December 14th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge let his coffee soothe him as he and Pickett waited for Robin and her computer people to dig out even more information.
And wait for word from Mike and Cavanaugh. They wouldn’t arrive up there for another forty minutes. Sarge might have to have a couple of pieces of the wonderful bread pudding by then.
And maybe some bacon and a waffle first.
He had a hunch Pickett was right, that the times and places were drops, more than likely of bags of money from casinos.
And if that was the case, this was a skim operation of large proportions, more than likely connected to a larger skim operation. Otherwise, even back in 1990 it would have been caught easily.
So for this to work, this had a lot of inside help and some powerful people involved. No wonder people were dying now. Chances were some of those powerful people were still around.
Robin was about to hang up, but Sarge had an idea and stopped her.
“Hold on,” Robin said to someone on the phone.
“Possible to run all those dates and locations and see which major casinos were close to them?”
Robin nodded and then said into the phone, “Thanks, call me at once when you have something.”
Then she clicked off her phone and turned to Sarge and Pickett. “Already did that. I noticed earlier that the locations were all close to the various Hughes Casinos, including the Landmark when it was still in operation.”
“Oh, no,” Pickett said, sitting back.
Sarge knew exactly what she was thinking. For the longest time it was rumored that Hughes skimmed vast sums of money from his casinos and took it with him when he left Las Vegas. It had only been rumors and some people thought that Hughes had nothing to do with it if it had happened. But it was one of those rumors that never seemed to die.
And Hughes left and started selling off his casino properties right about the time all this was happening.
“We might as well be chasing Bigfoot,” Pickett said.
Sarge laughed. “We’d have better luck with Bigfoot.”
“So you thinking this might have been a skim of a skim?” Robin asked Pickett.
“Only way money wouldn’t be missed or traced back then,” Pickett said, nodding.
Sarge agreed. By the Hughes era, the mob had been mostly chased out of town and the vast skim of money the mob had sent east was staying in town, for the most part, as large corporations started to move in and buy and build casinos. But those skim operations could have still been working easily for a few years, especially from the Hughes properties.
“The date that Heather shut down,” Sarge said, sitting forward. “Does that correspond at all with any major casino sting operation?”
Robin grabbed her phone again.
“That would explain why she left money in the vault and rigged everything to blow,” Pickett said, nodding. “If the entire operation was getting shut down, if they traced it to the storage unit, they needed to find money and everything destroyed.”
Sarge knew that Pickett was right. Finally an explanation for that setup in the storage unit.
“Articles headed to your phones,” Robin said and hung up her phone.
Sarge got the article a moment later and started reading at the same time Pickett and Robin did. A huge sting operation had been started in the summer of 1990 because of an informant, but the raid didn’t happen until December, at the exact same time as Heather shut down.
And two days before the last Darling Black column was published.
But it was the next to the last line of a third article that mentioned that the case had been delayed when the informant vanished suddenly in August.
He read that line aloud.
Robin and Pickett both nodded.
“Looks like we have found who was in that room,” Sarge said.
At that moment Sarge’s phone clicked.
Sarge put the phone to his ear.
“We’re here and it looks like the cabin is occupied,” Mike said. “Cavanaugh has the warrant and we’re going in.”
“Good luck,” Sarge said and hung up.
“Mike?” Pickett asked.
Sarge nodded. “They are going in.”