by Diane Capri
Scorpio spent about a nanosecond thinking about what to do next. He owned the kind of equipment he needed to breach the encryption on the flash drive. His stuff was all set up in an environment where he could get all the privacy in the world. He could take his time. Do it right.
He cleared his throat, which caused Thorn to meet his eyes in the rearview.
“Let’s stop for coffee and a bathroom break and fill up the gas. After that, we’ll head back to Rapid City,” he said.
“Roger that, boss,” Thorn replied. He used his turn indicator and took the first exit off the interstate.
CHAPTER 12
Friday, February 11
4:05 a.m.
St. Louis, Missouri
Otto pulled into the driveway at U Store Stuff and peered through the windshield. It was early, dark, and cold, but the icy rain had stopped. The place was deserted.
The business was contained in an enormous lot, surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire. The entrance was blocked by an equally enormous electronic gate. Surveillance cameras were mounted along the fence and on the buildings. Sometimes these places used mock cameras as a deterrent. They didn’t actually record anything. Which meant it was impossible to know whether the area was monitored constantly by a remote team.
From her vantage point, more than two dozen parallel rows of rectangular yellow brick buildings with flat roofs were laid out inside the fence. Each building was divided into individual units, visually defined by gray roll-up garage doors. The building rows were separated by wide lanes of pavement roomy enough for moving vans and forklifts to maneuver while loading and unloading. The lot was large enough to add more buildings.
There was no guard shack. She eased her vehicle up to the keypad, lowered the window, and reached out to punch in the code the Boss had supplied. A green light flashed on the keypad, and the gate rolled silently from left to right, opening wide enough to admit an eighteen-wheeled car hauler.
She rolled the rental vehicle through the open gate. Once she was past the sensors, the gate reversed course and closed solidly behind her. Lights were posted randomly in the lot, casting too many concealing shadows. She swiveled her head in all directions but saw no headlights or taillights anywhere. She lowered the window and heard no growling engines in the clear-aired darkness.
The unit she wanted was D-6. She followed the signs until she located block D, two lanes east of the main entrance, and turned left, heading north. Number six was one unit south of the center of the building on the west side.
The D-6 garage door was closed. It was secured like many others, with a long-shackle, heavy steel padlock. There were no vehicles parked nearby. Row D and all ten of its units were quiet and undisturbed. As were the units in Row E, opposite.
She pulled to the north end of the building and parked out of sight. She squelched her headlights and hunkered down to wait.
Less than thirty minutes later, a dark sedan pulled up to the gate and punched a code. Otto’s stomach clenched. She regulated her breathing while she watched the sedan enter the lot and drive straight to unit D-6.
He parked, left the engine running and headlights on, and got out of the car.
From this distance, she saw only a neat, compact man fitting retired FBI Special Agent Terrence Bramall’s general size and shape. He approached the D-6 garage door and examined the padlock. He lifted it away from the hasp, hefted it in his cupped palm, and let it fall against the door with a loud clang.
He returned to his sedan and opened the trunk, pulled out long-handled bolt cutters, and approached the padlock again. He adjusted the blades. One swift, hard push of the handles was all it took. The blades cut through the steel shackle, and the lock fell heavily to the ground. He propped the bolt cutters against the exterior wall and bent to lift the steel door by the handle.
She heard the door creaking as it rolled up. Bramall disappeared inside. Definitely breaking and entering. No question.
She slipped her rental into drive and accelerated quickly toward the open door. She faced the door head-on and flipped the headlight switch to bright, flooding the scene with more blinding illumination.
He turned toward the lights and raised his forearm to block his eyes. Otto drew the Glock and stepped out of the vehicle, poised behind the door. She assumed a textbook shooter’s stance. The rental’s engine idled quietly.
“Show me your hands,” she said, as she’d been trained to do.
He held both gloved hands up, palms out, squinting against the lights. So far, so good.
She asked, “Terry Bramall?”
“That’s right. Who’s asking?”
“Show me your ID.” She didn’t tell him to take it slow and easy because if he was Bramall, he’d know. If he wasn’t Bramall, she had a whole new set of problems.
He held his right hand up, palm out, and reached across his chest with his left arm to enter his breast pocket. Slowly, he pulled out his ID, opened the wallet, and held it out.
She left the flimsy safety of the vehicle’s door and kept her gun pointed center mass as she approached him. He made no false moves or threatening gestures.
From twenty feet away, she could see he held out his private investigator’s license issued by the state of Illinois, but she couldn’t read it. She hoped she wouldn’t need to. She walked closer until she could see that the photo matched his face. Brown hair, neatly combed, a lean and ageless face, which she pegged somewhere between sixty and seventy years old, which was exactly right.
“Open your coat.”
He used his right hand to do as she demanded. His pistol rested in its holster, snugged securely against his ribs.
“Keep your left hand extended and your right hand holding your lapel,” she said as she approached. Still beyond his arm’s reach, she stopped. Quickly, she glanced beyond him to his left side and then his right, confirmed no one was inside.
The headlights illuminated the contents of Unit D-6 well enough.
A wooden pallet held stacks of shrink-wrapped boxes. She recognized the pharmaceutical company logo from the evidence envelope Noble had shown her.
“I suspect we’re on the same team here. I promise not to shoot you if you return the favor,” Bramall said.
Holding her Glock in position with one hand, she displayed her badge wallet with the other. “FBI Special Agent Kim Otto.”
“I figured. I recognized the moves. Retired from the bureau’s Chicago field office myself a few years back. Can I put my hands down now?”
“Slowly.” She nodded toward the boxes. “You’re a long way from Chicago, Bramall. What’s going on here?”
“You were watching. You saw me arrive and cut the lock off. Everything was exactly like this when I opened the garage door not twenty seconds before you pulled up.” He gestured toward the boxes. “You know I don’t own this stuff and can’t tell you what’s going on here. Otherwise, I’d have had a key to that lock, and I don’t.”
“All I know so far is that you broke in here. Breaking and entering is a crime, which you well know. Unless you own the place or have permission to enter from the owners. You tell me.”
He smiled. And nodded his head a couple of times in approval. “You must be a good agent. Never jump to conclusions. Analyze the evidence. You had good training. And I really appreciate that you didn’t shoot me. Where’s your partner?”
She nodded in return. “You’ve been retired a while. There’s been a lot of changes at the Bureau.”
He arched his eyebrows. “Such as?”
She tapped the waterproof, night vision camera attached to her coat. “Field agents can be monitored twenty-four seven now. This body cam records everything that’s happening. Full HD video at a 140-degree viewing angle. Transmits to the bureau in real time. Response times near airports are damn fast now, too. Which means you could harm me, but you wouldn’t get away with it.”
“In my day, agents worked in pairs. I didn’t know about the body cams, but I
figured they didn’t send you to the middle of nowhere in the dead of night by yourself.” He paused. “Regardless, you’re in no danger from me.”
She paused another half second and then lowered her gun. She believed him. Simple as that. He put his ID back in his pocket and dropped his hands to his sides.
“What’s going on here?” she said again.
He answered easily. “I’m looking for two missing women. My investigation started in Lake Forest, Illinois, and led me here. I haven’t had a chance to check this place out yet.”
“Who are the women?” she asked, which was a sort of test, too.
“A housewife from Lake Forest. Jane Mackenzie. And her sister, Rose Sanderson.”
“Who hired you to find them?”
Bramall cocked his head. “Under different circumstances, I might protect my client’s identity. In this case, it’s no secret. Jane’s husband, Rex Mackenzie hired me.”
“When was that?”
“They’ve been gone about two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” She arched her eyebrows. “It took you two weeks to trace a housewife and her sister from Lake Forest to St. Louis? Three hundred miles? You could drive that distance in half a day.”
“Everything always sounds easier than it is,” he said, with a defensive frown, followed by an all over shiver. “It’s damn cold out here. You want to look around inside, or you want to keep insulting me for a while first?”
She grinned. Everything in the Boss’s file on this guy suggested he was a straight shooter. He had retired honorably from the FBI with a full pension and a spotless record. His private investigator’s license issued by the state of Illinois was squeaky clean. If he was dirty, she’d seen no evidence of it so far.
The only glitch was that Noble claimed Bramall was traveling with Reacher. She’d met several of Reacher’s sidekicks by now. They were almost always involved with law enforcement in some capacity. They were rarely cooperative. Always skeptical and defensive whenever Reacher’s name came up. So far, she hadn’t met a single one who was willing to answer her questions. Even Noble, come to think of it, had ducked out before she could get any real answers.
Still, she kind of liked Bramall, and he looked harmless enough. So far, anyway.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” she said. She returned her gun to its holster and reached into her pocket for her cell phone. The body cam would do the job for the Boss, but she liked to have personal copies of everything. Just in case.
She opened the video camera on her phone and turned it on. She established time, place, and date on the recording before she aimed the lens at herself and then at Bramall. Then she began a video record of the contents of Unit D-6 while they inspected.
The space was ten feet wide and ten feet deep. Smaller than a single car garage. Dozens of shrink-wrapped boxes were stacked along three walls, leaving the center open to walk around or to use a small forklift, maybe. Had the boxes been abutted to each other, she estimated they’d have created a thick block more than a yard wide, a yard deep, and a yard high.
“This stuff is pristine. Looks like all of these boxes came right off the loading dock at a pharmaceutical company. Like there’s an inside man diverting the inventory,” she said, partly for the video record. “I see tablets and patches. Mostly fentanyl. A half-dozen boxes of naloxone, which is the antidote. Just in case something goes wrong and somebody overdoses, I guess.”
She ran the video until all boxes were captured before she turned to Bramall again. “Do you see anything else?”
Bramall shook his head and did not reply.
According to Noble, there was no way to get pharmaceutical grade opioids like this on the black market anymore. And yet, here they were.
Bramall had claimed not to know the drugs were here, but he didn’t seem surprised, either. Which meant he wasn’t quite the good guy she had believed.
CHAPTER 13
Friday, February 11
5:10 a.m.
St. Louis, Missouri
Otto stomped her feet to gin up some body heat, but she was losing the battle. February was no warmer in Missouri than most other places in the country north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Snidely, she said, “Is your client a doctor? Pharmacist? Pharmaceutical rep?”
Bramall grunted. “Not even close.”
“But this is his storage unit, right?”
Bramall shrugged.
“Where’d he get all this stuff?”
Bramall said nothing.
She walked the video around the room making sure to capture barcodes and product numbers wherever possible. The process didn’t take long. She snapped a few still shots in case she needed them for witnesses.
Which was when she noticed one row along the south wall of the unit where the boxes were not snugged close to the concrete block. A twelve-inch gap ran the length of the wall behind the boxes. She leaned closer and used the flashlight on her phone to peer into the space.
Recessed from the front edge of the stacks of fentanyl tablets and patches in white boxes, she saw two brown shoeboxes. She bent over to grab one of the shoeboxes, but they were out of her reach. She turned sideways and tried to slip her leg into the opening, but the gap was too narrow, even for her.
She took a few still photos of the shoeboxes in position and then turned to Bramall. “Hand me those bolt cutters. There’s something back here.”
Instead of handing them over, he said, “They’re a bit heavy. Let me.”
She moved aside and held the phone’s flashlight to illuminate the crevice. He leaned forward holding the long-handled cutters in one hand. He extended his arm and used the closed blades awkwardly to drag the stacked shoeboxes toward him. After a slight struggle, the boxes emerged. Bramall stood aside.
Otto snapped a few more photos before she donned a pair of gloves from her pocket and bent to lift both shoeboxes from the floor. She set them on top of the stack of fentanyl.
The shoeboxes were wide, and the tops were attached on one side. Both boxes once contained women’s running shoes, size 8. She set the phone to video and flipped the first box top open. The stench of new money wafted to her nose first, followed by the visual.
Inside the box was cash. Newer bills. Twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Banded together in bricks, maybe an inch thick, as if they’d come straight from the federal reserve. She glanced at Bramall, who was shaking his head.
She opened the bottom box. Also full of cash, as newly stinky as the first.
She turned the video off. “What do you make of all this?”
He shrugged. “Looks like a drug dealer’s stash to me. Inventory and revenue, all in one tidy spot.”
Otto nodded. She turned the video back on and emptied the contents of both shoeboxes, displaying the stacks of bills and then the empty boxes for the video. She figured each box contained about ten grand. Twenty grand altogether.
At the bottom of the second box was a flash drive. She moved it to the side.
She refilled the boxes and spent half a moment thinking about the flash drive. She should have returned it to the box along with everything else and waited for a warrant. Let the FBI tech team handle the evidence the drive surely contained.
There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have done precisely that. But those days felt like a different lifetime on another planet from the world her job had become.
She tilted the video’s all-seeing lens toward the crevice and slipped the flash drive into her pocket. Then she settled the lids on the boxes and put them back where she’d found them.
Neither she nor Bramall spoke while the video was recording. Partly because the images were more likely to be usable as evidence without running commentary. Mainly because neither one wanted to be tied to the images. Not yet, anyway.
She hit the send button to transfer the video to the secure server, where she, Gaspar, and the Boss would have access to it.
Bramall was waiting with his hands in his pockets outside,
near the front door. If he saw her take the flash drive, he gave no indication.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked.
She cocked her head. “Did you bring a new padlock to lock this stuff up again?”
He nodded and pulled a heavy-duty padlock from his coat pocket. He yanked the garage door down. He inserted the new padlock to the hasp, which was secured to the brick wall on the right side of the garage door. He shoved the shackle down firmly, and the lock closed with an unnaturally loud click.
Bramall removed an evidence bag from another pocket and bent to lift the lock he’d cut apart off the ground. He slid the destroyed lock into the bag and sealed it. He wrote his initials on the bag along with the date and time. Then he retrieved his bolt cutters and turned to Otto.
“There’s an all-night pancake place about a mile up the road. How about I buy you a gallon of coffee, and we can talk?” he asked.
“I love coffee. Lead the way,” she replied.
Before they’d moved more than a couple of steps, she heard the growl of a large engine. She glanced toward the gate at the entrance. A black heavy-duty, extended length SUV pulled up to the keypad.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up and her stomach flipped. It was well after five in the morning. Possibly, the driver was on legitimate business, but she doubted it.
A man’s arm extended through the open window. He punched a few buttons.
The big gate started its slow roll to open.
There was a slight chance the driver of the Expedition XLT hadn’t seen them. Very slight.
Bramall said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Cut the lights,” she said, as they hustled to their vehicles. They extinguished their headlights and rolled as quietly as possible away from Unit D-6, to the spot behind the adjacent building where she’d waited for Bramall.
She heard the big entrance gate open and the black SUV’s engine growled as it crossed into the lot. The gate closed solidly behind it.