if a deal was struck. Joe Kennedy admitted he met with Giancana, but that was it and he claimed he never asked Sinatra to do it, but Connolly didn’t buy it.
Joe Kennedy made that deal.
That deal won the election.
John F. Kennedy became president.
What Connolly admired and learned from that little piece of history was that in a close election, you had to do whatever you could to win.
He was doing the same.
Kristoff and Foche just needed to finish their job and the rest would take care of itself.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Why did you come to the Twin Cities?”
Mac took a look at his watch: 11:28 p.m. He mixed some sugar into his oversized maroon University of Minnesota coffee cup, took a sip, and winced at the taste. The coffee the break room had to offer at midnight was less than stellar and Mac was a bit of a coffee snob. He opened the refrigerator and rummaged around and found some half-and-half. He screwed off the cap, smelled the creamer once, smelled it again, and decided it was good enough. He added it to the coffee and attempted to kill its battery-acid-like taste.
Mac possessed a minority ownership stake in a coffee chain called the Grand Brew and it was about to change his life. The business had exploded in the last two years. The chain was now up to nearly two hundred coffee shops spread across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, with plans for more expansion on the board.
The Grand Brew was started by two of Mac’s childhood friends. They needed $10,000 to get over the financing finish line for their first coffee house. Mac’s father had set up a college fund for him. But when Mac turned into a star high school athlete and went to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, the $57,408 Simon McRyan saved for his son’s college education wasn’t needed, at least for tuition, books or lodging. Mac accessed the fund from time to time in college for some spare money when needed and he also accessed it to pay for some of his law school tuition. However, when he graduated law school, the fund still had a little over $23,000 sitting in it. When his two buddies needed the extra ten grand, Mac agreed to provide it in return for fifteen percent of the business.
It was a good deal.
Each year, Mac received a dividend from the business. In the last three years, the dividend made his detective’s salary look like an allowance. Two large food corporations had been sniffing around looking to buy Grand Brew Enterprises. Both had now put legitimate offers on the table. Just before Mac arrived at The Snelling, he’d been meeting with his two friends. They told him that by this time tomorrow, he would be a multi-millionaire, all on a little $10,000 investment to help two buddies he’d known since he was six years old when they all walked to their first-grade class together. It would be a life altering event and his mind had wandered a bit in the last six hours thinking about it, wondering how much longer he would be a cop if it were to happen. If his friends were right, after tomorrow, he could do whatever he wanted with the rest of his life. What would that be? He liked what he did. It was rewarding work and it was the family business, but would he want to continue it going forward? Would he have the same passion, urgency, angst and commitment the job required? Would he need something else?
Mac shook his head. This could all wait. He refocused on the matter at hand and rolled his desk chair up to his desktop computer.
Lich was exhausted and went home. The case could wait, he said. He was probably right, but with Sally working late into the night, and Mac being a night owl anyway, he decided to keep working the case for a while longer. The case piqued his interest more than normal. On a case like this, he was less an investigator and more of a hunter, and the hunt was on. The game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say.
The squad room was quiet, with only a few night shift cops hanging around. A television in the corner was tuned to CNN. The volume was loud enough for Mac to hear a replay of the day’s political conversation. The presidential election was essentially down to four states based on current polling, the same four