“We’re done, buddy,” Riley said.
“We didn’t get much in there, that’s true, but there’s something going on here, Pat.”
“I agree. But at this point, the chief is thinking we can’t get them.”
“We don’t know that.”
Riley snorted. “Shit. What do we have? Nothin’ solid. They have an alibi, an answer for everything, and you and I both know it.” Pat slowly shook his head. “One hundred dollars says that, when the chief comes out, he’s going to tell us to go to the Pub, have a beer and come back tomorrow, ready to get back into the rotation because we are done with this.”
Mac didn’t have a response. Instead he grabbed a rubber band off the counter, started twisting it with his hands and walked around the small copy room, looking at the postage machine, the ten different three-ring binders with various office procedures, and then meandered over to the copier. It was new and rather large, with a flat screen touch-pad control panel. On the wall behind it were various procedures for copying, requiring you enter an employee code and project number. There were further instructions for printing from a desktop computer, how to set up large print projects or scanning documents into the system and sending them to your own computer. On the bottom of the instructions, it said, “Think Paperless.” PTA must have been making a corporate move to a paperless office.
Mac heard a door open behind him, out in the lobby area. He heard the chief ask for them. “Let’s go,” was all the chief had to say when he stuck his head in the copy room.
“What are we doing?” Riley asked as they climbed into the elevator. The mayor was staying behind.
The chief waited for the doors to close. “We can talk about it downstairs.” They rode down the rest of the way in silence. Once in the parking garage, Flanagan said to Captain Peters, “You take the van back, the boys and I here are going to take a little walk.”
They walked out of the garage and onto the street and back towards the Public Safety Building. “I wanted to wait until we were away from the building. Who knows-they might be listening,” the chief said. “You boys are done, you know that, right?”
Riley sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“Mac?” the chief asked.
“Sir, if we kept looking…” Mac started.
The chief put up his hand and then after a few seconds, “Your dad said something to me once.”
“What’s that?”
“We only catch ’em when they make mistakes. These guys,” the chief said, looking back at the PTA building and lightly shaking his head, “They haven’t made any mistakes. Sometimes, people simply get away with it.”
“So, you think they did it?”
“They’re up to something. What? I’m not sure.”
“They sure were smooth,” Riley said.
“Too smooth,” the chief replied. “I don’t know. They seemed to know what was coming.”
“So, what did you talk about with Lindsay?” Riley asked, shifting gears.
“We stop investigating, and they say nothing of the little conversation we just had. That was the deal.”
Made sense, Mac thought. The department had had a rough go with Knapp. The tumult surrounding that had died down now. If word got out that internally the department questioned the deaths of Claire Daniels, Jamie Jones, and possibly the senator, the department would take another hit. The chief didn’t want that to happen.
“So what’s the mayor doing?” Mac asked.
“Once Lindsay and I struck our little agreement, he wanted some time with the mayor to talk about issues of interest between PTA and the city.”
“Meaning, PTA’s willingness to stay in St. Paul?”
“Yup.”
They quietly walked for a block. Mac finally broke the silence, “If they don’t make mistakes, how do we catch them?”
“I asked your dad that once,” the chief answered. “He said, we build a time machine and go back and catch them in the act.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
One Week Later.
Alt went in the back door, dropped the keys on the counter and scratched his head, late on Thursday night. He was beat, tired and very much wanted — but knew he couldn’t have-a vacation. He thought that when they had taken care of McRyan the week before, everything would die down some and Lindsay would stop worrying about Cross.
Instead, Lindsay had pushed for them to make renewed efforts to find the missing documents. They had to be somewhere. He was relentless. “I want no loose ends. I didn’t tolerate them when I was at the agency, and I’m not about to start now,” he said. “Go back and retrace your steps. You missed Landy Stephens’s name on Jamie Jones’s refrigerator, so you probably missed something else. So go back. I want those documents found. You have complete freedom to do what you need to, spend what you need to spend, but find those documents.”
So they spent the week looking, everywhere. They had made late-night raids on both the Jones and Daniels places yet again. It was worthless, Alt thought. This was the fifth time through. But the boss ordered it, so they did it. Different people at each location, and they found nothing. And these were people with experience finding items that were never intended to be found. Not a hint of the documents at either place.
They tapped into the systems at Fed Ex, UPS, Overnight Express, and any other package delivery service they could think of, to see if Jones had sent the documents to someone other than Daniels. They checked local delivery services to see what had been delivered to Daniels at her home address. Nothing.
They searched everywhere at the PTA building in St. Paul and at the various company manufacturing facilities in the area. Perhaps Jones thought they would never look under their own noses. Nothing. They tore her office apart. Nothing. Tore her assistant’s office apart. Nothing. They tore all of accounting apart. Nothing.
Through the use of her PDA and computer calendar, they tried retracing Jones’ steps during her last few weeks. Any restaurant she went to. Any place where she shopped. Any people she saw. They searched three of her friends’ homes. Nothing.
She was a member at the University Club, where she had a locker. Nothing.
They searched her mother’s place again and delivery records for her. They hacked into her mother’s bank records to see if she had been to Jones’s safe deposit box at any time in the last few months. Nothing.
They did the same thing with Daniels. They went through her place again, through every closet, every set of drawers, computer, files, office, basement, kitchen, built-in cabinets, car, everything. Nothing.
They searched Daniels’ mothers’ place again. They checked her mother’s bank records, no trips to a safe deposit box. No deliveries of any kind. Nothing.
In a new twist, they went through Senator Johnson’s St. Paul residence, office, car, and even the cabin. Nothing.
They were back searching at Channel 6. Alt was certain the documents weren’t there. But the boss wanted someone there every night until the documents were found.
One solution that had been implemented was that they had very carefully arranged through a sea of paperwork to purchase both Jones’s and Daniels’s places. They would take possession of both after the first of the year. If the documents were still there, they’d be found because every wall in either place was coming out. Maybe they should be x-raying the walls. That was a thought. Alt would evaluate that one tomorrow.
He reached into the fridge and grabbed a cold beer and thought of McRyan. He’d gone back to regular police work. Alt had stopped following him, especially after he’d made a less-than-subtle remark about being
