Electing To Murder (3 page)

However, what travelers needed from a hotel, matched with years of neglectful ownership, had allowed The Snelling to fall into a dilapidated state. The red paint was peeling away from its cedar siding and the years of harsh Minnesota winters and heavy snow had wreaked havoc on the faded black shingled roof, causing it to look as wavy as Lake Minnetonka. The cement parking lot was strewn with small pot holes and the sidewalks were chipped and cracked. People looking for a good night’s rest and some peace and quiet usually did not stay at The Snelling. People looking to engage in activities they didn’t want others to see did. Time and neglect turned The Snelling over to a poorer clientele, one that frequently included drug dealers, junkies and prostitutes. So it was no surprise to Detective Mac McRyan that at 5:30 p.m. he was turning into the parking lot of The Snelling, pulling up to yellow crime scene tape and parking next to the coroner’s wagon.

This wouldn’t be his first rodeo at The Snelling.

Mac put his new Yukon in park and took one last long sip of his Depth Charge Coffee from the Grand Brew. Thirty-three years old, he had four years as a detective. He was a fourth generation cop, with cousins and uncles scattered throughout the St. Paul Police Department. When you retired from the first family business, you went to work for the second family business, McRyan’s Pub, sitting on the southwest corner of downtown St. Paul on West Seventh Street.

While policing and owning a bar were the family businesses, Mac’s route to being a cop was far more circuitous than for the rest of his family. He’d been a hockey player at the University of Minnesota, captain his senior year. He was also a scholastic All-American. As a result, Mac McRyan had other options available to him. So while other McRyans of his generation stayed true to family form and went into policing, Mac went to law school with his college sweetheart, got married and appeared set for a long, lucrative and successful legal career. He had been hired by the biggest firm in town with a six-figure salary waiting. Then lightning struck two weeks after he passed the bar exam. His two cousins and best friends were killed in the line of duty and suddenly he felt the pull and obligation of the family business. Mac made detective by age twenty-nine, was divorced by age thirty and now at age thirty-three was the best detective on the force.

He grabbed his worn brown leather folder, pen and cell phone and rolled his athletic six-foot-one frame out of the warmth of the truck. There was a definite chill in the air. The temperature was dropping quickly from a noontime high of forty-eight and was now dipping into the mid-thirties, with a stiff northwest breeze adding to the chill, cold even for Minnesota in late October. Winter was still a ways away, but days like today made you realize it wasn’t that far away. Mac threw his black wool overcoat on over his suit coat and pulled a navy blue scarf around his neck and walked under the crime scene tape.

His cousin Shawn, a uniform cop, greeted him with a smile and: “Hey cuz. I didn’t think the chief would send the A-squad to The Snelling.”

“Just my luck, I guess,” Mac answered. “Hold this,” Mac said as he handed his cousin his brown leather folder and reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of rubber gloves. He took the folder back, “Lich will be along any minute.”

“So you think the governor will pull it out next Tuesday?”

“I sure hope so,” Mac answered, “if for no other reason than just to see Sally happy. Given all the work she’s put in the last couple of months, she’ll be absolutely devastated if he doesn’t.”

Sally was Sally Kennedy, Mac’s girlfriend. She had taken leave from her assistant Ramsey County attorney job to work on Minnesota Governor James Thomson’s presidential campaign. An old law school friend who was a close aide of the national campaign manager, a famous local political operative named Judge Dixon, recruited her back in mid-summer. She’d poured herself into the work and made a very favorable impression on the man known as “The Judge.” It would be good for her career since she had aspirations beyond the county attorney’s office. Judge Dixon was an excellent man to have for a reference.

“So what do we have, Shawney?” Mac asked, getting back on task. A dead body awaited his attention.

“Body is upstairs. I snuck a quick peek. You’ve got a white male, probably in his mid-thirties. Bloody as hell. The guy’s throat was cut nearly ear to ear, pretty gruesome. Given the location, I’d say it’s probably a drug-robbery-sex cocktail.”

Mac raised an eyebrow, “So I can just go home then?”

Shawn smiled, “I suspect the powers that be probably would like a detective, particularly one of your caliber, to sign off on the theory of a lowly patrolman.”

“Pity,” Mac replied. “Who discovered the body?”

“A Valeninos Pizza delivery driver, with an assist from the motel manager.”

“Valeninos?”

“Yeah. Apparently our vic upstairs ordered a pie. The driver knocks on the door and there’s no answer. He looked in the window, there was a sliver of a gap between the curtains and the window and he saw a leg on the floor and the guy wouldn’t get up no matter how long he knocked. Driver was smart enough to …”

“… realize where he was and went and got the manager,” Mac finished.

“That’s right. Manager came up, opened the door, saw what you’re going to see and called 911.”

“Do we have a name?”

“Yeah, Bob Smith.”

Mac gave his cousin a skeptical look, “Bob Smith?
Seriously?
”

“That’s what the motel manager said. At least that’s what the room register has his name as.”

“Let me guess. Neither identification nor a credit card were required to rent a room?”

“The Snelling rarely asks for such niceties from its clientele these days,” Shawn answered. “Not good for their customer retention program, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t imagine it is,” Mac sighed as he strode over to the open-air concrete stairs and made his way up the steps to the second level and strolled along the balcony to room 211. He carefully stepped inside the doorway. Like all rooms at The Snelling, this one was cramped. To his immediate right was a cheap small square table with two extremely weathered navy blue fabric chairs. An unopened Valeninos’ pizza box sat on the table. Farther inside and to the right were two twin-size beds. The bedspread of the closest bed was slightly disturbed and the two pillows were stacked on the left side near the nightstand. A cheap oak dresser and old-school box television on a stand were to his left. The bathroom and a door-less closet containing two stray metal hangers on the clothes rod were to the back.

The body was laying face down, less than ten feet inside the door. There was a line of blood splatter on the left wall running above the dresser and across the mirror. The coroner was crouched down, examining the body, careful to keep her feet out of the pool of blood. She looked up to see Mac and smiled. “Detective McRyan, how nice to see you.”

“And you, Doctor. What can you tell me about our boy Bob Smith here? Like, for example, do we know if that’s actually his real name?”

“We don’t. No wallet on the body or in the room,” the coroner answered. “There are markings on his left wrist suggesting he wore a watch but there isn’t one to be found.”

“You’ll take prints off the vic, of course?”

“You bet, Mac. We’ll run them and see if we get a hit. Given we’re at The Snelling, odds are in our favor.”

Mac looked back to a uniform cop standing just outside the door. “Did you guys find any luggage? Duffel bag? Backpack? Anything like that?”

The uniform shook his head.

Mac turned back to the coroner, “How long has Bobby here been dead?”

“No rigor, so I’d say he hasn’t been dead more than two to three hours tops. Cause of death looks pretty obvious, knife, right across the throat.”

“I assume he was grabbed from behind?” Mac asked, as he jotted down notes.

The coroner nodded.

“And he’s facing the left wall here when he cuts him across the throat. Look at the blood splatter. See how it runs across the wall and thins out left to right? That would suggest to me the killer used his right hand.”

“As would the wound, from what I can tell,” the coroner replied. “The guy is damn near decapitated.”

“So how does our killer get in here and get the jump on the guy?” Mac asked and then looked down to his right at the table. “The pizza perhaps?”

“Maybe. The vic makes a call for a pie,” the coroner says. “Pizza guy gets in the room and then takes the knife to our guy.”

“Valeninos will
love
that,” Mac answered, shaking his head. “But that doesn’t really add up, does it? I mean, the Valeninos guy found our body to start with.” Mac flipped up the top to the pizza box. The box was empty.

“Interesting. No pizza in the pizza box.” Mac turned to the uniform cop. “Is the Valeninos guy still hanging around?”

“Yes.”

“Confirm with him that he still has the pizza that was ordered.”

The uniform ran off. Mac turned back to the room, “So between whenever he made his order and the time they found him, someone got in here, dressed as a delivery man, and decapitates our guy. But why? For what reason? Why is Bob, or whatever his name really is, so important? So important that someone would, in broad daylight no less, get in here, to The Snelling, to kill him.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to take a standard run of the mill drug or sex related murder here at The Snelling and turn it into something complicated,” moaned McRyan’s partner Richard Lich, a/k/a Dick Lick, as he stepped carefully into the room. Attired in one of his trademark shit-brown suits, striped tie and scuffed loafer ensembles that was topped off with a black fedora covering his bald dome, Lich carefully maneuvered his heavyset body around the deceased. “Why, for once, can’t it just be easy?”

“What would be the fun in that,” Mac replied with a wry smile. “Besides, the case is more interesting when you add into this the question of how our killer knows the guy ordered from Valeninos?”

Lich shrugged his shoulders.

Mac’s cousin had an answer, “Valeninos is the only shop that will deliver here.”

“Fine,” Mac responded, but then asked, “how did the killer know he ordered a pizza?”

“Hmpf,” Lich snorted. Dick walked over to the hotel phone, picked it up and took a quick look around and didn’t see an obvious listening device. “We should have crime scene take the phone and examine it,” he said. “That’s a good question, Mac. Could have just been standing outside the door and heard it and thought it’s a good way to get in.”

Mac chewed on that as he walked back over to the victim and ran his small pen-sized flashlight over the exposed arms of the victim. “Doc, you see any evidence of drug use on the vic?”

“No needle marks that I saw on his arms,” the coroner answered as she pulled off the victim’s socks and examined between the toes. “I don’t see any needle marks between the toes along the feet, so he looks clean. I can tell you for sure once I examine him at the morgue and run a tox screen. However, he doesn’t have the drug user look to him.”

Mac nodded as he looked the victim over. He had an expensive haircut with maybe one or two day’s stylish razor stubble. The victim’s clothes were a little dirty but were quality, Levi’s, nylon Nautica zip-up black pullover, top-of-the-line hiking boots. “Is it me or does this guy not fit the common demographic for clientele here at The Snelling, or at least the clientele that fractures the occasional law while here?”

“You mean, say, a strung out drug addled sex fiend?” Lich asked.

“Yeah, something like that,” Mac answered nodding.

“Then that’s a negative. He looks pretty clean cut for The Snelling.”

“Is
Bob
even from these parts?” Mac asked.

“No ID. No wallet. No luggage, so who knows?” Lich answered. “Maybe he’s a student from Hamline University who wandered down the street into the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He’s older than a Hamline student,” Mac answered. “This guy is in his thirties, I’d say.”

“Maybe a law student?” Lich questioned. Hamline had a law school.

“William Mitchell usually would have the law students in their thirties, going to the night school, not Hamline.” Mac answered, a William Mitchell graduate in his own right. He stood up and walked over to the bed where the victim appeared to have been sitting.

“What are you thinking, Mac?” Lich asked.

“Our guy was sitting here on the bed, watching television perhaps, maybe the news.”

“The news?
At The Snelling
?” Lich replied skeptically. “Porn seems more likely.”

“Speaking from experience,” Mac replied, which drew a one-finger solute response from Lich. “Whatever he was watching, our guy is sitting here, right?”

“Yeah. He hears a knock on the door,” Lich adds. “Thinking his Valeninos’ Deluxe Supreme has arrived.”

“Right, he looks through the peephole and the guy is holding a pizza or at least a pizza box.”

“So he lets the killer in. The killer walks in, puts the pizza box on the table.”

“Bob here is relaxed and perhaps reaches for his wallet. Figuring he’ll pay for the pizza quick and …”

“The killer sees this and jumps him from behind, cuts his throat and leaves with his wallet, watch and apparently anything else our guy came with,” Mac finished as he pulled the pillows up and looked down. Between the mattress and the wall, just under the headboard, he saw a piece of paper. He unfolded it.

“I don’t think Bob is from around here.”

“What do you have?”

“A boarding pass, interestingly enough. Delta flight from St. Louis to Minneapolis dated today. And it’s not for a Bob Smith, but for a Jason Stroudt.”

“Case just got a little more interesting,” Lich said.

“Perhaps,” Mac answered. “I mean, it seems to me it would be pretty unusual for someone to fly up from St. Louis and then come
here
?”

“Unless he was coming up here to get a little somethin’ somethin’, a girl maybe,” Lich answered. “Or maybe he’s going to make some sort of drug deal.”

“Where is the evidence of that? The coroner says there is no outward evidence of drugs on the victim.”