be.’
‘Khan knew where they would be.’
‘But why would he kill his employees? More to the point, you’ve got to have a very, very good reason to want to draw all the attention a homicide like this will bring.’
Ortega got called away and Raveneau lingered in the material storage area. He smelled fir. He touched smooth pieces of finish lumber and then looked over at the forklift. Dan Oliver, the employee who accepted the delivery set the plywood down on four inch by four inch stickers to keep the unit off the ground so a forklift could pick it up later. Then he parked the lift. The key was still in it.
Raveneau walked back to the unit of plywood and sat down on it. He ran his fingers along one of the steel bands holding it together and took another sip of coffee. Then, he thought, why not, but finished the coffee before laying down three pieces of wood he could slide the sheets of plywood on to. Then he went looking for a band cutter. He crossed the room to where he had seen tools stored and found one.
After cutting the two metal bands he slid the first sheet off and positioned it neatly on the wood stickers. He did the same with the next fifteen sheets, keeping the new pile exact and precise. A light sweat started on his forehead as well as the sense this was a little bit foolish. He felt the weight of each sheet now and each was four feet wide by eight feet long and three quarters of an inch thick. He rested a moment after getting through the next six sheets. That left twenty to go and he hoped Ortega didn’t walk back just yet. He didn’t really have a good explanation for why he was doing this.
He slid two more sheets off, then slowed and stood up as he slid off the next. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He had a pretty good idea, but he wasn’t there yet. All of the remaining sheets appeared to be joined together by long screws, and the oblong metal objects sat in pockets routed into the wood, each looking shiny and deadly, each resting in a wood pocket with packing around it to keep it from moving. There were four of them and routed into pockets alongside them, four end pieces nestled in the way a wedding ring might rest in velvet.
Raveneau touched the end of one and felt where the cap piece would screw in. Pack them with explosives and then screw on the cap piece, four casings about eighteen inches long, fat in the middle, narrowing at the nose, clean curved metal. He stared. He studied them before walking back to the saw cutting room and waving Ortega over.
‘Bruce, come take a look.’
And then Ortega was standing next to him saying, ‘Khan’s a bomb maker.’
Raveneau didn’t go there yet. He was still taking it in. Each was well machined, similar if not identical. This was production manufacturing. He turned to Ortega and asked, ‘Who’s the bomb guy we hired that was with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan?’
‘Yeah, I know who you mean. They call him Hurt Locker but I can’t think of his real name. Hagen knows him.’
‘Let’s get Hagen to call the bomb squad. Let’s see if we can get him here without the rest of the squad and before we call the Feds or anybody else.’
NINETEEN
The captain who oversaw the bomb squad told Hagen, ‘No way, it’s not going to happen.’ Raveneau was close enough to overhear. He refused to send Juan Garcia, the ex-Army technician alone.
Raveneau mouthed, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and Hagen stared hard at him before saying, ‘I’m going to put Inspector Raveneau on the line.’
When Raveneau brought the phone to his ear Captain Dixon asked, ‘Raveneau, are you ever going to fucking retire?’
‘I’m waiting you out. You go, and then I’ll go.’
‘What would I do every day?’
‘You’d do the same thing you do now, you’d sit around.’
Dixon laughed. Raveneau didn’t know him well but they liked each other.
‘Here’s the problem we’ve got,’ Raveneau said. ‘We’ve discovered what look like bomb casings and we don’t want to alert the owner yet. We need to keep this very quiet. We need a discreet look at them.’
‘Are you staying well away from them?’
‘We are.’
‘You need to get everyone out of the building. What’s the address again?’
Raveneau gave it to him and kept talking.
‘We can’t risk our suspect finding out we’ve discovered this.’
‘We have a very clear protocol, Ben, and I think everyone in the department knows it, you included.’
‘I understand, but we can’t risk the word getting out. If you can’t send him and give us a look and an opinion, we’ll go at it a different way.’
‘No, don’t call the Feds, we’ll get down there. Don’t touch anything and we’ll come in as quietly as we can.’
‘It’s plywood that’s been moved around with a forklift. It rode here on a lumber delivery truck. It can’t be that sensitive. Look, I’ll email you a photo of what we’ve got. I’ll do that right now.’
Ten minutes later Dixon called back, saying he was sending Garcia, the Hurt Locker guy.
While they waited Raveneau made a call to a friend who worked for a company called Shelter Products up in Portland. He figured if there was anyone who could trace where the plywood came from it was Ridge Taylor. He got through to Taylor and after the hellos said, ‘I can’t tell you why but I need to know. I’ve got an order and a delivery tag number. We can fax to you and I can tell you what’s stamped on the wood.’
No one told a joke better than Taylor, but he was quiet and serious as Raveneau went back and forth with him. Shelter Products sold point-to-point. They sold lumber as it was still rolling on a train. They sold into any number of states and after they were clear on the forty-two pieces of finish grade larch he asked Taylor about Branson Trucking, thinking they might know who to call if they didn’t know anything directly.
‘Why don’t I put you through to Hutton and let him tell you. Your plywood came out of a plant in British Columbia. Here’s the address and phone number.’
Taylor gave him that and a website, then put him through to Kurt Hutton. Hutton asked, ‘Are you building a wooden jail?’
‘No, and I can’t talk but I need to know anything you can tell me about Branson.’
‘I can tell you they appeared out of nowhere about four years ago with lower prices than anybody. The CEO, if you want to call him that, was somebody we did business with and he ran into hard times and went under. I don’t know when he connected with the investor money behind Branson. He’s not really the type to go out and find money like that, but obviously he did.’
‘If they’re less expensive why don’t you use them?’
‘They did do some hauling for us, but they couldn’t possibly have made money at the prices they charged us and it was hurting others we work with. They’ve got a good idea with their website though. On the website is a truck and you click and drag and as you load the truck it gives you the weight and you punch in the destination and it gives the hauling price.’
‘I’ve been to it.’
‘With their prices they had to be cutting corners other ways, so we backed away.’
He thanked Hutton as Hurt Locker showed up. He was probably no more than twenty-five but with a quiet walk and manner that made Raveneau remember his son. He watched how Garcia approached the casings and studied them. Ten minutes later he straightened, turned, and looked at them.
‘You’ve got yourself some pretty slick IED casings, except that they don’t look very much like improvised explosive devices. You’ve got four Cadillacs, depending on who puts them together from here. Anyone of these would make one hell of a bomb. See how the nose is shaped, directs the blast.’
He fixed on Raveneau.
‘These are some seriously bad dudes and they aren’t one-off deals. They’re producing them. This is one scary
