Roger Stelljes - The St. Paul Conspiracy

“So now, Detective, can I make you a copy of the documents?”

They were at a dead end, and Mac knew it. To save face he’d take a copy of the documents. Problem was they wouldn’t tell him anything, and he knew it, knew Lindsay would never give him anything of value that easy. He knew the documents were fake, a white wash meant to paint the story Lindsay wanted told. There would be no smoking gun in there. “Sure, we’d like a copy to look at.”

“Is there anything else, Detective?” Lindsay asked.

“Not right now. We might be back.” Mac replied.

“I think not,” the lawyer, Zimmer, replied.

“I don’t think that’s for you to say, Counselor,” Riles replied harshly.

“It will be my decision as to whether my client submits to this witch hunt again, Detective,” Zimmer replied acidly, getting on his high horse, pointing at Mac. “This is bullshit, and you know it. You haven’t put one piece of hard evidence on the table.” Zimmer waved his arms wildly. “You have these wild suspicions and have accused Mr. Lindsay, or someone who works for him of murder. Yet you have not one, not one , solid piece of evidence. It’s beyond belief that you’re here with this, accusing this company, and its president, a pillar in this community, of this. I tell you what, if the media got a hold of this, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. I’d advise my client to pull all of their business out of this city, just to start.”

“Your client has had weeks to cover his tracks,” Mac replied. “We’re only getting started.”

“You keep going with this garbage,” Zimmer said, hot, standing, fists on the table, “and I’ll take whatever action I deem necessary to defend my client.”

“What would that be, Counselor? Don’t we have enough dead bodies at this point!” Mac said, immediately wishing he could take it back.

“Detective!” Zimmer yelled and then pointed at Flanagan. “Chief, you may want to reconsider this detective’s position with your department.”

“Relax, Counselor,” the chief replied, standing up, putting his hands up. “Everyone just calm down. I think it would be a good idea at this point, if Mr. Lindsay and I had a little discussion in private.”

“Sir?”

“Mac, you, Pat and Peters wait outside with the mayor,” the chief replied, in a tone that suggested he had seen enough.

“Yes, sir,” Riley replied, lightly grabbing Mac by the arm. Mac didn’t say anything, trying to conceal his disappointment and probably doing a poor job of it. Along with Captain Peters, they went back through the double doors and out into the lobby area. Mac and Riles left Peters to the mayor and went into a small copy room.

“Fucking Zimmer. What a piece of shit,” Mac mumbled under his breath.

“Piece of shit got under your skin,” Riley replied.

Mac just nodded and exhaled. He rarely lost his cool. It generally only happened when he lost at something, and he felt like he just lost.

“We’re done, buddy,” Riley said.

“We didn’t get much in there, that’s true, but there’s something going on here, Pat.”

“I agree. But at this point, the chief is thinking we can’t get them.”

“We don’t know that.”

Riley snorted. “Shit. What do we have? Nothin’ solid. They have an alibi, an answer for everything, and you and I both know it.” Pat slowly shook his head. “One hundred dollars says that, when the chief comes out, he’s going to tell us to go to the Pub, have a beer and come back tomorrow, ready to get back into the rotation because we are done with this.”

Mac didn’t have a response. Instead he grabbed a rubber band off the counter, started twisting it with his hands and walked around the small copy room, looking at the postage machine, the ten different three-ring binders with various office procedures, and then meandered over to the copier. It was new and rather large, with a flat screen touch-pad control panel. On the wall behind it were various procedures for copying, requiring you enter an employee code and project number. There were further instructions for printing from a desktop computer, how to set up large print projects or scanning documents into the system and sending them to your own computer. On the bottom of the instructions, it said, “Think Paperless.” PTA must have been making a corporate move to a paperless office.

Mac heard a door open behind him, out in the lobby area. He heard the chief ask for them. “Let’s go,” was all the chief had to say when he stuck his head in the copy room.

“What are we doing?” Riley asked as they climbed into the elevator. The mayor was staying behind.

The chief waited for the doors to close. “We can talk about it downstairs.” They rode down the rest of the way in silence. Once in the parking garage, Flanagan said to Captain Peters, “You take the van back, the boys and I here are going to take a little walk.”

They walked out of the garage and onto the street and back towards the Public Safety Building. “I wanted to wait until we were away from the building. Who knows-they might be listening,” the chief said. “You boys are done, you know that, right?”

Riley sighed. “Yes, sir.”

“Mac?” the chief asked.

“Sir, if we kept looking…” Mac started.

The chief put up his hand and then after a few seconds, “Your dad said something to me once.”

“What’s that?”

“We only catch ’em when they make mistakes. These guys,” the chief said, looking back at the PTA building and lightly shaking his head, “They haven’t made any mistakes. Sometimes, people simply get away with it.”

“So, you think they did it?”

“They’re up to something. What? I’m not sure.”

“They sure were smooth,” Riley said.

“Too smooth,” the chief replied. “I don’t know. They seemed to know what was coming.”

“So, what did you talk about with Lindsay?” Riley asked, shifting gears.

“We stop investigating, and they say nothing of the little conversation we just had. That was the deal.”

Made sense, Mac thought. The department had had a rough go with Knapp. The tumult surrounding that had died down now. If word got out that internally the department questioned the deaths of Claire Daniels, Jamie Jones, and possibly the senator, the department would take another hit. The chief didn’t want that to happen.

“So what’s the mayor doing?” Mac asked.

“Once Lindsay and I struck our little agreement, he wanted some time with the mayor to talk about issues of interest between PTA and the city.”

“Meaning, PTA’s willingness to stay in St. Paul?”

“Yup.”

They quietly walked for a block. Mac finally broke the silence, “If they don’t make mistakes, how do we catch them?”

“I asked your dad that once,” the chief answered. “He said, we build a time machine and go back and catch them in the act.”

One Week Later.

Alt went in the back door, dropped the keys on the counter and scratched his head, late on Thursday night. He was beat, tired and very much wanted — but knew he couldn’t have-a vacation. He thought that when they had taken care of McRyan the week before, everything would die down some and Lindsay would stop worrying about Cross.

Instead, Lindsay had pushed for them to make renewed efforts to find the missing documents. They had to be somewhere. He was relentless. “I want no loose ends. I didn’t tolerate them when I was at the agency, and I’m not about to start now,” he said. “Go back and retrace your steps. You missed Landy Stephens’s name on Jamie Jones’s refrigerator, so you probably missed something else. So go back. I want those documents found. You have complete freedom to do what you need to, spend what you need to spend, but find those documents.”