FIRST CASE - Novella (McRyan Mystery Series Prequel) Read online

  “Speaking of his work, did he ever mention any trouble there?” Mac inquired.

  “No. He worked long hours at that firm like most young lawyers do, but he really seemed to like it. Sometimes he came here with people from the firm, lawyers, secretaries and stuff. I think he was a little friendly with a couple of women from the firm or at least it sure seemed like it. But again, he never mentioned any work trouble. He just worked a lot, I know that.”

  Lich and Mac spent a few more minutes interviewing Remer and then left him and walked back into the alley to look over the crime scene again. Mac walked back to the blood pool and knelt down to look around when a flash of light to his right caught his eye. Under the front of the left rear tire he saw a small brass plate, maybe an inch by half inch, rectangular in shape. It wasn’t marked as evidence. Mac pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket. He carefully moved around the blood pool and crouched down close to the brass piece and shined his flashlight on it. It looked like there was blood on it. Mac called over a crime scene tech to mark, photograph and bag it.

  Mac stood up and then looked back towards the dumpster and stared for a minute. Lich noticed the look.

  “What are you thinking, Mac?”

  Mac stood up and walked over to the dumpster and crouched down behind it, careful not to touch the dumpster. There was a gap between the back of the dumpster and the wall. He could peek through and see the back door to The Mahogany. The victim still had his wallet, watch and the car was still there.

  “Jack, did the vic have his cell phone?”

  Coonan shook his head. “Yes.”

  This wasn’t a robbery, Mac thought. Robber wouldn’t put the body in the truck, not to mention the fact that the wallet, watch, cell phone and perhaps even the truck would be gone. Mac peeked back through the opening again. “I think our killer crouched down behind the dumpster here, lying in wait for Mr. Oliver. When Oliver passes,” Mac stood up and swung down with his right hand, “the first hit knocks Oliver into the bumper of the truck here. Who knows, there’s a patch of ice here as well so after he’s hit, he stumbles, maybe steps on the patch of ice and then hits his head on the bumper. Then the killer hits him a time or two when he falls to the ground, finishing off what was already probably a finished job because the blow to the head on the bumper is what kills him.”

  “With what?” Lich asked. “Hits him with what?”

  “I don’t know with what yet,” Mac answered. “There’s the small brass plate our tech is bagging right now that has blood on it, so it might have fallen off of the murder weapon when the killer was swinging it and hitting Oliver with it.”

  “So what are you thinking, rook?” Lich asked.

  “This wasn’t random. Someone knew Gordon Oliver was here and knew his truck would be parked back here. He was killed by someone who knew him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “But a homicide is different, someone has been murdered.”

  While on a long drive for a hunting trip when he was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, unsure if being a cop was what he wanted in life, Mac McRyan asked his dad how he delivered the news to a family that they had lost a loved one. Simon McRyan was a gregarious, outgoing, larger than life personality who knew how to fill a room with fun and laughter. He could make a funny quip about anything and often, when making a serious point, he would start off with some humorous anecdote to soften the impending lesson. However, for this question from his son, Simon McRyan sat in silence for a number of minutes, looking out the windshield, deep in thought, before he carefully answered the question.

  Mac’s dad quietly said that before he ever informed the next of kin, he always tried to put himself in the shoes of the family and how they would want to be told the news and what they would want to hear from the policeman that was giving them the news. The most important thing was to make an investment in the victim. Then his father looked him straight in the eye and said: “Son, this is the most important thing. If you become a cop, if you work homicides, you speak for the dead. That is the job. You become their voice. That is the obligation and it is a heavy one. It is an obligation that not everyone can carry. If you become a cop and you become a detective and you want to work homicides, you will have to ask yourself if you can carry that burden. If you can, then you can talk to the family because then you have that investment in the case. You will say: ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and it will mean something to the family. They will trust that you will do everything you can to solve it and give them an answer, closure and maybe even a sense of justice.”

  Mac thought about those words all the way back to the station. The ride allowed him to clear his mind before he made the call; the phone call that changes everything for a family. Lich had managed to find out that Gordon Oliver was from Wichita, Kansas. His father had died two years ago but he was survived by his mother. She was about to hear the news that she’d lost another man in her life. To make matters worse, Mac would have to deliver the news over the phone which didn’t seem right but was unavoidable.

  He did the best he could with Janice Oliver.

  Mrs. Oliver hadn’t spoken with her son in a week, other than via a few e-mails. Her son hadn’t mentioned any problems with anyone at work or anyplace else for that matter. He enjoyed his work and seemed happy. Mrs. Oliver didn’t have any information that seemed helpful. Mac told her he would be in touch with more information as it developed and that she should call him if she thought of anything. He took down a list of other family members to contact. After he hung up, he sat in his desk chair for a minute to collect himself. It had been a difficult conversation.

  Lich had been sitting at his own desk twenty feet away, keeping a respectful distance while he listened in. When Mac hung up Lich left his desk for the breakroom. He came back with a cup of coffee for himself and his partner and said, “All in all, Mac, you did pretty well there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s different than when you’re on patrol. In those cases, it was an accident, right?”

  Mac nodded.

  Lich continued, “In those cases, it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances, and the victim has died. It was an accident. But a homicide is different, someone has been murdered. It was intentional. The victim is still dead, but a homicide, that just hits people differently. It makes them ask why?”

  Mac looked down for a moment and then pushed himself out of his desk chair, “Then let’s go figure out why Gordon Oliver was murdered.”

  * * * * *

  Their first stop was Gordon Oliver’s condo, which was a lofted apartment on the far eastern edge of downtown St. Paul, an area called Lowertown. The building, called The Parker Lofts, was a converted warehouse that was subdivided into condos. Oliver had a second floor unit. Mac and Lich, along with two crime scene techs, were let into the unit by the building manager.

  The building was a secure building, requiring a key to get in. The front entrance to the apartment, as well as its parking garage, was monitored by video cameras. The manager said he would pull the camera footage to see if anyone unusual entered the building, particularly after midnight.

  The loft was approximately one thousand square feet. The floor plan was open, with a kitchen opening into a large open living area that contained a leather sectional couch and easy chair situated around a large area rug and glass rectangular coffee table. The furniture framed a viewing area for the fireplace and a flat screen television. The bedroom and bathroom were positioned down a narrow hallway that ran behind the kitchen.

  There was a standard amount of disorganization that evidenced it was occupied by a single, young professional male who worked long hours. The wool blanket on the couch wasn’t folded, there were four different bowls and three glasses in the kitchen sink, there were four pairs of shoes, three dress and one tennis, strewn on the floor mat by the door. The bed in the bedroom was unmade, his toiletries were spread across the vanity in the bathroom and papers were strewn across the small dining table near the kitchen
.

  “The place looks disorganized, but it doesn’t look like anyone ransacked the place,” Lich observed.

  “No it doesn’t, although we need to review the video footage from the front door and garage to be sure,” Mac answered and jotted down a reminder. He perused the loose papers on the small table, a combination of work papers, legal briefs and cases and a few bills, one for cable and another for his cell phone. A red toolbox sat just to the side of the table and Mac smiled, thinking of the bartender’s statement, “You gotta use all the tools in the toolbox.” Of course, that referred to Oliver’s penchant to chase skirts.

  Mac and Lich spent time knocking on a few doors but none of Oliver’s neighbors heard anything or were aware of any problems.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You can’t make that shit up.”

  The Lowry Lewis Building was a five-story classic located in the middle of downtown St. Paul, six blocks from The Mahogany. The interior of the building featured a five-story courtyard with skylight. The offices opened to balconies that overlooked the courtyard. Marble, carved mahogany and oak were the distinctive finishes of the interior of the historic building. The first floor was occupied by a series of small businesses including a jeweler, shoe repair shop, clothier and barber. Krueger, Ballantine, Montague and Preston occupied the second through fifth floors. The receptionist area for the law firm sat at the top of a wide grand staircase that rose majestically to the second floor from the street level entrance.

  McRyan looked at the listing of attorney names on the wall behind the receptionist and counted forty-six attorneys. He recalled from his law school days of interviewing with firms that KBMP, as it was known, specialized in corporate transactions and the complex litigation that attached itself to that kind of work. It was an old-time St. Paul law firm, having first opened its doors as Krueger and Ballantine in 1922. Krueger and Ballantine had long since passed, and Montague was listed as retired. The only name partner still active was Marie Preston, who was listed as the firm’s managing partner. She was who Mac asked to see.

  Marie Preston was a woman in her mid-to-late fifties. She wore dark round tortoise shell glasses. Her black hair, with strands of gray, was pulled back in a tight bun. She was dressed in a plain black pant suit, red blouse with a double strand of pearls around her neck. She wasn’t dressed matronly but certainly conservatively. Mac broke the news to Preston about Gordon Oliver’s death.

  “It is such a shock. I saw him here just last night. Do you know who killed him?” Preston said after a few minutes, having regained her composure, although her eyes still watered.

  “We’re trying to figure that out, ma’am,” Mac answered. “What can you tell us about him?”

  Preston explained that Oliver was a fourth year associate who was an up and coming litigator. He was an extremely hard worker who had billed over 2,100 hours the previous year and was ahead of that pace in the current year. Good numbers for a young associate, requiring late nights and lots of weekend time.

  “Gordon was a good young trial lawyer. He tried his first jury trial last year and won. He had the mindset for litigation, he was going to be a good one, a very good one. A lawyer’s lawyer,” Preston explained. “He liked the battle and grind of it and he had just the right amount of arrogance for it.”

  “Arrogance?” Lich asked.

  “If you want to be a good lawyer, particularly a good trial lawyer,” Mac answered, “you need to be confident. You need to be arrogant.”

  “And Gordon didn’t lack for either quality,” Preston added.

  “Arrogance, huh. You were going to be a trial lawyer, weren’t you, Mac?” Lich said smiling.

  Mac shook his head, ‘walked right into that one,’ he thought. Then to Preston, “You said he worked long hours?”

  “If you want to be a good litigator, a good young lawyer for that matter, you must be willing to grind it out hour-by-hour, day-after-day. Gordon could do that and seemed to like doing it.”

  “We’re going to have to ask this question of a lot of people around here, but did he have any problems with anyone?”

  “Professionally? No. His conduct as a lawyer was exemplary. In fact, even though he was a very young lawyer, he’d become something of our professional responsibility expert when others had some ethical questions. Professionally, he was an absolute stickler for the rules.”

  “But personally?” Lich followed, picking up Preston’s tone.

  Preston sat back and picked her next words carefully, “With litigators like Gordon, you want them kind of living on the edge, to have something of a fearless attitude, to be willing to go at a hundred miles an hour. They are more effective that way. Gordon was no exception. With those kinds of lawyers you take the good with the bad.”

  “I assume the good was the legal work and billings,” Mac said.

  “Yes,” Preston replied. “Partners make money on profitable associates. Gordon Oliver made us money.”

  “What’s the bad?”

  “Well,” Preston answered slyly, “Gordon could be pretty abrasive and well, he really liked the ladies.”

  “So we’ve been told,” Lich said. “At least about the ladies. The abrasive part is new.”

  “So what about his liking the ladies was a problem?” Mac asked.

  “That he shared his affections with soooo many of them around the office,” Preston replied disapprovingly.

  “So many? Like how many?” Mac asked, pen at the ready.

  “Well there were at least three women that I know he slept with. There was a secretary, a paralegal and then one of our associates.”

  “Three? At least that you know of?” Mac asked skeptically, jotting down notes. “Were there more?”

  “I suspect there could have been but there are only three that I know of for sure.”

  “Hey, at least he’s equal opportunity, hitting everyone on the law firm food chain,” Lich said lightly.

  “Indeed,” Preston answered. “Gordon was, what one of my fellow partners likes to call, a hound. In any event, the problem in one case was that the woman was married and in another case, the woman was in a long-term relationship and it created some issues, particularly with the married woman.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “Well, about a month ago we had a rather angry husband appear at our reception desk demanding to see Gordon.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Martin Burrows. His wife Tammy Burrows is a secretary in our office.”

  “Did Mr. Burrows see Mr. Oliver?” Lich asked.

  “He did, unfortunately,” Preston related that as Burrows waited at the reception desk, Oliver and two other associates walked up the staircase, returning from a Starbucks run. Burrows attacked Oliver, landing one punch before the two other associates were able to get between them. Building security was called and Burrows was physically escorted out of the building.

  “Were any charges filed?” Mac asked.

  “No. Gordon let it slide. He didn’t want to make it any bigger a deal than it was. Perhaps he should have.”

  “The bartender at The Mahogany said that Oliver and another man got into it one night at the bar. No blows, but it got heated. Do you know if that was Burrows as well?” Dick asked.

  “It might have been. I heard some gossip about that incident but I didn’t hear that Burrows was attached to it. Who knows, it might have been the significant other of some other woman Gordon bedded. He was pretty adept at making that happen.”

  “You mentioned abrasive, how is that an issue?” McRyan asked.

  “You know that whole confident, arrogant thing. It rubs some people the wrong way. Some people were put off by his confidence. Partners have been feeding him a lot of work, especially Stan Busch, and Gordon wasn’t afraid to flaunt that.”

  “How about his work? Was there anything he was working on lately that could have caused him some trouble? A difficult client perhaps? Maybe opposing counsel he had an issue with?”


  Preston shook her head, “For the last three or four months he’s been heavily involved in a case that was supposed to go to trial starting next week. It’s a complex shareholder lawsuit. Gordon Oliver was working with another very good senior associate named Michael Harris. Both of them were working for Happy Hour.”

  “Happy Hour?” Lich asked quizzically.

  “Happy Hour is Stan Busch,” Preston replied. “I guess he’s kind of what I would call our morale partner. He’s notorious for taking people out for drinks after work. He’s done it for years. We call him Happy Hour.”

  “We’ll need to talk to him and the whole firm,” Lich said.

  “We’ll need a whole roster of your employees,” Mac added. “We need to speak with everyone and know who is here and who is not.”

  “Please wait here for a minute,” Preston replied. “I need to make an announcement.”

  * * * * *

  Mac and Lich spent the next three hours interviewing lawyers throughout the offices. The atmosphere was somber. Doors were closed. Discussions were in hushed murmurs. There were enough teary eyes and sad faces to suggest Oliver was liked by a fair number of people around the firm.

  They started with the lawyer Oliver was doing most of his work with. Mac and Lich caught Stan Busch a/k/a “Happy Hour” as they exited the conference room with Marie Preston. Busch was just arriving in the office, carrying two briefcases, a black leather litigation case and a weathered tan executive briefcase. Preston informed him of the news.

  Busch shook his head, “I knew the womanizing would get him sooner or later.”

  Mac and Lich shared a look and then followed Busch back to his well-appointed corner office. It reeked of old school lawyer and law firm, with fifteen-foot-high ceilings, crown molding, oak wood floors and dark cherry wood furniture. The office was a power office and Busch looked plenty comfortable sitting in it even given the circumstances. The veteran lawyer was nattily attired in a navy blue pinstripe suit, red silk tie and a crisply pressed blue dress shirt with a white collar. Busch sat casually, one leg crossed over the other, in his high backed leather chair behind his large cherry wood desk, cutting the look of a lord over his law practice.