“I don’t know, he moved out two weeks ago,” Burrows answered. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Is it because of what happened between you and Gordon Oliver?” Lich inquired.
“That’s certainly part of it.” Burrows related that her husband was moody and temperamental to begin with and it only got worse when he drank. He also had a criminal record.
“Criminal record, what did he do?”
“Bar fight. A long time ago. He nearly killed a guy.”
“Why?”
“The way the guy looked at me.”
Mac and Lich shared a look. Mac continued, “So knowing this about your husband, that he beat a guy to a pulp for looking at you wrong at a bar, you nevertheless slept with Gordon Oliver?”
Burrows shrugged. “Gordon Oliver was merely a symptom of the problems I had in my marriage. My husband and I haven’t been happy together for a long time. At least I haven’t been and if he were honest with himself he would admit the same. At some point I realized my marriage was over and Gordon Oliver was a good looking guy who was available, interested and there were no strings attached. I don’t regret it in the least.”
“How long did you and Oliver sleep together?” Mac asked.
“We didn’t sleep detective, we had sex.”
Mac shook his head, “Right. How long then, or rather perhaps, how often did you and Mr. Oliver get together for sex?”
“Over a two-month period, probably a dozen or so times. It would be a night here and there. Once in his pickup truck. There were a couple of nooners at the Holiday Inn off of 94 east of downtown. Gordon was a good lay and I liked it.”
“Your husband came after Oliver pretty good,” Mac said. “Confronting him here at the firm, at The Mahogany, even threatened to kill him once from what we hear.”
“That’s all true.” Burrows related what she knew about the confrontation at The Mahogany as well as when her husband called Gordon at three in the morning threatening to kill him. “That’s when I told him to get out,” Burrows said. “I haven’t spoken to him in a week and haven’t seen him in two, so I have no idea where he was last night.”
“Where were you last night between midnight and two a.m.?”
“I was with a friend.”
“What kind of friend?” Lich asked and Mac snorted, knowing exactly where his own sex crazed partner was going.
“A man, Alexander Burrows. I spent the night at his place.”
“Burrows?” Mac asked. “This wouldn’t happen to be a relation to your husband?”
“His younger brother.”
“H… h… his younger brother, I… see,” Mac was in disbelief. He needed a few seconds to compose himself. “Soooo… let me get this straight. Your alibi is that you were sleeping with your husband’s younger brother?”
“It is,” Cassidy Burrows wasn’t the least bit embarrassed or apologetic.
Mac pinched the bridge of his nose and Lich turned away, doing everything he could to avoid laughing. Mac steered into safer territory, taking down information about where Burrows’s husband worked, where he was living and where they were likely to find him. They both cautioned her to not contact her husband.
After Burrows left the room, Lich said to Mac: “Did we really just sit through that?”
“You can’t make that shit up,” Mac said shaking his head. “She is a piece of work.”
“I’d say if Martin Burrows didn’t kill Gordon Oliver, he might kill his brother,” Lich cracked.
“Or her,” Mac said. “And I’m not sure I could blame him.”
“What do you think?” Lich asked as they got ready to leave the conference room. “Does Martin Burrows look good for this?”
“I think we need to be careful.”
“Why?”
“Because Burrows looks exactly that, but that’s almost too easy.”
“What’s wrong with easy, I love easy,” Lich quipped.
Mac snorted. “You have to love easy. I mean, look at your suit.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“This will not end well for you!”
Having finished at the law firm, at least for now, Mac and Lich stopped into the Department of Public Safety to check in with their captain. After briefing him on the status of the case and their one good suspect, they pulled information on Martin Burrows.
Five years ago Martin Burrows spent six months in jail for his role in a bar fight. Apparently Burrows started the fight as his wife had said. He went in with fists and when his combatant answered with a stiletto knife, Burrows broke the end off of a beer bottle and stabbed the man in the abdomen. The man lived and had brandished the knife which apparently had served to mitigate Burrows’s sentence.
A review of Burrows’s license information revealed he was six foot three, two hundred twenty pounds. His DMV photo gave the appearance of a man not to be trifled with. His square head sat on a neck that looked like a tree trunk. Burrows wore his hair high and tight with a small thin beard sculpted around his mouth. His brown eyes glared menacingly out of the picture. “I think we’ll want a little back-up when we go see this guy,” Mac cautioned.
Mac’s cell phone buzzed and it was Jack Coonan. He spoke to Coonan for a moment and hung up. Mac jotted down some notes.
“So what’s the Doc have to say?” Lich asked.
“He says his initial assessment at the scene looks correct. The contusion to Oliver’s temple is what killed him. The contusion led to temporal bleeding. Like Coonan said, without immediate medical treatment, the wound was fatal. But that’s not what was interesting.”
“What was?”
“You remember the contusion on the back of his head?”
“Yeah, on the back right side,” Dick answered, grabbing the spot on the back right of his head.
“Exactly,” Mac replied. “Coonan says the wound to the back of the head was made by a descending blow by someone taller.”
“How can he tell?”
“The shape of the wound is like an indentation, made by something that is a half inch wide. The downward angle of the wound suggests that whatever was used came from a high angle from someone taller than Oliver. Coonan thinks the person was over six feet, at least six-two.”
“And Martin Burrows is how tall?”
“Six-three.”
In the late afternoon, with the sun quickly fading in the west, Mac and Lich tried to find Burrows at the apartment he was renting just off Snelling Avenue near the Minnesota State Fair Grounds. There was no answer to their door knocking. The manager let them into the apartment, which was a small one bedroom. A quick look revealed Burrows was not there. His pickup truck was not in the parking lot either. His wife said that if he wasn’t at his apartment, he often liked to ride a bar stool at Drew’s Saloon, a small working man’s bar on Dale Street, just north of Interstate 694.
Drew’s Saloon was a corner bar that occupied half of an old two-story brown brick building with Vittolo’s, an Italian restaurant, occupying the other side that fronted Dale Street. They were separate establishments. Behind the saloon and restaurant was a shared parking lot, which Mac cruised. Burrows’s red Chevy Silverado was among the twelve vehicles scattered about what looked to be thirty parking slots.
“He’s here,” Lich said as Mac pulled the Crown Vic into an open parking spot. Mac checked his watch, 6:09 p.m. The sun was just a glimmer in the western sky. It would be dark in a matter of minutes.
“Where’s our backup?” Lich wondered.
“Right there,” Mac answered with a smile as a patrol car pulled up to the curb running along the parking lot. McRyan jumped out and quickly walked over to the squad car. One of the patrol cops was Mac’s cousin Shawn, who powered down his window, smiled and greeted his cousin: “Look at you in the suit,” Shawn needled as he exchanged knuckles with Mac. “So what do you need from us, cuz?”
Mac gave Shawn and his partner, Victor Montonez, a picture of and the rundown on Burrows, including size, criminal record and general volatility. “So he might be trouble, boys. Lich and I will go in the back. You and Victor stroll in the front and hopefully the show of force will make him come nice and easy.”