flight nor had he taken any other flight, unlike his business partner. Kristoff had a team conduct a search of Stroudt’s home and office in the early morning hours. The team was still reviewing everything from the search but thus far they had no leads on how the two bloggers knew of Kentucky.
Montgomery would surface eventually. Kristoff’s men were tracking Montgomery’s cell phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, website, credit cards and cash card. Sooner or later he would show up on the electronic grid, they always did. Kristoff just needed Montgomery to come out of hiding in or near a place where he had assets available to be deployed.
In the meantime, Kristoff and Foche decided to monitor the Stroudt crime scene. They’d been watching The Snelling for a half hour when the Black Yukon arrived bringing the first suit to the scene. “Younger guy,” Foche said hopefully.
“Do St. Paul cops drive high-end Yukons?” Kristoff wondered out loud as he picked up his cell phone and made a call. “I need you to run a Minnesota plate.”
Fifteen minutes later he had the rundown on the Yukon on his phone. “This could have gone better,” he muttered.
“Why?” Foche asked.
“The Yukon is not department issue but the personal vehicle of Michael McKenzie McRyan. He’s a detective and from the look of things, a fine one. Magna Cum Laude graduate from the University of Minnesota and William Mitchell College of Law. He joined the police department after law school and has some rather impressive police work to his name.”
“Guy with that background becomes a cop for a very specific if not personal reason,” Foche said with some insight. “Something must have happened to him or a family member to make him become a cop.”
“You may be right. Part of the answer may be that police work is something of the family business. Apparently there are many a McRyan in the St. Paul Police Department. His late father was Simon McRyan, a detective of some regard years ago. Perhaps young Michael McKenzie here simply followed the calling to the family business.”
“What has he done that means we should hold him in such high esteem?” Foche asked.
“You remember hearing about that shoot-out in St. Paul with some professionals who worked with the military contractor PTA?”
“I do,” Foche answered, sitting up in his passenger seat and dropping the binoculars from his eyes to look at Kristoff. “I knew the man with PTA. His name was Webb Alt. I worked with him two different times when he was CIA, they called him Viper. He was very good.”
“While at PTA, this Alt got into some off-the-books arms sales business that this McRyan discovered. McRyan took him down. There was a chase through downtown St. Paul and McRyan got the drop on Alt and shot him in a parking ramp. Then summer before last there was a kidnapping case, where the St. Paul police chief’s and a prominent lawyer’s daughters were kidnapped. It was a national story over the 4th of July. There was significant media coverage.”
“McRyan had that one as well?” Foche asked.
“He did. Apparently, against orders, he went rogue with a couple of other detectives. He brought both women home and took down all the kidnappers, even the FBI agent working it from the inside.”
Foche was mildly concerned. “I seriously doubt McRyan will find much at the scene that will trace this back to us, but we handled Stroudt without much preparation.”
“So?”
“We should keep a little eye on this McRyan. He obviously has some ability.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Virginia? Really?”
Sebastian McCormick slumped his angular six-foot-two frame into a soft conference table chair and put his Budweiser to his lips as he looked out the windows of the twenty-second-floor conference room of the Thomson Campaign Headquarters in downtown St. Paul. At thirty-six, he was hitting his stride as a master political operator. Although he’d worked one previous presidential campaign, most of his experience was with Minnesota state politics. But this go around he’d hitched his wagon fully to the Judge, who was the master, and McCormick was soaking up every last bit of knowledge he could from Dixon and had impressed all in the Democratic Party in the process. He now knew every power player in the party, had them on his cell phone and now they all took his calls. In four years he expected to either be running the re-election campaign of President James Thomson or that of whomever the Democratic Party ran. His star had shot that high, with no