Counterfeit Road

by Kirk Russell

  He looked through the window again at the kitchen clean space where Khan stored completed cabinets. Two jobs were complete and waiting to ship. The newly built cabinets were wrapped individually in thin plastic to protect them, but that plastic was in tatters, cut loose when the cabinet interiors were searched. Khan was a meticulous man. Raveneau glanced at his handwriting again. He ran a small factory from this office and had earned a reputation for accuracy among those whose businesses rested on accuracy.

  What was that Ortega said an architect told him? That Khan worked with wood yet worried over dimensions as if he was working with metal. Raveneau was turning that in his head when Ortega walked in.

  ‘Gibbs is back with coffee and something to eat. Come take a break.’

  Raveneau checked his messages. He thanked Gibbs for the coffee and then walked down to the steel racks at the far end of the building that held Khan’s stored inventory. Different types of wood were on different racks. The larch ply Drury delivered was on stickers on the floor.

  From behind him, Ortega said, ‘We confirmed he needed this plywood for a cabinet project here in the city. It’s on the plans he was working from and I talked to the architect and the contractor.’

  Raveneau turned to him. ‘Where are you going to go with Drury?’

  ‘We’ll interview him again this week. I went back over his delivery sheet yesterday.’

  ‘What do you think about him quitting his job?’

  ‘I talked to Branson, his boss again. He told me Drury was probably going to quit anyway.’

  ‘Who quits a job nowadays?’

  ‘I will if I can’t find who killed these people. What happened here, Raveneau? What do you think and what are you doing down at this end of the building? You picked up your coffee and walked straight down here. If you see something I need to know what it is.’

  Raveneau reached out. He put a hand on Ortega’s shoulder.

  ‘I am sorry about yesterday and I know what pressure you’re under. I didn’t walk down here because I had any new ideas, but I keep thinking about the delivery, the tight window and that the employees were all at their stations working against a deadline. I keep thinking they were shot by someone who knew where they would be.’

  ‘Khan knew where they would be.’

  ‘But why would he kill his employees? More to the point, you’ve got to have a very, very good reason to want to draw all the attention a homicide like this will bring.’

  Ortega got called away and Raveneau lingered in the material storage area. He smelled fir. He touched smooth pieces of finish lumber and then looked over at the forklift. Dan Oliver, the employee who accepted the delivery set the plywood down on four inch by four inch stickers to keep the unit off the ground so a forklift could pick it up later. Then he parked the lift. The key was still in it.

  Raveneau walked back to the unit of plywood and sat down on it. He ran his fingers along one of the steel bands holding it together and took another sip of coffee. Then, he thought, why not, but finished the coffee before laying down three pieces of wood he could slide the sheets of plywood on to. Then he went looking for a band cutter. He crossed the room to where he had seen tools stored and found one.

  After cutting the two metal bands he slid the first sheet off and positioned it neatly on the wood stickers. He did the same with the next fifteen sheets, keeping the new pile exact and precise. A light sweat started on his forehead as well as the sense this was a little bit foolish. He felt the weight of each sheet now and each was four feet wide by eight feet long and three quarters of an inch thick. He rested a moment after getting through the next six sheets. That left twenty to go and he hoped Ortega didn’t walk back just yet. He didn’t really have a good explanation for why he was doing this.

  He slid two more sheets off, then slowed and stood up as he slid off the next. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He had a pretty good idea, but he wasn’t there yet. All of the remaining sheets appeared to be joined together by long screws, and the oblong metal objects sat in pockets routed into the wood, each looking shiny and deadly, each resting in a wood pocket with packing around it to keep it from moving. There were four of them and routed into pockets alongside them, four end pieces nestled in the way a wedding ring might rest in velvet.

  Raveneau touched the end of one and felt where the cap piece would screw in. Pack them with explosives and then screw on the cap piece, four casings about eighteen inches long, fat in the middle, narrowing at the nose, clean curved metal. He stared. He studied them before walking back to the saw cutting room and waving Ortega over.

  ‘Bruce, come take a look.’

  And then Ortega was standing next to him saying, ‘Khan’s a bomb maker.’

  Raveneau didn’t go there yet. He was still taking it in. Each was well machined, similar if not identical. This was production manufacturing. He turned to Ortega and asked, ‘Who’s the bomb guy we hired that was with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan?’

  ‘Yeah, I know who you mean. They call him Hurt Locker but I can’t think of his real name. Hagen knows him.’

  ‘Let’s get Hagen to call the bomb squad. Let’s see if we can get him here without the rest of the squad and before we call the Feds or anybody else.’

  NINETEEN

  The captain who oversaw the bomb squad told Hagen, ‘No way, it’s not going to happen.’ Raveneau was close enough to overhear. He refused to send Juan Garcia, the ex-Army technician alone.

  Raveneau mouthed, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and Hagen stared hard at him before saying, ‘I’m going to put Inspector Raveneau on the line.’

  When Raveneau brought the phone to his ear Captain Dixon asked, ‘Raveneau, are you ever going to fucking retire?’

  ‘I’m waiting you out. You go, and then I’ll go.’

  ‘What would I do every day?’

  ‘You’d do the same thing you do now, you’d sit around.’

  Dixon laughed. Raveneau didn’t know him well but they liked each other.

  ‘Here’s the problem we’ve got,’ Raveneau said. ‘We’ve discovered what look like bomb casings and we don’t want to alert the owner yet. We need to keep this very quiet. We need a discreet look at them.’

  ‘Are you staying well away from them?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘You need to get everyone out of the building. What’s the address again?’

  Raveneau gave it to him and kept talking.

  ‘We can’t risk our suspect finding out we’ve discovered this.’

  ‘We have a very clear protocol, Ben, and I think everyone in the department knows it, you included.’

  ‘I understand, but we can’t risk the word getting out. If you can’t send him and give us a look and an opinion, we’ll go at it a different way.’

  ‘No, don’t call the Feds, we’ll get down there. Don’t touch anything and we’ll come in as quietly as we can.’

  ‘It’s plywood that’s been moved around with a forklift. It rode here on a lumber delivery truck. It can’t be that sensitive. Look, I’ll email you a photo of what we’ve got. I’ll do that right now.’

  Ten minutes later Dixon called back, saying he was sending Garcia, the Hurt Locker guy.

  While they waited Raveneau made a call to a friend who worked for a company called Shelter Products up in Portland. He figured if there was anyone who could trace where the plywood came from it was Ridge Taylor. He got through to Taylor and after the hellos said, ‘I can’t tell you why but I need to know. I’ve got an order and a delivery tag number. We can fax to you and I can tell you what’s stamped on the wood.’

  No one told a joke better than Taylor, but he was quiet and serious as Raveneau went back and forth with him. Shelter Products sold point-to-point. They sold lumber as it was still rolling on a train. They sold into any number of states and after they were clear on the forty-two pieces of finish grade larch he asked Taylor about Branson Trucking, thinking they might know who to call if they didn’t know anythin
g directly.

  ‘Why don’t I put you through to Hutton and let him tell you. Your plywood came out of a plant in British Columbia. Here’s the address and phone number.’

  Taylor gave him that and a website, then put him through to Kurt Hutton. Hutton asked, ‘Are you building a wooden jail?’

  ‘No, and I can’t talk but I need to know anything you can tell me about Branson.’

  ‘I can tell you they appeared out of nowhere about four years ago with lower prices than anybody. The CEO, if you want to call him that, was somebody we did business with and he ran into hard times and went under. I don’t know when he connected with the investor money behind Branson. He’s not really the type to go out and find money like that, but obviously he did.’

  ‘If they’re less expensive why don’t you use them?’

  ‘They did do some hauling for us, but they couldn’t possibly have made money at the prices they charged us and it was hurting others we work with. They’ve got a good idea with their website though. On the website is a truck and you click and drag and as you load the truck it gives you the weight and you punch in the destination and it gives the hauling price.’

  ‘I’ve been to it.’

  ‘With their prices they had to be cutting corners other ways, so we backed away.’

  He thanked Hutton as Hurt Locker showed up. He was probably no more than twenty-five but with a quiet walk and manner that made Raveneau remember his son. He watched how Garcia approached the casings and studied them. Ten minutes later he straightened, turned, and looked at them.

  ‘You’ve got yourself some pretty slick IED casings, except that they don’t look very much like improvised explosive devices. You’ve got four Cadillacs, depending on who puts them together from here. Anyone of these would make one hell of a bomb. See how the nose is shaped, directs the blast.’

  He fixed on Raveneau.

  ‘These are some seriously bad dudes and they aren’t one-off deals. They’re producing them. This is one scary thought.’

  ‘What would one of these do to a cable car?’

  ‘Oh, I think you’d be looking for pieces and parts four blocks away.’ He paused. ‘You want to find the bomb maker like right now, pronto.’

  TWENTY

  Raveneau moved his car so the bomb sniffing dogs and the X-ray robot could enter through a loading bay. Still, you couldn’t fool the street. The neighbors quickly noticed the vehicles and a couple of people walked up to ask what was going on.

  But nothing more was discovered and the X-ray was negative on anything else hidden in the plywood. Hurt Locker Garcia operated the X-ray robot. He determined the casings weren’t booby-trapped and removed them slowly. After that, the only metal the robot picked up were the screws sandwiching the plywood together. Garcia nodded at Raveneau’s guess the end pieces threaded on after the explosive was inside.

  Other than Garcia no one touched them and Garcia wore gloves. A CSI team was on its way here and the hope was they’d pull something off them that would help.

  Raveneau asked Garcia, ‘They looked heavy when you picked them up.’

  ‘They are. They’re some sort of alloy.’

  Raveneau took photos and then stepped back as the CSI crew arrived and tried to figure out how to approach this. Meanwhile, Raveneau, Ortega, and the canine crew helped load the X-ray robot back into the van. When the bomb squad left Ortega called a meeting in Khan’s office. He wanted to caucus on how to proceed. One idea was to restack the plywood, reband the unit, and set up surveillance cameras before turning the building over to Khan. Raveneau favored that idea but disagreed with Ortega over bringing in the FBI.

  ‘You’ve got to bring them,’ Raveneau argued. ‘There’s really no choice.’

  ‘Raveneau, you know as well as I do what’s going to happen. They’ll trample our murder investigation. By noon they’ll have a press release out saying they’re working a significant terrorism investigation in San Francisco. The murders here will become a sidebar. They’ll tuck Khan away somewhere. We can wait a few days.’

  ‘I know who to call.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mark Coe.’

  ‘I don’t even know him.’

  ‘You’ll meet him today. You’ll be able to work with him.’

  Hagen jumped in. ‘Couldn’t disagree more,’ he said, and they continued on like this, but knew the call was going to get made. Ortega would have cut this debate off awhile ago if it wasn’t. Half an hour later, Ortega asked for Coe’s cell number.

  Thirty-five minutes later Coe and two other agents were in the building looking at bomb casings. More calls got made and a bomb expert an hour and a half down the coast at Fort Ord got in his car. Another boarded a plane in LA. With Coe there Raveneau stepped back. He listened to Ortega sketch out his video surveillance idea.

  ‘We’re going to pull the crime tape anyway. We can put the bomb casings back in their nests, reband the plywood, give him the building back and watch what he does. His attorney keeps telling us his client will lose his business and they’ll sue if we don’t let him back in here soon.’

  Raveneau knew Coe couldn’t decide on his own. He’d have to call his ASAC at a minimum. That call got made now and late in the afternoon Raveneau left the building to buy a banding tool and steel tape at a lumberyard. A clerk showed him how to use it. When he got back to Sixteenth Street he called Celeste to let her know he was going to be late.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said as she picked up, ‘you aren’t going to make it tonight.’

  ‘I’ll be late. We found something very disturbing.’

  ‘That sounds scary.’

  ‘It is.’

  Coe got a wiretap warrant and the FBI tested and retested their video system trying to get at a bug in it as Raveneau stacked plywood with Ortega. Every three or four sheets they stopped to make sure everything was lining up correctly. Lining up the creases the former banding tape made on the edge of the last sheet was hard. It needed to align perfectly and Raveneau struggled with the banding tool. But finally he figured it out and when he finished the stack looked pretty much like it had. One by one, they backed out of the building and as Raveneau stood with Ortega down the block and outside his car, Coe called from back in the Fed field office.

  ‘Everything is working, you’re good to go.’

  Ortega turned to Raveneau and said, ‘Here goes.’ He called Khan’s lawyer. ‘This is Inspector Ortega. Mr Khan can have his building back. If he needs someone we can give you the names of several firms who do crime scene cleanup.’

  ‘Does that mean he is no longer a suspect?’

  ‘We’ve never called him as a suspect.’

  Raveneau smiled as Ortega said that.

  ‘You’ve treated him as one. You prevented him from reopening his business and cost him a great deal of money. Who is going to compensate him for that?’

  ‘You tell me. I have no idea. Good night.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Eight months ago near the end of spring last year, Celeste told him, ‘I’m forty-eight. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.’

  She had two hundred seventy-one thousand dollars saved over seventeen years for the sole purpose of opening a restaurant. But the tipping point was when her mother died about a year ago and Celeste inherited $185,000, and with that felt sure she had enough money. Her mother’s death also made life much more finite for Celeste. That started the summer of eating and looking at other restaurants and places for lease.

  They had fun with it right up to the point where she signed a lease and the clock started. The second thoughts arrived then and the fear she was in over her head in a competitive city woke her at night. She planned to serve food at the bar but had last cooked professionally twenty-five years ago when she imagined a career as a chef before becoming a bartender and later a wine broker.

  During the heatwave last September when city temperatures broke one hundred degrees for the fourth day in a row, she had an anxiety attack that a
lmost derailed the project.

  She wept and shook as she told him, ‘I’m wasting everything I inherited and all the money my mom saved on a vain idea. I’ll get panned in the first reviews and will never be able to compete.’

  But by then she was committed to the lease and had already spent fifteen thousand on architectural drawings. She broke out in hives. She fought panic with manic focus on restaurant design and construction and by testing drink recipes at home. But the low point was yet to come. It arrived a month later as she got the first construction bids from two general contractors, both of whom had come highly recommended.

  The bids were nearly double what her architect had estimated. She found a third contractor and got another bid, then two more before realizing that she needed to scale back her plans radically. She kept the idea that you could still eat at the bar or a bar table. Not a restaurant style meal, and very casual eating, with the idea there would be six to eight small plates and always pizzettas. You’d get paper napkins not cloth but food would be part of the draw. She focused on the mixology, on bartending, on a culture that would treat customers like friends.

  She didn’t have to but she also focused on sustainable. She found recycled materials. She bought used bar equipment and chairs and tables. She refinished the tables with Raveneau’s help. She found a used pizza oven and the architect came up with a way to capture waste heat from the bar dishwasher, running plastic Pex lines embedded in the concrete bar top so if you rested your elbows on the bar top concrete they would stay warm.

  She fought. She negotiated. The flue rebuild became yesterday’s problem. The Health and Building Departments signed off. A local advocate for handicap rights came by and measured the bathrooms. Then Bo Rutan pulled up in his old El Camino with Louisiana plates saying he had in fact trained in Rome not New Orleans. He was in chef whites making pizzas when Raveneau walked in tonight.