The Investigator, page 5
“I made the call. I watch,” Hawkes said, and she turned back to the dying couple. Boxie Blackburn went first, trembling violently as his brain died. When the woman died, Hawkes went to the kitchen sink and vomited up everything she’d eaten that day. When she’d finished retching, she washed her face, dried it on her shirtsleeve, and said, “Let’s finish it. You all know what to do. Max, get the thermostat…”
FOUR
Letty and John Kaiser flew into Oklahoma City on a Tuesday morning after a long Monday getting briefings at Homeland Security headquarters in Washington. The problem involved relatively small amounts of missing crude oil from the Permian Basin in West Texas.
“Now listen,” Colles had told Letty. “I want you to talk to an old man named Vermilion Wright in Oklahoma City. He owns an oil company, or most of one. He’s been bitching and moaning about oil thefts out in West Texas, where most of his oil wells are located. That’s not really what we’re worried about. We’re worried about what the thieves are buying with the oil money. A couple of Homeland Security agents have been out there and didn’t come back with much, which is why the IG’s office is now involved. I want you to go out there and see what you can see.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“Hey, you could at least pretend to be respectful,” Colles said. “I’m a fuckin’ U.S. senator. And no, that’s not all I know. I’ve set you up to be briefed by a semi-high-level Homeland executive Monday morning. Kaiser will pick you up. I understand you two are buddies now.”
“I don’t plan to kill him in the immediate future,” Letty said.
“Good enough. Monday. Be there and be awake.”
* * *
Their briefer was a thin, sunburned woman named Billy Greet, who wore khaki slacks and square-shouldered blouses with epaulets, her blond hair pulled back in a tight bun. She might recently have been out in a desert somewhere, because her lips were thin and peeling, her cheekbones sharp and pink.
“Nobody except the oil people really gives a crap about the missing oil—it’s the equivalent to about a minute of our daily national supply requirements,” she told them. “One fundamental question that nobody can answer is, how is the oil being stolen? Are there thieves loading up trucks and selling the crude on the black market? Is somebody doing something funny with a pipeline? Or is it a purely white-collar deal, with accountants shuffling numbers?”
DHS, Greet said, didn’t care about that, because it was a problem best handled by local law enforcement and oil company security officers.
“That was until an Exxon security team picked up rumors that a man named Rand Low is involved in the thefts,” she said. “Low is a political extremist who got out of a Texas prison about three years ago.”
Greet clicked on a video screen and brought up a mugshot of Low. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man with a hatchet face and a prominent, battered nose. “He talked to his parole officer exactly once, then dropped out of sight and hasn’t been heard from since. He’s from that country out there, West Texas. He spent six years in the Army, got out as a buck sergeant, then he worked oil, as a laborer and a truck driver, before he got involved in politics and started stealing cars, supposedly to raise money for a militia.”
While most militias were composed of hapless goofs with guns and confused ideas about America and patriotism, Greet said, Low’s militia, according to rumor, had a sharper, more focused edge—anti-immigrant, antigovernment, secretive, and heavily armed.
“We’re not sure of this, but we think one of the leaders of the group is a woman, and she might have a sexual relationship with Low. We don’t know her real name, if she exists. The militia supposedly has links to other militias around the country, particularly those operating in the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, and the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Some of the El Paso people, including Low, were in Portland during the most violent of the riots there. We think his girlfriend might have been with him. If she’s real, and we can identify her, we’d really like to speak with her.”
While the oil thefts weren’t important in the overall scheme of things—they didn’t threaten national energy security in any way—they had kicked off a lot of cash, by normal standards, and there were indications that the thefts were continuing.
“The oil companies want to stop the thefts. We, DHS, want to know where the money is going, and if the rumor is true, what Low and his friends are buying with it,” Greet said. “This is a heck of a lot more than living expenses—they’re probably taking in something between a half-million and a million dollars a year, and maybe a lot more. If we can figure out how the oil is being stolen, we can probably identify at least some of the thieves. Then we can turn them over to the Texas Rangers and let the Rangers hold branding irons on their naked feet and get some answers.” Pause. “Not really. I didn’t actually say that.”
“Sounded like you said that,” Kaiser said.
“Sitting in an air-conditioned room, fully hydrated, and the poor man is hallucinating,” Greet said to Letty.
Letty nodded. “Or it could be simple dementia.”
* * *
At the end of the day, Letty and Kaiser were ushered into the office of a DHS assistant inspector general, who gave Letty two government identification cards. The first said that she was a congressional employee with an endorsement granting access to the Department of Homeland Security; the second was a DHS sidearm permit.
“We’re not too happy about this, frankly, the gun thing, but Senator Colles knows how to twist an arm,” the assistant IG said. “You do not have arrest powers. You’re not a law enforcement officer. The gun permit will allow you to carry a firearm for personal protection only. Do you understand that?”
She did. “Will it allow me to carry it everywhere?”
“Well, no foreign countries, but anywhere in the U.S. and territories, with the exception of certain high-security facilities where you would have to check it. And you can’t fly with it on your person; you’ll have to check it to take it on an airplane,” the assistant IG said.
Letty didn’t say so, but she was pleased. When they left the office, walking down the hall, Kaiser gave her a cell phone–sized package covered with Christmas wrap: “A gift,” he said.
Puzzled, she opened it, and found a black alligator leather ID case, sized for her new cards.
She said, “I just… I mean… John!”
She tipped her head back and laughed: she could carry a gun.
Anywhere.
* * *
Oklahoma City was the home of Hughes-Wright Petroleum, run by a billionaire named Vermilion Wright, his business housed in the thirty-seven-story Hughes-Wright Petroleum Center.
During the trip out from Washington, Letty and Kaiser had been talking about the range of employment opportunities she might be interested in, if the DHS well came up dry. On the way into town from the airport, in a rented Ford Explorer, Kaiser said, “The thing you’d hate about the military is the sheer fuckin’ boredom and the paperwork. Orders. Every time you go outside…”
Letty was driving, Kaiser was picking his teeth with a peppermint-flavored toothpick. “Even if you got picked up by Special Ops, you’d spend ninety percent of your time either sitting around or training. While you’re doing that you’ve got some Ivy League asshole who’s never left D.C. yapping in your ear about combat ethics…”
He was about to go on when Letty asked, “Is that where we’re going?” She pointed up through the windshield. “The second building behind the first one? The gold-glass one?”
“They told us the second-tallest building in town and that one is, so it must be it,” Kaiser said.
And it was. They found an open space in the underground parking garage and took the elevator to the lobby level, where a security guard checked their appointment status, gave them adhesive paper name tags to stick on their shirts, and sent them to the top floor.
Letty had checked a directory behind the reception desk and noticed that while Hughes-Wright occupied the top four floors of the building and apparently had naming rights, the rest of the place was occupied by a variety of investment and real estate firms, and smaller oil- and gas-related companies. Nevertheless, the place smelled of oil—not crude, which stank, but like the odor of hot motor oil on a car’s dipstick.
That struck her as odd, since so little of the building seemed to have anything to do with oil. Maybe some kind of aerosol spray, an oil-industry version of Febreze?
As they rode up in the elevator, Kaiser said, “While I’m a much better shot than you are, or can ever hope to be, I’ll let you do the talking here.”
“I let my guns do the talking on the range, but I do think it’d be wise to let me talk here,” Letty agreed. “Do you smell oil?”
“Yeah, I do. I was thinking something was wrong with my nose. Maybe they oiled the elevator this morning?”
After the shooting contests at the Virginia range and the DHS briefings, it seemed to Letty that she and Kaiser might fall into a prickly friendship, which was about right, since they were both distinctly prickly. During the briefings, and afterward, and on the trip to OKC, Kaiser had begun playing the part of a surrogate uncle, giving her advice that she didn’t need, though he never missed a chance to check her ass.
Which she knew, of course.
He was currently unattached, he’d told her, but the DHS briefing officer, Greet, “kinda liked my whole package,” and had mentioned in passing that she, too, was currently unattached. “Gonna call that girl up, when I get back to D.C.,” he said.
“If you need any advice about how to talk to women, I’m always here,” Letty said. “Believe me, you do need that advice.”
“Au contraire, as we say down in Terrebonne Parish. With the right woman, I speak in poetry.”
* * *
The elevator doors opened and a woman in a dark green dress was standing there, holding a leather portfolio. “Ms. Davenport? Mr. Kaiser? Mr. Wright is waiting.”
Vermilion Wright occupied an expansive wood-and-glass office that overlooked Oklahoma City. He was a tall man, white-haired, angular, deep-set eyes under thick white eyebrows, strong for eighty-five. A recent newspaper story that Letty found on the Net said that he had bad knees from a life of crawling around oil rigs; a bamboo cane lay on one side of his desk.
He stood up when Letty led Kaiser into his office, and stuck out a bony hand to shake with each of them.
“Nice to meet you. Sit down,” Wright said. “The last DHS guy in here was about as useful as tits on a bull. I hope you can do something to help us out.”
“We’re not so much anxious to help you out as we are to find out where the money is going,” Letty said, as she took one of the leather visitor chairs and crossed her ankles. “Of course, if we figure that out, we’ll probably know who’s stealing your oil.”
He contemplated her, then asked, “You smart?”
Letty nodded. “Yes.”
“Where’d you go to school? What’d you study?”
“Stanford. Economics,” she said.
He nodded and smiled. “Went there myself. Back in the fifties. ‘Go Cardinal.’ Never really gave a shit about college sports, though. You know anything about oil?”
“Only what I read in the Yergin books,” she said.
“That’s a start,” he said. “What’d you think about them?”
“They taught me the difference between investment and fashion,” Letty said. “When COVID hit, Exxon’s stock went to $30.11. I borrowed a quarter-million dollars from my father and bought eight thousand shares at $31.11, a dollar up from the bottom. I sold out at $67.20.”
“So you’re up a quarter-million after you pay back your old man,” Wright said.
“Not quite. I had to pay capital gains. And the IRS made me pay a year’s interest to my dad on the loan.”
“So why’d you do that? Bet on Exxon?”
“I checked to see how many electric cars there are. Last year, a little more than five percent of the cars sold in the U.S. were electric or hybrid. The rest run on gasoline or diesel. That’s a hair more electric cars than in 2013, but only a hair. The electric cars run on power that mostly comes from natural gas–fired power plants. Guess who supplies the gasoline, diesel, and natural gas? For the time being, electric is fashion, oil is investment. That will change, but not yet.”
“You embarrassed about that? Young liberal woman buying oil stock?” Wright asked.
“I had about as much effect as a match in a forest fire.”
Wright nodded. “Where’d you put your quarter-million?”
“I’m still thinking about it,” Letty said.
Wright gazed at her for another minute, then asked, “Did your boss tell you two why you’re here? Why you’re here in my office today?”
“Something about a guy you can’t find,” Kaiser said. “Blackburn?”
Wright turned to Kaiser. “That’s right. Boxie Blackburn. Real first name is Bradley, but nobody calls him anything but Boxie,” Wright said. “Nobody can find him, four days now. Can’t find his wife, either. He works out of our Midland office, does the paperwork for us. I was putting the screws on him to find out where the oil was going, since we should have paper every step along the stream. He was exploring the possibilities and the next thing I hear, he’s gone. His cars, too. Nobody at home.”
“How much have you lost?” Letty asked.
“Maybe ten or twelve thousand barrels a year, going back a year or two,” Wright said.
Letty sat back. “That sounds like a lot.”
“Well, we pump a bit more than eighty million barrels a year,” Wright said. “The shrinkage is maybe one one-hundredth of one percent—one percent of one percent—and there’s always some shrinkage, some variation between what we get paid for and what we think we pumped.”
“But you’re sure you’re missing oil?”
“Boxie isn’t sure, but I am. The question I got in the back of my head is, Was Boxie involved? Did he think the jig was up? Is he running?”
“I looked at the WTI index this morning and over the past year you’ve averaged in the mid- to upper fifties per barrel,” Letty said. “So you’re down roughly a half-million dollars, maybe six hundred thousand, a year.”
“That’s correct,” Wright said. “But we’re not the only company that has the problem.”
He stood up, turned around, and limped over to his windows. With his back to them, he said, “None of the oil patch companies are anxious to discuss it publicly, but I’ve had some heart-to-heart talks with a couple other guys. My feeling is, overall, these crooks could be stealing as much as a hundred thousand barrels a year. Maybe more. Chevron, I think, got whacked. They aren’t talking, at all, but they’ve got security guys sniffing around the Permian and I’ve gotten back some rumors.”
“How much are the thieves getting for the oil?” Letty asked.
“I don’t know. Because I don’t know how much is being stolen. I’m guessing. No matter what they’re doing, they’ll have some costs, too,” Wright said. “Unless… and this troubles me… it’s being stolen on paper. That somebody else is being credited with our oil. Lots of people handle the oil before it winds up in a gas tank. Or the money winds up in our bank account. Stealing actual buckets of oil… that’d be complicated. If it’s some nerd sitting at a computer and moving numbers around… that might be complicated, too, but it’s not like you’d have to hire trucking companies to move the oil around.”
He turned back to them as Kaiser said, “Whatever it is, even if it’s just your oil, it’d be worth doing, for most folks. Now your Boxie guy is missing. Four days, he could be in Panama by now, already moved into the new house. Making bids on a power cat.”
Wright jabbed a finger at him: “That’s what worries me. He stole it and ran. Or, worse, he poked his nose in somewhere he shouldn’t have, and somebody cut it off.”
“We’ll want to talk to the people in your Midland office,” Letty said.
“It’s already fixed. They’ll answer any questions you have.” He turned to Kaiser. “You might want to take a gun. Rough stuff happens out on the patch. There could be a lot of money sticking to the wrong fingers.”
* * *
They talked for another half an hour, and Letty noted the names of Wright-Hughes employees in Midland. “You going down today?” Wright asked.
“Might as well,” Letty said. “Get an early start tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” Wright moaned. “I’m going to Phoenix tomorrow, down to the Mayo to get my knees replaced. Both of them. I’ll be out of it for a while, but I will leave strict instructions with Midland: what you want from us, you get.”
Letty nodded: “Thank you.”
Wright spent another fifteen minutes outlining problems and personnel, speculating on which other companies might have gotten hit—“I talked to the boss over at Lost Land; he thinks they’re down between eight and ten thousand”—along with background on Boxie Blackburn.
When they finished talking, Wright picked up his cane and walked with them to the elevators and wished them luck. “Get these guys. I know you have different concerns, but if you can get me names, I have some security people who’d like to talk to them privately.”
* * *
“What do you want to do?” Kaiser asked, as they took the elevator down. The smell of oil was still with them, and outside, the sun poured down like melted butter.
“Get something decent to eat—I couldn’t eat that crap on the plane,” Letty said. She put on her sunglasses. “Then get outta town.”
“Maybe find a rib joint,” Kaiser suggested. “Towns like this got good rib joints.”
“Fine with me, if I can get a salad.”
They wound up at Front Door Barbecue, where Kaiser ingested a year’s worth of cholesterol and Letty had an oversized salad with turkey. Satisfied, they walked back to the car, took it out to I-44, and turned south. As they crossed the Canadian River, leaving the city behind, Kaiser said with patent insincerity, “I’ll drive if you want.”
