Fatally Bound Read Free

exposed a few days before the election, propelled Governor Thomson to a convincing victory. Sally Kennedy, Mac’s girlfriend of two years, had taken a leave from her job as a Ramsey County prosecutor to work for the Thomson Campaign. In her brief tenure with the campaign, Sally impressed the governor and the governor’s campaign manager and closest confidant, a political legend named Judge Dixon. Ten minutes after the networks declared Thomson the winner, she was offered a key political position in the White House political operation. Mac, not seeing how he could possibly deny Sally her dream shot, knew he was going with her. So, the day after New Year’s, Mac packed a large U-Haul and moved to Washington, DC.
    The decision to move was made easier by his newfound wealth resulting from the sale of a chain of coffeehouses he’d owned a minority interest in. He never needed to work again if he didn’t want to, and in Washington that was exactly what he was doing, not working, not getting shot at and leading a relatively quiet and sedate life for a change. Instead of the grind of police work, he was doing two things to keep himself busy. His first project was rehabilitating their dated Georgetown brownstone he bought as a place for them to live and as an investment. He liked working on it and seeing the progress as he restored the home to its original traditional Georgetown glory. When he eventually sold it, he was confident it would net six figures in profit.
    His second project was working on a book about the election investigation with Dara Wire, the ex-FBI agent who worked the high-stakes case with him. Rather than succumb to media interviews that neither of them wanted to give, they instead agreed to split a large advance from a publisher to write the definitive inside story of the investigation. A ghost writer was working with them. A draft of the book for Mac and Dara to tweak and edit was a month away.
    However, as busy as those two projects kept him, Sally worked extremely long hours, leaving him with a lot of downtime to fill. He’d been through all the Smithsonians, checked out all the monuments, and now was starting to play the DC area golf courses and even had played Congressional Country Club, but he was getting a little restless. His life was quiet and sedate, but it was a little too quiet and far too sedate. Mac didn’t think he wanted to be a cop again full time, but he definitely missed a little action in his life. Finding the DC cop bar, meeting and befriending some local officers and detectives and even brainstorming on some of their cases only served to further feed his desire for something to do.
    When he informed St. Paul Police Chief Charlie Flanagan, a father figure for him, he was leaving St. Paul for Washington, the chief refused to let him resign his position. “Mac, just put in for a long leave of absence. You never know, we might need you. You never know,
you
might want to come back.”
    That was seven months ago.
    “Where’s the fourth camera going?” Lich asked as he looked up from the laptop, now with three camera feeds on his screen.
    “Third floor, remember?”
    “
Riiiight,
the room that serves as the ‘
ahhhrt gallery
,’” Mac’s partner mocked. “The room the
missus
complained was on the third floor, so hard for people to get to so they could see their
collection
.”
    Mac chuckled, “Rich people problems.”
    “You know all about those,” Lich needled.
    “Not quite. The Sloane family is in an
entirely
different fiscal league, Dicky Boy.”
    Edward and Margaret Sloane were exceedingly wealthy, members of the Sloane family that the
StarTribune
had recently reported was worth north of $500 million dollars in their annual listing of the Twin Cities’ wealthiest families. An article that was also no doubt noticed by the break-in crew they were now hunting.
    For eight months there had been a slew of unsolved robberies throughout the entire Twin Cities’ metro area, although