Roger Stelljes - The St. Paul Conspiracy

Then he came from the left, a black streak. He was dressed in all black a ski mask over his head. He jumped on the bed and was on top of her in an instant, strangling her.

“Oh, my God,” Sally croaked, putting her hands to her own throat.

Daniels flailed away at the killer, hitting him in the face, the arms, kicking with her legs, but he was too strong, never releasing the grip. After a minute, the flailing slowed down, less strong, the life slowly leaking out of her body. Finally, the arms slowly fell down to the bed, and Daniels was gone. The man in black checked her pulse, nothing.

“Who are you?” Mac uttered in a hushed voice, putting his face close to the screen.

The man in black got off her and stood on the far side of the bed and rubbed his jaw through the mask. Then he took off his gloves and pulled the mask from over his head.

“I fuckin’ knew it!” Mac yelled.

“You know who that is?” Sally asked.

“Yeah. Webb Alt.”

“Who’s he?”

“Vice-president of Security at PT fuckin’ A. I knew it. I knew it!” Mac yelled, a wave of satisfaction rushing over him.

He pulled his cellphone out and started dialing, and looked over to Paddy, “You guys get all this down. You’re key witnesses now.” They both nodded, furiously scribbling into their notebooks. The chief’s secretary answered, “This is McRyan. I need to speak to the chief.”

“Mac, he’s in a meeting, I can take a message.”

“Charlene, put me through on this. When I tell him what I have, he won’t care.”

He waited and then a minute later Flanagan got on the line, agitated, “Mac, what the hell.”

“Chief, we got ’em.”

Alt took the elevator up to the top. At least they knew who had had the documents, Daniels. Taking her out had been the right thing. However, the question was: what did she do with them? They’d been through her place a number of times and hadn’t found anything. They would be going back again.

He got off the elevator and walked right in and told Lindsay what they had found.

“How did we miss it at the station?” was his first question.

“The log book was in a locked cabinet, sir. Last night it was lying out, and they were able to get a look at it. In fairness to those guys, I ordered them to spend their time looking around her work area and where the station stored documents and not the receptionist area. It wasn’t until this week that we started looking at delivery companies. That triggered them to take a closer look up front, where a delivery of this nature would come.” He didn’t have a better answer than that.

“So, what are we doing now?”

“I’m sending Hansen and Hennessey over to Daniels’ place now. I’d prefer to wait until it’s dark to send them back in. There is a lot of traffic in the area. They’ll sit tight until I give them the go ahead.”

“What about moving up our possession of the condo?”

“Already working on it. I’ve told the real estate guy to do whatever needs to be done.”

“If nothing else, have him get us in there today for another look around.”

“Absolutely.”

“Where else could she have put those documents?” Lindsay asked. He knew they had looked high and low for them.

“I don’t know. There’s some place out there we’re not aware of. However, we know now that it was Daniels who has them. So, now we focus on her completely.”

“What about the delivery source?”

“We’ll take care of him later.”

Mac followed Paddy in the squad in front, with another behind them, lights flashing, as they headed downtown. The box and DVD player were in the back seat.

As Mac drove, Sally was looking through the ledger book from the box. “Mac, these guys were up to something with this Cross place.”

“What are you seeing?”

“Huge money going to a lot of people. Stephens, the guy from the video Alt, someone named Bouchard, a Hennessey, Hansen, Kraft, Thompson, Skogman, probably about twenty in all. The biggest money goes to someone who’s only marking is an X.”

“What kind of money?”

“Millions, Mac. Millions.”

“Whatever they were doing, Stephens was keeping the records. He was the money man after all. Stephens dies in the accident. The records are up at the cabin. He dies, Ms. Stephens finds the box and gives it to Jones. She looks through it and realizes what’s been going on. She does two things. She likely confronts Lindsay with it, and she also talks to Daniels. PTA figures this out and takes them both out.”

“Why take out the senator?” Sally asked.

“Because if he walks, we might look elsewhere. If it looks like he commits suicide, nobody ever bothers looking. And I’m thinking they took out Knapp too.”

“Why would they do that Mac?”

“He wouldn’t confess to killing Jones, because he didn’t. Again, if he’s dead, everyone assumes he killed Jones, and nobody goes looking.”

“And even if anyone does, you could never charge them. No hope of a conviction because they had all kinds of reasonable doubt.”

“‘ Had ,’ counselor. They don’t now.”

“Let me use your cell. I have to call Helen. She’s going to love this.”

“More headlines for her.”

Sally made the call and informed Helen to just get over to the chief’s office, and she’d tell her more there. She handed the phone back to Mac.

“Boy, we sure ended up taking a circuitous route to find this stuff didn’t we?” Mac said, a Cheshire cat smile on his face. “We go looking for documents scanned onto a CD, and we come away with the actual documents and the video to boot.”

“Unbelievable. Amazing. I mean, I don’t know what else to say,” Sally replied, a huge smile on her face. Mac was definitely out of the doghouse.

“What’s amazing to me is to find the video,” Mac said, as they came over Cathedral Hill and drove towards downtown. “I wasn’t counting on that.”

“I agree,” Sally said. “Women usually don’t do that sort of thing.”

“That’s true,” Mac replied. “But I could have seen it.”

“How? How could you have possibly seen that?”

“She had tapes and DVDs of all of her work, workouts, golf swing, all this different stuff. She was a perfectionist at everything. It’s not that much of a leap that she wanted to be a perfectionist when it came to sex. I could have seen that. I could have looked for that. She had all these racy videos with some of the hottest sex scenes. She made a sex tape with a boyfriend in college. I could have connected it. I should have connected it, but I didn’t.”

“Geez. Don’t beat yourself up over that,” Sally said, still shaking her head in amazement. “That would be a big, intuitive leap.”

“I remember Joe Elliott, at Channel 6,” Mac said, recalling the conversation now. “He’d hooked up with Daniels when she first got to town. He said at the time that she was amazing in the rack. I think he said it was as if she was ‘perfect’ at sex. Now we know why.”

“To have it taping that night…”

“Yeah, lucky for us on that one. The chief said we only catch them when they make mistakes. They finally made one.”

Hansen and Hennessey pulled into the Mardi Gras parking lot and saw the commotion.

“This can’t be good,” Hennessey said.

“How many squads you think?”

“Four or five, plus a few Crown Vics.”

A crowd had started to develop, and crime scene tape and been put out to keep them back. They got out of the van and walked over to the crowd. It was clear the police were inside Daniels’ place.

“Tell me if you see McRyan anywhere,” Hansen asked.