have given Foche time to hopefully be made well enough to travel and leave the country to recover if he survived. But McRyan didn’t think that way. Instead, in a mere seven hours, he’d found Foche. On a professional level, it left Kristoff extremely impressed.
Foche had been leery of McRyan from the get go, much more than Kristoff himself. Kristoff was an operational man, a problem solver, whereas Foche was the stronger of the two in accounting for the human component of what they were doing. He had an uncanny ability to read people. Kristoff’s partner was proven right yet again. McRyan was an extremely capable adversary.
Kristoff wished to fly back to Minneapolis to immediately and personally assess the situation of his friend. Could he break him free of police custody? Could he get him on a plane to safety? Would he even be healthy enough to travel? If given some time and resources, he was confident he could make it happen, no matter the odds.
Moriarity and Holmes knew this but warned him off nonetheless. His two men told him that the police presence surrounding Foche was robust and that it would require a significant assault to free him and even then the chances of success would be questionable at best. The police in the Twin Cities were now on full alert and no chances would be taken with the security around Foche, they said, if the force surrounding him at Lupo’s office was any indication. Nevertheless, Kristoff wanted to go back to see for himself.
The Bishop understood Kristoff’s desires, but they had to wait. The “oil well” that was their current crisis was still not fully capped and the next step in tying it all off would be far more difficult and an operational approach to taking care of that problem needed to be quickly developed.
Foche could and would have to wait. In fact, with regard to Foche, Bishop held a different concern. Would he talk? “I am loyal, Kristoff, this you know. But if he lives, will Francois talk?”
“Never,” Kristoff replied defiantly. “Francois will not break, I promise you. He knows that I will come for him. They may identify him but there is no way they can tie him back to you and he will not say a word.”
“In the long run, that he is in Minnesota is not the worst for us.”
“What do you know of the Minnesota penal system?” Kristoff asked.
“Minnesota does not have the death penalty for murder,” the boss answered. “If he is convicted of first-degree murder, he will get a life sentence. Minnesota prisons are not as bad as some other states, nor, might I add, as secure.”
“Then in time I will get him out.”
“And I’ll help,” the Bishop answered. “But first, we must finish this or it will not matter.”
“Understood.”
Kristoff poured himself another glass, “I will see you again, my friend,” he whispered and toasted Foche one more time and started contemplating his next move.
* * *
The two Milwaukee detectives, understanding what their Twin Cities colleagues had gone through and where their suspicions were coming from, treated the scene as a homicide.
Problem was, the scene looked an awful lot like a suicide.
There were no signs of any struggle or forced entry into the home, other than the efforts of McRyan to get inside from the patio to see if Checketts was still alive. There was no suicide note left behind. However, a look at the financials and correspondence on Checketts’s desk suggested a likely reason for his suicide, if that’s what this was. The man was broke. He’d lost millions in Vegas and owed millions more and he didn’t have the funds to cover it. He appeared to be ruined financially, at least on a personal basis. You could theorize how a person like Checketts, a successful businessman who was about to be broke, couldn’t face it. The crime scene techs weren’t finding anything inside the house to suggest otherwise and the coroner, at least preliminarily, said it looked like a suicide. That is what it looked like to Kaufman and Herdine as well, although they were both careful to say that is what it looked like. Mac could tell the two of them were on the ball with a healthy dose of police skepticism. He knew plenty of cops who would see the obvious, take it and never give it a second thought, never question if the obvious was actually the answer.