First Deadly Conspiracy Box Set

by Roger Stelljes

  She pulled out her phone and dialed Gail Carlson, a veteran reporter who used to work the investigative beat, but now worked general reporting. She was at the station today, but not covering anything.

  “Carlson.”

  “Foxx. I need a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Monitor the police band up in the Forest Lake area today.”

  “Forest Lake, honey? Not exactly a hotbed of criminal activity.”

  “I know, I know. But all the same, monitor the jurisdictions up there, Forest Lake, Chisago, maybe Wyoming.”

  “What am I listening for?”

  Heather explained. She wanted Carlson listening for anything about the bureau or St. Paul Police poking around the area.

  “Heather, what do you got?” Carlson asked, suspiciously.

  “Just a hunch.”

  Heather’s cameraman stuck his head inside the truck. “The scuttlebutt says there’s going to be a big powwow here soon: FBI, police, and so forth, and then a press briefing at noon.”

  “We best get out there then,” Heather replied, quickly signing off with Carlson. She stepped outside into the blazing heat, already ninety-three degrees. She decided that her suit coat was a no-go and jettisoned it. Besides, the collar of her white, V-neck silk blouse plunged just enough to give a tiny hint of cleavage, which she knew would draw the attention she wanted.

  “What do you think they’ll be talking about in there?” the cameraman asked.

  “Word is there’s a call coming later today on the ransom. I haven’t been able to find out if there is a set time, or if they’re just sitting around waiting for it,” Foxx answered as they joined the gathering horde of media at the front of the police department. “There doesn’t seem to be much going on from an investigative standpoint.”

  “You think that’s unusual?”

  “I’m not a cop, but I do think so,” Foxx answered. She watched as Mac McRyan pulled into the lot in his Explorer. His partner wasn’t with him, which was a bit unusual. “I can’t imagine Mac McRyan sitting around and waiting,” she said. “That’s not his style.”

  McRyan, rather than parking to the side and trying to avoid the media, approached the front of the building. This was rather peculiar as well, Heather thought. Despite his friendly little news tip on Wiskowski yesterday, McRyan loathed television reporters. He generally did everything he could to avoid them. Today he looked relaxed, almost cheerful. As he passed her he gave her a “Hiya, Heather,” and smiled. As he walked through the media crowd he was pleasant in saying, “No comment” and “I’m sure the department or bureau will have something to say shortly.”

  “Now that’s odd,” Heather remarked out loud as the doors closed behind McRyan.

  “What?” the cameraman asked.

  “McRyan just now.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was friendly, casual, relaxed—as if he wanted to be on camera. Heck, he gave me a wink, a smile, and a hello. That never happens.”

  “Heather,” the cameraman answered, smiling, “come on. Any man smiling at you, even Mac McRyan, is not unusual.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she answered, waving him off, but then looked him in the eye. “But it is for Mac McRyan. He thinks most of us are parasites.”

  The cameraman shrugged. “Okay. I’ll bite. What does it mean then?”

  Heather bit her lip and thought for a minute. “Friendly, casual, relaxed,” she said, tapping her index finger on her lips. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say he’s up to something.”

  • • • • •

  Mac stepped inside the building and stopped, letting the refreshing blast of the air-conditioning wash over him. He found Riley, Rock, and Lich drinking coffee and waiting, and they all slipped into an interview room and closed the door.

  “Anything from down at the firm?” Mac asked.

  “Nothing helpful yet,” Riles answered, and then smiled. “But Hagen has them all working their asses off.”

  “And,” Lich added, “whatever he’s doing works, I think. He’s got this program running, and whenever a name matches between the chief’s list and Lyman’s clients, it lets you know. At this point, what it’s finding is common last names like Johnson, Anderson, Peterson or Swanson. Now, a lot of them are eliminated because first names don’t ultimately match, or maybe a middle name eliminates them. In a couple of cases where there has been some sort of match, we’ve taken a look and eliminated them quickly. They weren’t even worth a phone call or interview. It was obvious there was nothing there.”

  “So,” Mac said, “if there’s a connection to be found…”

  “This program Hagen has running should find it.”

  Peters knocked on the door and then entered. “Anything?”

  “Not yet,” they replied in unison.

  “Well, come with me. Burton’s about ready to start the show.”

  They all started to file out, but Mac stopped them. “Scan the room,” he said quietly. “If we’re right, and somebody is working this from the inside, that person is likely in the room. I don’t know what to look for, but look.”

  Everyone nodded and they walked down the hall and into the overflowing meeting room. Burton saw them walk in and immediately approached.

  “Have you been back on the safe house?” he asked, looking at Mac and then to the others.

  “Yup,” Mac answered neutrally. “They haven’t come back yet, obviously, but we think it’s still worth watching.”

  Burton looked to the others, who nodded.

  “All right then. Stay on it, at least for this afternoon. However, if they don’t come back to the house, we will need you guys when the ransom call comes in.”

  The group agreed. Burton headed up to the front of the room. Mac and the others found space along a side wall and stood as Burton began to speak. Conspicuously seated at the front of the room, the chief and Lyman watched as Burton called the room to order. The chief in particular looked to Mac, giving a small nod that Mac returned.

  Burton began with a recap of where the investigation stood, which was really nowhere, other than the safe house, which was looking deader by the minute.

  “We have a crew sitting on the house right now. I’ve spoken with Detectives Riley and McRyan, and they are of the opinion that the house should remain under surveillance. I concur, and so we will continue to monitor that situation.”

  “Has anything come of the video release?” a voice asked.

  “No,” Burton replied. “I’m a little surprised frankly. It’s been played every half hour since yesterday, and we’ve gotten nothing.”

  “How about anything from the video itself? Anything to help us?”

  “Again, we’ve found nothing,” Burton replied. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to pull anything off it that is useful.” Burton transitioned to the ransom. “As you know, the ransom demand is for five million.” Burton explained the details of the demand.

  “Do we know when the ransom call is coming?” another cop asked.

  “Six o’clock p.m.,” Burton replied. “We expect that we’ll receive drop instructions at that time. We’ll need to move quickly.”

  “How’s the drop going to be completed?” Double Frank asked.

  “We don’t know,” Burton answered honestly. “We’re getting a call at 6:00, and it’ll be the kidnappers’ show at that point.”

  “So what are we doing?” Mac asked. He wanted to be free for the afternoon, but at the same time, wanted to assess the preparedness of Burton and the bureau.

  “Good question,” Riles said in his ear.

  “Let there be no doubt, we’ll be ready,” Burton said. “We don’t know what they’re going to do, that’s true, but we will have massive resources at our disposal when it comes time to pay the ransom. They’ve demanded five million in cash. That’s a lot of money, and it doesn’t come in a small package. It’s sizable. It will fill two large duffel bags. In other words, we should be able
to track it. We have plenty of bodies. We’ll have birds in the air. We’ll put a tracker in the money bag. As you’ve noted a couple of times, Detective McRyan, the kidnappers are sharp, well prepared, and precise in their planning. That suggests to me that we’re looking at a money drop. They will have to expose themselves to get the money, and that’s when we’ll have our chance to pounce.”

  “Just like that, huh?” Double Frank snorted skeptically.

  “It’s never just like that,” Burton replied evenly. “All I’m saying is that if something doesn’t break between now and then, our best chance to get them is when they go for the money. That’s when they’ll come out of hiding. They have to.”

  “We don’t know when or where the drop will be?” Mac asked. “And let’s be honest, we don’t know for sure there will be a drop, you’re just getting a phone call at six, right?” Burton nodded, and Mac noted the chief’s piercing gaze as he spoke. “They could throw you a curve.”

  “I’m sure they’ll try to. All I can say is we’ll be as ready as we can be, Mac,” Burton replied, nonplussed by the hard questioning. “I understand the concerns of everyone in this room. I share them. I’d like to know more, a lot more, about whom and what we’re up against. But we are where we are.”

  “What about the girls?” someone asked.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Burton replied. “This is a kidnapping, and we have a ransom demand. We catch the kidnappers at the drop, and we’ll find out where the girls are.”

  “You hope,” a voice from the group said.

  “I think I’m right. These guys won’t want a murder rap. They’ll look to start cutting years and making deals. If we handle the drop right, if we get them there, then we stand a chance to get the girls.”

  Mac wasn’t so confident, but didn’t want to say so with the chief present. In his mind, there was more than a payday in play. Burton was planning as though it was just about the money, as if it was a simple exchange of dollars for the girls and that didn’t feel right. If it was just about money, the ransom demand would be for more. This was about more than money. It was about retribution, and the chief, Lyman, and everyone else was about to be led right into something a lot uglier than a payoff.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “What connects him with Hisle?”

  12:03 p.m.

  Shamus McRyan knelt down to tie closed a white box labeled Hammond et al. v. Easy Flow Systems, a class-action case, and reached for the next box. Shamus was in a row of files that covered the early to mid-1990s.

  “This search lead to anything yet?” inquired Percy Wallace, a rotund, black retired detective who was one of Shamus’s golfing buddies. Percy was supposed to be working the first tee as a starter at Highland National Golf Club. Instead, Shamus recruited him down to the storage garage.

  “Not yet,” Shamus answered.

  “Man, how many boxes we been through?”

  “I stopped counting after twenty, and that was a while ago,” Shamus replied.

  “So, what do we have here?” Percy asked, pushing the sleeves up on his golf pullover.

  “Looks like Erickson v. TOM Trucking, 1994.” Shamus grunted as he moved the box and opened it up. Wallace grabbed a red-rope folder marked “Pleadings Vol. 1” and started scanning for information. Shamus grabbed another red-rope that contained deposition transcripts along with the correspondence file, which he flipped open to read the summary of the case. He found that reading the small summaries helped him understand the information he was looking at. The one paragraph summary on a now-faded green piece of paper indicated that Erickson v. TOM Trucking was a sexual harassment case brought by Barb Erickson and three other women against the owner of the trucking company, Thomas Oliver Mueller, hence TOM Trucking. A notation at the bottom of the summary noted the file was closed in 1994 after Lyman obtained a verdict of $3.4 million. Shamus smirked. Just another cool million for Lyman Hisle.

  Wallace noticed Shamus reading the summary and asked, “What’s that sheet say?”

  “Sexual harassment,” Shamus answered. “Appears the owner of the company liked to fondle the hired help.”

  Just then Henry Brown, the Brown in Hisle & Brown, walked up. Summer had called him in to help supervise. He noted the name on the case and said, “I remember that one. I couldn’t believe that verdict.”

  “Why’s that?” Wallace asked, looking up from the pleadings.

  “Mediocre facts,” Brown answered. “Lyman offered to settle the case for a couple hundred thousand early on, but Mueller refused.”

  “So they ended up at trial, then?” Shamus asked.

  “Yeah, and Lyman did an absolute number on Mueller at trial. The jury came back and nailed him but good. I think the verdict eventually put Mueller out of business. His insurance didn’t cover harassment, and he had to pay the verdict out of his back pocket. For a little trucking company, $3.4 million is hard to swallow,” Brown said. He moved on to check on the next group.

  Shamus grabbed the deposition transcript for Thomas Mueller and found the personal information for Mueller and his family. He looked to a young attorney from Hisle’s office named Ramler who’d come to help and was sitting at a laptop.

  “Dougie, you ready?”

  “Yes sir,” Ramler answered, his fingers at the ready.

  “Good. I’ve got a Thomas Oliver Mueller…”

  • • • • •

  Peters ushered Mac and the boys into a small, windowless interview room. After a minute, the chief joined them. He was sleep-deprived and ill-looking, with large dark bags under his eyes. But his bright blue eyes were alert as ever, and he cut to the chase.

  “What are you boys up to?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Mac replied.

  The chief looked at Mac squarely. “I know you,” he said, and then pointed at the rest of the group. “I know all of you. Burton’s setting up for the ransom and has everyone waiting it out. They’ve run all the criminal connections between Lyman and me and crapped out, he says. The only possible lead is this safe house that we got a tip on yesterday. He says you guys have been sitting on that house for seventeen hours or something like that. You four? Sitting on a house for seventeen hours? I don’t buy it. That’s not your style, just sittin’ around and waitin’. So while we were in there, I was watching you,” he pointed at Mac. “I was watching all of you. Mac’s standing there, checkin’ his watch every two minutes. The rest of you are all looking around the room as if you’re looking for someone or something. And your body language says you’re not buying what Burton is sellin’. So what are you up to?”

  Mac didn’t want to burden the chief further—the man was under enough stress as it was. But the jig was up. Mac glanced over to Peters, who nodded.

  “We haven’t been laying back, Chief.”

  “But whatever it is you boys are up to, nobody else in that room has a clue, do they?” the chief asked.

  “They do not.”

  “Why not? And I better not find out that this is some sort of fuckin’ pissin’ match.”

  “It’s not,” Mac answered and then put all the cards on the table. “We’re worried the kidnappers have someone on the inside.”

  “What?” the chief replied, stunned. “How did you reach that conclusion? How do you know this? Who is it? Is it one of our people, the FBI, who?”

  “We don’t know,” Riley answered. “But all of us think someone is a source for these assholes.”

  The chief was flabbergasted. He paced around the room, pinching the bridge of his nose and then sighed. “Tell me what you boys are thinking.”

  “You better start from the beginning, Mac,” Peters suggested.

  Mac started, “Chief, these guys have been ahead of us from the start.” He laid out what they knew about the two kidnappings, the woman working the inside, the calculated dropping and blowing of the vans, the setting-up of Drew Wiskowski, and the fact that the criminal-case connections between the chief and Lyman weren’t panni
ng out. “These guys left next to nothing behind,” Mac said. “Then, at the safe house, after we searched it, we were sitting on it, watching from across the street.”

  “That’s when things might have changed, Chief,” Riles added.

  “How so?”

  “Pat and I were talking to the owner of the house and his wife, and we start talking about when the kidnappers left the safe house.”

  “So?”

  “It was within minutes of his call. And then we talked about how the vans left in a hurry. Mrs. Hall said, and I quote, ‘they ripped out of there.’”

  “That triggered all sorts of alarm bells,” Riley added. “We started thinking that maybe they got a tip.”

  “That’s a pretty big stretch,” the chief replied, skeptical. “And you didn’t find anything in the house, did you? No forensic evidence, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” Lich answered, explaining the chipped paint on the basement beds. “It’s thin, but we think it was a safe house, the place these guys were operating out of.”

  “And forensics is telling us that the house was cleaned at least twice in the days before we went in.”

  “Still, how can you know they were tipped off?”

  “Other than the timing of when they left and how, we don’t,” Mac answered honestly. “My gut tells me something wasn’t right about it. And if they weren’t tipped off, why not come back?”

  The chief nodded at that.

  Mac continued, “We know that’s a little thin, but… I don’t know. It’s a gut feeling.”

  “So what have you been doing to look into that?”

  “Before I get to that, there’s one other thing that occurred to us last night,” Mac added. “We looked at all the connections for Lyman’s criminal cases to you, but one thing we weren’t looking at was Lyman’s civil cases.” He quickly related the story about the attorney getting chased with an axe in Minneapolis the day before. “We’ve looked at the obvious connections on the criminal side, so now we’re looking at Lyman’s civil cases. If someone is pissed enough to go after an attorney with an axe, why not do what the kidnappers are doing here?”