“I’ve been going through Kendra’s mail. She hired a private investigator to tell her which companies in Orange Country have private rail sidings.”
“Why?”
“No idea. But I talked to the investigator after I found an annotated map in her mail, and it shows all the sidings. Maybe your guys could check that out?”
“Maybe so. I’ll send someone for that map, OK?”
“Fine. So, what I’m fixing to do is go back out to the Marine base and talk to Kendra’s boss. That’s what Chelmin was supposed to do just before he disappeared. But he didn’t know about the railroad map and all that.”
“Be careful, Will.”
“Depend on it.”
§
Will put his phone away. There was something that Blair had just said that bothered him. A name. He played the conversation back in his mind until he got to Alvarez. Alvarez was dead, Blair said. But there was something about that name.
He put it out of his mind, knowing that his subconscious would chew it over, and if there was something to it, it would swim up. Maybe in the shower. Or when he was falling asleep.
Will returned to cleaning his mess. When he got to the Belize travel brochures, he stacked them, then pawed around the desk for the envelope. After a few seconds, he found it beneath the big manila envelope that had held the railroad map.
But when he grabbed a corner and picked it up, it felt strange, as though one end was heavier than the other. He held it up to the light, peered inside but found nothing. Then he ran his fingers over the front of the envelope. When he reached the oversize postage stamp, which displayed an enormous conch shell, it felt thick. He got out the magnifying glass and examined it closely. It appeared that there were two stamps, one glued atop the other.
Why would anyone do that? he asked himself.
He took his thumb and his forefinger and gripped the double stamp from both inside and outside the envelope simultaneously.
And felt something, something a little thicker than the rest of the stamps, in the center.
He took the envelope into a tiny office used to turn out flyers, a monthly newsletter, and occasional newspaper ads for the department. In the desk, he found a set of X-ACTO knives, very sharp blades of different lengths and shapes and fastened to steel handles. They were used by artists and hobbyists for very precise cutting.
He pawed through the desk until he found tweezers.
Grasping the stamp near its bottom with the tweezers, Will gently inserted the blade between the edges of the two stamps, and carefully pushed down. After a few tries, the stamps separated.
In the center of the bottom stamp, no longer hidden behind the top stamp, was a tiny, rectangular piece of black plastic about half an inch wide and maybe a third of an inch high, with two slots in the bottom. It was a micro secure disc, and in his phone was one just like it.
Will consulted his wristwatch. It was almost 3:00. If he hoped to find some answers out at the Marine base, he realized, he’d best get out there fast. But first, he had one essential task to perform.
One Hundred Four
Cautiously, Will pushed the door open, and Rhonda Hawkins, the data processing supervisor, looked up from her desktop computer terminal.
“Hello, Mrs. Hawkins, how are you today?”
She looked up, beaming. “Will Spaulding! I thought you joined the Army,” she said, standing, nicely turned out in a gray business suit with a lace-fringed blouse and blue-and-white scarf.
Hawkins said, “I saw your mother just last week—we went shopping in San Berdoo.”
Will said, “She mentioned what a nice time she had. And I am in the Army.”
He took out his CID badge to show her.
“I should have known that you’d land on your feet, Will. You always do. And just so you know, neither Henry nor I believed a word of all that ‘dirty cop’ business in the Chronicle. Anybody who knows you understands that they smeared you just to keep Taylor out of jail. You should sue the paper.”
“Maybe I should,” Will said. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Just. Fort Fremont is short four cases of boots, and they’re asking if we have them.”
“One case of size 10 1/2, and three of size eleven?”
“However, did you know that? Don’t tell me they sent you here looking for those boots?”
Will smiled. “Nothing like that. Have you seen my boss? Mr. Chelmin?
“Not since a few days ago. Uh, do you know if he’s married, Will?”
“Thinking of leaving Mr. Hawkins?” Will said, smiling.
Mrs. Hawkins turned pale. She clutched her chest. “Heavens, no! Of course not.”
Will laughed.
“That was very naughty of you, Willson. Do you know Roseanne Thorne?”
“I believe she’s part of your bridge group?”
Hawkins ducked her head. “Not much of a card player, but very sweet. She’s just turned 40, and I have to say that she’s very attractive—almost beautiful. And very shy. She lost her husband, the year before last. In Afghanistan, with the Marines.”
“Now I understand. I have no idea whether Mr. Chelmin is single or married. But I need your help on something, and it’s kind of urgent.”
“I’m sorry,” Hawkins said. “How can I help?”
Will said, “Did you know Kendra Farrell?”
“Of course—oh my God! She was found on that train, wasn’t she? Was it a carload of boots?”
“Yes. By the way, I’m pretty sure that you’ll find those missing boots in a trash barrel or dumpster somewhere near the railhead. Most likely, they were loaded on the train and later removed by her killer. I’m here on something connected to that, but it’s urgent.”
“Sit down, Will, and tell me how I can help.”
Perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair, Will reached into his coat pocket and took out a small plastic evidence envelope holding the tiny chip that he’d found in Kendra’s mail. He handed it to Hawkins.
“Do you have a way to find out what’s on this?”
“Just a minute,” she replied and got up from her desk to open a low filing cabinet. She extracted a small box of clear plastic, poked through it and found a blue plastic square.
“This is an adapter that will fit my disc reader,” she said and slipped the tiny rectangle into the larger one, then inserted it into a small port on her computer.
“Let’s see what you’ve got here, Will.”
A few seconds later, Hawkins looked up.
“Come around and look,” she said and waited until Will was standing behind her.
“Is that Kendra Farrell?” he asked.
“What a pretty girl she was. My top supervisor, and by the way, she earned a master’s in computer science at age twenty-three from Texas Tech.”
“That’s all that’s on the chip? Kendra’s selfies?”
“They’re in big, high-quality jpeg image files. See for yourself, Will.”
Will used the mouse attached to the computer to flip through a dozen photos: Kendra with Eugene Alter in front of a hotel in San Jose. Kendra and Alter inside the atrium of an office building where all the signs were in Spanish. Kendra alone at the Belize airport. Kendra in front of a La Princesa Fiorella store. Kendra in front of the Heritage International Bank building in Costa Rica. Then another shot, in front of the same bank’s Belize office. Kendra, her face turned to the camera but her finger pointing to a listing on a marquee in the lobby of an office building. Kendra standing in front of the Marine base main gate, then another, in front of the Data-Processing Center. Then Kendra, again frowning, at her computer terminal. Finally, Kendra, almost glowering, in front of a line of enormous refrigerators.
“Let me see them again,” Will said and watched carefully as Hawkins showed each on the screen.
“There’s something going on with these photos. First, she’s smiling on vacation in Costa Rica with Alter, then she’s at the Belize airport, then a bank, and then an office b
uilding, and then wham, bam—shots of her looking unhappy around here. It’s a story in pictures.”
Hawkins said, “But the pictures don’t tell us why she seems so unhappy. Because she hates her work? I never got even the tiniest hint of that from her. She seemed to love her job.”
“Look, Mrs. Hawkins, this chip was hidden. She went to a lot of effort to smuggle it into the country without anyone knowing about it. After she was murdered, someone ransacked her apartment. Maybe this is what they were looking for.”
Hawkins frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“She mailed that micro disc in a letter from a Belize hotel. But she made a sandwich of two big postage stamps and hid the chip between them and mailed it to herself. From Belize.”
“I thought she and Gene Alter went on vacation to Costa Rica, not Belize?”
“They did go to Costa Rica. Alter told me that after a few days, she told him to enjoy the rest of his vacation, and she went to the airport and flew to Houston. And by the way, she didn’t tell him that she was going to Houston and on to Belize. I had to call the State Department and the airlines to get that information.
“She was in Houston only about three hours, and then she flew to Belize. Stayed overnight and came back to Houston. Then she flew back to California.”
“How very odd. Did you just say that she hid the micro disc between two postage stamps?”
“And the stamps were pasted on the envelope, one behind the other.”
“That sounds like a John Le Carré novel!”
Will smiled, “You read spy novels?”
Hawkins blushed again. “When I was younger. But what I meant was that Kendra was kind of acting like she was a spy or a secret agent.”
“My thought exactly.”
“You always were the deep thinker in your family, Will. Why was she doing that?”
“Kendra thought that she was in danger. That’s why she took her son, Spencer, back to San Antonio.”
Hawkins' mouth flew open. “She never said anything about being in danger. From who? From what? Why?”
Will shrugged. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. By the way, she told her boyfriend, not in so many words, that she was afraid of her bosses, her higher-ups.”
Again, Hawkins' mouth flew open. She touched both cheeks with her hands. “What are you talking about?” she said with a half-suppressed shriek.
Again, Will shrugged. “All I know is that she was planning to quit her job and move back to Texas.”
Hawkins took a deep breath and then buried her face in her hands. “Why didn’t I know anything about any of this?” she sighed and began to weep.
Will said, “Please, Mrs. Hawkins, pull yourself together. We’re running out of time.”
Hawkins took a tissue from a box on her desk and daubed her eyes.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“Chelmin, is missing. I’m afraid that every minute that goes by lessens the chance that we’ll ever find him.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
Will said, “I’ll explain later. Right now, I’m trying to focus on these photos. She went to extraordinary lengths to hide them. Why? What are we missing?”
Hawkins said, “If what you just said is true, then maybe there’s a hidden meaning in those pictures?”
Will smiled. “Yes. Maybe. Can you blow them up? Make them much bigger?”
Hawkins nodded. “Of course.”
She returned to the keyboard, touched a few keys, and the first picture, Kendra with Alter in front of their hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica, appeared on the screen. She touched two more keys and began to zoom into the picture. The image had remarkable clarity—as it got bigger and bigger, more details appeared. Hawkins touched the keyboard again and with Will looking over her shoulder, slowly began to pan across the enlarged image.
When she got to the far side, she scrolled down a bit, then panned back across to the other side.
After ten minutes, they had looked at the entire image in great detail and found nothing out of the ordinary.
Will straightened up, raised his hands high over his head, and stretched.
“I don’t think we’ll find it this way,” he said. “Maybe we’re looking at the picture, but we’re not seeing what Kendra wanted us to see. Wanted somebody to see.”
Hawkins looked confused.
Will nodded in response. “Give me a minute to think.”
Will straightened up and closed his eyes for a long moment. He paced for a long minute, squinting as he moved around the office. Then he opened his eyes, an odd look on his face. Hawkins could almost see an idea forming in his mind.
Will said, “Maybe steganography? She did have a master's in computer science.”
Hawkins said, “What is that? Steven what?”
“Steganography. Do you know what that is?”
Hawkins shook her head, no. “I started here as a key-punch operator almost thirty years ago. I know what I need to do to make this department function efficiently, but unlike Kendra, I don’t have a formal education in computer science.”
Will put a hand on Hawkins’s shoulder. “Let’s see if Kendra was as smart as I think she was. Do you have a program on that computer that reads text files?”
“Well, I have a word-processing program. Business letters and memos, things like that.”
“That might work. But a simpler text editor like WordPad would work better.”
Hawkins looked blank.
“It’s an old program, one of the earliest Microsoft word processors. Very simple, without many bells and whistles. These days it comes bundled with most Microsoft operating systems. Try the ‘Accessories’ folder.”
Hawkins brought up the Windows Start Menu, then scrolled through it.
“Got it,” she said. “Now what?”
“Double-click to open.”
A window opened on the screen. Across the top were the familiar menus of a word processor.
Will said, “Now go to ‘file,’ pretend that Kendra’s picture file is a word processing file, and open one.”
“How could that possibly work?”
Will said, “I don’t know for a fact that it will. But I’d like you to try. Please.”
Hawkins said, “Will, I’m trying to understand exactly what you want. We want to look at the picture file, but in a word processing program?”
“Exactly.”
Hawkins frowned. “Okay, we’ll try that.”
Using the computer’s attached mouse, she dragged the image file into the word processing program.
The picture appeared on the computer screen, huge and detailed.
Will said, “Maybe that’s not the right way to access the image data. We want to see the data in the picture file, not the picture.
“So please, try to open one of those jpeg files as if it was a text file.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“Trust me, you’ll see what I’m looking for.”
Silently, she obeyed. And then paled at what she saw:
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Hawkins said, “Where did this come from?”
“Scroll down. More ... more,” Will said.
Page after page of random symbols appeared.
“Keep going, please,” Will said.
“Oh, my God,” Hawkins whispered.
Neatly arrayed in fron
t of her was what looked like a spreadsheet.
Will asked, “Can you make any sense out of that?”
Hawkins took a deep breath and peered closely at the screen.
“This is a log of some kind. It shows shipments in and out of our facility.”
“Excuse my ignorance, Mrs. Hawkins, but even though I grew up here in Barstow, and this base has been here since before I was born, I don’t understand exactly what you do here.”
“This base stockpiles almost everything needed to support Marine forces in the U.S., west of the Mississippi, in the Far East, and in Asia. Pretty much everything except fresh food and fuel, and a few other perishables. Requisitions come here by secure email, where they are approved for appropriateness and budget, and then all the items in each requisition are gathered together and shipped by the best means possible.
“Boots and clothing go to the Recruit Depot in San Diego on a train, because they order a lot of them four times a year. We might air freight or air courier critical spare parts to a Marine Air Wing,” Hawkins said. “But most of the bigger shipments go by rail.”
Will nodded to himself, realizing that this was why Kendra was so interested in rail lines and spurs. But why in Orange County? he asked himself.
Will said, “Thanks. What does that log tell you?”
“It’s a list of ID numbers and dates of shipments to Marine or Navy units over the last six months.”
“What’s in these shipments?”
“I’ll have to look up the inventory codes.”
Hawkins took a pad from her desktop and began writing one string of numbers after another. Then she opened another window on her monitor and entered a database, where she keyed each string of numbers in, one after another.
“OK, here we go. Percodan... Dilaudid... Hydrocodone... Alprazolam... Diazepam... Desoxyn... OxyContin.. and Xyrem.”
Xyrem! thought Will and shivered. Something was very wrong with that list.
Hawkins swiveled in her seat to face Will. “Those are all prescription drugs.”
“Where were they shipped?”
Hawkins peered at the data, using a manicured fingernail to guide her eyes across the data to the final column. “I’m not familiar with this routing number,” she said. “I’ll have to look it up.”
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