Electing To Murder (2 page)

Wire punched in a search on the address; Raymond Hitch came up. Wire opened up another program on her computer and searched for Hitch in Vice President Wellesley’s database of campaign supporters and a few seconds later, there he was. Hitch was known as a Lone Ranger. In Wellesley campaign parlance, that was a fundraiser who committed to raising ten million dollars for the candidate. You had Super PACs and then you had individual donors and the people that bundled them. No matter how long she was around politics, the sums of money spent on campaigns bewildered her. Ten million later on would get you access to the president, perhaps consideration for an ambassadorship or some other plumb reward. Hitch was from Nashville but it wouldn’t be surprising that he had a lake place up in Kentucky.

If you wanted a private late meeting, this would be an ideal place. Kentucky lake country was quiet and lightly populated in late October, especially on a Wednesday night. There would be the odd year-round cabin dwellers still at their lake places, usually retirees or perhaps folks who worked back in town another few miles up the road. However, if Wire had to bet, the meeting place would be one where there was no chance it would be seen by a stray neighbor. If you were going this far out of the way, it was guaranteed to be private. Besides, it was late now, approaching midnight, and the rain was intensifying from a light drizzle to a steady downpour.

Wire looked at the roads leading to the Hitch place. The road she was on would proceed to the south a quarter mile or so and then turn left for a few hundred feet as a road to a half dozen other cabins and then would loop back to the north, bringing her back to Elmwood and within a few hundred yards of the motorcade’s location. Wire left the car lights off and slipped on a pair of night vision glasses. She dropped the gear shift and slowly followed the road as it looped around and stopped two hundred yards from where the road would run back into Elmwood. To be safe, she backed up twenty feet and into a small private driveway for a cabin now dark for the season. She grabbed her backpack from the backseat and did a quick inventory of her equipment, which consisted of binoculars, two cameras, a small handheld video camera and a handheld GPS system to help her find the cottage and navigate her way back to the SUV if need be. Wire quickly slipped on black rain pants and zipped up her short black raincoat. She tightened her ponytail and then slid it through the hole in the back of her black Washington Nationals baseball cap. Wire then pulled the raincoat hood over her head, buttoning up tightly to keep the rain off of her body. She had no idea how long she would need to be outside and there was nothing worse than being cold and wet.

She slipped out of the car and pulled on her night vision glasses. She walked back up to the road, turning right and making her way along the side of the road, hugging the tree line. There was no street or cabin lighting. It was pitch black.

Fifty feet from where the roads merged, Wire glanced right and noticed another car parked as she had, twenty feet back into a small winding driveway. She quickly walked down the road, took the glove off her right hand and felt the hood. It was cold. The cabin at the end of the driveway was dark, no lights. However, with the night vision goggles she was able to see fresh footprints leading back to the road. She followed them and they led towards Hitch’s cabin.

Perhaps she wasn’t alone. Wire took a quick photo of the car and the license plate.

* * *

Adam Montgomery had been sitting in the woods for a little over half an hour and was now miserable. His partner, Jason Stroudt, was equally so. Neither man properly planned for the rain. Sure they had on raincoats, but no rain pants or hats, and without those, the chilling rain water easily found its way to their bodies. The two were going to be cold, but they hoped it would be worth it.

They’d managed to arrive ahead of the motorcade and were well positioned to the south of the Hitch cottage, kneeling behind a fallen tree, ten feet into dense woods. They were looking out over a large open yard that led to the cabin. Of course, the cabin wasn’t really a cabin, it was a small estate. The home was well over seven thousand square feet and a look inside revealed the finest of cottage furnishings and the layout was perfect, especially if you were looking in from the outside. The main level was large and open, with high ceilings and three different distinct seating areas. The seating area drawing their particular attention was in front of the massive stone fireplace. Over the fireplace was a sixty-inch flat-screen television which was currently rerunning that evening’s
The O’Reilly Factor
. The seating area directly in front of the massive stone fireplace contained comfortable dark plaid couches which were situated around a massive handmade coffee table on three sides. A fire was roaring, with plenty of extra logs to keep it going for hours. Best of all for Montgomery and Stroudt, the front and front sides of the cabin were all tall windows. While the windows undoubtedly provided a wonderful view out to Lake Barkley during the day, they allowed for Montgomery and Stroudt to easily see inside.

“It sure would be nice to be in there,” Montgomery whispered while he quietly fiddled with the lens on his camera, sliding on a telephoto one. They were two hundred feet away from the cabin but there were at least four people patrolling the grounds that they’d seen and they didn’t dare move any closer.

“I would agree,” Stroudt replied softly, wiping the rain drops off the front of his binoculars for what seemed like the tenth time. “There must be someone important coming to meet Checketts,” he added confidently.

“Why do you say that?”

“The Johnny Walker Blue. You don’t break out the Blue for just anybody.”

Montgomery looked inside and his partner was right. On the massive coffee table were a dozen glasses, two buckets of ice and four bottles of Johnny Walker Blue. “What’s the Blue go for these days?”

“My dad bought a bottle last Christmas. He said it ran just north of $200 a bottle.”

“Who are these other two guys?” There was another short, stout, older-looking man pacing around the room in a black suit and shirt, and with a black fedora pulled down tight on his head. He had said perhaps three words to Checketts and spent the remainder of his time either on or reading his smart phone. The third man sitting at the table was thin with blond hair and high cheekbones. He spent his time alternately on his laptop and looking at his phone. It did not appear that the three men necessarily knew one another.

“I don’t know, never seen them before. Checketts carried in a briefcase and the other two look empty handed.”

Just then lights appeared to their left. “Let’s see who else is coming to dinner,” Montgomery said quietly. The blogger put his camera up and zoomed in.

“So who do we have?” Stroudt asked, letting the binoculars hang around his shoulders, his vision partially blocked by trees.

“Looks like,” Montgomery moved slightly left and looked through the camera into the cabin and started snapping and then stopped, quietly uttering, “Oh my God!”

“What?” Stroudt asked urgently.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“What? Tell me,” Stroudt answered, sliding left as well, the binoculars coming to his eyes.

“It’s Heath Connolly,” Montgomery whispered excitedly.

“No way.”

Montgomery simply nodded.

“Checketts and these other two guys are meeting with Connolly? Five days before the election? Out here in backwater Kentucky?”

“What have we stumbled onto here?” Stroudt whispered excitedly.

Montgomery didn’t respond, he simply snapped photos.

* * *

Connolly was inside now, Wire thought as she settled into position behind the base of a massive fallen trunk of a large tree. The tree was one of four or five on the ground in her immediate vicinity. All appeared to have recently fallen, probably the result of a strong storm from the summer now long since passed. The position provided her a clear view of the circular drive to the back of the cottage which would allow for the taking of pictures as everyone departed. Two private security guards were standing on the back porch, both with Styrofoam cups in their hands. Wire put the camera to her eyes, zoomed in and took pictures of each. Another man stepped onto the back porch and gave orders, casually waving the men off the porch and walking around the cabin. Wire snapped two photos of the man, who appeared to be in charge of the security.

Instructions given to the worker bees, the man moved back inside the cabin. And what was going on inside is what interested Wire. However, to see she would need to move to the front of the cottage. She turned to her right, took one careful step and she saw them, perhaps sixty to seventy feet away, camped behind a similar log, already taking photos.

Wire was really good at this but she wouldn’t be able to get into position on this side of the cabin without being noticed by the two men. Even if she could, if they made a mistake, she’d be caught up in the wash. The car she’d seen in the driveway must belong to those two. They’d beat her to the scene.

So who were they? Who did they work for? How did
they
know about this meeting? Those were questions Wire wanted to ask, and would, but in a different and safer time and place. She had the license plate and would track them down. However, for now, unless all she wanted was pictures as the meeting participants walked in and then out the back door, she needed another option.

Wire turned her gaze to the property on the opposite side to the north of the cottage. The topography of the land was not promising as it ran down away from the cottage, although she could make out what looked like another cabin perhaps a hundred feet north of the Hitch place. She carefully moved back to her left ten feet to get a better look. The cabin was older and much smaller, but was two stories with a steep pitched roof. The peak of the roof looked to be just slightly above the height of the main level of Hitch’s. If she could get up on top of that roof, she might be able to see into the cabin from the other side. Wire slid the night vision glasses back on and started carefully moving back towards the road.

It took her ten minutes to pick her way over to the property north of Hitch’s cabin. She was now peaking around the corner of the three-car detached garage sitting twenty or so feet lower than Hitch’s place. The backyard of the cabin was open and cleared like a yard you would find in the city, with just a few trees interspersed through what would be a finely manicured yard in the summer. Fortunately, the cabin appeared to be buttoned up for the year and the floodlights on the garage were dark. Nevertheless, she stuck close to the northern edge of the property and the tree line and scooted to the cabin.

There was an old metal television antennae tower that hugged the north side of the cabin. Wire suspected this was left over from a bygone era before cable or satellite dishes became prevalent. She looked at the base, which had cement footings. The tower itself was secured to the house in two places by metal brackets. Best of all, it had foot rungs. It was sturdy and would easily hold her one hundred twenty-five pounds. She put her left foot into the first rung, when to her right she noticed another set of headlights approaching.

Wire stepped back down off the antennae and slithered back to the rear corner of the cabin and peered towards the driveway behind Hitch’s place. Another limousine had arrived. She slipped off her backpack and kneeled down and took out her camera. She snapped a photo of the license plate. A man providing security opened the rear passenger door.

* * *

“Someone else has arrived,” Stroudt stated, seeing the headlights appear. “Who do we have now?”

“I can’t tell,” Montgomery answered, starting to stand up. “Let me see if I can get in position to take a picture.”

“Can you get one?”

“I need a little better angle,” Montgomery answered as he stood up. He moved to his left five feet, not looking down, and stepped awkwardly onto a branch.

The crack was loud—too loud.

* * *

Wire had her camera trained on the newly arrived limousine. A foot appeared from the rear passenger door, a man ready to step out.

“There’s somebody up there!” she heard a security guard scream as she slipped safely back behind the cabin. “Up in the woods. Up there! Up there! On the south side! On the south side! Up there!”

The two men had been discovered. She was instantly relieved she’d had to change positions. The security man holding open the limousine door was animatedly talking to the man inside the limousine. Then the security man took two steps away from the limousine, quickly pivoted to the south and ordered: “Don’t let them get away.”

“There they are! There they are!” one of the guards yelled.

Then she heard it, an unmistakable sound.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three shots fired.

“What in the hell?” she muttered to herself.

Then she heard another series of gunshots.

The limousine that had just arrived peeled out of the driveway.

The meeting was over.

She sprinted back to the detached garage and took stock. With security focused on the south side of the Hitch cottage and away from her location to the north, Wire took a chance.

She jumped from behind the detached garage and bounded up the hill to the back of Hitch’s and knelt down in a small cluster of trees. She snapped photos of Connolly and others running out of the cabin, and into the waiting limousines and SUVs.

The motorcade quickly sped away.

Wire held her position for a few minutes in case she missed any straggling personnel hanging around. The cabin had gone quiet; most of the lights now out. Sure that it was now safe to move, she carefully moved back away from the cabin and up towards the road and picked her way back to the Acadia all the while wondering “What did those two see, anyway?”

T
he Snelling Motor Lodge was a two-story L-shaped motel from a bygone era, both in its shape and function. It was L-shaped to fit snuggly into a tight lot on the east side of Snelling Avenue near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. In years gone by, its function would have been to host out-of-state families in the cities either visiting or working at the Minnesota State Fair or in town visiting their children attending Hamline University which was located just to its north.