The rest of the night passed in a blur of questions. First from Deputies Thatcher and Roussa, who were first on the scene, and then Lieutenant Yerby at the sheriff’s station, after he’d separated Dez and me. Our story was ninety-eight percent true and thus hard to screw up: we’d driven to the house, seen Constable Beacham’s cruiser, Dez unlocked the door, and we found the body and called for help.
Still, Yerby seemed determined to find a hole in our tale, until Roussa confirmed that Henry Gillespie and Jim Seebright had seen Dez and me off at the saloon only thirty minutes before my call to 911.
Around one o’clock in the morning, Yerby let us walk. Roussa drove Dez back to her friend Jaye’s house. I let the Dodge coast down the deserted road toward the rental house while I had one last conversation over the phone with Ganz.
Ephraim was not pleased to be woken yet again. He was halfway through a complex string of epithets before I managed to interrupt and explain what had happened. I claimed that I’d seen the suicide note while checking Beacham for signs of life. The bloodstained coveralls and boots I pretended not to have noticed. The cops would bring those to light soon enough.
Ganz promised to rustle the bushes at Judge Clave’s office once they opened. For now, he told me, don’t do anything. The else on the end of that command was implied.
I lay in bed in the rental house, counting stains on the popcorn ceiling. Waiting between rounds of interrogation with Yerby and the deputies had given me plenty of time to think. I’d normally feel some regret at a suicide, even the suicide of a fuckup like Wayne Beacham. But I could guess why Dez’s estranged husband had chosen to use a gun from Leo’s workbench to kill Erle. And why he’d hung around the scene after the murder.
Leo came to work when the gun shop opened every morning. Beacham made early morning rounds through the town, checking locks, looking for vandalism like that conveniently broken window at the dress shop. It wasn’t a stretch to say that the constable knew Leo’s schedule and counted on it.
I could piece together most of Beacham’s probable actions that morning. He had slipped away from the dress store and thrown the coveralls and boots over his uniform before murdering Erle. Then he had forced the lock on the shop next door to quickly stash the bloody clothes and hightail it back before he was missed.
The rest of his intended plan was simple. The constable would wait for Leo to arrive for work, and then kill him, too, staging it as a justifiable shooting. Beacham could have pretended that he had overheard the shot that killed Erle and had run to investigate. The town would probably give him a medal. For killing his wife’s lover.
Except that Henry Gillespie and Zeke Caton had shown up, allowing Leo to escape out the back of the gun shop. Bad luck for Beacham. He’d have had to be content with Leo getting busted for Erle’s murder.
Maybe the constable’s overzealous application of the baton to Leo’s head had been a last-ditch effort at killing him, or at least getting one good shot in before the arrest.
The facts weren’t a perfect fit. I couldn’t figure out how Beacham had known Erle’s security cameras were turned off. How he’d known it was the right moment to enter the gun shop. He must have moved very quickly. Fain and Zeke had seen him at the broken window at seven o’clock, within twenty minutes after Erle must have been killed. And I also couldn’t reason why the constable had taken Erle’s cell phone. Had Erle called him? Was that how he’d learned the cameras were turned off? But why would Erle have told Beacham that?
I thought back to how strained Beacham had looked when he had braced me in front of the courthouse. How hollow. Hard to live with killing someone. Even if you have a lot to gain by it. Even in war. The number of Rally booths dedicated to stress management and mental health were proof of that.
The constable was dead now. His only reward would be a full-dress funeral, if the town permitted it. A few words from a book, a folded flag, and then Mercy River would do its best to forget the whole fucking mess.
With the morning sun high above the horizon, I set the kettle on to make instant Sanka. Ganz had left behind a can of the granules. Maybe I’d caught a taste for it from him, like a virus.
A computer had come with the rental house, a desktop tower so old that I doubted the owners worried much about theft or damage. I booted it up and plugged in the thumb drive I had liberated from Jaeger. I wasn’t certain what I was searching for—though I could admit to some professional curiosity about the cash trucks—but a little knowledge about Jaeger’s potential targets could be useful.
The thumb drive held a lone Excel spreadsheet. I scrolled down the sheet for a quick count. More than five hundred rows, each detailing a single truck’s daily schedule. The column at the left told me the type of truck—Full-Armored, the big tank-like monsters, Protection Transit, a smaller version for chauffeuring clients, or what HaverCorp called a Road Truck, which must be one of the lighter unmarked vans for less obvious deliveries. Jaeger and his gang had stolen the drugs from a road truck in Nevada. No one had expected trouble.
I read through a few rows, getting a feel for the information. Every truck had target times for hitting each stop. Another series of columns specified the coordinates of the required route. If HaverCorp ran a tight ship, the truck’s GPS tracker would signal any deviation from the route, and alert the dispatcher that something was wrong.
A few of the truck routes were pickup-only, stopping at stores and banks to take the day’s cash receipts. Those routes didn’t attempt to predict how much the drivers might be taking on; a column labeled $ COLLECT next to each stop was left blank.
The big money was in cash deliveries. The truck—always a full-armored—would leave the dispatch, pick up preloaded ATM cassettes from a central bank, and distribute those little boxes of twenty-dollar bills to area banks throughout the day. One Portland truck was scheduled to carry more than seven hundred grand.
A good haul, but maybe not worth the risk when that score had to be shared with multiple accomplices. One full-armored would be a tough enough target on its own. If Jaeger’s goal was to hit as many armored cars as he could, as fast as he could, before HaverCorp took precautions, he was even more insane than Schuyler Conlee claimed.
I toyed with the spreadsheet menu, figuring out how to filter and sort the data. Cash deliveries only, highest dollar value at the top.
At first I thought what I was seeing was an error, or a row of junk data somehow mixed in with the others. The first space under the column labeled $ DISPATCH read 11,200,000.
Eleven million dollars. In cash. It must be wrong. No bank would require—
Not one bank, I saw. Multiple banks on the route, all branches of Prime Bank National, each one of them receiving somewhere between half and three-quarters of a million dollars. From where?
I’d missed seeing columns at the very far right, past all of the drop points on the route. The columns were blank for most trucks. For this one, under ORIGIN it read FRBSF-RNWA. Under TYPE it read RECIRC-50.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s local branch was in Renton, Washington. I knew that, the way that a mountain climber knows what nearby peak is the highest and most dangerous.
Holy shit.
The kettle’s whistling had become a shriek. I got up and poured the frothing water into a mug, where it melted the granules instantly. My mind was churning at about the same rate.
RECIRC-50 must mean recirculated bills, in fifty-dollar denominations. Each Federal Reserve branch takes in billions from banks and other vendors across the nation. Currency still in halfway decent shape is sent right back out to other banks. Moving cash where it’s needed is part of the Reserve’s mandate. Macomber had told me HaverCorp had won a big government contract. Maybe making deliveries for the Reserve was part of that package.
I had stumbled upon one of Prime Bank’s major deliveries for the year. Sixteen Seattle branches. Enough money to keep their ATMs stocked until Thanksgiving.
It wasn’t a perfect target for theft. Every bill through the Fed is scanned, the serial number recorded. If stolen money turned up at another bank after a theft, the FBI would be on that trail like coyotes after a housecat.
But there were a thousand ways to launder cash, including selling it for a percentage or spending it overseas where the FBI had no jurisdiction. And eleven million was eleven damn million.
Jaeger would go for the big money. I was certain of it, just as I was sure that he would immediately murder the guards to eliminate witnesses, as he had in Nevada.
A column on the list told me how many potential victims. Two. A driver and a hopper, to make the dash into each Prime branch. Plus any civilians who were unlucky enough to be within range.
I wasn’t responsible for whatever that freak and his damned First Riders did. I could remind myself of that truth as often as I liked. Maybe it would help to while away the winter nights to come.
The Federal Reserve route was scheduled for Thursday morning, three days from right now. If Jaeger was as smart as I thought, he wouldn’t risk hitting another truck first. HaverCorp might start swapping routes around.
I could call HaverCorp myself. Read them their own truck route details, shock the crap out of them, and the Reserve truck would be out of danger. Which would only kick the problem downfield. Jaeger would shift his attention elsewhere, and other people would be in line for a bullet. Including me and the Conlees. I hadn’t forgotten Jaeger’s promise.
Or I could call the FBI. Convince them I wasn’t a crank somehow, without giving them enough details to hang Conlee and the general and Fain’s team along with Jaeger. Maybe they would be able to nail Jaeger in the act.
It was the “in the act” part of that idea that worried me. The FBI would wait until they had Jaeger dead to rights, to where a robbery charge would be undeniable. Confronted by a tactical team closing in, it was easy to picture Jaeger’s men turning that scene into a charnel house.
Three days. Eleven million dollars. I had a lot of thinking to do.