Deadly Stillwater

“And then,” Mac said, pacing now, his left hand grabbing the back of his neck while he gestured with his right hand, “They bring Carrie back here after they dump the van over in south Minneapolis.”

“Precisely,” Lich said.

Mac laughed.

“What?”

“You said, ‘precisely.’”

“Fuck you,” Lich went back to the task at hand. “Monday night one of the kidnappers drives over to Ellsworth to make the call and then drives back.”

“Then they take the girls and put them underground, but it’s someplace that isn’t that far from here,” Mac said. “So while we’re running around down in Ellsworth and dragging Drew Wiskowski in for questioning, they’re putting together that video.”

“Which they put under the stands at the football field sometime overnight,” Lich added. “After which they come back here.”

“Exactly,” Mac said. “The house gives them a good central staging area, so they can be close to town and operate, yet they’re not too far from wherever the girls are buried.”

“I shouldn’t smile,” Lich said, smiling. “But we’re on it, man. This is something. We just have to lay in wait.”

“ If they come back,” Mac said, doubt creeping onto his face. “This place has been cleaned, is clean,” he said as he climbed the basement steps. “What if they’re not planning on coming back? The ransom call comes tomorrow at six. What if we’ve missed them?”

“Only one way to find out,” Lich said following.

“I know. We’ve got to sit on it,” Mac answered.

21 “ What do you mean ‘ripped out?’”

7:45 PM

The small monkey wrench thrown into the day’s plans was having an unintended but pleasant effect. After exchanging vehicles with Dean in Cambridge, a small town nearly an hour north of the Twin Cities, Smith and Monica had started driving back into town when she spoke.

“There’s a little motel.”

“Looks like they have a vacancy,” Smith added, turning right off of Highway 65 and into the dirt parking lot of the 65-Hi Suites. They had several hours to kill before a midnight meeting. There were ten rooms at the motel and five cars in the parking lot: just enough that they wouldn’t be memorable to the motel clerk, and just few enough that there was minimal risk they would be remembered by a guest.

His first two weeks out of prison, Smith stayed in Chicago and went on a binge, hooking up with a different woman every night. Some nights it was a woman he picked up in some bar. A divorcee, a woman looking for a fling, he wasn’t real particular. If he couldn’t find a woman at a bar, a hooker in a cheap hotel room would do. The quality didn’t really matter. He was working off fifteen years of pent-up sexual frustration, so any woman did it for him.

After Chicago, he moved to the Twin Cities and joined up with Dean, David, and their sister Monica to start the planning. He was immediately attracted to her. Monica was in her mid-forties, but the years were being very kind to her. Twice divorced, Monica was a petite woman with creamy skin, short, jet-black hair in a stylish cut, deep green eyes, a tiny, slightly upturned nose, and full ruby lips. And she was smart as a whip. A CPA, she worked the books for a number of years for area jewelers. That was where, three years ago, she crossed paths with Lyman Hisle. He didn’t know her, but she knew him.

Monica was in a jewelry store on Ford Parkway, balancing the books, when Hisle walked into the store, dressed in a two-thousand-dollar French suit and two-hundred-dollar Italian shoes. He spent ten thousand dollars in fifteen minutes without blinking an eye, money that Hisle had made off of people like her father.

Anger raged within her as Lyman Hisle whipped out his American Express card and spent the money as if it were nothing, as if he were buying groceries or a DVD. From that point forward, she never let the rage go. As far as she was concerned, Lyman Hisle had killed her father. He didn’t pull the trigger, her father did that. But Hisle drove him to do it. For ten years she suppressed the anger, shoving it to the back of her mind. She’d been able to cope with the damage Hisle’s work did to her father, the drinking, the pills, the loss of all the money, and finally the suicide. But seeing Hisle, seeing him spend all that money so cavalierly, brought it all back.