Distortion (Moonlighters Series)

by Terri Blackstock

  Again, a bolt clicked. “Got it,” Michael said.

  Juliet stepped back, and Michael pulled the heavy door open. They stepped into the pitch-black house. Michael felt along the wall next to the door and found a light switch. He turned it on.

  This room was empty except for some tools lying on the floor. Several kinds of saws, screwdrivers, crowbars, hammers.

  “Okay, not what I expected,” Juliet whispered.

  They waited as Michael made a quick search of the house, checking every room and every closet for occupants. “It’s clear,” he said when he came back downstairs.

  Juliet breathed a sigh of relief and looked around. All the windows were covered with steel plates. The rooms felt stale, hot. She could hear the hum of air conditioning, but the thermostat was set high, maybe eighty degrees.

  Michael went to the kitchen, visible from the room they were in. More tools sat on the counters, and a gray dust had been tracked in from the garage. “Come on in here, but avoid these tracks on the floor. Stay against the walls.”

  They did as they were told, and Juliet looked around the room. This place clearly wasn’t used for cooking, but there was nothing obvious here worth noting.

  Michael opened the door to the garage. He flicked on the light. “Bingo,” he said.

  Juliet hurried to the door and stepped out. It was a fourcar garage, facing the back of the property. All she saw were some dismantled cigarette boats. “What do you mean, bingo? I don’t see anything except for some torn-up boats.”

  “That’s our gold,” he said. “I’m getting a clearer picture of how they were using this place.”

  Cathy came into the garage and looked around. “You care to share it with us?”

  He was looking into a boat, his eyes wide, checking out the damaged structure. “The favorite way to transport drugs from Colombia or other South American countries known for growing these crops is by boat. But it’s dicey bringing a load into US waters, because customs agents are pretty tough. Anything coming from Colombia would automatically be searched. So they plot their course from the Bahamas or Mexico or some midpoint that isn’t as suspicious.”

  “But there’s still a high risk they could be caught,” Cathy said.

  “Right. So they have to get creative about how to transport. Larger cargo ships are more likely to be searched. They can carry more drugs, but the risk of losing a load is greater. With loads like cocaine and heroin, they can have smaller loads and make more money. So sometimes they build them into these cigarette boats.”

  “Build them in?” Juliet asked. “How do you mean?”

  Michael pointed to one of the boats. Its hull had been sawn open. “The boat is made of fiberglass. There’s a closed bow. It holds up to five people, but for a drug load, there would probably only be two guys. The smaller the crew, the better. These boats are thirty to fifty feet long. Mostly fiberglass. They could hide drugs inside the bow, the walls, the floor, and customs agents would have to tear the boat apart to find them.”

  “So you mean they literally manufacture these boats with drugs in them?”

  “No, not at the manufacturing point. They would have a boat architect at their end, taking the boat apart, loading the drugs in, then putting it back together.”

  “So customs agents never look that far?” Juliet asked. “If you know about it, how come they don’t?”

  “They do. But in order to take the boat apart, Customs would probably have to take it out of the water and dry dock it. And if the boat had Colombians on board, they might be suspicious enough to do that. Colombia is responsible for 42 percent of the cocaine in the US. But if the transporters aren’t Colombian, and it looks like these are just boaters out having a good time, they might decide not to waste their time—or to risk damaging an expensive boat whose owners may not be guilty of anything.”

  Cathy walked to the garage doors. There were no windows. “So you think the transporters deliver the load here, on the water?”

  “Right,” Michael said. “They could pull up to this private dock in broad daylight. There’s a boat landing here, so pretty soon after they dock, they can put the boat on a trailer and pull it straight into this garage. The garage opens to the back, and they filled the pool in so it would be easier to pull the boat across the lawn and straight into the garage. Then they take it apart and get to the drugs.”

  Juliet frowned, trying to envision the whole process. “But it seems like the neighbors would get suspicious if boats come, then disappear, never to be seen again.”

  “The neighbors wouldn’t be that suspicious of boats docking at these houses. Besides, the boats might be seen again,” Michael said. “Having them vanish or not return to where they came from could be a red flag for Customs. There have been cases where the traffickers have a dummy boat identical to the one they tore up, waiting to replace the one with the drugs. The new boat would go back into the water. Anyone who noticed would think it was the same boat, customs officials who might be tracking them would be satisfied, and the transporters would be on their way, safe and sound.”

  “So there would be someone here to get the boat out of the water and load it into the house? Was that Bob?”

  “No, probably the same people who tear the boat up to find the drugs. They’d want to keep the crews small and segmented from the people above them. The same crew might transport the drugs to the distributors. Bob might never get his hands dirty. He might never even be here when this stuff is happening. He would only control the locks on the doors from his computer and monitor things from a distance.”

  Juliet found this all hard to believe. “How do we know this for sure?”

  “Can you think of a reason that there would be remnants of . . .” He counted the boats in the garage. “At least three boats in here? And I saw pieces scattered all through the house. I didn’t know what they were until I came into the garage, but now it makes sense. They probably cut them down into smaller pieces and dispose of them later.”

  “It just . . . it all seems so far-fetched. Crazy. That people would go to these lengths.”

  “If they get caught, they could serve upwards of twenty-five years. They would also lose a load of drugs worth millions. Yeah, they go to those lengths. You bet they do.”

  Michael went around the garage, taking pictures at various angles with his iPhone.

  “Can we go through the rest of the house?”

  “Yeah. The upstairs was pretty bare, but you might be interested in the two downstairs bedrooms. Just stay against the wall and watch where you step. The feds might be able to get footprints. Don’t mess them up.”

  Juliet followed Cathy up the hall, stepping carefully—one foot lined up in front of the other—to the master bedroom. There was no bed here, no furniture at all. But as Michael had said, there were smaller pieces of fiberglass and foam, boat seats, steering wheels, and other parts she didn’t recognize. A stack of empty boxes stood against the walls.

  “They probably take the parts out in these boxes,” Cathy said. “A trunk load that they could dump into a Dumpster somewhere.”

  She opened the walk-in closet. “This closet has been converted to a vault,” she said, looking back at Juliet. “It’s a walk-in safe. Is there a code for this?”

  Juliet pulled the wadded sheet out of her pocket and smoothed it out. “Yes, it’s right here. It says there are two safes in the house.” She saw that this one required a thumb-eye scan too. “Here, I’ll type it in.”

  Cathy stepped aside, and Juliet typed the code in, then set her thumb on the scanner and placed her eye in position. The red line floated by, then she heard the click. Cathy pulled the door open.

  Inside were boxes measuring three feet on every side, stacked to the ceiling. “What are those?” Juliet asked. “The drugs?”

  The lid of one of the boxes close to the safe door was open. Cathy turned on the closet light and bent down. “No, it’s cash. Lots of cash. Hundred-dollar bills, twenties, fifties . . .”
/>   “There could be millions of dollars here,” Juliet said.

  Cathy shook her head. “I doubt it. But think about it. Why would they keep the drugs stored? They’d get it to the distributors as fast as they could. That’s probably where this cash came from. From the distributors who bought the drugs.”

  “Then they’d get the drugs into the hands of the dealers.”

  “Right. And the dealers would never know about this place or any of the people involved above them.”

  In the other downstairs bedroom, they found the second safe. They opened it and found more cash.

  Cathy snapped some pictures. “So this is why Miller was trying so hard to get into this place.”

  “And why it’s locked down like Fort Knox.”

  They heard Michael coming in behind them. Juliet turned to him and said, “See what we found?”

  “Yep,” he said, unsurprised.

  “So why would Bob keep this much money here?” Juliet asked. “It seems really unsafe, even with all these precautions. I’m sure there would be a lot of people willing to kill him to get to this.”

  “It’s probably just a temporary storage place until he can launder it. After that, I assume he moves it to off-shore bank accounts.”

  “So do you think that’s why he was killed?” Cathy asked. “For this cash?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t paying the people he owed. He would have had to send the money for the shipments to his contact in Colombia. If he didn’t pay, there could be trouble.”

  “But why wouldn’t he pay? He had it. And wouldn’t he pay in advance?”

  “Could be another reason,” Cathy said. “Maybe one of his contacts here turned on him.”

  Still a mystery, Juliet thought. But they knew more than they’d known before.

  When they’d searched the rest of the house and taken all the pictures they wanted, Michael told Juliet to call the FBI.

  “Do I tell them we’ve already been through the house?”

  “Sure. Tell them the truth. Just leave the safes open.”

  Juliet called Darren and updated him. He told them to get out of the house and wait for his and Agent Blue’s arrival. They locked the house up and waited in the courtyard area in front.

  When Darren and Blue arrived, Michael went to the gate and figured out how to open it from the inside. They pulled their car in.

  “Sure wish you’d called us before you went in,” Darren said, clearly irritated, as they got out. “There’s evidence in this place that you may have contaminated.”

  “We were careful,” Michael said. “Gloves and shoe covers.”

  “I have CSIs on their way,” Darren said. “I didn’t want to wait. I want to see what we’re dealing with. Juliet, can you open this lock?”

  Juliet typed in the code for the front door. As at the back entrance, another steel door waited just inside the foyer. She got them in, then waited in the front courtyard as they went through the house.

  “How much money do you think is in there?” she asked.

  Michael was pacing back and forth along the wall. “I’ve seen these boxes before, when I was on the force. They can sometimes pack half a million dollars in a box that big, depending on the denomination. I counted twenty-two boxes. That could be up to eleven million.”

  “Juliet?”

  Juliet turned to the front door and saw Darren motioning her in. “Did Griffin give you a code for the back closet?”

  Juliet consulted her sheet. “Yes. It’s where his security equipment is stored.”

  “Come do your thing and let me in.”

  She went back in and followed him down the hall to the third bedroom on the ground floor.

  She pressed her finger to the pad, let it scan her eye again, and punched in the code. The door opened and she saw the computer equipment that monitored the cameras around the place. “I thought Bob monitored it from his computer,” she said.

  “He did. But he would be able to change the direction of the cameras and so on from in here. If the remote link ever failed to work, he would have come here to reset it.” Darren stood in the tiny room, studying the monitors that showed the areas around and inside the house.

  “Have you found the video footage on his hard drive?” Juliet asked.

  “Yep,” Darren said. “But we didn’t know where the place was.” He checked out something on the computer, then glanced at her. “You can go on back out now. You guys never should have come in here before calling us. I could slam you for interfering with an investigation.”

  “We told you we didn’t touch anything.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Evidence could be contaminated just by your walking through.”

  His tone heated her blood, and she bit her lip as he typed something on the keyboard. “You know, Darren, this is my life. Bob was my husband. The father of my children.”

  He looked up at her. “I know that, Juliet.”

  “And all this affects me. It’s not just a case. It’s not a mystery to be solved. It’s my life.”

  “But your life could be in jeopardy if you keep interfering. You have children to think about, Juliet. You need to back away and let us do this.”

  “You’ve had his computer,” she said. “You have all the information the DEA had on him. Yet you didn’t find this place. We did.”

  “You don’t know what we’ve found or what we’ve done.”

  “So you knew about it? And you hadn’t been here yet?”

  He turned back to the computer. “No, we didn’t know. We haven’t been here. You want me to give you a trophy because you got to it first?”

  “Of course not. But I’m trying to point out that we aren’t interfering. We’re helping. You have access to all this now, and you didn’t before.”

  Darren shook his head. “Juliet, it’s time for you to go.” He took her arm and walked her to the front door. Tears stung her eyes.

  Darren stopped before putting her out. “Look, Juliet, it doesn’t matter how long I’ve known you or how long I knew Bob. I have to be objective. If you were any stranger who went into a crime scene and contaminated the evidence before we got there, I would treat you just the same.”

  “We didn’t contaminate evidence! You can log our gloves and shoe covers to see if they have trace evidence. But we took those precautions.”

  “From this point on, I want you out of this. I’d like to put you and your kids in a safe house.”

  Juliet liked that idea. “Okay, but why now? We’ve been in danger all this time.”

  “If these traffickers learn that you’ve gained access to this place, they’ll be even more desperate to force you to help them.”

  The thought made her sick. “All right. I’ll do whatever you say. But how will you get back in here without my fingerprint and retina scan?”

  “We’ll do some reprogramming now, adding our prints and retinas to the mix. We can override what’s there, now that we’re inside. We’re professionals. Unlike you guys.”

  She didn’t know why that put her on the defensive. “Michael’s not an amateur.”

  “No, he’s not. But I still want all of you to leave this to us. Do you understand?”

  Tears glistening, she nodded her head. “All right. And if someone contacts me or I trip over more evidence, do you want me to call you or sit on it? Because I don’t want to get chewed out.”

  Darren closed his eyes and shook his head. “Obviously, you call me. But don’t go looking for things. I don’t want to have to investigate your death, Juliet.”

  She turned away, but Darren caught her arm and turned her back. “Juliet, look at me.”

  She met his eyes.

  “I care about you, okay? You’re my friend. I want you safe.”

  Her anger melted. “I’m sorry. I know you’re just doing your job. So about the safe house. How does that work? I still have to get my kids from school and pack up their stuff.”

  “I’ll send for someone to escort you when you
leave here. They can let you go home so you can pack a quick bag. Hopefully you won’t have to stay there long.”

  She couldn’t help feeling relief. “Okay. Yeah, I guess that’s best.”

  She stepped out the front door.

  Michael and Cathy were standing at the edge of the yard, beside the wall. “You okay?” Cathy asked.

  Juliet shook her head. “Not my best day,” she said. “It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. That Bob could sit in church every Sunday and say his prayers with our kids at night and go to men’s conferences and . . . act like he was some big Christian.”

  They both looked at their feet.

  “How do I explain this to my children?”

  “You don’t have to explain anything,” Cathy said.

  “Yes, I do. Zach already knows. If it’s going to be on the news, he’ll find out about it.”

  “Maybe we can keep it off the news.”

  “There’s no way a prominent doctor in town is caught in a drug ring, murdered for it while hiding a huge stash of money in a local upscale neighborhood, and it stays out of the news.”

  “Let’s not worry about the media right now, honey. One thing at a time.”

  She drew in a long, ragged breath. “Well, the one thing that’s going to happen next is that they’re taking me and the kids to a safe house.”

  Michael’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? That’s good.”

  She nodded. “Things are starting to feel even more dangerous. I’ll feel better when we’re where they can’t find us.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Robbie was still sick. Amber had tried to take him to daycare that morning in spite of his fever, but they had refused to take him. She had to do something. Lenny hadn’t been able to get into the house where the cash was, the delivery had been aborted, and the prospects of her walking away from this mess with any cash at all were getting slimmer all the time.

  The babysitter Amber preferred was at school, so she called her neighbor across the street who homeschooled her children. “I need a babysitter,” she said. “Could your oldest kid babysit for me? What’s her name? Ariel? Allison?”

  “Her name is Lizzy.”