FIRST CASE - Novella (McRyan Mystery Series Prequel) (7 page)

Mac crossed Snelling Avenue at 6:15 a.m. heading west, now in the last stretch of his run. The traffic was starting to pick up some now on Summit Avenue, the morning rush not far off. He made a last mental checklist of what he’d thought about as he kicked it down for his house, finishing the last mile of his eight-mile run at 6:27. He stopped a block short of his house and walked the rest of the way for a cool down, sending himself another e-mail of his thoughts on the case while he did so. They would be in his inbox when he got to work in an hour.

Mac walked up the driveway to the side portico entrance of the house and into the kitchen. He grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator as Meredith walked into the kitchen in a dark olive dress suit and off white blouse and three-inch heels. She looked good. She always looked good.

Mac started a pot of coffee and said, “I was thinking we haven’t had a dinner together in a while.”

“No we haven’t,” Meredith replied looking at her watch and waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. “I can’t tonight, I’ll be working late. This Clanex merger is proving to be a killer.”

“I suspect I will be working late tonight as well,” Mac answered. “I picked up the Gordon Oliver murder.”

“I heard about that yesterday,” she answered. “Word is he was probably killed by some jealous husband. I hear he was quite the ladies’ man.”

“Yeah, women should be careful about men like that,” Mac replied, curious if Meredith caught the meaning. “Anyway, how about tomorrow night? I can try to be home by seven. I could pick up some Chinese,” which was her favorite. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about. It’s kind of important.”

“I think I can make it,” Meredith answered as she poured coffee in her travel mug.

* * * * *

At the station, Mac and Lich discussed the case over coffee and came to the conclusion they needed to go back to KBMP and interview everyone again. Mac brought in two additional veteran detectives, Frank ‘Double Frank’ Franklin and Rick Beckett, as there were upwards of eighty people to go back through. It was a long morning and early afternoon. Mac and Lich re-interviewed everyone from the day before while Franklin and Becket interviewed others in the office that had less exposure to Oliver.

A little after three p.m. they reconvened in a small law firm conference room to review notes. Stan Busch gave Mac and Lich a list of cases that Oliver had worked on for him the past six months. Michael Harris worked on most of the cases with Oliver but recalled nothing about the cases that were a problem.

“Gordon could be extremely combative in depositions, at times overly so,” Harris said. “I’ve seen him piss off opposing counsel and deponents more than once. But that’s standard and most of the people we had Gordon depose were usually lesser players in the cases. I tended to handle the bigger fish so I’m hard pressed to think of anyone in a case that would want to kill Gordon. I can’t think of one case where that was an issue.”

“How about clients?” Mac asked. “Was there ever a client that Oliver had issues with?”

“Not one that I can think of,” Harris answered. “Like I said the other day, Gordon was really attentive to our clients and our clients are pretty happy. Stan reels them in and I do the litigation work with Gordon’s help, at least until yesterday. Gordon was a pain at times, detective, but like I said yesterday, I’ll miss the guy. As a young associate, he was money.”

Further interviews with the rest of the firm’s lawyers revealed that in the last six months most of Oliver’s work was with Stan Busch. There was some real estate litigation that Oliver worked on for Marie Preston and one case for another partner, Jackson Lund. No problems were noted with those cases yet more names were collected to potentially interview.

Franklin and Beckett interviewed the firm’s staff and their results reaffirmed one immutable truth of the work place, the staff always knows more about what’s going on in the office than the bosses. Turns out that Gordon Oliver had slept with not three, not four, not even five, but six different women in the firm, including one partner. Beckett and Franklin interviewed the law firm’s IT manager who said that Gordon told him one time that he had his own little Yahtzee card. It required sleeping with a receptionist, secretary, paralegal, associate and a partner. The staff knew that he’d completed the card by recently bedding a forty-three-year-old partner named Constance Bernier on the leather couch in her office.

“She said ‘he got me at just the right time,’” Double Frank said.

“This dude was good,” Beckett added.

“He’d fuck a goat if you held it for him,” Mac replied disgustedly.

“You saying he had it coming, Mac?” Franklin asked.

“No. I’m merely stating the fact that he was a douche bag when it came to women.”

“It’s probably what got him killed though,” Dick added. “We just have to find the person he pissed off the most and we have our killer.”

“How about the other women he slept with?” Mac asked. “Do any of them look good for it? Have boyfriends or husbands who look good for it?”

Franklin and Beckett shook their heads. “Two of the women now have boyfriends although they didn’t while they were serving as a love receptacle for Gordo,” Beckett said. “They both claim they were home with their new boyfriends last night. We’ll follow up but I’d bet my pension they alibi out.”

“What about Bernier?” Mac asked.

“She flew in from Atlanta this morning. She was there for the last four days.”

“We could look at her financials and see if she hired someone to do it?” Lich speculated.

“We can and should but does this really look like a hit to any of you guys?” Mac answered, shaking his head. “If it were a hit, there would be a bullet in his head or a hitter would have known enough to make it look like a robbery gone bad. He would have taken Oliver’s wallet and watch. This looks like neither.”

“So what is this then?” Beckett asked.

“This is someone angry at Oliver who made a mistake, didn’t mean to kill him or made a split-second decision to kill him for some reason. This person didn’t really know what they were doing, panicked and quickly hid the body and ran.” This train of thought gave Mac an idea. “Maybe there’s a surveillance or security camera that caught our guy nearby?”

Lich was skeptical. “Mac, none of the buildings in the alley had any cameras, at least not ones on the alley.”

“I know that,” Mac answered, thinking broader. “I’m thinking in the vicinity, within the three or four block area. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see someone walking, running or driving away from the area that is tied to Oliver, The Mahogany and the law firm.” Mac thought for another minute and looked at Beckett. He was good with video and computers. “Rick, you and Franklin hit the establishments around The Mahogany and get any video running in the time window of the murder. Maybe we’ll get a hit off of that.”

“What are
you
guys going to do?” Beckett asked, a tinge of bitterness in his voice, knowing how boring surfing hours of video could be.

Mac looked at his watch which said 3:44 p.m. “We’re going to go back to the station for a few hours. I want to go over everything we have and then Dick and I are going over and re-canvassing The Mahogany when it starts getting busy. I want to hit it when most of the staff and regulars are around.”

L
ich said he needed a break before they went over to The Mahogany. Mac was okay with that. It gave him some time alone with the case to work through the evidence. One thing Mac learned from watching his father over the years was that at some point in a case you needed to sit down and take a look at everything and see if a pattern, string or trail developed.

In law school, a professor happened along Mac studying in the law library. He saw Mac had written ‘jurisdiction’ and drawn a box around it on his legal pad. He had a line to the left that read ‘personal jurisdiction’ and a line to the right that read ‘subject matter jurisdiction,’ the two components necessary for a court to have jurisdiction over a particular case. Then notes were jotted around each of the words. The professor smiled and said, “Mr. McRyan, you are mind-mapping.”

A mind-map is essentially a diagram that uses words, ideas, tasks or other items arranged around a central key word or idea. Mac saw his father do it when he was a kid. Mac picked it up and used it in college and then law school. He never knew it was called mind-mapping but that’s what Professor Becker was telling him and Mac apparently had a good understanding of jurisdiction. He aced the Civil Procedure final.

While Lich took his leave for a few hours, Mac jotted ‘Gordon Oliver’ in the middle of the page, drew a rectangle around it and started jotting down notes in bullet point format:

• Associate at KBMP for 4yrs.

• A very good young litigator according to several attorneys including Preston, Busch, Bernier, Anthony, Lund and Harris.

• Worked killer hours, strictly litigation, going to trial next week.

• No problems professionally at work.

• Mr. “All the tools in your toolbox.” His signature catch-phrase for work and pleasure.

• Womanizer. Slept with at least six women at law firm, probably more. 1. Burrows alibi’d out. 2. Mathis home with boyfriend. 3. Bernier in Atlanta. Other women are not good suspects, no apparent motive (might need to evaluate further?).

• The Mahogany is favorite bar. Confrontation at bar but it was with Burrows, who alibi’d out.

• No other apparent social life beyond law firm and bar.

Mac drew another line away from Gordon Oliver and jotted down ‘Crime Scene’ and drew a box around it:

• Alley at The Mahogany.

• Time of Death - Midnight - 2:00 a.m.

• Blunt force trauma to temple was the fatal blow.

• Not a robbery. Still had wallet, watch and cell phone. New Ford F-150 left behind. If robbery all would have been taken and body left behind.

• Body stuffed into truck bed. Why? To hide it. Why hide it?

• Hit from behind by someone who was tall, at least 6’2" based on wound angle. Weapon unknown.

• Brass plate with blood. Unsure if from murder weapon. Forensics still evaluating.

• Why use the alley? If not robbery, then he was killed by someone who knew him. Alley was a good location but killer
had
to know that he would be there. Only someone who knew him well would know he would be there. The killer knew him - really knew him.

Mac circled that notation on the legal pad. The killer knew him—
really knew him
. So how many people
really
knew him?

Mac leaned back in his desk chair and twirled his pen in his fingers. Now that was something to think about. Only someone who knew him or talked to him all the time would know he was at the bar that night and at that time. Someone could have followed him or they knew he was there and then could lay in wait.

Mac opened the folder on his desk that contained Oliver’s cell phone records. He’d asked that the records identify the number and identity on the other end of the call. A cell phone was essentially one of Oliver’s appendages according to the attorneys at his firm. The records reflected that. On the day he was murdered, he had thirty-three cell phone calls. Mac shook his head. A record day for him might be ten calls and this guy had thirty-three. The day he was killed was not an outlier. As best Mac could tell, he averaged somewhere around twenty-five calls a day.

As for the day he was killed, the calls appeared to be from a collection of clients and from the firm. A number of calls were identified as being from the clients he was going to trial with next week on the RFX Industries shareholder suit. Opposing counsel in the case must have been from French and Burke as there were three calls from that firm. Gordon had calls from Stan Busch, Michael Harris, Constance Bernier as well as two from his secretary and one from a paralegal. The firm calls were mostly between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. and as Mac looked back on his notes, Oliver took a long lunch that day with some other attorneys from the firm. Towards the end of the day, there was one call from Stan Busch at 6:30 p.m. and another from Michael Harris at 8:22 p.m. Mac made a note to follow-up on those phone calls to see what Harris and Busch discussed.

He had to have been killed by someone who knew him, but why? Could be the womanizing but Mac was starting to think that was not the cause. Martin Burrows was their one good suspect on that angle and he was out. The others just didn’t feel right nor did the evidence really point in their direction. Nobody else seemed bitter enough to want to do anything to Oliver.