Free Electing To Murder by Roger Stelljes Page A

Snelling would take credit, it was just rare that anyone would actually use credit there.
    Mac walked over to the whiteboard and looked at the timeline.
    Why would Stroudt want to stay out of sight?
    Mac kept running it through his head. On Tuesday night, he and Montgomery are using credit cards to stay at a DoubleTree Hotel and buying an expensive steak dinner. The next day they’re still using credit cards in Kentucky for gas and meals like normal business travelers. But then something happens that starts changing their behavior. He made himself a note to see if the car they rented in Nashville had GPS. Perhaps he could get some insight if the GPS told him where the car traveled.
    That was for tomorrow. As for now, Mac stood up and walked to the whiteboard and wrote above the timeline “What Happened” between the last credit card expenditure on Monday night and 7:00 a.m. Tuesday morning in St. Louis. He then wrote the same thing for the time period between Stroudt’s arrival and his check-in at The Snelling. Then Mac went back and added one more thing in blue at the St. Louis notation—”Why come to Twin Cities?”
    Mac sat back and looked at the board and muttered: “Why did you come to the Twin Cities?”
    Political bloggers fly from Washington to Nashville seven days before the election. They drive into the Kentucky countryside and suddenly change plans, skipping their return flights from Nashville to DC and instead splitting up in St. Louis. One disappears and the other flies to the Twin Cities.
    Why come to the Twin Cities?
    Mac’s cell phone started ringing.
    It was Sally and he suddenly had a thought.
    A half hour later, Mac pushed through the back door into his house and he could hear the shower running upstairs. He made his way upstairs and up to their bedroom. He quietly put his Sig Sauer, badge and wallet in his nightstand drawer and slipped out of his work clothes.
    He walked into the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain, climbed into the large cast iron bathtub and joined Sally, hugging her from behind. She turned and kissed him twice lightly on the lips. “Hey.”
    “Hey yourself,” he replied.
    She was a beautiful woman with long red hair, a gorgeous smile and a wonderful thin figure.
    In law school he’d noticed her once or twice, thought her quite attractive from a distance, but hadn’t given her much thought beyond that and wasn’t even sure he’d actually formally met her. He was married at the time, clerked for a law firm during the day and went to class at night. Most of his free time was spent buried in the corner of the law library studying or with his wife. As a result, he’d never really gotten into the William Mitchell social scene and, in retrospect, made but a few close friends in those three years. Sally, on the other hand, while also married at the time, didn’t work much, attended class during the day, hung around the William Mitchell campus all the time and had numerous friends with whom she was still close.
    After graduation, the next time he saw her was in the days following the finalizing of his divorce, when she’d just started as an assistant county attorney with Ramsey County and had been assigned to a case he was working. He was immediately attracted to her. She was newly divorced at the time as well and the two just seemed to find each other and fit together at the right time. They’d been inseparable since.
    “So I have a favor to ask,” he said as he squirted body wash onto his hands and softly washed her arms and shoulders.
    “Which is what, pray tell?”
    “I need to speak to people at your campaign,” Mac related the death of Stroudt. He figured he was in town for some political reason and Sally’s campaign was the biggest game in town.
    “He could have been interested in any number of the federal campaigns going on, Mac,” Sally answered, guarded.
    “And Dick and I plan on talking to all of them,” Mac replied easily as he washed her lower