First Deadly Conspiracy Box Set

by Roger Stelljes

  “So what are you doing?”

  “We have people down at Lyman’s office and at an off-site storage unit looking through the civil cases, the harassment, discrimination, and class-action stuff.”

  “There are thousands of names,” Riles added. “Plus Hagen…”

  • • • • •

  Hagen lorded over his computer, monitoring the program, swiveling back and forth in his chair, twirling a pen through his fingers when his monitor beeped at him with a hit. He sat up and clicked on the search result, which showed connections between a Smith Brown on the chief’s list and a David Mueller, the son of Thomas Oliver Mueller, a defendant in one of Hisle’s sexual harassment cases.

  Sally noticed Hagen peering closely at the computer and walked over. “What do you have?”

  “Connection of some kind,” Hagen answered, running his cursor over the screen, clicking on and reading various links. “Smith Brown, who was…” Hagen looked away from the computer to a binder-clipped packet of papers, flipping through it until he found Smith’s name, “…a DEA agent that Chief Flanagan put in prison fifteen or sixteen years ago, and a David Mueller, who occupied the neighboring cell at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.”

  “Who’s Mueller?”

  The computer whiz scrolled down the screen and whistled, “Son of Thomas Oliver Mueller, who Hisle sued back in the early ‘90s. It must have been a good case, because Hisle got himself a $3.4 million verdict.”

  “Where are these guys now?”

  Hagen clicked through several programs and brought up the federal prison system records, accessing the records for Leavenworth. After a minute he found the records, and they both whistled. “Brown finished his sentence six months ago, and Mueller has been out for nine months.”

  “What are their current addresses?” Sally asked, pulling up a chair and grabbing a notepad.

  “Brown has one in Chicago, and Mueller,” Hagen clicked on a different link, “Mueller has an address in Osseo.” Osseo was a small northwestern suburb of Minneapolis. “Is this worth a look?” Hagen asked, turning his gaze to Sally, who was furiously jotting notes down on a legal pad.

  “Keep digging and I’ll ask Mac,” she said as she took out her cell phone.

  • • • • •

  “You have Hagen in this?” the chief asked. “How’d you swing that?”

  Riles shrugged. “Warden at the workhouse is a friend of mine. All I had to mention was this involved you, and it wasn’t a problem. Anyway, Hagen’s got this computer program set up and is cross-referencing your list with Lyman’s. So if there’s a connection to be made, he’ll find it.”

  Mac’s cell phone went off and he looked at the caller ID. “It’s Sally,” he said as he stepped into the hallway to take the call.

  “So how many people are in on this?” the chief asked.

  Riles chuckled. “Mac had Shamus call the cavalry. He recruited a whole boatload of retired guys to this off-site storage place. They’re out there, going through boxes of Hisle’s old files. They’re using laptops and putting what they find into this program that Hagen created. Apparently, the program is constantly searching the records for a match.”

  “What’s he searching?”

  “Social Security, IRS, INS, NCIC, federal and state prison systems, maybe more. Whatever we could access here, Hagen is accessing from the firm.”

  “Here’s where you might have to provide some cover, Chief,” Peters added. “Our guy Scheifelbein has been providing Hagen access to this information and masking the access, hiding it from everyone else, so he might need a little chief-like protection if and when this comes to light.”

  “Done,” the chief replied.

  Peters nodded. Then Mac burst back into the room and looked to the chief. “Do you recall a guy you put away named Smith Brown?”

  The chief looked down in thought for a moment and then looked up. “Yeah. DEA agent. That’s years ago, fifteen or twenty. He was holding back bricks of coke from busts here and putting it on the street. He had some gambling debts or something like that. I pinched a bookie, who fed me Brown for a reduction in his sentence, as I recall. It was at one of those times when drug enforcement was big with the first Bush administration and the US attorney wanted to make a statement.”

  “And you were heavily involved, right?”

  “I busted him. You know how I feel about dirty cops.”

  “So what do they have?” Lich asked. “What connects him with Hisle?”

  “He was in a cell next to a guy named David Mueller, who was also in the pen for a federal drug charge,” Mac answered, reading from his notepad. “David Mueller was the son of Thomas Mueller. Thomas Mueller owned a trucking company that Lyman sued for sexual harassment. Lyman hit the jackpot with a $3.4 million verdict from a jury.”

  “That’ll piss a guy off,” Lich said.

  “Well, Thomas Mueller can’t be pissed anymore,” Mac said. “He committed suicide within a year or two of the verdict. The case killed his business. His wife left him, and his two sons were in prison for drug dealing, apparently trying to make money to help the old man save the trucking company. There’s a newspaper article Sally found from up in Chisago Lakes, where Mueller Lived. The article quoted his daughter Monica as saying between his sons being in jail, the loss of the business, and losing his wife, he simply couldn’t go on. And there’s one other thing.”

  “Which is?” Flanagan asked.

  “Mueller had two sons, both, it turns out, in Leavenworth. The other Mueller is named Dean. And there’s one other thing about the brothers. They’re…”

  “Twins,” Lich finished. “They’re not just brothers, but twins, aren’t they?”

  “Identical, in fact,” Mac answered. “They’re both six-three and about two hundred forty pounds, with dark hair, according to their prison records.”

  “Damn,” Lich said. “Fuckin’ Fat Charlie actually came through for us,” he said, shaking his head.

  “So, we have Brown, who the chief put in, and Mueller’s father, who Lyman put out of business and who then committed suicide. Mueller and Brown spend years in prison together and probably get to talking about how they both ended up in jail. Brown talks about the chief becoming chief. Mueller sees Lyman getting rich off of cases like the one that did in his father. The two of them probably start talking about payback, revenge. They were in the can together for what? Twelve years?” Mac said. “That’s a lot of time to talk about payback, to plan it and to get the courage up to seek it. Then they get out about the same time and put this all together.” Everyone nodded. Perverse as it was, the connection made sense.

  “This could be it,” Riles said. “Brown was a DEA agent. He’s probably a pretty bright guy.”

  “He was, as I recall,” the chief added.

  “So he’s running it. He’s the voice on the phone,” Rock said. “He’s the one calling the shots.”

  “The one who said Shannon was the appetizer and Carrie was the main course,” Mac noted. “It fits. Brown’s the brains of the operation.”

  “And the Mueller brothers are the brawn,” Riles added. “They fit the general descriptions we had on both kidnappings. Big guys, dark hair, and so forth.”

  “That looked like brothers,” Lich added, “just as Fat Charlie’s guy told us.”

  Everyone nodded, running it through their minds.

  “Where are these guys now?” Flanagan asked, breaking the momentary silence.

  “I’ve got Sally looking into that,” Mac answered. “Dean and David currently share an Osseo address, and Smith apparently has an address in Chicago. Sally is calling CPD to have someone check on him, see if he’s around.”

  “He’s not,” Peters said, pointing at Mac. “He’s here. These are our guys.”

  “I bet they are,” Riles added, and then pivoted. “What do you think, Mac? Do we let others know? We might need their help.”

  Mac thought for a moment, his arms crossed. “Not quite yet. If we’re
right and someone is feeding Brown information, we don’t want to tip them off. We don’t know where the girls…” Mac stopped, aware of having spoken about the girls as if the chief wasn’t in the room. “Sorry, Chief.”

  The chief didn’t flinch, “It is what it is, boyo.”

  “We don’t know where these guys are, or where they have the girls. If they do have someone on the inside, and we come out with this, the kidnappers get tipped off and the girls could pay the price.”

  “Agreed,” the chief said. “You don’t have much time. We’re getting a phone call at six. You’ve got…” everyone looked at their watches, 12:15 p.m., “less than six hours.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “This is where it gets interesting.”

  Smith Brown sat in a desk chair in a fifth-floor hotel room, looking east through binoculars down Kellogg Boulevard on the south side of the Xcel Energy Center in downtown St. Paul. He checked his watch: 12:28 p.m. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The heat radiated off the pavement as the temperature continued its inexorable climb to triple digits. He was happy to be inside.

  On a national holiday, there was little activity around the brick and curved glass of America’s finest hockey arena, which sat kitty-corner from his perch. A digital marquee on the corner of West Seventh and Kellogg announced upcoming events, which in the summer were generally concerts. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were coming to town the last week in July.

  Smith glanced to his right, looking south down the ever-expanding restaurant-and-bar-district that was West Seventh Street. There was little car traffic and less on foot. It was one of the traits that made St. Paul unique. The downtown area was generally quiet when the working folks weren’t around. Of course, a Minnesota Wild game or event at the arena across the street changed all that, bringing 20,000 people downtown. However, if there wasn’t a specific event, activity moved to the other neighborhoods around the city. Given that it was a holiday, the foot and car traffic was even less than its normal negligible amount.

  He turned his gaze back to the east to see Monica coming into view, dressed attractively in white tennis shorts and a low-cut, dusty-rose tank top. She was walking toward the hotel along the sidewalk of Kellogg Boulevard, a black nylon computer case hanging over her shoulder. As she crossed the street and stepped under the canopy of the hotel entrance, Smith scanned the area outside, making sure nobody followed or watched her. Satisfied that she was free and clear, he moved away from the window. A minute later he heard the key card slide into the reader, and Monica entered the room.

  “Everything go okay?” he asked as he dropped some ice into a hotel glass and poured himself a Diet Coke.

  “No problem. It’s pretty empty in there.”

  “You tested the camera?”

  “Yes,” she answered, putting the shoulder bag onto the bed. “It worked fine. We’ll be able to monitor what they’re doing.”

  “Excellent.”

  “What’s next?’ she asked as she opened a bottle of water.

  “We sit and wait for awhile, try to relax,” Smith answered, turning on the TV. “At five thirty I’ll drive the minivan over to Eagle Street and wait.”

  “Dean and David get the easy duty, don’t they?”

  “At least for now,” Smith replied. “David saved my life in prison. If things go awry, he and Dean can walk away, as can you.”

  “Have you changed your mind about the girls?”

  “No,” Smith replied.

  “You know how Dean and David feel.”

  “I do,” Smith replied looking out the window. “They don’t think the girls should pay.” He turned back toward Monica. “The thing is, if everything goes according to plan, nobody will ever know who we are. Or if they do eventually figure it out, it will be too late. We’ll be long gone. If we let them know where the girls are, that increases the risk that we’ll be found before we’re safely away. If we give them the girls, the police very likely will discover who we are, probably before we’ve made the necessary changes to our looks.”

  “I know, I know,” Monica answered, looking down and picking at the carpet with her toes. “Thing is,” she started quietly, “the girls are guilty of nothing other than having the fathers they have.”

  “And what about my daughter?” Smith asked, anger rising in his voice. “What was she guilty of besides having me as her father? She died because of Charlie Flanagan. I’m in prison, and my wife can’t get insurance. She can’t get treatment for my little girl. When the state finally comes through, my little girl’s on her deathbed and it’s too late. That’s all on Charlie Flanagan.” Smith turned back toward the window, away from her. “He needs to feel what I felt. He needs to feel what it’s like to lose a daughter. He’s going to feel that before he dies.”

  • • • • •

  Mac and the others burst into the conference room to find Hagen’s fingers dancing frantically over the keyboard and a printer spitting out reams of paper. “What do we know?” Mac asked, walking up to Sally.

  “It doesn’t look like Brown is in Chicago,” Sally said. “I had CPD go to the last known address. It doesn’t exist.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t exist? The address doesn’t exist? It’s a fake?” Rock growled.

  “Yeah. Brown served his full sentence and was a free man, free to go wherever he wanted,” Sally answered. “It would appear that in his six months out he has chosen to fall off the grid.”

  “And this is the guy who was in prison with David Mueller?” Rock asked, looking at a picture of Smith taken six months before he was released. Six feet tall, Brown had black hair graying at his temples. He had brown eyes and a knot at the bridge of his already large nose.

  “Yes,” Sally replied. “For twelve years. We looked at Brown’s records for Leavenworth. It appears he had trouble on his arrival.”

  “He’s probably lucky to be alive,” Lich said. Cops have issues in prison.

  “That’s where David Mueller comes in,” Sally added, flipping to a different page. “He saved Brown’s life. Apparently David was pretty good with his fists. He, and his brother Dean, who I’ll get to in a minute, were in the Golden Gloves back in the day. Anyway, David seems to have used those skills to save Brown, or at least that’s what we’re seeing as we read between the lines on some stuff from Leavenworth. Apparently, David, and later Dean, took it upon themselves to apply a couple of beatings, to send a message and that probably allowed Brown to make it out alive.”

  “So he’s loyal to them,” Rock said. “And I suppose vice versa.”

  “What about the Muellers?” Mac asked, looking at pictures taken prior to their release from Leavenworth. The brothers were definitely twins, thick necks, black hair, unibrows, but all-in-all decent-looking boys. The only noticeable differences were their eyes and noses. Dean’s eyes were spread a little farther apart from his nose. David had an unnaturally crooked nose, probably broken from boxing.

  “This is where it gets interesting. The brothers have an Osseo address, an apartment complex a block off of the main street,” Sally gave him a sheet with directions and the address. “I spoke with the Osseo police chief. He says give him a holler at that number,” she handed a yellow sticky note to Mac. “He and another officer will meet you at a gas station a few blocks away.”

  “Okay, but you said ‘interesting’ a minute ago, what else?” Mac pushed impatiently, reading from the sheet. “What’s so interesting?”

  “The Mueller boys have an older sister named Monica Reynolds—her married name.”

  “Tell me the older sister looks like our missing woman,” Riles said, hopeful.

  “Here’s a picture we got from the DMV for her license,” Sally responded. “Tell me what you think.” Her tone said she thought it was a match.

  The group gathered around the table to look at the artist sketch of the woman from Cel’s Care next to the blown-up DMV photo. They also had security camera stills from Milwaukee and St. Thomas Universi
ty for comparison. The hair color was right, as were the lips and nose and the eyes. The hair of the woman at the café didn’t match, but again, the eyes, nose, and lips looked about right. Mac spoke for everyone. “It could be her, there’s certainly a similarity.”

  “Where is Monica Reynolds at these days?” Rock asked.

  “Again, interesting,” Sally said, as Summer Plantagenate handed her another set of papers, as smoothly as if the two were going through exhibits at a jury trial. “Up until two months ago, she owned a house over on the east side of St. Paul by Lake Phalen. She sold it for $225,000 and left a PO Box as a forwarding address. It doesn’t appear she has established another home.”

  “At least not one I can find,” Hagen added, looking up from his computer. “I’m still searching.”

  “The money from the sale ended up in a checking account at Wells Fargo,” Sally said, “an account that she closed shortly thereafter; we can’t find any evidence she’s opened another one somewhere.”

  “So she’s floating out there with a nice chunk of walking-around-money to finance whatever it is these guys might be up to,” Mac said. “This is adding up.”

  “It is,” Sally said.

  “So we’ve got a solid connection between the chief and Lyman in Brown and the Muellers. We have physical descriptions that are consistent. They’ve got motive. Brown gives them the intellect to pull this off,” Riles summarized.

  “And Brown and Monica at least seem to have pulled a disappearing act,” Mac said.

  “So what’s next?” Sally asked. “What do you think?”

  “We check out this last known address,” Mac answered. “Lich and I will do that.”

  “What do you want Rock and me to do?” Riles asked.

  “Stay here and work this for now,” Mac replied. “We need to look into family for the Muellers and Brown. Do they have family around and where? If they do, we need to be talking to them. We should have someone run Monica’s photo over to the café, see what people over there think. Also, run these four against the department personnel files. Maybe we find the mole that way. And one other thing.”