Every city has a 494 strip. In the Twin Cities, 494 is the south and west section of a ring road that encompasses the outer perimeters of Minneapolis and St. Paul. A primary commercial artery in the cities, its increasingly clogged traffic is the result of its being the feeder road to the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport and to the burgeoning suburbs to the south and west of Minneapolis’s first-tier suburbs. But it was when the Mall of America—a monument to the power and passions of American consumers—opened in 1992 that development along 494 grew exponentially. And new hotels led the list of new development along the 494 strip.
On January 2, more than fifty law enforcement officers from around the country gathered in a sublevel meeting room at the Airport Sheraton, less than a mile from the airport and located on a 494 frontage road. If you’d asked the theoretical question, can you get fifty people together from multiple agencies and jurisdictions in four days’ time—right after the New Year’s holiday—everybody’s first answer would have been a solid no. But Minneapolis had something going for it in getting the meeting scheduled fast. Nobody wanted a victim dying on their watch now that they had been alerted to the risk.
In addition to the chief, Mars, Nettie, Glenn Gjerde from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, Linda VanCleve,
and Tee Tucker, there were chiefs of police from sixteen jurisdictions in the investigation, investigators accompanying the chiefs, attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis, local FBI investigators, and Boyle Keegan. Gordon Ball had sent a junior officer since Ball was unwilling to leave Richmond until they’d found Junior Boosey.
As Mars looked around the room, he wished Joey Beck was there. To see what he’d started, to know that something good might yet come of his dad’s death. Mars glanced at three FBI agents standing together near the coffeepot. They’d made little effort to mingle and a lot of effort to look bored by the proceedings. On an individual basis, Mars didn’t have anything against FBI agents. He’d worked with more than one who’d been top-notch investigators and who’d made substantive contributions to cases. Part of the problem came from the Bureau’s hiring practices. It had in recent years made a practice of hiring young attorneys without much street experience as investigators. And too often the attorneys thought the law degree gave them a leg up over other law enforcement professionals. Arrogance doesn’t get you anywhere in an investigation, and more than once an arrogant FBI agent had caused serious problems. From where Mars stood, the three young suits by the coffeepot looked arrogant. Except when Boyle Keegan was within sight. Their deference to Boyle was obvious, even from the opposite side of the room.
The task force meeting began with a go-around where each of the attendees introduced himself or herself and explained their connection to the case. Then Mars was up. He gave a chronological presentation of the case, but spent most of his time on target victim identification. That was, after all, what made the local jurisdictions’ collective hearts beat faster. And there were the still unanswered questions about who the final three victims were.
The funny thing was, the missing victims made sense to Mars and Keegan. The missing victims were Hec’s wild
card. A target that he controlled. A target that he could use to confuse and confound anyone that had figured out his methodology. It was just one more example of the cunning built into his strategy. Mars was sure that Macintosh had used the same elegant means of selecting the last three victims that he’d used in selecting the first sixteen. But what that elegant means was had not yet come to light.
Hec would have been pleased to see the effect his missing three victims had on those attending the task force meeting. They ignored the fact that they had names of target victims in their own jurisdictions and the dates on which those target victims would be at risk, protesting vigorously that anything less than 100 percent certainty was unacceptable.
In frustration, Keegan rose. “Look,” he said. “Consider yourselves lucky. It’s not impossible that one or more of Macintosh’s last three victims would be in your jurisdiction—but it’s not likely. You’re the ones who know who the targeted victims are and when they’re going to be at risk. It’s much more likely that we’ve got someone out there where the jurisdiction hasn’t been notified.”
Keegan’s word quieted the group, but Mars could tell they weren’t comfortable with having anything less than an airtight assurance that there wouldn’t be another victim on their watch.
A chief of police from Watertown, South Dakota, rose. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You’ve got nineteen target dates for the hangings—based on the birth dates of the nineteen guys from Virginia who died at Gettysburg. That right?”
Mars nodded, waiting for his point.
“And what you’re saying is, of the sixteen identified target victims, three are already dead. Leaving thirteen who are at risk on all nineteen dates—or just the sixteen dates where no hangings have occurred yet?”
“I think,” Mars said, “we can be pretty confident Macintosh isn’t going to hang more than one victim on the same date. His point is to honor all nineteen members of the
Twenty-eighth Virginia who died—and all those birth dates are different.”
“So,” the Watertown chief concluded, “our job is to protect identified victims within our respective jurisdictions on the sixteen dates.”
“You got it in one,” Mars said.
The Watertown chief looked around the room. “Well,” he said, “I guess I can live with that. Even if, somewhere out there, there’re three guys who can’t.”
The room erupted in laughter.
“Exactly,” Mars said. It was what he and Keegan had been saying, but having it come from somebody other than the two of them helped. Mars hated to throw a monkey wrench into the improved atmosphere, but it had to be said.
“But remember what we’ve been saying all along. Confidentiality is critical. If Macintosh becomes aware that we know what he’s doing, and when he’s going to do it—if Macintosh thinks there’s a chance we’ll catch up with him before he completes his mission, we think that’s when he’ll use his wild cards.”
Linda VanCleve followed Mars’s presentation with an overview of the historical controversy. VanCleve made the story of the First Minnesota Volunteers’s capture of the flag a compelling narrative, but Mars was irritated by the amount of time she spent justifying the History Center’s retention of the flag. Who had a right to have the flag wasn’t at issue here, but Linda VanCleve had put more effort into winning hearts and minds for her cause than explaining how the deaths that had brought them together related to the captured flag. VanCleve and Mars were a long way from achieving anything like reconciliation.
After VanCleve’s presentation, Gordon Ball’s delegate from Richmond, along with an FBI agent leading the Fugitive Task Force, gave a presentation on Junior Boosey and Hec Macintosh and the status of the search to find the two men. “Like a needle in a haystack,” was the unoriginal but correct conclusion of the Feebie agent. All the same, it was
useful for the attending jurisdictions to attach faces and personalities to the previously amorphous perpetrators.
Mars came forward again after the perpetrator presentation had been completed. He paused for a moment, taking a long gulp from the can of Coke he’d balanced on the podium. “What we want to do now is talk about how we can protect targeted victims in your jurisdictions.”
The room stirred; investigators sat forward with pens poised for note taking.
“As we’ve advised in previous communications, from what we know about the hanging here in Minneapolis and the hangings in Kansas and Wisconsin, Macintosh moved on the victim in a very calculated manner. Our belief is that he chooses a time based on specific knowledge regarding when the victim will be alone and on what the victim’s specific interests are. In Minneapolis, our victim was in dire financial straits. He needed capital badly. His situation had been covered in business publications in the Twin Cities media. We believe the perpetrator researched the victim and identified the victim’s Achilles’ heel. Then he contacted the victim, indicating an interest in investing capital, and asking for confidentiality. He met with the victim, they came to an oral agreement, and then he does something like pulling out a hip flask, proposing a toast. The flask—or whatever—has been heavily spiked with barbiturates—something that has been confirmed by the medical exam. The hanging takes place when the victim’s ability to resist has been compromised.
“Wisconsin and Kansas have just opened homicide investigations in their hanging cases, so we don’t yet know for sure if this scenario matches with their victims. But we know enough to be reasonably sure that Macintosh is using a tailor-made approach based on what he has determined is the victim’s special interest, need, or concern.”
An investigator from Upstate New York raised his hand. “So, as far as what you feel it would be effective for us to do? …”
Mars glanced at the chief before answering. “You all
need to evaluate your targeted victims’ risk individually and make your own judgments. At a minimum, speaking for myself, I’d meet with the potential victim and explain the situation based on the fraud scenario we distributed earlier. We don’t want to start a panic. We don’t think anybody’s gonna be wakened in their beds at night. We’re pretty confident they’re going to receive a contact from a stranger, from somebody suggesting they can support—with money, expertise, whatever—something in which the targeted victim has a strong interest. The stranger will want to meet, and that meeting will be under circumstances where the perp can be confident he will be alone with the victim. So, number one. Your targeted victims should be advised to be extremely cautious regarding any contacts from strangers and to be in touch with law enforcement immediately if they are contacted. Number two, my guess is the perp is not only doing research on victims but is conducting extensive surveillance on the victims before making the contact. So your victims should be alert to the repeated appearance of strangers or vehicles.”
The chief was the last item on the agenda. He covered interagency communications and coordination, indicating it had been agreed that the Minneapolis Police Department would act as lead agency. The Coffeepot Three exchanged disgruntled expressions at this, but said nothing.
Then the chief reviewed support that would be provided to each of the local police departments on target dates. No less than a dozen FBI field agents would be in place, undercover, around each targeted victim. All airports, rental car agencies, and bus and train stations would be covered to identify any suspects that met Macintosh or Boosey’s descriptions. The chief looked over his glasses at the room. “I should say that we’re not expecting public transportation to be used. Our suspect has resources to provide himself with a vehicle, and he has the time to get himself from wherever he is to where he needs to be on the target date. A vehicle gives
him much more flexibility and makes him much harder for us to track. Gives him more anonymity, especially as he can afford to change vehicles from time to time.”
Concluding, the chief said, “Any questions?” The room was silent. “Our hope and expectation is that January four will produce an arrest, not another hanging. And I thank you all for coming to assure that end.” His eyes covered the room. “And Happy New Year.”
Mars, Nettie, and Boyle Keegan stayed around the squad room after midnight on January 4. The plan was that task force members would be advised by phone as soon as Macintosh made his initial contact with a targeted victim. That call would be followed by a conference call for all task force members as soon as Macintosh was—fingers crossed—arrested.
Nobody expected to get the call about Macintosh making a contact with the target before morning. It just wouldn’t make sense to approach a target anytime other than during daylight hours. All the same, Mars, Nettie, and Keegan couldn’t stay away. They hunkered down in the lounge, talking aimlessly, occasionally watching television, and wandering off, one at a time. They took turns napping on the couch, which brought forth curses from Keegan.
“Every time I start to fall asleep, this thing bucks,” he said, rolling off the couch on all fours and crawling on the floor to figure out the problem.
“That’s been happening for years,” Nettie said. “Nothing short of a new couch is gonna change that.”
Keegan stood up, carefully selected months’ old magazines of the desired thickness from the coffee table and dropping down again, slid the magazines under the leg.
Gingerly, he balanced himself on the couch. No rocking. He smiled broadly at Mars and Nettie, raising both arms over his head. “Oh, ye of little faith! I solve murders, I heal the crippled! And now I sleep.” He sank down on the couch, and said, “If we ever bag this case—which admittedly is a
pretty dubious possibility—I’m going to see to it that the Minneapolis PD Homicide Division gets new lounge furniture. That’s a promise.”
He woke, abruptly, at three. “I’m trying to decide,” he said, “if I’m still on duty.”
Mars raised his head. He’d fallen into a doze sitting in a chair. He blinked and looked at Keegan. “In my experience,” he said “we’re always on duty.”
“Yes,” Keegan said. “But there’s on duty and there’s on duty. If what I am right now is on duty, then it wouldn’t be appropriate to pour myself a vodka on the rocks from the bottle in my briefcase. There’s enough for three drinks, if we can decide that none of us is on duty.”
“Drink up,” Mars said. “Me, I’m going in search of an Atlanta cocktail.”
“An Atlanta cocktail?” Keegan said.
Nettie yawned and rebunched her coat under her head. “He’s gonna get a Coke. My turn on the couch yet?”
Mars went down the stairs to the vending machines. City hall was stone silent. It was an odd feeling. To be on the edge of the biggest homicide investigation of his career and to have nothing to do. To know that as he walked the corridors of city hall in the dead of night, Hector Lee Macintosh could be waiting for the dawn of light, poised, ready to move again. While Mars was getting a Coke, the FBI’s premier forensic analyst was fixing furniture and pouring himself a vodka on the rocks, and Nettie was sacked out on the lounge couch.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Mars mumbled to himself as he fed the Coke machine quarters.
At 6:00 A.M. Mars said, “Al’s Breakfast is open. Macintosh isn’t going to call anyone before eight, nine o’clock. Let’s go for breakfast and get back here by seven. I’ll have my calls here forwarded to my cell phone.”
It was something to do.
Al’s Breakfast was in Dinkytown, an approximately four-block-square cluster of squat buildings just north of the university’s East Bank campus. Al’s was an intrinsic part of the university’s culture and one of the few fixtures of that culture that hadn’t changed much in fifty years. It was short on comfort and quiet, and long on atmosphere and attitude. A guy with a good wingspan—Michael Jordan, say—could stand in the center of Al’s single aisle and touch Al’s two walls. Because essentially, that’s what Al’s was—an aisle, with a narrow grill on one wall, a counter, and maybe a dozen stools along the counter.
On a summer morning when the U was in session, there’d be a line out the door waiting for a stool. Once you made it in—no matter how hot it had been outside—you’d get hit with a blast of heat that had texture. If you were there with someone, you didn’t think about getting two stools together. You just took the first stool that was available and hooked up again after breakfast. It wasn’t like you could have a conversation with someone while you were at Al’s, anyway. Mars and Chris went to Al’s occasionally, but they never went when they had something specific to talk about. The noise level obliterated conversation. Eating breakfast at Al’s was more like going to a performance, with the audience all lined up on the stools. The show was Al’s staff cooking, taking orders, being rude to customers—sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes not.
At 6:15 A.M. on January 4, with the university on winter break and the temperature at four degrees Fahrenheit, Mars was able to pull the squad into a space directly opposite Al’s front door. The three of them walked in without a wait and took stools together at the far end of the counter. There were four other customers at the counter, and to Mars’s eye, they were a perfect microcosm of Al’s clientele: a street person, doubtless enjoying Al’s renowned largesse; a couple in jeans, with identical high-volume tightly curled shoulder-length hair; and a notably sedate, middle-aged guy
who was chewing blueberry pancakes very slowly.
Nettie, who was sitting on the opposite side of Keegan from Mars, leaned across Keegan and whispered, “The president of the university.”
Keegan’s brows tightened. “Who?”
Nettie continued to whisper, giving her head a delicate tip in the direction of the blueberry pancake eater. “The president of the university. He came up from the University of Texas—like two years ago. From what I’ve seen of him, he has almost no personality. Except that he’s made a big deal out of being a pancake aficionado. Not, as far as I’m concerned, an acceptable substitute for actually having a personality.”
Keegan smiled wickedly. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that it would be amusing if your pancake-eating president with the personality deficit was in fact one of our missing three victims, and that fellow”—Keegan tipped his head in the direction of the street person—“was Hec Macintosh in disguise.”
“I’m thinking,” Nettie said, “that sleep deprivation is making some of us silly.”
“Sleep deprivation,” Mars said, “and vodka.”
By 10:00 A.M. they’d been back in the squad room for almost three hours. Mars was getting uneasy and Keegan had stopped being silly. The chief had come by twice, the second time with news that he had called other chiefs of police. There was nothing, anywhere. And everyone was getting nervous.
Mars wouldn’t have said it out loud, but he would have preferred a death to nothing. Nothing happening threw all their assumptions about Macintosh and his strategy into question. Nothing happening meant they’d spend too much time on the phone trying to explain to other jurisdictions what was going on. Which wasn’t easy, given that they didn’t know themselves.
Better one death than to risk all the remaining targeted victims, was how Mars felt.
Nettie said, “What we’d talked about before—that if Macintosh realized we knew what he was doing—that he’d pitch the plan, go wild. Do you think that’s happened?”
Mars and Keegan looked at each other. Then both shook their heads. Keegan said, “What Macintosh knows at this point is that the cops are onto Junior. And that Junior has escaped. I don’t see how he gets from that to we know he’s alive, that we know who he’s targeting …”
Mars said, just remembering, “Ruth knows about the numbers. I told her when I was there. Before I knew Hec was still alive.”
“Yes,” Keegan said, a bit impatient, “she knows we know the numbers relate to the Twenty-eighth Virginia flag—at least, that’s what I gathered from what you said, Mars. That doesn’t mean she knows we know about the dead survivors’ target descendents—much less who and where those descendents are. And he doesn’t know we know about the dates. Right?”
Mars nodded. “Probably not.”
“I was thinking,” Nettie said. “Macintosh started these killings almost two years ago. But he didn’t hang a victim last January fourth. Maybe he hangs on those nineteen dates, but he’s not going in chronological order. He kills when he has the information he needs to select the victim, he works on a regional basis—I don’t know, something like that.”
Keegan groaned. “She’s right. Hadn’t focused on that at all. He could do one a year, two a year—any of the dates. Damn. This could go on past my lifetime.” He looked at his watch, then snapped his fingers. “Something else. We’ve had cameras set up at Gettysburg since the twenty-eighth. I could get those tapes and—”
“No,” Mars said. “I haven’t told you yet. When I was in Richmond, I went out to Hollywood Cemetery. The Confederate soldiers who died at Gettysburg are buried there. There’s a big pyramid memorial to the Confederacy, a monument to General Pickett—when I saw it, I thought, if Macintosh
is doing some kind of ritual to mark the killings, this is where it’d be.”
Keegan slapped his hand flat on the desk. “Exactly the right place.”
“I didn’t see anything that looked like something Macintosh would have done, as part of a ritual,” Mars said, “but it was almost dark. I meant to call Ball and ask him to go out to the cemetery during the day and check it out. Slipped my mind completely.”
Without a victim contact by 10:00 P.M., the task force conference call was moved up.
Mars dreaded the call, but it was even worse than he’d expected. In preparing what he was going to say, he realized they’d oversold the certainty of an attempted killing on the fourth. What they should have emphasized to the task force was that January fourth was the first day that identified victims were at risk. Instead, they’d sold January 4 as a sure thing. So much for hindsight.
The jurisdictions that had spent the whole day at full alert were frustrated. Worse, everyone was losing confidence in Mars’s analysis of Macintosh’s MO. What they wanted—and you could hear it in the tone of their voices—was the sure thing.
Mars apologized for the false alarm, then said what should have been said with more emphasis when they’d met on January 2: there was no certainty that Macintosh would make a move on any of the targeted dates. The only thing that was certain was that they needed to be ready on the targeted dates.
They sat together in silence after the conference call, until Mars said, “Nettie? When’s the next date?”
Nettie flipped pages in a file. “February eighth.”
A simultaneous sigh rose from the chief, Keegan, Mars, and Nettie. The chief stood up. “Well, I guess that means we can all get a good night’s sleep, for a change. That’s the
good news.” He looked at Mars. “I don’t want you beating yourself up over this. I’m the guy who sold today as D day at the task force meeting. You’re the one that’s made sense out of this whole thing—the three of you together, but Mars, you especially.” Keegan and Nettie piped up with words of support. It only made Mars feel worse.
Losing the confidence and support of the task force was nothing short of a disaster, and they all knew it.
The chief went home and Keegan went back to his hotel to pack.
“I think the best thing I can do now,” he said, “is to pitch in with the field agents looking for Junior and Hec. I’ll plan on being back here shortly before February eighth. Wouldn’t want to miss breakfast at Al’s while we wait out the task force call.”
Mars and Nettie sat in silence for maybe fifteen minutes after Keegan left.
Nettie said, “What do you want me to do next?”
Mars bent forward, dropping his elbows to his knees, cupping his hands over the lower half of his face. He looked up at Nettie and moved his hands. “Did you get hold of Gordon Ball’s secretary? About his going out to Hollywood to see if there’s any evidence of ritual? …”
Nettie nodded. “She said he’d get to it as soon as he could. He’s out of Richmond right now, working with some of the Feebies in West Virginia. Should be back to us sometime tomorrow.” She looked closely at Mars. “Should I ask her to have someone else assigned to do it?” Nettie’s voice was almost gentle.
Mars looked at her. “No. Gordon will know what to look for without knowing what he’s looking for. One other thing.”
“What?” Her voice was still gentle.
“I hate it when you’re nice. You make me feel like an invalid.”
“So stop moping around like you are an invalid,” Nettie said.
“That’s better.”
“There’s got to be something we can do …”
“Tee Tucker ever get back to us on anything about the dead survivors that might explain why one of them would have more than one descendent targeted? I asked him Christmas Day.”
Nettie shook her head and made a note on her pad. “I’ll call him first thing tomorrow. Struck me as the kind of guy you need to keep after.” She doodled aimlessly for a minute, then stood up. “I’m gonna follow the chief’s lead and head home. You should get some sleep, Mars.”
“You’re being nice, again.”
“Get your ass out of here, Mars.”