“He’s not your average cop, Dara.” Dixon provided some background on McRyan. “And Mac? He knows this smells. I could hear it in his voice and Sebastian saw it in his eyes. He knows Stroudt was in Kentucky. In fact, he has a good timeline established. And after today, as sure as the sun rises in the east, he is going to come back at us because he knows we know more than we let on. So rather than pissing him off, I’d rather have him on our side. If we tell him what we know and give him what we have, little though it may be, he will run with it. And once he has the scent, look out.”
Wire didn’t often hear the Judge speak of people in this way. The man was a hard sell, yet he gushed about this St. Paul detective. “You’re that impressed with him?”
The Judge nodded. “He’s natural police. You will like him. I guarantee it.”
“So do we call him when we land?”
“I have Ms. Kennedy taking care of that. We will meet first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Kristoff, we have a problem.”
Mac was a St. Paul guy through and through, but when it came to good restaurants, the competition to the west, Minneapolis, won hands down. In particular, Mac and Sally had developed an affinity for the little restaurants, bistros and character filled hole-in-the-wall bars just northeast of downtown Minneapolis, across the Mississippi River, in an area known to the locals as Nordeast. They often found themselves over in that part of town, going to dinner at one of the little eateries and then finding a small bar or two, usually with good live music, for post-dinner drinks, especially if they made their way over that way on a weekend. The twenty-something crowd, along with Twins and Timberwolves fans could have the robust bar district in downtown Minneapolis, but Nordeast catered to the thirty-something crowd and that worked just fine for them.
Their new favorite restaurant was the Bella Eatery that served authentic Italian. The Bella sat in the middle building of a short block on University Avenue. It was a small place with two rows of four top tables up front, then a small bar that divided the restaurant width wise and then a series of tall booths in the back. When they came to the Bella, Mac and Sally always tried for one of the booths. Tonight, their timing was impeccable as their favorite booth opened up just as they walked in. The booth was a small circular one isolated in the far back right corner. It offered privacy and quiet, as if you were eating at home.
The greeter seated them at the table and let them know of the specials. The waiter was Johnny, on the spot a minute later: “Can I offer either of you a glass of wine?”
Mac was a beer man normally but he’d taken a liking to wine in the last year or so. Up until that point in time, he’d never been a big wine fan, not liking the bitter taste and generally being like his family, strictly beer and Irish whiskey. Sally told him it was because, “All you’ve ever drank was cheap Two Buck Chuck or Boone’s Farm, Mac. Funny how much better good wine tastes, you know, wine that comes out of a bottle with like, you know, a cork.”
Sally was exaggerating to a degree, but when he went to a dinner party with some older lawyer friends of hers last year, he was introduced for really the first time to high quality wines. The friend had a wine cellar in his Lake Minnetonka home stocked with over five hundred bottles of red wine. That night the dinner party of ten polished off twelve bottles and the quality of each left Mac with a new appreciation for wine.
As was his nature, once he was interested in something, he jumped in with both feet. The day after the party, Mac went online and ordered a subscription to the Wine Enthusiast magazine. Not long after, he joined a law school friend’s wine club and found his way to a half dozen wine tastings in the last year. In his own right, he was now building a wine collection with over fifty bottles of mostly red wine at home and was drawing up plans for a small wine cellar behind the bar in their basement. In no way did he consider himself