No Honor Among Thieves: An Ali Reynolds Novella (Kindle Single) (4 page)

Adding GPS locator beacons to all the pallets had been done at B.’s suggestion. Each chip listed the individual pallet’s weight as well as its final destination.

“We know from the readings on the pallet tracking system that the designated weight on each pallet remains unchanged from what it was when it left the plant in Mexico.”

“All the pallets may still weigh the same amount,” B. said darkly, “but I’m betting some of them aren’t carrying their original payloads or maybe the boxes in the wrecked truck are from a pallet that was never chipped in the first place.”

“As in ‘no chip, no pallet’?” Ali asked.

B. nodded. “Which would mean there are people working this scam at both ends of the food chain, and we need to find out who they are.”

Cami waited quietly on the phone, listening, until B. and Ali finished their own discussion. “Is that all you need me to do, then?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “What’s Stu’s favorite Subway sandwich?”

“The club,” Cami answered without hesitation. “With mayo, lettuce, tomato, and Jack cheese. Why?”

“Go get two of them,” Ali said, “one for him and one for me. It turns out he and I about to take a little trip, and we’ll need some sustenance along the way.”

“What kind of trip?” Cami asked.

“Never mind. We’ll tell you when we get there.”

•   •   •

By the time B. pulled into High Noon’s lot, Ali had finished letting the YWCA know that she would be a no-show for that day at least and maybe longer. Cami arrived at the same time they did. She was just exiting her car with a pair of sandwich bags in hand, when the shadow of a landing helicopter passed over her head and then swooped down for a landing in the far corner of the lot.

Cami looked at it and then back at Ali and B. “Surely you don’t think Stu’s going to ride in that.”

“He’ll have to,” B. said. “This is an important client, and we need a quick turnaround.”

Cami shook her head. “Good luck with that,” she said, and stalked inside with B. and Ali right behind her.

“Hey,” the unsuspecting Stu said when he saw them. “Marliss Shackleford just updated her blog.”

“What’s new?”

“Come look.”

B. and Ali walked over to Stu’s bank of computers and read over his shoulder.

At a hastily called press briefing this morning, Chief Deputy Tom Hadlock, media spokesman for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, has just confirmed what I had reported earlier. The fatality truck accident that occurred earlier today on Highway 92 east of Palominas is now being investigated as a homicide.

According to Chief Deputy Hadlock, the vehicle, carrying a load of possibly stolen goods, was attacked with a barrage of automatic gunfire just west of the San Pedro bridge. The driver of the vehicle, still unidentified, was found dead at the scene. An autopsy is scheduled later this morning with the Cochise County Medical Examiner.

Chief Deputy Hadlock is urging anyone who might have been traveling on Highway 92 between the hours of midnight and three
A.M.
to contact the sheriff’s office, especially if they happened to spot anything out of the ordinary.

In the briefing, Chief Deputy Hadlock said the truck was carrying “contraband” of some kind and declined to discuss the nature of said goods. But that’s just him. He may still be playing the old “refuse to confirm nor deny” game, but I’m convinced that the stolen goods in question are LEGO sets.

Stay tuned and keep in mind that you heard it here first.

“I suspect Ms. Shackleford here most likely isn’t one of the local sheriff’s favorite people,” Ali observed when she finished reading the blog post. “There’s some obvious animosity here, and someone who publishes unsubstantiated rumors is liable to be blackballed from the room.”

“Which means you should probably have a little chat with Ms. Shackleford when you’re down there,” B. said. “After all, I’m not the kind of person who turns up my nose at unsubstantiated rumors.”

“You’re going there?” Stu asked. “To Bisbee?”

“No,” B. said. “You are—you and Ali. There’s likely to be a tech component to all this. If so, I’m hoping you can glean as much information from that as possible.”

“But I already told you,” Stu said. “It’s more than a five-hour drive from here.”

“We won’t be driving,” Ali said. “B. called Heli-Pros. Our aircraft is already out in the parking lot, ready to go.”

“A chartered helicopter?” Stu said, sounding alarmed. “You expect me to get on a helicopter? I don’t do helicopters. I weigh too much, and I know too much about gravity.”

“Stu, we need you to do this,” B. reasoned. “LEGO is an important client, and we need to do whatever’s necessary to learn what we can about what’s happened.”

“Not if it means I have to ride in a helicopter,” Stu said determinedly, shaking his head. “I won’t go.”

“Please,” Ali begged. “We need you on the ground to sort things out.”

“Send Cami,” Stu said. “She can do everything I can do . . . well, almost everything. And if something turns up that stumps her, as long as she has my tool kit and a video camera, I can walk her through whatever needs to be done”

Stu reached under his desk and pulled out a worn leather bag that TV’s Marcus Welby, MD, might have dragged along with him on house calls back in the sixties.

“Trust me,” he said, handing the bag over to Cami. “Most everything you need is in there, except for the RFID reader itself. My cloner’s in there, too, by the way.”

“Really?” Cami said, brightening. “You’re going to turn me loose with your cloner?”

Ali knew the cloner to be a piece of specialized cell phone duplicating equipment that Stu had never before allowed out of his personal possession.

“I’m pretty sure you’re trustworthy,” Stu said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

After Stu’s ringing endorsement of Cami’s capabilities, Ali realized that both she and B. had been overruled and outmaneuvered.

“So much for not being able to give a haircut over the phone,” she said with a grin in B.’s direction. “I guess they’re possible these days after all. All right, Cami,” she added, turning to the young woman. “I guess that other club sandwich belongs to you. Wheels up in five.”

•   •   •

Right around five thirty, with the horizon slowly brightening in the east, Dave Hollicker sought out Joanna and shook an evidence bag in front of her face. “Hey, boss,” he said gleefully, “we’ve got some.”

“Some what?” Joanna echoed. “Bullets, I hope.”

“Yup. Five so far, and we’ll probably find more.”

“What kind of bullets?”

“They’re 7.62 NATO rounds,” Dave answered. “That means we’re most likely looking for an AK-47.”

“That news doesn’t exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy,” Joanna told him.

“Me neither.”

“Anything else?”

“A broken Garmin GPS, a cell phone that’s smashed to pieces and dead as a doornail, a crack pipe, a wallet with fifteen hundred dollars in it in cash. There’s also a California driver’s license belonging to one Fredrico Arturo Gomez with an address in Bakersfield, California.”

“So we have a pretty good idea of who our victim is, then?” Joanna asked.

“No such luck,” Dave replied. “When I ran the license, it turned out to be phony and so was the address.”

“So either he’s an illegal, a crook, or both?”

“That’s about the size of it. Once the ME collects his prints, we may get a hit on one of those. With the crack pipe in play, most likely this isn’t his first rodeo, and his prints will be in the system.”

The radio on the shoulder of Joanna’s uniform squawked awake. “Sheriff Brady,” Armando Ruiz barked in her ear. “The SCRs are here asking what you want them to do.”

Joanna’s watch said six
A.M.
sharp as she started back up the steep embankment. George Winfield and his band of eight eager-beaver reservists stood at the ready. Gathered around a nine-passenger minivan, they were busy examining the metal detectors they had just been issued.

“We’re ready to go to work,” George told her. “What do you want us to do?”

“This is a shooting that was not random. We’re operating on the assumption that the victim was deliberately targeted. We’re looking for shell casings, folks, a whole bunch of shell casings. We’ve had vehicles driving back and forth all morning, and no one has spotted anything on the pavement. That suggests that the shooter was off the roadway somewhere, maybe hiding in the brush, and waiting for our victim to pass by. I want you to start from where the truck went through the guardrail and then, using the metal detectors, work your way back, searching both sides of the highway both visually and with the detectors.

“I’m asking for a systematic, inch-by-inch scan from the edge of the pavement out to the fence line and back again. If you find casings, do not touch them or move them. Call George immediately so he can notify one of my CSIs to come take charge of the evidence. And if you see any recent shoe prints or tire prints near the casings—or anywhere else, for that matter—please avoid obliterating them if at all possible.”

As the SCRs set off to do her bidding, Joanna stood between the torn pieces of guardrail and stared down at the scene, convinced that she’d made the right call. With the number of holes in the truck—in both the cab and the bed—there had to be dozens of casings out there somewhere. The fact that Agent Cannon had been on the scene summoning assistance such a short time after the crash meant the shooter wouldn’t have had time to hang around collecting his brass. Information gleaned from that might well lead back to both the weapon in question as well as the shooter.

Even without additional evidence, it was clear to Joanna that this had to have been an ambush with the shooter lying in wait until the truck reached a certain point in the road. Had the shooter merely intended to disable the truck and lift the cargo, the shots would have been aimed at the engine block or the tires. The shots into the truck’s cab had all been kill shots, so who was the target here? Just the driver, or was it someone behind the driver—maybe whoever might well have forked over $1,500 to have the load transported? Either way, the first order of business was establishing the driver’s identity.

Ten minutes after the SCRs were deployed, George called her. “Okay,” he said. “We found your casings—a whole flock of ’em—inside a mesquite grove on the left side of the road just west of the parking lot for the Saddle Up Steakhouse. Couldn’t see any tire tracks at all. The restaurant’s parking lot is paved, so the shooter may have parked on that and walked from there. With all the grass on the shoulder of the road, I doubt you’ll find footprints.”

“Probably not,” Joanna agreed.

“But as close as this is to Hereford,” George continued, “I’m surprised no one heard anything.”

“Tell your guys I said ‘Thanks and good work,’ ” Joanna told him. “Make that ‘great work.’ I’ll send the CSI team down to bag and tag the casings. I’ll also get someone on the horn to the owners of the steakhouse to see if they have any security cameras.”

“Wait a minute,” George said. “Are you telling me I dragged everybody out of bed for something that only lasted ten minutes and now I’m supposed to say, ‘Go home and go back to bed’?”

Joanna thought about that for a second. “No,” she said finally. “Don’t do that. Once the CSI’s finish processing the scene down on the river, we’ll need someone to go around collecting LEGO sets—hundreds of them—and load them onto another truck.”

“How much time before they’ll be ready for us?” George asked. “Enough for us to head back to the café in Palominas for some breakfast?”

“That should work out fine,” Joanna assured him.

By seven thirty the SCRs, now sporting latex gloves, were down in the riverbed gathering scattered LEGO sets and packing them one by one into the U-Haul truck that Deputy Stock had parked on the bank nearest the highway. Joanna felt guilty watching people she regarded as “old codgers” hoofing it through the sand, but the truth was she needed the help and they seemed to be having a ball. Besides, if she’d called in her deputies to do the job, there would have been no one left out on patrol.

As the boxes were gathered and loaded, it soon became apparent that a second U-Haul would not be required. The same could not be said of the totaled box truck. That one for sure required two flatbed tow trucks: one for the cab and one for the body, which had literally split into two pieces. The tow truck guys were in the process of finishing loading the cab onto the second flatbed, when Joanna’s phone rang. Her secretary, Kristin Gregovich, was on the line.

“I know you’ve got your hands full out there today, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin said, “but I just had a call from Dr. Baldwin. Jaime’s already up at the morgue, waiting. Dr. Baldwin wants to know if you’re still coming or should she do the autopsy without you?”

Glancing at her watch, Joanna was astonished to discover that it was almost eight thirty. She had been at the crime scene for the better part of five hours, and she was now almost half an hour late for the autopsy.

“Tell Dr. Baldwin I’m sorry to have kept her waiting,” Joanna said, sprinting back up the embankment to where her Yukon was still parked. “I’m on my way right now. I’m probably another half hour out at most.”

•   •   •

The trip to the morgue wasn’t one that merited lights and sirens, but Joanna drove well over the posted limits to get there. When she arrived in the parking lot, Jaime was climbing out of his car to go back inside.

“What’s up,” she asked, hurrying to intercept him.

“Dr. Baldwin took the victim’s prints and I just finished running them,” he reported. “Turns out Mr. Fredrico Gomez is actually a small-time crook out of Santa Ana, California—one Alberto Ricardo ‘Taquito’ Mendoza.” He simulated quotation marks in the air with his index fingers when saying the word “Taquito.”

“His nickname is Taquito?” Joanna asked. “Really?”

“That’s what it says on his rap sheet.”

“What else does it say?”

“Small-time drug violations, mostly: possession with intent to sell, everything from crack to meth. He’s been out on probation for three months. I’m sure this little out-of-state venture would have sent him straight back to the slammer. Now that he’s dead, that’s a moot point.”