“In this case, the passenger directs the driver,” Mac stated. “I assume no good facial views of the passenger either?”
Ring shook his head, “Dressed in the same uniform. They were a team.”
“How about witnesses? Were there any?” Wire asked, looking around. It was a busy street near the bar district.
“Kind of,” Ring replied. “The security guard for the tower heard the collision and was the one who called it in. There were two other witnesses walking on the street but they were a good hundred yards away when Martin was run down. They gave us a description of the Suburban but not much else. So there wasn’t much there.”
“How about Martin? Anyone have a reason to want to kill him?”
“That’s what was incredibly odd,” Ring answered. “I figured we’d find someone with motive when we started digging through his life but turns out, the guy didn’t have much going.”
“Let me guess,” Mac started. “He had work and not much else.”
“Correct.”
Mac and Wire looked up and down the street again, taking the scene in. Wire held her gaze to the west while Mac asked, “So Martin didn’t live here, right?”
“No,” Ring answered. “He was visiting a friend here, a Ms. Ginger Bloom. Turns out she was his assistant at DataPoint.”
“Fishing off the corporate pier?” Mac asked.
Ring smiled, “You know they say that is a really bad idea, that it can go really bad.”
“It certainly did in this case,” Wire noted.
“You could say that, Ms. Wire, you could,” Ring replied with a smile. “In any event, Mr. Martin was here until just after 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday and then when he left, he was killed.” The detective looked at his file and sighed sadly. “You know. This Martin guy didn’t look like he ever did anything wrong. Good citizen, worked hard, maybe even a workaholic, and yet he gets steamrolled in the middle of a busy street and I can’t understand why. What did he do?”
“Detective Ring,” Wire answered, “that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“And,” Mac finished, “we’re thinking the answer is at DataPoint. Think you could help us?”
Ring nodded, “Let me make some calls.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“You caught the hesitation?”
Mac was on his phone as he, Wire and Ring walked out of the Starbucks with fresh coffees. It was a Saturday morning and Ring made some calls to arrange for key personnel to appear at DataPoint. While there was a Saturday manufacturing shift working, the key players they wanted to talk to were not in. They would be by the time Ring led them there.
Mac hung up his phone, “Paddy confirms, same shoe tread in St. Paul as we found out at Checketts’s place. Also same size, this was not a suicide,” Mac reported.
“We should let Kaufman and Herdine know,” Wire suggested as they walked down the street.
“I gave him Herdine’s number so that’s going to be taken care of. Bit by bit we’re getting somewhere here,” Mac said enthusiastically.
As she approached the Acadia, Wire looked back west down Juneau and stared for a moment. “Why don’t you drive,” she suggested, flipping the keys to Mac as they approached the Acadia. “You seem to know the town better anyway.”
Mac took the keys and jumped behind the wheel and turned the ignition and adjusted the rearview mirror up some and noted Ring approaching in his dark blue Crown Victoria from behind. Once Ring was past, McRyan pulled away from the curb and fell in behind for what Ring said would be a ten-minute drive to DataPoint. Wire, meanwhile, sat slouched down in the passenger seat and with the finger controls on the center console, adjusted the passenger-side rearview mirror so that she could look back. After a minute she saw it. She casually pulled a small notepad out of the pocket of her leather jacket and started writing down the plate number.
“Silver Traverse six or seven back, right?” Mac said, taking a gander in the rearview mirror. “I assume that is what’s got you a little spooked?”
Wire looked back to McRyan with an astonished look on her face. “How long have you been on it?”
“I noticed it once or twice when we were driving into the city from Whitefish Bay if only because the license plate has the numbers 422. And then again when we were walking the scene with Ring which is when you noticed it, right, you were gazing back down the street for an extra stretch?”