigneault and Foucault watched the DataPoint offices from across the street. McRyan and Company had gone inside ten minutes ago. Now the two men sat in wait—again.

“Do you know why it is that Kristoff was so worried about this company in the first place? So worried that he had us take this Martin out?” Foucault asked, peering out the windshield through the mist, the wipers automatically clearing the glass every so often.

“He has not shared that with me,” Vigneault replied. “I do what I’m told and I get paid.”

Foucault nodded as he watched the front of the building, desiring a cup of coffee, maybe a bite to eat, but knowing he and his partner could not leave their post, at least not at this location. They would have to wait it out with the radio quietly playing light rock music. Vigneault took a couple of photos of the building, the Acadia that McRyan was driving and sent them off to Kristoff, so as to keep their employer informed. He was on the East Coast now but was demanding he be kept up to date with every move made by McRyan.

“Here comes Ring,” Foucault reported, now familiar with the Milwaukee detective, having watched his every move the day following their taking out of Martin. The sharp dressed Milwaukee cop came out the front door, talking on a cell phone, looking at a notepad, occasionally surveying the surroundings all while standing under the awning covering the entrance to DataPoint.

“It would be nice if we had another team with us,” Vigneault noted. He was worried about their exposure. He’d have much preferred to have another team so that they could be running a rotating tail, relieving each other if need be and allowing for shifting positions while monitoring. None of that was possible in this instance. “I feel like we’re a little exposed here. We might have to consider moving back.”

* * *

Wire peered through the shades.

“Still there?” Mac asked, walking up behind her.

“Uh huh.”

There was a knock on the door and Bruzinski came back into the small conference room with Ginger Bloom. Ginger was aptly named, with light red hair falling around her narrow face and to her slender shoulders. Ms. Bloom was carrying balled up tissue in her hand. She’d been crying. Her eyes were red and her mascara was smeared. In the matter of three days, she’d lost the two people she worked for, one of whom was her boyfriend.

Ring pulled out the chair for her to sit down. Typically, Mac would have wanted Bruzinski out of the room, but Bloom looked like she wanted the familiar face with her so he was allowed to stay, for now. Ring made some quick introductions of Wire and McRyan.

“Ms. Bloom,” Wire started, “were you aware of the financial difficulties that Mr. Checketts was having?”

Ginger shook her head, “No I wasn’t. He never shared that with me. He rarely talked about anything outside of work with me.”

“Strictly professional?” Mac asked.

Bloom nodded.

“But that was different with Gabriel Martin?” Wire led and Mac let her go. This was a natural line of questioning for some female bonding. “That wasn’t strictly professional.”

Bloom sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with the tissue, “N.. n.. no,” she stammered. “We were dating for a while. I don’t think anybody knew, at least not until he was killed.”

“How long have you worked for Martin and Checketts?”

“Just over three years.”

“How long were you dating Martin?”

“About five months or so, ever since early June,” Bloom answered.

“Was it all of the sudden or …”

“… had it been coming?” The secretary offered a slight smile. “Ms. Wire, our relationship was something of a slow burn. He was my boss at first, then friends and then over time an attraction started to build. You spend an extra minute or two in each other’s work space. Then you start texting each other. Of course, then we started sharing lingering looks with each other, holding eye contact that extra second. Gabe called it eye sex. You ever have that happen to you?”

“No comment,” Wire replied with a slight embarrassed smile. Mac wasn’t sure if Wire was putting on a little act to develop rapport or if she’d experienced what Bloom had.

“Well, it happened to me.”

“Were you in love with him?”

The question caused Bloom to choke up and the tears started anew for her as she stammered, “Y…y… yes. I was and he was as well.”

“Did he ever share with you any problems he was having here at work?”

“Not really. The only work problem I remember was the issue we had with the new machines.”

“Mr. Bruzinski, you mentioned that earlier. What was the malfunction?” Mac asked.

“The memory cards were not computing properly,” Bruzinski answered. “Gabe had to go out and analyze the problem and he was relieved, I remember, that it wasn’t so much a programming issue as a production one from one of our subcontractors, so we hired a new subcontractor to manufacture the cards and then we had our crews go out and install them, test them and make sure everything was working.”

Mac and Wire shared a look, “When did the fix take place?” Mac asked.

“We finished it about ten days ago. It was a pretty big project. We had to replace the memory cards in our machines in those three states. From my perspective it was nerve racking only because the fix was at our cost. We’re going to pursue compensation from our old subcontractor for the fix.”

“Did that put financial stress on the company?”

Bruzinski shook his head, “It hurt a little but like I said earlier, we’re having a great year so we could absorb it pretty easily. The fix just ate into the profits a little is all. I’m a CFO. I just hate to see that money going out the door.”

“Did Checketts seem particularly bothered by it? Was there anything unusual about the project?”

Bruzinski gave it some thought. “He didn’t seem overly bothered by it that I could tell. The only thing that was unusual was that he was a little more hands on in this case, I guess.”

“How so?” Wire asked.

“He decided who we would hire as the subcontractor which was usually a decision for Gabe and I, but he was emphatic we use a specific contractor so we did. It was a company I’d never heard of. In any event, he wanted to know how the process would work, the timeline for completion, who would be doing the installation of the cards, when they would go out, so on and so forth.”

“And that was unusual?” Mac asked.

“A little,” the CFO replied. “He was pretty hands off most of the time. He would let Gabe run the technical side and our manufacturing people would run the production side with our outside vendors and he would just say get it done. In this case, he took much more active interest. I figured he did that because it involved an error on our part.”

Mac snuck a glance at Wire, who was looking right back, the recognition on both of their faces. Was this what this was all about? He looked to Bloom. “Ms. Bloom, did either Mr. Checketts or Mr. Martin express any concerns about this project or anything else that was going on?”

“Mr. Checketts didn’t.”

“What about Martin?”

Bloom hesitated for a moment, as if she was giving deeper thought to the question. “He didn’t say anything about that project to me.” She glanced in Bruzinski’s direction but Mac could see she was becoming guarded and hesitant. “He was involved in evaluating what the problem was with the memory cards but otherwise he didn’t say much about the completion of that project.”

Mac’s eyes shifted over to Wire again. She’d seen it too. Bloom knew more than she was letting on. She wasn’t necessarily lying, he wasn’t getting that vibe, but she was holding something back, perhaps thinking it through. Mac looked down to his notebook and jotted down some notes about the conversation, not wanting to lose track of this thread. Then he went in another direction to give her some time.

“Mr. Bruzinski or Ms. Bloom, does the name Jason Stroudt mean anything to you?”

Bruzinski and Bloom shook their heads.

“How about Adam Montgomery. Does that name ring a bell?”

Bruzinski shook his head and said: “No.”

Bloom’s eyes went wide and then she looked over to Bruzinski quickly and then said: “N… n… no. I do… do… don’t know that name.” Wire looked at Mac, did you catch that? Mac raised an eyebrow.

Montgomery registered with Bloom.

Why?

There was a knock on the door of the conference room door and Bruzinski was asked out into the hallway, “If you’ll excuse me for a moment.”

Wire leaned over and whispered to Mac: “You caught the hesitation?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see what it’s about.”

“Go.”

Wire leaned away from Mac and looked to Bloom: “The name Adam Montgomery means something to you, doesn’t it?”

Bloom bit her bottom lip and a scared look washed over her face and sadness became nervousness.

“Ginger, something has you spooked here,” Mac asked quietly. “What is it?”

“Gabe gave me something a day before he was killed. I have it at my apartment. He told me that if anything happened to him, I should give it to Adam Montgomery and he gave me a phone number to call. I’ve tried to call Montgomery but he hasn’t answered his phone.”

“Ginger,” Mac answered, “Adam Montgomery is dead. He was killed last night in St. Paul.”

Bloom’s right hand went to her mouth in shock. Wire lightly grabbed Ginger’s left hand. “He was meeting with a friend of mine when he was killed,” Wire added. “My friend was shot and killed as well.”

Very quietly, Mac said: “Ginger, I’m going to make sure you’re safe. But you’re going to need to show us what Mr. Martin gave you, but not here.” He took out a business card and wrote instructions on the back.

* * *

The vice president was in the middle of his speech, just getting warmed up about the need for fiscal sanity in the government. He was in Cincinnati, speaking to a massive rally at the Riverfront Coliseum. If northern and eastern Ohio were fertile territory for Governor Thomson, southern Ohio was lush territory for Vice President Wellesley. Connolly had looked at polling data and the metering dials from the last presidential debate. When government spending was framed as being out of control or that the government was spending insanely, the vice president experienced an uptick in the state. So, it became part of the stump speech, the democrats equaled insane government spending. Never mind the fact that under the Barnes Administration the debt had increased by another $5 trillion. Politics was perception, not reality.

Connolly stood with Wellesley Jr., just off the dais, taking in the speech, feeling the roars of the crowd of nearly 18,000, an exceptional turnout. The campaign manager felt the buzzing of the phone in his left front pocket, the burner phone for the Bishop. “Our friend is texting.”

“The Bishop?” Wellesley Jr. asked quietly, looking straight ahead.

Connolly nodded and the two of them slipped away from the dais and down a tunnel that led back to the bowels of the arena and to a locker room that was an anteroom for the campaign. The burner phone revealed a text with a message: “Check e-mail. Look at pictures. Do you know woman?”

“Woman?” Wellesley Jr. asked.

“I think he’s asking about the woman working with the St. Paul Detective McRyan. It’s a new development. Let me get out my personal tablet.” Connolly took his tablet out of his computer bag, opened up the e-mail from the anonymous account and opened the first picture.

“Dara frickin’ Wire,” Wellesley Jr. said bitterly.

“You know her?”

“FBI. Or she was. She’s …”

Connolly saw the look of anger over take Wellesley Jr.’s face. “She’s the one who … you know … like … rearranged your face.”

“That’s her,” Wellesley Jr. growled. “You tell our friend that if he can take that bitch out I’ll get him any vote he’ll ever need.”

“I’ll call the Bishop.”