The St. Paul Conspiracy (32 page)

“Why?” Rock asked.

“Politicians, especially ones like Senator Johnson, leave themselves a way out of every situation. Escapability, deniability—it’s in their DNA. They don’t put themselves in a position like the senator did—if he did. Murder? There’s just no escape from that. Even the suggestion of it is a career killer, just ask Gary Condit. Even if Daniels threatened to expose their little affair to his wife or someone else, that’s a manageable situation, happens to politicians all the time. It’s not a situation to kill over, certainly not with all the evidence left behind pointing at him.”

“But if the senator didn’t do it, who did?” Riles asked. “On that case, you had no forced entry and a witness having Johnson leaving around the time of estimated death. I mean that’s pretty solid. What evidence do you have that someone else did this?”

“One thing that never came out was a witness I found about the time of the senator’s hearing. I got a call from a guy named Paul Blomberg.” Mac related the story of the alley pick up behind Daniels’ place the night of her murder.

“This is news to me. Why didn’t it ever came out?” Rock asked.

“We never had to disclose it because the prosecution never went any further. It would have been an issue at trial.”

“So, the senator doesn’t kill Daniels. We prosecuted the wrong man, and he commits suicide over it! Shit, shit, shit!” Lich said, shaking his head, disturbed over the thought. He kicked a chair. “Damn it.”

“If he did commit suicide, Dick,” Sally said. “Maybe he didn’t.”

Lich, skepticism in his voice, “What? Now you’re saying the senator didn’t commit suicide? I mean I was out there. I saw what you saw.”

“Dick, do you know what the senator’s blood alcohol was at the time of his death?” Mac asked.

“No, I don’t, but I suppose your going to tell me.”

“This afternoon, when I was working all of this out, I spoke with Rick Hansen, the Wright County Sheriff. Remember him?”

Lich nodded.

Mac continued. “Hansen told me the senator’s blood alcohol was .32 percent at the time of death.”

“Whoa,” Riley blurted.

“Exactly,” Mac replied, “At the senator’s weight .32 and you’re smoked, passed out, not getting up on any stool to hang yourself.”

“Not impossible either, Mac,” Rock added with a laugh, a little levity. “I mean, there were a couple of guys in here last night that might have pushed to that level, and they were still standing.”

“Could they have climbed a barstool?” Mac asked, not laughing.

“I doubt it.” Rock answered quietly.

“Exactly. I bet ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a person that loaded passes out long before doing anything, let alone hanging yourself. Besides, if you proclaim your innocence as strongly as the senator and Lyman Hisle did, do you commit suicide that same night? Before going to trial?”

“So, somebody killed the senator? Made it look like a suicide?” Lich asked.

“Possibly,” Mac replied. “Follow it all the way out, Dick. If you have the ability to take out Daniels and Jones in the same night, what’s taking out the senator a few nights later? It’s November, and there are few if any people at the lake. Not to mention the fact that his cabin was isolated and hidden, thick pine trees everywhere. Remember?”

Lich nodded, starting to buy it.

“It was the perfect place to stage a suicide.” Mac finished and slammed his beer. He’d shot his wad. But it was comforting to him that an uncomfortable silence overtook the room. The boys were thinking about it. What he’d just told them made some sense.

Riley spoke first, lightly shaking his head, pinching the top of his nose, “Christ, Mac.”

“What can I say?”

“You sold me,” Riley replied.

“Yeah?” Mac was a little surprised. “What about everyone else?”

Rock and Lich nodded as well.

“I don’t suppose you have a suspect in mind,” Rock inquired.

“I do, but it’s total speculation at this point.”

“As if this whole thing isn’t?” Rock replied with a rueful chuckle. “Hell, you’ve gone this far, boy. Don’t stop now.”

What the hell,
Mac thought. “This is not one person acting alone here. Not possible. Whoever did this, if you assume I’m right, had to have money, resources, and people to do this.”

“Agreed,” Riles said. “If you’re right, this is some sort of coordinated effort, and there are some very skilled people—professionals—at work here.”

“So, cut to the chase, Mac. Who do you think it is?” Lich asked.

“I don’t have a person.”

“Mac?” Lich was getting impatient.

“PTA.”

Jaws went agape.

“Holy shit, Mac,” Riley finally replied, shaking his head. Rock let out a slow whistle.

“What makes you think that?” Lich asked.

“This is where it gets a little thin.”

“Ohhhhhh,
this
is where it gets thin,” Riley said, a huge smile on his face, causing them all to laugh.

Mac smiled and kept going. “Jones was the CFO at PTA. She took over for a guy who died last year. Stephens was his name. He’d been there a long time, died in a car accident on Shepard Road. Nothing hinky about that. I talked to one of the patrol guys on the scene. It was a one-car accident that happened in a snow storm around the time of the state hockey tournament.”

Everyone nodded at that, remembering the storm—over a foot of snow.

Mac moved on. “I don’t know. Maybe Jones stumbles across some financial issue that Stephens had managed to bury. PTA naturally wants her to keep it quiet, continue to cover it up. She balks.”

“Yeah,” Sally added. “She has nasty visions of Enron. She’s the next incarnation of Sharon Watkins.”

“And she knows Claire Daniels,” Riles said, finishing and picking up on the train of thought.

“That’s right,” Mac added nodding. “I’m guessing Jones talks to Daniels. PTA gets wind of it, realizing they won’t be able to control her.” Mac tossed his beer bottle into the garbage. “PTA has the money. Maybe they have the resources and the people as well.”

Everyone took it all in for a moment, the gravity of what Mac had just laid out for them.

“Anyone else know about this?” Riles asked quietly, leaning back.

“Nope, just everyone in this room and one other person, wholly unaffiliated with the department that we can trust,” Mac answered.

“So, where does that leave us?” Lich asked.

“On the trail of an assassin,” Mac replied.

“Should we be telling the chief?” Rock asked.

“With what we got? No way. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t touch this with a ten-foot poll, nor should he.” Riles shook his head. “No. We have to protect the department. We keep this to ourselves until we find something concrete. If we do, then we can think about going to the chief.”

“And, if we don’t,” Rock added, “Nobody’s the wiser.”

“So, what’s next?” Lich asked.

“We stay covert,” Mac replied calmly. “We don’t tell anyone what we know or think.”

“And?” Sally asked.

“The chief has given us all a few days off,” Mac replied. “And I have some ideas of what I’d like to do with the time.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“As long as I always get a third.”

Viper tucked McRyan and Kennedy into bed at McRyan’s place at 11:15 p.m. The report from Kraft that Lyman Hisle had met with McRyan, followed by the rest of the little detail going downstairs, had him concerned. He became downright worried as he listened with his earpiece to the detective and assistant district attorney discussing PTA prior to moving onto nocturnal activities. Things were not yet over. McRyan and company had to be watched.

The crew dropped Viper back off at his home. He went in the front door, checking the mail on the way in. Mostly bills, one from the gas company, another for the telephone, and one of those annoying credit card offers, all addressed to Webb Alt, Viper’s name.

He went to the kitchen and dropped his keys in a little wicker basket on the counter. Having watched McRyan and friends hit the bar had left him thirsty for a beer, and he needed to relax and wind down. The fridge was his salvation, providing a bottle of Heineken. He fished an opener out of a drawer, popped the top and went to his den. Grabbing the remote, he clicked on the news and threw himself into his easy chair. Kicking off his shoes, he took a sip of his beer and thought about Cross.

It had been such a sweet little deal. It had made Alt, Ted Lindsay, Bouchard, James Stephens, and select others inside and out of PTA a nice little pile. And until very recently, nobody knew. They needed to keep it that way. McRyan was a concern and becoming a bigger one by the minute. He was connecting some of the dots. They had to keep him from connecting them all.

Ted Lindsay was Alt’s and PTA’s boss. Ten years before, PTA was a large manufacturing company that was, among other things, a supplier of small arms, weaponry, ammunition, explosives, and communications equipment to the United States Department of Defense. It was a profitable company, with 8,000 employees and operations in Minnesota, California, and West Virginia. It did extensive work for the Defense Department, but little or no work with the CIA or NSA. Ted Lindsay changed that.

In the ten years that Ted Lindsay had been president and CEO, PTA went from being one of many companies to being
the
company when it came to contracts with the Defense Department, as well as the CIA and NSA. Lindsay was even starting to make headway with the Department of Homeland Security. The company had grown to more than 62,000 employees with manufacturing operations in sixteen states. It had gone from being a nice little company in St. Paul to being mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft, GE, and Boeing. It was a name people knew. That was due in large part to the vision and work of Ted Lindsay.

Lindsay did two things that made PTA grow. First, at the time of his arrival, the company had started developing satellite technology for commercial use, in particular for satellite television. Lindsay understood its potential application to intelligence gathering. He was fully aware of the CIA’s movement towards the reliance, if not flat out dependence, on satellites for intelligence gathering. He leveraged his contacts and obtained a large chunk of the CIA’s business for PTA. Not long after, he was able to work his way into the NSA as well. PTA became intertwined in the overall defense of the country. It had led to a three-fold increase in their governmental work.

Second, he took the company’s expertise in software, communications and satellite technology into retail. The company was the first company to offer walkie-talkie ability with cell phones. Some of the first personal digital assistants (PDAs) came from PTA. PTA offered one of the first combination cell phone/walkie-talkie/PDAs. One could buy their products at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sears. It was a name brand.

After two years and even before the company’s aggressive move into retail markets had taken off, Lindsay had been looking for a big increase in pay. Given what he’d done with the company in his two short years, he felt entitled. He was disappointed with what the company offered. A decent raise and an increase in stock options helped but was nowhere near what he’d expected. He wanted to, expected to move into the big leagues of executive compensation. However, the board of directors had been disturbed by stories about high executive pay at prominent corporations. They did not want criticism in that regard coming their way, especially given how much of the business was based on government contracts. Taxpayers would not be happy to learn that their tax dollars paid a president and CEO ten million dollars, plus stock options and it wasn’t enough. Lindsay would have to take what the board was offering.

Lindsay started to look around. Through intermediaries, he learned of potential openings and interest in his abilities. He arranged for that interest to leak to the media. He expected the board would then sweeten his compensation, not wanting to lose the one person who had raised profits and stock prices to new heights. The board, knowing a media leak and power play when it saw one, played hardball and put together their own list of potential replacements and leaked that to the media. Lindsay seriously considered walking.

Then Cross came along.

Lindsay had worked his way up through the CIA over twenty-five years, with his last ten years spent as the deputy director of Operations (DDO). That made him Alt’s boss. Alt worked as an intelligence officer. Supposedly, after the Church hearings in the 1970s, the CIA was out of the assassination business. That wasn’t entirely the case. Alt, and a number of others now with PTA had worked wet operations for years for the CIA. That was how Alt met Bouchard—some joint activities with the French. Lindsay had ordered assassinations and other operations, with Alt integrally involved in many of them. When Lindsay went to PTA, he wanted to significantly upgrade the security at the company. He brought in Alt for that very purpose and made him a vice president. Another person Lindsay brought to the company was CIA numbers genius, James Stephens, naming him chief financial officer.

After two years, when Lindsay was just about ready to walk away from PTA, Stephens and Alt came to him with Cross.

The increase in governmental contracts in Lindsay’s first couple of years necessitated that the company go into an expansion, acquisition and hiring mode. Their facilities were tapped out for space and efforts were made to create as much room as possible to fulfill the contracts. New facilities would be built, but that took time. In the meantime, the company had to ramp up its operations immediately, and they were short of space.

James Stephens had been tasked with evaluating each facility, its equipment, capacity, viability and needs. Stephens found that at many company facilities there was an abundance of surplus military hardware and equipment, leftovers from previously fulfilled government contracts. It had simply been stored and nobody knew or had ever decided what to do with it. It was largely unrecorded on the company books. Stephens mentioned the surplus to Alt, who in turn started to formulate an idea.

PTA had one facility that was underused. It was an old explosives manufacturing facility outside the small rural town of Cross, West Virginia. Cross was the official address, but given the inherent danger of an explosives manufacturing facility, it was located well outside of the town, completely isolated. It was a facility that had fallen into disrepair, and it was about to be shut down. However, the one thing Cross had, that other PTA locations didn’t, was space, and in particular, two empty warehouses. So the decision was made to ship all surplus equipment and materials to Cross. Once there, the company would decide what to do with it all. This is where Stephens and Alt came in with their idea.