First Deadly Conspiracy Box Set

by Roger Stelljes

  “What?” Lich said, seeing the look on Mac’s face.

  “You have to use all the tools in the toolbox,” Mac mumbled as he flipped the metal clasps loose and opened the toolbox. A dusty tray sat in the top with a few screw drivers, wrenches, tape measure and hammer. Mac pulled the tray out and looked into the box itself. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  Mac pulled out a yellow folder that was clasped closed. “Grab the camera out of my backpack.”

  Lich walked back to the door into the apartment and grabbed the backpack Mac brought along. Dick pulled out the camera and snapped three photos of the envelope. Mac then opened the top and slid the contents out onto the table. There was a computer flash drive and copies of a death certificate, driver’s license and other various papers. Mac read through the documents and a smile crept across his face.

  “What do you have?” Lich asked.

  “Yahtzee.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Your whole life is a lie.”

  At 10:03 p.m., Mac pushed into the interrogation room with Lich, sat down at the table and looked across at his suspect.

  “Why am I here?” Michael Harris asked.

  “You tell me, Michael,” Mac answered acidly, dropping a stack of paper down on the table in the interrogation room, “Or should I say Jordan. As in Jordan Paris.”

  You could have knocked Michael Harris a/k/a Jordan Paris over with a feather.

  “You look surprised. Wait until you see what I found,” Mac added with dramatic flair. “You know what they say. You gotta use all the tools in the toolbox.”

  In Gordon Oliver’s toolbox, Mac found a binder clip of documents that showed Michael Harris was in fact Jordan Paris and that the real Michael Harris was dead and had been for eight years. McRyan and Lich spent the better part of the last four hours putting it together.

  Jordan Paris, who was now sitting across the table from them, graduated from the University of San Diego School of Law cum laude eight years ago. In his final year of law school, as required in California, he submitted his application to the Committee of Bar Examiners for the State of California. To be admitted as a lawyer in California, the applicant must be shown to be of appropriate moral character for the practice of law. Jordan Paris had a felony drug conviction from his sophomore year in college when he was running with a bad element. A drug sale went sideways, there was gunfire and one person was killed. Paris didn’t shoot anyone, was largely in the wrong place at the wrong time, but ended up with six months of jail time and a felony conviction. After his jail stint, Paris re-dedicated himself to his schooling and managed to fight his way into law school. While worried about getting admitted to the California bar, he thought with his clean last four years and good grades, he’d be able to show evidence of reform and rehabilitation. Then in the summer between his second and third year of law school, Paris was arrested for driving while intoxicated. His application was rejected by the committee as he was viewed as lacking the moral character for the practice of law. He filed an appeal, which failed. He would not be admitted to the practice of law in California.

  Paris met Michael Harris while in his second year of law school. Harris was attending Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. The two ran into each other in the law library at the county courthouse. Paris could tell right away, Harris was a loner. Yet they struck up a friendship. When Paris was down on his luck, with no job, even fewer prospects and almost no money, Harris offered him the couch at his apartment. One month later, Michael Harris was killed in a car accident.

  At the time of his death, Harris was just starting his own law practice, running it out of a run-down job share office with four other young lawyers. Harris was an only child and both his parents were dead. He appeared to be a loner and few people seemed to notice that he passed. When he died and nobody seemed to be missing him, Jordan Paris made a calculation.

  Jordan Paris became Michael Harris, proving the Committee of Bar Examiners for the State of California correct about Paris’s lack of moral character.

  Paris assumed his friend’s identity, moved to Florida and was admitted to the bar. After three years practicing in Florida, he moved to Illinois for two years and then had been at KBMP for the last two years. At KBMP he became the model senior associate, working almost exclusively for Stan Busch, trying cases and putting himself on a potential path to partnership.

  Harris impressed Oliver. So much so that Gordon Oliver called a friend of his named Jane Phipp, who worked the career center at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Oliver raved to Phipp about Harris, how personable he was and what a good lawyer and mentor he was. Phipp related to Mac that she said to Oliver that she didn’t remember Michael Harris in that way and the two of them did a little more talking and corresponding and they realized they were not talking about the same person.

  Oliver did what good young lawyers do, research. Mac had to hand it to him. Gordon Oliver pretty much had it all and was dead on based on what Mac and Lich had dug up in the last three hours.

  Mac laid it all out on the table for Paris.

  “This is not what you think, detective,” Paris pleaded. “I did not kill Gordon Oliver.”

  “I don’t know, Jordan,” Mac replied casually. “It seems to me like you’ve got huge motive to have done so. Oliver figures out you’re not who you say you are, that you’ve assumed Michael Harris’s identity and that you’ve been practicing law under his name. He confronts you about it a day or two ago, threatening to expose you to the firm, the authorities and anyone else who would be interested. I mean, you’re finished but good. Before he does that, before he reports you, maybe he offers you some sort of alternative. Maybe he’s worried about the damage it will do to the firm, so he gives you the chance to come clean or maybe just leave town, a little get out of jail free card. Whatever it was, it doesn’t work for you. So you went to The Mahogany to confront him.”

  “You might not have even wanted to kill him,” Lich added.

  “That’s right,” McRyan stated, sitting back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest, his right leg over his left, “You just wanted to talk again, but he rebuffs you. He’ll have none of it. Everything is falling apart. So you lose it. You hit him in the back of the head. Gordon stumbles, falls and hits his head on the bumper. Then he isn’t moving. He’s dead. You killed him.”

  “So you panic,” Dick followed. “You put his body in the back of the truck and you get the heck out of there. It might have helped if you’d grabbed his wallet, watch, etcetera… so that it looked like a robbery. I’m a little surprised you didn’t think of that. It certainly caused us to look in other directions, such as the law firm where we found you.”

  “I didn’t kill him, detectives,” Paris exclaimed. “I didn’t even know Gordon knew about me. If he did, he didn’t let on at all. I had no idea.”

  “Come on,” Lich replied exasperated. “You can’t expect us to believe that.”

  “It’s true, you have to believe me.”

  “Why?” McRyan retorted. “There’s nothing about you that is true, that is real. Your whole life is a lie.”

  “That’s true. What you say is true, everything, except the part where I killed him,” Paris exclaimed and then slumped back in his chair, rubbed his face and exhaled. “Look, I’ve been pretending to be Michael Harris for eight years. I’ve grown eyes in the back of my head. I could sense a couple of people might have been on to me in Florida so I moved on. Same thing when I worked in Chicago, there was a lawyer in the office who started asking some questions that told me it was time to get out while I could. So I could smell it coming in Miami and Chicago. But I got nary a whiff here. I had no clue.”

  It was Mac’s turn to sit back. His gut was telling him Paris might be on the level. He looked over to Lich who was unimpressed with Paris’ performance.

  Mac flipped back through some pages from his notebook. “You said to me the other day that you left your office on the night Oliver was murdered ar
ound 11:15 p.m., correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s plenty of time for you to get to The Mahogany and to the back alley and wait for Oliver to leave.”

  “I went right home that night. I left the office at 11:15, I got to my apartment at 11:25 and I was asleep ten minutes later. I was exhausted from preparing for trial.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  Paris’s head went down and his shoulders slumped. He shook his head. “I live alone. I drove to my apartment along Grand Avenue, parked and went into my place.”

  “Any security in your building?”

  Paris shook his head.

  “Any cameras that could verify your arrival?” Mac followed.

  Paris shook his head.

  “Any neighbors you saw on the way in?” Mac asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s not exactly what we would call airtight there, Jordan.”

  “I don’t know what else to say, detective,” Paris uttered. “It’s the truth.”

  McRyan and Lich stepped out of the interrogation room and into the hallway. It was after midnight. “So what do you think?” Mac asked.

  “I think he’s guilty as the day is long,” Dick answered. “You actually have doubts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lich rolled his eyes. He was tired. It was late. “What? Something is bothering you, Mac, so frickin’ spit it out.”

  Mac plopped himself down into his desk chair, pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled. “The part where he says he’d grown eyes in the back of his head. Something about that rang true to me.”

  Lich grabbed his own desk chair and rolled it over to Mac’s desk. He sat down, leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, ready to impart a little wisdom on his smart but young partner. “Mac, the guy has been lying to people for eight years. He’s gotten really good at it. Now I hate admitting this, especially to you, but in my experience lawyers tend to be pretty bright people, Mac. They’re smart. Paris adds to that, a well-developed ability to lie. Put those two things together and you have yourself a lethal weapon—which is capable of doing who knows what. In this case, the lethal weapon was willing to kill. Mac, he killed Oliver two nights ago. Since then he’s had plenty of time to think about what he would say if we got onto him, which we did. He’s playing us, he’s playing you. Don’t let him.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mac answered as he sat back up to his desk. A forensics report was sitting on the desk. The forensics reports identified where the blood covered brass plate from the crime scene came from. “Or maybe I am right.”

  “Huh?” Lich said.

  Mac handed him the forensics report. “Take a look at what that blood covered brass plate is from.”

  Dick read the report, and looked up to Mac.

  “Do you remember where we saw one of those?”

  Lich nodded.

  “We got the wrong guy.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I can prove it all.”

  Stan Busch sat awaiting Mac and Lich in the interrogation room. Busch, as usual, was smartly attired in a black pin stripe suit, white monogrammed dress shirt and red silk tie, looking like a million bucks. In the last eight hours Mac and Lich managed to reveal that looking like a million dollars and living a million dollar lifestyle was why Stan Busch was their man.

  Mac and Lich observed Busch briefly through the mirror into the interrogation room. Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Bobby Young was standing with them. It was easy to see that Busch was angry, upset and also, at least to Mac, nervous. He was conferring with his lawyer, a local legal heavyweight named Saul Tobin. Normally Tobin would be reason to be wary, he was good, very good. However, Mac and Lich had the goods.

  “You ready?” Lich asked.

  “Let’s go,” Mac answered, picking up a green garbage bag and leaving the viewing room. The two detectives stormed into the interrogation room.

  “Arresting me at the courthouse on some bullshit murder charge in front of my legal colleagues? You two have a lot of explaining to do,” Busch started. “Saul and I are going to have your badges.”

  “Lighten up, Stan, you’re gonna wanna hear this,” Lich said flatly.

  Mac took Dick’s lead in: “Let me tell you a little story, Mr. Busch.”

  “About what?” Busch snorted.

  “About why and how you killed Gordon Oliver.”

  Busch snorted.

  “Don’t say a word, Stan,” Tobin ordered.

  “Counselor, he won’t have to,” Lich responded casually.

  “No, he won’t,” Mac added confidently and then started. “We’ve done some looking into you, Stan, these last eight hours once it became clear you were our guy. For me, I wanted to know why you killed Gordon Oliver. I knew that you did but I needed to know why. And you know what? I think I know.”

  “Oh, do you now,” Busch spit.

  “Stan,” Tobin warned.

  “I do, Mr. Busch, and it’s the oldest reason in the book. Money. We looked over your billings for the last three years. You have been billing Michael Harris at $350, $375 and $400 per hour the last three years. He billed 1,922, 1,988 and 2,189 hours in those years. My Cretin High math tells me that’s $2,293,800 of billings by Michael Harris on your files. I also know that you recovered 96% on your billings, so there has been very little discounting taking place.”

  “We also understand,” Lich added, “that under your firm’s compensation system that you receive significant credit for those billings come bonus time, not to mention your own time that you put on those files. That’s why you’ve made $748,000, $792,000 and $849,000 in the last three years from your firm. Michael Harris has helped make you wealthy.”

  “So what?” Busch answered.

  “So what? Michael Harris isn’t a lawyer and you know it,” Mac answered, looking at Tobin, who flinched. It was clear that counsel for the defense was unaware of this little tidbit of information. “In fact, you know that Michael Harris’s real name is Jordan Paris.”

  Mac looked over to Tobin. “Counselor, to bring you up to speed, Jordan Paris is a graduate of the University of San Diego School of Law but he was never ever admitted to the practice of law in California or any other jurisdiction because of some criminal issues of his own many years ago. The real Michael Harris, who was Paris’s roommate at one time, is dead as the result of a car accident eight years ago. Paris assumed his identity, moved to Florida, then Illinois and finally here, holding himself out as Michael Harris.”

  “Of course we don’t need to tell you this, Mr. Busch, do we?” Lich added. “Because you already know.”

  “Indeed you do,” Mac continued, flipping through his notes and then turning his attention back to Busch. “We checked your phone records and those of the law schools. You called both the Thomas Jefferson and University of San Diego School of Law in the last week. They remembered you just as they remembered Gordon Oliver calling them about the same thing two weeks ago. Your Michael Harris isn’t a lawyer.”

  Mac looked over to Tobin, “Counselor, if a law firm finds out that one of their lawyers wasn’t one, what does the firm have to do with the fees paid for the legal work of the non-lawyer?”

  “Disgorge the fees,” Tobin answered.

  “I thought so,” Mac said and then to Busch: “Since Harris, or shall I say Jordan Paris, only worked on your files, that’s $2,293,800 in legal fees that would have to be returned. Not to mention all the money you would owe back to your law partners. And the alimony from your marriage, holy cow your financial situation is tanking worse than Enron. And oh-by-the-way, can you imagine the damage such a disclosure would cause to your book of business going forward? There are a lot of lawyers in this town, good lawyers, and that business would be gone in a blink of an eye and you would be gone from KMBP in the next blink.”

  “And if that wasn’t motive enough, there was your other little ethical issue two years ago. You remember don’t you Mr. Busch. That case where you
failed to disclose a settlement offer to your client, a settlement offer that was significantly more than what the jury awarded your client at trial,” Lich added. “That resulted in complaint to the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, a malpractice claim and some rather bad press for the firm.”

  “Not to mention the loss of a multi-million dollar client,” Mac added. “Given how tenuous that put your position with your firm, you had plenty of reasons for wanting to take care of this problem with Paris before anyone found out.”

  “That may all be true,” Busch answered, “but on the night Oliver was killed I was at home with my sixteen-year-old daughter which I know you have verified. I left the office at 6:20 p.m. and went home and never left until I came into the office the next morning.”

  “We talked to your daughter yesterday,” Mac answered. “She did say you were home when she went to bed at 10:30 or so. She even recalled setting the alarm for your security system before she went to bed and recalled shutting it off the next morning before she left for school.”

  “Like I said,” Busch said confidently.

  “So we checked with your security company,” Lich responded. “They confirm your daughter’s story. But then they also have the system being deactivated at 11:20 p.m. and then re-activated at 12:48 a.m. So why would you have done that?”

  “Perhaps my daughter did. I was asleep.”

  “You’re lying. You turned off your security system. You left your house. You went to The Mahogany and killed Gordon Oliver.”

  Busch laughed it off. “That’s a nice story. A nice theory even. But you can’t prove any of it.”

  “I can prove it all,” Mac answered as he opened the garbage bag he had brought in and pulled out Busch’s weathered tan executive briefcase and slammed it on the table. Next to the briefcase, Mac placed a series of photographs.

  “Do you recognize this briefcase?” Mac inquired.

  Busch didn’t respond but Mac detected a slow leak of air from Busch’s posture.