As they exited the car, Jeff said, “You realize if you’re wrong about this, Victor’s going to fire me.”
“Let’s hope I’m not then.” Emory tried the front glass-paned door to the Algarotti Smoky Mountain Springs factory and found it locked.
Jeff nodded toward a young uniformed man sitting in the lobby, watching TV and eating a dripping meatball sandwich. “Looks like Victor finally hired a security guard.”
Emory knocked on the door and held his badge to the glass. The startled young man placed his dinner on the seat and walked over to open the door.
“What can I do for you, officers?” asked the guard, fluorescent lights shining off his over-gelled black hair.
Emory handed him a document. “We have a warrant to search the factory again.”
“Wh…What?”
Emory noticed the name on the guard’s badge. “Clarence, are you the only one here?”
Clarence nodded. “It’s Sunday.”
“We need to see the records room,” Emory said as he headed that way.
Clarence stepped in front of him. “Wait, you can’t come in. Please. Today’s my first day. I don’t want to get fired.”
Jeff smirked. “There’s a lot of that going around.”
Emory asked, “Would you rather be jailed for interfering with an investigation?”
“Well, no.” Clarence stepped out of the way. “I don’t even know where the records room is.”
“That’s okay. I do.” Emory proceeded down the hall with Jeff at his side, and the security guard following.
The guard pulled his cell phone from his belt. “I’m calling my boss.”
“Please do,” Emory replied as the guard began talking on the phone.
“God, I hope you’re right,” Jeff muttered.
Clarence told Emory, “My boss wants to know what’s this about.”
“Tell him we’re looking for narcotics.”
“Narc…Drugs?” The guard told his boss on the phone, “That’s what he said.”
When they reached the records room, Emory said, “New door.”
Clarence covered his phone to tell them, “The door guy was here earlier.”
Jeff tried the doorknob. “Locked.” He looked at the guard. “Did the door guy give you a key?”
Clarence told his boss, “Sir, I gotta go. They want me to open a door for them.” The guard hung up his phone. “He’s calling the owner.”
Emory’s only reaction was, “Open it.”
Clarence looked at the door and frowned at the two men. “This don’t say record room.”
“It’s the right room,” Emory insisted. “Do you have the key?”
“They gave it to that other guy, the one who works here. Sam…Stuart…”
“Scot?” asked Jeff.
“That’s it!”
Emory’s eyes locked on Jeff’s, and he could tell they were thinking the same thought. “Scot’s our guy.”
“Wait!” Clarence held up a black key on the key ring chained to his belt. “I do have a master key.”
“Will it work?” Jeff asked. “It’s a new door.”
The guard laughed. “Big places like this always install locks with the same master core. And those locks can all be opened with the same master key.” He inserted the key and tried to turn the tumbler, but it wouldn’t budge. “That’s weird. It should work.”
Emory nodded to Jeff, signaling him with his expression. The PI asked, “Are you sure?”
Emory shrugged and pointed his hand toward the guard. “The key doesn’t work.”
Jeff headed toward the receiving area. “God, I hope you’re right.”
“Stop saying that. You’re making me nervous.”
Clarence asked, “What’s he doing?”
“Finding a key that works.”
“Oh,” Clarence muttered.
Emory knocked on the door and announced himself.
The security guard told him, “There’s no one in there.”
“Just a formality.”
A moment later, a roaring sound caught the attention of the two men by the records room. They both faced the double swing doors and saw Jeff charge into the hallway in a forklift.
Emory’s mouth dropped. “Oh my god!”
Clarence shook his head and waved his arms. “No, you can’t do that! Seriously. It’s my first day!”
Jeff stopped shy of the records room door. “The crowbar wasn’t there. Should I?”
Emory stepped back. “Do it.”
The skinny guard gasped and clenched his fists as Jeff rammed the forklift through the door. He drove inside a few feet before parking it and jumping out of the cab. Emory flicked a switch to illuminate the small room, lined with metal shelves full of file folders, ledgers and other archived materials.
Clarence put his hands on his hips in a cocky stance. “Well, it don’t look like there’s any drugs. What made you think there’d be something in here?”
Emory explained as he passed the shelves, touching various items, “Something the owner said. When Victor Algarotti saw this room yesterday, he said it seemed smaller than he remembered from when he was younger.”
The guard said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before, that places look smaller when you’re older.”
“It’s not because you’re older. It’s because you’re physically bigger. Victor was in his twenties when he started working here, and from a picture I saw of him, he looked the same as he does now – same height, same build.”
Jeff asked, “So why would the room look smaller to him?”
“Exactly, so that got me thinking. When I flipped through the pictures I took of the room, I noticed something odd.” Emory pointed to the forklift tracks on the floor of the records room. “You see the tracks?” After the two men nodded, Emory pointed to where the tracks ended. “See how they end at the shelf against that wall?”
The guard said, “Someone must’ve backed into it.”
Emory shook his head. “That’s what I thought at first, but look at the shelf and the wall.”
Jeff inspected the metal shelf where the tracks ended and then the wall behind it. “There’s no damage to either.”
“Not a scratch,” said Emory.
“Maybe the shelf wasn’t there, and the forklift stopped just before it hit the wall.” Clarence grabbed the shelf and tried to move it. “It’s attached to the wall. Could’ve just been attached recently. There’s no telling how old them tracks are.”
Emory stepped on one of the tracks, and he felt a slight stickiness when he raised his shoe. “The tracks are fresh. Two days ago, the foreman commented on the same sticky tracks in the hallway like they were new.”
Clarence grimaced at him. “I didn’t see no tracks in the hall.”
“They must’ve been mopped up by whoever cleans this place, but they didn’t have access to this room.” Emory turned on the flashlight feature of his cell phone and looked under the shelf. “The tracks continue, looks like all the way to the wall.”
“There’s a hidden space!” Jeff exclaimed.
Emory returned to his feet. “I think so. The foreman also told me they had recently refurbished the back area. Either something was put in there to stay for good—”
“Or there’s a secret door.” Jeff put his hands on hips. “We need to find the trigger to open the door.”
All three started pulling on ledgers and other items on the shelves, but Emory soon stopped to look at the massive amount of materials stored on the shelves against the wall and throughout the room. “This is going to take forever.”
He abandoned the wall and jumped into the forklift. “Stand back!” Jeff and Clarence jumped out of the way as Emory turned on the vehicle. He raised the arms five feet, floored the gas pedal and crashed into the shelf-covered wall. The forklift crumpled the shelf and punctured two manhole-sized breaches into the wall.
As Emory backed the forklift, Jeff squinted into one of the holes. “There’s definitely something back there!”
Emory repositioned the arms and hit the wall again, repeating his actions until the opening was large enough to walk through. He turned off the forklift and joined Jeff and Clarence as they were about to crawl over the rubble.
“Oh my god!” Victor screamed from behind them. He was standing in the doorway, eyeing the damage to the new door. “Again?” His gaze turned to the gaping hole in the wall. “OH MY GOD!!”
Standing nearest to the door, the guard froze in Victor’s glare. He responded in staggered grunts before forcing his mouth shut. Clarence handed the search warrant to Victor and pointed an accusing finger at Emory and Jeff. “They served me with a search warrant.”
Refocusing his glare onto the other two men, Victor told them, “That doesn’t give you the right to damage at will.” Mouth open and shaking his head, Victor stamped toward them, and he handed Emory a folded paper he had brought with him. “This is yours.”
“What is it?” Emory asked.
“The bill for the last door. Expect another one tomorrow.” Victor looked to Jeff for an explanation. “Now tell me what on Earth is going on here.”
Emory asked, “You put Scot in charge of your recent renovation, correct?”
“So?”
“My guess is he took the opportunity to cut this room in half.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Let’s find out.” Emory turned on his phone’s flashlight and led them into the secret room.
When they entered, a motion-detecting light turned on. Once his eyes adjusted, Emory did a three-sixty and estimated the original storeroom was about sixteen-hundred square feet. He whispered to Jeff, “Strange coincidence, don’t you think?”
“What?”
One of Emory’s eyebrows rose above the other. “I’ve encountered two hidden rooms in a week. The other was in your office.”
Jeff threw a hand to his chest. “What, you don’t think I have something to do with this, do you?”
“Like I said, it’s a strange coincidence.” Emory shrugged and walked away.
Victor touched some antique equipment shoved against one wall. “I had forgotten all about this. It’s some of the original machinery and tools my father-in-law used when he started the company. I kept meaning to build a museum room off the lobby, but I never got around to it.” He passed a coffin-sized glass case, which displayed the original drill Connor Ashley, Meredith Algarotti’s father, used to bore a well into Yonder Springs. A picture of Connor by the first well leaned against it on the floor.
Emory focused his attention on two long metal tables in the center of the room. They were littered with a wide assortment of lab supplies – beakers, test tubes, a digital scale, Bunsen burners and a centrifuge. “This place looks like a high school chemistry lab.”
Jeff glided past a group of five propane tanks toward eight palettes of Algarotti water – cases of grape-flavored water. Someone had cut the shrink wrapping down the middle of each case and taped it back together. “This water’s been tampered with. Victor, how many palettes have been stolen?”
“Twelve, I think.”
“Where are the rest of them?” Jeff muttered.
Emory strolled between the tables, giving alternating glances to the items on top of each. He saw a lab apron draped over the room’s only barstool, and on the table surface above it, he found a lab notebook, a stapled printout of step-by-step instructions for the manufacturing of MDMA and a black light. He put on his gloves to pick up the notebook and thumb through it. “Scot kept a record of his attempts to make ecstasy and then modify it.” He put the notebook down, and his hands moved to the next object. “Why does he need a black light?”
“Maybe he has underground raves here,” Jeff joked.
Emory scanned the room until he saw the light switch on the wall. He asked Clarence, “Would you mind hitting the manual button on that light switch?” Once the guard did, the room pitched into near-perfect darkness.
“What are you doing?” Victor asked.
Emory turned on the black light and flashed it around the room until he saw points of illumination near where Jeff was standing. “What’s that?”
Jeff walked to the points of light and grabbed one, causing a squeaking sound as he did. He held it up for others to see. “It’s a bottle of water. Each one has a luminescent smiley face emoji painted on it to mark it.”
“Turn the light back on,” Victor ordered, and a second later, it was on again. Fuming, he approached a map of the Southern states hooked onto the wall. Numerous cities had a green triangle beside them, and three of them – Knoxville, Nashville and Memphis – had been circled with a red marker. “Our distributor map.” As the other men came to him, he explained, “The triangles are cities where we deliver our water.”
Clarence gawked at the map. “Wow, that’s a lot of cities.”
“What are the circles?” asked Jeff.
Victor faced them. “I have no idea.”
Emory had seen similar maps in previous drug busts. “Those are the locations where he has a distributor for his product.”
“What are you talking about?” Victor asked.
Emory explained, “He’s using your trucks and water to get his product out.”
“What product? What is all this?”
Jeff answered, “Scot is spiking some of your water with a drug similar to ecstasy, which would make it easier to distribute to users without being detected.”
“He put drugs in my water?!”
“Not all of it,” Emory told him. “Just the stolen water. I think he has an accomplice at each of the circled sites who could pick up the water marked with a smiley face and sell it at local clubs.”
Victor leeched his palm onto his forehead. “This will ruin my company.”
Jeff waved toward the water. “There are three cities circled, but four palettes are unaccounted for.”
Emory said, “The van the sheriff described seeing here wouldn’t have the capacity for four palettes. My guess is it picked up one of the palettes to give samples to his distributors and maybe others he’s trying to recruit. Victor, were deliveries being made to any of the circled cities this weekend?”
Victor thought aloud, “I shut down production on Friday, so we didn’t have enough product to ship out yesterday. We just barely made enough yesterday for one truckload to ship out today. With my foreman out, I had to come in myself to open the dock for a little bit before going to the hospital.”
Emory asked, “Where was it heading?”
Victor’s head dropped. “All three cities.”
Emory exclaimed, “We’ve got to stop that truck!”
“Wait!” Victor shouted before anyone could leave. “You have to keep this confidential. If word got out that any of our water, even stolen water, had drugs in it, our customers would drop us before waiting for an explanation. Promise me this won’t get out to the media.”
Emory assured him, “We’re not going to announce it, but arrests are public record.”
Victor snarled at them both, “I want you to get that son-of-a-bitch. Better yet, shoot him!”
“I’m not going to shoot—” Emory started before he was interrupted.
Victor pointed to Jeff. “Wait a second. Didn’t you say whoever was stealing the water killed my daughter?”
“I said it could be the same person,” Jeff clarified.
“I’m going to shoot him myself!” Victor growled before storming from the room.
Emory and Jeff dashed after him, followed by the security guard. As soon as they passed through the broken doorway, Emory looked to his left to see Victor turning a corner to another hallway, heading toward his office. “This way!”
Jeff grabbed Emory’s arm to get his attention. “That way. It’s Scot!”
Emory looked to his right. Scot Trousdale stopped in his tracks and shot a glance toward Jeff’s voice. After a frozen second, Victor’s assistant bolted.
“You take Victor!” Emory ordered Jeff, and he pointed at Clarence. “Do not let anyone in this room!”