Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  “Not quite the same,” Gesch uttered ominously.

  Delmonico looked up to her left to see Gesch pointing his flashlight to his right. She glanced back to her right to see a message written crudely on the cinder block wall in blood: “Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same,” she quietly read out loud. Delmonico scanned farther down the wall with her flashlight, “Oh Lord.”

  There was a signature.

  The message was signed this time.

  The Reaper.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Rich people problems.”

  St. Paul, Minnesota.

  The television played quietly in the corner of the second-story den. CNN was reporting on a serial killer operating on the East Coast. He’d given himself a name.

  “The Reaper?” Richard Lich said. “Seriously?”

  “I read earlier that the guy leaves biblical versus behind about reaping what you sow,” answered Michael McKenzie “Mac” McRyan as he peered through the horizontal blinds with binoculars out the rear window of the house at the large Victorian mansion to the north across the alley. Inside the mansion, his cousin, St. Paul Detective Paddy McRyan, dressed as a member of the weekly cleaning crew, placed small cameras in strategic places in the house. One camera overlooked the alarm code panel and also provided a view down the center hallway and the stairs to the basement which led to the garage tucked under the mansion. The second camera was zeroed in on the wall safe located behind a picture on the wall in a lower-level office. Currently, he was working on the camera in the master bedroom, giving his cousin a small wave when he entered the room.

  Mac felt his right hip and the Sig Sauer in his holster and his St. Paul Police shield on his belt and smiled inwardly. It felt good to be a cop again, even if it was temporary. The action, the weight of the gun, the shield on his belt and the fact that they were operating and on the hunt all felt good.

  James Thomson, the former Minnesota governor, was elected president the previous November, largely as a result of a magnificently run campaign, but also partly as a result of Mac’s investigation of a series of murders that started in St. Paul and tied into the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. The murder conspiracy, exposed a few days before the election, propelled Governor Thomson to a convincing victory. Sally Kennedy, Mac’s girlfriend of two years, had taken a leave from her job as a Ramsey County prosecutor to work for the Thomson Campaign. In her brief tenure with the campaign, Sally impressed the governor and the governor’s campaign manager and closest confidant, a political legend named Judge Dixon. Ten minutes after the networks declared Thomson the winner, she was offered a key political position in the White House political operation. Mac, not seeing how he could possibly deny Sally her dream shot, knew he was going with her. So, the day after New Year’s, Mac packed a large U-Haul and moved to Washington, DC.

  The decision to move was made easier by his newfound wealth resulting from the sale of a chain of coffeehouses he’d owned a minority interest in. He never needed to work again if he didn’t want to, and in Washington that was exactly what he was doing, not working, not getting shot at and leading a relatively quiet and sedate life for a change. Instead of the grind of police work, he was doing two things to keep himself busy. His first project was rehabilitating their dated Georgetown brownstone he bought as a place for them to live and as an investment. He liked working on it and seeing the progress as he restored the home to its original traditional Georgetown glory. When he eventually sold it, he was confident it would net six figures in profit.

  His second project was working on a book about the election investigation with Dara Wire, the ex-FBI agent who worked the high-stakes case with him. Rather than succumb to media interviews that neither of them wanted to give, they instead agreed to split a large advance from a publisher to write the definitive inside story of the investigation. A ghost writer was working with them. A draft of the book for Mac and Dara to tweak and edit was a month away.

  However, as busy as those two projects kept him, Sally worked extremely long hours, leaving him with a lot of downtime to fill. He’d been through all the Smithsonians, checked out all the monuments, and now was starting to play the DC area golf courses and even had played Congressional Country Club, but he was getting a little restless. His life was quiet and sedate, but it was a little too quiet and far too sedate. Mac didn’t think he wanted to be a cop again full time, but he definitely missed a little action in his life. Finding the DC cop bar, meeting and befriending some local officers and detectives and even brainstorming on some of their cases only served to further feed his desire for something to do.

  When he informed St. Paul Police Chief Charlie Flanagan, a father figure for him, he was leaving St. Paul for Washington, the chief refused to let him resign his position. “Mac, just put in for a long leave of absence. You never know, we might need you. You never know, you might want to come back.”

  That was seven months ago.

  “Where’s the fourth camera going?” Lich asked as he looked up from the laptop, now with three camera feeds on his screen.

  “Third floor, remember?”

  “Riiiight, the room that serves as the ‘ahhhrt gallery,’” Mac’s partner mocked. “The room the missus complained was on the third floor, so hard for people to get to so they could see their collection.”

  Mac chuckled, “Rich people problems.”

  “You know all about those,” Lich needled.

  “Not quite. The Sloane family is in an entirely different fiscal league, Dicky Boy.”

  Edward and Margaret Sloane were exceedingly wealthy, members of the Sloane family that the StarTribune had recently reported was worth north of $500 million dollars in their annual listing of the Twin Cities’ wealthiest families. An article that was also no doubt noticed by the break-in crew they were now hunting.

  For eight months there had been a slew of unsolved robberies throughout the entire Twin Cities’ metro area, although mostly concentrated in the moneyed areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul. At first, the robberies were not connected, but eventually the various law enforcement agencies of the Twin Cities got together and realized a highly skilled crew was operating around town and an investigative task force was formed. The chief put his best boys, Detectives Pat Riley, Bobby Rockford and Mac’s longtime partner, Richard Lich, better known as “Dick Lick,” on it.

  In conjunction with the Minneapolis PD and the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the best investigative minds in town were working the case, but the robberies continued unabated.

  The crew was good and showed no signs of stopping. “A shark is not going to leave the waters if the feeding is good,” the chief counseled.

  There was a level of sophistication to the crew as security systems were easily defeated, forensic evidence was nonexistent and nobody ever seemed to notice them going in or coming out of the homes. No hairs, prints, saliva or any forensic evidence of any kind was ever left behind. It was like they were ghosts. In fact, the task force had taken to calling them “The Ghost Crew.” The jobs were well planned and the crew clearly engaged in a great deal of research and preparation, as there were usually anywhere from two weeks to a month between robberies. Money, jewels, electronics, precious metals, furniture and art were gone without a trace. The estimated take from all of the jobs was over $10 million, assuming the merchandise was being moved. However, if the merchandise was being fenced, it wasn’t being done so locally. The police hit all the known fences in town and applied all the pressure possible.

  There was either an extremely high level of fear of the crew or nobody around town knew a thing.

  “Town’s too small to fence this stuff here,” Riles suggested. The Twin Cities was an area of over three million people but still was small enough that if something high-end was moving, word would filter out somehow. “You fence the high-end stuff around here, we’d hear about it.”

  Three weeks ago, Sally left on a week
-long trip to Asia with the president. The last time she’d left on a lengthy trip, Mac stayed back in Washington and ended up completely bored out of his mind. So with her gone for a week and no job to keep him tied down, Mac went home to see friends and family. While at the Flanagan’s for dinner, the call came regarding the latest robbery, a mere three blocks from the chief’s home in the Highland Park neighborhood on St. Paul’s affluent far western end. “Mac, we have nothing on these guys. We could use some fresh eyes; go with the boys and take a look.”

  At first, Mac didn’t see anything that struck him or led him to anything that the other detectives hadn’t noticed. Other than the missing pieces of art work from the walls, you’d have never known the house was robbed it was done so cleanly and professionally. A smash and grab job it was not. Two days after the robbery, while sitting around the detectives’ bullpen at the St. Paul Department of Public Safety, Mac was reading through the inventory of items stolen and something that had not been mentioned by the family when they were first interviewed caught Mac’s eye.

  “Riles, when we were interviewing the family, did they say anything about baseball cards?”

  “Baseball cards?”

  “Yeah, baseball cards. You know, like you bought at the drugstore as a kid. They have the tasteless piece of pink gum in them.”

  “Yeah, I know what they are asshole, but no, Mac, they didn’t. All they were concerned about that night was the jewels, cash and bearer bonds that were stolen from their safe. It wasn’t until the next day that the old man thought about his baseball card collection that he kept in a lockbox in his office over the garage. The box and cards were gone as well.”

  Mac read through the inventory of missing baseball cards and smiled. “This guy was a serious collector. His collection would have given Ken Burns a documentary hard-on. He had rookie cards for Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Whitey Ford, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, I mean all the greats from the 1940s and ’50s. He had their rookie cards and several others. He claims they were in ‘mint’ or perfect condition. If so, that collection is worth some serious money, I bet well over a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “How do you know?” Lich asked.

  “While it’s nothing like this, I have a collection of my own,” Mac answered. “I collected baseball, hockey and football cards when I was kid, plus I ended up with lots of cards that other older kids in the neighborhood were just going to throw out. And my dad, he collected when he was a kid and left me some really good baseball cards from the 1950s, ’60’s and ’70’s, not the rookie cards necessarily, but I have really good cards for Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Harmon Killebrew, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Sandy Koufax, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Tom Seaver, Robin Yount, Rod Carew and Reggie Jackson, among others. I had my collection appraised two years ago and the best card collector in town said I could probably get somewhere around $25,000 for my entire collection.”

  “Did you sell it?” Rock asked.

  “No.”

  “Why the heck not?” Lich asked, surprised, salivating at the thought of twenty-five Gs. Money was seemingly always in short supply for Dick.

  “A lot of those cards were from my dad. I still like to sit and look at them every once in a while. Helps me remember when he and I did that.” He looked at the list more. “Assuming this crew wants to move these cards and get top dollar for them, there is a limited pool of buyers and sellers. The people that move those kinds of high-end cards are a fairly small group of people and they all kind of know and network with each other.”

  “What are you thinking?” Riles asked, seeing the wheels turn in McRyan’s head.

  “The card collector I talked to who looked at my collection, he’s pretty plugged in, or at least he seemed like it. He knows a lot of people in the card business, legit and, in some cases, illegitimate. If these cards start showing up, even somewhere else besides the Twin Cities, he’s likely to hear about it.”

  A week ago, rookie cards for Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson were walked into a small out of the way memorabilia store in south Chicago. Mac’s card contact had called the store directly a week earlier to have him keep his eyes open. The store owner, well regarded in the card collecting industry, called Mac’s contact while the man looking to sell the cards was standing right across the counter. “Didn’t you tell me a few months ago you were looking for a Mantle rookie card?” he said to Mac’s contact. “I might have a line on one for you.”

  The card collector contact relayed the call to Mac who had Chicago police in the store in less than ten minutes. The man looking to sell the cards was a high-end fence that CPD had been paying attention to for other reasons. It wasn’t his first bust. He was looking at a long prison stretch and was ready to make a deal.

  • • • •

  Washington, DC.

  President Thomson grimaced as the telephone call continued. Two hours ago his press secretary’s afternoon briefing went off the rails when she started getting pressed about the death of Hannah Donahue at the hands of what now appeared to be a serial killer. Hannah was the daughter of William Donahue, a big party contributor, a man who delivered a lot of campaign money to the president, among other politicians. That the White House didn’t know about her death until asked only furthered the mess the briefing turned into. Then Donahue was caught on camera, emotional, blasting the FBI-led investigation and talking about how he would make people in Washington very uncomfortable until the case was solved. Not long after, pictures from inside the house with “The Reaper” and the biblical verse from Job 4:8 written in blood on a wall leaked online. Within two hours, a mini-media feeding frenzy engulfed Washington. The political nature of the victim meant the case was sure to be a talker for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Were the victim a minority woman, it would have been buried inside the local news section of the paper. Since it was an upper-class white woman with a politically connected father, it was national news.

  Following the debacle, the White House political operation sprung into action to minimize the damage and put the president on the phone with Donahue. A call to express his condolences to a key political contributor whose daughter had been brutally murdered in Dover, Delaware, had now stretched to fifteen minutes, was grinding along difficultly and had the president, rather than offering heartfelt condolences, on the defensive and dancing.

  “Bill, I assure you and Barbara that the FBI is doing everything they can. I know that Director Mitchell has some of his best investigative and behavioral science people on this. He was in my office just before I called you to brief me personally. I have told Director Mitchell that I will work to get him any assistance he could possibly need. Everything that can be done is being done and will be done.”

  “Damnit, Mr. President,” William Donahue replied bitterly, “if they were doing everything, this psychopath wouldn’t have been operating for the past month, cutting these women up, including my Hannah. That’s my Hannah they’re talking about on the news, Jim, my little girl. My Hannah, Jim, my Hannah! My little girl was gutted by this monster, just like two other poor girls. Whatever they’re doing is not enough. You need to get involved, Mr. President. You need to get personally involved.”

  “Bill, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this. I will now be getting constant updates on the case and if I learn anything, you will be the first to know.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. President,” but Donahue’s tone said he didn’t, not fully, “but you have to do more than that. Don’t let another family go through this. Don’t let this animal do this to another family, to another woman. Getting constant updates is not sufficient. I can get constant updates, I will get constant updates. But from you I expect more. I expect you to use that fancy office of yours, the one I helped put you in, by the way, to apply the resources and personnel to get this done.”

  The president pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed,
“Bill, I sympathize, you know I do, I mean, I can’t begin to imagine what you’re going through, but you have to know that I can’t dictate this investigation.”

  “Perhaps not, Jim, but you can apply plenty of pressure. More must be done and I will make sure to use whatever resources I have available to me to make sure that happens,” Donahue answered in a threatening tone. “I have a lot of friends.” That meant in Congress and the press. “This is on you now, Mr. President, this is your responsibility. You have to do whatever you can to stop this man. You owe me that and I will be watching closely, very closely, to make sure that this is indeed one of your top priorities.” Click. Donahue hung up on him.

  The president stared quizzically at the phone. It wasn’t often he was hung up on when he was governor, let alone president of the United States. He exhaled lightly and gently put the phone back in its cradle and pushed himself up out of his desk chair. He took his suit coat from the back of his chair and slipped it on. He strolled out of the Oval Office and strode to the office he went to when he had a problem.

  Judge Dixon was visiting with FBI Director Mitchell and White House Deputy Communications Director Sally Kennedy. “How did it go?” the Judge asked warily, seeing the president’s pained expression.

  “Not well, not well at all,” the president replied and looked down to the FBI Director. “Thomas, are we really doing everything we can on this?”

  “Mr. President, I have very good people on this and that was before Mr. Donahue’s daughter was murdered. I am now directly in the loop on the investigation with Aubry Gesch, the lead senior agent. He is very good, someone I trust. He has extensive experience on cases like this. I will be pushing Gesch and this investigation hard on this until we nail this guy; you have my word on that, Mr. President.”

  “Fine, you have excellent people on it, but is there anything else you need? Is there anything more that can be done? Because let me tell you, William Donahue is about to make my life, and by extension, Thomas, your life, very difficult if we don’t find this killer, and find him yesterday. Donahue is upset and feeding the media, Lord help us all.”