Making my mood even worse is all the holiday cheer I’m surrounded by. I tag along with Laurie to about four hundred parties, though in Findlay the word “parties” may be overstating it. They’re more pleasant get-togethers with smiling people who talk about good health and toast with eggnog. It’s enough to make me nauseous, with or without the eggnog, yet Laurie seems to revel in it.
Since today is Christmas, it seemed an appropriate time to give my stakeout team the day off. They’ve uncovered absolutely no activity of any kind at the airport, and there’s no reason to think that any nefarious activity would suddenly spring up on Christmas Day.
I tell Laurie about the suspension of the stakeout, since she is the officer in charge at the precinct today. Laurie has voluntarily agreed to work on the holiday so as to give Parsons and others under her a chance to be with their families.
The net result of her generosity to her staff is that Tara and I are left alone. I turn down a bunch of invitations to spend Christmas at various friends of Laurie’s, preferring to indulge my bad mood by staying home and watching a college bowl game and two NBA games.
I call in a bet on the bowl game, since why else would anyone in their right mind want to watch Toledo play Hawaii in the Aloha Bowl? I take Toledo and four points, and I realize I’m in trouble before the opening kickoff. The coaches for Toledo are wearing ridiculous flowered Hawaiian shirts, not the kind of outfits that will motivate their players to fight their hardest for dear old Toledo U.
Sure enough, Hawaii is ahead 31-3 at halftime, and unless the flower-shirted coaches are going to convince their team to blossom for the Gipper, my bet is history.
This leaves me more time to think, a pastime I haven’t found to be terribly enjoyable lately. It is burning a hole in my gut that cold-blooded murderers are out there, getting away with what they’ve done and probably pointing and laughing at me in the process.
“You feel like going on a stakeout?” I ask Tara.
She doesn’t get excited and start wagging her tail, but nor does she growl or cover her head with her paws. Tara has led a fairly sheltered life, and it’s just possible she’s never been on a stakeout before and therefore doesn’t know what to expect.
“We sit in the car, with the heat on, and eat potato chips and dog biscuits,” I say by way of explanation. Her tail starts to wag, but I think it’s the word “biscuits” that does it.
“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, biscuits,” I say, and get the same wag. I think I’m detecting a pattern.
In a few minutes I’ve stocked the car with stakeout supplies and we’re driving out toward the Center City airstrip. I’m aware it’s a ridiculous, unproductive thing to do, but the possibility that something will happen on the one day we’re not watching is gnawing at me.
We’re at the airstrip in twenty minutes, and we take up the same position that Larson has been occupying. It only takes a quick look to see that today is no different than every other day; the place is totally quiet, with no one to be seen anywhere.
Within thirty seconds I’m bored out of my mind and Tara is asleep on the backseat. I know that it’s very unlikely that anything will come of this, but just in case, I need to remain alert.
When I wake up, the clock in the car tells me that I’ve been asleep for almost an hour. Tara continues to sleep on the backseat; she has many wonderful qualities, but ability as a stakeout dog is not one of them.
Within moments I realize that I didn’t just happen to wake up, that an increasingly loud noise did the trick. I look around, trying to find the source of the noise, which seems to be coming from up in the air. Maybe ten seconds later I see it, coming from the other side of the airstrip. It’s a small cargo plane, already quite low and obviously coming in for a landing.
My heart starts pounding in my chest, and a bunch of things quickly run through my mind. One is that I have no idea what to do. Another is that I’m sorry I brought Tara; the idea of exposing her to any possible danger is simply unacceptable. Even dumber than bringing Tara was forgetting my cell phone, which leaves me with no possible way to call for help.
It’s warm in the car, but I’m frozen in place, watching the scene unfold before me. The cargo plane lands and taxis toward the hangar. The large hangar door opens, revealing the presence of someone inside. I can’t come close to seeing who it is from this distance, and I don’t know if that person has been there the whole time, or arrived during my nap.
The plane enters the hangar, and the door comes down behind it. Once again the airport takes on that desolate, abandoned look, but this time I know better. I know that there are humans in that hangar; what I don’t know is what the hell they are doing.
I briefly debate whether to leave my car and sneak across the airfield to the hangar, so as to learn what is going on. The reason the debate is brief is that the idea of it is stupid: I would be completely exposed to anyone who bothered to look outside.
So all I can do is wait, and I do so, for an hour and twenty-one minutes. That’s when the door opens, but instead of the plane coming back out, a truck rolls out. It looks like any one of the trucks that carry goods out of Center City. It’s hard to make out the name from this distance, but my best guess is “R amp;W Dairies.”
The truck rolls out onto the road, heading in my direction. I’m set off from the road, and there’s no way the driver will be able to see me. The unfortunate flip side of that is that there is no way I will be able to see him.
I get out of the car, leaving it running so that Tara will remain warm. I move quickly toward the road, just reaching it as the truck goes past. The side of the truck does say “R amp;W Dairies,” and there are two people in the front seat. From my vantage point I can’t see who the passenger is, but I definitely recognize the driver.
Alan Drummond.
I go back to the car and get in. I slam the door shut, which wakes up my stakeout mate in the backseat. She looks around as if to say, “What did I miss?” but I don’t give her the satisfaction of telling her.
My strong desire is to go toward the airstrip and check out what might still be inside the hangar. That desire collides head-on with my self-preservation instinct, and I decide against it. I have no idea whether there are any people still in there, but if there are, I’d be a sitting duck.
I drive back to Findlay, annoyed that all this took place without me learning anything from it, but somehow rejuvenated by the process.
• • • • •
LET’S GO” are the first words out of Laurie’s mouth when she hears my story. I dropped Tara off and came here to her office, and within three minutes Laurie and I are back out and in the car.
“We’re going out to the airstrip?” I ask.
“That’s right. We’re going to check it out.”
Ever the lawyer, I point out, “You don’t have a search warrant.”
“I’ve got something better than that,” she says. “I’ve got a citizen who reported seeing a possible crime taking place.”
“That would be me?”
She nods. “It would.”
Laurie drives right up to the airstrip with no apparent hesitation, but makes a rather obvious concession to the possible danger by taking out her handgun as she gets out of the car.
We walk to the smaller door, the one that lets in people but not planes, and Laurie rings the bell. We hear it sounding loudly through the building, so if anyone is in there, they could not help but hear it as well. Laurie holds her gun at her side, concealed but ready.
There is no answer, so she tries twice more. Still no response.
“Can you kick it in?” she asks.
“Excuse me?” I ask, though we both know I heard her quite clearly.
She takes out a small device, which looks a little like a can opener, and calmly pops the lock. The door swings open.
I shake my head, showing my disapproval. “Illegal entry, said the defense attorney to the judge.”
“I had a perfect right to
do that,” she says. “I believed that someone might be in distress; the citizen I was with thought he heard a scream.”
“That would be me?” I ask.
“It would.”
We enter the hangar and see the plane, the hold open and empty of cargo. There are no people around, no trucks, and no evidence of what might have been on that plane.
Laurie says, “So a plane comes in on Christmas Day, leaving a cargo that is taken off in a dairy truck. Doesn’t sound terribly normal to me.”
“Maybe somebody needed a cheese transplant, and they flew in a Gouda.”
We close up the hangar and leave. Laurie drops me back off at the house, and she heads to her office. We make plans for her to come over for dinner, at which point we’ll try to figure out where we go from here.
I call Sam Willis at home and ask him to get on the computer and see if he can find out anything about R amp;W Dairies. It only takes him about forty-five minutes to call back and tell me exactly what I expected: He can find no record of such a company.
What I believe happened today is that a cargo plane landed at the Center City airstrip, its contents were unloaded and placed on a truck, and that truck was driven away by Alan Drummond.
In legal terms I have only circumstantial evidence of this; I certainly didn’t see the unloading and loading take place. Theoretically, the plane could have come in empty, and the truck could coincidentally have left empty a short while later. But as the old example goes, if you go to sleep with the streets clear, then wake up in the morning and they’re covered with snow, it’s a good bet it snowed that night, whether you saw it happen or not. The airstrip scenario is not quite as clear as that, but it’s clear enough for me.
By the time Laurie comes over, I’ve formulated some theories well enough to bounce off of her. “There is no doubt in my mind,” I say, “that whatever those kids were afraid of that night has to do with Alan Drummond and that airport.”
She’s not quite so convinced. “We’re making some assumptions here,” she says. “We don’t know for a fact that they were afraid of Alan Drummond, only that Madeline thinks so.”
“Eddie said he was afraid I was Drummond,” I point out.
“He could have meant Stephen, and it could have been because Stephen is the number two man in that church. Stephen represented authority, and Eddie could have been afraid of that authority.”
“You don’t believe that,” I say.
“That’s true, but it is possible. And while we’re talking about what’s possible, it’s also possible that there is nothing criminal going on at that airport. All we know for sure is that a plane came in and a truck left.”
“A cargo plane with no flight plan came into an airstrip that according to the FAA does not exist.”
She doesn’t seem happy with this, so I continue. “Laurie, I agree that I am making assumptions here. But that is the only way I can move forward. If they’re wrong, then they’re wrong. But for now I have to assume they’re right.”
She nods; that makes sense to her. “Okay, make some more assumptions.”
“I assume that the plane was carrying illegal merchandise of some sort, maybe drugs, maybe counterfeit money. Whatever it was had to be small enough to fit on that truck.”
“Where was it coming from?” she asks.
“Canada. I spoke to Donna Girardi again today and bounced some ideas off of her. If it originated across the border, came in over Lake Superior, and flew low enough, it likely wouldn’t be picked up on radar in this area. But if it flew over the U.S. most of the time, the chance of it not being detected would go way down.”
“And if it weren’t crossing a border, there would be no need for a plane,” she says. “They could just load it on a dairy truck in the first place.”
“Right… so here’s my theory: Alan Drummond, probably acting on behalf of his father and Wallace, has been smuggling illegal goods from Canada by plane. Liz, Sheryl, and Eddie somehow found out about it. Perhaps Sheryl was the first one to discover it, since she was Alan’s girlfriend, and she told her friends. Alan realized what they knew, and they were all too aware how dangerous Alan could be, so they tried to run. Liz and Sheryl didn’t make it, and Eddie made the mistake of calling me.”
Laurie thinks about this for a long while, weighing the possibilities. “Okay, but something else bothers me,” she says. “You had someone staking out that airport for weeks, and nothing happens. The day you pull your guy out of there, in comes a plane.”
“Maybe they saw Larson on his stakeout and then followed him. Maybe they were smart enough to track the guy tracking them.”
“It’s possible, but a stretch,” she says.
“Or maybe Christmas Day was always going to be the day they did it. I’m sure the Centurions don’t celebrate Christmas, but they know that nobody’s out on the roads… everybody’s home with their families…”
She still looks dubious as she considers the possibilities.
“Laurie, I’m a lawyer. I come up with my theory of a case, and I pursue it. This is no different; in fact, there have been plenty of times that I’ve had a lot less to go on. The only difference for me is that usually I have to convince a jury, but now I have to convince you.”
“Why me?”
“Because I need you to take the next step.”
“Which is?”
“To be there when this happens again, stop the truck, and search it.”
She thinks about this for a few moments and says, “I can’t spare people to watch that airport for another flight to come in. It took three weeks last time; this time they could be waiting for Memorial Day.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll have Larson watch it; he’ll be much less noticeable this time.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he doesn’t have to get close to the airport. He’s just watching for a plane, and we know what direction it’s coming from. He can be a long distance away.”
“And where will your police officers be stationed?” she asks. It’s a not-so-subtle dig at me for trying to use her department as my personal investigative staff.
I pretend not to notice. “They don’t have to be stationed anywhere,” I say. “From the time Larson sees the plane, we’ll have at least an hour to get in position to wait for the truck. I’ll call you or Parsons, and then your officers come out and stop the truck along the road.”
She spends a few more minutes trying to poke holes in my plan but is unable to make a dent. Finally, she says, “Okay. I’ll set it up.”
“Good. I’ll tell Larson.”
I give her my best boyish smile of victory, with just a touch of humility thrown in. It’s a specialty of mine, and to my knowledge women have no defense against it. When I use it, they are genetically compelled to kiss me.
Laurie, it turns out, must have some kind of genetic defect, because all she does is leave.
• • • • •
LARSON’S CALL takes me by surprise. It’s only been three days since we put our plan into action, much sooner than I expected.
“I’ve got incoming at twelve o’clock” are his first words. He sounds like he’s talking to his tail gunner, but I resist the impulse to say “Roger” or “Wilco.” Instead I say, “Got it,” and I hang up the phone and call Laurie.
Laurie and Parsons have been alternating days being on call, and today is her turn. She wastes no time in telling me that she and her people will meet me at the designated area. I drive out there, hiding my car behind nearby trees. Laurie and three officers arrive a few minutes later in three cars and set up for the roadblock.
Larson, as per our plan, drives toward the airport, though he keeps a safe distance away. He is to call me when the truck leaves and to confirm that it is again an R amp;W Dairies truck.
An hour and ten minutes after the original call, Larson calls me on my cell phone. “It’s heading towards you,” he says. “R amp;W.”
We’ve estimated that the truck
will take five minutes to reach us, and it makes it in four. Once it’s in sight, Laurie and her team execute a roadblock, using two of the cars. The third car circles behind the truck, blocking a possible escape to the rear. It’s done with great precision, and as I watch, I feel a flash of pride and admiration.
The truck slows to a halt, and I can see Alan Drummond in the driver’s seat. This time he is alone; or at least there is no one in the passenger seat. There could certainly be someone in the back with whatever merchandise was transferred from the plane.
Two of Laurie’s officers have their guns drawn, though Laurie does not. “Step down from the truck, Mr. Drummond,” Laurie instructs.
Alan Drummond does as he is told. He may be intimidating to the youth of Center City, but he couldn’t be further from that right now. Unless I’m a very bad judge of emotions, he is close to panic-stricken at what is taking place.
“What’s the matter? What’s going on?” he asks.
Laurie instructs him on the proper position to assume, with his hands against the squad car and legs spread. He does so, and one of the officers frisks him, signaling with a shake of the head to Laurie that he is not armed.
“Is the back of the truck locked?” she asks.
“Hey, come on. I didn’t do anything wrong” is his answer. It comes across as a bit of a whine, reflecting his fear at the way events are moving.
“Is the back of the truck locked?” Laurie repeats.
“Yes.”
“Where is the key?” she asks.
His mind seems to be racing for a way out of this, so much so that he forgets to answer the question. Laurie repeats it, and he says that it’s on the key ring that is still in the ignition.
One of the officers gets the key, and he gives it to Laurie. He then handcuffs Drummond and leads him back to one of the patrol cars, putting him in the backseat. Laurie and the other two officers go around to the rear of the truck. They both draw their guns while Laurie unlocks the door and opens it.
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