A Deadly Development (15 page)

“What all did he get charged with?”

“Are you kidding me? All charges were
dropped. Once he stopped crying, he called the old man, who just
happened
to be good golfing buddies with the Jackson County
prosecutor. That little shitbird probably got home before I did
that night.”

Burke thought it was too good to be true. Too
easy to make the connection.

“But that was forty years ago,” he offered.
“He can’t still be acting that way.”

“How’d your victim die?”

“Hit over the head repeatedly with what we
believe to be a small bookend.”

“Sounds like Pete Knaak’s M.O. to me,” the
old man said while smiling. “God how awesome would it be if my son
got to arrest that little rich prick for murder. Now
that
would make my year.”

Tom Sr. took the last half of the donut and
shoved it in his mouth. He waited until he was done chewing before
he started talking.

“You got any tie-ins to him and your
victim?”

“Vithous and Knaak? Only that they were both
close advisors to the Mayor. And, looks like Vithous was running a
pay for play scheme up there, looking for either cash or property
or both.”

“Any recent dealings between them on any
property?”

“Yep. Turns out the new development down on
the river is owned by Knaak, a development that just recently sold
a small portion of property to a company that Vithous’ girlfriend
owns. For the enormous sum of one dollar.”

Burke Sr. made a low whistling sound.

“Sounds like to me Pete Knaak had a hell of a
motive to kill your man.”

“Maybe. But I don’t have any proof. Not yet,
anyway.” Burke stood up. He needed to go.

He had a breakfast meeting with Bobby, and
needed to digest all that he had just learned.

“You’ll get there,” Tom Sr. said, walking
into the living room. He shut off the TV that no one was watching
and opened the door for his son.

“Learned from the best,” Tom said. He usually
wasn’t that generous with his father. He had been mad at him for a
long time, and the old man still could get him going when he wanted
to. But, he had appreciated the help. And, it was true. His dad
was
a good cop.

“Tommy,” the old man shouted at him, as he
walked to his car, parked on the curb, “remember one thing. People
don’t change. They get older, maybe a little wiser with time, but
they don’t ever change.”

Tom nodded, and got into his car. Did Pete
Knaak kill John Vithous? He didn’t know for sure, but at least he
now knew Knaak had a violent temper.

“You’re late,” Bobby said, pointing to his
watch on his left wrist.

“Sorry,” Tom said as he slid into the booth
spot across from his cousin, “I got caught up at Dad’s.”

“How’s the old man?”

“Good,” Tom said, “really good, actually. The
old man somehow always manages to land on his feet.”

Bobby brought the docket. They met at greasy
spoon breakfast restaurant they liked in Westport. Sitting in a
wide booth with bright red vinyl seats and a Formica table and
started to go over the projects. Bobby had marked all the economic
development projects with a yellow highlighter to make it easier
for Tom to follow along.

“You’ve got only three candidates,” Bobby
stated while scanning the forms, “one up by the airport, one on the
Plaza, and one on the riverfront.”

“Who represents them?”

“The Plaza project is Romanelli Engels, the
one up by the airport is Hanna Gorman Coker, and the riverfront is
Snyder Knaak.” Sullivan took a large gulp of coffee.

“As in Peter Knaak?” Bobby asked. “Viceroy,
right?”

“Yup,” Bobby replied. “You know he owns the
property too, right?”

“I had heard that.” Burke scratched his head,
thinking. Could it really be falling into place this easily? After
all the false starts and dead ends, he wasn’t going to jump to a
conclusion just yet.

“My guess is that all of them hired Vithous
as a ‘consultant’ for these projects.” Bobby was inhaling his
coffee. The mug was the size of a soup bowl, but he was making fast
work of it. “In fact,” Bobby said while pulling out a sheet of
paper, “I went to his consulting website. He listed all his
clients. All those firms are on there. Even mine.”

“Ok,” Burke said, “Vithous liked to double
dip on things. Had been doing so for years. What would be different
about these projects? To me, it looks like it is just business as
usual.” Burke gazed out the window. An old lady was running after
the metro bus, trying to flag it down, to no avail. He had felt
like that lady for the past five days.

“I thought about that, so I asked around
some,” Bobby replied, “all of it off the record, of course.”

“And?” Tom was impatient. He wanted to be
done with John Vithous and City Hall.

“Apparently, sometimes John would come back
at the last second and say that there was some unforeseen problem
that was going to hold up the project. This would happen the week
the ordinance approving the project was up for a final Council
vote. He would claim that some extra work would need to be done to
ensure it would be approved.”

“So, the bastard would hit them up for a
little extra cash right at the end?” Burke said while taking a
large bite out of his bagel. Despite his best efforts, a large glob
of jam dripped off the bagel and into his lap. He cursed briefly
and started frantically trying to clean it up with napkin. He
didn’t want to have to pay for dry cleaning.

“I’m thinking he mixed and matched –
sometimes he took cash, sometimes he took a bit a property, and
apparently sometimes he took both.” Sullivan paused. He wanted to
see his cousin’s reaction to that one.

“He’s was a greedy little S.O.B., that’s for
sure,” Burke moved forward in his seat, he was antsy and irritated
by it all. He wanted to get a giant fire hose and hose down the
entire building.

“I’m surprised you didn’t catch onto this
earlier,” Bobby replied. “He was pretty brazen about it once he got
himself up in the Mayor’s office.”

“The brutality of the crime scene threw me
off,” Burke admitted. “It seemed much more like a crime of passion
than someone upset about getting screwed financially.”

Tom was drumming his fingers across the
table. He was thinking.
Lots of conjecture; not a lot of
facts
. But, Bobby was about to brighten his mood
considerably.

“This is when being my cousin really pays off
for you,” Sullivan said. He pulled out a one page printout that he
had folded neatly in his pocket

“This was supposed to be yesterday’s docket,”
he said pointing to the date on the top of the page along with the
words ‘Finance and Audit Committee’, “If you look down at the list
of ordinances, there is this - 012045, approving the purchase of
200 acres of land from the City of Kansas City to Viceroy
Development, LLC.”

“Holy shit,” Burke said, “but the project had
already started.”

“Phase
one
had already started Tom,
this is phase
two
. Phase two was going to be much more
lucrative. It is for a bunch of high rise office buildings. We are
talking big bucks.” Sullivan stopped to let his cousin drink it all
in.

Burke was thinking back to the day in the
coffee shop, with Bethany Edwards. He was trying to remember how
much of the map had the yellow property lines around it. If he was
remembering right, there had been a large tract of land to the east
of Viceroy, that wasn’t anything but an empty field.

“What do you mean that it was
supposed
to be on the docket?” Burke could feel the caffeine beginning to
take effect. He felt jittery and jumpy, although that might have
been more about what he was hearing than what he was drinking.

“My secretary prints out the weekly docket
every Monday morning,” Bobby replied. “I like to look at it to see
what is going on in each committee. It lets me know what my
competition is up to.”

“When I first started pulling things for
you,” Bobby went on, “I printed out the docket for each of the
committees that met yesterday. Almost all the committees meet on
Wednesday over there. While looking at the Finance and Audit
committee, I noticed the Viceroy ordinance wasn’t there.”

Burke stared at Bobby. He was hanging on
every word.

“They pulled it?” Burke asked.

“Yes,” Bobby agreed, “sometime between Friday
afternoon when they first put together the docket for the upcoming
week and Wednesday when the committee actually meets, someone had
asked that the ordinance be pulled off the docket.”

A huge grin now appeared Bobby’s face.

“Now you are
really
going to owe me,”
he went on, “because I called a contact I have in the City Clerk’s
office and found out who requested that hold. You ready for this?
John Vithous.”

Burke about leapt out of his seat and hugged
his cousin, but he wanted to hear more first.

“Vithous was smart, too. He didn’t call or
email his request. He walked into the Clerk’s office and asked for
the hold personally.” Bobby was smiling, greatly pleased with
himself. “I should be the detective in the family.”

“You couldn’t stand the massive pay cut,” Tom
said, his mind moving in a million directions at once, “Did your
friend say what time Vithous made the request?”

“You’re not going to believe it,” Bobby said,
“turns out my friend was actually walking out the door, it was
almost five, and she was the last person in the office. Apparently
a lot of them leave early on Friday.”

“And?” the suspense was killing Tom.

“John Vithous stopped her as she was walking
out, asked her to pull that ordinance then. She told him that she
could make the request, but it would take a day or so to show up in
the system.”

“Meaning that it was still there when your
secretary printed it out Monday morning, but gone before the
committee met. I…”

“Even better,” Bobby interrupted, “turns out
my friend just lied to him. She didn’t want to hassle with making
the change. She just wanted to go home, so after Vithous left, she
just stuck a sticky note with the ordinance number on her computer
screen to remind her when she came in on Monday morning to pull it.
Which would have been no big deal….

“If,” Burke finished his cousin’s thought,
“Vithous hadn’t gotten killed that night. Holy shit.”

“So now what?” Bobby asked.

“I’ve got to track down Peter Knaak,” Burke
said while getting up, “and soon.”

Burke called Thurber on his way down and
filled him in on the latest news. Thurber was excited as he was.
“Fucking A,” Thurber said, “I guess your hunch about that project
actually is going to pay off.”

Thurber had news too. He had stopped by City
Hall first thing in the morning, and gotten the logs of the
elevators from the head of security. No surprises, no one had
pressed a button to go to the 29
^th
floor after 5 pm.
“But,” Thurber added, “Someone had requested an elevator at 5:56
p.m. They rode it down to the basement. Assume they used the door
on the west side to exit the building. Then nothing until 6:28,
which is our cleaning lady.”

“Yep,” Burke said. “Peter Knaak didn’t need
to request an elevator to go up to the 29
^th
floor. He
already was there. He just needed to leave quickly after he was
done.”

They agreed their next order of business was
to find Knaak and interview him. Burke swung by police headquarters
where Thurber was waiting out front for him. They could have walked
to the law firm, but Burke wanted to have the car handy in case
they had to drive somewhere else to find Knaak. The drive to Snyder
Knaak, LLP was five short blocks. Their offices were housed within
a thirty story building in the heart of downtown. Made of black
granite, it had an impressive foyer, with marble floors, thirty
foot ceilings and floor to ceiling glass. Peter Knaak’s law firm
was on the top floor.

“Mr. Knaak isn’t here,” the receptionist said
tersely when they had asked for him; “he is out of the office the
entire day.” From this vantage point, Burke could see the rest of
downtown, the River Market and the river. Somewhere next to the
river were workers, building Viceroy, unaware that their project
had caused Peter Knaak to snap and bash John Vithous’ skull in with
a bookend.

“Is he ‘out of the office’ really, or ‘out of
the office because he doesn’t want to talk to two homicide
detectives’?” Thurber hadn’t even tried to hide his hostility.

“He’s really out of the office,” she said,
“my guess, on a beautiful day like today; he’s out playing golf at
the Kansas City Country Club.”

“You bring your clubs?” Burke asked as they
rode down the elevator back to the car.

“No, I wasn’t really ever the country club
type,” Thurber chuckled as the elevator doors opened.

The drive to the country club took twenty
minutes. They didn’t talk much. They drove with the windows down.
Heading south on Broadway they saw a bunch of City workers, putting
up crowd barriers and port-a-johns along the side of the street.
Burke suddenly realized that tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day.
Consumed by the investigation, it had completely slipped his mind.
Maybe he could get an arrest in time to still see his family
tomorrow. But, he would have to work quickly.

Thurber had printed out a picture of Knaak
from the firm’s website, so they knew who to look for. He had gray
hair parted on the left side, a little long to hide his large ears.
A generous smile on his face; Pete Knaak looked smug.

The golf course was lined with beautiful oak
and maple trees that were just starting to bud. The trees and the
bushes were still gray, but the course itself was a beautiful
emerald green. It wasn’t terribly busy, but there were a few
golfers out. They got the golf pro to give them keys to a golf cart
and started down the cart paths looking in vain for Peter
Knaak.