First Deadly Conspiracy Box Set

by Roger Stelljes

  “Is that what this is really all about, Detective?” Lindsay said. From where he was standing, Alt couldn’t see the boss’s 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 conveyed 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.”

  “Webb is, I think, correct in that statement,” Lindsay added. “That isn’t to suggest we would look the other way, but sometimes those of us who write the rules don’t always follow them to the letter.” A frank disclosure, one to further make the boss appear forthright and reasonable.

  “So now, Detective, can I make you a copy of the documents?”

  • • • • •

  They were at a dead end, and Mac knew it. To save face he’d take a copy of the documents. Problem was they wouldn’t tell him anything, and he knew it, knew Lindsay would never give him anything of value that easy. He knew the documents were fake, a whitewash meant to paint the story Lindsay wanted told. There would be no smoking gun in there. “Sure, we’d like a copy to look at.”

  “Is there anything else, Detective?” Lindsay asked.

  “Not right now. We might be back,” Mac replied.

  “I think not,” the lawyer, Zimmer, replied.

  “I don’t think that’s for you to say, Counselor,” Riles replied harshly.

  “It will be my decision as to whether my client submits to this witch hunt again, Detective,” Zimmer replied acidly, getting on his high horse, pointing at Mac. “This is bullshit, and you know it. You haven’t put one piece of hard evidence on the table.” Zimmer waved his arms wildly. “You have these wild suspicions and have accused Mr. Lindsay, or someone who works for him, of murder. Yet you have not one, not one, solid piece of evidence. It’s beyond belief that you’re here with this, accusing this company, and its president, a pillar in this community, of this. I tell you what, if the media got a hold of this, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. I’d advise my client to pull all of their business out of this city, just to start.”

  “Your client has had weeks to cover his tracks,” Mac replied. “We’re only getting started.”

  “You keep going with this garbage,” Zimmer said, hot, standing, fists on the table, “and I’ll take whatever action I deem necessary to defend my client.”

  “What would that be, Counselor? Don’t we have enough dead bodies at this point!” Mac said, immediately wishing he could take it back.

  “Detective!” Zimmer yelled and then pointed at Flanagan. “Chief, you may want to reconsider this detective’s position with your department.”

  “Relax, Counselor,” the chief replied, standing up, putting his hands up. “Everyone just calm down. I think it would be a good idea at this point, if Mr. Lindsay and I had a little discussion in private.”

  “Sir?”

  “Mac, you, Pat, and Peters wait outside with the mayor,” the chief replied, in a tone that suggested he had seen enough.

  “Yes, sir,” Riley replied, lightly grabbing Mac by the arm. Mac didn’t say anything, trying to conceal his disappointment and probably doing a poor job of it. Along with Captain Peters, they went back through the double doors and out into the lobby area. Mac and Riles left Peters to the mayor and went into a small copy room.

  “Fucking Zimmer. What a piece of shit,” Mac mumbled under his breath.

  “Piece of shit got under your skin,” Riley replied.

  Mac just nodded and exhaled. He rarely lost his cool. It generally only happened when he lost at something, and he felt like he just lost.

  “We’re done, buddy,” Riley said.

  “We didn’t get much in there, that’s true, but there’s something going on here, Pat.”

  “I agree. But at this point, the chief is thinking we can’t get them.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  Riley snorted. “Shit. What do we have? Nothin’ solid. They have an alibi, an answer for everything, and you and I both know it.” Pat slowly shook his head. “One hundred dollars says that, when the chief comes out, he’s going to tell us to go to the Pub, have a beer, and come back tomorrow, ready to get back into the rotation because we are done with this.”

  Mac didn’t have a response. Instead he grabbed a rubber band off the counter, started twisting it with his hands and walked around the small copy room, looking at the postage machine, the ten different three-ring binders with various office procedures, and then meandered over to the copier. It was new and rather large, with a flat screen touch-pad control panel. On the wall behind it were various procedures for copying, requiring you enter an employee code and project number. There were further instructions for printing from a desktop computer, how to set up large print proj
ects or scanning documents into the system and sending them to your own computer. On the bottom of the instructions, it said, “Think Paperless.” PTA must have been making a corporate move to a paperless office.

  Mac heard a door open behind him, out in the lobby area. He heard the chief ask for them. “Let’s go,” was all the chief had to say when he stuck his head in the copy room.

  “What are we doing?” Riley asked as they climbed into the elevator. The mayor was staying behind.

  The chief waited for the doors to close. “We can talk about it downstairs.” They rode down the rest of the way in silence. Once in the parking garage, Flanagan said to Captain Peters, “You take the van back, the boys and I here are going to take a little walk.”

  They walked out of the garage and onto the street and back towards the Public Safety Building. “I wanted to wait until we were away from the building. Who knows—they might be listening,” the chief said. “You boys are done, you know that, right?”

  Riley sighed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Mac?” the chief asked.

  “Sir, if we kept looking …” Mac started.

  The chief put up his hand and then after a few seconds, “Your dad said something to me once.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We only catch ‘em when they make mistakes. These guys,” the chief said, looking back at the PTA building and lightly shaking his head, “they haven’t made any mistakes. Sometimes, people simply get away with it.”

  “So, you think they did it?”

  “They’re up to something. What? I’m not sure.”

  “They sure were smooth,” Riley said.

  “Too smooth,” the chief replied. “I don’t know. They seemed to know what was coming.”

  “So, what did you talk about with Lindsay?” Riley asked, shifting gears.

  “We stop investigating, and they say nothing of the little conversation we just had. That was the deal.”

  Made sense, Mac thought. The department had had a rough go with Knapp. The tumult surrounding that had died down now. If word got out that internally the department questioned the deaths of Claire Daniels, Jamie Jones, and possibly the senator, the department would take another hit. The chief didn’t want that to happen.

  “So what’s the mayor doing?” Mac asked.

  “Once Lindsay and I struck our little agreement, he wanted some time with the mayor to talk about issues of interest between PTA and the city.”

  “Meaning, PTA’s willingness to stay in St. Paul?”

  “Yup.”

  They quietly walked for a block. Mac finally broke the silence, “If they don’t make mistakes, how do we catch them?”

  “I asked your dad that once,” the chief answered. “He said, we build a time machine and go back and catch them in the act.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

  One Week Later.

  Alt went in the back door, dropped the keys on the counter and scratched his head, late on Thursday night. He was beat, tired, and very much wanted—but knew he couldn’t have—a vacation. He thought that when they had taken care of McRyan the week before, everything would die down some and Lindsay would stop worrying about Cross.

  Instead, Lindsay had pushed for them to make renewed efforts to find the missing documents. They had to be somewhere. He was relentless. “I want no loose ends. I didn’t tolerate them when I was at the agency, and I’m not about to start now,” he said. “Go back and retrace your steps. You missed Landy Stephens’s name on Jamie Jones’s refrigerator, so you probably missed something else. So go back. I want those documents found. You have complete freedom to do what you need to, spend what you need to spend, but find those documents.”

  So they spent the week looking, everywhere. They had made late-night raids on both the Jones and Daniels places yet again. It was worthless, Alt thought. This was the fifth time through. But the boss ordered it, so they did it. Different people at each location, and they found nothing. And these were people with experience finding items that were never intended to be found. Not a hint of the documents at either place.

  They tapped into the systems at Fed Ex, UPS, Overnight Express, and any other package delivery service they could think of, to see if Jones had sent the documents to someone other than Daniels. They checked local delivery services to see what had been delivered to Daniels at her home address. Nothing.

  They searched everywhere at the PTA building in St. Paul and at the various company manufacturing facilities in the area. Perhaps Jones thought they would never look under their own noses. Nothing. They tore her office apart. Nothing. Tore her assistant’s office apart. Nothing. They tore all of accounting apart. Nothing.

  Through the use of her PDA and computer calendar, they tried retracing Jones’s steps during her last few weeks. Any restaurant she went to. Any place where she shopped. Any people she saw. They searched three of her friends’ homes. Nothing.

  She was a member at the University Club, where she had a locker. Nothing.

  They searched her mother’s place again and delivery records for her. They hacked into her mother’s bank records to see if she had been to Jones’s safe deposit box at any time in the last few months. Nothing.

  They did the same thing with Daniels. They went through her place again, through every closet, every set of drawers, computer, files, office, basement, kitchen, built-in cabinets, car, everything. Nothing.

  They searched Daniels’s mother’s place again. They checked her mother’s bank records, no trips to a safe deposit box. No deliveries of any kind. Nothing.

  In a new twist, they went through Senator Johnson’s St. Paul residence, office, car, and even the cabin. Nothing.

  They were back searching at Channel 6. Alt was certain the documents weren’t there. But the boss wanted someone there every night until the documents were found.

  One solution that had been implemented was that they had very carefully arranged through a sea of paperwork to purchase both Jones’s and Daniels’s places. They would take possession of both after the first of the year. If the documents were still there, they’d be found because every wall in either place was coming out. Maybe they should be x-raying the walls. That was a thought. Alt would evaluate that one tomorrow.

  He reached into the fridge and grabbed a cold beer and thought of McRyan. He’d gone back to regular police work. Alt had stopped following him, especially after he’d made a less-than-subtle remark about being followed.

  His group continued to monitor McRyan’s and Kennedy’s places. Nary a word about Cross. McRyan had scared them. But the investigation, if that’s what one would call it, had been shut down. Surveillance since then revealed McRyan and Kennedy were going to take a vacation together. Alt was about ready to shut that part of the operation down altogether.

  Alt strolled to the den, dug around in the dark, found the remote, and turned on the television. He dropped into his easy chair, flipped off his shoes and sipped his beer. He surfed through the channels until he found Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He wasn’t a big movie guy but he always liked the Jones flicks. The movies reminded him of going to the movies as a kid, the good versus evil storylines, the heroes, a simpler time. He’d seen this Jones movie a hundred times, which was the case these days, all the cable channels running movies into the ground.

  He turned to it just before one of his favorite parts, where Indy is in the old library in Venice, uses his dad’s Holy Grail diary, discovers the sequence of roman numerals in the library, and the entrance to the Knight’s Tomb, which is in the large Roman numeral X on the floor, and Indy says, with a sheepish smile, “X marks the spot.” This was, of course, after he previously said to his archeology class, “and X never marks the spot.”

  “That’s it,” he thought. The original Cross documents are buried in a hole somewhere. They just had to find the treasure map and where X marked the spot.

  • • • • •


  Mac grabbed four turtlenecks out of his dresser drawer and threw them into his suitcase. He already packed fleece tops, long johns, socks, jeans, shoes, and his toiletries. His skis, boots, poles, coat, gloves, and goggles were laid out in the living room. He had two ski coats, plus his leather coat he liked to drive in, laid out on the couch. He shook his head—too much stuff. He always over packed when he traveled. Never a Boy Scout, he followed the motto anyway, “Be Prepared.” He had everything he needed for a long weekend, and he needed a long weekend away.

  Since the showdown at PTA fizzled, Mac was a grump. He never took losing well. He always thought Lombardi had it right, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” He lost. He didn’t like it.

  The case gnawed at him, and he’d decided it wasn’t just because he lost, but because PTA got away with it. Because of jobs, money, reasonable doubt, and politics, a deal had been struck. The chief and the rest of them were pissed about it, sure. They knew PTA got away with something, but they could all rationalize it, live with it, move on from it. They’d all seen it a hundred times before and would see it a hundred times again. “God damn it, Mac, look at O.J.,” Lich said one night at the Pub, “he was guiltier than my first wife, but now he’s hunting for Nicole’s killer on every golf course in America. It’s over, OVER, deal with it. Now pass the beer nuts.”

  Mac understood the deal; he just couldn’t rationalize it like everyone else. Maybe he wasn’t cynical enough or, on the other hand, maybe too idealistic? In his view of the world there was right and wrong, and there was justice. In his mind, the pursuit of justice didn’t include calculating bank balances, economic impact, or political power. No, for the victims, the dead, justice must come for them, no matter the cost. The deal that was struck with PTA was the antithesis of that.