Electing to Murder

CHAPTER TWO

“What would be the fun in that?”

Thursday, October 31st

The Snelling Motor Lodge was a two-story L-shaped motel from a bygone era, both in its shape and function. It was L-shaped to fit snuggly into a tight lot on the east side of Snelling Avenue near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. In years gone by, its function would have been to host out-of-state families in the cities either visiting or working at the Minnesota State Fair or in town visiting their children attending Hamline University which was located just to its north.

However, what travelers needed from a hotel, matched with years of neglectful ownership, had allowed The Snelling to fall into a dilapidated state. The red paint was peeling away from its cedar siding and the years of harsh Minnesota winters and heavy snow had wreaked havoc on the faded black shingled roof, causing it to look as wavy as Lake Minnetonka. The cement parking lot was strewn with small pot holes and the sidewalks were chipped and cracked. People looking for a good night’s rest and some peace and quiet usually did not stay at The Snelling. People looking to engage in activities they didn’t want others to see did. Time and neglect turned The Snelling over to a poorer clientele, one that frequently included drug dealers, junkies and prostitutes. So it was no surprise to Detective Mac McRyan that at 5:30 p.m. he was turning into the parking lot of The Snelling, pulling up to yellow crime scene tape and parking next to the coroner’s wagon.

This wouldn’t be his first rodeo at The Snelling.

Mac put his new Yukon in park and took one last long sip of his Depth Charge Coffee from the Grand Brew. Thirty-three years old, he had four years as a detective. He was a fourth generation cop, with cousins and uncles scattered throughout the St. Paul Police Department. When you retired from the first family business, you went to work for the second family business, McRyan’s Pub, sitting on the southwest corner of downtown St. Paul on West Seventh Street.

While policing and owning a bar were the family businesses, Mac’s route to being a cop was far more circuitous than for the rest of his family. He’d been a hockey player at the University of Minnesota, captain his senior year. He was also a scholastic All-American. As a result, Mac McRyan had other options available to him. So while other McRyans of his generation stayed true to family form and went into policing, Mac went to law school with his college sweetheart, got married and appeared set for a long, lucrative and successful legal career. He had been hired by the biggest firm in town with a six-figure salary waiting. Then lightning struck two weeks after he passed the bar exam. His two cousins and best friends were killed in the line of duty and suddenly he felt the pull and obligation of the family business. Mac made detective by age twenty-nine, was divorced by age thirty and now at age thirty-three was the best detective on the force.

He grabbed his worn brown leather folder, pen and cell phone and rolled his athletic six-foot-one frame out of the warmth of the truck. There was a definite chill in the air. The temperature was dropping quickly from a noontime high of forty-eight and was now dipping into the mid-thirties, with a stiff northwest breeze adding to the chill, cold even for Minnesota in late October. Winter was still a ways away, but days like today made you realize it wasn’t that far away. Mac threw his black wool overcoat on over his suit coat and pulled a navy blue scarf around his neck and walked under the crime scene tape.

His cousin Shawn, a uniform cop, greeted him with a smile and: “Hey cuz. I didn’t think the chief would send the A-squad to The Snelling.”

“Just my luck, I guess,” Mac answered. “Hold this,” Mac said as he handed his cousin his brown leather folder and reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of rubber gloves. He took the folder back, “Lich will be along any minute.”

“So you think the governor will pull it out next Tuesday?”

“I sure hope so,” Mac answered, “if for no other reason than just to see Sally happy. Given all the work she’s put in the last couple of months, she’ll be absolutely devastated if he doesn’t.”

Sally was Sally Kennedy, Mac’s girlfriend. She had taken leave from her assistant Ramsey County attorney job to work on Minnesota Governor James Thomson’s presidential campaign. An old law school friend who was a close aide of the national campaign manager, a famous local political operative named Judge Dixon, recruited her back in mid-summer. She’d poured herself into the work and made a very favorable impression on the man known as “The Judge.” It would be good for her career since she had aspirations beyond the county attorney’s office. Judge Dixon was an excellent man to have for a reference.

“So what do we have, Shawney?” Mac asked, getting back on task. A dead body awaited his attention.

“Body is upstairs. I snuck a quick peek. You’ve got a white male, probably in his mid-thirties. Bloody as hell. The guy’s throat was cut nearly ear to ear, pretty gruesome. Given the location, I’d say it’s probably a drug-robbery-sex cocktail.”

Mac raised an eyebrow, “So I can just go home then?”

Shawn smiled, “I suspect the powers that be probably would like a detective, particularly one of your caliber, to sign off on the theory of a lowly patrolman.”

“Pity,” Mac replied. “Who discovered the body?”

“A Valeninos Pizza delivery driver, with an assist from the motel manager.”

“Valeninos?”

“Yeah. Apparently our vic upstairs ordered a pie. The driver knocks on the door and there’s no answer. He looked in the window, there was a sliver of a gap between the curtains and the window and he saw a leg on the floor and the guy wouldn’t get up no matter how long he knocked. Driver was smart enough to …”

“… realize where he was and went and got the manager,” Mac finished.

“That’s right. Manager came up, opened the door, saw what you’re going to see and called 911.”

“Do we have a name?”

“Yeah, Bob Smith.”

Mac gave his cousin a skeptical look, “Bob Smith? Seriously?”

“That’s what the motel manager said. At least that’s what the room register has his name as.”

“Let me guess. Neither identification nor a credit card were required to rent a room?”

“The Snelling rarely asks for such niceties from its clientele these days,” Shawn answered. “Not good for their customer retention program, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t imagine it is,” Mac sighed as he strode over to the open-air concrete stairs and made his way up the steps to the second level and strolled along the balcony to room 211. He carefully stepped inside the doorway. Like all rooms at The Snelling, this one was cramped. To his immediate right was a cheap small square table with two extremely weathered navy blue fabric chairs. An unopened Valeninos’ pizza box sat on the table. Farther inside and to the right were two twin-size beds. The bedspread of the closest bed was slightly disturbed and the two pillows were stacked on the left side near the nightstand. A cheap oak dresser and old-school box television on a stand were to his left. The bathroom and a door-less closet containing two stray metal hangers on the clothes rod were to the back.

The body was laying face down, less than ten feet inside the door. There was a line of blood splatter on the left wall running above the dresser and across the mirror. The coroner was crouched down, examining the body, careful to keep her feet out of the pool of blood. She looked up to see Mac and smiled. “Detective McRyan, how nice to see you.”

“And you, Doctor. What can you tell me about our boy Bob Smith here? Like, for example, do we know if that’s actually his real name?”

“We don’t. No wallet on the body or in the room,” the coroner answered. “There are markings on his left wrist suggesting he wore a watch but there isn’t one to be found.”

“You’ll take prints off the vic, of course?”

“You bet, Mac. We’ll run them and see if we get a hit. Given we’re at The Snelling, odds are in our favor.”

Mac looked back to a uniform cop standing just outside the door. “Did you guys find any luggage? Duffel bag? Backpack? Anything like that?”

The uniform shook his head.

Mac turned back to the coroner, “How long has Bobby here been dead?”

“No rigor, so I’d say he hasn’t been dead more than two to three hours tops. Cause of death looks pretty obvious, knife, right across the throat.”

“I assume he was grabbed from behind?” Mac asked, as he jotted down notes.

The coroner nodded.

“And he’s facing the left wall here when he cuts him across the throat. Look at the blood splatter. See how it runs across the wall and thins out left to right? That would suggest to me the killer used his right hand.”

“As would the wound, from what I can tell,” the coroner replied. “The guy is damn near decapitated.”

“So how does our killer get in here and get the jump on the guy?” Mac asked and then looked down to his right at the table. “The pizza perhaps?”

“Maybe. The vic makes a call for a pie,” the coroner says. “Pizza guy gets in the room and then takes the knife to our guy.”

“Valeninos will love that,” Mac answered, shaking his head. “But that doesn’t really add up, does it? I mean, the Valeninos guy found our body to start with.” Mac flipped up the top to the pizza box. The box was empty.

“Interesting. No pizza in the pizza box.” Mac turned to the uniform cop. “Is the Valeninos guy still hanging around?”

“Yes.”

“Confirm with him that he still has the pizza that was ordered.”

The uniform ran off. Mac turned back to the room, “So between whenever he made his order and the time they found him, someone got in here, dressed as a delivery man, and decapitates our guy. But why? For what reason? Why is Bob, or whatever his name really is, so important? So important that someone would, in broad daylight no less, get in here, to The Snelling, to kill him.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to take a standard run of the mill drug or sex related murder here at The Snelling and turn it into something complicated,” moaned McRyan’s partner Richard Lich, a/k/a Dick Lick, as he stepped carefully into the room. Attired in one of his trademark shit-brown suits, striped tie and scuffed loafer ensembles that was topped off with a black fedora covering his bald dome, Lich carefully maneuvered his heavyset body around the deceased. “Why, for once, can’t it just be easy?”

“What would be the fun in that,” Mac replied with a wry smile. “Besides, the case is more interesting when you add into this the question of how our killer knows the guy ordered from Valeninos?”

Lich shrugged his shoulders.

Mac’s cousin had an answer, “Valeninos is the only shop that will deliver here.”

“Fine,” Mac responded, but then asked, “how did the killer know he ordered a pizza?”

“Hmpf,” Lich snorted. Dick walked over to the hotel phone, picked it up and took a quick look around and didn’t see an obvious listening device. “We should have crime scene take the phone and examine it,” he said. “That’s a good question, Mac. Could have just been standing outside the door and heard it and thought it’s a good way to get in.”

Mac chewed on that as he walked back over to the victim and ran his small pen-sized flashlight over the exposed arms of the victim. “Doc, you see any evidence of drug use on the vic?”

“No needle marks that I saw on his arms,” the coroner answered as she pulled off the victim’s socks and examined between the toes. “I don’t see any needle marks between the toes along the feet, so he looks clean. I can tell you for sure once I examine him at the morgue and run a tox screen. However, he doesn’t have the drug user look to him.”

Mac nodded as he looked the victim over. He had an expensive haircut with maybe one or two day’s stylish razor stubble. The victim’s clothes were a little dirty but were quality, Levi’s, nylon Nautica zip-up black pullover, top-of-the-line hiking boots. “Is it me or does this guy not fit the common demographic for clientele here at The Snelling, or at least the clientele that fractures the occasional law while here?”

“You mean, say, a strung out drug addled sex fiend?” Lich asked.

“Yeah, something like that,” Mac answered nodding.

“Then that’s a negative. He looks pretty clean cut for The Snelling.”

“Is Bob even from these parts?” Mac asked.

“No ID. No wallet. No luggage, so who knows?” Lich answered. “Maybe he’s a student from Hamline University who wandered down the street into the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He’s older than a Hamline student,” Mac answered. “This guy is in his thirties, I’d say.”

“Maybe a law student?” Lich questioned. Hamline had a law school.

“William Mitchell usually would have the law students in their thirties, going to the night school, not Hamline.” Mac answered, a William Mitchell graduate in his own right. He stood up and walked over to the bed where the victim appeared to have been sitting.

“What are you thinking, Mac?” Lich asked.

“Our guy was sitting here on the bed, watching television perhaps, maybe the news.”

“The news? At The Snelling?” Lich replied skeptically. “Porn seems more likely.”

“Speaking from experience,” Mac replied, which drew a one-finger solute response from Lich. “Whatever he was watching, our guy is sitting here, right?”

“Yeah. He hears a knock on the door,” Lich adds. “Thinking his Valeninos’ Deluxe Supreme has arrived.”

“Right, he looks through the peephole and the guy is holding a pizza or at least a pizza box.”

“So he lets the killer in. The killer walks in, puts the pizza box on the table.”

“Bob here is relaxed and perhaps reaches for his wallet. Figuring he’ll pay for the pizza quick and …”

“The killer sees this and jumps him from behind, cuts his throat and leaves with his wallet, watch and apparently anything else our guy came with,” Mac finished as he pulled the pillows up and looked down. Between the mattress and the wall, just under the headboard, he saw a piece of paper. He unfolded it.

“I don’t think Bob is from around here.”

“What do you have?”

“A boarding pass, interestingly enough. Delta flight from St. Louis to Minneapolis dated today. And it’s not for a Bob Smith, but for a Jason Stroudt.”

“Case just got a little more interesting,” Lich said.

“Perhaps,” Mac answered. “I mean, it seems to me it would be pretty unusual for someone to fly up from St. Louis and then come here?”

“Unless he was coming up here to get a little somethin’ somethin’, a girl maybe,” Lich answered. “Or maybe he’s going to make some sort of drug deal.”

“Where is the evidence of that? The coroner says there is no outward evidence of drugs on the victim.”

“Maybe the tox screen will prove otherwise, Mac. Maybe he’s not a user but a dealer meeting a supplier, who knows. Smart drug dealers are ones who don’t use their own product.”

“That’s true. To figure this out we have to start putting this guy’s life together, at least the last few hours of it, to see what’s what,” Mac declared. “Let’s go down and talk to the manager and see if he can give us anything.”

The long-time manager of The Snelling was Tony Seville. Seville was a slight and grungy man whose eyes were constantly shifting left to right. He never looked anyone in the eye, which was advisable given where he worked. Seville was fully aware of the activities that took place at the motel he managed. Vice thought he probably got a little piece of the action from time to time from some of his regular clientele and was accomplished at turning a blind eye. Consequently, he knew little and was evasive in providing what he did know. He reported that Bob Smith checked in mid-afternoon. After some further questioning, he pegged the time at a shade after 2:00 p.m. Seville was even evasive about how Smith reserved the room. After pestering from McRyan and Lich, it turns out that there was no reservation for a room. He paid cash for one night, scribbled his name on the register and was handed a room key. The only other contact with the guest was when he called down for a pizza delivery number.

“I gave him Valeninos.”

“Any particular reason?” Lich asked.

“They’re the only ones that will still deliver here and even then only while the sun is still up,” Seville answered.

“What time was that at?” Mac asked. “That he called down for the pizza number.”

“I couldn’t say for sure,” Seville answered quietly, slippery as ever.

Mac finally snapped. “Damn it, Tony! All I asked was what time he called down for a f*cking pizza, so enough of this shit. You know I’m not a vice or dope cop. I don’t care about what you have going on the side here. But if you don’t start answering my questions the first time, I’ll have vice and dope in here within the hour and they will care about your side action. Hell, they’ll come down here just for the practice.”

Seville held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Detective, I’m pretty sure he called down to me between 2:45 and 3:00.”

“What time did the driver stop in here asking for you to come up to the room?”

“Right around 4:00 p.m.”

Mac looked to Lich. “That gives us 2:45–3:00 to 4:00 as the kill zone.”

Lich nodded, jotting down notes.

“Did you see anyone approach his room?”

“I didn’t, but …” Seville shrugged his shoulders.

“What?” Lich said.

“You make it a practice to turn a blind eye unless you absolutely have to?” Mac surmised.

“Occupational requirement,” Seville answered.

“Economic necessity,” Lich quipped. Seville just shrugged.

Mac continued: “So when he checked in, did he have any luggage, anything like that with him?”

“Not that I really recall,” Seville answered and then thought for a moment. “He had a backpack, I think, over his left shoulder, but no suitcase or anything like that.”

Mac jotted that down. “How did he get here?”

“I think he drove,” Seville answered. “I did watch him when he walked out. There are the curtains on the bottom of the window, but when he walked out, I could see the top of a car door that opened, he dropped down and into the car. I assumed he drove it down closer to the steps at the end of his wing of the building and went up.”

“What kind of car?” Lich asked.

“I didn’t look. Like I said, I saw the very top of the door swing open, darker color I think, but I didn’t watch him drive away.”

Mac looked out the window and given that the victim’s motel room was to the right, Seville wouldn’t have been able to see the car. It would have been blocked by the half-curtains for the window.

“And he gave you the name Bob Smith?”

Seville nodded.

“Did you look at his identification at all? Perhaps his driver’s license?”

“No,” Seville responded. “The only time I do that is if someone tries to pay with credit, then I might give that a look because I don’t want to get stiffed, but people usually don’t flash the plastic here, almost always cash. If they pay cash, I don’t really care what their name is. Joe Schmo, Bob Smith, Little Richard, I don’t care what name they use as long as we get paid.”

“How about the name Jason Stroudt?” Lich asked. “That name mean anything to you?”

Seville shook his head.

“Was Bob Smith the only person you rented that room to today?” Mac followed.

Seville nodded.

“Anything else, Tony?” Mac asked skeptically. “Anything you’ve purposefully neglected to tell me?”

The Snelling manager shook his head. “You know what I know, Detectives.”

Mac and Lich stared him down.

“Honest.”

Mac and Lich walked out of the manager’s office. There wasn’t a car parked in the vicinity of the victim’s room.

“So where’s the car?” Lich asked.

“We have two things to track down, our victim and his car,” Mac said, scribbling down some to do’s. “I’m going to call Delta and see if Bob Smith is really Jason Stroudt. From there, maybe we can track the car.”

* * *

Heath Connolly stood off to the side of the dais reading e-mails from his campaign staff while Vice President Wellesley delivered his second speech of the day in Cincinnati. The campaign manager tried to focus on the flurry of e-mail clogging his smart phone. One e-mail wanted approval of Friday and Saturday’s travel schedule. Another e-mail inquired about Connolly’s availability to appear on the Sunday morning political shows and This Week was making a particular push which made Connolly wince. He always tried to avoid This Week, if for no other reason than the Washington Post’s George Will always seemed to twist him in knots. Another e-mail provided him with an update on Super PAC advertising in Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia and Ohio, the key battleground states. However, he was having trouble focusing, the hairy events of the night before still fresh and swirling around in his mind.

He’d held many a late night meeting at Hitch’s place in the past without a problem and it had seemed like a completely safe and out of the way place for last night’s meeting to see the demonstration of The Plan in its ultimate form. Unfortunately, that demonstration was delayed several hours and only then provided in the hanger at the airport in Princeton, Kentucky, once completely secured. From what Connolly had seen, the plan would work. He just needed to keep the election tight and the plan from being exposed.

The former was looking easier than the latter when there was a buzz in his left suit pant pocket.

He casually put his campaign phone inside the breast pocket for his suit coat and reached into his left pant pocket and pulled out his other phone, which displayed a new text message. The message read: ‘One down, one to go.’

Connolly casually elbowed Donald Wellesley Jr. standing just to his right and handed him the phone. Wellesley Jr. knew fully the events of the night before even though he’d not attended them. He handed the phone back to Connolly and whispered, “Any idea where they are on the other?”

“No.”

“Breathe easy, Heath,” Wellesley said casually. “It’s only a matter of time before Kristoff and his merry band of men track him down and then this thing will be in the bag, like it always should have been.”

Connolly snorted, “I won’t breathe easy until this is over.”

“Fine,” Wellesley replied nonplused, “but we keep the pressure on in Iowa, Wisconsin and Virginia and we’re golden, my friend. Thomson won’t know what hit him.”

* * *

Kristoff watched the scene unfold at The Snelling from across Snelling Avenue, sitting in a black Chrysler minivan. To his right was his long-time friend and business partner Francois Foche. Both were taking in the murder scene of Jason Stroudt with binoculars.

Once again they were cleaning up a mess. They’d cleaned one up in Milwaukee last night only to get the call that they had a new one requiring their attention.

Jason Stroudt was one half of their problem, which meant that one half of their newest problem was now solved. Stroudt, and his partner, somehow knew about the meeting at Hitch’s cabin. In the chase through the woods from Hitch’s cabin, one man managed to get a partial plate on a Ford Taurus as it sped away. The partial plate led to Stroudt.

Kristoff and Foche tracked Stroudt to the Twin Cities via his credit card and flight. They’d tracked him from the airport to The Snelling. The rest, while not hard, was constructed on the fly. In his experience, when you had to make such a move on the fly, something invariably was missed.

Having taken care of Stroudt, Kristoff and Foche reviewed what the blogger had in his backpack. Stroudt and his partner saw too much in Kentucky. What had Kristoff worried was that whoever was with Stroudt in Kentucky probably possessed the same information and photos that Stroudt did. Kristoff knew what the election plan was and if someone knew what they were looking at in the photos and put the pieces together, the fallout would be massive.

Kristoff and Foche had to tie off the loose end from Kentucky.

So who was with Stroudt last night?

Kristoff was certain it was Stroudt’s blogging partner Adam Montgomery. The two of them flew together to Nashville and stayed at the same hotel. For now, it appeared that Montgomery had fallen off the grid, exercising far more caution than that exhibited by his now late business partner. Montgomery’s cell phone was turned off, there was no credit card activity and they had been unable to track his whereabouts since Kentucky. He did not make his Nashville flight nor had he taken any other flight, unlike his business partner. Kristoff had a team conduct a search of Stroudt’s home and office in the early morning hours. The team was still reviewing everything from the search but thus far they had no leads on how the two bloggers knew of Kentucky.

Montgomery would surface eventually. Kristoff’s men were tracking Montgomery’s cell phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, website, credit cards and cash card. Sooner or later he would show up on the electronic grid, they always did. Kristoff just needed Montgomery to come out of hiding in or near a place where he had assets available to be deployed.

In the meantime, Kristoff and Foche decided to monitor the Stroudt crime scene. They’d been watching The Snelling for a half hour when the Black Yukon arrived bringing the first suit to the scene. “Younger guy,” Foche said hopefully.

“Do St. Paul cops drive high-end Yukons?” Kristoff wondered out loud as he picked up his cell phone and made a call. “I need you to run a Minnesota plate.”

Fifteen minutes later he had the rundown on the Yukon on his phone. “This could have gone better,” he muttered.

“Why?” Foche asked.

“The Yukon is not department issue but the personal vehicle of Michael McKenzie McRyan. He’s a detective and from the look of things, a fine one. Magna Cum Laude graduate from the University of Minnesota and William Mitchell College of Law. He joined the police department after law school and has some rather impressive police work to his name.”

“Guy with that background becomes a cop for a very specific if not personal reason,” Foche said with some insight. “Something must have happened to him or a family member to make him become a cop.”

“You may be right. Part of the answer may be that police work is something of the family business. Apparently there are many a McRyan in the St. Paul Police Department. His late father was Simon McRyan, a detective of some regard years ago. Perhaps young Michael McKenzie here simply followed the calling to the family business.”

“What has he done that means we should hold him in such high esteem?” Foche asked.

“You remember hearing about that shoot-out in St. Paul with some professionals who worked with the military contractor PTA?”

“I do,” Foche answered, sitting up in his passenger seat and dropping the binoculars from his eyes to look at Kristoff. “I knew the man with PTA. His name was Webb Alt. I worked with him two different times when he was CIA, they called him Viper. He was very good.”

“While at PTA, this Alt got into some off-the-books arms sales business that this McRyan discovered. McRyan took him down. There was a chase through downtown St. Paul and McRyan got the drop on Alt and shot him in a parking ramp. Then summer before last there was a kidnapping case, where the St. Paul police chief’s and a prominent lawyer’s daughters were kidnapped. It was a national story over the 4th of July. There was significant media coverage.”

“McRyan had that one as well?” Foche asked.

“He did. Apparently, against orders, he went rogue with a couple of other detectives. He brought both women home and took down all the kidnappers, even the FBI agent working it from the inside.”

Foche was mildly concerned. “I seriously doubt McRyan will find much at the scene that will trace this back to us, but we handled Stroudt without much preparation.”

“So?”

“We should keep a little eye on this McRyan. He obviously has some ability.”