Deadly Stillwater

Mac and Riley told him about the timeline, the call from Hall and the vans’ sudden departure. It was thin, they all knew that, but it seemed right. Peters sighed.

“So we can’t trust anyone?”

“Beyond the people in this room and a few others, Paddy or Double Frank at least, no,” Riles said.

“We need to do this ourselves,” Mac added.

“That won’t make the mayor happy,” Rock warned.

“Screw the mayor,” Mac said. “Besides, he is one of the people we can’t trust.”

“And Burton?” Rock asked.

“He’s a good man, from what we’ve seen. If we start getting somewhere we can bring him in. But for now, we need to keep this close.”

“So what do you propose we do?” Peters asked.

“We need to set up shop over at Lyman’s offices and away from everyone else. We need to be able to hook into that database we’ve been building at the Department of Public Safety, and we’re going to need someone technical to make that all happen.”

“Hisle have anyone like that” Lich asked.

“I doubt it,” Sally answered. “Law office the size of Lyman’s will have someone who runs their document management systems, but I doubt it’s someone who has higher-end computer skills. And it sounds like you need something slightly illegal here.”

“How about your buddy Jupiter?” Peters asked.

“I’ve already got him doing something else,” Mac answered. He explained what Jupiter was looking for in the video.

“How about someone from the department?” Rock said.

“There’s one person who is pretty good,” Mac said. “That IT guy, Scheifelbein. I think we can trust him. But we’re going to need him to tap into that database and cover our tracks on that end, so he needs to stay put. We need to get someone from the outside.”

“Then who the fuck do we get?” Rock asked harshly. “You don’t just pick up someone like that off the street.” He looked at his watch, “At eleven twenty-four at night I might add.”

Mac smiled. He loved it when his mind got going. He could be a devious mother fucker when he did. “How about a convict?”

Riles snorted, shook his head, and smiled. “Hagen? You want to get Hagen don’t you?”

Mac simply nodded.

23 “ Where the hell are you going?”

11:35 PM

The money was pretty much set to go and Burton breathed a sigh of relief that the safe house had come up dry. By this time tomorrow it would all be over.

He looked outside for the media, some of whom were still hanging around. Those who were left hovered near the main entrance to the Department of Public Safety building. Burton slipped out the side and found his rental, a silver Ford Taurus, one of the world’s most popular fleet cars. He threw his leather briefcase and black suit coat into the backseat, dropped his lukewarm Diet Pepsi into the cup holder, and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He slowly drove around the edge of the parking lot, avoiding attention, especially from the media. At the parking lot exit, he pulled out and steered his way over to Interstate 35E. With downtown St. Paul and his room at the Crowne Plaza to his immediate left, he instead turned right and took the entrance ramp north on the interstate. Traffic was light at this hour, and he easily settled into the flow, staying in the right lane and hovering around the sixty-mile-per-hour speed limit as he traveled north out of St. Paul.

He loosened his tie and tuned the radio to the talk station. Word was out about the ransom, and speculation ran rampant. Oddly, there was nothing about the safe house on the news. Of course, the crime scene people struck out, finding nothing. The lease information for the house was a dead end. Now he had St. Paul’s best cops, the chief’s Boys no less sitting on a house their targets never intended to return to.

Perfect.

Burton wasn’t doing hits for the money. His payoff on this wasn’t much. He would get $200,000 from Smith in six months, just after his planned retirement from the bureau. No, he was paying a debt.

Seventeen years ago, when Smith was pinched by Charlie Flanagan, Burton was his partner, making sure the local FBI office in Minneapolis wasn’t paying attention while Smith underreported his drug seizures. They split the money off of Smith’s drug sales fifty-fifty. While Smith retires his gambling debts, Burton put the money away, thousands of miles away, down in the Caymans and over in Zurich, letting it quietly mature over time. That money, smartly invested and reinvested, was now over two million dollars, a nice little nest egg nobody knew about, not even his ex-wife. The $200,000 from Smith would simply be walking-around cash.