by J. A. Jance
The sheriff shot Cami a questioning glance. “You know how many sets were on each pallet?”
“Yes,” Ali said. “If you would allow us to examine one of the boxes with our RFID chip reader, we’ll be able to tell you where and when the box was manufactured and where it was going.”
For a moment, the sheriff said nothing. Then, making up her mind, she rose to her feet. “All right,” she said. “This way.”
Sheriff Brady led the way back down the hall and past the door through which they had entered, a series of interview rooms, and a break room before using a keypad to unlock the security door on what appeared to be a well-equipped laboratory. Two people, a young man and a young woman, were working there. They looked up questioningly as Joanna led Ali and Cami inside.
“These ladies, Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Lee, are doing some investigation into the LEGO connection to what happened out along the San Pedro this morning,” Sheriff Brady explained. To Ali and Cami she said, “This is my CSI team, Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker.”
Casey and Dave stepped forward to shake hands.
“They process whatever evidence that doesn’t require being forwarded to the state patrol crime lab in Tucson,” Sheriff Brady continued. “Casey’s specialty is latent fingerprints, but we’re a small department and they both have to be jacks-of-all-trades.”
“You’re looking into the LEGO connection?” Casey asked. “Over on my table I’ve got three dozen shell casings and a slew of bullets from what was probably an AK-47. I always thought LEGO sets were just toys. Since when are they worth going to war with automatic weapons?”
“These sets are manufactured in what amounts to limited editions,” Ali explained. “When one set sells out in regular retail channels, there’s a backstreet demand that can cause the prices of those unavailable sets to escalate into the stratosphere. Serious collectors are willing to pay the going rate, whatever that might be. Diverting part of a major shipment away from retailers this early in the sales cycle will create a shortage of that particular item from the get-go. My company, High Noon Enterprises, is charged with tracking down whoever is behind the diversion of these goods.”
“And our job is tracking down a killer,” Joanna countered. “That’s a higher priority than chasing after stolen goods.”
“Have you identified your victim?” Ali asked, hoping that her and Cami’s inside knowledge of the LEGO situation might make Joanna a little more amenable to sharing information.
Joanna considered for a moment before she nodded and replied, “His name is Alberto Ricardo Mendoza, sometimes called Taquito. His prints were in the system. He has a rap sheet with mostly drug violations but no violent crimes. We’ve reached out to the California state prison system for next-of-kin information and were told his mother lives in Mazatlán. He was carrying a fake driver’s license at the time of the wreck. As for the truck he was driving, it’s an off-brand rental from Anaheim, rented in the name of Gomez, paid for in cash.”
“Cash?” Ali asked. “Who in their right mind would rent a truck to someone for cash?”
Joanna sighed. “Someone who didn’t want to know who was using the truck or what it was hauling.”
“Knowing where the shipment originated would help us,” Cami interjected quietly, speaking for the first time. “And it might help you as well. It could give you a point of origin for the truck. If we could just check one of the boxes with the RFID reader . . .”
“Where are they?” Joanna asked, looking in Dave’s direction.
He shrugged. “There wasn’t enough room to bring all the boxes in here. We asked the jail commander if we could commandeer one of his cells. He’s got nobody in solitary at the moment, so he was glad to oblige.”
“All right, then,” Joanna said. “How about if you take Ms. Lee over to the jail and let her do whatever it is she needs to do. With gloves, however,” she cautioned. “We’re still looking for fingerprints wherever possible.”
“And that includes looking for prints on my shell casings,” Casey added. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to them. I’ve got an ATF agent due to arrive here any minute. I want to finish dusting for prints before he shows up to take charge.”
Dave led Cami out of the room, and Casey returned to her examining table, leaving Joanna and Ali on their own.
“I noticed your certificate from APA in your office,” Ali said. “Tough course.”
She had deliberately used cop jargon in her reference to the Arizona Police Academy, and she was rewarded by a visible double take from Sheriff Brady. “You’ve heard about it?”
“Been there,” Ali explained. “I used to be a television newscaster, but the shelf life of female news anchors is amazingly short. When mine ran out, I thought for a time I’d end up in law enforcement. Sheriff Gordon up in Yavapai County sent me to the police academy in Peoria. I made it through all right, even at what some of my classmates regarded as my ‘very advanced age.’ Then the economy took a nosedive, and the offer to work for Yavapai County went away. Besides,” she added with a shrug, “I’m better off doing what I do now.”
“Which is?”
“Doing PR and the occasional bit of investigative work for my husband’s firm.”
Joanna nodded thoughtfully. “Yavapai County. I actually know Sheriff Gordon,” she added with a small grin. “I’ve played poker with him on occasion—and cleaned his clock, too.”
With that small exchange, the whole tenor of the visit seemed to change. By the time Cami and Dave returned from their visit to the jail, Ali and Joanna were standing side by side at a lab table laden with some of the bagged and tagged evidence that had been collected from the crime scene earlier in the morning while Joanna explained that most of it would be picked up later in the afternoon and driven to the crime lab in Tucson for further examination.
Ali glanced up and caught Cami’s eye as she and Dave entered. “Find anything?”
“The boxes are definitely from the most recent Monterrey shipment,” Cami answered. “If we could have the license information and description of that truck, I could ask Stu to start checking on traffic cameras going backwards from here. If the trip here originated in California, the driver would have had to pass through at least one Border Patrol checkpoint and more likely multiple ones, to say nothing of state-run truck inspection stations. That should give us a trail of bread crumbs to follow.”
“Wait,” Ali said, focusing suddenly on those two words: “bread crumbs.”
“What about this?” she asked, pointing at an evidence bag containing the mangled remains of what had once been a dashboard-mounted GPS. “Don’t these leave bread crumbs, too, so you can find your way back the way you came?”
“A lot of them do,” Cami agreed. “If I could take a look at this one, I might be able to find out.”
“It’s broken,” Joanna said. “What good will looking at it do for us?”
“The screen may be broken, but most likely the chip inside is just fine,” Cami pointed out. “May I?”
Joanna shrugged. “I don’t suppose it would hurt,” she said without enthusiasm. “Go ahead and help yourself, but again, wear gloves.”
Dave passed Cami a new pair of gloves from an open box on the next table over. Moments later she began carefully removing broken pieces of the device from the bag and laying them out in an orderly fashion on the lab table. The studied concentration with which she arranged them somehow took Ali back to her high school biology class when they’d had to dissect a frog.
“It’s an ordinary Garmin and the bread crumbs should be there,” Cami remarked as she worked. “Fortunately, I’ve already got a plug-in app for that.” She paused long enough to take a photo of the model number on the back of the GPS. A moment later, Ali heard the sound of a departing e-mail. “I sent it to Stu,” Cami explained. “With the serial and model number, he’ll be able to start tracking th
e point of purchase.”
With that, Cami turned her attention back to the broken machine. “That’s what I needed,” she said, “a mini-USB port. If I can turn this thing on, I should be able to download the history.”
• • •
To Joanna’s way of thinking, Cami Lee looked more like a seventh grader than a college graduate. The very idea of having the young woman messing with evidence from one of her homicides made Joanna squirm in her chair.
Why on earth did I let these women into my lab? she asked herself. What the hell was I thinking? I should have tossed them out on their ears when I had the chance.
The problem was she hadn’t done so. Now, having given her tacit permission for them to be there, she couldn’t very well pull the plug. It was too late to go down that road. On the other hand, Joanna knew that there were always built-in delays in sending evidence to the crime lab in Tucson, where cases from smaller jurisdictions always took a backseat to whatever was going on in Pima or Maricopa Counties. If by some miracle Cami was able to extract some usable information from that broken GPS this very afternoon . . .
After having been momentarily lost in thought, Joanna returned to the conversation and to Cami’s running commentary. For a split second Joanna was back in Dr. Baldwin’s morgue and hearing her narration of the driver’s autopsy. The very thought of it made Joanna’s stomach clench. Joanna definitely didn’t want to go there. Absolutely not.
Refocusing on Cami’s progress, Joanna noticed that the power cord to the GPS had been sliced in half. It lay on the table before Cami in two pieces. “If the power cord is wrecked, how are you going to hook it up?” she asked.
“No problem,” Cami said confidently. “All it takes is the mini-USB connection, and I’m pretty sure Stu has one of those in his tool kit.”
She opened a battered black leather case and pulled out a fistful of power cords held together by plastic tie-wraps. She plugged one end of the cord into an opening on the broken frame of the GPS and plugged the other end into the port on her iPad. “Here goes,” she said, punching what was left of the on/off switch. “Let’s see if there’s any life in this old contraption.”
A moment later, the screen on her iPad lit up. “Bingo,” she said triumphantly, turning the iPad so both Joanna and Ali could see the screen.
“It looks just like a GPS,” Joanna said in amazement.
“That’s because it is a GPS,” Cami assured her. “This GPS,” she added, pointing to the damaged remains of the device that were now connected to hers. “Now, if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll download everything here into a micro-SD card and we’ll be good to go.”
It was clear to Joanna that at this point Cami was simply having fun. What followed was a long, silent pause while the download process took place. Once the download was complete, even more time passed before the newly reconstituted GPS was able to get its bearings. Finally it did.
“Okay,” Cami said. “What do you want to know? How about if we take a look at Recently Found?”
Joanna waited, holding her breath, while the GPS hourglass tipped back and forth. “Yay,” Cami said finally. “There it is. Starting location is an address in Long Beach which . . . Give me a minute,” she added, switching over to another program, “. . . just happens to be a shipping terminal at the Port of Long Beach. And now let’s hear it for that checkered flag. Does any of this look familiar?”
She passed the iPad over to Joanna. It took a moment for Joanna to realize what she was seeing. Squeezing her fingers together on the screen, the focus on the map narrowed, revealing far greater detail.
“That’s Holzmann Road,” she said at last. “It leads to Helmer Holzmann’s place, a ranch located at the base of the Mule Mountains. Helmer’s wife, Greta, died a few years back. The old man lives out there all by himself. Why on earth would someone be taking a load of LEGO sets there?”
Then, only a moment later, Joanna answered her own question. “Oh, no,” she said. “I had forgotten all about them, but I wonder if they’re connected.”
“If what is connected?” Ali asked.
“The shipping containers.”
“What shipping containers?”
“As sheriff, I’m required to attend the board of supervisors meetings. A few months ago, Helmer appeared before the board on his son’s behalf, asking for a variance so his son could build a retirement home out of a collection of shipping containers. The containers had evidently already been hauled onto his property, but the board wouldn’t give him the variance. What if those shipping containers have nothing to do with building a house? What if they’re being used to store stolen LEGO sets?”
“You said Mr. Holzmann’s son wanted to build a retirement home on the ranch. Do you have any idea what he’d be retiring from?”
“I’m pretty sure he works for U.S. Customs,” Joanna said. “Somewhere in California.”
“That may be our connection, then,” Ali said. “If you’re running a smuggling operation, what could be handier than having an inside guy? His last name is Holzmann?”
Joanna nodded.
“What’s his first name?”
“He’s quite a bit older than I am. We weren’t in school together, but Ernie might know,” Joanna said, picking up the phone.
“Who’s Ernie?”
“One of my detectives.” She waited a moment until someone must have picked up. “Hey, Ernie. What’s Helmer Holzmann’s son’s name?” She paused. “Thanks,” she added a moment later. “I should have remembered that.”
She turned back to Ali. “His first name is Hans. Why?”
Ali was already on her phone, with Stu’s line ringing in the background.
“Wait,” Joanna objected. “Who are you calling? I didn’t give you permission to share details about this case with just anybody.”
Ali held up her hand. “Stu Ramey isn’t just anybody,” she said. “He’s High Noon’s information guru. Let me give him a first and last name and see what he can come up with.”
“What kind of information guru?” Joanna asked.
But Ali was already back on the line. “Yes, first name is Hans. Last name is spelled H-O-L-Z-M-A-N-N. He may work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”
There was another long pause when the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock. While they waited, Joanna went back to fuming in silence.
“I’m sure that’s the one,” Ali said at last, turning to Joanna with a smile lighting up her face. “Hans Dieter Holzmann—that is the son’s full name, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it is, but how did you do that?” Joanna wanted to know.
“Our resident magician just accessed the U.S. Customs employee database. Turns out, there’s only one employee named Holzmann on their list: Hans Dieter Holzmann. And guess where he works? The cargo ship terminal in Long Beach where that LEGO shipment just happened to come ashore late last week.”
Ali returned to the phone. “Yes, Stu. Do some data mining and send us everything you can find on Mr. Holzmann, including whether or not he’s at work today. If he’s involved in this operation and has somehow learned that his shipment has gone horribly awry, he may be trying to do some troubleshooting from his end.”
“Before you hang up,” Cami said, “may I talk to Stu for a minute?”
“Sure,” Ali said, giving her the phone.
“Stu, I just sent you the coordinates of where the truck was going: the intersection of Holzmann Road and U.S. Highway 92. The ranch belongs to Hans Holzmann’s father. Now might be a good time to check out our new time-share access to satellite imagery.”
Ali silently nodded her agreement. Months earlier, during a serious crisis when High Noon had needed real-time satellite imagery, Stu had managed to come up with a work-around. They had since joined a private consortium that gave them access on an as-needed basis. The initial sign
-up fee had been jaw-droppingly expensive. After that, however, the charges were on a pay-as-you-go basis with the attendant fees billed back to the client.
“That’s right,” Cami said into the phone. “If you can, take a look at everything that’s there: house, outbuildings, whatever. We’ve also just learned there may be several metal shipping containers on the property. Try taking a look at those as well.”
“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You think your magician guy, wherever he is, will actually be able to see the containers?”
“You’d be surprised what he can see,” Cami said, pointing to another evidence bag. “Do you mind if I take a look at that phone?”
Kristin popped her head in the door. “It’s time for the press briefing, Sheriff Brady. Tom Hadlock would like to have you on hand for that.”
Sighing, Joanna looked first at Cami, then at the phone, and finally at Dave Hollicker. “If we end up needing that phone in court, it’s your job to maintain the chain of evidence.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dave said. “Will do.”
• • •
As Sheriff Brady left the lab, Ali’s phone rang with B.’s caller ID showing on the screen.
“Stu just told me about the situation on the ranch,” B. told her. “I’ve got a call in to corporate right now. Using satellite imagery will cost a ton of money, but if we can break this operation wide open, I’m betting they’ll cough up the fee.”
“Good,” Ali said. “What if what we’re dealing with are the kind of unclipped ghost pallets you mentioned earlier? Supposing whoever’s in Monterrey loads unchipped pallets into one or more shipping containers. The inside guy who works for customs tags those for special attention, and during those ‘special inspections’ said pallets simply disappear. That might not be too difficult, since—as far as anybody but the crooks are concerned—they never existed in the first place.”
“Sounds feasible,” B. said before adding, “Oops, getting a call back. Bye.”