AT Stake (An Alex Troutt Thriller, Book 7) (Redemption Thriller Series 19)

by John W. Mefford

  After spending the last thirty-six hours uncovering more data about the victims and following through with conversations with as many as we could hunt down, we’d come to the conclusion that Ozzie’s theories were no closer to being proven than they had been two days ago.

  Like he’d said, we needed more resources. Or a break.

  I’d spoken to Brad in the middle of the night—he was about to crash at his place for a couple of hours before going back to the command center. He’d shared with me that the ATF forensics team had yet to figure out how the second and third bombs were hidden—whether they were placed in boxes of protein bars or something else. Still, though, we all knew the devices had exploded at or near the aid stations, so it made sense to me to track the boxes back to the source. It took some digging, and a few minutes of time from Gretchen, but we learned that Blue Hill Services, whose blue sign was affixed to the red brick warehouse to my right, handled all distribution of products for the Boston Marathon.

  I picked up my coffee from the cup holder and sipped it, thinking about my brief conversation with Brad last night. We hadn’t gone this long without seeing each other in months. Frankly, I missed him, missed his hairy calves rubbing up against my legs at night, missed his nibbles at my ear in the morning. And with Nick finally out of the woods—he had been sitting up in bed, trying to get Stan to play some game of batting the balloon back and forth when I’d dropped by last night—a sense of renewal coursed through my veins. A positive vibe. Seeing my partner at the brink of death had probably heightened my anxiety about everything in my life, relationships included. So, seeing Nick on the road to recovery was a good thing for many reasons.

  When Brad and I had ended our conversation, I told him I missed him.

  “Ditto,” he’d said through a yawn.

  A yawn. An afterthought.

  The push-pull exercise with Brad continued. Did he even realize how he’d made me feel with that response?

  Uh, did you tell him? No, you didn’t, Alex. How do you expect him to know? Through telepathy?

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry, I was just talking to…me.” I sighed and gave Ozzie a raised-eyebrow, cocky expression. I was daring him to comment.

  “I talk to myself all the time. Don’t worry—I won’t ask what’s on your mind.” He pretended to lock his lips with a key.

  “Play games all you want, but I’m not saying.”

  He opened his hands and pressed his lips shut.

  “Oh, now you’re going to play mute?” I balled up a fist and punched the muscle in his upper arm.

  He rubbed it. I smiled.

  “Ready?”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything about Brad, until you punched me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You can go back to being mute. Let’s go.”

  Once on the sidewalk, we passed four guys who were jawing at each other. I knew it was nothing, but after we passed them, Ozzie said, “They keep calling each other a ‘fucking wise guy.’ Am I missing something?”

  “You’ve lived in the south too long.” I nudged his arm, and we turned and walked toward an area where a large garage door was open. Lots of men wearing blue-and-white uniforms were milling about. Boxes were stacked on pallets as far as the eye could see. Larger packages were being moved in and out of the warehouse on conveyor belts. A front-loader picked up a pallet and placed it in the back of a truck. Lots of loud voices, paired with the buzz of machinery, created a cumulative echo effect that was grating. I glanced at Ozzie, and I could see his jaw muscles flinching. He had to be having an even harder time with noise pollution.

  A woman walked up—that in and of itself shocked me—and as she adjusted her hardhat, her biceps muscle twitched. Her guns told me she’d worked here for a while. She asked how she could help us. I flashed my creds and asked if she was the manager. She said she’d find him. A man whose gut rivaled Jerry’s walked up with a clipboard in hand.

  “FBI, huh?”

  That was his way of introducing himself?

  I gave him our first names—I didn’t want to have to call out the fact that Ozzie wasn’t a special agent.

  “Everyone here calls me ‘Lloyd.’”

  “Oh. Then, what’s your real name?”

  “Lloyd. Lloyd Bowen.”

  I didn’t understand his point, but it wasn’t important.

  His eyes shifted to Ozzie and back to me. “You’re not cops. You’re the FBI. This must be big.”

  I nodded and looked around for an office so we could speak in privacy. I didn’t see one and realized that no one was in earshot, so I asked for him to confirm that his company had distributed the goods for the Boston Marathon.

  “Who’s asking?”

  I held up my badge and tapped it with my finger. “The FBI, Lloyd. Any issues with sharing this information?”

  “Well, no…I guess not. Just can’t be too careful. I want to make sure I protect my First Amendment rights.”

  Again, his eyes shifted to Ozzie and back to me. Was he thinking we were going to throw a burlap sack over his head, shove him into the back of an unmarked van, and take him to some unknown location so we could waterboard him until he gave us the answers we wanted? The level of paranoia was unmistakable. I just hoped it related to the anxiety of the bombings and that this guy wasn’t always so edgy. I chose not to explain that the First Amendment had to do with free speech and that it wasn’t applicable at the moment. One point for me, for not being snarky.

  “So…?” I motioned with my hand.

  He licked a finger and thumb, and then flipped through a few pages on his clipboard.

  “Ah, not sure I’ll find it in this mess, but yeah, we did that job. Why you asking?”

  Before I could respond, he said, “Oh, shit. You telling me this is connected to the—” He stopped short and jerked his head around, as if he were afraid someone might be on the verge of jumping him.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Lloyd was in charge, or so he thought. Ozzie and I gave each other wide-eyed looks as we fell in line behind Lloyd, the protector of the first amendment. As we rounded a column and headed for what appeared to be an office with glass walls, the girl with the “guns” approached him.

  “Not now, Peg. Important business here.” He didn’t even look at her.

  She backed away but kept her eyes on us.

  Finally in the office, Lloyd shut the door. “Okay, now that we can talk in private without all the little mice listening in, why don’t you start from the beginning?”

  He crossed his arms, resting them on his Buddha belly. He was beginning to remind me more of Jerry with every passing minute. But while they had the same appearance, they didn’t have the same authority, title, or clearance.

  Okay, I knew Ozzie didn’t either, but Jerry had given me the nod to use whatever resources I needed. He knew I’d at least consult with Ozzie.

  Back to Lloyd. “There is no beginning,” I said. “You’ve confirmed our first question, thank you. So, from here, we’ll need a complete understanding of how your operation works, from when the goods show up to when they leave, what trucks were used for the marathon, the routes they took, the list of employees who had any possible contact with those goods. Oh, and we’ll need as much information that you can provide on each of the vendors.”

  “You guys are like the IRS.”

  I replayed what he said. It wasn’t making sense. “Excuse me?”

  “The IRS,” he said, splaying his arms. “You know, an audit. You want to basically do a full audit of everything related to our Boston Marathon account.”

  Now we were talking the same language. “That’s it, Lloyd. You nailed it.”

  He smirked and nodded a dozen times or so. “I watch all those cop shows. I know what I’m talking about.”

  I wanted to roll my eyes so badly. Cops…FBI, First Amendment, Fifth Amendment. It’s all the same, right?

  “How long will this take you?” O
zzie asked.

  Lloyd looked at me and smiled. “He talks! And here I thought the lady was in charge. No offense on the gender thing.”

  “None taken.”

  “After all, you got him beat on experience any day of the year.”

  A jab at my age? I could feel heat rising up my neck.

  “How long did you say?” Ozzie asked, putting on a seriously fake smile.

  “Oh, right. Well, I’ll need some help. Let me get Peg. She’s really the only person who knows what the hell is going on around here. Everyone else is just a bunch of wise guys.”

  I nodded, and he opened the door and whistled. “Yo, Peg!”

  Ozzie looked at me and mouthed “wise guys.” I rolled my eyes.

  Peg marched in, flexed her muscles a couple of times—probably for Ozzie’s benefit; at least I hoped so—and then listened as Lloyd gave her instructions as to what we needed.

  “Think you can help us?” Ozzie asked.

  Without saying a word, she slid behind the desk and started clicking on the computer mouse. The monitor she stared at was one of the old boxed versions, with dust an inch thick resting on top.

  We stood in silence as Peg clicked and typed for twenty minutes. Then, I heard another machine come to life behind her on a metal shelf. It was a printer, but the noise sounded like it had lost its muffler. I pointed at it and gave her a questioning look.

  Finally, she spoke. “It’s a dot-matrix printer.” She held up her hand, shaking her head. “Don’t say it. I know this place is stuck in the medieval times.”

  Lloyd chuckled, and he shook all over, but not at the same time. “Ah, Peg. Always seeing the glass half empty.”

  He wasn’t looking when she flicked a hand in his direction—probably her signal for telling him to stick his half-empty glass up his ass.

  As the dot-matrix printer spit out pages, Lloyd tore off the sheets, pulled a pen out from behind his ear, and started circling the top of each page. “This here,” he said, tapping the pen to the paper on top, “is the high-level view of the items we delivered to the marathon for each location. From what I see, it appears we used three trucks that day.”

  I asked him to point out all information related to the delivery at the aid station located at the twenty-one mile mark, including all employees who would have had access to the goods.

  He went still. “You think one of our guys was involved in this?” His face started turning red.

  “We’re not accusing anyone of anything right now. We just need the information.”

  He pointed at the area above the door. I saw a tiny American flag stapled against the wall. “Every person I hire has to do the Pledge of Allegiance. Every one of them.”

  Was this guy for real?

  I said, “I’m sure most of you are very patriotic, Lloyd.”

  “Most?” He almost went falsetto on me.

  “Lloyd, I used to work as a lawyer,” Ozzie started.

  “Whoa, and I thought you guys worked in a respectable line of work.”

  “All the jokes about lawyers aside, in any office or profession, there’s bound to be a bad seed. Doctors, teachers, cops, construction workers. Bad seeds can sprout anywhere.”

  “Hey, did you hear about the teacher in Mauldin who got arrested for bopping that—”

  “Lloyd,” I snapped at him, “you’re holding up an FBI investigation. Do you want to be known as that guy?”

  His eyes darted back and forth. “I’m back on track.” He turned around to his assistant. “Peg, let’s not waste their time.”

  Peg rolled her eyes but kept clicking and typing, and the printer buzzed constantly. Lloyd handed Ozzie the stack of papers we’d just reviewed, tore more paper off the printer, and started his circling exercise again.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he said each time he made a circle with his pen. He sifted through ten pages. “Here you go.”

  Ozzie took the sheets, and I looked over his shoulder. My eyes went to the boxes of protein bars. “Lloyd, where are the employees who had access to these boxes, the protein bars?”

  He moved to the other side of Ozzie. Lloyd’s big head almost knocked Ozzie in the chin. Damn, Ozzie was tall.

  “Eh…” Lloyd started rummaging through the sheets. “Wait. Okay, here we go. These two shifts… they’re the ones who received the packages from the vendors and then loaded them on the trucks.”

  I did some quick counting. “What is it, fourteen employees?”

  “Yep. Seven per shift.”

  He stepped away and returned to paper-ripping and circling, as Ozzie and I studied the names. “How many of these guys are at work today?”

  “None of them.”

  “Huh, why?”

  “Well, they worked their tails off; that’s why. Plus, the union kind of sets the rules. So, I don’t have much choice in the matter.”

  “Not for the drivers,” Peg said, her eyes still on the monitor.

  “Yeah, whatever. They don’t really work; they just drive,” Lloyd said with a chuckle.

  “So, where in here are the drivers?” I asked.

  Lloyd huffed out a breath—apparently, we were frustrating him. Sheesh. “It’s in the original set I gave you.” He snatched the stack from Ozzie but lost control of it. The papers fluttered in the air like leaves being run through a lawn mower.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he said, groaning as he leaned over his belly to get to the papers.

  Ozzie and I bent down at the same time to help out and almost bonked heads. By that time, Lloyd had retrieved them all. When Ozzie pushed up, I heard a grunt. He grimaced at the same time.

  “Okay?” I asked quietly.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  He wasn’t. He always said he was fine when he wasn’t—that much I’d learned about Ozzie. He’d been healing rather nicely, but the quick movement probably brought on a sharp pain from his knife wound. I knew he’d be okay, but he wasn’t back to normal. That led to a brief thought of Nick and the silly banter that I’d seen between him and Stan. They were a riot, and it warmed my heart that they’d be able to razz each other for many years ahead.

  Back to our feet, Lloyd was breathing like he’d just run a marathon. The pages were all out of order, so it was taking him a while to find the information. I looked over to Peg. “Can you print off the home addresses for each person working those shifts?”

  “The drivers too,” Ozzie added.

  She nodded and clicked the mouse. The printer whined right when Lloyd said, “Here you go. Right here.” He tapped his pen on the page that had the drivers’ names. Peg then handed me two more pages. “Addresses for everyone you asked for,” she said.

  Ozzie put his finger on the paper, glanced my way, and then turned to Lloyd. “The driver for the truck that stopped at the twenty-one mile aid station is named is Bandar al-Salehi?”

  “Oh yeah—Bandy. He’s cool,” Peggy said.

  “He’s also full of Shi-ite,” Lloyd said with another chuckle.

  “Funny, Lloyd,” she said.

  “Why did you say that?” I asked.

  “No offense or nothing,” he said. “It’s just a joke. You know, we’re all about diversity here at Blue Hill.”

  I’m sure it’s because of his stapled flag. “Lloyd, I’m asking a serious question.”

  He got still. “Am I going to get in trouble?” He sounded like a second-grader.

  “No. You’re just exercising your First Amendment right.”

  He shook his head as if he’d just outsmarted the entire federal government. “Damn right I am.”

  “Back to Alex’s question,” Ozzie prompted.

  “Oh, well, if you haven’t noticed by the name, Bandar al-Salehi isn’t from this country.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know, New York or something. The kid’s always wearing a Yankees cap around here. That’s grounds for treason here in Beantown, baby.”

  I put a hand to my head. “You said he’s from another
country, Lloyd.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He threw his arms up. “He’s just got one of those…funny names. He’s Muslim, the Shi-ite kind.”

  I asked him to have all of his employees at work tomorrow. We would interview each one individually, I told him, but I didn’t want them to know about that until they arrived. He gave me a salute.

  I returned the salute as Ozzie and I walked out the door.

  23

  Alex

  I plucked a French fry from the box and offered it to Oz.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  He kept his eyes glued to the front of the apartment complex across the street. We’d been sitting in the car outside of the residence of Bandar al-Salehi for nearly ten hours. It was almost eight o’clock at night. A dim yellow light illuminated a thick mist.

  “You sure you don’t want to call in for backup, or whatever you guys do?” Ozzie asked.

  “Remember that whole profiling thing I brought up earlier?” My eyebrow inched upward.

  “Right. You don’t want our names to be the lead story on the news,” he said.

  “If you’re not feeling up to it, you can take a taxi back home,” I said. “But I can’t leave.”

  “And you can’t call Randy.”

  “He’d either blow me off, or tell me to blow him.”

  Ozzie snorted out a laugh.

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “From the Randy I’ve seen, you’re probably right.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Do you feel like we’re doing the wrong thing?”

  “Not if we’re right.”

  “But does the end justify the means?”

  “Didn’t you come up with this theory of the Shias and Sunnis being bitter enemies and how they could use the marathon as a battleground?”

  “I did…”

  I waited a second. “You were going to say ‘but.’”

  He scratched under his cast. “Yeah, maybe. It just doesn’t feel right, though.”

  “Honestly, that just means you’re human.”

  He looked at me.

  “I don’t know how many times I’ve questioned what I’m doing. I’ve come across people who didn’t belong in the human race. Hell, they were worse than any wild animal. So, the fact you’re questioning everything is a good sign.”