Deadly Stillwater

“You mean the revered Charlie Flanagan, chief o’ police for the city of St. Paul? Oh, we’re quite familiar with who your father is.” Smith smiled through his mask. “And we are not the least bit concerned about it.” He paused and patted her on the thigh. “Now Carrie, if you play ball with us and your daddy follows directions…” He leaned back and clasped his hands across his stomach. “Well, everything will all work out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, if you do as we ask, your chances of making it out of this are a lot better. If you don’t help us out, well… it certainly could go much worse.” Smith paused. “Now that’s not what I want, so let’s play ball, okay?”

“Do you really think my father will pay you?” Carrie asked in disbelief. “He’ll hunt you down with everything he’s got.”

“Oh, I expect he will,” Smith replied calmly, unconcerned. “But in the end, your father will pay us.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re his little girl. That’s all the motivation he’ll need.”

“It’s like Groundhog Day,” Mac quipped.

The scene was eerily similar to the one from the day before in River Falls. The burned-out van had been found behind a vacant building on Lake Street. The entire area was essentially deserted, the alley lined with abandoned houses and the storefronts empty, except for a small printing company a block to the west. Signs on the front of the vacant and now burned-out building announced a future home for street level retail, with condominiums overtop. It was all part of Minneapolis’s efforts to rehab the Lake Street area.

For the past twenty or thirty years the area had been one of crime and drug dealing, with seedy bars interspersed between hit-and-miss storefront businesses. In the 1950s and 1960s, it had been a thriving business area surrounded by large Victorian and Tudor homes. Minneapolis was in the process of revitalizing the Lake Street strip, rehabilitating historical buildings and sweeping away dilapidated ones. Soon, those efforts would overtake the vacant and crumbling building Mac and Lich were now standing behind.

As on the day before, the van had been parked and then incinerated after the kidnappers left the scene. However, in an area with an already high crime rate, the van was immediately recognized as a crime scene. The Minneapolis cops established a wide perimeter. The FBI and Minneapolis and St. Paul crime techs were working the scene, walking around carefully, photographing, marking, bagging, and collecting anything they could. Another helicopter was flying overhead.

Mac and Lich walked up to the scene and found a diminutive Minneapolis uniform cop that Mac knew named Norman.

“Hey Mac,” Norman said.

“Norms, what do you know?”

“Not much really,” the Minneapolis cop replied. He pointed toward Lake Street. “Old guy was walking along Lake Street and saw the smoke rising behind this building. He came around back and saw the burning van, walked a block or two to the gas station and called it in.”

“Anyone see anything?”

Norman shook his head.

“Not that we’ve found. Everything on this side of the street is abandoned, awaiting demolition. In fact, the wrecking ball hits this building after the Fourth of July holiday. And of course, some of the normal clientele of this neighborhood are a bit averse to talking to us police.”

“Drug trade?” Mac asked.

Norman nodded.

“So you’ve checked all these houses behind us?”

“Yes. But as you can see, they’re empty. If anyone was hanging inside them, they skedaddled before we got here.”

“Looks like a second set of tire tracks,” Lich said, pointing to the left of the van.

“Agreed,” Mac said. “Truck or van of some kind, based on the width of the tracks. We’ll get molds of the tire tracks, see what that tells us.”

“Let’s get one of the pros on it then,” Norman said as he waved over one of the crime scene techs.

“Probably a van,” Mac said, “if it’s our assholes.”

“We’ve got some footprints as well,” Lich noted, bending over carefully and pointing with his pen.

“Two that I see,” Norman added. “Similar size, big feet – I bet size twelve or thirteen.”

“That makes some sense,” Mac answered, now standing and looking around. “Witnesses have given us the general description of a big man.”

“Great,” Lich said, unimpressed. “We have van tracks leaving the scene. Two sets of footprints for bigger dudes. Only if we’re extremely lucky do we get any forensics off the van. And, we appear to have no witnesses who saw anything at all. We’ve got nothing.”

Mac simply nodded as his cell phone went off.

“It’s Peters,” he said to Lich as he looked at the display and then answered. “Hey Cap… Huh?… You want us to do what?”

9 “ You’re a pugnacious shit aren’t you?”