“What’s that?”
“Someone should be around when the ransom call comes in,” Mac said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that. Brown and the Muellers have been ahead of us every step of the way. There’s no reason to think they aren’t now.”
“Especially if they have someone on the inside,” Sally said.
“Exactly,” Mac answered, pointing at Sally. “But now maybe, just maybe, we’re evening out the odds here. We finally know who we’re up against. Now we just need to find them before this all shakes out.”
Mac and Lich turned to leave when Jupiter and Shawn McRyan came into the room. Jupe was holding up a DVD and color pictures.
“Tell me you found something?” Mac said.
“Maybe,” Jupiter said, briefly explaining the pictures pulled off the video. “If we can figure out where the PVC piping was purchased, maybe it’s another way to get a line on these guys.”
“Do that,” Mac ordered and then turned to Sally. “Let’s get on the horn to this company, figure out a way to find out who’s selling this pipe in Minnesota.”
“I’ll give it a shot,” Sally replied skeptically. “The Fourth of July keeps getting in the way. It’ll be tough to track somebody down.”
“Sally,” Hagen interjected. “While you’re trying the legal way, why don’t you give me what you have there,” he said pointing at the picture. “I might be able to find another way.”
Chapter Thirty
“This will serve as my last will and testament.”
After talking for a couple of hours, even having a few laughs along the way, conversation between Carrie and Shannon had faded. It was a pattern. Neither of them slept for long or stayed awake and alert for more than a couple of hours. Sleeping, if you could, was the best of the two options. If you were awake, especially if the other was sleeping, you just lay there thinking about where you were. Carrie was also trying to sleep lightly so that she could monitor Shannon’s condition. She was beginning to get worried about her and how long she could last.
Following their last conversation, Carrie slept for a little while, but she was awake now and her mind had started racing again. What else would your mind do when you were buried alive? Flanagan thanked God repeatedly that she wasn’t claustrophobic. What she needed was something to do, something to occupy her mind.
Carrie picked up the Dictaphone, contemplating its use. What if the kidnappers wouldn’t let anyone know where they were buried? She figured since they were buried alive, it was intended that they were to be found. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if they weren’t found in time? Carried sighed, and tears welled in her eyes for the first time in hours. What a way to go.
Her thoughts turned again to her family, to her parents, brothers, sisters, ever her boyfriend. She never had the chance to say good-bye. She took another look at the Dictaphone. There was plenty of space left on the tape—the message from the kidnappers had been short and to the point.
She remembered watching M*A*S*H with her dad. He loved that show and could recite from memory the dialogue from entire episodes. She chuckled at how many times her dad would say, for no reason, “Nope, its oak.” Or if Mom cooked a bad meal, he would get that mischievous smile and quote Hawkeye Pierce behind her back, “I don’t know how our cook got off at Nuremburg.” Her father loved the episodes with Trapper and Henry Blake, the early years of the show. But right now she remembered an episode from the later years, when the show got preachy. It was where Hawkeye was sent to an aid station at the front. Between triaging injured soldiers and ducking bombs exploding all around, he sat and wrote his will on a yellow legal pad, bequeathing gifts to everyone in the 4077.
Carrie was in the same situation for real. She could die. She wanted to say something to the people she cared most about, even if they never got to hear it. Twirling the Dictaphone around in her fingers near her face, she contemplated what to say. She closed her eyes. “I still can’t believe this is happening,” she uttered quietly, tears still pooled in her eyes. She hoped this was just an awful dream that she would awaken from, but it wasn’t and she hadn’t.
Flanagan opened her eyes and pushed the record button on the Dictaphone, “This is Carrie Marie Flanagan. I am the daughter of St. Paul Police Chief Charles Flanagan.” She stopped the tape and sniffled, getting her emotions in check before she continued. She didn’t want her family to hear the terror in her voice.
“I was kidnapped on Monday, July 2nd. I’m buried in this box with Shannon Hisle. Shannon is the daughter of Lyman Hisle, a St. Paul lawyer, a friend of my father’s. Shannon was kidnapped the day before on July 1st.” Carrie stopped again and rested the Dictaphone on her chest, breathing harder.
“Today is the Fourth of July and it’s…” she checked her watch, “2:15 p.m. We have been in this box for over forty hours now. If we’re not found soon, we will both die.” She heaved a big sigh and swallowed, a dry swallow, with little moisture left in her mouth. She wetted her lips as best she could and pushed up on the record button.
“This will serve as my last will and testament.”
She closed her eyes again and wiped the tears from her cheeks, still having a hard time believing she’d uttered those words. You were supposed to do something like this sitting across a large mahogany table from a lawyer, not buried underground, speaking into a Dictaphone that might never be found. But, as her father often liked to say, “it is what it is” and she was where she was. She contemplated what to say next. Carrie thought about the three older brothers who had looked after her all these years, protecting her, and in some, no, make that in many cases, chasing interested boys away, much to her chagrin.
Now her protectors would be feeling helpless, unable to help and guard her. Carrie didn’t want them to worry about it. She wanted them to remember the good times, what great brothers they were, how much she looked up to them, adored them, and loved them. One of her favorite possessions was the three pictures next to her bed, from her high school graduation: a picture of her with each of her brothers. A proud night for the family, the last of the Flanagan kids graduating from high school. She treasured those pictures.
Carrie pushed the record button. “To my brothers, I bequeath….” She stopped. To her right, she sensed Hisle moving, but it was unnatural. Hisle wasn’t adjusting her body, trying to get comfortable. She was starting to shake and reflexively pulling her legs into her chest. Shannon had warned this might happen when her blood sugar started getting really high and she didn’t have enough insulin in her body. Flanagan rolled onto her right side, slid over, and lightly shook Hisle.
“Shannon. Are you okay?” she asked in normal tone. Hisle didn’t respond. “Shannon! Shannon! Wake up! Wake up!” Carrie said urgently, shaking her shoulder harder.
Hisle started to stir.
“Shannon.” Carrie rubbed her arms and shoulders. “Stay with me.”
Shannon was shaking uncontrollably.
“Shannon, are you okay? You’re shaking.”
“I… don’t…” she stuttered. She didn’t finish the thought.
“Shannon, are you with me?”
“I’m not su… su…sure how much longer I can last.”
Carrie could tell that Shannon was breathing fast. She grabbed Shannon’s wrist and checked her pulse. Her heart was racing and there was almost a sweet fruity smell to her breath.
“Hang in there with me, honey. Hang in there,” Carrie said, hugging Shannon, rubbing her arms and legs, trying to keep her comfortable and conscious. The lack of insulin had slowly been weakening Shannon. However, now, nearly four days without insulin, Carrie could tell that Shannon’s body was now rapidly succumbing to the lack of it. She put the flashlight to her watch: 2:18 p.m.
“You’ll be okay, Shannon. They’ll be here soon. They’ll be here soon.” Carrie hoped that was the case. She was scared that Shannon didn’t have much longer.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Now we’re cooking with gas.”
3:08 p.m.
Mac ran the scenario round and round in his head as he and Lich drove north on County Road 81 into the northwestern suburb of Osseo. They were on to it now, finally. Smith and the Muellers were behind this. The motives were perverted, but if Mac could not understand them, he could at least see where they were coming from.
For Brown, it was the chief.
Charlie Flanagan hated dirty cops more than almost anything. In Brown’s case, he caught the DEA agent putting coke back onto the street to pay off gambling debts. It might have only been a one-time thing, but Brown was guilty and admitted it to Detective Flanagan. Peters told Mac that Brown had pleaded—flat-out begged—the chief to let it go. Brown was in counseling for his gambling and hadn’t placed a bet in ten months. Faced with the wrath of his bookie and his bookie’s muscle, he stole the coke to retire the debt. Brown told Flanagan he’d leave the bureau and law enforcement if he let it go. Brown also had a seriously ill daughter and was worried about what would happen to her.
Smith Brown simply didn’t know Charlie Flanagan. If you were dirty, you had to pay the price. Peters recalled Flanagan ruminating about what to do with Brown at the time, saying, “It would be one thing if he stole a couple of watches, a fur coat, maybe a TV from the evidence room, something like that. I wouldn’t condone it, but I would at least understand it. I could let that kind of thing slide. But stealing drugs, coke, and putting it back on our streets and all that comes with that? That I can’t look past.”
As Peters said, “You know the chief. It was a principle thing.”
Mac didn’t know what to think of it. He understood the chief’s position. But he doubted the chief thought Brown would end up with fifteen years in Leavenworth Federal Pen either. Life had to have been miserable in there, and the information they were finding said that was indeed the case. Fifteen years in prison is a long time to think. Especially after they also learned Brown’s daughter died after he went in, at least in part because his wife and child lost medical insurance. That only added fuel to the fire.
“He blames the chief for all of that, I’m sure,” Peters said. “I suppose I see how he gets there, but he’s wrong.”
“Smith might be wrong about the chief’s choices, Captain,” Mac answered, “but at the moment, he’s sitting with two aces in the hole.”
For the Muellers, it was Lyman Hisle, the man who killed their father.
The whole conspiracy was simple and made sense once you had the pieces. All of which made Mac more concerned about the ransom.
“This ransom call is about more than money,” Mac told his captain. “There’s a trap door here that we’re not seeing, and the chief and Lyman are going to fall right through it.”
“What’s the trap door?” Peters asked.
“I don’t know,” Mac answered. “But the ransom will not be some simple money drop. You’re not going to be dropping it into a garbage can somewhere. These boys want blood. The chief and Lyman are going to be involved in the drop somehow, and we need to stay close.”
Mac hung up his phone and retreated into his thoughts as they passed the Osseo city limits sign. Mac hadn’t been to Osseo for years. As a kid he came up this way to play hockey a couple of times every winter at the Osseo Arena, a rink that looked like a big beige utility shed and felt like the inside of a freezer. It had the hardest and fastest ice around. Back in those days, the town sat by itself among fields, looking like the small farm town you now had to drive out much farther to find. Today, Osseo was a little piece of small-town America completely surrounded by the suburbs of Maple Grove and Brooklyn Park, complete with three-car-garage mini-mansions, big-box retailers, chain restaurants, Lexuses, BMWs, and exploding populations.
Mac turned right off the highway and onto tree-lined Central Avenue, the town’s main drag. Osseo didn’t seem a natural choice for the Muellers, who were born and raised in Chisago Lakes, an equally small bedroom community fifty miles northeast of St. Paul. But it started to make some sense when Sally told him that they’d been working for a nearby lumberyard, based on wage records.
“Of course,” Sally said, “the Mueller brothers had checking accounts, but they were cleaned out a few weeks ago.”
Mac pulled up to a patrol car in the parking lot of the gas station along the main drag. Two uniform cops, one much older than the other, casually leaned against the front bumper of their cruiser, which was parked under the shady canopy of a small group of maple trees. The older of the two, who Mac assumed was the chief, was smoking. Mac powered down his window and stuck his hand out to shake. “Detective McRyan from St. Paul.”
“I’m Police Chief Pete Mitchell,” the older cop replied as he took Mac’s hand. “This here is one of my patrol guys. His name’s Bennett.”
Mac thumbed toward the passenger side, “This is Detective Lich. How do you want to do this, Chief?”
“I called the landlord,” Mitchell said, taking a drag on his Marlboro and blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. “He says the guys you’re looking for haven’t been around for a week or two, at least as far as he can tell.”
“We still should take a look.”
“I figured you’d want to. The landlord will let us in,” Mitchell said, stamping out his cigarette and waving them to follow.
The apartment was two blocks away in a rundown 1950s-style apartment building with a water-stained dark beige stucco exterior with brown-trimmed windows. The landlord was sitting on the steps, having a smoke of his own, when they pulled up. The man, dressed in dark brown pants and a white, short-sleeved collar shirt, looked to be in his sixties. His last strands of hair stretched in a brutal comb-over from one ear over to the other. Without saying a word, he turned and led the group up the steps to the second floor and a rear apartment. The landlord knocked on the door, waited fifteen seconds, knocked again, waited, and then slid in the key.
“Like I told Ole’ Pistol Pete here,” he said in a gravelly, smoke-damaged voice, “they haven’t been around for a week or two.”
Mac and Lich entered to find an apartment evidencing a Spartan existence. To their right was a tiny galley kitchen, straight ahead was a living room, and to the left was a hallway to two small bedrooms and a full bath. The living room had an avocado-colored couch and a harvest-gold-upholstered loveseat perched in front of an old twenty-seven-inch TV that sat on side-by-side milk crates. Down the hallway, there were mattresses on the floor of each bedroom, but no sheets or blankets remained. An old clock radio sat unplugged on the floor in one bedroom. The closets were empty. In the bathroom, there was a half roll of toilet paper but nothing more. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was empty except for a nearly empty carton of spoiled milk, three eggs, and a half stick of butter. Mac sifted through the cupboards and drawers, finding only a single pay stub for Zorn Lumber.
“This place is empty,” Lich said, standing in the living room with his hands on his hips.
“Abandoned, I’d say,” Mac added.
“When’s the rent paid up through?” Lich asked the landlord.
“Through June,” he answered. “They haven’t paid for July yet, and I was startin’ to wonder about it.”
“I doubt you’re going to get July’s rent,” Mac said. He showed the landlord pictures of the Mueller brothers. “Were these the guys renting the place?”
The landlord nodded, “That’s them, all right.”
Mac dug out pictures of Monica and Brown. “You ever see either of these folks hanging around?”
The landlord scratched the back of his head and peered at the pictures for a moment. “Her, yes,” he said. “You couldn’t miss her. She was a pretty thing. I’m not sure about the guy though. They didn’t have many visitors that I can recall, although people come and go all the time.” He held the picture in his hands for another minute, giving it a good look. “I just can’t say for sure if he was ever around.”
Mac turned to the chief, holding up the pay stub. “Is Zorn Lumber the lumberyard we passed out on County 81 as
we drove into town?”
“It is. Ol’ Ray Zorn runs the place. You want to talk to him?”
“We need to.”
“I thought you might. I called Ray and told him we might be stopping by. He lives five blocks from here.”
• • • • •
Jupiter sat next to Hagen as the convict computer genius’s fingers set speed records flying over the keys. Sally was striking out with the pipe company, which was located in Des Moines. There just wasn’t a way to get hold of someone on the holiday. If the FBI and their resources could be trusted, they might have been able to throw some weight around. However, Mac and Riles both said they didn’t want to do that unless they were left with no choice.
Hagen said they had a choice.
He rolled his eyes when Sally asked him if he could crack into the company’s system. Hacking was a skill one never really lost, he said, “like riding a bike.” Peters had already promised protection if anyone caught him.
It took him about twenty minutes, but now he was into the company’s electronic shipping records for the kind of pipe shown in the video. “So where do they ship the pipe to?” Hagen asked, staring at the computer screen with a perplexed look on his face.
“You’re in, right? Jupiter quizzed. “But can you find the information you need?”
“I’ve never been much of an end-user. I’ll find what we need, but…”
“It’ll take you some time,” Jones filled in. “I have a little expertise in this area. May I?”
“Be my guest,” Hagen replied, scooting over.
Jupiter wasn’t a hacker. He was originally a programmer who had since moved to video. He liked to use technology as a tool to develop information, whether it was business intelligence software, where he had made his initial fortune, or in video, where he was making his next one. Hagen, on the other hand, knew programming and he liked to use technology as a tool as well, but more like a sword to access the information of others—that was where the thrill, and utility, lay for him. It was a different mindset. But Hagen had used his sword, and now, Jupe thought, it was time for the toolbox.
First Deadly Conspiracy Box Set Page 68
