“Thomas? What the—”
“Eli passed the news,” Thomas said nonchalantly. “He’s too little to know what he was seeing, but it sounded like a boost to me.”
“You — you — how’d you get here?” Clarice spluttered.
Thomas laughed. “Easy. Been sneaking into places since I was six or seven. Back seat of the station wagon, now back here.” I caught the faint movement of his shoulders shrugging. “My older brother taught me how to shoplift, pickpocket, hot-wire cars, pick locks, so sneaking around is nothing. It was the B&E that got me sent to the camp.”
“Thomas.” I didn’t have to force my voice to be stern. It came out hard and non-nonsense all by itself. “If you want to stay at the camp — instead of juvie — you have to keep out of this. You’d break Walt’s heart.”
“This is different, Nora. We all know something bad’s happening to you. What if you get kidnapped again?” Thomas’s voice turned to pleading. “I can help. I can get you in so you don’t have to break a window. No trace, if you’re careful inside. I’ll stay out here, keep a lookout — no problem.”
The kid had a better plan than I did — the voice of experience, apparently.
“How’d Eli know?” Clarice growled.
Thomas laughed again. “He notices everything. Plus he has hypersonic ears. I just cut him in. No sense in trying to work around him. Never pans out.”
I opened my mouth to protest — what? Everything. The general illegality of what I was doing, of what Thomas did and was doing, the worry about what Eli was part of. There was no way Walt could know every second what every one of his eighteen — now nineteen with Bodie — boys was doing. I’d figured they didn’t have opportunities for crime and drugs and gangs out here in the boonies. But their creative energies seemed to have found alternative expressions.
I bit my lip but couldn’t resist. “Cut him in on what?”
Thomas shifted, dropped a few inches until only the top half of his head was a dark bump above the back of the seat.
“We’re not moving until you spill,” I gritted out.
“Bookmaking,” Thomas mumbled.
“You’re taking bets from the other boys?” My voice may have squeaked a little.
Thomas nodded. “Just lame stuff, you know. Like how many times we’ll have mashed potatoes in a month, whether or not Wilbur will eat rancid tuna salad, which plaid shirt Etherea’s wearing on the day we go to the store for supplies. Eli always beats the house. He’d wipe me clean if I let him bet, so I cut him in.”
“Wilbur eats everything,” I said. Wilbur and his twin brother Orville are semi-tame pot-bellied pigs with the run of the poor farm.
“Exactly.” Thomas’s teeth flashed in a wide smile.
“What math are you studying this year?” I asked.
“Algebra.”
“You should try statistics,” Clarice grunted. “Speaking of which, the odds are, the longer we sit here, the more likely we are to attract attention.”
“Gotta watch?” Thomas asked. “Time me.” He squeezed from behind the seat and whisked to the office door, no more than a shadow.
He was back in under two minutes. “All clear. No alarm company stickers. There’s a keypad by the door and a couple cameras in the corners, but I think they’re dummies. No blinking lights.”
I almost congratulated him, then thought better of it. I was already setting a terrible example; I didn’t need to add verbal encouragement. “You’re staying right here,” I pounded a fist in the middle of the bench seat, “and not moving a muscle until Clarice and I are back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I ignored his cocky tone and hurried around to the back of the pickup. Clarice met me there and handed me a pair of rubber gloves and a flashlight.
“Go ahead. I’ll bring in the equipment,” she hissed.
“We don’t need much since Thomas unlocked the door,” I whispered back. “I wonder what other specialties are represented among Walt’s boys.”
Clarice grunted and followed me with two of the empty suitcases. I played the beam along the worn carpet of the entry area and made a beeline for the hall. I tapped the frame of the first doorway, and Clarice peeled off to set up our photocopying assembly line.
Divide and conquer. I went straight to Hank’s office at the end of the hall. The door was now locked. I’d left my purse and its attendant credit cards in the truck. I zipped back to the electronics boneyard.
The copy machine was already humming and clicking, warming up. Clarice looked ghastly, her face underlit by the green glow from the control panel, her blotchy shape lurking eerily in the dark room.
“I need a sheet of sturdy plastic, like a report cover or something,” I hissed.
“Got a three-ring binder here, the flimsy throw-away kind,” she replied.
“It’ll do.” I held out my hand, and she slapped it into my grasp.
And I was right — the plastic slid down the crack between the door and the frame like it was greased. The knob was sloppy, and I jiggled it hard while pressing my shoulder against the door. I few good thuds, and I was in the room, glad I hadn’t needed to call on Thomas’s services again.
I was sweating and shivering at the same time. Outside, I’d been oblivious to the tingly cold fog that had settled like dust into the landscape, leveling out the dips and hollows into a fuzzy, gray plain the truck’s headlights had skimmed over. Now, inside a building that had to be thirty degrees warmer, I shuddered with clammy stickiness.
I stuck a finger in the drip tray for the dead plant, found the key as Hank had promised, and knelt in front of the file cabinet. The bottom drawer was full — crazy full — files jammed, overflowing. I raked the flashlight over the labels, catching my other purple hand in the beam as well. Leave it to Clarice to select fashionable housekeeping/burglar wear.
Half the files were labeled with some kind of cryptic notation. It probably made sense to someone familiar with the workings of a freight terminal, but the words were a foreign language to me. The files also looked old — grungy and worn. I wondered if Hank had inherited these files when he took the job and had just been getting around to sifting through them when he’d come across the property records.
“Well?” Clarice rasped from the doorway. She’s patently incapable of producing a subtle whisper.
“Where to start?” I murmured. “There isn’t time to read through all these to find whatever it is I’m looking for.”
“Then we’ll copy all of them. We gotta move.” Clarice bent next to me, wedged her hands into the drawer and pulled out a thick stack of files. “Mark the spot so they stay in order — if they’re in order.” Her sarcastic tone made me smile in spite of my jangling nerves. Clarice does not believe in shoddy filing. “Keep ‘em coming.”
In between shuttling batches of files back and forth from the copy room, I searched through the other drawers in the filing cabinet and Hank’s desk. Just the usual office stuff — an amazing stockpile of paperclips, rubber bands, ink cartridges, pens missing their caps, sheets of blank labels, etc.
A sweet photo portrait of Sidonie and CeCe sat on the desk. Tucked into the corner of the frame was a smaller snapshot of the twins that must have been taken at the hospital, their faces scrunched-up sleepy and wearing their matching newborn beanies.
The corkboard on the wall above the desk held a few message slips and business cards. I removed them and hustled down the hall so they could be copied too. Then I carefully pinned them back in place.
I turned on Hank’s computer, typed the word ‘password’ at the prompt, and the screen came alive. So much for security. In fact, the whole place was curiously unsecured. I guessed the warehouse portion had better safeguards, even though the freight didn’t stay long in one place.
Which is exactly what Hank’s computer confirmed. That day’s inbound shipments were listed — cheese in a reefer, Hon office furniture, Samsung electronics, a truckload of Levi’s branded apparel, giant rolls of paper
from Georgia Pacific, machined parts for Boeing. The outbound list was similar. The place was hopping, a hub for trucked products — items moving from ports or manufacturers to distributors and retail stores. Or in the opposite direction — from factories to ports for packing into containers for the long ocean ride on a cargo ship.
Clarice was halfway through copying the contents of the bottom drawer when I finished rifling Hank’s office. She’d had to remove her gloves in order to get the touchscreen commands on the copier to work. I made sure she was well supplied with the next files in order, then snuck to the third doorway and tried the binder trick on Lee Gomes’s office.
Bingo.
If the abundance of coffee rings was any indicator, he wouldn’t notice if a few papers had been moved slightly. But there wasn’t time to be thorough. While his computer was booting up, I went for the less obvious — what was in his drawers.
Lee Gomes didn’t use his drawers, except to stash peanut M&M’s and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I enjoyed the fleeting relief that he didn’t appear to be a customer of Dwayne’s, since he bought branded whiskey and not stuff in a quart Mason jar. The state of his desk indicated he must be one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind people, not trusting himself to remember what he couldn’t see.
The computer beeped — an email notification. I clicked the message open and scanned it. Then I went back to the top and read it completely, the air squeezing out of my lungs. And then I hit print.
I’d spent too much time in the wrong office. Whatever Hank had found was nothing compared to this.
The printer on Lee’s desk blinked blue lights at me, the printhead clunking into starting position. It sucked paper from the feed tray and whirred into action.
I pulled up Lee’s contact list — names, email addresses, occasionally phone numbers — and printed the whole thing, twice. I’d have to sort through the names later, separate the criminal from the innocuous, if not innocent.
Those pages safely stuffed inside my jacket and down into my waistband, I scrolled through the other emails, noting his most frequent correspondents. They used the word ‘goods’ a lot. If there was some way to match up the dates of the emails with the shipment manifests for the dates surrounding the messages, I might be able to figure out what those particular goods were. But I didn’t have time for that. The only thing I knew for certain was that the goods weren’t always headed to their lawful owners.
“Finished with the copies,” Clarice hissed from the doorway. “We gotta go. Too long already.”
“Let me shut this down,” I said. “Did you wipe down the copy machine?”
“Don’t I always?” Clarice growled.
I made sure every program was closed and turned off the computer but not the printer, leaving them exactly the way I’d found them. I gave the papers on Lee’s desk the barest whisk of a shuffle so they didn’t look too tidy. I might have unconsciously fidgeted with them while I perused his emails, out of shock or nerves or pure disbelief.
Clarice and I wheeled the now heavy suitcases out to the pickup.
“Forty-seven minutes.” Thomas materialized at my elbow. “What took you so long?”
“None of your business,” I muttered. “No questions. The less you know, the better.”
“Right, boss.” Thomas’s tone was like an open smirk.
I turned back, locked the glass door and pressed it closed with a satisfying click. Then I hefted the two burdens and thumped them in the pickup bed.
When we were humming down the county road with Thomas wedged safely between Clarice and me, I asked, “Did the copy machine have an internal counter?”
Clarice grunted. “The last service sticker was dated January 2010. How much do you want to bet no one pays it much attention?” She scowled at Thomas. “Don’t answer that. We did use three-plus reams of their paper, though.”
“What’s a little pilfering among thieves?” I muttered.
CHAPTER 9
After a pitiful attempt at catching a few winks, I was on the road again. I wanted to get to the restaurant parking lot before Josh. Mainly in case I needed to hightail it out of there. I wasn’t expecting him to be a creep, but the whole situation gave me the jitters, probably because he, a former FBI agent, had sounded nervous on the phone. What makes a hardened law enforcement officer nervous? Unless it was his own conscience, I didn’t want to guess. And I wanted to see him before he saw me.
Dwayne’s map markings and advice had been spot on. But I needed to buy a warmer jacket. By the time I’d reached the Gonzales’s house on foot, my eyes and nose were streaming from the frosty air, and I couldn’t feel my ears, toes or fingers. Traipsing about in the frigid dark forest required better equipment than I currently owned. The way things were going, I needed to plan on more of the same.
This time, I decided to borrow Sidonie’s old, boxy Volvo. Variety is the spice of life. It’s also good not to set patterns in case anyone is watching. Our Snoopy consort hadn’t raised any objections to our pretense of neighborly concern last night, so I was hopeful that our side trip had slipped under their radar.
Clarice had strongly — vehemently — objected to my taking this venture solo. But the possibly tapped phones — my original one and Skip’s — were a problem. Someone had to monitor them for potential ransom calls, but they couldn’t leave the premises without arousing suspicion. Which meant she was stuck holding down the fort and the phones.
I probably should have given her more warning of my plans, but I’d wanted to keep the inevitable argument as short as possible. Disagreeing with Clarice is an exhausting undertaking. She’d eventually relented and sent me off with a shoulder bag stuffed with snacks and a thermos of coffee.
I’d left her something to stew on — one of the copies of Lee Gomes’ contact list. I’d handed it to her without comment. Her eyes had flicked back and forth over the pages, her mouth puckering into a tight knot, and she’d dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair.
When she did glance back up at me, her eyes were huge and worried behind her cat’s eye glasses. “Cinco and Nueve. And — and Freddy.”
When I’d found Skip’s extra bank accounts — the ones he’d allegedly used for money laundering — and the notebook in which he’d tallied how much money belonged to whom, Clarice and I had made a list of his top clients, the ones he still owed money to. We’d labeled them Numero Uno through Nueve since at the time we didn’t know their real names. We’d since identified a few of them, but their numbered monikers stuck in our minds.
Freddy Whelan was Skip’s lawyer and general counsel for his carwash business, Turbo-Tidy Clean, who had rather inconveniently never returned my calls after Skip was kidnapped.
I’d nodded. “Makes you wonder why Skip bought this place. Proximity? Did he offer this property rent-free, all expenses paid, for the boys’ camp as a charitable cover? It would fit with his push to fund the foundation I ran — placing emphasis on his honorable activities in order to hide the bad.”
“Now, you don’t know that for sure,” Clarice had warned.
“Patterns. I don’t like it.”
“I’ll do some research—” she’d waved her empty hand toward the ceiling, indicating the possibility of invisible listening ears. Then she’d crumpled the corner of the pages in her fist, a fierce scowl angling all her wrinkles horizontal.
The farther south I got, the more treacherous the driving conditions became. The air temperature must have been warming because what started as the tiniest specks of swirling snow turned into bouncing ice pellets. The thick, steel-gray clouds sank lower and squelched any hint of a sun rising behind them.
Twenty miles later those pellets became splatty, and ice chips slithered across the windshield on a film of water which the wipers struggled to keep up with. I clenched the steering wheel with aching hands and motored through. It felt exactly like what I was doing inside my own mind, too — motoring through, not lingering over the icy stabs of hypocrisy or worry or indecision. If I hes
itated even for a moment, I was terrified I’d become paralyzed, as though my brain and body would seize up, rendering me ineffective.
I struggled with the urge to self-justify, that somehow the names on Lee Gomes’s contact list turned my conscripting of a minor, however willing he might have been, for a criminal activity into an acceptable endeavor. I gulped at what Walt would think of my ethical gymnastics.
In trying to fix Skip’s wrongs, I was becoming too much like him. I was counting on Josh to give me some answers, to clear the path I was supposed to take, even though I knew my conscience was no one’s burden but my own.
Hours passed in dreary monochrome grayness slashed with red taillight streaks and road spray. Just north of Canby, I slammed into a wall of precipitation.
The car in front of me spun with no warning. After two full rotations, a back tire hung up on the rumble strip, and the car shot into the ditch nose first. I was past the scene before I knew it, foot off the gas but still coasting too fast. The ditches on both sides of the three-lane freeway were littered with vehicles. Those still on the pavement slowed to a crawl, brake lights lit up like Christmas.
The Volvo’s radio antenna wobbled lopsidedly in the wind, coated with ice to three times its normal diameter. The wiper blades were icing up, sloughing cracked sheets of freezing rain off the glass. I turned the defroster to full blast and cranked the dial to its hottest setting.
A fire truck puttered by on the northbound center shoulder, lights flashing. Soon it was followed by an ambulance and another fire truck. I concentrated on not rear-ending the car in front of me. Following distance was suddenly of paramount importance. And no sudden movements — just letting the clunky old Volvo roll, keeping the steering wheel loose. The last thing I needed to do for the Gonzales family was wreck their car.
Southbound, the exits were numbered in descending order. I became fixated on the big green reflective signs announcing the upcoming towns and counting down to my destination. An Oregon map I’d found in the glove box lay open on the seat beside me. At ten miles per hour, I might not make it to the restaurant before Josh.
Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) Page 6
