Insider Justice

by Dennis Carstens

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” Connie said. “At least that’s what they will claim.”

  “What about if you’re acting as Marc’s lawyer?”

  “Maybe,” Connie replied.

  “Are you sure we want to do that?” Maddy asked. “Won’t we be waving a flag at them letting them know we’re involved?”

  “We’re not doing anything, yet,” Carvelli replied. “We’ll see.”

  SEVENTEEN

  At 3:00 A.M. Maddy drove into the parking lot of Connie’s building. The two women had spent a fruitless two hours hanging around the ICU waiting room. Eric and Jessica were asleep in an empty room and Marc was still unconscious but still stable. He was scheduled for surgery at 7:00 A.M. to stop the internal bleeding. His broken and fractured bones, of which there were many, would have to wait.

  Around 2:30 they had sneaked a peek into Marc’s room. What they saw brought another round of tears. He looked awful. Bruised, battered and quite beaten with tubes in various places and a huge bandage wrapped around his head. They quietly left and decided to go home.

  Connie’s car was still parked behind the office. Maddy dropped her off and headed for home herself. The long day was catching up with her and without noticing it, she blew through a red light on 26th and Lyndale. Just her luck, an MPD patrol car was right behind her. Thinking he had a drunk, his rooftop light bar went on when he was almost at Maddy’s bumper.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “What is this?”

  She immediately pulled over and when the patrolman got to her window, Maddy flashed him a big smile.

  Madeline Rivers was an ex-cop from the Chicago Police department in her early thirties. In her three-inch suede half-boots she liked to wear she was over six feet tall. She had a full head of thick dark hair with auburn highlights that fell over her shoulders, a model-gorgeous face and a body worthy of Playboy. In fact, foolishly posing for that magazine was what led her to quit the Chicago P.D.

  Maddy, as she was called by her friends, had moved to Minneapolis after quitting the Chicago cops following her Playboy pose. At the same time, she went through an ugly breakup when she found out the doctor she had fallen for was married. After arriving in Minnesota, she obtained a private investigator’s license. Maddy was befriended by Tony Carvelli and she was now doing quite well for herself.

  The cop used his flashlight and shined it directly into her face. When he saw that smile, he froze for several seconds, unable to speak.

  “I’m sorry, officer,” Maddy said. “I’m not sure what I did.”

  “Um, ah, you, ah, went through a red light, ma’am,” the young man managed to say.

  Great, she thought, they’re calling me ma’am.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Have you been drinking, ma’am?”

  Please stop calling me ma’am, she thought.

  “No, no, officer. Not at all. It’s, well, been a long day. A good friend was in a bad accident, and I’m heading home. I was at the hospital until now.”

  “Is she going to be okay, your friend?”

  “He,” Maddy corrected him. “We’re not sure yet.”

  By now he had lowered his flashlight and was still staring. “Would you like an escort home? I’d be glad to do it.”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Maddy said while thinking, please don’t ask for my phone number.

  “All right, ma’am. You take it easy.”

  “I will and thank you, officer,” Maddy replied noticing the subject of a ticket for the red light never came up.

  While Madeline was avoiding a traffic ticket, Tony Carvelli was at the home of an off-the-books tech guy he knew.

  Tony Carvelli was in his fifties and due to his years on the streets of Minneapolis, looked it, but could still make most women check him out. He had a touch of the bad boy image they couldn’t resist plus a flat stomach and a full head of thick hair touched with gray highlights; a genetic bequest from his Italian father.

  Carvelli was an ex-Minneapolis detective and had the reputation of being a street predator which was well deserved. He looked and acted the part as well. Dressed as he normally was today, he could easily pass for a Mafia wiseguy. Growing up in Chicago, he knew a few of them and could have become one himself and very likely a successful one at that. Instead, after his family moved to Minnesota, he became a cop.

  Carvelli had retired as a detective with over twenty years on the job with the MPD, the last three years in the department’s intelligence unit. As a result of his time in intelligence, Carvelli knew just about everything and everyone there was to know in the seedy underside of the entire metro area. When he retired from the police, despite several lucrative corporate security job offers, he decided to go into business for himself. The thought of wearing a suit and tie every day and playing ass-kissing office politics in the corporate world had no appeal whatsoever. Over the years, he was able to build a successful business doing mostly corporate security investigations.

  Paul Baker was the name of the man Carvelli was seeing at 1:00 A.M. Christened Pavel Bykowski by his devout Roman Catholic mother, Paul was a world-class hacker. Whatever there was to know about someone, Paul could dig it out of the internet.

  Baker’s office was the entire second floor of his South Minneapolis mortgage-free home; mortgage-free because Paul had hacked the lender and wiped the debt clean. There were two bedrooms upstairs and the wall separating them was gone, creating sufficient space for his setup. Tony knew of at least two FBI agents, four and maybe five or six MPD cops who also used him. He suspected the man had another dozen or more cash clients as well. It was enough to keep Paul Baker supplied with the latest equipment, at least three or four luxury vacations each year and all the best weed he desired.

  “This is a disguise?” Baker asked.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is. The guy didn’t even try to cover up and he had to see the camera filming him,” Carvelli replied.

  The two of them were in Paul’s living room watching the DVD on his large HD TV. Carvelli had paused it at the spot where the driver was closest to the camera. There was a clear picture of him. Medium length brown hair, black-framed glasses, and a mustache and goatee; a man you could see a hundred times on the streets of any major city and never notice.

  “From the way he’s seated in relation to the steering wheel I’d say he’s about six feet tall. Maybe an inch or two less but no more,” Paul said.

  “Good guess. Probably about one-seventy to one-eighty,” Carvelli added.

  “This will take some time,” Paul said. “I’ll have to go through a lot of different looks.”

  “See his nose,” Carvelli said. He had moved right up to the front of the screen, kneeled and was using a finger to go over the driver’s nose. “It’s a little too wide. See it?”

  “Yeah. Probably some putty to make it bigger. I’ll find this guy for you, Tony. Once I remove the glasses, I’ll get a good look at his eyes. You can do a lot to reshape your face and even color the eyes with contacts. But there’s not much you can do with the shape of the eyes without surgery.

  “I’ll find him. I’ll have to run through a lot of different looks, but I’ll find him. Anyone that would do this is in someone’s database somewhere.”

  “True,” Carvelli said. “Okay, Paul. Get at it. This is a priority…”

  “I know,” the hacker acknowledged. “Go home and get some sleep.”

  At 8:15 that morning, at least an hour before the night owl Carvelli habitually got out of bed, he stepped off the elevator at Regions Hospital. With him was a very well dressed, elegant looking woman. They were on the floor of the ICU walking toward Marc’s room. Oddly there was no one in the hall.

  Carvelli and his lady friend stopped at the nurse’s station and inquired. They were told Marc was in surgery and everyone with him was downstairs. They got directions and a few minutes later walked into a surgical center waiting room.

  The woman with Carvelli smiled at the small crowd then hurried to Er
ic and Jessica and sat down with them. They were sitting side-by-side along a wall, and she sat next to Jessica and took her hand.

  “Hi,” she softly said. “You don’t know me, officially. I’m Vivian Donahue…”

  “I know who you are,” Eric said.

  “I’ve known your dad for a while and consider him a friend,” Vivian said.

  By now Maddy had sat down next to Eric.

  “I just want you to know that anything he needs, he’ll get. He’s going to be okay. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but I’ll do anything I can for him.”

  Jessica wiped a few tears from her eyes, looked at the older woman and softly thanked her. Eric also did.

  Vivian looked Jessica in the eyes and said, “I could really use a hug from you.”

  After they embraced, Vivian looked at Maddy, whom Vivian would like to adopt and asked, “Any word?”

  Maddy shook her head and said, “No, nothing yet.” She looked at the clock on the wall and added, “He’s only been in there about an hour. We’ll see.”

  By now the others had sat down in chairs around them. Vivian had that innate ability to draw people around her. She smiled at Connie Mickelson and Carolyn Lucas, both of whom she knew well.

  Vivian Corwin Donahue was the current matriarch of a very well-known family that was one of the most socially prominent, politically connected and old-money wealthy in Minnesota. The lineage could be traced directly back to the 1840’s when the family patriarch, Edward Corwin, immigrated to the mostly empty prairie that was Minnesota at that time, started farming and began building an agricultural empire that was worth billions today. The family itself was no longer involved in Corwin Agricultural but Vivian, as the current head of the family, could still move political mountains and when she called a governor, senator, congressman or mayor, that person had better sit up and pay attention.

  Maddy stood up and took a couple of steps to where Carvelli was sitting. She bent down and whispered in his ear, “In the hall.”

  She walked to the door with Carvelli following and said to the others, “We’ll be right back.”

  The two private investigators strolled down the hall toward the exit stairway door. Maddy started by saying, “I’ve been thinking. We both agree this was no accident and the target was Marc’s client…”

  “Zach,” Carvelli agreed.

  They had reached the end of the hallway and were standing in front of a window facing each other.

  “…and Marc was collateral damage. The sheriff’s office found the van later that day. Tell me, how did the driver leave the van and get away?”

  “Had a car there,” Carvelli said. Then the light in his head turned on, and he added, “How did the car get there? It was ten miles away out in the woods. He couldn’t drive both the car and the van himself. He had help. Someone was waiting for him.”

  “Which adds up to a conspiracy,” Maddy added.

  “Who, what and why?” Carvelli said.

  “And do you believe it is a coincidence that they killed the guy accused of murdering the woman, Lynn McDaniel?”

  “No,” Carvelli agreed. “And the nice thing about a conspiracy is the more people involved, the less likely it will hold up.”

  “It’s likely the two guys driving the cars are not the ones behind the whole thing,” Maddy said. “Probably hired help.”

  Carvelli stood silently thinking about what his P.I. friend had come up with. He tapped her on the end of her nose with an index finger and said, “You’re a smart cookie, you know? What we need now is a motive.”

  “Who stands to gain,” Maddy agreed.

  Almost two hours later a young doctor came into the waiting room. He addressed Marc’s son and daughter and said, “He’s out of danger. We stopped all of the internal bleeding. In fact, it wasn’t as bad as we feared. There doesn’t appear to be any serious damage to any internal organs.”

  With this news, Jessica burst into tears while Vivian held her.

  “We still have fractured bones to repair. We’ll give it a couple of days before we do that.”

  “The worst of it is over?” Carvelli asked.

  “I’d say yes. We’re pretty sure he has a concussion but no fractures to the skull. His right leg is broken in a couple places. He has a fractured hip and wrist. A couple of fractured ribs and pretty badly bruised and beaten. I don’t see anything permanent. I understand the man he was with wasn’t so lucky,” the doctor added.

  “DOA at the scene,” Carvelli told him.

  “We won’t know anything about recovery time or when he can go home for a few days. For now, he’s basically out of the woods and resting comfortably. Unless complications arise. He’s still out of it and in recovery. Probably best to let him rest for a couple of hours before you go in to see him.”

  “Will he be conscious?” Carvelli asked.

  “Sure,” the doctor said with a puzzled look.

  “Oh, god, I forgot to tell you,” Maddy said. “He regained consciousness during the night. Eric and Jessica even got to talk to him.”

  “Good,” Carvelli said.

  When the doctor left, Vivian stood up and said, “Well, that’s good news. I don’t know about the rest of you but all of a sudden, I’m famished. How about I take everyone out to grab a bite?”

  EIGHTEEN

  Tony Carvelli impatiently rang the doorbell for the third time. It was 9:00 A.M., two days after he had dropped off the DVD of the hit and run scene. Between the trips to the hospital and Foster, Minnesota, Carvelli’s sleep was a mess. His nerves were a little frayed and it was already eighty-five degrees and humid which didn’t improve his disposition. Standing on the stoop, waiting for his hacker pal was getting annoying. He was reaching for the doorbell again when the door came open.

  “Hey, dude, come on in,” Paul said as he stepped back holding the door open.

  “Where the hell…, ah, never mind,” a grumpy Carvelli started to ask. He looked at the rumpled, disheveled hacker and asked, “When was the last time you slept?”

  “Ah, what day is it?”

  “Forget I asked,” Carvelli said walking past him into the living room. “What do you have?”

  “I have worked my ass off on this. I had to go through hundreds of different looks for this guy and…” Paul started to explain.

  “Stop! Don’t try padding your bill,” Carvelli said from the couch.

  “Come on, dude, that’s insulting.”

  “Right,” Carvelli sarcastically replied. “Show me what you have.”

  Paul took a seat in a chair next to his TV. He had prepared a video show to explain how he found what he did. For the next half hour, while Carvelli grew more and more impatient, the hacker took him through a tour of the internet and facial recognition software.

  Carvelli finally tilted his head onto the back of the couch to stare at the ceiling to show his frustration. At that point, Paul pressed a couple keys on his laptop and got to the end.

  “I came up with five solid possibles,” he said as the image of the first one appeared on the screen.

  Carvelli was intently looking at the screen, a police mugshot of the first one.

  “I got a paper report of each one for you,” Paul continued as he retrieved five manila folders from the floor next to himself. He handed them to Carvelli and said, “They’re in order. The guy on the screen is the folder on top.”

  The two men spent ten to fifteen minutes on each reviewing the first three. Paul would explain each one while Carvelli went through the material in the folders following along.

  “The photos of the first three are close, but I’m not convinced. Plus, what I’m looking at in their background reports doesn’t strike me as people sophisticated enough for this,” Carvelli said. “These guys were paid by someone to do this and the first three don’t strike me as hitmen with high placed connections. They’re more lowlife scumbags.”

  “That’s kind of what I thought, too. You said somebody else must have been involved. Th
ere must have been two people to pull this off. That’s why I saved these last two for last,” Paul said.

  He clicked a couple more keys and a new face appeared. Like the others, it was a police mugshot.

  Carvelli sat forward on the couch and stared at the man’s face for almost a minute. “That’s the best one yet,” he finally said.

  Paul clicked another keystroke and the photo of the van’s driver appeared next to the subject.

  “I think so, too,” Paul said.

  Carvelli picked up the folder and began reading out loud.

  “Ryan Tierney, age forty-seven. Height five-eleven, weight one seventy-five. Born Boston, Mass,” he said. He flipped a page and continued silently reading the man’s criminal history.

  When he finished, he said, “Quite an illustrious career. He certainly fits the bill.”

  “And you wanted known associates,” Paul said. “Check out number five.”

  He hit a couple more keys and a new face appeared, very similar to the previous one.

  “He could be the guy’s brother,” Carvelli said.

  “There’s a good reason for that. He is the guy’s brother. Michael Tierney, five-foot-ten, one-ninety. A real leg breaker. Check out his bio. Looks like big brother Ryan is the brains and Little Mikey, a nickname, is the muscle,”

  “In fact, he looks more like the driver than the other guy, number four,” Tony said.

  “He probably was the driver,” Paul said. “If it was these two. As I said, Ryan is the brains; Little Mikey is the muscle.”

  Tony picked up the last manila folder and silently paged through it. It took almost ten minutes to go through it and when he finished, he placed it on the coffee table.

  “This guy’s a real asshole,” Carvelli said. “Suspected of at least a dozen homicides. Both of the brothers affiliated with a Boston Irish gang but also known to do freelance.”

  “I checked something else on all of them,” Paul said. “I checked for each traveling lately under all the names they are known by. I came up with this.”