plywood and the one after it. You told the FBI the plywood switchout was a five minute stop. You said you backed up and the forklift driver was “super quick,” your words.
‘I took the time it was when you called in from your stop before that and added five to ten minutes for the plywood stop and added that to the time difference between when you called in on the stop prior to the plywood and the one after it. I did that and I couldn’t make it work. No matter how I added it up there was still a missing fifteen or twenty minutes, so I ran that by some other homicide inspectors and then the Feds and realized there was another stop.’
Drury started to deny that and Raveneau shook his head. He pulled the chair back. He sat down across from Drury.
‘This is it, John. This is last chance, and let me tell you something else. When they get tired of waiting for you to break down and talk, they’re going to use you as bait. I promise you that’s what will happen. Look, you made another stop. But it didn’t hit me until later that it wasn’t material you were picking up or delivering. It was a person. It was the shooter. Probably you didn’t know what was going on when you picked him up, but you sure knew afterwards. You’ve got to start talking today. It may save you.’
Drury looked away as he said, ‘I’m not going to get screwed.’
‘Dude, you’re already screwed. It’s just about how bad and how long now.’ Raveneau waited three beats then asked, ‘Did you know what he was going to do?’
Drury shook his head.
‘Say something.’
‘I didn’t even know that’s where he was getting out.’
‘Where was he?’
‘He was in the cab with a hoodie hiding his face. He never once turned his head. He told me if I looked at him he’d kill me.’
‘So you knew something bad was going to go down.’
‘That’s all he said to me. He didn’t say anything else.’
‘But you knew there was a reason.’
‘Yeah, but I thought it was something to do with the owner owing them money or something. I didn’t know. If anyone asked I was supposed to say he was a new driver I was training.’
‘Who said that?’
‘The guy who hired me, the one I told you about. I was supposed to meet him that night and get paid but when you called I freaked out and went to the bar instead.’
Raveneau nodded. That was probably why Drury was alive. It probably meant the gunman was dead. They would have broken the link but Drury could still give them the man who hired him.
‘And that’s why you gave us a bad description, you were scared?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, I can understand that. Now give me a better one, first the gunman sitting next to you in the cab. You saw part of his face. You heard his voice. White, black, what?’
‘I don’t know and I’m not lying, I couldn’t tell and I didn’t try hard to look.’
‘How old?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How tall?’
‘Sort of average.’
‘How did you know where to pick him up?’
‘I got a text on the phone they gave me.’
‘Was he carrying anything?’
‘A brown bag with a zipper down the middle and he put it in the back at the very end and said not to touch it. He said he’d get it when the time came.’
‘What did you think was in the bag?’
‘I didn’t know.’
He knew but that didn’t matter right now. Probably got very good money to deliver the man with a promise of an even larger payoff once it was over.
‘You’re going to be asked to work with a sketch artist to come up with an image of what he looks like and you’ll have to go back to zero and start over on the man who hired you. No one is going to question that the description may be different this time. That man is very important. With both you need to think about identifying marks, moles, skin aberrations, scars, tats, variance in the eye color. If the man who hired you has hair growing out his ears we want to know about it.
‘Now let’s go forward again. You’re at the cabinet shop. The plywood has been offloaded by Khan’s employee. Where is the guy who rode with you and the bag he brought?’
‘He’s gone to the bathroom.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did he know where the rest room was? Did he get out of the truck and say, hey, I’m going to the rest room? Had he ever been there before? Tell me how it went down.’
Drury didn’t want to answer and Raveneau thought about Drury with a gun in his hand, adrenalized, the veins of his neck bulging, his face twisted with anger and fear as Raveneau entered the house in San Leandro. He looked at Drury’s scalp, the short hair.
‘I didn’t know he was going to do what he did. No one said anything to me about any of it.’
‘OK, you asked if he could use the bathroom, then what?’
‘Then we signed the delivery tags and I told the older guy that worked there — I can’t remember his name — that my guy was back in the truck and I needed to hustle.’
‘Did he watch you leave?’
‘Never does.’
Never did, Raveneau thought, and knew Drury had rehearsed this. Drury and the man who had hired him rehearsed the moves at the cabinet shop. The shooter probably did sit silent and they brought him in with the plywood so there wouldn’t be any gap between delivery and taking out the employees. That probably said several things; one being they worried employees would open the unit of plywood and accidentally discover the bomb casings. And they made a cynical calculation that it wouldn’t get found during the murder investigation. He stared at Drury. No way was he still supposed to be alive. So they were making mistakes. They were stumbling, but they prepared for stumbles. They were good enough to adjust and send Khan in and get the casings.
‘Did you get money upfront and were going to get the balance afterwards?’
‘Yeah, the rest after.’
‘Do you know how I know you never collected it?’
‘How?’
‘You’re alive. When was he going to give you the final payment?’
‘A week later.’
‘Where?’
‘At Pete’s Corner.’
‘Is that the only place you met with him?’
‘Yes, but after the first time it was in her car in the lot there. She would text me.’
‘Not a man.’
‘No.’
‘OK, but that’s over now, right? When I walk out and the FBI walks in, are you going to be ready?’
‘Will I know what’s going to happen to me?’
‘Just answer.’
He nodded instead.
‘You help them on this and they’ll return you to the real world. You’ll still have to deal with everything else you did, but they will return you. This means you’re going to do the polygraph tests, everything.’
Raveneau stopped at the door. He turned.
‘A woman?’
