by Matthew Iden
“Uh-huh.”
“Pseudoephedrine’s regulated. It’s why you get tackled coming out of a Rite Aid with more than two boxes of cold medicine. The anhydrous ammonia is watched, too, but you can get it almost anywhere because it’s what industrial farms use to fertilize crops with. So the guys who bake this stuff can find tanker trucks of it on farms, just sitting there waiting to be grabbed if the farmers don’t lock it up.”
“Dangerous?”
“The ammonia is dangerous to handle, though not volatile by itself. But if you make a mistake mixing it with the last ingredient, lithium—and you happen to be understaffed in the brain cell department—you can have an explosion, a fire, or a chemical disaster.”
“Explains the rash of booms out in Wisconsin and Iowa.”
“Right.”
“So, the lithium,” I said. “Where do they get that?”
“You won’t believe this. Batteries.”
“Batteries?”
“Not the regular kind. You can’t buy enough store-bought batteries to extract sufficient lithium. So—you’ll love this—one source is to break into the backup control systems at railroad crossings.”
“Because the switch boxes need to be reliable and last a long time…” I said.
“…so they’re powered by lithium batteries,” Sam finished. “Huge ones that supply enough lithium to make batches and batches of meth.”
“But, without the batteries at the switch, the trains wreck, right?”
“The nice junkies make it obvious they’ve broken into the cases and stolen the batteries so that the railroad people will know and replace them before anything bad happens. The assholes lock the boxes like they were so they’ll have more lead time to run.”
“What happens when a train derails because of these guys?”
“If someone dies, it gets prosecuted as a homicide. Murder one.”
“Not much of a silver lining, but it’s something,” I said. “So the ammonia is easy to get if you’ve got the guts to steal it, the lithium is there for the taking with a little bit of effort. That leaves…”
“The pseudoephedrine. Suzie. It’s a synthetic drug itself, so it’s hard to come by.”
I searched my memory of trainings from years gone by. “Most of it comes up from Mexico?”
“Mostly. The smugglers get caught ninety percent of the time, so the border patrol is snatching most of the pseudoephedrine coming over the border. But production of it in China and other parts of Asia is on the rise and it dwarfs the amounts that the Mexicans can make. The stuff gets sent over here in shipping containers. We still catch most of it, mainly on the West Coast. It sucked when China beat out Mexico as the main source, but we’re on top of it. It hasn’t been easy, but the whole market is being taken away.”
“Since production gets more difficult if you can’t get all your ingredients from robbing a farmer or knocking over a railroad switch box.”
“Right. These guys still need immense quantities of pseudoephedrine if they want to actually deal. When they only have small amounts of material, they’re reduced to using this penny-ante method called one-pot, where you take bits of pseudoephedrine from legally bought allergy medicine to make tiny batches of meth. Get enough junkies and dealers and losers to do one-pot for you and you’re a medium-level meth dealer.”
“But not really enough to make it lucrative.”
“Gold star for you,” Sam said. “So that’s the background. Meth production has been falling thanks to the wipeout on pseudoephedrine. And the fact that it’s hard as hell to make any money using the one-pot method.”
“Okay.”
“The only place meth production’s been holding steady is New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, where enough Mexican pseudoephedrine still makes it across the border to make it worthwhile despite the busts. Eventually, the product travels east, and we make our arrests, but we’re netting users and low-level dealers, not the cooks who make it.”
“Production is somewhere else in the country.”
“Right. Here’s the problem. After you called, I did some cross-referencing in some of the reports that come my way for DC and the mid-Atlantic. Busts, arrest records, intelligence from snitches.”
“Let me guess. Illicit drug use hasn’t gone down.”
“Meth use is up three thousand percent in the last six months. Localized to DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, Raleigh, and Charlotte.”
He was quiet so I could figure it out. I pictured a rough map in my head of the cities he’d listed, then felt a tingle run up my spine. “Oh, shit.”
“Oh shit is right,” he said. “Geographically speaking, Cain’s Crossing is dead center to all of them. Congratulations, Marty. You just found the new East Coast capital of meth production.”
I chewed my lip, thinking. “Cain’s Crossing is in the middle of farm country, so the ammonia is here. And lithium you can get if you try hard enough. You also need a fairly isolated location to cook the batch, since it stinks like hell. Pretty easy to come by down here in the sticks.”
“So the question is?”
“Where are they getting the pseudoephedrine from?”
“Yeah. And that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. There are plenty of places that fit the bill in all the other ways.”
“And you don’t have an answer for that.”
“Nope.”
“But you wouldn’t mind if I happened to find out?”
“I’d love it. As long as you observe all the laws and statutes of this great nation of ours as well as the state of Virginia while doing so.”
“If you figured this out, Warrenton DEA could, too. In fact, they should be all over it.”
Tap, tap, tap. “No shit. If someone’s found a reliable way to get pseudoephedrine into the country—and, specifically, the East Coast—in industrial amounts, it’s not going to be confined to rural Virginia for very long. By this time next year, we’ll have a meth epidemic that will make crack look like a walk in the park.”
“That bad?” I’d been in the middle of my homicide career when crack hit the streets in the eighties and it hadn’t been pretty.
“It’s as bad as you can imagine,” Sam said. “Good meth is three or four times more potent than crack. You can smoke it, slam it, snort it. Some people like to use it as a suppository, stick it up their ass.”
“Must put a damper on the party scene.”
“The point is, if there’s a new channel for pseudoephedrine, the wheels are going to come off. We can’t control the ammonia or the lithium. And you can make it anywhere. Kids do one-pot in two-liter Coke bottles, for Christ’s sake.”
“How much pseudoephedrine does it take to cook?”
“Two-to-one. Typical dosage is a hundred milligrams.”
“You can get ten people high off a gram?”
“Yeah. At two-to-one, it takes just two grams of pseudoephedrine to make it. So, with the suzie you could hide in one footlocker—say, a hundred pounds…”
“You could make enough meth to supply a large city,” I said, doing the math. “Five hundred would supply the whole East Coast.”
“For a while,” he said. “Until demand started to take off.”
“I don’t see the Brower boys having the imagination to initiate and maintain a meth empire,” I said. “Though I was told they might be taking orders.”
“You’d be surprised at how few brains it takes to make and sell this shit. And that’s part of the problem, too. This new flood of meth is attracting attention. Your Brower boys are going to be in for a rude awakening if and when some real players decide that they want some of the action. Cain’s Crossing will get wiped off the map if the MLA or the Aryan Nation decides it’s time for a change in management.”
I was quiet, looking off into the middle distance, dimly aware of a few cars passing by, moving slowly through the quaint main square. From here I could see the crown of the library poking up over the houses. The tall tops of oak and chestnut trees
swayed in the breeze, nearly hiding the white church steeple. I could feel the slow, bucolic pulse of the town as it eased through a summer of cookouts and church picnics and Little League baseball games.
“See what you can find, Marty,” Sam said. “I’m going to hold off until I hear back from the DEA, but someone’s got to move on this. And soon. Or we’re going to have one hell of a mess.”
vi.
Two months later, we testify at J.D.’s trial. His defense attorney goes the obvious route: the gun doesn’t have his fingerprints, his client claims it wasn’t his. The prosecution is just as predictable—a habitual criminal, known to associate with criminals, is in illegal possession of an unregistered firearm. The surprise comes from Stan.
“I know he’s killed someone,” he says when asked for his description of J.D. “Maybe not with this gun, but with a gun like it. He ditched it or sold it and got this one as a replacement, but whatever else he did, I know he’s killed somebody before.”
The defense erupts. The judge tears strips off Stan when it’s clear he can’t prove any of it. But the bell’s been rung. And when the mother of the slain six-year-old gives her testimony, everyone in court holds their breath.
It works. J.D. gets twenty years based on the flimsy evidence, Stan’s outburst, and the mother’s tears. The bailiff leads him out, wide-eyed and still disbelieving, trying to understand that two decades of his life has just been excised and removed like an organ from his body. He sees me watching and seems about to say something, but then the system pulls him through the door like water down a drain. The judge, the lawyers, the bailiff have all forgotten about him and the courtroom fills with the small noises people make when they move on.
“That’s that,” Stan says behind me, brushing his hands together. “Too bad they didn’t really nail his ass to the wall.”
I turn to look at him. “Twenty years is pretty good for an impermissible opinion from the cop who arrested him and a boatload of circumstantial evidence.”
“The bullets that killed that little girl were real enough.”
“Stan, we had next to nothing on this kid.”
“That’s not how the jury saw it.”
I’m tired of Stan’s mock superiority and his staged, exaggerated personality. “You really think that clueless hick killed five people? He was stupid enough to pick up a gun from somebody and we were lucky enough to find it. End of story.”
“We don’t have a confession, so just let him go?” Stan says, leaning back on his rhetoric. “Pat him on the ass and give him a ticket? Since when did you need an airtight case, Sherlock?”
“I don’t,” I say, not feeling good about where Stan is going. Not feeling good about any of it. “But I’m not stupid enough to confuse one thing with the other. This shit we put together barely limped into the courtroom.”
“That’s the problem with you, Marty,” Stan says. “You want it by the book, all the time. Due process until we all choke on it. How about the fact that he had a fucking gun? You don’t think he was going to use it? That, a year from now, we weren’t going to pick him up for putting two in somebody’s head over a wad of bills or a bag of crack?”
“When it happens, we deal with it, Stan. We don’t put people away for things they might do,” I said, looking at him. There’s a stale, uneasy tone to his voice, like he’s rehearsed all these lines, but doesn’t believe them himself. “Unless you know something I don’t?”
“What, now I framed him? This whole thing was a setup? Fuck you, Marty. I don’t need to waste my time setting up little shits like J.D. Hope. They do it to themselves.” He turns and walks away, done with me. But then he snaps his fingers and turns around, like he’s just remembered something. “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot to ask. I mean, as long as you’re playing saint. If you didn’t think he did it, why didn’t you say something?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“And do you plan to use our facilities for anything seditious, criminally inclined, or pornographic?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “Unless you want me to.”
Ms. Hawkins, the Cain’s Crossing head—and only—librarian, assumed an expression like she’d just smelled something unpleasant, but pushed a small slip of paper and one of those two-inch golf pencils across the counter towards me anyway. “Sign here, please.”
And with that, I was permitted to use the one computer in the library—possibly the county—that had an Internet connection. I signed the slip, then went to the corner to park myself in front of the aging machine, armed with a brittle tablet from the Mosby, a pen, and my curiosity.
I wasn’t an online research type of guy. The bulk of my homicide career had consisted of knocking on doors and relying on face-to-face interactions. And not because I was inherently opposed to technology. I just found that even the phone got in the way sometimes when you needed information. People find it ever so hard to lie when they have to look you in the eye and tell you that they didn’t shoot someone or run them over with their car.
But even I had to admit that the ease with which you could find hard facts online—not the dissembling of suspects or witnesses, but dates, times, places, maps—made it very close to the technological miracle that everyone else seemed to think it was. Amanda, fully plugged in, had given me some pointers over the last couple of months and I now felt better than completely lost when I pressed the ON button of a computer.
My first stop was to find a decent map of the greater Cain’s Crossing area with aerial photos, if possible. I poked at the keys, making sure I got my spelling right. I blinked. The map and photos were on-screen before I’d raised my eyes from the keyboard. Keeping that window open in the background, I then nosed around in the local tax records and phone directories until I found the Brower family residence, which was six miles outside of town, give or take. That took half a minute. I leaned back in my chair, allowed myself a congratulatory grin. At this rate, I’d crack the case before lunch, sitting on my butt in the library.
Last stop, real estate listings. Despite the beauty of Cain’s Crossing’s pastoral simplicity, my guess was that property wasn’t moving all that fast. It was too far for weekend getaways from Richmond or DC, not quite in horse country, hours from the beach, and not on the way to much of anything else. I did a filtered search for farms and ranches that had been on the market for more than a year. It took some back-and-forthing to get exactly what I wanted, but the final count was seven. The diminutive thumbnail pictures showed that four of them were old enough to include descriptions like “great DIY project” and “build your new dream home on this lot,” which meant that the buildings were falling over. And thus, abandoned. Perfect for someone looking to start a homegrown meth lab. I jotted down the addresses of the four, then went back to my first screen and mapped them in relation to the Browers’ home.
“Ta-da,” I said, too loudly. From her desk, Ms. Hawkins hit me with laser-beam eyes. I ducked my head behind the wall of the carrel like a third grader.
Three of the four properties were just minutes away from the Browers’ by car, the fourth too far out. Three old farms, almost certainly empty, and quite possibly abandoned. I drummed my fingers on the table, weighing things in my mind. Could it be this easy? Were they this dumb?
Maybe. Redneck crooks used to pushing everyone around. An ineffectual police force. A rural county where fertilizer was fairly common and could be bought or stolen, then transported a short distance away to make the product.
Okay, what would I do? I’d build my labs far enough away from my own house that I wouldn’t kill myself or bring even a police force as lackadaisical as the Cain’s Crossing PD around. But I’d also want to be able to check on my product, protect it, and make sure it got shipped out. Would I really want to drive to the next county to do that? Wouldn’t I build the labs in the woods and hills and farms my family had known for two hundred years?
I went over to Ms. Hawkins and asked how I could access news and police reports for the last year. She
pointed to the microfiche machine and I smiled. Compared to the computer, it was like something Howard Hughes had invented. I traded a monitor for an opaque screen, a mouse for antiquated dials.
It took me the better part of an hour to find what I was looking for. Fire at Lentz Farm Burns Through the Night. I skimmed the article until I found the address, then compared it to my list. It was the second of the three. I tapped the list in triumph, then went back and read the article carefully.
The abandoned, turn-of-the-century farmhouse had burnt to the ground after an explosion had ripped off the eastern half where the kitchen was located. The building had been reduced to ash before firefighters had been able to control the blaze. Given the remains of drug paraphernalia and bottles of alcohol in the debris, the fire was blamed on nameless teenage deviants partying too hard and playing with fire.
I frowned. No mention of meth. The good folk of Cain’s Crossing were isolated, but even they had to have heard of meth labs going up in smoke. I scrolled to the top of the article. Written by Chick Reyes. Naturally. Awfully light, Chick. I’d have to rib him about it.
But that would have to wait. I had some snooping to do.
. . .
I sighed and squirmed in the seat. It had been a long time since I’d done a true stakeout and it was twice as tedious as I remembered it. The heat didn’t help, since I couldn’t really run the air conditioner and still stay hidden. So I sat with the windows down in the shade of a chestnut grove, squinting at my target, sweating through my clothes into the fabric of the car seat.
Since the Lentz farm had gone up in a blaze of glory, there were two farms left from my short list of three. My theory was based on a ridiculously unscientific process and the likelihood that I had a fifty-fifty chance of finding a meth lab with some guesswork and an hour in the local library was small. But I had time and no better prospects other than getting one of the Brower brothers alone and beating some answers out of them, which was neither legal nor likely.