The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (58)

“Okay. I’ll talk to the boss, and if he approves, I’ll go to our FBI liaison,” Greet said. “Tell them that we don’t want to talk to local law yet. See what they say.”

“Call me,” Letty said. “We’re going to check Terry Duran’s address. Maybe we’ll spot Crain there.”

“Careful.”



* * *





When she was ready to go, Letty called Kaiser and suggested that they hit the McDonald’s for breakfast. “Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, mmm-mmm.”

“My heart’s already clogging up, hearing that,” Kaiser said. “But I guess this job comes with sacrifices.”

“I’m going to call Vee Wright and Senator Colles and I want you to hear the calls,” Letty said. “We can do that from the car.”

“Am I being informed, or implicated?” Kaiser asked.

“Take your pick, John.”



* * *





In the car, Letty called Vee Wright, who was awake in his Phoenix hospital room. He was, he said, in moderate pain. “They got me out of bed and walking around. Couple of pills and I should be good to go.”

“That’s great. Listen, we might have found your oil thieves . . . I’m going to text you a photograph of some pipes, right . . . now.” She pushed a button on her cell phone.

She told Wright about tracking the tanker truck and about the scene at what she thought was a pipeline, about the men loading what looked like a scuba-diving tank into the truck.

Wright said, “I got your picture . . . All right, all right. That might explain some things . . . like a scuba tank? Did you see any fixtures on it?”

“We couldn’t see it very well—it was dark, and they were pulling a bag over it, but there was something sticking out of one end.”

“I think what they did was built themselves a pig.”

Pipelines, he said, had a variety of internal monitoring and maintenance jobs done by “pigs,” which were metal or plastic tanks that were dropped into pipelines and pushed along by the oil inside the pipes. They were also used to separate batches of oil from different companies.

“You put a pig in a pipeline through a launcher. The launcher inserts the pig into a stream of oil that pushes it along. I suspect they made themselves a pig that somehow gets into the stream and then maybe . . . expands? Or extrudes some feetlike things that cause the pig to jam in the line? The oil would back up through the launcher and you could pump it out to your truck. Interesting. That would explain why they steal it from a bunch of different companies. They wouldn’t know which batch of oil they’re getting.”

“You were right about Winks. That’s where they’re unloading it,” Letty said.

“All right. Good. Let’s get the FBI on it, right quick . . .”

“Not too quick, or we’ll miss some of these guys,” Letty said. “The other thing is, we don’t know if they killed the Blackburns. We’ve got work to do before we can establish that, even as a probability.” And she lied a bit: “Our DHS people are coordinating with the FBI right now. We could have something before you’re back in your office. We want to make sure we get them all, and we get them for the murders.”

“Excellent work. Excellent,” Wright said. “I’m willing to let them steal the oil for a little while, anyway, if we can hang them on the murders. You go ahead and do that.”



* * *





Colles was not in his office, but a secretary who knew Letty said he would call back that afternoon. “There’s an interagency clusterfuck going on about museum construction on the Mall. He’s in the middle of it.”



* * *





At the McDonald’s, Letty summarized what they’d figured out. “We’ve got three guys we’re pretty sure of: Duran, Crain, and Max Sawyer. They all live too close together in Monahans not to be linked up. Greet says Duran is in this Land Division and I found that militia stuff in Crain’s moving boxes. Any of them could point us at Low and Jael, if we had a way to convince them to do that.”

“That’s not really us, that kind of action, squeezing people,” Kaiser said. He lifted up the top of his biscuit, looked at the bacon below it, frowned, put the biscuit back together, and took a bite. He winced, swallowed, and asked, “Why would they even believe us?”

“That’s a problem,” Letty conceded. “Something wrong with that sandwich?”

“Yeah, I’m probably gonna eat about four of them,” Kaiser said. “Say what you like about McDonald’s, they can make a sandwich . . . and, not to change the subject, it might be time to call in the local cops.”

“We can’t be sure of them. Probably okay, but possibly not: that’s what Greet told me,” Letty said. “I’ve got a feeling that what we need to do will be boring: we need to pick one of these guys and watch him. See who he’s talking to.”

“Greet could help with that—DHS has all kinds of cybersecurity and intelligence units; one of them should be able to get Duran’s cell phones and see who he’s talking to.”

“Good. I gotta learn about DHS resources.”