Murder At The Podium Read online

  “Okay, so we’re on the hunt for these two men to wrap up the operation and then perhaps we’ll get our answers to whom and why Stacy Johnson was killed,” replied Castillo.

  “I recommend we look for the Johnson children as that might tell us where Adam is or speak with his parents in Houston,” Pete suggested. “Hopefully the kids are there and if they are, it would make sense to me that he needs to cross the border with his children to run from American authorities. If I ever committed a crime and believed I could outrun authorities, I would grab my children and take them with me.”

  Jill and Castillo looked at him in surprise and he said, “Hypothetically speaking. Just trying to get inside Adam’s head.”

  “Does he have access to a plane or a pilot’s license?” Jill asked

  “I’ll check,” said Castillo as he began punching buttons on his computer tablet.

  “Can we search Mexican property records?” Jill said. “If I was involved in a drug smuggling ring, I would know that the gig wouldn’t last forever and that I should make plans for an escape. I wonder if there was something in this house that he needed? It was quite a risk to come back here after the car chase.”

  “Good point, but we observed him leaving this house in a rush to get into the car,” Pete said. “What would he have forgotten to take with him? Was he carrying a backpack or some kind of bag?”

  Jill sat for a moment, thinking, and then said, “It was too dark to see so I don’t know if he was carrying anything.”

  “How about a few minutes ago, was he carrying anything?”

  Again Jill had to think about her thirty second interaction with Adam. She’d turned around and there she was gazing into the eyes of a suspected killer holding a gun pointed at her face. He had nothing in his hands and she couldn’t recall seeing a shoulder strap of any kind holding a bag and then she said, “No.”

  “So he ran out of here earlier without having the time to grab something that he wanted and unless the item was in the kitchen, he still didn’t have it when he left after firing his gun at you, Jill,” Castillo said. “It says something about him that he was so willing to try and kill you.”

  Jill shuddered; she couldn’t recall being that close to someone holding a gun pointed at her face. Maybe she was too tired to be as scared as she should be. She looked around the kitchen to see if she remembered anything missing that Adam might have taken with him. She paused then went back to the shelf she’d been reviewing. Was something missing?

  She looked over at the coffee pot and thought about getting some caffeine, but she was in the house of a suspected murderer and even if they weren’t executing a warrant, there might be arsenic in the coffee tin. Lost in thought, she didn’t hear the conversation going on around her. Then it clicked. When she started the search, she had opened all the cupboard doors and taken a few pictures with her cellphone in order to capture all that was in the kitchen in case it was important. She opened the pictures and compared them to what she was looking at now and something was missing.

  “Guys, there was what looked like an ugly cookie jar on the shelf I was working on and it’s now missing; here, look at this photo.”

  Castillo, Pete, and two of the other officers searching the kitchen gathered around her. They looked from her phone to the shelf and back several times and then around the kitchen just to make sure it hadn’t been moved. Sure enough, it wasn’t anywhere. Adam must have taken it after firing a shot at her.

  “Maybe Adam fired the gun at me to get me out of the kitchen and not to kill me,” Jill said.

  “You think that hitting the door frame, an inch from your head was a random scare you off shot? Newsflash Jill, the man was trying to kill you.” Castillo said. “If he’d hit the bottom of the doorframe, then he would have been trying to scare you; top of the frame is a kill shot gone wild.”

  “Destroy my optimistic attitude why don’t you?” Jill replied with a tired grin. “Adam’s eyes did have an empty look about them. So what are our next steps?”

  “Find Brian Campos and Adam Johnson,” replied Castillo.

  “I’ve got that,” Jill said. “How?”

  “I think our best bet is turning all the resources of the command post on them,” replied Pete. “With the help of the DEA and the Texas Rangers, we have a lot of extra personnel to search for Adam. Now that daylight is here, it will be much harder for him to hide. How would you suggest we find them?”

  “I don’t have any brilliant ideas; rather I’m panicked that since we’re so close to the border the two of them may already be in Mexico by now and if they are, we’ll never capture them.”

  “Our relationship has changed with the Mexican police. They are not likely to help these two and will do what they can to assist us in finding them,” Castillo said. “So all is not lost.”

  Castillo paused for a moment, then added, “I wonder if there’s a way to use you as bait to get him to surface for us?”

  “Gee thanks, Detective.” Jill said with clear annoyance.

  “Hey, I told you from the beginning that you seemed to have a track record of being an attractive target for the criminals,” Castillo said. “How do we use that to our advantage?”

  The two men pondered that question for a moment, while in the background other officers were still searching the house for evidence. Jill had no experience with Castillo’s question and she was partially brain-dead from the long sleepless night. If they didn’t come up with a suggestion soon, she’d fall asleep on them.

  “How about if we call a press conference today? Announce the arrests and breakup of the chemical precursor pipeline, put Jill on stage to talk about the connection to the arsenic murder in Dallas and provide her with some words to incite Adam to come out of hiding?” Pete suggested.

  “Let’s head back to the command post and talk that idea over with others; I like it,” Castillo agreed.

  Jill sighed then added, “Maybe we could say something about the missing ugly cookie jar. That ought to irk Adam that he didn’t get away with stealing something under our noses.”

  Piling into Castillo’s car, the three of them headed back to the command post. The morning sun seemed unusually bright to Jill’s tired eyes. They arrived in the parking lot as traffic was picking up all around the city for the morning commute. On her way into the conference room, she asked Pete in desperation “Is there some bad police coffee somewhere in this building?”

  He smiled and asked, “Cream? Sugar?” and turned toward Castillo silently asking the same.

  Pete pointed the way toward the conference room, as he went in a different direction for coffee returning a short while later with a large black for Castillo, and a large with cream and sugar for Jill. She never used real sugar in coffee because of the calories, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  As they entered the room, Agent Black gave Jill a tired smile and said, “I heard you’ve had some hair-raising adventures overnight. The rest of us just quietly arrested the bad guys and confiscated their equipment.”

  “It’s my new method for staying awake during an all-nighter,” Jill replied. “You ought to try having a criminal hold a gun aimed at you while you’re standing on a kitchen chair for excitement. It was like drinking a gallon of coffee.”

  “How did you avoid harm?” Guerrero asked.

  “I’ve been training in Tai Chi - I’ve got a green belt. Before I took this case, I’d been working on the Lotus kick which was a perfect action to knock the gun out of Adam Johnson’s hand with my foot. The trouble was that I hadn’t practiced it while standing on a kitchen chair. When I executed the kick, I knocked the gun out of his hand, but my weight followed my foot and I went flying off the chair and into the kitchen cabinets, bounced off those and ran like hell out of the kitchen. I wish my instructor could have seen my kick; I did him proud.”

  “You’re very brave,” Agent Black said in a quiet voice that carried across the hushed room.

  “It wasn’t a hard decis
ion when you come face-to-face with Adam Johnson’s empty eyes. My first thought when I looked over my shoulder and saw him was I’d better get down off the chair, so I didn’t break anything when he shot me and I fell off the chair. I had no doubt he would pull the trigger - there was no hint of nervousness or hesitation in his face. Then I decided that allowing him to shoot me was stupid, so I shifted my weight and came up with a better scenario in my head.”

  “That was excellent judgement and decision making. I don’t know if any of the specially trained men and women in this conference room could have done better than you,” Agent Black stated.

  Jill’s tiredness was seeping away to be replaced by embarrassment. If the agent had one more word of praise, Jill was sure that because she was so tired and therefore her emotions were close to the surface, she’d do a full body blush. She tried to change the topic of conversation.

  “Has anyone seen Adam Johnson since he left his house?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Adam returned to the SUV after his encounter with Jill Quint inside his own house. He was enraged she was in his house, enraged that he hadn’t been able to gather everything that he wanted, and most of all enraged that his gunshot missed. He had to sprint over several fences to return to the car. His three kids were in the back seat and were silent or asleep. They’d been through a lot in the last couple of weeks - the death of their mother, and now this upheaval yesterday. At least he had the presence of mind to hire a Mexican citizen as their nanny before he killed Stacy. The children had her for a comforting presence and she wouldn’t mind relocating south of the border.

  “Did you get all that you needed?” Brian asked in a soft voice.

  “No, that bitch, Jill Quint, was in my house along with at least one other agent. I tried killing her but my aim was off and she ran yelling to a cop so all I had time for was this ugly cookie jar.”

  “What’s so important about it?”

  “It has the arsenic metal that I used to poison Stacy, and it has a fake passport and Mexican ID. I wanted to grab some of the kids’ stuff, computers, cash I had stashed under the house and a few other personal belongings. Maybe once the heat dies down I can go back and get those things.”

  “You know that the U.S. government is going to hunt you down the rest of your life? I have my family to protect me in Mexico, but other than doing work for the cartel, we have no family allegiance to you. Just saying.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Adam sighed. “This transportation scheme was going so well for so many years, but I‘ve been preparing for this day. I bought the property in Culiacán, saved a lot of cash and the kids and I can be happy there. We just need to get there. How soon will we be at the ranch?”

  “Another forty-five minutes at least. As you know, there’s a runway behind a private house owned on paper by an aunt of mine. I kept my larger plane at the Midland airport, but I’m sure we can’t get near your plane or mine or that airport. The trouble with this back up plane is it seats four adults. Who do you want me to take? By the way two of your kids equal the weight of one adult so maybe they could share a seat.”

  The implied question was did he and the three kids go and then wait in Mexico for Brian to fly back with the nanny, Sofia, or did Adam give up his plane seat to her? Since he was wanted by the police, and she was not, it made sense to leave her behind.

  “It’ll take you nine hours to fly us straight there,” Adam suggested. “We could land in Juarez and charter a different and faster plane to get to Culiacán. I have a second identification with me, although I am not sure I have a pilot’s license in that name. Let me look.”

  “I didn’t use my real name to file the registration for this plane so I’m sure I could use it in Juarez. The problem is that I’m not rated for anything more than a single engine. I could get us refueled in Juarez, but not switched to a faster plane. I’ve a few hours of instruction in bigger engine planes but I’m not certified. Added to that is some of the mountain peaks are nearly 9,000 feet so I wouldn’t recommend a straight route to Culiacán.”

  “We’re talking about flying my kids, so I agree with you that it would be a bad decision to fly them all the way to Culiacán in a small plane. I don’t have fake passports for them and I don’t want to find out that there’s a notice at the airport to take them into custody. The kids and I could rent a car and take a few days to reach home. Once you fetch Sofia, you could bring her back to Juarez and put her on a commercial plane to Culiacán.”

  ‘That’s a possibility,” Brian mused. “I could then fly on by myself the long way to Culiacán. By going back to pick up Sofia and then taking a longer route with the plane, I should get home about the time you will with your kids.”

  “Sounds like a plan, let’s proceed that way. Sofia will be comfortable for a few hours until you return for her.”

  They drove up to a ranch with a series of outbuildings. They’d both been there before and knew which outbuilding housed the plane. There was a landing strip at the side of the house that would allow them to depart as soon as the pre-flight check was performed. While Brian went through the flight check, Adam made sure that Sofia was comfortable in the house for the few hours she would have to wait for Brian to return.

  The kids were buckled into the back seats of the plane and a car seat containing the third child was strapped to the floor. They were soon in the air. They had been in the air for about an hour on a direct course for Juarez and they could see off in the distance, a faint line ahead that was hopefully the Rio Grande River; the border between the United States and Mexico. The population density was also changing suggesting they would be heading for El Paso and Juarez just across the river. They had GPS and knew how far away the border was, but there was no cellular service yet and thus they had missed the text from Sofia that someone was approaching the house of the ranch. Adam hadn’t told her that he was wanted by American police - the less she knew the better; so she was surprised to see both plain cars and cars with emergency lights on top.

  Chapter Twenty- Seven

  “That’s the million dollar question,” replied Agent Black ready to get the conversation back on mission. “Since the start of the op we’ve had an APB on Adam Johnson and Brian Campos. Other than your interactions with Adam, we’ve had no sightings of either of them. We searched Brian’s home and Vernon Oil’s headquarters. We’ve sent agents to interview the CEO on his ranch, but so far he’s been of no help. There are many small airports and private airstrips throughout Texas and both Brian and Adam have pilot’s licenses so they have a lot of options to avoid discovery.”

  “Adam’s parents are in Houston?” Jill asked. “Have you made contact with them? Are they caring for Adam’s children? Does Adam or Brian have other family in this area or in Texas?”

  “Agents have visited Adam’s parent’s home with a search warrant,” said another person in the room. “There was no sign of him or the children. The parents were shocked by our allegations, and said they had last spoken with him and the grandchildren at Stacy’s funeral. So our guess is he is running with the children.”

  “Great, so we’ll have to worry potentially about keeping three children safe when we confront Adam,” Agent Black noted.

  “Brian Campos seems like more of an enigma,” noted another command post member. “We searched his home this morning and came away with nothing. It looked as sterile as one of those long term stay hotels with no family pictures anywhere in the house. We have no record of his being married or having children. We’re hoping to get something out of our interview with Vernon’s CEO.”

  “Are Mexican authorities cooperating with us?” asked Chief Swanson. “Do we have any information on Mexican residences for these two?”

  “They’re cooperating with us but remember they also cooperated with the U.S. over the capture and imprisoning of El Chapo, so take the cooperation for what it’s worth,” replied Black and looking around the room asked, “Dave, what did you learn about property in Mexico? Do Bri
an or Adam own any?”

  “They both own large complexes in the city of Culiacán, a city considered to be the home base of the cartel,” Dave replied. “We’ll get cooperation from local authorities but likely they’ll warn Campos and Johnson and they’ll be long gone by the time a “raid” is made. The economy is booming in that city with the flow of narco money south and the cartel is not viewed negatively by the average citizen.”

  “So do you just give up on locating these two men?” Jill asked.

  “They’ll end up on a Most Wanted List and be prevented from re-entering this country,” replied the agent. “We still have a fair amount of work to do to unravel their operation, and shutting it down so the moment we stop surveillance, the chemical transportation stays closed. While we don’t have Brian or Adam, we do have about fifteen other narco criminals, their tanker trucks, and all chemical assets under wrap.”

  “Agent Black, some new information has just come in from the agents at the Vernon CEO’s house. He was asked if he knew of any other properties the two of them owned and he gave us an approximate location about one-hundred miles west of here that they had all visited. Using Google Earth we were able to identify the ranch. The CEO may not be any good with oil, but he has a great memory for ranch layout, and outbuildings.”