The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (32)

“I’m listening. What’d he figure out and why are we going at it backwards?”

“Because I believe what he did was, he started asking, who would be buying it? Not who was stealing it, or selling it. Whoever buys it from the thieves would have to be somebody who is small enough to take the risk. They’d also need an excuse for having a hundred thousand barrels of oil for sale. The buyer would need a way to get it to a refinery . . .”

“Okay. Yeah. I see where you’re going,” Grimes said. He was suddenly interested, his voice pitching up. “Letty, listen to me: this is a very solid idea. We can work with it, but it could be dangerous, talking about this. I know some people . . . Vee knows some people . . . we could call up some people . . .”

“What people are you talking about?”

“Pipeline people. Refinery people. Trucking companies. You can’t get a bucket of crude oil and put it in your truck’s fuel tank. They’re not selling it retail. It has to be run through a refinery and that oil is accounted for. I talked to Vee’s secretary an hour ago and she said he’s out of the operating room with his new knees, but he should be able to talk to us tomorrow morning, and he’ll want to. This is something we can figure out. We need to ask, what small-time wildcatter who was maybe putting out a hundred thousand barrels a year, or less—maybe a lot less—suddenly bumped up another hundred thousand barrels or so? Not a one percent increase, but a hundred percent increase.”

“Like somebody said, it’s not much money for you top guys, but it’s a lot of money for somebody,” Letty said.

“Exactly . . . Listen, Tanner just came out of the house. I think they’re gonna want me to go look.”

“Go. Call me back and tell me if we’re correct, that it’s the Blackburns under the beds.”

“I will. Soon as I know. Damn. I think you could be on the right track about the sales.”



* * *





Letty got up, brushed her teeth, called Kaiser. “You find a way to amuse yourself?”

“I drove all over town,” Kaiser said. “I’m still doing it. It’s a complicated place, not all that easy to get around. One area is a big circle thing, but most of it is little squares. North of here . . . man, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s pumpjacks as far as the eye can see. Hundreds of them. Thousands of power poles.”

“I’d like to see that. Maybe you could roll me around town a little?”

“Ten minutes, out front,” Kaiser said. “You figure anything out?”

“Maybe,” Letty said. “Tell you about it when you get here.”



* * *





Letty was waiting out in front of the hotel when Grimes called back. “Okay. My God, that’s not something I ever want to see again, but it’s them. Boxie and Marcia, smothered with those bags, their eyes . . .”

“Easy,” Letty said. “They’re not suffering anymore, they’re gone.”

“Okay, okay, I gotta get home. I gotta, I don’t know . . .” Grimes stuttered off into silence.

“We’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Letty said. “You take care.”

He rang off as Kaiser pulled in. Letty got in the Explorer and said, “Let’s see the sights.”

“Did Grimes call?”

“Yes. He identified them. It was the Blackburns,” she said.

“Are we over our heads yet?”

“Not yet,” Letty said.



* * *





As they drove through the city, Letty told Kaiser about the possibility of finding a buyer for the oil, rather than searching for the thieves.

“There must be dozens of small companies out here,” Kaiser said. “Guys who have, like, one well. Okay. Maybe not one well, but you know . . . small-timers.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Letty said. “But there aren’t hundreds of pipelines or hundreds of trucking companies or hundreds of railroads. Those people must have data on their customers. You’d just print out a list of oil shipments and run your finger down it, see who got a bump in the last year.”

“Could work,” Kaiser said. “Of course, with the post-COVID boom, there could be a lot of companies showing an increase.”

“Didn’t think of that, but you’re right. On the other hand, Grimes and Wright would probably know which ones are legit and which ones aren’t. We’ll see.”



* * *





Kaiser took Letty on a tour of the city and then the countryside around it, down white-dust service roads through the oil fields that not only surrounded the town but penetrated it, and then down through Midland’s near-twin city of Odessa. The Permian oil fields amounted to the biggest machine she’d ever seen, Letty decided, a level plain marked by endless acres of weeds and machinery. She said, “Those pumpjacks, the pointy top part—the way they go up and down, they remind me of herons sniping frogs off a pond.”

“The oil’s not just here—it goes all the way across the border into New Mexico,” Kaiser said. “I went past a billboard that said the Permian Basin covers eighty-six thousand square miles, and if it was a state, it’d be the twelfth largest. Ahead of Utah.”