Murder At The Podium Read online

  She thought about going back to the rig to look at what Adam had been fiddling with. However if there were security cameras on the rig, she might be caught on camera. Since she didn’t know much about the petroleum industry, she decided she would learn little looking at the rig. With no better ideas in mind she returned to stake-out Adam’s employer again. She presumed he returned to the tanker yard a few minutes before her, but maybe he went somewhere else. It just made no sense to her that you would use a tanker truck to make engineering calls on your oil rigs. It was bulky to drive and a gas hog, but then when you owned a company that pulled oil from the earth, maybe gasoline was free. She wished she done a better job following him.

  Watching the front entrance she heard her phone ring and looked down to see Castillo calling.

  “Hello Detective.”

  “What are you doing at the moment?”

  “Watching the front entrance of Adam Johnson’s employer.”

  “Why?”

  “Something fishy is going on here, I just don’t know what it is and I’m not sure if it’s related to Stacy’s murder.”

  “Are you pursuing a hunch?”

  “Yeah. I'm trying to sort through the lies in Adam Johnson's life.”

  “What’d he do today?”

  “He drove an oil tanker truck to check on an oil well about twenty-five minutes outside of town.”

  “I'm not sure I understand what you just said Dr. Quint. Our suspect drove an oil tanker to an oil well but didn't fill it up. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn't he just use his own car to drive out to an oil rig?”

  “If this is a clue, it's about as strange a clue as I've come across,” Castillo said disbelief in his voice.

  “I lost track of the tanker truck, but given that he didn't refill it at the rig I assumed he drove back to his company's headquarters. So I thought I would sit here and wait for him to leave with the tanker for the next visit to a rig. Do you have any news for me? Were you able to identify the three men that accosted me at the convention center?”

  “Sorry no new clues for you and due to the camera angle, our pictures of the three men are all partial to full side views of their faces.”

  Jill was watching an oil tanker approaching her target company and, using the binoculars, identified the driver as Adam Johnson.

  “Hey this is odd, Adam has just returned with the tanker truck and it appears to be empty as it's bouncing up and down which it wasn't doing earlier. So he must've visited a refinery and dumped a tankful of crude oil.”

  “You're making an assumption that it was filled with crude oil,” Castillo noted.

  “I think that's a reasonable assumption considering it's pulling out of the yard of a company that manages oil rigs.”

  “Let's verify that the tankers are filled with oil as opposed to any other substance.”

  “Detective, I'm not following you; what else would you put in a tanker truck? If it was carrying milk, it would need to visit a dairy.”

  “Perhaps it's carrying grape juice for Texas grape growers to make wine with.”

  “The sign outside the yard where these tanker trucks are pulling into does not include the word winery in it. It has words like oil and gas pumping and exploration. As a vineyard owner, I would never want to see my grape juice arrive in an oil tanker truck. I don't care how many times you wash out or sterilize the interior of the tank, I know that it would affect the taste of the grapes. So from a grape grower’s standpoint, I am absolutely sure that tanker truck is not carrying grape juice.”

  She heard Castillo chuckle on the other end of the phone. She realized she sounded really prissy about how grape juice was transported, but she didn't care; she was passionate about making great tasting wine.

  “Since you're running with gut feelings at the moment, all I can tell you is to go check out the contents of the next tanker truck that you see Adam drive away with. I do agree with you that it's odd that someone in management would be driving a tanker truck to oil rigs to perform measurements.”

  They ended their conversation shortly and Jill resumed her surveillance of the oil tanker yard. She used her phone to look up the specifications of the model of oil tanker that Castillo wanted her to look into and judge its contents. She read about the valves on the underbelly of the tank and learned how to open one of those valves to spill the contents. The problem was that oil was a hazardous material and she had no idea how much would gush out with the slightest turn of the valves. Maybe she could sneak into the yard across the street and check the tanker out there. If the owners discovered a spill, they would have the materials on-site to deal with it. She supposed she could also open the valve when she followed Adam to another oil rig. She thought back to the time that Adam was away from the truck today and there was sufficient time for her to open the valve and shut it again. She could take a container with her so she had something to dump it in. She wasn't clear on which valve was the right valve to open so she would just move down and open and shut each valve. She thought about quitting when the first valve gave her oil, but really she should sample each liquid to determine its contents.

  Three hours later, Jill saw Adam leave the yard in another tanker truck. This time she was going to be sure not to lose him. She wished she had the opportunity and the equipment to put a GPS tracking device on the truck, but she didn't carry those kinds of gadgets with her on a case. She gave it some thought and debated if she should take off her smart watch and wrap it around some piece of the truck so she could follow it without being too close. She decided that was a risk worth taking. Everything on her smart watch was backed up on her iPhone, so she did a hard reset on the smart watch so that if anyone found it on the truck they wouldn’t be able to tell who it belonged to, but she hoped to retrieve it once her surveillance was finished. She would have to crawl somewhere under the truck where the watch wouldn’t be visible. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too scratched up after this trip.

  Plan in place in her head, she followed the tanker truck to an oil rig located north of Odessa. Luck was with her when she discovered that the rig was parked close to several houses. She pulled in the driveway of one house, keeping watch in case someone came out of the house, as well as Adam's motions regarding the oil rig. She took the watch off her wrist and found the perfect place to attach it to the truck. She scuttled back to her car and returned the way they came, looking for a good spot from which to observe the truck’s movement. Jill couldn't help but pat herself on the back for being so creative in her tracking of Adam and his tanker.

  She parked at the first convenience store parking lot she could find upon leaving the location of the oil rig. If Adam happened to look over at her truck, all he would see was a woman wearing a baseball cap with black hair underneath; from the back he would not be able to view her face. He could memorize her license plates and so she'd have to think about switching them around depending on her surveillance going forward.

  She tested her iPhone connection to the watch and let him get a mile ahead of her. She noted that the tanker truck had stopped and figured he must be at a refinery unloading his crude oil which was the form it came out of the ground in. When she arrived at the tanker's location, she was puzzled that she couldn't see the tanker parked in front of any of the series of warehouse type buildings. This didn't look like a refinery, but maybe they did things differently in Texas. The refineries that she had seen in California were full of pipes and always had a flame burning somewhere. This just looked like a warehouse industrial area. The truck stayed in its location for about an hour and then according to her phone it was on the move again. She parked her truck down the street from the warehouse entrance and the opposite way that Adam would take to return to his place of employment.

  Now what should she do? Should she try to figure out why the tanker was parked inside one of the warehouse buildings? Should she get behind Adam and see if he stopped anywhere else that was either interesting or would provide her with the
opportunity to sample what was in the tanker or to retrieve her smart watch? She decided she could come back later to the warehouse area. She might ask Guerrero or Rogers if they knew what was in the warehouse area; it was better now to follow the truck, if for no other reason than to get her watch back. Again she hung back out of sight of the tanker as it drove through town, taking the path back to Adam’s employer. She decided to get close to it so she could tell if it was weighted down or not. Her unscientific measure of weight was how it handled the bumps. The weighted down tanker seemed to sink then roll out of road hazards. The empty tanker bounced like a skipping stone, in and out of the divots. This truck was bouncing, so it must have unloaded its weight at the warehouse. She backed off again expecting it to return to the yard; but to her enormous luck Adam visited another oil rig with good enough coverage in the surrounding area for Jill to run over and retrieve her watch. She then returned to her truck and returned to her viewing spot in a parking lot near Adam’s employer. She’d settled in with binoculars in hand when a tanker truck approached the yard. She noted Adam's face and the license plate of the tanker truck which was different from the one he drove that morning. No surprise there, as something had to have filled the truck up and that something was not located in the truck yard across the street.

  So tanker trucks were arriving at the yard fully loaded with petroleum, and then exiting the yard, being driven around Odessa to oil rigs only to be unloaded in a warehouse not connected to an oil refinery. What a strange picture. She picked up her phone and dialed Detective Guerrero.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Detective. It's Jill Quint from the Adam Johnson case.”

  “Yes I remember your name.”

  “I've been watching Adam’s employer for most of the day and something unexplained is going on. I wondered if you might help me.”

  “Sure, how can I help?”

  “There are a series of warehouse type structures over on Almond Lane. Do you know what business that is and what they keep in the warehouses?”

  “I don't offhand, but give me thirty minutes and I can look it up in the city records. Do the warehouses appear to belong to a single business or are there several at that location? Do you have a street number?”

  “The warehouses are not all uniform on the outside so I would guess more than one company is in there. There is no sign at the entrance and the address is 971 Almond Lane. I didn't see any building numbers or letters that might constitute an address within that address.”

  “Okay. Should I call you back at this number?”

  “Yes.”

  They ended the call and Jill went back to writing down license plates of the tankers that entered and exited the oil company yard. She didn't see Adam behind the wheel again that day other than his drive home. She decided to call it a day and head back to Midland. On her way she called Nathan as much to cleanse her brain of oil tanker thoughts as to relax. He wasn’t happy to hear about her smart watch surveillance, but she could also tell he didn’t have a better idea. Like her, he was comforted by the thought of her driving around in a big pick-up truck. He’d thought he might visit her that weekend, but since she was working in Odessa there didn’t seem much reason to fly four hours each way only to sit beside her in a truck watching her do surveillance. He thought that they would likely get on each other’s nerves. She’d agreed with his line of thinking and they moved on to chat about other things.

  As she reached Midland, she pulled into the gym’s parking lot. She opened a locker and waited until the room was empty to remove her wig and place it inside. A few minutes later she was out on a treadmill undoing the damage of hours of surveillance duty sitting on her butt. They had a stretching cage that she used to contort her body a number of ways, loosening up her muscles and joints. Her mind felt much better after her workout and she could summarize for herself what she wanted to look at that night. Putting her Katy Perry wig back on, she was out of the gym and back at the hotel room in under ten minutes. Before going to the shower, she took another look at her email.

  Detective Guerrero left her a voicemail with the property ownership of the warehouse area where the tanker had been that afternoon. He indicated that only one company owned that piece of property, but he didn’t know if they had sub-leased parts of it to another business. Both the business license and property ownership records indicated the warehouse was owned by the BDC Company. Their mailing address was listed as the warehouse address and the primary business contact was Mary Garcia with an El Paso telephone number. Ok, she had some new contacts to search for later. Guerrero ended with the comment that he asked a few officers if they had ever been in those warehouses and the answer was ‘no’ and there were no crime reports filed on that address. She sent the BDC Company to Jo and Mary Garcia of El Paso to Marie to see if they could find her information. She didn’t know their schedules that night to know if they had any time to work for her so she would do the same searches. Oftentimes if Jo and Marie spent twenty minutes in a search in their respective areas while she spent two hours doing the same thing, they got better results, so she would have to wait and see.

  After a shower, she sat down with a sandwich, fruit, and a glass of wine to begin her search. The detective hadn’t told her what the business license was for, but she noted on the city’s website that there was a license relating to gas pumping and she would have bet that if that was the license he would have mentioned it. BDC seemed to be a subsidiary of a subsidiary. She hadn’t yet found any names attached to the company. Worse still was looking for Mary Garcia of El Paso - there were sixty of them in every age group. The telephone number was disconnected. What had seemed promising an hour ago was fading. She paused on chasing that thread and looked at the tedious footage that the Odessa PD had obtained for her on the traffic cams.

  She was able to locate several pictures of Adam driving different tanker trucks. She studied the license plates and determined that as many as thirty different tanker trucks entered the yard of Adam’s employer, but Adam restricted himself to just four tanker trucks that he drove. Jill studied the four trucks to see if she could detect a different engine or weight about the tankers, but she couldn’t detect anything that different about the tankers. Overall she saw perhaps three or four different models turning into the yard. The four trucks that Adam drove all were the same model but there were additional trucks of that same model that he didn’t drive. How strange? Furthermore, he was somewhat predictable as to when he would take the trucks out. It was on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule, once in the morning around ten and then again around three. What was in those tanker trucks that Adam drove? What did it have to do with his wife’s death?

  She thought she’d have to do another day of surveillance to figure out this odd behavior. She’d read more on the petroleum industry and see if different oils were extracted from the earth and transported differently. Maybe some of it was natural gas. Could those oil tankers carry natural gas? Did you have to keep the two products completely separate from a safety perspective? She wrote Castillo a summary of what she was seeing and then copied Guerrero just in case he ever needed back-up or additional information from the local police.

  She then gave up the search for a while and tuned into a cable television show devoted to watching a buyer examine houses for purchase, buying and then moving in. She made it a game to try and guess which one they would pick. She was only about fifty percent correct with her guesses. That show was followed by another show in a similar vein in some international location. Understanding property values around the United States and in the rest of the world was always good entertainment. She had one part of her brain tuned to the show and the rest of her brain focused on the trucks.

  National Geographic had a nice website on petroleum. It was amazing that all the oil in the ground and the sea came from long dead fossils. Jill hadn’t given thought to the number of dead dinosaurs that it would take to make the oil quantity that the earth seemed to have. Wow. Okay ti
me to move on to more relevant facts to Stacy Johnson’s murder. It was easy to get distracted by amazing but irrelevant pieces of knowledge. So beyond the dinosaurs it seemed that there were different types of petroleum related to where in the world the oil field was and it was primarily differentiated by sulfur. The oil of North America was distinctly different from that of the North Sea and the Arab desert region. Those main three types were easily separated by sulfur and color, but beyond those three major locations, minerals in the ground always played a role in what was contained in the oil. So there was no reason to think that Adam’s company was extracting different types of oil when they were in the region of West Texas Intermediate crude; she supposed that the oil wells themselves could be comprised of enough different chemicals that it made sense to transport them by specific tankers and maybe Adam was pitching in when his company had a shortage of drivers. She pulled her Department of Motor Vehicles report and looked at when he had gotten the special trailer truck license and it was five years ago. That was a long time to have a labor shortage; but maybe it was seasonal shortage based on oil production fluctuations. She reviewed the literature on that idea and tossed it. Oil was oil and it came out of the ground at the same rate.