The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (70)

“Somebody tipped them off to the shooting at Winks’s, and they hustled up here and burned everything they couldn’t move. Didn’t need the truck anymore with Winks dead. We got them worried.”

“Where would they have gotten the tip?”

“A cop,” Letty said. “Cops would have been the people who would have known about this in the middle of the night, early enough that these guys could feel confident about coming out here and setting the fires . . .”

“Yeah. That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Kaiser said.

“Now we call Rhodes and see if he’ll let us in Winks’s office,” Letty said. She looked around the site. “There’s nothing more for us here.”



* * *





Letty and Kaiser, trailed by an FBI agent in a separate car, drove out to Winks’s early in the afternoon and found two sheriff’s deputies sitting in the shade of an oil tank, reading their phones. Both bodies had been removed, the deputies said, and the crime scene crew had finished their work.

Winks had used a Windows laptop, which was sitting on his desk, lid closed. His cell phone was sitting beside it. The FBI agent opened the computer, brought it up. The computer asked for a password.

“What do you do here?” Letty asked.

The agent was digging in his briefcase, and took out a thumb drive. “I’ve got an offline NT password and registry editor here . . . I can edit the registry and reset the password.”

Kaiser: “It’s that easy?”

“Yeah, it is,” the agent said. “Of course, if he’s encrypted his files, we’re out of luck . . .”

They stood around, watching as he worked: five minutes later, he said, “We’re in, and the files are not encrypted. Dummy. What are we looking for?”

“Let me in there,” Letty said. “Emails first.”



* * *





They found dozens of receipts for oil pickups by a half-dozen different oil service companies, but nothing that suggested a connection to the suppliers of the oil, the thieves. Winks had saved a number of websites, but all but one were commercial and routine. The FBI agent pointed to a link in the browser and said, “Click on this.”

They did, and found it led to an empty website.

“I’m thinking what they did was, they talked here,” he said. “Whoever is on the other end wiped it out after every conversation. Or Winks did.”

“Why do you think that?” Kaiser asked.

Letty: “Because of the website ID.”

“Exactly,” the agent said. “Fifteen random numbers and letters dot com. Not something anyone would find by accident. The only way you could find it would be if you came to this machine, or the other one, and found it like we did. But with nothing there . . . we’re shut out.”

“What about his cell phone?”

“That will take a while, unless you find something written down somewhere. We’ll have to go fight Apple about it.”

“Damn it,” Letty said. “You know what we’re talking about here. These people may be getting ready to blow something up. Why don’t you tell Apple that?”

“We will. Today. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“How about recovering deleted files? Deleted emails.”

“I can try to go to his ISP for that . . . He’s not in any cloud that I can see, so it’s not up there. The ISP, you know, we’re dealing with sticky bureaucracies here. Sometimes they don’t even answer the phone.”

“Not even for the FBI?”

“We can get to them eventually, but it can take time. I’ll push it as hard as I can.”



* * *





Winks’s office gave up nothing useful. Letty called the sheriff and asked him to contact the state patrol to see if anyone whose name they had—Sawyer, Duran, Crain, Low—had any traffic tickets of any kind, from anywhere.

Rhodes called back and said that Sawyer had gotten a speeding ticket in the past twelve months in El Paso. “You going down there?”

“Actually, I think we’ve seen something about El Paso,” Letty said. “I’ve got to read through my notes.”

“If you go, take it easy down there, girl. Things can get rough on the border.”

“But not in Santa Anna County?”

“We’re peace-loving folks here, by and large,” Rhodes said. “With a few outliers.”



* * *





“Are we going to El Paso?” Kaiser asked.

“Those guys spent a lot of time down there,” Letty said. “It’s probably the headquarters of this Jeep militia. I mean, the militia patrols the border and the border isn’t here. This was the moneymaker.”

“So we go down there and talk to who?” Kaiser asked. Then, “Should have a big FBI office, maybe they’ve got something on the El Paso area militias? Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a half-dozen of them.”

“Maybe the Border Patrol would have something. Can’t be many militias that have a woman as a leader.”

“You know who’d have something?” Kaiser asked.