As Celeste washed new bar glasses her face was lit and happy. She had passed the inspections. Bo, the new cook was there and with the lights down low, the space looked all but complete. And she was no longer looking for a big crowd on opening night. Raveneau wasn’t sure why the shift in expectations had come, but it sounded right. She spoke of a soft opening and word of mouth to get people here. He worked alongside them setting up the back bar until late in the night.
Early the next morning he drove to the Hall. Ortega called as he got upstairs to Homicide. It gave Raveneau a chance to apologize.
‘Sorry about yesterday afternoon. I know you’ve worked this thing non-stop.’
‘No, I’m the asshole letting the press thing go to my head. This is the biggest investigation I’ve ever worked and I’m still trying to get my head around that. Despite what I said yesterday, I’m calling this morning to ask for your help. We’re going to have to give Khan back the building in a couple of days. His lawyer is on us and now the judge is too. Khan is going to lose his business if he can’t get in there and make cabinets, but I want to go through it again.’
‘Search the building again?’
‘Yes, and I’m wondering if you could come down and help us.’
‘When?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
‘See you then.’
It was the last thing he wanted to do this morning and he’d come in early to get a clean start on the day. But at eight o’clock Raveneau stood behind the other inspectors and listened as Ortega explained what he wanted to accomplish. When he finished Hagen started in on Khan.
‘Khan is a naturalized citizen, but his wife doesn’t look like she’s got all of her papers in order. I’m getting this from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I’ve got a friend who works for ICE. We can use this with Khan and I think we should. He needs to tell us why he’s still alive.’
Raveneau disliked the immigration angle. He disliked the way it had grown after 9/11 and again as the recession put the heat on illegal Hispanics. It was an excuse not to do police work, but he did agree that the owner, David Khan, was the one with the opportunity to kill the four employees. If any motive arose everything would focus on him. He listened briefly, then walked over to Ortega.
‘Where do you want me?’
‘I want you to go through Khan’s office again.’
‘Hasn’t it already been searched twice?’
‘Even more than that, but let’s do it again. We’re not going to get another chance.’
‘You got it.’
It wasn’t hard. The computer wasn’t here and neither were most of the files. Raveneau sat at Khan’s desk and looked through his pencils and rubber bands. He looked through the window at what Khan saw every day and tried to imagine a believable motive for Khan to kill his four employees, including one who had been with him since the start of the business twelve years ago. Drugs, smuggling, something illicit, but Ortega’s team was coming up with nothing. Interviews with the contractors and architects on Khan’s contact lists painted a picture of a hardworking man who strove to please his clients.
Raveneau went through a file cabinet that still held older records of past jobs and invoices. Khan’s small careful handwriting was easily identifiable. The records for 2008 and forward were missing and he confirmed with Ortega they were at Homicide and would also have to be returned soon. The employee records were at the Hall as well. There wasn’t much of anything in the office. Even the trash can was empty. The carpet that once sat under the desk was at the crime lab where blood was matched to one of the employees, but it was old blood and he doubted it was anything more than the employees cutting themselves while working.
He looked through the window again at the kitchen clean space where Khan stored completed cabinets. Two jobs were complete and waiting to ship. The newly built cabinets were wrapped individually in thin plastic to protect them, but that plastic was in tatters, cut loose when the cabinet interiors were searched. Khan was a meticulous man. Raveneau glanced at his handwriting again. He ran a small factory from this office and had earned a reputation for accuracy among those whose businesses rested on accuracy.
What was that Ortega said an architect told him? That Khan worked with wood yet worried over dimensions as if he was working with metal. Raveneau was turning that in his head when Ortega walked in.
‘Gibbs is back with coffee and something to eat. Come take a break.’
Raveneau checked his messages. He thanked Gibbs for the coffee and then walked down to the steel racks at the far end of the building that held Khan’s stored inventory. Different types of wood were on different racks. The larch ply Drury delivered was on stickers on the floor.
From behind him, Ortega said, ‘We confirmed he needed this plywood for a cabinet project here in the city. It’s on the plans he was working from and I talked to the architect and the contractor.’
Raveneau turned to him. ‘Where are you going to go with Drury?’
‘We’ll interview him again this week. I went back over his delivery sheet yesterday.’
‘What do you think about him quitting his job?’
‘I talked to Branson, his boss again. He told me Drury was probably going to quit anyway.’
‘Who quits a job nowadays?’
‘I will if I can’t find who killed these people. What happened here, Raveneau? What do you think and what are you doing down at this end of the building? You picked up your coffee and walked straight down here. If you see something I need to know what it is.’
Raveneau reached out. He put a hand on Ortega’s shoulder.
‘I am sorry about yesterday and I know what pressure you’re under. I didn’t walk down here because I had any new ideas, but I keep thinking about the delivery, the tight window and that the employees were all at their stations working against a deadline. I keep thinking they were shot by someone who knew where they would be.’
‘Khan knew where they would be.’
‘But why would he kill his employees? More to the point, you’ve got to have a very, very good reason to want to draw all the attention a homicide like this will bring.’
Ortega got called away and Raveneau lingered in the material storage area. He smelled fir. He touched smooth pieces of finish lumber and then looked over at the forklift. Dan Oliver, the employee who accepted the delivery set the plywood down on four inch by four inch stickers to keep the unit off the ground so a forklift could pick it up later. Then he parked the lift. The key was still in it.
Raveneau walked back to the unit of plywood and sat down on it. He ran his fingers along one of the steel bands holding it together and took another sip of coffee. Then, he thought, why not, but finished the coffee before laying down three pieces of wood he could slide the sheets of plywood on to. Then he went looking for a band cutter. He crossed the room to where he had seen tools stored and found one.
After cutting the two metal bands he slid the first sheet off and positioned it neatly on the wood stickers. He did the same with the next fifteen sheets, keeping the new pile exact and precise. A light sweat started on his forehead as well as the sense this was a little bit foolish. He felt the weight of each sheet now and each was four feet wide by eight feet long and three quarters of an inch thick. He rested a moment after getting through the next six sheets. That left twenty to go and he hoped Ortega didn’t walk back just yet. He didn’t really have a good explanation for why he was doing this.
He slid two more sheets off, then slowed and stood up as he slid off the next. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He had a pretty good idea, but he wasn’t there yet. All of the remaining sheets appeared to be joined together by long screws, and the oblong metal objects sat in pockets routed into the wood, each looking shiny and deadly, each resting in a wood pocket with packing around it to keep it from moving. There were four of them and routed into pockets alongside them, four end pieces nestled in the way a wedding ring might rest in velvet.
Raveneau touched the end of one and felt where the cap piece would screw in. Pack them with explosives and then screw on the cap piece, four casings about eighteen inches long, fat in the middle, narrowing at the nose, clean curved metal. He stared. He studied them before walking back to the saw cutting room and waving Ortega over.
‘Bruce, come take a look.’
And then Ortega was standing next to him saying, ‘Khan’s a bomb maker.’
Raveneau didn’t go there yet. He was still taking it in. Each was well machined, similar if not identical. This was production manufacturing. He turned to Ortega and asked, ‘Who’s the bomb guy we hired that was with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan?’
‘Yeah, I know who you mean. They call him Hurt Locker but I can’t think of his real name. Hagen knows him.’
‘Let’s get Hagen to call the bomb squad. Let’s see if we can get him here without the rest of the squad and before we call the Feds or anybody else.’