“They could have… been… gaming this thing from the get go.” She put her hand over her mouth, astonished.
Summer nodded. “Do we tell the rest of my people coming?”
“Let’s not if we don’t have to,” Mac cautioned. “I want to keep this part of it quiet for now.”
Two lawyers and a secretary walked into the room. Summer broke off from Mac and Sally to give them the rundown. The three immediately went to the computers and started them up, and Summer waved Sally over, showing her what to do. The idea was to pull every name they could find from the civil side of Lyman’s practice. When Hagen arrived he’d run that information against the database of information at the Department of Public Safety.
Mac went to the whiteboard, flipped open his notebook, and started copying out the thoughts he had at the Pub. He excluded his speculations on the inside job, keeping that close for now. With it all back up on the whiteboard, he scanned once more for the big picture. Lyman and Chief, long list of cases. How long? Mac turned to Plantagenate.
“Can you access all of Lyman’s civil cases here at the office?
“Everything in the last five years or so,” Summer replied. “The rest is off-site.”
Mac sighed. Nothing was ever easy. “Where? Where is the off-site?”
“North St. Paul, up off of Highway 36, place called Old Files,” one of the other lawyers answered.
“We need people up there as well. Get them there with cell phones, laptops, Dictaphones, the works,” Mac said. “We’re on a tight clock here.” Summer started dialing.
Lich came back into the room with an odd look on his face. “We gotta go somewhere.”
Riles and Rock stood with the warden at the front entrance to the Ramsey County Correctional Facility, otherwise known as the County Workhouse. The short and heavyset warden of the facility, a man named Ferm, worked his second Marlboro. He talked about the first-place Twins, the weather, and the circus that often was the Fourth of July event in his hometown of Stillwater.
“Shit, with all the boats on the river tomorrow night, there’s sure to be trouble.”
“How many boats?” Rock asked as he sucked on a cigar he’d bummed off Lich, skillfully blowing smoke out through the gap in his front teeth.
“In Stillwater, around the bridge,” Ferm replied, “hundreds for the fireworks. Not to mention it’ll just be busy as hell up and down the whole thing all day. My wife and I love the river.” Ferm blew smoke and then shook his head, “but we never go out on the Fourth. The only place it’ll be quiet is up north, near the old railroad bridge and even then, with the fireworks in Stillwater, not to mention those that people just shoot off normally, it’ll be a raucous night. I just hope nobody gets hurt.”
Just then, the diminutive Hagen came through the doors with a pair of guards. He saw Riley and Rock and smiled. “I should have known it was you two fuckers.”
“Ooooo, it’s the hardened convict,” Rock said, smiling, pulling cuffs out of his pocket and dangling them in Hagen’s face before slapping them on the man’s wrists. The cuffs secured, Rock eased him into the backseat of the Crown Victoria.
Riley shook Ferm’s hand and got behind the wheel, pulled away and drove back east on I-94 toward downtown St. Paul. Once on the highway, Rock reached into the back and undid the cuffs. The cuffs were just for show anyway. Hagen was an unlikely flight risk.
Arrested last winter as part of the bust on PTA, Hagen, a computer whiz, was seduced by the money offered by the company to run their network and computer systems. The company, and in particular the vice president of security, a man named Webb Alt, noted Hagen’s computer skills and put him to work on operations that monitored company employees. Before he knew it, Hagen was working for former CIA operatives who had no trouble dropping bodies to protect a covert arms sales operation. When Mac and Company came down on PTA, Hagen was found in a basement bunker in the PTA building, running the computer operations for Alt’s crew. In an effort to shave years off his sentence, Hagen worked with the police and federal authorities to piece together the PTA operations and track down missing PTA personnel.
He was no hardened criminal. Small in size and about as far from intimidating as you could get, Hagen had been dragged into the whole thing without much choice. He could have been sentenced to years of prison time, but Flanagan, Mac, and the rest took a shine to him as he helped tie up loose ends on PTA. Sally successfully worked to get his sentence reduced and also have it served in the County Workhouse.
Hagen had another six months to go on his one-year sentence. Two times already, Riles and Rock had sprung him to do a little work for the police department. This was on top of all the computer work he did at the workhouse. It would cost the county millions to pay contractors for what Hagen was providing them in return for three hots and a cot. Now they were calling on him again.