Phantom Purloiners, page 8
“They make it this far west?”
“Yes, sir. Every Saturday morning.”
“I just had a few questions.”
“You professionals always do. You don’t look like Columbo.”
“I dress better, but I’d like to think I’m just as smart.” Noonan pulled out his notebook and flipped through some pages.
“Word on the street is that you are. Let me make your job easy. When the call came in regarding Mr. Harrison on day three, I never made the Frank M. Canton Hotel. I was ordered to cover the road over Cannibal Pass. I drove all the way over the pass to the interstate and sat with a Wyoming State Trooper for three hours to make sure no one tried to slip out of town.”
“Did anyone?”
“Slip out of town? There were three or four carloads. We checked everyone’s ID, recorded the names. Yes. There was no one I didn’t know at least casually. Like I said, we’re a small town.”
“Actually, I’m more interested in the robberies.”
“I was told you’d ask that. I was at the bus terminal when the call came in about the robbery. I went directly to the Bodacious jewelry store and basically guarded Sam until the other two officers got there. I spent the next three, four hours doing inventory with Sam Bodacious and matched up missing jewelry boxes with consignment sheets.”
“So you never saw the robbers?”
“That’s correct. We, that is, the three officers on duty, did a Q&D.” He paused for a moment. “Do you know what a Q&D is?”
“Quick and Dirty,” Noonan replied. “When you have to do something important but don’t have the time to do it meticulously.”
“Right. We did a Q&D of vehicles in town. The state troopers had a roadblock up in a matter of minutes. They checked IDs and car trunks and searched vans and every Winnebago for the next twelve hours. They came up empty. No one matching the description came through the roadblocks.”
“You searched in town as well?”
“Not every door but, yeah, in town as well. You can’t hide in this town.”
“Nothing?”
“Niento. Or, as you say in English . . .”
“Nothing,” Noonan replied. “I speak a little Italian.”
Noonan was looking at his notes when Strano asked if he wanted more coffee. Noonan nodded yes. Strano got up and asked if he wanted cream and sugar. Noonan just said “black” and pointed to a pile of cream capsules on the table. When Strano got back to the table, Noonan had found the spot in his journal he needed.
“You said that you got the call to go to the Bodacious jewelry store while you were at the bus terminal. Something about an alarm. Was there a fire at the bus terminal that day?”
“It was a false alarm. A tour bus had stopped for diesel when it started smoking. The smoke was pretty thick, and it set off the fire alarm. I came over from police headquarters and checked out the situation.”
“No one injured?”
“No. Just a lot of smoke.”
“What color was the smoke?”
This took Strano by surprise. “What color was the smoke? Smoke is, well, smoke.”
“Not really. It’s not as if there are lots of kinds of smoke. Generally speaking, there are three kinds of smoke: dark or black, white, and blue. Do you remember what color the smoke was?”
“No. Not really. Why not ask the terminal manager? I wasn’t there very long before I got the call to go to the Bodacious jewelry store.”
“Was anyone else at the terminal when the bus started to smoke?”
“Well, yeah. Every volunteer firefighter in town. Like everyone tells you, we’re a small town. When there’s a fire, we respond.”
“How many firefighters do you have in Washakie?”
“I can’t give you an actual number. I think there are six firepeople—two are women—who are sort of full time. I say sort of because everyone here has more than one job.”
“Do you have more than on job?”
“I lied. A lot of people have more than one job. I’m not sure about the firepeople and if they have other jobs. But the city pays for six. Then there are another six or seven volunteers.”
“Did the volunteers show up at the fire?”
Strano gave Noonan a look that read “Really?”
Noonan got the message. “So all of the volunteers came?”
“I saw four or five. Then I got the call, so I left. I left Brenda Maple in charge. To do the paperwork, I mean. She’s pretty competent. She works for the county in the county building.”
“Did she file a report?”
“Got it right here,” Strano said as he pawed through a pile of papers Noonan could not see on the seat of a chair beside him. “I knew you were coming, so I made a copy.” Strano handed him two sheets of paper. “Brenda is quite competent. I have no idea why you want this, but here’s a copy.”
“How did you know I’d be asking for this?” Noonan asked as he jiggled the paper.
“I’m psychic,” said Strano with a smile. “Everyone said you were thorough.” Then he leaned forward, “And it’s the only paperwork I have that has anything to do with the Harrisons or Bodacious brothers.”
“You are good at your jobs, sir. Is there anything you can tell me—since you are psychic—that I don’t know that will help me?”
“Nothing that would stand up in court.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’d say the Harrison murder and the robberies are connected. How I do not know.”
“Why do you say that?”
“This is a small town. We know everything about everyone in town.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Noonan said smiling. “Everyone keeps telling me.”
“I can imagine,” Strano replied. “But two odd events happening so close to one another in a town where nothing ever happens, well, there has got to be a connection.”
“You may be right,” Noonan looked at his notes. “Just one more thing.”
“You sure you are not channeling Columbo?”
“I’m not psychic, remember. You are.”
“Got me there.”
“The bus that was smoking. It was fixed there in the terminal?”
“Don’t know. But it was running fine an hour or two later. It came through the roadblock on the highway.”
“You searched the bus?”
“Top, bottom, storage space, and I even crawled under the bus to make sure no one was up inside any hollow under the bus.”
“No suspects.”
“Not the guy. He was well over six feet. The tour bus was all women, and a few of them were about five feet tall. We ran their IDs and got matches. I’ve got their names if you need them.”
“Bus driver not over six feet?”
“Short, squat. Over six feet around, not tall.”
CHAPTER 18
Cell phones were a gift of the gods. They made Philadelphia, Nassau, Georgetown, and Washakie as close as neighbors in a subdivision. Closer, actually. This was particularly true when it came to money. Banking was at the speed of light. Even more important, news of banking—specifically, transactions—were a click away. Then, when all was said and done, the phones could go ghost. Be gone. Deep in the blue sea, roasting in the Badlands, or buried in a landfill. The clock was ticking.
CHAPTER 19
Joshua Three Trees was exactly what his name described—except that the three trees were one on top of the other. Three Trees was the tallest man Noonan had ever seen. But then again, Noonan was not a basketball fan. Three Trees might have been seven feet tall. Noonan didn’t know, but he did have to look up to talk to him.
It did not take Noonan long to realize that he was in way over his head.
One sentence.
“I have nothing to say to the occupying forces.”
“Sorry?”
“Occupying forces. You whites. Take our land. Steal our women. Leave us in the wilderness with nothing to starve and die.”
“That’s quite a charge.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“I’m not here to arrest you. I’m here to talk about your jewelry consignment at the Bodacious . . .”
Before he could complete the sentence, the front door slammed in his face.
CHAPTER 20
“He has come and gone.”
“What did he ask?”
“Consignment only.”
“Nothing else?”
“Never had a chance to ask.”
“Keep it that way.”
“No other way to have it.”
CHAPTER 21
“Nelvis Thompson and don’t ask.”
“I can imagine what it is most people ask.” Noonan gave a sly smile as he shook the Wyoming state trooper’s hand in the hole-in-the-wall trooper substation in the back of what would have been called mall in North Carolina but was advertised as the Washakie Shopping Center. Thompson offered Noonan a chair in front of the paper-littered desk as he spoke.
“Thanks for not asking.”
“I’m discrete. I’m . . .”
“Oh, I know who you are. Everyone in town does.
“Let me guess; it’s a small town and . . .”
“Everybody’s told you, so I don’t have to. And you want to called Heinz, right?”
“As rain.”
“Since I had nothing to do with the murder investigation or the robberies but ran the blockade, I’ll take a wild guess and suggest that’s why you’re here.”
“Everyone in this town is psychic.”
Thompson laughed. “No. We’re a small town and, well, you know the rest.” He scrounged around on the piles of paper on his desk and came up with six sheets of paper, all of them in sets of two and stapled. He handed Noonan one set of sheets. “This is the list of everyone stopped going either direction after the Harrison murder.” Then he handed Noonan another set of stapled sheets. “And this is the list of everyone stopped going either direction after the Bodacious robberies.” He handed Noonan the final set of stapled sheets. “Finally, assuming you were going to ask for it, these are all the people stopped on the Cannibal Pass road after the murder and robberies. And before you ask, yes, we compared all lists and came up with no duplicates.”
“You are to be commended for you work.”
“Just because we live in Wyoming doesn’t mean we do slipshod work.”
Noonan took the lists, folded them, wrote on them, and slipped them into his notebook. Indicating the lists by tapping on their folded edges he said, “About how many of these people do you know or are local?”
“Almost all of them. The only exception was the busload of tourists. All women and I didn’t know any of them.”
“Are their names listed here?”
“Only the ones who were under about five two.” That was the description of the woman in the Bodacious robbery.”
“How many women were on the bus?”
“Oh, I don’t know. More than fifteen and less than thirty. City folks on some kind of bird-watching expedition.”
“They were on the bus that was smoking?”
“It wasn’t smoking when we stopped it.”
Noonan was silence for a moment. Then he asked, “Was the bus in Washakie being repaired when the Bodacious robberies went down?”
“Had to be. Otherwise we would not have stopped the bus.”
“Did the bus start smoking before the robberies?”
“Again. Had to be. I think I, we, the troopers, were told the women had about an hour or so in town while the smoking problem was solved. That would be about the time of the robberies. But”—and he raised his hand to stop a question by Noonan—“there was absolutely, positively, no woman on that bus who was under five two” that is not on the list in your hand. The bus driver was a lot shorter than the six feet whatever, and the Washakie cop, Johnny Strano, went over that bus with a fine-tooth comb. Checked the luggage compartment and under the engine hood. Even crawled the length of the bus on his back to make sure no one was hiding in some hollow over the drive shaft.”
“Could any of the other vehicles have had hidden compartments?”
“Nope. Like I said, even though we’re in Wyoming, we don’t do slipshod work.”
“Well, then, since you are from Wyoming. If a man six feet two and a woman under five feet robbed a pair of Washakie stores in broad daylight and they can’t be found in town and aren’t picked up at a roadblock, where are they?”
“If I knew that”—he smiled humorously—“I’d be the chief of detectives in some town on the North Carolina beach.”
CHAPTER 22
The stack of papers was not very heavy. But then again, it didn’t have to be heavy to be worth $20 million. It was going to be a three-way transfer, so no one was going to be left holding the bag.
But it was going to be tricky.
Had this been a straight transfer, a simple sale, the papers would have gone from seller to buyer with no intermediary. But that was not the way the deal had to go down. It was seller to an intermediary who would transfer ownership to a third party. At the same time, the third party was paying, the intermediary was buying a pig in a poke. But that pig was a multimillion-dollar pig, and for $20 million, it was worth the risk. Even then, the paperwork had to be so buried and dispersed that it would take an army of auditors to ferret out the responsibles.
But not the blame.
That was the joy of being too big to prosecute. If worse came to worst, it would all be handled sub rosa. Even if not, in this business there was no such thing as bad publicity. Most delicious of all, money paid for penalties had one of two specific legally insulating caveats: tax deductions and cost of doing business.
She would be the only person on the dodge. She didn’t care. Where she was going, she would not even have to file with the IRS. Her partners could file with the IRS. They had done nothing illegal. Business was business.
There was only one more shoe to fall.
CHAPTER 23
“Blue.” The bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor had no trouble at all remembering the tour-bus smoke.
“You sure?”
“Been in the business about as long as you’ve been a cop. Blue.”
“Do you have this problem often—bus smoking?”
“Yeah. Not all the time. Upon occasion. Let me put it another way. It’s not unusual.”
“Anything unusual about this occasion?”
“Not that I can think of. Bus pulled in and started to smoke, alarm went off, and we cleared the terminal.”
“Why did you clear the terminal? Is a smoking bus dangerous?”
“No, but my insurance agent is. Any hint of danger to a person, we have to evacuate the terminal.”
“Do you do this every time a bus smokes?”
“Only if the alarm goes off. Then my insurance agent knows there’s a problem. She’s a volunteer with the Washakie Fire Department. When she shows up, I clear the terminal.”
“In the last month, how many smoking buses have come into the terminal?”
“All of them. Buses smoke all the time. You just don’t see it when the bus is moving. When the bus comes into the terminal, the exhaust starts to fill the room. The bus turns the engine off, no more exhaust.”
“Was the tour bus smoking when it came into the terminal?”
“Must have been.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“That’s right. The tour bus came in. Smoke started to fill the terminal. The smoke alarm went off. I cleared the terminal because I knew my insurance agent was going to be coming to the ‘scene of the fire.’”
“Are you sure the smoke set off the alarm?”
“Pretty sure. Why?”
“Just wondering. Is there a way to find out?”
“Sure. It takes a day or two. But yeah, why?”
“Because I’m a curious kind of guy.”
The bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor laughed. “Sure. Whatever. But even if I find someone set of the alarm, so what? The terminal was filling with smoke. There were people coming off the bus, probably some still inside the bus. It would have been a good idea to hit an alarm.”
“If they knew where to find them.”
“State of Wyoming makes sure you can find them. Any more questions?”
“One more. What day do you take out the garbage?”
“From the terminal?”
“Yes.”
“Inside or outside?”
“Is there a difference?”
“There are two kinds of inside garbage. One is what you would call trash. That’s plastic pop bottles, facial tissue, food wrappers, paper cups. When the garbage can fills up, we wrap up the plastic liner and set it out back. The second kind of inside trash is from the mechanical end of the business: oily rags, empty oil cans, broken bolts, stuff like that. Which trash are you talking about?”
“Both.”
“OK. The filled plastic bags go out Thursday morning. The trash company picks up the bags early in the morning. The other trash we take to a special landfill. We are environmentally conscious here in the Badlands.” The second sentence was said with sarcasm.
“So the plastic bag from the day of the alarm is gone.”
“Four, five days gone.”
“Thanks.”
“How about the smoke? Don’t you want to know what happened to the smoke?”
This took Noonan by surprise. “The smoke? Where did it go?”
“The Great Smoky Mountains. Where do you think the mountain range gets its smoke?” Then the bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor laughed. “Just a joke. I’ll see what I can find about the alarm, but I don’t know what help it will do you.”
CHAPTER 24
Harrison Day Three was pleased to meet with his lawyer. Or, as they say in Wyoming, loyer. His loyer was a public defender from the State of Wyoming who told him the same thing that day as on the first: keep your mouth shut. That was fine with Harrison Day Three.
“Yes, sir. Every Saturday morning.”
“I just had a few questions.”
“You professionals always do. You don’t look like Columbo.”
“I dress better, but I’d like to think I’m just as smart.” Noonan pulled out his notebook and flipped through some pages.
“Word on the street is that you are. Let me make your job easy. When the call came in regarding Mr. Harrison on day three, I never made the Frank M. Canton Hotel. I was ordered to cover the road over Cannibal Pass. I drove all the way over the pass to the interstate and sat with a Wyoming State Trooper for three hours to make sure no one tried to slip out of town.”
“Did anyone?”
“Slip out of town? There were three or four carloads. We checked everyone’s ID, recorded the names. Yes. There was no one I didn’t know at least casually. Like I said, we’re a small town.”
“Actually, I’m more interested in the robberies.”
“I was told you’d ask that. I was at the bus terminal when the call came in about the robbery. I went directly to the Bodacious jewelry store and basically guarded Sam until the other two officers got there. I spent the next three, four hours doing inventory with Sam Bodacious and matched up missing jewelry boxes with consignment sheets.”
“So you never saw the robbers?”
“That’s correct. We, that is, the three officers on duty, did a Q&D.” He paused for a moment. “Do you know what a Q&D is?”
“Quick and Dirty,” Noonan replied. “When you have to do something important but don’t have the time to do it meticulously.”
“Right. We did a Q&D of vehicles in town. The state troopers had a roadblock up in a matter of minutes. They checked IDs and car trunks and searched vans and every Winnebago for the next twelve hours. They came up empty. No one matching the description came through the roadblocks.”
“You searched in town as well?”
“Not every door but, yeah, in town as well. You can’t hide in this town.”
“Nothing?”
“Niento. Or, as you say in English . . .”
“Nothing,” Noonan replied. “I speak a little Italian.”
Noonan was looking at his notes when Strano asked if he wanted more coffee. Noonan nodded yes. Strano got up and asked if he wanted cream and sugar. Noonan just said “black” and pointed to a pile of cream capsules on the table. When Strano got back to the table, Noonan had found the spot in his journal he needed.
“You said that you got the call to go to the Bodacious jewelry store while you were at the bus terminal. Something about an alarm. Was there a fire at the bus terminal that day?”
“It was a false alarm. A tour bus had stopped for diesel when it started smoking. The smoke was pretty thick, and it set off the fire alarm. I came over from police headquarters and checked out the situation.”
“No one injured?”
“No. Just a lot of smoke.”
“What color was the smoke?”
This took Strano by surprise. “What color was the smoke? Smoke is, well, smoke.”
“Not really. It’s not as if there are lots of kinds of smoke. Generally speaking, there are three kinds of smoke: dark or black, white, and blue. Do you remember what color the smoke was?”
“No. Not really. Why not ask the terminal manager? I wasn’t there very long before I got the call to go to the Bodacious jewelry store.”
“Was anyone else at the terminal when the bus started to smoke?”
“Well, yeah. Every volunteer firefighter in town. Like everyone tells you, we’re a small town. When there’s a fire, we respond.”
“How many firefighters do you have in Washakie?”
“I can’t give you an actual number. I think there are six firepeople—two are women—who are sort of full time. I say sort of because everyone here has more than one job.”
“Do you have more than on job?”
“I lied. A lot of people have more than one job. I’m not sure about the firepeople and if they have other jobs. But the city pays for six. Then there are another six or seven volunteers.”
“Did the volunteers show up at the fire?”
Strano gave Noonan a look that read “Really?”
Noonan got the message. “So all of the volunteers came?”
“I saw four or five. Then I got the call, so I left. I left Brenda Maple in charge. To do the paperwork, I mean. She’s pretty competent. She works for the county in the county building.”
“Did she file a report?”
“Got it right here,” Strano said as he pawed through a pile of papers Noonan could not see on the seat of a chair beside him. “I knew you were coming, so I made a copy.” Strano handed him two sheets of paper. “Brenda is quite competent. I have no idea why you want this, but here’s a copy.”
“How did you know I’d be asking for this?” Noonan asked as he jiggled the paper.
“I’m psychic,” said Strano with a smile. “Everyone said you were thorough.” Then he leaned forward, “And it’s the only paperwork I have that has anything to do with the Harrisons or Bodacious brothers.”
“You are good at your jobs, sir. Is there anything you can tell me—since you are psychic—that I don’t know that will help me?”
“Nothing that would stand up in court.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’d say the Harrison murder and the robberies are connected. How I do not know.”
“Why do you say that?”
“This is a small town. We know everything about everyone in town.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Noonan said smiling. “Everyone keeps telling me.”
“I can imagine,” Strano replied. “But two odd events happening so close to one another in a town where nothing ever happens, well, there has got to be a connection.”
“You may be right,” Noonan looked at his notes. “Just one more thing.”
“You sure you are not channeling Columbo?”
“I’m not psychic, remember. You are.”
“Got me there.”
“The bus that was smoking. It was fixed there in the terminal?”
“Don’t know. But it was running fine an hour or two later. It came through the roadblock on the highway.”
“You searched the bus?”
“Top, bottom, storage space, and I even crawled under the bus to make sure no one was up inside any hollow under the bus.”
“No suspects.”
“Not the guy. He was well over six feet. The tour bus was all women, and a few of them were about five feet tall. We ran their IDs and got matches. I’ve got their names if you need them.”
“Bus driver not over six feet?”
“Short, squat. Over six feet around, not tall.”
CHAPTER 18
Cell phones were a gift of the gods. They made Philadelphia, Nassau, Georgetown, and Washakie as close as neighbors in a subdivision. Closer, actually. This was particularly true when it came to money. Banking was at the speed of light. Even more important, news of banking—specifically, transactions—were a click away. Then, when all was said and done, the phones could go ghost. Be gone. Deep in the blue sea, roasting in the Badlands, or buried in a landfill. The clock was ticking.
CHAPTER 19
Joshua Three Trees was exactly what his name described—except that the three trees were one on top of the other. Three Trees was the tallest man Noonan had ever seen. But then again, Noonan was not a basketball fan. Three Trees might have been seven feet tall. Noonan didn’t know, but he did have to look up to talk to him.
It did not take Noonan long to realize that he was in way over his head.
One sentence.
“I have nothing to say to the occupying forces.”
“Sorry?”
“Occupying forces. You whites. Take our land. Steal our women. Leave us in the wilderness with nothing to starve and die.”
“That’s quite a charge.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“I’m not here to arrest you. I’m here to talk about your jewelry consignment at the Bodacious . . .”
Before he could complete the sentence, the front door slammed in his face.
CHAPTER 20
“He has come and gone.”
“What did he ask?”
“Consignment only.”
“Nothing else?”
“Never had a chance to ask.”
“Keep it that way.”
“No other way to have it.”
CHAPTER 21
“Nelvis Thompson and don’t ask.”
“I can imagine what it is most people ask.” Noonan gave a sly smile as he shook the Wyoming state trooper’s hand in the hole-in-the-wall trooper substation in the back of what would have been called mall in North Carolina but was advertised as the Washakie Shopping Center. Thompson offered Noonan a chair in front of the paper-littered desk as he spoke.
“Thanks for not asking.”
“I’m discrete. I’m . . .”
“Oh, I know who you are. Everyone in town does.
“Let me guess; it’s a small town and . . .”
“Everybody’s told you, so I don’t have to. And you want to called Heinz, right?”
“As rain.”
“Since I had nothing to do with the murder investigation or the robberies but ran the blockade, I’ll take a wild guess and suggest that’s why you’re here.”
“Everyone in this town is psychic.”
Thompson laughed. “No. We’re a small town and, well, you know the rest.” He scrounged around on the piles of paper on his desk and came up with six sheets of paper, all of them in sets of two and stapled. He handed Noonan one set of sheets. “This is the list of everyone stopped going either direction after the Harrison murder.” Then he handed Noonan another set of stapled sheets. “And this is the list of everyone stopped going either direction after the Bodacious robberies.” He handed Noonan the final set of stapled sheets. “Finally, assuming you were going to ask for it, these are all the people stopped on the Cannibal Pass road after the murder and robberies. And before you ask, yes, we compared all lists and came up with no duplicates.”
“You are to be commended for you work.”
“Just because we live in Wyoming doesn’t mean we do slipshod work.”
Noonan took the lists, folded them, wrote on them, and slipped them into his notebook. Indicating the lists by tapping on their folded edges he said, “About how many of these people do you know or are local?”
“Almost all of them. The only exception was the busload of tourists. All women and I didn’t know any of them.”
“Are their names listed here?”
“Only the ones who were under about five two.” That was the description of the woman in the Bodacious robbery.”
“How many women were on the bus?”
“Oh, I don’t know. More than fifteen and less than thirty. City folks on some kind of bird-watching expedition.”
“They were on the bus that was smoking?”
“It wasn’t smoking when we stopped it.”
Noonan was silence for a moment. Then he asked, “Was the bus in Washakie being repaired when the Bodacious robberies went down?”
“Had to be. Otherwise we would not have stopped the bus.”
“Did the bus start smoking before the robberies?”
“Again. Had to be. I think I, we, the troopers, were told the women had about an hour or so in town while the smoking problem was solved. That would be about the time of the robberies. But”—and he raised his hand to stop a question by Noonan—“there was absolutely, positively, no woman on that bus who was under five two” that is not on the list in your hand. The bus driver was a lot shorter than the six feet whatever, and the Washakie cop, Johnny Strano, went over that bus with a fine-tooth comb. Checked the luggage compartment and under the engine hood. Even crawled the length of the bus on his back to make sure no one was hiding in some hollow over the drive shaft.”
“Could any of the other vehicles have had hidden compartments?”
“Nope. Like I said, even though we’re in Wyoming, we don’t do slipshod work.”
“Well, then, since you are from Wyoming. If a man six feet two and a woman under five feet robbed a pair of Washakie stores in broad daylight and they can’t be found in town and aren’t picked up at a roadblock, where are they?”
“If I knew that”—he smiled humorously—“I’d be the chief of detectives in some town on the North Carolina beach.”
CHAPTER 22
The stack of papers was not very heavy. But then again, it didn’t have to be heavy to be worth $20 million. It was going to be a three-way transfer, so no one was going to be left holding the bag.
But it was going to be tricky.
Had this been a straight transfer, a simple sale, the papers would have gone from seller to buyer with no intermediary. But that was not the way the deal had to go down. It was seller to an intermediary who would transfer ownership to a third party. At the same time, the third party was paying, the intermediary was buying a pig in a poke. But that pig was a multimillion-dollar pig, and for $20 million, it was worth the risk. Even then, the paperwork had to be so buried and dispersed that it would take an army of auditors to ferret out the responsibles.
But not the blame.
That was the joy of being too big to prosecute. If worse came to worst, it would all be handled sub rosa. Even if not, in this business there was no such thing as bad publicity. Most delicious of all, money paid for penalties had one of two specific legally insulating caveats: tax deductions and cost of doing business.
She would be the only person on the dodge. She didn’t care. Where she was going, she would not even have to file with the IRS. Her partners could file with the IRS. They had done nothing illegal. Business was business.
There was only one more shoe to fall.
CHAPTER 23
“Blue.” The bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor had no trouble at all remembering the tour-bus smoke.
“You sure?”
“Been in the business about as long as you’ve been a cop. Blue.”
“Do you have this problem often—bus smoking?”
“Yeah. Not all the time. Upon occasion. Let me put it another way. It’s not unusual.”
“Anything unusual about this occasion?”
“Not that I can think of. Bus pulled in and started to smoke, alarm went off, and we cleared the terminal.”
“Why did you clear the terminal? Is a smoking bus dangerous?”
“No, but my insurance agent is. Any hint of danger to a person, we have to evacuate the terminal.”
“Do you do this every time a bus smokes?”
“Only if the alarm goes off. Then my insurance agent knows there’s a problem. She’s a volunteer with the Washakie Fire Department. When she shows up, I clear the terminal.”
“In the last month, how many smoking buses have come into the terminal?”
“All of them. Buses smoke all the time. You just don’t see it when the bus is moving. When the bus comes into the terminal, the exhaust starts to fill the room. The bus turns the engine off, no more exhaust.”
“Was the tour bus smoking when it came into the terminal?”
“Must have been.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“That’s right. The tour bus came in. Smoke started to fill the terminal. The smoke alarm went off. I cleared the terminal because I knew my insurance agent was going to be coming to the ‘scene of the fire.’”
“Are you sure the smoke set off the alarm?”
“Pretty sure. Why?”
“Just wondering. Is there a way to find out?”
“Sure. It takes a day or two. But yeah, why?”
“Because I’m a curious kind of guy.”
The bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor laughed. “Sure. Whatever. But even if I find someone set of the alarm, so what? The terminal was filling with smoke. There were people coming off the bus, probably some still inside the bus. It would have been a good idea to hit an alarm.”
“If they knew where to find them.”
“State of Wyoming makes sure you can find them. Any more questions?”
“One more. What day do you take out the garbage?”
“From the terminal?”
“Yes.”
“Inside or outside?”
“Is there a difference?”
“There are two kinds of inside garbage. One is what you would call trash. That’s plastic pop bottles, facial tissue, food wrappers, paper cups. When the garbage can fills up, we wrap up the plastic liner and set it out back. The second kind of inside trash is from the mechanical end of the business: oily rags, empty oil cans, broken bolts, stuff like that. Which trash are you talking about?”
“Both.”
“OK. The filled plastic bags go out Thursday morning. The trash company picks up the bags early in the morning. The other trash we take to a special landfill. We are environmentally conscious here in the Badlands.” The second sentence was said with sarcasm.
“So the plastic bag from the day of the alarm is gone.”
“Four, five days gone.”
“Thanks.”
“How about the smoke? Don’t you want to know what happened to the smoke?”
This took Noonan by surprise. “The smoke? Where did it go?”
“The Great Smoky Mountains. Where do you think the mountain range gets its smoke?” Then the bus-station manager, ticket agent, and janitor laughed. “Just a joke. I’ll see what I can find about the alarm, but I don’t know what help it will do you.”
CHAPTER 24
Harrison Day Three was pleased to meet with his lawyer. Or, as they say in Wyoming, loyer. His loyer was a public defender from the State of Wyoming who told him the same thing that day as on the first: keep your mouth shut. That was fine with Harrison Day Three.
