The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (20)

Grimes’s office was purely functional: the desk, an expensive office chair behind it, filing cabinets along a wall, a bookcase, and the visitor chairs sitting on a brown carpet dusted with sand. Four pictures hung on the wall behind Grimes, in brown plastic frames: a thin, blond, fiftyish woman with sharp eyes and a sharper nose; and three willowy dark-haired girls, who, though they caught features from both the older woman and Grimes, were all improbably pretty, given their gene pool. A plain Christian cross hung on the wall to the right of them, and Letty noticed a well-worn Bible on the bookcase.

Grimes said “Yeah” one more time, and “Talk to you later.”

He punched the phone off and said, “I spoke with Vee—Mr. Wright. He said that as big a pain in the ass as you’re likely to be, he wants me to cooperate in every way I can and give you everything you need.”

He was a large man, both tall and thick, with close-cropped curly black hair and tangled eyebrows, brown eyes so dark that he didn’t seem to have pupils, and a fleshy nose. The two sides of his nose didn’t match, and Letty thought he might have had a part of it cut out, like you would with skin cancer. He had a couple other scars on his left cheek, and when he lifted a hand, she saw that he was missing most of his left little finger. He was wearing a pink golf shirt under a gray canvas overshirt, and jeans.

“What’d you think about that?” Letty asked. “About cooperation?”

Grimes scratched the scarred side of his nose and then said, “Well, I didn’t like it. Then I thought about it for a while. Since Vee runs the company and has about a billion dollars and, sometimes, a bad temper, I decided I’d cooperate every way I can and give you everything you need. I do plan to piss and moan about it from time to time.”

“Then we’ll get along,” Letty said. “I’ll tell you what, Dick: you don’t have to help us much, other than getting the people around here to listen to us, if we need them to listen. We’ll try not to bother you, or worry you, or create any trouble. We don’t mind some pissing and moaning. We’ll probably do some ourselves.”

Grimes nodded. “Then what can I do for you? I mean, right now?”

“I’m sure you know about Mr. Wright’s problem with missing oil?”

Grimes shook his head. “He thinks we’re short. It’s driving me crazy. It’s like when my wife sends me to the grocery store to get her some strawberries and the store doesn’t have any. When I get home, it turns out that’s no excuse. I’m telling you, I looked everywhere and I can’t find a leak. Boxie—Boxie Blackburn, our numbers guy, Vee told you about him—couldn’t find one, either. Vee says ten or twelve thousand barrels, or more, per year, and he is death on those kinds of numbers. He can smell a leak, so I believe him, but I can’t find ten barrels. I’m pulling my hair out.”

“You’re not losing it at, you know, the pumps? Uh, the rigs?” Letty was unsure of the nomenclature.

“Nawp,” he said, a Texas cross between “naw” and “nope.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“If we are, I can’t figure out how. A couple of guys here wonder if there’s a phantom pipeline cut somewhere, where somebody takes the oil out before it gets to the tanks. But that’s . . . nutso. I can’t even think how in the hell you could do that, with nobody seeing it. My personal opinion is, if we’re missing oil, it’s paperwork somewhere along the way. Somebody’s accountant is stealing it.”

“Blackburn?”

Grimes stood up. There was only one window in the office, behind his desk, a high, thin slit whose lower edge was chin high on Grimes. He turned and peered out at a slice of blue sky, then said, “I’ve known Boxie for twenty goddamn years, since we were both working outside. I can’t believe he’s stealing it, but . . . where is he? Where’s Marcia? We can’t find either one of them.”

“Talk to the police?”

“Yeah, but they’re not too interested at this point. They’ve gone out to his house, they say both of his cars are gone. Can’t find them, but they’re gone. They think he and Marcia took off for somewhere. Either for good or evil.”

“Would you mind if we poked through Mr. Blackburn’s office?”

“Yeah, I’d mind, and so would he, but given what Vee’s said, and that you’re government people, and the fact that we can’t find Boxie or Marcia . . . go ahead,” Grimes said. “The door’s unlocked, I was in there this morning.”

“What about his computer . . . You think it’s protected?”

Grimes sat down again, reached across his desk for a scratch pad, and jotted some numbers and letters on it: 71Boxer73. He pushed the note across the desk and Letty picked it up.

“That’s his password. He was born in 71, his wife in 73. Clever, huh?”

Kaiser asked, “Do you have any idea why he might have taken off? Okay, maybe he’s gone shopping, or maybe he’s behind the oil thefts and decided to take off. But maybe . . . he figured something out and said so to the wrong people . . .”

“Like he might be dead?” Grimes’s eyebrows scaled up his forehead.

“Gotta ask,” Kaiser said.

“I’ll tell you guys, there’s been some rough shit happened out here in the Permian over the years,” Grimes said. “I’ve known people got killed on the job, even one guy who got shot, murdered—but there’s never been any mystery about it. That’s what’s got me scratching my head: the mystery. Where in the hell are they? If Boxie shows up tomorrow morning and says he and Marcia been out hunting jackrabbits, I’ll kick his ass up around his ears. So to answer your question, no, I got no idea where they are, or why they’re gone.”