Murder At The Podium Read online

  “What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

  “More surveillance, I guess” Jill said. “I want to see if they go back to those buildings again with tanker-trucks.”

  “How does that help you solve Stacy Johnson’s murder?”

  “Wow, you really know how to cut to the heart of my decision making.”

  “Why are you so focused on Adam driving these trucks to this building?”

  Jill thought for a moment. It was really clarifying to talk to Detective Guerrero.

  “Because past experience has taught me to look for pieces of any picture that don’t fit and that is what this tanker-truck is. Stacy had the marriage and the three children with her college sweetheart. That sweetheart is a petrochemical engineer driving just four trucks of his company’s fleet. So here is what doesn’t make sense - we have a highly educated engineer who is driving a truck six times a week to this warehouse where there is no refinery or pipeline located. The truck looks visibly lighter when it leaves this building so something is happening here that I need to witness to understand.”

  “I’d advise against doing that tomorrow,” Guerrero said. “I’m sure the seven men with guns from tonight will be in this area.”

  “Yeah, I agree with you. Is there a police reason you could invade their property while the truck was there?”

  “You could call me on your cell phone when you see the truck pull in and report suspicious activity. That would give me a reason to get pretty far onto the property. I wouldn’t have probable cause to search the property, but if I can walk into the warehouse because no one stops me, I will.”

  “Will you have a partner with you?” Jill asked.

  “Yes, you never walk into a suspicious activity call without a partner.”

  “Good. I’ll do as you suggest. Now I just need to decide how to track Adam and his truck. I assume he’ll go to a particular pump station to check it and from there swing over to this warehouse. I think I’ll rent a different color truck and get a different wig so if he does notice me following him he won’t connect it to today’s journey.”

  “Good idea and maybe I can help you on the tail. When you see it leave the yard, follow him, and call me. I’ll pick up the tail for a while, and then you can reappear and take over.”

  “Thanks, Detective, for your help with this case. I realize it’s not your homicide investigation and I appreciate the time you’re giving it.”

  “This is my town and something is going on in those warehouses. I don’t like seven men showing up with guns to investigate a security system breach. I don’t believe they were on my side of the law,” said Guerrero.

  “Okay, I’ll be in position around 9:30 and I’ll text you to confirm.”

  They had been talking on the drive back to Jill’s hotel and the detective pulled up next to the portico. Jill exited the car and entered the hotel lobby and was shortly back in her room. It was closing in on midnight which was way beyond her usual bedtime. She still had a partial adrenaline feeling from their encounter with the seven men. She’d tell Nathan much later and perhaps never about her experience tonight. She was asleep soon after her head hit the pillow.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jill awoke refreshed and ready to tackle Adam and his trucks this morning. She arranged a second rental car and hit a Halloween store in town to pick-up a new costume. She decided on a Donald Trump mask as she liked the idea of looking like a male rather than a female if Adam caught a glimpse of her in his rear view mirror. With a baseball cap over the mask, and a loose jacket covering her curves, she looked like a male driver. She wondered if she would explode from heat between the mask, hat, and jacket. Even though it was sixty degrees outside, she had the air conditioning on inside the car trying to cool off.

  She arrived at her surveillance spot thirty minutes before she expected Adam to leave his company’s yard. She put her iPhone on her dashboard so she could read the phone and catch movement coming from the yard at the same time. She had an email from Jo about the BDC Company.

  “I expected the company to be owned by a famous celebrity. I chased the company through at least six other companies before I lost track of it when the parent company became Romero Enterprises of Mexico City. Then I had to do a quick search to understand how businesses are owned and operated in Mexico. Nearly 90% are family owned so finding the connection between companies and their leadership structure is like doing an ancestry search. It was one of the more intriguing searches I’ve done for you. I could give you the labyrinth that I traveled, but I’ll cut to the chase and tell you what is at the end of the tunnel. BDC is connected to the family that operates the Precursor Chemical Cartel which does exactly what it sounds like - it moves chemicals that are used in the production of drugs and especially methamphetamines. I did the lightest of searches on this cartel and from my five minutes devoted to them, they are worse than the Sinaloa Cartel. Quit this case and GO HOME.”

  Wow, that was the strongest advice that Jill had ever seen Jo provide. Worse than the Sinaloa Cartel? She didn’t think you could get worse, but she guessed there were all levels of sickos in these cartels and their personalities were reflective of their leadership.

  She was musing over Jo’s email when she caught a truck movement out of the corner of her eye and noted that Adam was on the move. She made sure her mask and cap were on straight and put the car in gear to follow him, texting Guerrero as she went.

  As in the previous trips, the tanker drove to a pumping oil rig and after some notations, moved on. Guerrero had taken over for her about four miles into their journey and then they switched back again. Jill had stopped a little less than a thousand feet away. She'd used her binoculars to verify Adam’s actions at the oil rig, then she turned around her car and parked in a convenience store lot waiting for his tanker truck to drive by on its way to the warehouse location. Fifteen minutes later, the tanker truck went sailing by. She let it get further down the road before picking up the tail.

  They were in a busy part of Odessa and so she could hang back and not worry about the driver seeing her or her losing track of the truck. She was most surprised when the truck continued beyond the turnoff for the warehouse. She sped up until just three cars separated the distance for fear of losing him as she called Guerrero.

  “He missed the turn-off for the BDC warehouse. Can you look up that company and see if they own any other properties in town? I got an email from one of my teammates who is a financial whiz and she tracked the company through Texas and into Mexico. It’s a subsidiary of a subsidiary and so on until the company shows up as related to someone in the Precursor Chemical Cartel. Have you heard of them?” Jill asked.

  “No. Did you make that name up?”

  “”No, the Mexican Government did. Apparently their focus is moving around the chemicals used in the manufacture of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.”

  “I haven’t heard about that cartel, but I guess it makes sense from a manufacturing perspective. While we were talking, I looked up BDC Company in the county tax records and there’re additional properties owned by that company. Looking at the addresses, they’re all within two miles of the interstate, evenly spread around the city. Since you're traveling west, there’re two properties that could be his destination. The first property is off of State Highway 338.”

  “Adam's truck is coming upon that exit and he’s not signaling that he plans to exit the freeway. Now we’re past that exit ramp, so what's the next property he might be visiting?”

  “Okay the other property is in the direction that you're going. It’ll be two off ramps from where you're presently located. That will take you a few miles outside the city, and less than a mile off the interstate. I'll warn you that that area is flat and with few houses so it will be hard to hide your car if you follow too closely.”

  “If I stay on the interstate and sail past that exit, how far do I have to go before I can turn around? Trucks have to slow down so much getting off an Interstate, I fear
it will be very hard to stay well back in a car.”

  “The next exit is four miles away. You could speed up and pass the tanker truck, take the second exit make a U-turn and get back on the freeway to come back east and get off at the exit I suspect Adam is taking. That exit will provide your car some cover.”

  “My binoculars are good for a thousand feet, but I assume this property is a little more distant than a thousand feet. How about if I go back under the interstate and travel perhaps a quarter-mile before I pull off and pull out the binoculars. Do you think I'll be able to see the property that you're speaking about?”

  “Yes. The odd thing about this property is I don't believe there are any buildings on it. So not sure what he's doing.”

  “I'll call you back when I'm in position,” Jill said.

  “Call me back regardless in six minutes.”

  “Okay,” and they disconnected the call.

  Jill was trying to watch in her rearview mirror for the tanker truck, but there was just enough of a rise that she occasionally lost sight of the traffic behind her. She saw her exit up ahead, got off, made a turn under the interstate, and got back on going the direction she'd come from. Another three minutes and she was back to the designated off-ramp which she took. Watching her odometer she traveled about a quarter of a mile and pulled off the road. Picking up her binoculars from the seat beside her, she looked ahead for the tanker truck. It had just made a turn into an oil rig off the road that she was on. She observed Adam connecting the tanker truck to something on the oil rig. That was a first, she hadn't seen him connect the truck to anything in the previous couple of trips.

  She noted that the rig was not moving. All of the other oil rigs that he pulled up to had that circular pumping motion going, indicating that they were pulling crude oil out of the earth. She noted that but didn't take any pictures as she was sure her camera did not have enough zoom on it to catch the truck in the distance. She made a U-turn and returned to the freeway ramp that would take her back to Odessa. She put her car in reverse and backed up as far as she could and still stay hidden from the main traffic of the interstate as well as from the tanker truck when it eventually went back to Odessa.

  Jill updated Guerrero a few times as she waited another thirty minutes or so before she saw the tanker truck enter the interstate to travel back to Odessa. She was torn whether to follow the tanker or to go look at the oil rig. She had plenty of daylight hours ahead of her so she could come back and look at the oil rig later. It was more important to see where the tanker truck drove.

  She relayed the information to Guerrero in a text. It soon became apparent that Adam was heading back to his employer’s truck yard. The story kept getting stranger and stranger she thought. She could've sworn that the tanker truck was full when it approached the oil rig and empty upon its return to the petrochemical company yard. Why would you unload a tanker truck into an oil rig? It should have been the reverse. Why wasn't the oil rig moving? Was there a public database that told her which oil wells were producing and which ones had been abandoned for a lack of production?

  Jill acknowledged that there were several strange and probably illegal actions on the part of Adam Johnson, but was that information getting her anywhere with Stacy’s homicide investigation or was she on a wild goose chase? She really didn’t know. She called Castillo and checked in with him.

  “Detective Castillo.”

  “It's Jill. I wanted to update you on where I am with this investigation including a connection to a different Mexican cartel than the Sinaloa cartel.”

  Jill went on to explain the developments over the last twenty-four hours including the trip to the oil well.

  “I think we need to get a sample from these tanker trucks to understand what's inside them. I'll give Guerrero a call and see if he has any tactics we could use to examine the truck. Maybe we could have a state trooper pull it over for a traffic violation and get a sample at that time. I agree with you, Jill, that you're not making fast progress with this case, but what you may be uncovering is a motive. If Adam was transporting an illegal substance and his wife found out about it and she's worked in the healthcare field, then as a couple, they may have had some kind of moral compass crisis within their marriage. Then we have our motive.”

  “Is there something I'm not investigating, that you think I should?” Jill asked.

  “Based on what you described I think something illegal is going on here. If you don't catch Stacy's murderer, I think you will catch someone else who's committing some kind of crime based on whatever is in that tanker truck. If it's cocaine or if it's ephedrine which is used to make methamphetamines, then we’ll solve the crime for the Odessa Police Department. My gut tells me you're on the verge of something big and you just need to hang in there and wait for it.”

  “Okay, I'll keep trucking along as they say.” Jill said and they ended their call.

  Jill looked at her watch and assumed she had several hours before Adam went out on another trip. She could grab a bite to eat then go visit the oil well to see if she could figure out what they put in it, if indeed something was put in a well there. Guerrero was also working his end trying to figure out if he had found all the properties owned by BDC Company and looking at a couple of state databases to see if anyone was required to report oil production at each well and whether it was active or closed. She’d asked him some of the same questions she’d asked Castillo and got the same answers.

  She brought with her a compact test kit that allowed her to perform a few tests on site. However, if she was dealing with liquid cocaine, if there was such a thing, or ephedrine, then she couldn’t test for it. She did have some test tubes that she could fill with whatever she could pull out of the oil pump. While she ate her lunch, she studied a diagram of the model of oil rig she thought she’d seen this morning. She needed to know where to extract samples from without having oil under pressure explode all over her. She had an idea of what to do when she reached the rig. She cleaned up after her lunch, hit the restroom and planned to drive out to the oil rig.

  Having performed her fair share of surveillance in her short private detecting career, she was attentive to who was around her. If she could spy on people, then they could do likewise and it never paid to put down your guard. She hadn’t noticed anyone following her which was a good sign. She exited the Interstate and stopped at the point she had that morning and used her binoculars to scan the terrain in front of her. She saw nothing - no movement, no cars, no people, and no cows. Why had they built an off ramp at this location? Maybe all the activity was on the south side of the Interstate rather than this north side. With five minutes of study and no activity she felt safe to proceed to the oil rig. Like this morning, it wasn’t in motion. She pulled to the side of the road again as she got closer to check for cameras on the rig. She’d no desire to encounter the seven men with guns from last night. There was no camera that she could spot on the rig. There were utility poles in the area and she studied those as well, but couldn't see all sides of the pole from her single vantage point. She drove down the road beyond the oil rig and again studied it and the utility poles for any surveillance cameras. It looked like the coast was clear and she could visit the rig without discovery. Before she put the car in gear, Jill again studied the diagram of how the rig worked and where she might sample the oil. She had a final thought that she should leave her car well beyond the oil rig and walk back to it to avoid someone seeing her car from the interstate. It helped that her subcompact car was sort of that same desolate dirt color of the landscape around the road. She took her purse containing car keys, cell phone, test tubes, pipette and tubing, and bug spray and set off down the road in a jog. Better to be quick and get the heck out of this area.

  She approached the oil rig and pulled out her camera to study where Adam had connected the truck’s hose. It appeared to be connected to a tank which made sense. What did an oil rig do with the oil that comes out of the ground; it must be stored somewhere. She
opened the cap on the storage container and used a paper napkin to wipe the edges. She then stuck a small-bore plastic tubing into the storage tank and used the pipette to suck the tubing to get the flow of whatever was in the tank going. She soon had her sample for her test tube. She put her stuff in separate plastic bags then screwed on the cap and took off on a jog to her car. She checked her watch and it had taken a total of seven minutes to jog to the rig, get her samples and jog back. She was in her car and moving forward to the interstate overpass. As she was under the overpass, she noted in her rearview mirror, one of the cars that appeared at the warehouse the previous night. She remembered the car as it was a 1970’s gas guzzling large car. She gunned it onto the interstate ramp watching in her mirror to see if the car followed her. It must not have seen her as it continued toward the rig with apparently all eyes trained on activity at the oil rig. Jill heaved a sigh of relief and headed back to the Odessa Police Department. She would dump the specimens with the detective, return to Midland and return this car, then get back in her pickup truck and come back to watch Adam’s afternoon run.