“Doc says he’s still not ready to be moved. He’s too weak and frail. It’s still very much touch and go at this point.”
“So all remains quiet?” Mac asked.
“Very,” Riley replied. “We’ve got a ton of people in place if they show, but Lupo said they should have checked with him at 6:00 a.m. He never got a call. They called at 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. so my sense is …”
“They know you’re there,” Mac answered.
“We came in heavy when we did, which we had to given all that had happened, but I’m starting to think …”
“They were probably watching the doc’s place from a distance, saw us roll in and evacuated the area.”
“That’s my sense of it dude, sorry,” Riles answered. “So where are you?”
“Milwaukee.”
“Milwaukee?” Riles replied with surprise. “As in Wisconsin?”
“Is there any other Milwaukee? We’re on our way to Whitefish Bay. It’s a ritzy suburb north of the city sitting on Lake Michigan.”
“What the hell are you doing there?” Riles asked dumfounded.
“Long story short, Dixon is pulling strings. He wants Wire and me to get after Checketts and see what he can tell us.”
“If you guys are right and this case is about voting machines, isn’t that federal?”
“That part is,” Mac agreed, although some of the jurisdiction issues between state and federal could get a little tricky.
“I would have thought he’d want the bureau on that,” Riles said.
“Me too,” Mac replied. “But if the bureau is on it, that means word might get back to Connolly and …”
“Ahhh, and he wants his ducks in a row before …”
“We, or the bureau, or he, or some combination of all of that, goes after Heath Connolly. This is one part a good investigational move and another part political. Besides, this is still a murder investigation. Someone hired that guy. I want to know who and that remains my jurisdiction. Checketts is part of that and Wire and I want a shot at him before we try to go after Connolly.”
“We’re getting close,” Wire said as she turned right onto a residential street, the dark blue waters of Lake Michigan visible in the distance as they descended down a slight incline towards the lake.
“Riles, I gotta go. Keep in touch.” Mac hung up.
The background on Checketts was that he was divorced for three years. His ex-wife now lived at their former vacation home in Naples, Florida. Checketts kept their Whitefish Bay home overlooking Lake Michigan. Other than running his company, a little research revealed that Checketts also owned a condo in Sin City and there was some allusion in a few background articles that he liked to frequent the casinos in Vegas.
Mac was fine continuing to pursue the case to Milwaukee and even accepting the campaign jet plane ride, but if he was going into another cop’s town, you called the cops in that town. Chief Flanagan had already called ahead to his opposite number in Milwaukee who then phoned up to Whitefish Bay. The Milwaukee chief offered to have his guys shadow St. Paul and Whitefish Bay agreed. That’s why, waiting in a playground parking lot in a black Crown Victoria, were two Milwaukee homicide detectives. Wire pulled up next to them and she and Mac hopped out of the Acadia.
Mac approached the detective on the passenger side and pulled out his shield. “Detective McRyan from St. Paul.”
“Detective Herdine from Milwaukee PD,” a tall thinning redhead answered, extending his hand. “That short guy over there is my partner Detective Kaufman.”
“Who ya calling short?” Kaufman replied while shaking his head, although he was a good three to four inches shorter than his partner. “Herdine just gets pissed because I take him for everything at the golf course.”
Mac laughed and introduced his partner, “This is Dara Wire. She is, shall we say, currently unaffiliated with a law enforcement agency but she is a former fed and has been consulting with us in our investigation back in St. Paul.” Everyone shook hands.
“So you two were involved in all the action in St. Paul last night, eh?” Kaufman asked. “We saw it on the news this morning at the station.”
“We were,” Wire answered and yawned. “We’ve been on the go ever since.”
“Well, what can this Mr. Checketts tell you about all that?” Herdine asked casually, taking out a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum. He then offered gum to everyone else who obliged.
“Detective Herdine, that is exactly what we would like to find out,” Mac answered and then he and Wire tag teamed in giving the two detectives a little background on the investigation. “Ever since the meeting in Kentucky on Wednesday night, bodies have been dropping and we think Mr. Checketts can provide us a little insight into who is behind that,” Wire said, finishing up.
“You guys have any idea who that might be?” Kaufman asked.
“We have a theory,” Wire answered. “We don’t think it’s Checketts, per se.”
“But Checketts is either in on it or knows who’s calling the shots,” Mac added.
Herdine nodded and said, “Well then, let’s go see the man and see what he has to say for himself.”
Kaufman jumped behind the wheel and led them down the remainder of the block and pulled into the circular driveway for Checketts’s home, a sprawling two-story spread sitting grandly on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The house itself had white siding, black shutters and looked for all intents and purposes like it could have been plucked from an oceanfront summer home on Cape Cod. To the right of the home was a detached three-stall garage. One stall door was open and a black BMW Alpina B7 was parked inside. “Nice car,” Wire noted.
“Means he should be home,” Mac added.
Kaufman parked under the large portico in front and Wire pulled in behind. Everyone filed out and Kaufman looked to Wire, “You may have the honor.”
Wire pressed the doorbell twice and waited. There was no answer. She hit it again and then knocked. “Mr. Checketts, it’s the police. Open up.” The group waited another minute and then shared a look. Nothing was stirring in the house. It was eerily quiet and still. The only noise was the waves crashing the shoreline around the back of the house.
Everyone’s gut told them something didn’t seem right.
Wire pulled out her Sig and let it hang at her side and Mac soon followed. Kaufman nodded to Herdine who walked over to the garage and the open stall. He touched the hood of the Beamer and then briefly disappeared inside the garage. After a few seconds, he reemerged and quickly walked back over. “Engine’s cold on the Beamer, as are the ones for the Tahoe and the sweet candy apple red Porsche in the third stall.”
“Let’s take a look around,” Mac suggested. “Dara, Detective Kaufman and I will head around the back. You and Detective Herdine watch the front.”
McRyan and Kaufman went around the left side of the house, peering in windows. Mac looked in the corner window, which was for a smaller eating area just off the kitchen that opened into a large area of couches, chairs and a fireplace with exposed beams thirty feet up to the ceiling and that’s when he saw it. “Ahhhhh, shit,” he groaned.
“What? What did you see?” Kaufman asked.
Mac took off running around the back of the house, up onto the patio to the wall of twenty-foot-high windows looking out to the lake and pointed inside. “That.” Mac holstered his Sig. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he muttered in disgust.
Framed in the large windows looking out to Lake Michigan was Peter Checketts. From an exposed beam twenty feet up, he was hanging by a rope around his neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Suicide? Seriously?”
Kristoff buckled his seatbelt as the pilot told him they were ready to take off. He was leaving a team of two behind to monitor the situation at Checketts’s, to make sure what he left behind was interpreted properly by the authorities once they arrived and in time they would arrive. He hoped it would be a day or two; given it was a Saturday morning and Checke
tts lived alone, there was a decent chance that would be the case. He wanted it to go down as a suicide. Given the victim’s financial circumstances, it would be easy for the police to piece it all together if they were so inclined.
He took a sip of his wine. As he looked out the window while the plane taxied, he made a mock toast to Foche, his comrade in arms.
Kristoff met Foche when they were both with the General Directorate for External Security, the French equivalent of the CIA. Foche was five years his junior but he’d identified him as an exceptional candidate to be a field agent and Foche had not disappointed. They served their country ably for years around the world. However, a joint intelligence and military operation in Afghanistan in 2002 with the United States went awry. It was Kristoff’s operation but it failed, not due to his planning or execution, but because of an American security breach in Kabul that caused Kristoff and Foche to walk thirty men into a Taliban ambush in Kandahar. Kristoff, and by extension Foche as his right-hand man, were the scapegoats for the French. The two intelligence officers were moved out of the field, professionally humiliated and moved to a desk in the General Directorate where they would be quietly phased out. Their careers in the field were over. Field work was all the two men knew. It was all they wanted to do. It was what they were built to do.
Then the Bishop rescued them.
The Bishop knew what really happened in Afghanistan, knew of their exemplary records and of their capabilities. What the Bishop needed was two men who could speak multiple languages, operate in the shadows, hire the right people, be ghosts when need be and have little compunction about killing if and when it was necessary. In return for this risky work they would be paid handsomely.
They’d both gotten their hands dirty in Afghanistan and long before for menial pay and love of country. Now, they would be paid beyond their wildest dreams to do the kind of work they were built to do. Their boss of the last ten years had lived up to every commitment that had been made and then some. Their loyalty to him was absolute. If the Bishop needed something, it was done, no questions asked.
Kristoff and Foche always knew it could come to an end. Their work was dangerous but they were elite. Until last night, they’d never failed, rarely came close to harm and never were remotely close to being identified. That was all no more.
Foche was in custody and fighting for his life. He was shot three times in the chest. Kristoff was surprised to find him still alive. He thought the police would assume he was removed from the house to be dumped. With that thought in mind, that would have given Foche time to hopefully be made well enough to travel and leave the country to recover if he survived. But McRyan didn’t think that way. Instead, in a mere seven hours, he’d found Foche. On a professional level, it left Kristoff extremely impressed.
Foche had been leery of McRyan from the get go, much more than Kristoff himself. Kristoff was an operational man, a problem solver, whereas Foche was the stronger of the two in accounting for the human component of what they were doing. He had an uncanny ability to read people. Kristoff’s partner was proven right yet again. McRyan was an extremely capable adversary.
Kristoff wished to fly back to Minneapolis to immediately and personally assess the situation of his friend. Could he break him free of police custody? Could he get him on a plane to safety? Would he even be healthy enough to travel? If given some time and resources, he was confident he could make it happen, no matter the odds.
Moriarity and Holmes knew this but warned him off nonetheless. His two men told him that the police presence surrounding Foche was robust and that it would require a significant assault to free him and even then the chances of success would be questionable at best. The police in the Twin Cities were now on full alert and no chances would be taken with the security around Foche, they said, if the force surrounding him at Lupo’s office was any indication. Nevertheless, Kristoff wanted to go back to see for himself.
The Bishop understood Kristoff’s desires, but they had to wait. The “oil well” that was their current crisis was still not fully capped and the next step in tying it all off would be far more difficult and an operational approach to taking care of that problem needed to be quickly developed.
Foche could and would have to wait. In fact, with regard to Foche, Bishop held a different concern. Would he talk? “I am loyal, Kristoff, this you know. But if he lives, will Francois talk?”
“Never,” Kristoff replied defiantly. “Francois will not break, I promise you. He knows that I will come for him. They may identify him but there is no way they can tie him back to you and he will not say a word.”
“In the long run, that he is in Minnesota is not the worst for us.”
“What do you know of the Minnesota penal system?” Kristoff asked.
“Minnesota does not have the death penalty for murder,” the boss answered. “If he is convicted of first-degree murder, he will get a life sentence. Minnesota prisons are not as bad as some other states, nor, might I add, as secure.”
“Then in time I will get him out.”
“And I’ll help,” the Bishop answered. “But first, we must finish this or it will not matter.”
“Understood.”
Kristoff poured himself another glass, “I will see you again, my friend,” he whispered and toasted Foche one more time and started contemplating his next move.
* * *
The two Milwaukee detectives, understanding what their Twin Cities colleagues had gone through and where their suspicions were coming from, treated the scene as a homicide.
Problem was, the scene looked an awful lot like a suicide.
There were no signs of any struggle or forced entry into the home, other than the efforts of McRyan to get inside from the patio to see if Checketts was still alive. There was no suicide note left behind. However, a look at the financials and correspondence on Checketts’s desk suggested a likely reason for his suicide, if that’s what this was. The man was broke. He’d lost millions in Vegas and owed millions more and he didn’t have the funds to cover it. He appeared to be ruined financially, at least on a personal basis. You could theorize how a person like Checketts, a successful businessman who was about to be broke, couldn’t face it. The crime scene techs weren’t finding anything inside the house to suggest otherwise and the coroner, at least preliminarily, said it looked like a suicide. That is what it looked like to Kaufman and Herdine as well, although they were both careful to say that is what it looked like. Mac could tell the two of them were on the ball with a healthy dose of police skepticism. He knew plenty of cops who would see the obvious, take it and never give it a second thought, never question if the obvious was actually the answer.
Mac walked out the back of the house and found Wire down by the edge of the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, talking on her cell phone.
“Yes sir, that’s correct,” Wire reported. “I will, sir.”
“Dixon?” Mac asked as he walked up.
Wire frowned and nodded and then asked skeptically. “Suicide? Seriously?”
“That’s what they’re saying,” Mac answered. “No suicide note, but in his office, his financial records are lying about. It would appear the man was personally broke. He owed a lot of money to casinos in Vegas and he didn’t have the equity to pay. So rather than face it, he hung himself. It’s wrapped up all nice and neat.”
“But you don’t buy it?”
McRyan shook his head as he looked out over the lake. “Awfully convenient, don’t you think,” it was a statement, not a question.
“They’re tying up loose ends?”
“Yeah, but whose loose ends? What did the Judge have to say?”
“That he needed some time to think,” Wire answered.
Wire and McRyan stared out over the bluff and into the deep blue waters of Lake Michigan, the cool winds refreshing after a long night’s work. “So last night these guys are in St. Paul, coming after Montgomery and taking McCormick in the process. I mean, in reality, Sebastian was jus
t in the wrong place at the wrong time if you think about it.”
“Agreed.”
“So then they come over here and get Checketts before we can even talk to him.”
Wire nodded, “Because we now have the pictures with Checketts in them. He’s a liability now.”
“How did they do that? I mean, they’re shooting at us at what, almost 11:00 p.m. last night? We get here at a little after seven this morning. So that’s an eight-hour window and in reality a lot less than that to get over here to Milwaukee and do the deed. I wonder what time of death is for Checketts?”
Wire gave that a moment’s thought and then smiled. “There aren’t just people sitting here in Milwaukee you can hire on a moment’s notice to do this right?”
Mac shook his head and the raised his eyebrows, as if to say, go on.
“So they had to fly over here,” Wire said, a slight smile coming across her face. “And if you fly over here …”
“… there has to be a record of the flight,” Mac finished the sentence for her.
“Right,” Wire replied and then looked back out to the lake. “That’s right. I don’t suspect they flew over commercial.”
“I doubt there would have been one available at that time of night,” Mac answered. “It’s almost surely a small commuter plane or corporate jet like we flew over on.”
Wire folded her arms and put her finger to her lips, “I wonder how many places there are around here that you could fly into like that?”
“We need to start looking,” Mac answered.
“Given what these guys are capable of, there may not be a record of the flight,” Wire said.
“That could be,” Mac answered. “But I bet there’s a tower log of the flight or radar signature of the flight, something for a plane coming from Minneapolis/St. Paul over to Milwaukee or the surrounding area. If we move quickly enough they might not be able to erase the flight from the records.”
“Okay, so we look into that,” Wire stated as she turned to look at the house. “So this is no suicide. Checketts was murdered. How would you have done it?”
Electing To Murder Page 21
