The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (16)

Which she knew, of course.

He was currently unattached, he’d told her, but the DHS briefing officer, Greet, “kinda liked my whole package,” and had mentioned in passing that she, too, was currently unattached. “Gonna call that girl up, when I get back to D.C.,” he said.

“If you need any advice about how to talk to women, I’m always here,” Letty said. “Believe me, you do need that advice.”

“Au contraire, as we say down in Terrebonne Parish. With the right woman, I speak in poetry.”



* * *





The elevator doors opened and a woman in a dark green dress was standing there, holding a leather portfolio. “Ms. Davenport? Mr. Kaiser? Mr. Wright is waiting.”

Vermilion Wright occupied an expansive wood-and-glass office that overlooked Oklahoma City. He was a tall man, white-haired, angular, deep-set eyes under thick white eyebrows, strong for eighty-five. A recent newspaper story that Letty found on the Net said that he had bad knees from a life of crawling around oil rigs; a bamboo cane lay on one side of his desk.

He stood up when Letty led Kaiser into his office, and stuck out a bony hand to shake with each of them.

“Nice to meet you. Sit down,” Wright said. “The last DHS guy in here was about as useful as tits on a bull. I hope you can do something to help us out.”

“We’re not so much anxious to help you out as we are to find out where the money is going,” Letty said, as she took one of the leather visitor chairs and crossed her ankles. “Of course, if we figure that out, we’ll probably know who’s stealing your oil.”

He contemplated her, then asked, “You smart?”

Letty nodded. “Yes.”

“Where’d you go to school? What’d you study?”

“Stanford. Economics,” she said.

He nodded and smiled. “Went there myself. Back in the fifties. ‘Go Cardinal.’ Never really gave a shit about college sports, though. You know anything about oil?”

“Only what I read in the Yergin books,” she said.

“That’s a start,” he said. “What’d you think about them?”

“They taught me the difference between investment and fashion,” Letty said. “When COVID hit, Exxon’s stock went to $30.11. I borrowed a quarter-million dollars from my father and bought eight thousand shares at $31.11, a dollar up from the bottom. I sold out at $67.20.”

“So you’re up a quarter-million after you pay back your old man,” Wright said.

“Not quite. I had to pay capital gains. And the IRS made me pay a year’s interest to my dad on the loan.”

“So why’d you do that? Bet on Exxon?”

“I checked to see how many electric cars there are. Last year, a little more than five percent of the cars sold in the U.S. were electric or hybrid. The rest run on gasoline or diesel. That’s a hair more electric cars than in 2013, but only a hair. The electric cars run on power that mostly comes from natural gas–fired power plants. Guess who supplies the gasoline, diesel, and natural gas? For the time being, electric is fashion, oil is investment. That will change, but not yet.”

“You embarrassed about that? Young liberal woman buying oil stock?” Wright asked.

“I had about as much effect as a match in a forest fire.”

Wright nodded. “Where’d you put your quarter-million?”

“I’m still thinking about it,” Letty said.

Wright gazed at her for another minute, then asked, “Did your boss tell you two why you’re here? Why you’re here in my office today?”

“Something about a guy you can’t find,” Kaiser said. “Blackburn?”

Wright turned to Kaiser. “That’s right. Boxie Blackburn. Real first name is Bradley, but nobody calls him anything but Boxie,” Wright said. “Nobody can find him, four days now. Can’t find his wife, either. He works out of our Midland office, does the paperwork for us. I was putting the screws on him to find out where the oil was going, since we should have paper every step along the stream. He was exploring the possibilities and the next thing I hear, he’s gone. His cars, too. Nobody at home.”

“How much have you lost?” Letty asked.

“Maybe ten or twelve thousand barrels a year, going back a year or two,” Wright said.

Letty sat back. “That sounds like a lot.”

“Well, we pump a bit more than eighty million barrels a year,” Wright said. “The shrinkage is maybe one one-hundredth of one percent—one percent of one percent—and there’s always some shrinkage, some variation between what we get paid for and what we think we pumped.”

“But you’re sure you’re missing oil?”

“Boxie isn’t sure, but I am. The question I got in the back of my head is, Was Boxie involved? Did he think the jig was up? Is he running?”

“I looked at the WTI index this morning and over the past year you’ve averaged in the mid-to upper fifties per barrel,” Letty said. “So you’re down roughly a half-million dollars, maybe six hundred thousand, a year.”

“That’s correct,” Wright said. “But we’re not the only company that has the problem.”

He stood up, turned around, and limped over to his windows. With his back to them, he said, “None of the oil patch companies are anxious to discuss it publicly, but I’ve had some heart-to-heart talks with a couple other guys. My feeling is, overall, these crooks could be stealing as much as a hundred thousand barrels a year. Maybe more. Chevron, I think, got whacked. They aren’t talking, at all, but they’ve got security guys sniffing around the Permian and I’ve gotten back some rumors.”