Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14)

by Todd Borg

  There were two armored trucks inside the garage. Another man, dressed in multiple, thick layers like the receptionist, was polishing one of the trucks, making it shine like the ones pictured in the lobby. The other truck was somewhat dirty.

  “Lockbox number two,” Bosworth said, pointing to the dirtier truck.

  “How many trucks does your company have?” I asked as I walked up to the truck.

  “Three lockboxes. Plus a longer-haul transport, which is out on a trip to the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. We also have a pickup for local errands. It doesn’t haul money, but it does have our same logo paintjob. Image is everything in the security business. Which is why having a lockbox emptied is such a big deal. Very bad for our image. Insurance covers the loss, but our cred still suffers big time.”

  I walked along the side wall of the truck. The truck appeared to be like other armored transports I’d seen. Small, thick, bulletproof windows in a large squarish box. Heavy gauge steel body panels and door hinges. Locks that would take a crowbar and a sledge hammer to dent. Loopholes through which occupants could return fire if attacked.

  There were video cameras at every corner of the truck and one in the center of the rear, above the rear door.

  “You’ll notice that the cams are unobtrusive,” Bosworth said. “But they’re still obvious. Each lockbox also has six hidden cameras, in the body seams, the engine grill, at the inner edge of the wheel wells.” He pointed.

  “So a naive robber can tape over the obvious cameras but still be a movie star,” I said.

  “Exactly. Same for our outdoor microphones. You make a sound near our machine, it’s recorded for posterity.”

  “You mentioned that your system is online continuously.”

  “Right. But we’ve still got all the feeds recorded by the truck’s black box. Every aspect of our security has built-in redundancy. I gave the cops the downloaded copies of our computer log as well as those from the black box. They’re going to have their cyber expert look for anything unusual.” Bosworth reached into his pocket, pulled out a computer memory stick, and held it up. “The system records on the black box memory and a backup memory simultaneously. In addition to our computers, I’ve already saved another copy on this stick.”

  “I will need to look at that.”

  Bosworth looked irritated. “Whatever Mr. Timmens wants,” he said like a petulant child.

  I walked to the back of the truck. “After the robbers sent your men walking away, what happened next?”

  “The back door was already open from when Larry unlocked it and got out. The camera shows that one of the robbers had a large bolt cutter. He stepped inside and came out with two bags, which is all they had for the delivery.”

  “How much is each bag?”

  “Approximately fifty pounds.”

  “I mean, how much money was it?”

  “Oh,” Bosworth said. “Money in multiple denominations for an operation like a casino averages about five thousand dollars a pound.”

  “So two fifty pound bags is one hundred pounds,” I said. “At five thousand dollars a pound, that would be five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Right.”

  “Was the cash marked in any way?”

  Bosworth shook his head. “No. And we didn’t record serial numbers or put dye packs in the bags. We only do that on what we call our dye-for-distance shipments, which is anything over one million dollars and one hundred miles one way. But this was a relatively small delivery and very routine. Statistically, it’s not cost-effective to go to the extra trouble when it’s small and close.”

  “What is Reno Armored’s liability in a situation like this?”

  Bosworth shook his head. “Nothing. Outside of the damage to our rep, insurance covers it all. As long as we meet all of their security parameters, we’re covered.”

  “When you’re carrying cash for a client and it is stolen, how long does the client have to wait to be paid?”

  “There’s barely any wait at all,” Bosworth said. “We belong to a virtual bank network. When a client gives us cash to bring to the bank, the moment we accept the cash, it’s like the client already deposited it in the bank. In fact, as we sign for the shipment on the iPad app, the deposit instantly shows up in the client’s bank account. It’s that immediacy that assures the client. Of course, if it turns out that there is a discrepancy in the deposit, the account balance is later adjusted.”

  “But this was money going the opposite direction,” I said. “Instead of taking money from the casino to the bank, you were taking it from the bank to the casino. What happens then?”

  “As soon as the robbery was reported, the virtual bank network worked in reverse. The bank that sent the cash got an immediate credit from the insurance company for the original amount. Then that bank simply sent out a new cash transfer. It went to the casino by a different armored transport company, I’m embarrassed to say. That hurts. But it really doesn’t matter to the casino. The replacement cash arrived less than two hours later. The cash is always covered by insurance, and a robbery doesn’t really interrupt business much beyond the loss of productivity when employees lose work time talking about it at the water cooler. The only people holding the bag, so to speak, are the insurance companies. But of course, that’s their business. They get paid healthy premiums to cover things like robbery or fire or anything else that takes cash out of the system.”

  I looked around at the garage. “The money you haul. Where do you store it if it’s not on your trucks?”

  Bosworth turned and pointed to the far corner of the garage. “See that garage door? It’s heavy-duty and secure and raises and lowers just like the others. But it doesn’t lead to the outside.”

  “It’s a facade,” I said.

  “Right. Behind it is our vault. It’s the same as the vaults banks use. Fireproof, bomb proof, impossible to break into. It has a timed entry system and requires coordinated inputs from two people who each have their own code and key.”

  I nodded. I walked to the rear door of the truck. “Okay if I look inside?”

  “Of course. The door is unlocked. Inside you’ll see that there are no windows, just a video screen and microphone. That’s the only way the rear guard can communicate with the men in front. There’s a touchscreen input so the guard can switch back and forth between any of the camera feeds.”

  I lifted up on a heavy handle, pulled open the door, grabbed a handle at the side of the truck, and climbed a two-rung ladder into the truck.

  The truck’s cargo area was spartan in extreme. It had large metal bins at the front wall. On the floor was a locker with a locking lid.

  There was a small seat with a seatbelt and near it the monitor screen that was the rear guard’s communication port to the rest of the world.

  In one corner hung several bags, empty of contents but heavy of fabric. I lifted one off the hook. It was made of a fabric I hadn’t seen before. Some kind of mixture of heavy canvas with reinforcement threads of metal. At the top was a folding clasp with a padlock.

  I carried the bag to the rear of the truck where Bosworth stood.

  “Is this the kind of bag that the money was in?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Two of them. In normal operations, we don’t need empty bags in the lockbox. But we carry extra in case a cash pickup instruction changes after the lockbox has left our dock. Never know when a casino loses track of their empties.”

  “The bags look hard to cut.”

  He nodded. “It’s like chainmail. You’d need a specialty shears designed to cut metal.”

  “Were the bags padlocked?”

  “Yes, again. We have a system that takes the guards out of the loop. We lock the tops of the bags and we also lock them into the truck lockers before the truck leaves our facility. The keys stay here. By prearrangement, the casino or bank or wherever has the only other set of keys.”

  “That’s got to slow the robbers down a lot,” I said.

  “Yeah. Th
ey have to cut the bags out of the locked truck bins, then carry them someplace where they can work on them with a shears or a saw or something.”

  “The design of the truck and its security features,” I said, “is such that a lot of robbers could never even get to the money, right?”

  “Yeah. Come at a lockbox with normal weapons, you don’t have a chance. The guards can just sit inside. If you fire on them, they can pick you off by shooting out through the loopholes. But explosives, that’s a different story. Not much you can do when someone lobs C-Four under your buggy.”

  I got out of the rear of the truck and walked around to look in the cab. It was similar to other truck cabs but with a smaller windshield and side windows and four small video screens on the dash.

  “How do you access the black box info that gets sent over the internet to your computer?” I asked.

  “Over here,” Bosworth said. He walked over to a desk. “This computer is logged into the system.” He sat down, moved the mouse, typed a password, and brought up the software. “When the lockbox is on the road, the video and audio feeds get sent over a secure radio system to the internet. The company that provides the software stores all of the information. We can access it from this computer and also from the one in Howard’s office.”

  “Howard Timmens,” I said.

  “Right. Armored’s President. He works out of an office in downtown Reno.”

  “Is he the company owner?”

  “No. We’re owned by a private equity company in San Francisco. There’s a bunch of lawyers who own armored transport companies all across the U.S. and Canada. Howard answers to them.”

  “Can I look at the video feeds from the truck at the time of the robbery?”

  Bosworth looked at me like I was wasting his time.

  “Sure,” he said with false cheeriness. He brought up two different windows on the computer screen. “The main ones are the front and rear cameras, so I can show those simultaneously.” He used his finger on the touchscreen to bring up the feeds. “We can search this any way we want, by time, by action, by whichever camera we want to focus on. I’ve already been through this, so I can show you the robbery sequence without you having to wait forever.”

  Bosworth dragged his finger here and there, tapped some buttons, and the robbery unfolded.

  It was just as he’d described on the phone. Two men walked in front of the truck. They wore hoodies with the hoods up. The hoods came over the top of their heads and partially down over their foreheads. They had on hockey masks so their faces were completely covered. They each carried what looked like a military assault rifle. One stood back while the other held the phone and the papers with written instructions against the windshield.

  The other screen showed the two men at the back. They also had on black hoodies and white hockey masks.

  “What about the audio?” I said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “I could turn it up, but all you’ll hear is street noise.” Bosworth dragged a slider icon on the screen.

  I heard some wind in the microphone, a distant horn, some engine noises. “Earlier, you said that the robbers didn’t say anything. Any chance they spoke softly to each other? Words that could be pulled out of the background noise by a recording engineer?”

  “I don’t think so. I listened to the entire recording twice. I paid special attention to those moments when they turned and gestured toward each other. There wasn’t even the slightest sense of vocal sounds. I believe that they’d rehearsed so thoroughly that they didn’t need to talk. They just communicated by prearranged gestures. When you think about it, it’s impressive. We don’t know what they look like or sound like.”

  “Were there any other unusual sounds?” I asked.

  “Not that I heard. If you want, I can play the entire audio feed for you.”

  “No. Maybe later. Right now I’d like to have my dog take a look at the truck if that’s okay.”

  Bosworth looked startled. “You have a dog? Like one of those drug-search dogs the police use?”

  “Sort of. My dog isn’t a professional search dog, but he’s useful. He might notice something I didn’t.”

  “I don’t see what good a dog could do.” Bosworth glanced over at the truck as if reassessing a previous plan that hadn’t considered what a dog’s nose could find.

  “I’d still like to have him inspect the truck.”

  Bosworth’s hesitation had turned into resistance. “Between the cops searching and me searching, I can tell you that your dog is unlikely to find anything.”

  Time to push. “Could you pull the truck outside, please? If I bring my dog in here, the other scents of the building will distract. The cold air will also change his perception. A dog is most useful if ambient smells are similar to where he’s been. Then unusual smells stand out.”

  Maybe Bosworth came to understand that my request was reasonable. Or maybe he realized that resisting made him look suspicious. He walked over to a workbench and lifted a key off a hook on the wall above it.

  TWELVE

  “We have security garage doors,” Randy Bosworth said. He opened a panel on the wall next to the garage door and typed in a code. Then he climbed into the cab and touched the remote on the visor. The garage door went up, letting in a welcoming flood of warm air. Bosworth started the engine, a big diesel that roared in the enclosed space. He backed up slowly, loud warning beeps piercing the air. When the truck was twenty feet outside the building, the garage door went back down. Bosworth shut the engine off and climbed down out of the truck.

  “Where’s your dog?” he said. “Let’s see if he’s any good.”

  “In my Jeep at the front. C’mon, I’ll introduce you.”

  We walked around to the front lot. When we got close, Bosworth stared at the Jeep and said, “Whoa, that boy is...” He stopped walking.

  I reached for the rear door.

  Bosworth took a step back. “He’s friendly, right?”

  “Yeah. Name’s Spot. Give him a pet, and he’ll be your friend forever.” I pulled open the rear door of the Jeep. Spot jumped out, wagging. He took two jogging loops around the parking lot, then ran up toward Bosworth. Normally, I step between Spot and other people he doesn’t know. It reassures people that they’re not about to become doggie lunch. But I decided to let Bosworth grapple with his emotions. Bosworth’s hand went to the butt of his gun as Spot did a quick stop in front of him. Bosworth leaned back and his hands levitated into the air as Spot nosed him all over.

  “Spot, meet Randy Bosworth,” I said. Spot lifted his head high and sniffed toward Bosworth’s face, moving slower than normal, probably being cautious about the dangers of the man’s breath. Bosworth backed up.

  “Just a single pet will satisfy him,” I said.

  Bosworth reached out a tentative hand and gave Spot a pet, his big meaty hand looking small compared to Spot’s head. Spot broke into a pant. “Is he ever... unfriendly?” Bosworth asked. “He could put my head in his mouth.”

  “He could, but I don’t think he will,” I said.

  “You don’t think? That’s a joke, right? Tell me that’s a joke.”

  “It’s a joke. Okay, Spot, you can run.” I gave him a smack on his rear, and he took off across the parking lot.

  While Bosworth and I walked back to the truck, Spot cruised past the other parked vehicles, went up and sniffed the front door of the building, charged down the side of the building, and veered off into the vacant lot next door, sniffing out hints of past critter movement through the sagebrush.

  “He needs to burn off some energy before he works, huh?” Bosworth said. He looked at Spot, then at the truck.

  “Yeah. But mostly I want him to get used to the local smells. When dogs charge around it looks like they’re playing, which they are. But they are also acquiring a kind of olfactory acclimatization.”

  “Like making a smell map of the landscape,” Bosworth said, a surprisingly acute observation for someone who still seemed dist
racted.

  “Yeah. That’s a good description for what they do.”

  “Then if they find other smells when they search,” Bosworth continued, “they’ll know if those smells belong in the landscape or not.”

  “You’d make a good search dog handler,” I said.

  After another minute, I whistled, and Spot turned to look at me. He was fifty yards away. Whatever he was investigating was much more interesting than what I had to offer.

  “C’mon, boy,” I called out.

  Spot looked toward me for a moment more, then went back to sniffing the dirt. Next, he trotted over to sniff along a fence.

  “Spot, come,” I shouted, wishing that just once he’d act like a class valedictorian and do exactly as I asked.

  Spot ignored me.

  “You want a treat?”

  Spot lifted up his head and looked.

  I patted the cargo pocket of my pants where I keep treats, pulled one out and held it up.

  Spot broke into a run, charged up, then did a quick stop. He sniffed at my hand. I tore off the wrapper and gave him half.

  Spot inhaled it, then sniffed at my hand, which was holding the other half of the biscuit.

  “It’s all about food, huh?” Bosworth said.

  “It’s always all about food,” I said.

  “I’ve got a friend who’s a K-nine handler with the Washoe Sheriff’s Office. He has a German Shepherd. That dog will do anything my buddy asks.” Bosworth sounded boastful. “Never gives the dog a treat until the very end.”

  “That’s the difference between a Great Dane and a German Shepherd,” I said. “When it comes to getting paid, Danes are like smart businessmen. They have the sense to demand a fifty percent deposit up front and the balance immediately on completion.”

  “That’s another joke,” Bosworth said, sounding unsure.

  I turned to Spot. “Okay, boy, you want the rest of your treat, you gotta provide service.” I took his collar with my left hand and walked him to the truck. “You and I are just going to do a little look/see on this truck.” I walked Spot counterclockwise along the side of the truck, holding his collar with a loose arm so he could move his head. I didn’t want to let go because he would probably run away.