by Dale Mayer
As he stepped through the door into the last room, he froze because it sounded like somebody was inside. Then he noted a flashlight beam. So Johan didn’t turn on the overhead light and immediately dropped to the ground and crept onto the other side behind the doorway. He waited and listened. He was a pro at this. Whoever was in here had to be aware that he’d entered, and now they would be worried about what he was up to.
He smiled at that, because when it came to playing a game of cat and mouse, Johan was definitely the cat. He heard a semiscuffle, as if somebody was to his right and was sliding closer to the doorway. Amateur. Silently Johan shifted across to the boxes in front of him, keeping out of sight, but leaving the pathway open for whoever it was who wanted to escape.
He heard another movement and another, as Johan slid a little bit closer. What the stranger didn’t know, possibly because of the angle of the doorway and how it entered the small hallway, was whether Johan had come in or whether he just opened the door and then left. Now Johan could hear his heavy labored breathing, panicked and moist.
Johan let his eyes adjust to the darkness, hoping to see a shape, a shadow, something. With the next movement, an outline took form. Male, five feet, eight inches, maybe 160 pounds. Casually dressed. The stranger took another step forward. Johan pondered his options. He could give himself away by catching the stranger now, or he could see who this person was and do a check on him before approaching him later. Then the man raced to the door in a sudden panic and opened it.
He disappeared into the darkness.
Maybe because he didn’t want to get caught in the act of stealing? Johan thought. Or maybe because he had just stumbled onto this too? If he’s one of the good guys, he could have run because he might have thought I was one of the bad guys.
Johan stayed where he was and immediately noted the impressions of what he’d seen on his phone, hoping to match this guy’s description with a name soon. He’d check all the photos in the personnel files. Then he stood, turned on the light, and checked out the room. This room was a different matter entirely. This was completely full of medications. All with labels for Westgroup. Johan took several photos of multiple cases, and, when he was done, he stepped out into the hallway, took a photo of the hallway with these doors.
There was one more hallway around the corner, which he took. It led to more stairs. As he walked up the stairs, it took him directly to the loading docks. Johan looked back, wondering if he’d missed an elevator somewhere. Because it would make more sense to go from the loading dock with all these cases of inventory via an elevator to these storage rooms on another level.
He retraced his steps and, sure enough, against the wall in the half-darkness was an elevator. He immediately looked for a control panel, but it was flush against the wall. Johan was surprised when he got it opened with no security card needed at all and stepped inside, checking out what the options were inside the car. What he saw caused him to whistle. Because that elevator led right to the top floor. No other choices were given. All the way to the penthouse and the corner offices of this building.
He quickly took a photo of the two elevator stops, designated simply as P and B3, and stepped back out again. Then he went up the stairs and stepped out into the loading dock bays. Several men unloaded a bunch of materials, as several others, and what looked like a trucker, stood there, talking. Johan quickly scanned the men, looking for the stranger he had crossed paths with in that last storeroom. He sighed when nobody matched up.
At his sudden presence, they all turned and stared at him. He gave a half smile and didn’t make any explanations as he walked over to the truck and studied the interior.
“Hey, who are you and what are you doing here?”
Just enough anger was in his voice that Johan immediately spun around to look at him.
One of the bigger of the six men came toward him.
“Just checking out what you’re doing,” he said, noting this guy had a Westgroup employee photo ID badge. Yet his workers did not. So Westgroup had hired the foreman, probably letting him dole out the work to independent contractors, field laborers even. Did Westgroup have enough trucking needs to have a full-time foreman on hand? Maybe the foreman was part-time. More questions. “I’m part of a two-man team of investigators here, looking into some specific issues,” he said calmly. He deliberately kept his voice mild as he waited to hear what the other man would say.
The foreman took a step back, his hands on his hips. He wore one of those yellow safety vests, with his employee card dangling from a lanyard on top. Grabbing the front edges of the vest, he glared. “Well, your investigation doesn’t have anything to do with anything down here.”
“How do you know?” Johan asked in a mild tone. He studied the other men, who were all collecting around the first man. Nobody but the foreman wore a name tag, so Johan carefully took a moment to study their faces so he’d remember them later.
“We haven’t been told about anything,” said one of the men in the back.
“Do the higher-ups talk to you about things going on in the company all the time?” Johan asked with genuine curiosity.
Finding out how a company worked was just as important as how it wasn’t working. For all Johan knew, everybody was involved in this scam from top to bottom. And yet he still hadn’t found any proof of any internal scam, so maybe it was his mind-set that automatically determined everybody was guilty until proven innocent.
“If it’s major, yes,” the foreman said, “so you need to get the hell out of here.”
“And why is that?” Johan asked, not moving.
“Well, for one thing,” one of the guys said, “you don’t have safety boots on.” A couple guys around him grinned because that was generally a safe bet.
“Quite right, I don’t,” he said. “But no machinery’s operating at the moment.” Turning to look at the truck, he asked, “What are you unloading?”
“Boxes,” the foreman in front sneered. “And, if you don’t get out of here, we’ll call our manager down here.”
Johan spun around and said, “Please do.”
That stopped the foreman flat-footed. He looked at the others and frowned.
“Are you really doing an investigation?” asked one of the men in the back. It was the same one who had mocked Johan over the lack of safety boots.
Johan nodded slowly. “Yes, I really am,” he said.
“About what?”
“Something that affects every level of the company,” he said. “Obviously I’m not at liberty to give you too many details.”
“Well, you can give us one,” the foreman snapped.
“Theft and smuggling. There’s two.” He said it more to see their reaction, hoping they would react in a way that would help him somehow.
At that, several of the men’s faces turned bleach-white, which Johan noted with interest, but the foreman in the front just turned bubbly red. “Well, you sure as hell don’t need to be rooting around accusing us,” he roared.
“Did I say I was?”
“You’re down here,” he snapped. “That’s all the evidence I need.”
“Interesting,” he said. “So the fact that I’m down here checking things out bothers you? So far, I haven’t seen anything, but, at the moment, it looks like you guys are trying to interfere with my job.”
That set the men back a little as well.
Johan waved a hand at them. “Carry on with your jobs,” he said. “I’m just here to observe.”
They frowned and shuffled their feet, but the man in charge nodded at them and motioned at the truck. “Get moving,” he said. “We haven’t got all day. We’ve got two more trucks coming in.”
“How do you move the material from here to the research center?”
“We don’t.” The guy looked at Johan in surprise. “Why would we? That would defeat the purpose. If they’re on a truck already, you might as well just truck them over there.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Joh
an said in a mild tone.
The guy stared at him in confusion.
Johan just smiled and stepped out of the way when the men returned to the truck to unload the rest of the boxes. Because he was watching, of course, they went about it in a fast and efficient manner, trying to look good. And he could appreciate that.
While they did their thing, Johan wandered around and studied the view, the access, the cameras, and security. The guy who was obviously in charge walked over and said, “If you’ve got any questions, ask me please, and don’t disturb the guys.”
“I’ll ask whoever I want to ask,” Johan said, without even turning around. He knew that would insult almost everybody and wanted to see what would set off these guys. Were they company men, or would they be upset at their employer and be ready to haul ass out of here?
He could hear the snort from the guy behind him, but Johan continued to walk, looking at the equipment and noting everything was well maintained, parked nicely and neatly out of the way, and that safety was obviously a prime concern. He nodded approvingly.
“What?” asked the foreman.
Johan looked at him. “Don’t be so touchy,” he said. “I was just noticing how clean and well maintained everything is and how safety appears to be paramount.”
“It is,” he said proudly. “We haven’t had an accident down here in over four years.”
“And considering you’re running a lot of forklifts,” Johan said, “that’s impressive.”
“Injuries happen regardless of the forklifts,” he said. “You get guys who lift boxes improperly, guys who load up crap and don’t watch where they’re going, or don’t wear their safety gear,” he said with a shake of his head. “I got no use for that.”
Johan nodded in an understanding way.
The foreman relaxed. “It’s hard to keep track of all these guys, you know?” he said confidentially. “They come and they go, and you think you got them broken of their bad habits because you watch over them like a hawk.”
“That’s because the bosses never understand how easy it is for accidents to happen. They just look at you and say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you stop it?’ Right?”
The foreman reached up and rubbed a little bit of white fluff remaining on the top of his almost bare head. “Isn’t that the truth,” he muttered. “The last guy dropped a box on his foot and broke his toe. Somehow I was supposed to stop that. They forgot about the fact that he lifted the box properly, carried it properly, and checked his pathway carefully.”
“Right. Dropping a box is pretty darn easy,” Johan said. “Surely somebody in management gets that.”
“Whatever was inside the box caused the chaos,” he said. “I don’t even know what it was, but it was damn heavy, and everything’s supposed to be packed under fifty pounds for personal lifting,” he said. “If we’d realized it was heavier, we would have used equipment. But it’s never that simple. Part of doing our job means we have to rely on other people to do theirs.”
At that, Johan laughed. “I think that’s a complaint the whole world over.”
“It is, indeed,” he said.
With the other man obviously easing his outrage, Johan nodded. “Looks like you’ve got this well in hand.”
“Well, I do,” he said, “but I only work five days a week.”
“Right. So you’re full-time, I presume.”
The foreman nodded.
“So is this area open the other two days?”
“We don’t have any receiving coming in those two days,” he said. “But, of course, the lab guys are moving stuff up and down as needed.”
“Are the offices all closed on the weekends?”
“From what I know, yes. Not the lab,” he said. “They have to check up on stuff all the time, so that stays pretty busy on weekends.”
“Makes sense,” Johan said. “I’ll find out for sure, as I’ll be in tomorrow too.”
The other guy looked at him in surprise, then shrugged and said, “Makes sense,” he said. “At least you’ll have access to what you need then.”
“That’s the plan,” Johan said. He took a step back, smiled at the foreman, and said, “I’ll leave you to your work then.” Johan turned, catching the relief spread over the man’s face as Johan headed back out to the loading bay, where he jumped down to the concrete slab and walked out to where he could turn and look at where the bays were situated on the actual building.
The bay doors were flush with the wall, and some windows were up above, but the lights didn’t appear to be on, or the rooms weren’t occupied at present, at least from what Johan could tell. He knew the other men were standing and watching him as he headed backward, looking at the entire layout of the building and the property itself. But Johan had to check not just the microstuff but also the macro as well.
When he got to the edge of the parking lot, almost to the driveway out onto the main road, he turned to look at all the buildings around. It was a heavy commercial-industrial area here. At least on this side and heading off in one direction. Yet the backside of the museum could be seen from here, but that building fronted another road, more or less marking off the arts district of downtown Houston.
Everybody on this side, fronting the nearest road, had big trucks, huge driveways, and wire fences between the places, all with gates that could be locked up at nighttime and weeds that seemed to be heavier all along the fence line.
The problem with that was it was pretty easy to hide a cut or to bend a portion of the fence to gain access—even how somebody dug down beneath the fence in order to get under it. Something that he’d have to take note of. He pulled out his phone and deliberately took several photos of the fence line and then of the building itself, as he walked around to the front so he could go in through the reception area. He checked out the parking lot that he passed on his way. The loading docks were in the back, with a parking lot on this side, a parking lot on the far side, and then in the front was the visitor parking.
Finished with his external inspection, Johan walked back inside the front reception area. The woman at the front desk looked up at him in surprise and asked, “May I help you, sir?”
He lifted his pass, smiled, and walked right past her through the security doors behind her.
She called out, “Sorry, can I—” and, with that, he was gone.
He wasn’t sure if she would call somebody or come after him herself. But, when she didn’t come through the connecting door, he figured that was his answer. Security around here sucks.
At the first set of stairs, he headed back down to his office. Once he got there, he noted that Galen still hadn’t returned. He checked his watch, frowned, and sent him a text. You coming back anytime soon?
On my way. Just passed you outside.
Yeah. Been looking at the loading bays, the various basement levels, and access to all. Found three doors locked with no security, all full of boxes of products. One guy was in the third, which was full of drugs.
Interesting. That was all Galen said.
Yeah. Uploading a bunch of material for Levi to look at.
Johan sat down at his laptop, went to his email, and quickly checked if anybody had been through his system. It was clean. With that, he sent Levi a zip folder with all the pictures he’d taken with his phone and the notes he’d taken, including everything about the random inventory in the three locked rooms and a description of the stranger. He included a note.
Levi, zip file with pics attached. Not sure what any of this is or if it’s important, but wonder what the deal is with three locked doors without the typical keypad security or cameras. Odd collection stored. One guy hiding in the shadows in the third one that held drugs.
Then he hit Send. By the time he got through the other emails that had downloaded into his mailbox, he looked up to see Galen walking in with two coffees. Johan smiled. “You know what? I keep thinking there’s got to be a place around pretty close where we can grab good coffee, and then I forget when I’m out.”
“Got you covered,” Galen said and set one down on the desk in front of him. “So tell me what you found.”
Johan hopped up, walked over to close the door, then explained what he’d seen, occasionally referencing his photos. They brought up a blueprint to the building on his laptop. He looked at it and frowned. “Hmm. Not seeing the rooms I was in today.”
“Added afterward, you think?”
“That would make sense,” he said, “especially if you really don’t want people to know.”
“So then, were they done on purpose for this stealing event, or was somebody just taking advantage of empty space? I mean, they probably figured that because those rooms weren’t on the blueprint or that people didn’t know about them, they were safe enough for their purposes?”
“Lots of questions. Again, just no answers.”
“What was the loading bay like?” Galen asked.
“The usual stuff. You know? ‘Get out of my turf. This is my space. We’re fine without you. Take your investigation somewhere else.’ All the usual crap.”
Galen laughed. “Turf wars are normal. If you were to go to the front receptionist and say you were doing an investigation, she’d be the same way.”
“Yeah. I just flashed my card at her and kept going and thought she was gonna chase me down as it was,” Johan said cheerfully.
Then he showed Galen the photos he had taken from the inside the locked rooms.
“Very interesting,” Galen said. “But why? A lot of material is here. Seems like wasted money, right?”
“The question is, has it just been forgotten? Because it’s just stuck down there and who cares? Or is it something people are moving in and out secretly? Or is this something that accidentally got dumped here because they didn’t have storage space at the big lab, or maybe they needed to move it somewhere else. Like an unusual or unexpected event. Remember though. The lab itself is down the block, but we still have some researchers in this building. However, I think they are more online researchers, not actual researchers testing formulas in a lab. So I don’t see how our in-house researchers would need the medicines and the medical supplies and such. Do you?”