“Riiiiight,” Mac muttered as they walked to the car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“He’s alive. Everyone else is dead.”
Sunday morning, 3:32 a.m. The small FBI motorcade made its way through the now sleepy streets of Washington DC from Reagan National, with its destination being the Hoover Building.
Mac was alone now. Wire was not going to be in on the briefing of the FBI director. If the investigation, if that’s what it still was at this point, was going to end up going where Dixon wanted it to go, Mac would have to get it across the finish line.
On the flight to Washington, Mac and Wire walked through the case. Mac put together a PowerPoint on his computer, building from the outline on the whiteboard back in St. Paul. While they were doing that, the voting machine was tested in another part of the plane and the memory cards did exactly what Gabriel Martin explained they would. One of every twenty votes for Governor Thomson was rolled over to Vice President Wellesley’s column, so in Mac’s mind, they had solved what the whole cover-up was about, election fraud. He had his murderer, at least of Montgomery and McCormick and probably Stroudt as well. But someone let the killer off the leash and put the plan to manipulate the election results in motion and had been engineering the cover-up of its discovery. That someone looked to be Heath Connolly.
Wire and the Judge were absolutely convinced it was Connolly.
Mac wasn’t so sure.
After Mac, Wire, Dixon and Sally worked through the case timeline on the flight, Mac sat with the outline for a while. On his laptop he kept flipping through all the pictures of the Kentucky meeting and he kept stopping on one: Wire’s photo of the limousine, with the door open and a leg showing under the bottom of the door. Wire told him that as she took the photo, someone yelled out they had spotted Montgomery and Stroudt on the south side of the cabin. The person never got out of the limousine and it simply sped away.
Who was it?
Just another person with a small part to play in the whole process or was it someone more? One person knew and it was Heath Connolly.
The motorcade pulled in underneath the Hoover Building. As Mac got out of the Suburban, his phone beeped. It was a text from Duffy. Mac read it and mumbled a “shit.”
“What?” Agent Berman asked.
“Nothing,” Mac answered, wanting to digest this latest update. Mac was escorted through security and to an elevator that took them up to FBI Director Thomas Mitchell’s office. The director was in his office in the early a.m. casually dressed in khakis, a blue cardigan and white button down collar dress shirt. He looked the part of the senior lawman, however; tall, forceful, with salt and pepper hair cropped tightly to his head and perceptive eyes.
Agent Berman introduced Mac.
“Detective, your father was Simon McRyan, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mitchell gave a small smile, “He and I worked together a few times many many years ago. As good a police detective as I ever ran across.”
“Thank you for saying that, Director.”
“I also chatted with Charlie Flanagan about an hour ago.”
“At two in the morning, sir?”
“Yeah, the chief wasn’t too happy about that until he realized it was me calling. He’s an old friend. I asked him to give it to me straight about you.”
Mac winced a little, uncertain.
“You needn’t worry, Detective. He said if I thought Simon McRyan was good, wait until I meet his son.”
Mac smiled, just a little, relieved. “The chief is very kind, sir, and perhaps not always objective when it comes to me.”
“I know Charlie Flanagan, Detective,” Mitchell answered seriously. “He doesn’t bullshit and he said neither do you. So I’m very interested to hear what you have to say. I don’t have a good handle on what this is all about. Judge Dixon, another man I trust, gave me his version of events. But he is not objective in this matter. He has an agenda. My agents from Milwaukee and my people in the Civil Rights Division are telling me we’ve got a serious election fraud issue here. I am told the one person who can explain how it is we got to this point is you.”
“I can give you the big picture, sir,” Mac answered.
“Let’s have it.”
Mac looked over to the director’s conference table. “May I?”
Mitchell nodded and followed Mac to the conference table. Two agents also set the DataPoint Voting Machine, silver briefcase, memory