by Steve Levi
“What kind of a truck was it?”
“Large, a big one. One of those heavy four-wheelers with roll bars.”
“What color was it?”
“Black and silver on the front and back, with red flames on the side panels.”
“How high was the front bumper?”
“To my knee.”
“Did you run a check on the truck?”
“Absolutely,” said Delgado. “It was clean. No priors. Owned by a Yuppie in Garden Park.”
“Did you actually look at his driver’s license to check the face on the license with the face of the man?”
“Her. And yes, they matched.”
“Did you check the face on the computer with the face of the woman?”
“Sure. I did it on the trooper computer. It was a match with the license she had.”
“Was there any kind of foam anywhere?”
This took the two young men by surprise. Almost in unison they said, “Foam?”
“Foam,” Noonan repeated. “Supposedly the drivers said they were being foamed.”
“I . . .” Delgado started and then added, “we had not heard any reference to foam. All we, the two us, know is the armored entered the tunnel and never came out. I . . . we don’t know anything about any foam.”
Noonan pressed them. “So you didn’t see any foam of any kind in the tunnel?”
Delgado looked at young Swensen and young Swensen looked back, both with question marks in their eyes. “Neither of us saw anything like foam. At least I didn’t,” he said. Then to young Swensen he said, “Did you?”
Young Swensen just shook his head and then said with a questioning face, “Foam?”
Noonan looked over the files on his desk and then looked up at young Swensen. “You’re related to John Swensen, the president, correct?”
“Well . . .” young Swensen was hesitant. “Sort of. I’m the foster child of his sister. In that sense, yes, I am related.”
“Are you being groomed to take over the business?”
Young Swensen started to protest but then said, “I guess you could say that. It’s never been said to me in precisely those terms. John —that is, my uncle—has only said that as long as I work out, there will be a place for me here. He never said he was leaving the business to me, if that’s what you mean. He’s had some severe medical issues lately, and just recently he told me he is in the process of retiring. He specifically told me and Ramon,” he pointed to Delgado, “we were going to be taking on a larger role in the company, but that’s it.”
“So you are not in his will or anything like that?”
“Not as far as I know.” Young Swensen thought for a moment and then said, “I’m not stupid, Captain . . . Captain . . .”
“Noonan, but you call me Heinz.”
“I’m not stupid, Heinz. Uncle John has no wife and children. His only blood relative is his sister, my mother. So, yeah, if something happens to him, then I will end up running the business, but my mom will probably own it. I guess you could call that motive.”
“Motive?” Noonan gave him a strange look. “There has to be a crime for there to be a motive. Has a crime been committed?”
Delgado snapped, “Well, an armored car is missing.”
“Missing is not a crime.” Noonan looked at Delgado. “How long have you been working with the Swensen Armored Car Company?”
Delgado suddenly looked surprised. “I didn’t make the armored vanish.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Noonan responded. “I only asked how long you’ve been working here.”
Delgado gave young Swensen a quick look. “About four years. John and I started together. When we were in college.”
“So the two of you started to work here at the same time?”
Delgado looked at young Swensen and young Swensen looked at Noonan. “Look,” he said, “it’s no secret around the homestead. Ramon and I are partners. We’ve been together since our junior year in college. So, yeah, we’ve been working here together for three, four years. I had the connection, and Uncle John doesn’t care as long as we do a good job.”
“He doesn’t care you two are a couple?”
“He never said he cared. He treats Ramon like family at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“Does he put the two of you together all the time? I mean, when you are at work, are the two of you paired up all the time?”
Delgado was quicker than young Swensen with a response. “Our lives together,” he indicated young Swensen with a wave of his left hand, “is personal. When we work here, we’re two employees. We’re just like everyone else. When it comes to assignments, it’s done randomly. That’s the policy. Sometimes we work together, sometimes we don’t. It’s not like we are a team every time we show up.”
“So you have worked with . . . with . . . with . . .” Noonan looked at the personnel file tabs, “Charlie and George from time to time?”
“Everyone works with everyone else from time to time,” young Swensen snapped. “We don’t know who is going to be working with whom when we show up. We arrive and get an assignment. I’ve worked with Charlie and George, individually and together. The armored drivers change too. I’ve worked with the two Jacksons before—again, individually and together.”
“Was this last time any different?”
“Not really,” Delgado said. “We arrived, and the guard at the front gate gave us the assignments. We got our bikes and waited for George in the lot. John and I were at the front. Charlie and George took up the rear. George went into the garage, checked out the armored, and came out. He gave the go-ahead, and we left.” Delgado pointed to young Swensen. “We led the way, the armored followed, and Charlie was behind with George.”
“Did you see them—I mean, Charlie and George—behind the armored car?”
This took the two young men by surprise. “No,” said Delgado. “I mean, we didn’t look to see if they were there. We just led the armored.”
“We assumed they were there,” cut in young Swensen. “I mean, where else would they be?”
Noonan didn’t say anything. He picked up a yellow pad and looked at it for a moment. Then he asked, “What happened when you saw the motorcycle lying on the ground?”
“You mean the accident,” Ramon said. “Nothing. It had already happened. The motorcycle was on the pavement, and a lot of people were standing around. We followed procedure. If there is an impediment, we are to take another route.”
“You didn’t stop?”
“We don’t stop,” replied young Swensen. “There was no reason to. No one was injured.”
“No one you saw,” Noonan corrected him.
“Correct,” Delgado answered. “There was no reason for us to stop, so we didn’t. We went around the block and were back on route in a matter of a few minutes.”
“You didn’t stop anywhere along the way, correct?”
“We didn’t stop until we came to the Pamlico Tunnel.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, we stopped then,” Delgado said. “But it was the first time since leaving the Swensen facility.”
“But you did stop?”
“Yes, sir,” Delgado said.
“Heinz.”
“Eh?”
“Heinz. My name.”
“Oh yeah. Heinz. That was the first time we stopped.”
“You pulled up to the tunnel entrance and stopped.”
“Correct,” Delgado said. “We stopped.” He pointed to young Swensen. “The armored car was behind us. About four feet away. We talked with the traffic person and—”
“Did you know the tunnel was under construction?” Noonan asked.
“Sure,” said young Swensen. “They’ve been working on it for weeks. We knew the convoy procedure weeks ago.”
“So the process of getting through the tunnel was not new?”
“Nope,” said Delgado. “It was set standard. We’d been through before. Old hat.”
“S
o you didn’t have to instruct the traffic person about how you were going to go through the tunnel.”
“We’d been through the tunnel before with the woman. She wasn’t new. She knew our procedure.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” said young Swensen. “Besides, we told her again. Procedure. She did the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and Ramon and I went through.”
“Nothing unusual about the day?”
“Not a thing,” said young Swensen.
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. I mean nothing unusual. We didn’t know anything had gone wrong until the convoy came out of the tunnel with no armored car.”
“How did you know the armored car had not been sidelined for another convoy?”
“We didn’t.” Delgado shook his head. “We assumed it had been because it had not come out with the convoy. When the armored didn’t come out on our side, John,” he indicated the young Swensen, “rode in the convoy going back through the other way, I mean, back from our side of the tunnel. He wanted to see what had happened. When he got to the other side, Charlie and George did a ‘what’s going on here?’ That’s when we knew something had gone wrong. We put in a call to the troopers and chased down the vehicles in the convoy.”
“You stopped every vehicle that had been in the convoy?”
“Every one. There was no way for any of the vehicles to get off the highway. There was no exit, and they were moving slow because the roadway was torn up pretty bad. The troopers put up a roadblock in a matter of minutes and stopped everyone.”
“When did you go back through the tunnel?”
Young Swensen cut it. “We didn’t go together as a team the first time. I blasted ahead to make contact with the troopers. Ramon and Charlie went back into the tunnel.”
“Where was George?”
“He went with me to the trooper blockade,” young Swensen said. “It was all following procedure.”
“The procedure is for you to split up your team?”
“That I do not know,” young Swensen said. “It seemed the right thing to do. Actually, it’s what George ordered us to do. He was lead. He just pointed at Ramon and Charlie and ordered them to check the tunnel. Then George and I headed for the trooper blockade.”
Delgado followed up with “Later, when we regrouped, then John and George went through the tunnel. After that, all of us, all four of us, went through the tunnel.”
“On foot?” Noonan asked.
“We’ve been through the tunnel on motorcycles, on foot, and with troopers. More than once.” Delgado shook his head sadly. “There was nothing there. No armored car.”
“What about the trooper blockade? Did they check every vehicle?”
“Inside, outside, up, and down,” young Swensen said. “They matched every name and every plate and every license.”
“And there was zip?” Noonan asked.
“Goose egg,” said Delgado.
Chapter 21
It was not hard to break open the briefcase-sized delivery item from RMD, LLC. The Cookie-Cutters came with their own set of skeleton keys—or what passed for skeleton keys in the modern day and age. Opening the item was not hard. The Cookie-Cutters did something so quickly that John Swensen could not follow the action. He put the briefcase on a shelf in a storage locker next to the vault, and in the next instant, it was open.
“Just a second,” he snapped at the Cookie-Cutters. “I need to get any money, as in cash, out of there.”
One of the Cookie-Cutters tipped the briefcase forward. Dockets fell out on the shelf. But no cash.
“What are you looking for?” Swensen asked as the Cookie-Cutters piled the dockets on the shelf.
“Illegal financial transactions,” one of the men said as he opened one of the dockets.
Swensen pointed to one of the open dockets. “Hey,” he said. “I’m only half as stupid as I look. Those are legal documents. They’ve been filed with a court. Even I can see the stamps.”
“Oh, they all are legal documents,” said one of the Cookie-Cutters. “We just want to see the bulk of them in one location.”
Swensen picked up the warrant. “It doesn’t say anything here about legal records.” He looked up. “This is bat poop crazy! You got a warrant to open a briefcase full of legal documents and you knew they were legal documents?!”
“Ah,” said one of the Cookie-Cutters. “The United States government works in strange ways.”
“Maybe so from your side of the table,” Swensen said angrily. “But not here. Those are legal documents and your warrant,” he shook the piece of paper, “just says you want to examine them. So they stay here. I have no reason to release documents that I believe to be legal.”
“Oh,” the second Cookie-Cutter said, smiling, “we’re not going to take the documents. We’re only going to photocopy them.”
“You are going to photocopy publicly available legal documents? That makes no sense at all!”
“Like I said,” Cookie-Cutter two said, “the government works in strange ways.”
“Strange or not, I’ve got the Swensen Armored Car Company’s reputation to consider. I’ve got to tell RMD, LLC their privacy has been violated.”
The statement brought an unexpected response from the Cookie-Cutters. Rather than a snippy response couched in governmentese, it was a cautionary note. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because there is a lot more here than meets the eye. You said RMD, LLC stores money here. Money as in cash? In the vault? In cash form?”
“I never said that. And you don’t have a warrant to ask that. If you want to know, get a warrant.”
“I take that as a yes,” one of the Cookie-Cutters said.
“All cash stored here is logged in, recorded, stored, and insured. We have not failed a single audit in the past twenty-six years. If any of the money, the cash, was from an illegal source, it would have been discovered by now.”
“Well, you know . . .” started Cookie-Cutter one.
Swensen cut him off. “Look, what we have here is a real problem. Your warrant says you want to see records. You’ve seen them. The warrant says nothing about copying any records. And it doesn’t say anything about taking them away. This is the dumbest search I have ever heard of. First, you want to open a private company’s briefcase and look at documents you knew were public. Then you want to copy the public documents and put them back in the briefcase. Then you want to know about money stored here by the same company, without a warrant. What am I missing here?”
“Well . . .” Cookie-Cutter one started again. Before he continued he looked at his partner, who gave him a slow nod. “It’s a complicated situation.”
“No, it’s not,” complained Swensen. “Now you two come clean, or my lawyer gets involved, and I tell RMD, LLC the feds are looking into their packages.”
“Well . . .” said Cookie-Cutter two. “Let’s see what I can tell you without violating any confidentiality.”
“Uh-huh.” Swensen did not have a genuine scintilla in his “Uh-huh.”
“RMD, LLC is actually involved in the drug business.”
“Drug business? With legal documents?! Give me a break.”
“The drug in this case is marijuana. You see, while marijuana may be legal in some states, it is still a Schedule 1 drug along with heroin and LSD.”
“But RMD, LLC isn’t shipping marijuana,” Swensen said, pointing at the dockets. “That doesn’t look like marijuana to me. Even if there was marijuana in the briefcase, it would be a state crime, not a federal one.”
“Oh, there isn’t any marijuana here. This is drug money being laundered.”
“Give me a break. What you’re telling me is RMD, LLC is laundering money from marijuana sales that were made legally.”
“Not in this state.” Cookie-Cutter one was striving for some justification.
Suddenly it dawned on Swensen. “Ah, let me see if I’ve got this
right. What you are saying is, the RMD, LLC is taking money, cash, from legal marijuana sales in other states and moving it to North Carolina.”
“Sort of,” said Cookie-Cutter two.
“There’s no sort of about it.” Swensen was now angry. “Money from legal marijuana sales is legal money. It’s not illegal money. Read your United States Constitution. It’s called the Full Faith and Credit clause.”
“True,” Cookie-Cutter two broke in. “But money from and associated with marijuana sales is still considered drug money by the federal government.”
“That may be true,” Swensen cut it. “But it’s garbage. Come on! Money from a legitimate sale is legal money. Even when it crosses a state border.”
“True,” Cookie-Cutter one added. “But as far as the United States government is concerned, it’s drug money. It can’t be deposited in a bank. And you can’t use checks, credit cards, or debit cards to buy it.”
“I know that,” snapped Swensen as he pointed at the open briefcase with the dockets. “Those are legal documents.” Suddenly his eyes popped with understanding. “So RMD, LLC can’t use the United States Postal Service, can it?”
The two Cookie-Cutters looked at each other and then at Swensen.
“So, that’s the game! RMD, LLC can’t use the post office. If it did, you could take a look-see with no problems. But RMD, LLC is not using the post office, so you have to find another way to see the documents. Why not just go to state courts? All of those documents have been legally filed.”
“Well,” Cookie-Cutter two said sheepishly, “we don’t want to tip our hand.”
“Bat poop. You are doing an end-around-run. You don’t know what RMD, LLC is doing with its money, so you want a peek at the other guy’s cards. To look at all of the documents in one place rather than guess which courts in which states have the documents, you need to examine.”
“Well, that’s not exactly—”
Swensen cut him off. “This conversation is over. Now Swensen Armored Car Company has met and exceeded its obligation to the United States Government. You have looked inside the package as the warrant allows. There is nothing in this warrant about photocopying . . .” Swensen pointed to the sheet of paper on the shelf.
