The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (28)

The chief raised his eyebrows, creating a half-dozen wrinkles across his forehead, and asked, “Do you read a lot of mystery novels?”

“My father is a U.S. Marshal and was a lead homicide investigator for the city of Minneapolis and for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’ve talked with him about his cases since I was twelve years old and I was involved in a couple of them. I am now an investigator, a researcher, for the U.S. Senate and the Department of Homeland Security.”

Short, the chief, looked at Tanner and then back at Letty. “Involved in your father’s cases how?”

Letty said, “He broke up a drug-smuggling ring that had killed some people in the Twin Cities. Two of them got crazy and crashed into our house, trying to kill our family as revenge. I shot and killed both of them. And I once shot a crooked cop. On two different occasions.”

The chief leaned away from her and then said, “That’s not a story you hear every day.”

“It’s all true,” Kaiser said. “I looked it up. You ought to read about her old man. He’s a piece of work.”

“Why would you tell us that?” the chief asked Letty.

Letty said, “Because Tanner said he’d need my fingerprints and I told him they were available through the FBI. He wanted to know why, but we put off talking about that—but me shooting those people, that’s why. It was going to come out, so I thought I might as well be up front about it.”

The chief rubbed his nose and said, “Okay.”

Tanner: “We need to talk to Ms. Davenport and Mr. Kaiser separately, and Mr. Grimes here will do the identification . . .”

He explained Grimes’s relationship to the Blackburns, and he added, “There may be a problem with some missing oil.”

The chief again took Tanner by the elbow, and led him away, and they talked for a while, then the chief waved at Letty, Kaiser, and Grimes and marched back down the driveway to his car. Tanner came over and said, “The chief was explaining how if I didn’t solve this, and right quick, I’ll be doing the Midland County peyote cactus inventory for the next several years. So we better get after it. Mr. Kaiser, I’d like to talk to you first. Ms. Davenport, if you’d like to wait in your Explorer . . .”



* * *





Tanner took Kaiser to his police cruiser. The crime scene crew arrived while they were talking, and Tanner got out and led them into the house. He came back ten minutes later, talked to Kaiser for another ten minutes. Then Kaiser got out of the cruiser and waved Letty over.

As they passed each other Kaiser muttered, “No problem,” and Letty went on and got in the passenger seat of the cop car. Tanner had an iPad in his lap and was reading newspaper stories from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, concerning the home invasion that Letty had stopped.

Letty settled in without saying anything, and Tanner read on; at one point he said, “Holy cow,” and glanced over at Letty.

“What can I tell you?” Letty said. “That’s pretty much the way it was. There were a couple of small errors in that story, but then, my dad says all newspaper stories have a couple of small errors and most of them have more than that. He says that most TV stories are fairy tales; I agree with that, because . . .”

“. . . you worked for a TV station as a school reporter.”

“Unpaid intern,” Letty said.

“Let me read for another couple of minutes.”

He typed and paged, and typed and paged, and said, “My God, your father . . . Kaiser said he was a piece of work, but I had no idea. I mean, I know some of these cases. That shoot-out down in Marfa. That’s just couple-three hours south of here . . .”

He read for another minute, whistled once, shook his head, then turned the iPad off and reached into the center console and took out a digital recorder. “I talked to Mr. Kaiser, and now I’m going to ask you a series of questions about how you got to Midland and why, and what you did when you entered the house here. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

Tanner turned on the recorder, identified himself with the time, date, and location, asked Letty for her DHS identification card and her Virginia driver’s license, read that information into the recorder, and then led her through the decision to drive to Midland, beginning with the possibility of stolen oil.

Letty explained her position with DHS, about Bradley (Boxie) Blackburn’s disappearance and the fear that it might have something to do with the missing oil—that he might be involved, or that he might have discovered something that led to his disappearance. She explained her dissatisfaction with the lack of reaction by the Midland Police Department, and her decision that she needed to go to Blackburn’s house.

“We had the key and security code, which we took as permission to enter the house in what might be an emergency . . .”

When she finished, Tanner said, “Okay. Good. Clear and succinct. Since this seems to be both a federal and local problem, and your father would have jurisdiction anywhere in the country . . . are you planning to ask him to get involved in this?”

Letty shook her head: “I doubt he’d be interested. He thinks these kinds of cases are best left to people with local knowledge. Besides, I’m working it.”

“Okay. Seems like a smart guy,” Tanner said.

“He’s very smart.”