before he reached age thirty. Mac was on his way. And it wasn’t just on the job, but financially as well. He’d also invested in the Grand Brew Coffee shops. That little ten grand investment was paying off twenty fold and was certain to provide more.
Yet Meredith was unhappy.
Things had changed.
There was no going back.
The last six months Meredith came home later and later at night. There were a few nights where she said she was working through the night and just stopped home in the morning to shower and change clothes. A new case came up that required trips to New York, Washington and San Francisco. She became distant at home. Their love life, once extremely active and adventurous had essentially come to a halt.
At first, Mac wanted to believe it was just that she was as driven to succeed in her career as he was in his. But he had always taken pride in being brutally honest with himself and knew he was in denial. All the telltale signs were there. He was virtually certain of it but he needed to be sure.
Mac knew five retired cops who became private detectives. The best of the lot was John Biggs, a detective who once worked cases with and had the respect of Simon McRyan. Biggs ran a small private investigation firm and developed a very good reputation and catered to an exclusive clientele. Three weeks ago Mac hired Biggs to find out if his instincts were right.
At 11:00 p.m. sharp, Biggs let Mac into his office. A thick manila folder with Meredith Hillary McRyan written on the tab sat in the middle of Biggs’s desk along with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and two glasses and that told Mac all he needed to know.
“Looks like I was right.”
Biggs walked behind his desk and took the cap off the Scotch and poured two fingers in each glass. “I’m sorry, kid,” Biggs answered simply as he handed Mac a glass. “The question now is how much do you really want to know?”
“Everything.”
“You sure?”
Mac simply nodded. In his heart and his head he knew this was the case and was mentally prepared for it. Nevertheless, the reality of it still hit him like a punch to the gut.
“Take a seat.”
Biggs flipped open the folder. He had two clipped sets of pictures, handing one to Mac. Biggs or one of his investigators followed Meredith Monday through Friday up until three days ago, when Biggs had seen enough and began to put together his investigative report. Biggs walked through the report and pictures with Mac. Biggs was good, very good, Mac realized objectively. He had the goods. He caught Meredith in the act on multiple occasions.
It was with whom that threw Mac.
Meredith worked on complex corporate litigation and many cases would involve five or six attorneys, usually a senior partner, a junior partner and three to four associates. Mac had figured Meredith found another similar aged associate at her law firm given she was working late and traveling more on firm business. But that was not the case and who she was sleeping with told him everything he needed to know about his wife, what he was blind to about her all along. Their relationship was less about love and more about social status. When Mac was at the University and in law school he looked like a man who was on the right path. He was on the path of status, wealth and notoriety. These were the things, Mac realized, that mattered most to his wife. Meredith was more concerned with status, wealth and looks than love and honor. She had to be because she was having an affair with the senior partner she’d worked with since she first joined the firm, the very married forty-seven year old J. Frederick Sterling.
“Surprised it’s Sterling?” Biggs asked.
“Stunned.”
“Me too,” Biggs answered. “Because I did a little research about his marital history.”
“Which told you what?”
“Well, J. Fred here is on his second marriage,” Biggs answered. “And he has a prenuptial agreement with the current Mrs. Sterling that has an interesting provision or two.”
“Interesting?” Mac asked, catching Biggs’s tone. “Interesting how?”
“If they divorce she gets $350,000 and that’s it.” Biggs took a drink of his Scotch.
“Pocket change for a guy with his money,” Mac answered with a dismissive wave. “From what Meredith told me a few years ago, he’s worth at least seven or eight million dollars.”
Briggs held up his hand, “Except there’s an infidelity clause in that prenup my friend. If they divorce because he’s caught cheating, she gets a cool five million.”
Mac’s jaw dropped, “Five million… dollars.” Mac whistled. “Really?”
Biggs nodded with a satisfied look on his face.
“Hmpf. I’m surprised you didn’t run into a private investigator tailing him. She ought to have one on retainer just to protect herself.”
“I seriously thought the same thing but we didn’t see anyone,” Biggs said as he lifted the bottle and Mac nodded. Biggs poured more liquor into Mac’s glass. “A friend of a friend of an acquaintance got me a look at the prenup. Apparently the first marriage went tits up because J. Freddy was schtoppin’ wife numero dos.”
“So wife number two knows that Sterling has the wandering eye and writes in a little protection,” Mac adds. “He stays faithful or if not…”
“It’ll cost him,” Biggs finished. “The language is rock solid, if he gets caught cheating, he owes the five million. Of course that would be on top of the rather sizable monthly alimony of $25,000 he pays to wife number one from his first divorce eight years ago, not to mention child support for three kids at Blake School, which runs him somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty grand a year. Now he took home a little under $900,000 last year so he’s not living check to check-yet. If he gets divorced because he gets caught with his fly down, it’ll cost him dearly.”
Mac’s strategy and terms for divorce suddenly became crystal clear.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“So what is this then?”
Mac got home at 1:15 a.m. Meredith was already asleep and given what he’d just learned from Biggs, couldn’t bring himself to join her in bed so he simply racked out on the couch. Never one who needed more than a few hours of sleep, he was up by 5:30 and went for a long run.
When Mac decided to become a cop, one thing he agreed to was buying a house. The house, of course, needed to meet Meredith’s expectations. Consequently, the house was most definitely at the upper end, and in reality, beyond what they probably could afford at the time, a 4,500 square foot Victorian in the Mac-Groveland neighborhood, four blocks east of the University of St. Thomas. While he never had any formal training, Mac was handy with tools and interior design. He’d spent the better part of the last four years on various restoration projects in the home, including the furniture layout and color scheme. It was plenty livable when he started but it was now a beautiful home and would, if he put it on the market, easily net him double the original purchase price, even in the flat-lined real estate market. That day was soon coming, but until then Mac would enjoy another of the house’s perks, its close location to Summit Avenue.
Summit Avenue ran east from the Mississippi River a little over four miles to downtown St. Paul. It was a boulevard filled with stately mansions, synagogues and churches, majestic one-hundred-year-old trees, the Minnesota Governor’s mansion, his law school William Mitchell College of Law, the University of St. Thomas and Macalester College. It was a wonderful stretch of city for a morning run.
He put his earphones in, set the music to random and began his run in the cool March air. The morning jogs were always important to him. He worked problems out in his mind in the solitude of the early morning. For the last several months, he’d thought through his marital issues. Now he had a plan for dealing with that. This morning he wanted to think about something else, the Gordon Oliver murder. His first case and after one day, he felt
