Electing To Murder

by Roger Stelljes

  Mac stood behind the shell casings and looked back down the alley towards the fence. Then he looked back to his left to McCormick’s house and then he looked to his right between two houses and out to St. Clair Avenue. “I wonder,” he mumbled as he slowly started walking towards St. Clair. Just short of the large two-story house on the left was a garden that ran to the property line. He shined his light on the garden, now just dirt, and noted three fresh footprints moving in the direction of St. Clair, large footprints, perhaps a size eleven or twelve. “See that?”

  Lich nodded.

  “Mark this area off, Officer Skrypek,” Mac ordered and then kept walking through the houses and down to St. Clair Avenue. He quickly looked both directions but didn’t see anything of note but when he looked back towards McCormick’s house, he could see straight through to the back door. Then he started thinking about what he saw inside the house, the blood spot on the far dining room wall and the spot on the floor as well as the void. He thought about the call he and Sally received from the Judge and then about the person Sally said the Judge wanted him to meet and a scenario started forming in his head.

  Lich could see the wheels turning in his partners head. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that there’s another shooter I hadn’t thought of.”

  His partner looked at him quizzically. “I’m not following.”

  “I got the call from the Judge, right?”

  “Yeah, so.”

  “He must have had someone else in the car with him and that someone is our second shooter.”

  “Explain it, please?” Mac’s partner was not following yet.

  “Okay. The shooter, I’m going to call this person the ‘Second Shooter,’ is with the Judge and parks here on St. Clair. They jump out of the car,” Mac started walking fast back towards McCormick’s. “They’re walking through here to go to the back door.”

  “Why?”

  “Caution maybe,” Mac speculated. “They know that McCormick is meeting with or might be meeting with Montgomery.”

  “So?”

  “After what happened to Stroudt, this person decides to be careful. They will come to McCormick’s from the back.” Mac walked past the shell casings.

  “What about the casings?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute.” Mac kept walking to the house but then stopped ten feet short. He visualized the two bodies inside. From the back of the house, the dining room was to the left. In the dining room, one body was to the right of the table, McCormick, and the other was on the end, Montgomery. “I bet that’s what happened,” he uttered.

  “What? What happened?” Lich asked, still not fully reading his partner’s mind.

  Mac took his Sig out, walked up to the back door, opened it and went inside, walked up the three steps to the landing and then left into the kitchen and then right to the archway into the dining room. He pointed the Sig at the space where Montgomery was sitting and said, “Pop.” Then Mac moved a step right, pointed and said “Pop. Pop,” at McCormick.

  Lich was picking up on it now. “First shooter comes in from the back and takes these two just like that.”

  “Right,” Mac answered. “So we have accounted for Montgomery and McCormick.”

  “So what’s with the second shooter you’re talking about?”

  “I’m guessing but I haven’t been able to account for Kate Shelby yet and I know she was here.”

  “So where is she?” Lich asked.

  “I’m thinking,” Mac was really hoping, “she got away because of the second shooter. If you were the first shooter, you take Montgomery and McCormick. Assume that Shelby was down at that end of the table when the shooter comes in.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what does she do?”

  “She runs for it.”

  “Towards the front door, right?”

  “If she was at that end of the table, yes.”

  Mac backed out of the dining room, went back through the kitchen to the hallway that split the house down the middle. “Second shooter also comes in the back. Second shooter has heard or seen the shots. Second shooter comes down this hall. Shelby is at the front door.” Mac walked down the hallway, gun up, scanning left, looking through the spindles of the stairway banister. He stopped at the end of the banister. “Second shooter gets here, Dick, and puts a shot or two into the first shooter.”

  Lich had it now. “The shots throw the first shooter back into the dining room wall, leading to the blood smear and pool of blood on the floor.”

  “Right.”

  “So if the first shooter was shot, where is he?”

  “Or she.”

  “Whatever,” Lich replied. “Where is the first shooter? We don’t have a body.”

  Mac thought about it for a second and then asked: “Partner, why don’t the Second Shooter and Shelby stay? The threat is gone, right?”

  At first Lich squinted at Mac, not getting it. Then a small smile creased his face. “The first shooter has friends.”

  “Exactly,” Mac answered. “Exactly. The second shooter and Shelby have to get out of here. They run out the back. First shooter’s buddies are coming down the alley in the SUV …”

  “So the second shooter pops the SUV.”

  “And then runs to their car on St. Clair and they’re gone,” Mac finished and then his eyes brightened. “And that explains what happened to the body.”

  “I don’t follow yet,” Lich said.

  “Remember, the neighbor down the alley said after the SUV took out his fence it drove down here towards McCormick’s and then a minute later there was a squealing of the tires, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s going on in that minute?”

  Now Lich got it, snapped his fingers and pointed at Mac, “They were removing the body.”

  “I think so,” Mac replied. “They removed the first shooter’s body. They couldn’t leave the body behind.”

  “No, they have to go throw it in the river somewhere,” Lich answered.

  “Maybe.”

  * * *

  Wire had checked her rearview mirror for the last ten minutes as she’d weaved her way through St. Paul and away from McCormick’s home. Now on Rice Street, she was motoring north, the brightly lit white State Capitol building shrinking away in the distance behind her. Sensing they were free of a tail for the time being, she allowed herself to breathe a little easier and think about the last ten minutes and the loss of Sebastian. Shelby was feeling it too, lying against the back right window, weeping quietly. The Judge was also quiet, alternatively looking out the rear window for a tail and giving directional suggestions. With the capitol disappearing from view, he said: “I think we’re clear.”

  “Maybe,” Wire answered. She thought she’d gotten away from the scene without being seen, but she couldn’t be sure. There was enough commotion and shots fired that their escape could have drawn someone’s attention, perhaps a plate number and or description of the Acadia. Wire had no way of knowing for sure. She wasn’t plugged into the police radio system. So that was one problem. The other problem was, at this point, she didn’t know who they could trust. Wire approached the intersection of Rice and Larpenteur Avenue.

  “Take a right,” the Judge suggested.

  “You see something?” Wire asked pensively.

  “No,” the Judge answered calmly. “Just being extra careful is all.”

  Wire turned right on Larpenteur and checked the mirror herself. No vehicles turned to follow. She exhaled and the events of the last fifteen minutes started taking a toll on her. With the adrenaline wearing off, she started to shake a little. She gripped the wheel tightly but it didn’t help. Champps Restaurant, with a packed parking lot, was just ahead of them on the left. Wire turned left into the parking lot, circled around to the far side of the lot that backed up to the exit ramp from Interstate 35E and backed into an open space so she could see the entrance and any approaching vehicles. She turned off the l
ights but left the engine running.

  “You okay, Dara?” the Judge asked, putting his hand on Wire’s sleeve.

  “I just need a minute to clear my head,” she answered as she leaned back, tilted her head up and exhaled. Her heart was racing. She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing. The Judge intuitively understood what she was doing and stayed quiet, only the hum of the car heater and the traffic from the interstate behind them provided some ambient noise.

  She’d fired her weapon two times in her bureau career and in both instances the adrenaline of the confrontation gave way to the shock of shooting another man. Her body was shaking and it would continue to do so for a few moments. Like with those prior shootings, she ran the whole scenario back through her mind, every step of it, both because it wouldn’t leave her mind but also because, in this instance, she kept wondering if there was anything she could have done to stop it, to have saved Sebastian. They had tried to call, she got there as quickly as she could and she wouldn’t have approached the house any other way than how she did. She was just a little too late.

  After a minute she decided it would be best to occupy her mind so she turned to the task at hand.

  “Kate, didn’t you guys get our calls?”

  Shelby sniffled and shook her head.

  “They must have been jamming it then.”

  “Jamming it?” the Judge asked, confused.

  “Yes. Whoever these guys were, they were jamming the cell phone signal into the house. If you have the right equipment, you could sit out in the street and jam the signal to the house and they were tracking Montgomery somehow, they had to be, that’s the only explanation I can come up with how they ended up at Sebastian’s house.” That gave Wire another thought. “Judge, Connolly has three bodies on him. He’s dropping bodies and he doesn’t seem to care. Who is doing this for him? Where is he getting these guys? Is he using government resources?”

  Dixon was skeptical and shook his head, “This isn’t the government. Could be a contractor, but it’s not our government. I don’t think that for a minute.”

  “Doesn’t have to be the government sanctioning it, Judge,” Wire answered. “But it still could be government agents of some kind, CIA, NSA, who knows.”

  The Judge shook his head, certain, “I don’t buy it. These guys are private. They’re working for Connolly.”

  “Fine, he’s not using federal agents to kill people but seriously, Judge, what in the hell did Stroudt and McCormick stumble onto in Kentucky that I didn’t see?”

  “Perhaps whatever is in this backpack,” Shelby answered from the backseat. She sat up, sniffled and wiped away a tear with the back of her right hand and then unzipped the backpack that she and Wire had taken from McCormick’s.

  The Judge’s cell phone rang and he looked at the display. “It’s Sally Kennedy.” He looked over to Wire and asked, “Should I answer?”

  “Not yet, Judge. I need to think this through. Let’s see what’s in the backpack first.”

  Shelby pulled out the laptop, which was still powered up but was at the password screen, something they didn’t have. “I can’t get into the laptop without the password,” she said. “We’ll need some help.”

  “What else is there?” the Judge asked.

  Shelby held up a cell phone.

  “That’s a burner phone,” Wire said. “Cheap one he probably bought at a convenience store with a set number of hours. Is that the only one he had in there?”

  Kate rummaged through the backpack and shook her head. “That’s the only phone.” She pulled out an Altoids tin and opened it up. Inside she found a SIM card. “I bet he kept his SIM card, though, for his contacts.”

  “So I bet he dumped his cell phone because it had GPS,” Wire said. “So I wonder how they tracked him to St. Paul?” The cell phone had been the first thing she thought of.

  “Perhaps they were sitting on Sebastian’s house?” the Judge offered.

  “Maybe,” Wire answered skeptically. “I suppose they could have thought that if Stroudt’s intent was to come here and contact Sebastian, maybe Montgomery would try and do the same thing. But …”

  “… That’s really betting on the come,” the Judge finished. “Montgomery could appear anywhere and if anything it would have been bucking the odds huge to think he’d follow Stroudt.”

  “Perhaps that’s what Montgomery was thinking as well,” Wire added. “No, they tracked him in some other way. What else is in the backpack?”

  Shelby pulled out a camera, an Olympus. “Maybe this will tell us what they saw.”

  “Let me see,” Wire answered. She took the camera from Shelby, turned it on and started looking through the photos. “These are definitely from Hitch’s cabin in Kentucky,” she reported. “They were in the position I wanted to take pictures from.”

  The Judge leaned over, “There’s Connolly walking in,” he said with disgust. “That bastard, I’m going to fry his ass if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Who is this man?” Wire asked, pointing to a rotund balding man in a black suit coat and white dress shirt.

  “I don’t recognize him,” the Judge answered and then pointed to another man on the right hand side of the picture. “How about this guy?” Dixon pointed to a younger blondish man, holding something up in his hand while standing by a silver metal briefcase.

  “Don’t know who that is, Judge,” Wire answered. “I only know Connolly.”

  There was a fourth man in the photos, besides security. “How about the Prince of Darkness here?” The Judge pointed at a man dressed in all black including a black fedora. Wire scrolled through the photos but there was never a good picture of the man. His head was always either tilted down or he was standing in the shadows. “I can only make out part of his face,” the Judge said, pulling the camera close to his eyes. Then he handed it back to Wire. “Advance through the photos, Dara, see if we can get another look at him.”

  “I remember the guy,” Wire answered. “If only because I never got a good picture of him myself in all of the chaos when people were running out of the back of the cabin and I rolled video and took pictures. The ones I took of him didn’t show much.”

  Wire advanced through all of the photos but there was never a clear picture of the man’s face, only partial profiles or even shots of his back but never a straight on photo. The man was always in the shadows, behind everyone, his hat pulled down over his eyes. It didn’t help that Montgomery never seemed to focus on the man. Instead he was focused on Connolly and the rotund bald man.

  Dara got to the last picture in the roll.

  “What’s that a picture of?” Dixon asked. It looked like a limousine in the distance with a man opening the door.

  Wire glanced at the photo. “I’d kind of forgotten about this. There was another limousine that arrived. Whoever was in it never got out because before he or she did, all hell broke loose.”

  “So we have another player out there somewhere,” the Judge mused, stroking his chin, calmer now, analyzing their problem.

  Wire backed through ten photos to where the younger blond man held something in his hand and showed it to Connolly and the rotund man. In the next photos he was turned, back to the camera, showing the man in the shadows it as well.

  “What is he holding?” Wire asked, squinting at the small camera screen. She enlarged the photo on the display but couldn’t make out what he was holding. “I can’t really make that out. His hand covers most of it. Looks like an iPod, almost.”

  She showed the Judge, who took a closer look. “I don’t know what that is. Maybe if it were bigger we could get a better idea,” the Judge said.

  “I think Montgomery was going to use the laptop and its bigger screen to show us the photos but before he could …” Kate suggested from the back and then she started to tremble again. “Before he could, that man came from out of nowhere and started shooting.”

  The Judge looked over to Wire, “The man you shot. Did you recognize him?�
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  Wire shook her head. “I didn’t look at him long, Judge, but I didn’t recognize him. I checked him quick but he didn’t have any identification on him. Maybe the police will figure out who he is.”

  “Speaking of which, perhaps we need to get with them now,” the Judge offered.

  Wire wasn’t so sure. “Judge, we have no idea how deep this goes, who these guys have contacts with, who we can trust.”

  The Judge nodded, “I hear you but there is one man I know we can trust.”

  “We can trust Mac,” Kate added meekly, still in shock. “We can trust him.”

  “Yes we can,” the Judge said assuredly. “And he will know who he can trust. We have to go in, Dara. We’re sitting ducks out here.” Dixon reached for his cell phone and hit the number for Sally Kennedy.

  * * *

  From the flashing lights stationed in front of McCormick’s house emerged the chief. Charlie Flanagan was a tall and angular man, who walked with an elegant gait befitting of a man with a bright white shock of hair. Most of the time the chief looked aristocratic in his pinstripe suits and flowing trench coats, but he acted and sounded anything but.

  The chief had been the top lawman in St. Paul for eleven years, an impressive stretch of service for a big city chief. This was particularly the case because the chief was not an especially adroit politician and he refused to play the games politicians loved to play. He was not, and proudly was not, a politician in a policeman’s job. He was a policeman in a political job. Flanagan was a St. Paul cop for thirty-six years. He never forgot whom he was the chief of and that was the police. He was beloved and respected by the force. His men would do anything for him because they knew the chief would have their backs. It was that loyalty and devotion that had kept him in his position for so many years.