Murder At The Podium

by Alec Peche

  “All I have so far is a gut feeling that Adam Johnson orchestrated his wife’s death. As it occurred while she was speaking at a convention, visitors and the business community want to see this case solved. If you guys convict Adam for narcotics trafficking, that’s great but it would be far better if we can get him on both charges. I’m happy to add my manpower to whatever operation you decide on, but that’s the extent of the involvement of the Dallas PD in your case. You’re chasing a narcotics kingpin, I’m chasing a murderer and I think they’re one in the same person.”

  “You probably need to include to some degree, the Mexico side of the operation,” Jill suggested. “I bet those four tanker trucks have some kind of document that shows that they are coming from a Mexican oil company. Crude oil is legitimately moved across the Mexican border to American refineries. According to the schedule I have seen on tape, a truck will cross the border early morning tomorrow. It would be helpful to get a copy of the documents the truck shows to the border guards. Can you place an agent at the crossing to do that?”

  “Dr. Quint, for having no background on the narcotics trade, you’re doing a great job thinking about the full scope of this operation; that’s a great suggestion.”

  “For me, this is still a murder investigation and I’m used to thinking about all the threads of evidence I should follow, often not knowing which one will bear relevant new information.”

  Another DEA agent in the room spoke up, “We have a match on your three suspects from Dallas to the Precursor Chemical Cartel. Do you want their names?”

  “Yes,” Jill said. “I want to look them up in my database to see if they were one of the more than one-hundred suggestions.”

  “Marco Aurelio Lopez Franco, Edgar Flores Lopez, and Jacobo Montellano Minero.”

  Jill went to work searching for them in her database and found them. She sent the names to Marie to see what she could find on them. At this point, their only relevance was in finding out how they knew when Jill was walking from police headquarters to her hotel.

  “How are you going to identify everyone connected to this operation?” Jill asked. “Is it all the employees of Vernon Oil? How about the drivers crossing the border - how do you collect everyone in one sweep? How about the guys that attacked me? Where are they now? I know I sound like I’m having a panic attack on capturing this group, but as I said earlier to someone in this room, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg with my one tank filled with methylamine. There’s a bunch of logistics in play here that need to be identified.”

  “Dr. Quint, this is not our first rodeo as they say in Texas,” replied Agent Black. “I know we need to gather more names and better understand the scope of the operation so we snuff it out completely. Let’s keep the discussion going and see if we have any more brilliant ideas like your suggestion of the border crossings.”

  “Sorry Agent Black, I like speedy resolutions to my investigations and I’m lacking the patience with this case. Just ignore my outbursts.”

  The agent smiled at her and moved on, but Jill still felt like she was six inches tall in this room of giant law enforcement personnel. She’d have to learn not to think out loud with this group. Jill tuned back in to see Agent Black defining an operation on the whiteboard. He started with the scope they were aware of and then added tangents of information they needed to collect. He also added legal actions they would take at the appropriate time and projected outcomes. The discussion went on for several hours as the group fleshed out the plan.

  It was getting late and Jill still had the twenty minute drive back to Midland. Her two points of interest in solving the crime were the interview of Adam Johnson and the search of his home. They might be able to match any arsenic found in Adam’s home to that which was in Stacy’s blueberry muffin. Agent Black was laying out a plan to investigate the oil wells owned by Vernon Oil. When he assigned another agent to map out the wells then stop and get a sample at each, Jill remembered to add something to the discussion.

  “By the way guys, I forgot to mention that when I sampled the non-moving oil rig this morning, I escaped a second round of the seven thugs. I passed just out of their view to get back on the Interstate as they exited and headed towards the oil well. So they must have some kind of security that I set off.”

  Half of the room was giving her a look of awe for almost coming in to contact with the seven thugs while the other half was giving her a frustrated look for her leaving out such a key point.

  So she added, “Just saying you’ll want to be careful that the entire operation doesn’t get suspicious and disappear to set up this activity in another town. I would think they would already be on edge between our entry into the warehouse last night and my setting off security at the oil rig this afternoon. Also I have facial and object recognition software on my laptop that is very good. If you want to feed me a satellite view of the oil wells, I bet I could have them identified in about ten minutes.”

  As this would result in a much quicker answer than driving to each well, an agent made arrangements to get Jill the footage and she was forgiven her earlier lapse. She wanted to talk to Castillo about the murder without the rest of the room listening so she texted him.

  If the three thugs from the convention center are from the cartel and Adam is doing deliveries for the cartel, then I would assume he knows I’m working with you.

  It was a long text but she’d never mastered texting shorthand. He texted back.

  I think that’s a safe assumption. So what?

  Good question on Castillo’s part; so what did she care if he knew she was on the case? She thought about that one for a while.

  I guess I can dump my current wig and move my hotel from Midland to Odessa.

  Jill began looking up hotels in Odessa when the text arrived.

  He may not know that you’ve been in Odessa for two days. He may think you’re still in Dallas.

  She thought about Castillo’s response then replied.

  No way could he think that when I haven’t used the shuttle for a few days or been spotted near the hotel.

  The cartel guys had her under surveillance when she was in Dallas to know when she exited the police building.

  True

  Okay the master of the short response was back. Maybe she’d stay in Midland since she had the small kitchen and the gym worked out and she might not find the same in Odessa. Besides she didn’t need to be close to the action as she wouldn’t be participating. Jill sat back to think about the murder investigation and what more she could do. Then she noted the ping from the DEA agent with the satellite footage. She ran it through her software and quickly had the locations of the non-working oil wells. There were forty of them. Either this was the largest storage cache of drug making chemicals in the history of America, or not all of the non-working oil rigs were being used for that purpose.

  Jill tuned back in to the discussion about how to organize the surveillance of the non-working oil rigs and an idea came to mind.

  “We know that there are four trucks that are crossing the US-Mexico border and those same four trucks are driven by Adam Johnson. If we looked at road cameras, I bet we could see if those four trucks are visiting a non-working oil rig and from that we would have our answer. It wouldn’t tell what was being stored there, but it would tell you that it was likely not oil.”

  “Dr. Quint, you’re redeeming yourself with these excellent ideas,” said a grinning Agent Black. “I assume that software program of yours would be able to process that information quickly. I would like to see your software in action on this search. Where did you get it?”

  “Almost two years ago, I solved a murder in Belgium. The man who created this software sells it worldwide and was the husband of the victim, so I first used it to solve his wife’s murder. I’d be happy to demo it for you and give you his contact information if you want to pursue a purchase.”

  “Depends on his price, but as you’ve used it in this room, you’ve cut hours off of our i
nvestigation and that can mean we’ve a bigger net to catch more thugs if we move quicker. Do you have any ideas on the warehouse?”

  “Same approach, let’s first make sure those four trucks visit all of the locations. Once we have confirmation we need to use some kind of camera blocker - it’s being watched somewhere because the thugs showed up about twelve to fifteen minutes after I got there and I guess my face is on their recording and now that I think about it, it may have given the whole game away if they identify me. Perhaps we should spread out immediately among the warehouses and oil rigs to see if they’re dismantling something. The chemicals that they are transporting and storing must have a street value. Is that something to walk away from or do they try to move out their inventory elsewhere?”

  Jill comments caused the room to go quiet. With her few sentences the timing of the operation had changed from days to minutes.

  “That’s an interesting observation,” Castillo said. “Jill, these men react to you this morning, but you still observed Adam pull out in a tanker this afternoon, visit a pumping oil rig, then drive to a BDC property. If you’re a key member of this narcotics operation and you think the cops have a fix on you, is that how you would spend your afternoon? I would change the plates on the tanker trucks and move whatever I could to another city in the Permian Basin. I wouldn’t waste twenty minutes taking meter readings at a pumping oil rig with a full tanker-truck; I would get the hell out of here.”

  “That’s a good observation Detective Castillo. Maybe they don’t have video; perhaps it’s just a motion detector that you’re setting off. We need to send manpower to the BDC Properties to see if we have any action going on,” replied Detective Guerrero. “We‘ve some patrol units that could survey two of the properties. Who else wants to take a road trip?”

  Jill, Castillo, and two DEA agents volunteered. A short few minutes later they left the room with directions to the BDC properties. Twenty minutes later they’d all reported back that no activity could be viewed from the street. Another twenty minutes and everyone was back in the conference room. From what Jill could see, they had moved up the operation substantially, bringing in DEA agents from around the state so they could make an early morning raid on Vernon Oil, Adam Johnson, and the BDC Company. It looked like Jill and Castillo would finally have the opportunity to interview Adam regarding his wife’s murder.

  While she was out visiting the BDC company site, one of the agents had gotten several weeks of satellite images of the BDC Company locations and six of the seven had been visited by one of the four tanker-trucks. With some forty plus non-working oil rigs, they would have a lot of locations to cover. Furthermore, they didn’t know who or where all of the thugs related to this drug cartel operation resided and they didn’t want to alert them ahead of time. They would work through the night to try and gain that information before dawn.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jill tried to think of how she could help this operation given her skill set and a few thoughts came to her. With a little help from the Odessa Crime Lab, she could set up test kits for the officers and agents involved in the raid. She had a list of chemicals used in the manufacture of illicit drugs as well as cocaine and heroin. She guessed that if they could rig the tanker truck to move methylamine, then they could rig it to move cocaine powder. She thought she could create a kit for them to test the contents of tanks and buildings.

  She tuned back into the discussion and listened for an opportunity to break in. She found her moment fifteen minutes later.

  “Agent Black, with a few supplies from the Odessa Crime Lab, I believe I can make kits for officers and agents on the raid to know what substance they’re faced with. Also, I might make a good decoy to at least bring the seven thugs out of hiding as the official start to this raid.”

  “Okay to your first suggestion and explain more about your thoughts as a decoy.”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to bring these thugs out of hiding and arrest and identify them other than by getting them to pile into their cars and come investigate someone threatening their oil-rig or warehouse. They have become complacent to some degree as they have chased me down twice in the same cars. I’m thinking I could purposely trip one of the storage locations and you folks can protect me from them; I’ve tripped their security system twice so my face may be a familiar sight. In fact, we might want to try this before dawn as that generated a larger response than my mid-day raid. While you guys discuss that, I’m going to head over to the crime lab and see about making test kits for this operation,” and Jill got up and left the room with Guerrero.

  “That was a bold offer from you,” Guerrero said.

  “Not really, if I have all you guys protecting me and if the DEA put a helicopter in the air, all the better. It’s just that we’ve no information on who these men are and where they’re dispatched from. Being an identified face of a DEA computer system isn’t good enough justice for me. Where is their command center with security devices monitoring the suspect rigs and warehouses? They can arrest Adam and the drivers and they can shut down the storage and transportation, but that doesn’t get the men or infrastructure behind this chemical cartel. If you want to avoid having them set up shop in the next county over, you need to get more than Adam and the drivers.”

  The detective pushed open the door to the crime lab and introduced Jill to the staff member inside. Jill explained her desire to create some fifty test kits for anyone to use at the sites to identify the substances. The lab already had test strips to identify heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Jill was making kits for the precursor chemicals. She’d excelled in chemistry in college and so knew how to make the right combination of chemicals so that substances would change colors if certain chemicals were present. An hour later, she had field kits with instructions ready to go for everyone on the raid. She boxed stuff up and returned to the conference room.

  She watched the folks eye her with a combination of awe and bewilderment like she had invented something miraculous. She demonstrated her products and Agent Black responded, “When this case is over Dr. Quint, can we talk about you being employed by the DEA? You have so many odd and useful skills.”

  “No thanks, I don’t like guns so I would never pass your test to be an agent,” Jill replied smiling. “You can always call me for advice on a case even if you haven’t hired me as a consultant.”

  Castillo spoke up and added, “Dallas PD hired her because if you look at her past high profile cases, her very presence seems to bring out the criminals as we witnessed in Dallas and now you have seen here in Odessa.”

  There were a lot of smiles at Jill during this exchange. The group went back to their planning as the room was expanding with ever arriving additional DEA agents. While she’d been in the crime lab making up kits, they agreed to start the operation by having Jill break into one of the warehouses. The group discussed whether to go with someone else as the decoy, but in case she was captured on video, it was better that her face alert the thugs. That action would allow them to capture some of the henchmen in addition to the drivers and Adam. They monitored the border to know there were two trucks on their way here and as they stopped at the border, a DEA agent had placed a GPS tracker on the trucks. They were expected to roll into the Vernon Oil yard just as the agents wrapped up their operation elsewhere.

  Jill got a ping from Marie then signaling an email. Glancing at the time, it was close to eleven in the evening. Marie got up around five to get a work-out in before work, so she tried to fall asleep between nine and ten. It started with,

  Couldn’t fall sleep, so I got up to research your three men, wanted to make sure you’re fully briefed on them and can I say that they may be about as bad a criminal you’ve ever come in contact with? They’re wanted in Mexico on charges of rape, murder, decapitation, and child abuse. They seem to have no redeeming qualities as human beings if they are such…

  This is what I was able to find on a possible location of them. I collected
some pictures I found referencing them. They aren’t in the pictures but there is mention that they were with these groups of people. Perhaps if you could find these locations around Odessa, it might tell you where they are staying…

  One more thing, I did a little more research into Adam Johnson - looking at a circle of acquaintances around him from college onward - I’ve been working on this off and on for a few days. Poor guy seems to be the grim reaper. He’s lost a college roommate, two co-workers, a neighbor, and he was even friends with Stacy’s first boyfriend who all died young. I’ll forward you the cause of death for these people when I locate them. Can I say these are red flags and don’t hire this man!

  Jill smiled at Marie’s human resources attitude towards the facts she uncovered with one of her searches for Jill. She pulled up the five pictures that Marie had attached after quickly sending her a thank-you email and again broke into the conversation concerning the operation.

  “A member of my team who performs background searches collected some interesting information tonight. First, these five pictures are referenced to the three suspects that the DEA identified earlier. They may or may not be a part of the gang of seven that appeared at the warehouse. It was too dark to identify them. If you know where these locations are in Odessa, you might be able to round them up,” Jill said while connecting her laptop to the screen. The DEA agents weren’t that familiar with Odessa, but the Odessa police department recognized three of the pictures immediately.