For Brown, it was the chief.
Charlie Flanagan hated dirty cops more than almost anything. In Brown’s case, he caught the DEA agent putting coke back onto the street to pay off gambling debts. It might have only been a one-time thing, but Brown was guilty and admitted it to Detective Flanagan. Peters told Mac that Brown had pleaded — flat-out begged — the chief to let it go. Brown was in counseling for his gambling and hadn’t placed a bet in ten months. Faced with the wrath of his bookie and his bookie’s muscle, he stole the coke to retire the debt. Brown told Flanagan he’d leave the bureau and law enforcement if he let it go. Brown also had a seriously ill daughter and was worried about what would happen to her.
Smith Brown simply didn’t know Charlie Flanagan. If you were dirty, you had to pay the price. Peters recalled Flanagan ruminating about what to do with Brown at the time, saying, “It would be one thing if he stole a couple of watches, a fur coat, maybe a TV from the evidence room, something like that. I wouldn’t condone it, but I would at least understand it. I could let that kind of thing slide. But stealing drugs, coke, and putting it back on our streets and all that comes with that? That I can’t look past.”
As Peters said, “You know the chief. It was a principle thing.”
Mac didn’t know what to think of it. He understood the chief’s position. But he doubted the chief thought Brown would end up with fifteen years in Leavenworth Federal Pen either. Life had to have been miserable in there, and the information they were finding said that was indeed the case. Fifteen years in prison is a long time to think. Especially after they also learned Brown’s daughter died after he went in, at least in part because his wife and child lost medical insurance. That only added fuel to the fire.
“He blames the chief for all of that, I’m sure,” Peters said. “I suppose I see how he gets there, but he’s wrong.”
“Smith might be wrong about the chief’s choices, Captain,” Mac answered. “But at the moment, he’s sitting with two aces in the hole.”
For the Muellers, it was Lyman Hisle, the man who killed their father.
The whole conspiracy was simple and made sense once you had the pieces. All of which made Mac more concerned about the ransom.
“This ransom call is about more than money,” Mac told his captain. “There’s a trap door here that we’re not seeing, and the chief and Lyman are going to fall right through it.”
“What’s the trap door?” Peters asked.
“I don’t know,” Mac answered. “But the ransom will not be some simple money drop. You’re not going to be dropping it into a garbage can somewhere. These boys want blood. The chief and Lyman are going to be involved in the drop somehow, and we need to stay close.”
Mac hung up his phone and retreated into his thoughts as they passed the Osseo city limits sign. Mac hadn’t been to Osseo for years. As a kid he came up this way to play hockey a couple of times every winter at the Osseo Arena, a rink that looked like a big beige utility shed and felt like the inside of a freezer. It had the hardest and fastest ice around. Back in those days, the town sat by itself among fields, looking like the small farm town you now had to drive out much farther to find. Today, Osseo was a little piece of small-town America completely surrounded by the suburbs of Maple Grove and Brooklyn Park, complete with three-car-garage mini-mansions, big-box retailers, chain restaurants, Lexuses, BMWs, and exploding populations.
Mac turned right off the highway and onto tree-lined Central Avenue, the town’s main drag. Osseo didn’t seem a natural choice for the Muellers, who were born and raised in Chisago Lakes, an equally small bedroom community fifty miles northeast of St. Paul. But it started to make some sense when Sally told him that they’d been working for a nearby lumberyard, based on wage records.
“Of course,” Sally said, “the Mueller brothers had checking accounts, but they were cleaned out a few weeks ago.”
Mac pulled up to a patrol car in the parking lot of the gas station along the main drag. Two uniform cops, one much older than the other, casually leaned against the front bumper of their cruiser, which was parked under the shady canopy of a small group of maple trees. The older of the two, who Mac assumed was the chief, was smoking. Mac powered down his window and stuck his hand out to shake. “Detective McRyan from St. Paul.”
“I’m Police Chief Pete Mitchell,” the older cop replied as he took Mac’s hand. “This here is one of my patrol guys. His name’s Bennett.”
Mac thumbed toward the passenger side, “This is Detective Lich. How do you want to do this, Chief?”
“I called the landlord,” Mitchell said, taking a drag on his Marlboro and blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. “He says the guys you’re looking for haven’t been around for a week or two, at least as far as he can tell.”
“We still should take a look.”
“I figured you’d want to. The landlord will let us in,” Mitchell said, stamping out his cigarette and waving them to follow.
The apartment was two blocks away in a rundown 1950s-style apartment building with a water-stained dark beige stucco exterior with brown-trimmed windows. The landlord was sitting on the steps, having a smoke of his own, when they pulled up. The man, dressed in dark brown pants and a white, short-sleeved collar shirt, looked to be in his sixties. His last strands of hair stretched in a brutal comb-over from one ear over to the other. Without saying a word, he turned and led the group up the steps to the second floor and a rear apartment. The landlord knocked on the door, waited fifteen seconds, knocked again, waited, and then slid in the key.
“Like I told Ole’ Pistol Pete here,” he said in a gravely, smoke-damaged voice, “they haven’t been around for a week or two.”
Mac and Lich entered to find an apartment evidencing a Spartan existence. To their right was a tiny galley kitchen, straight ahead was a living room, and to the left was a hallway to two small bedrooms and a full bath. The living room had an avocado-colored couch and a harvest-gold-upholstered loveseat perched in front of an old twenty-seven-inch TV that sat on side-by-side milk crates. Down the hallway, there were mattresses on the floor of each bedroom, but no sheets or blankets remained. An old clock radio sat unplugged on the floor in one bedroom. The closets were empty. In the bathroom, there was a half roll of toilet paper but nothing more. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was empty except for a nearly empty carton of spoiled milk, three eggs, and a half stick of butter. Mac sifted through the cupboards and drawers, finding only a single pay stub for Zorn Lumber.
“This place is empty,” Lich said, standing in the living room with his hands on his hips.
“Abandoned, I’d say,” Mac added.
“When’s the rent paid up through?” Lich asked the landlord.
“Through June,” he answered. “They haven’t paid for July yet, and I was startin’ to wonder about it.”
“I doubt you’re going to get July’s rent,” Mac said. He showed the landlord pictures of the Mueller brothers. “Were these the guys renting the place?”
The landlord nodded, “That’s them, all right.”
Mac dug out pictures of Monica and Brown. “You ever see either of these folks hanging around?”
The landlord scratched the back of his head and peered at the pictures for a moment. “Her, yes,” he said. “You couldn’t miss her. She was a pretty thing. I’m not sure about the guy though. They didn’t have many visitors that I can recall, although people come and go all the time.” He held the picture in his hands for another minute, giving it a good look. “I just can’t say for sure if he was ever around.”
Mac turned to the chief, holding up the pay stub. “Is Zorn Lumber the lumberyard we passed out on County 81 as we drove into town?”