“Jason Hawley.”
He nodded. “Information from here on out is speculation because we’ve got no official documentation. We assume LeFleur told Hawley about the warehouse setup. Whose idea it was to steal the product… again, pure supposition. Maybe LeFleur wanted revenge. Maybe it was strictly about the money. LeFleur and Hawley didn’t have much planning time, roughly two months.”
“But if LeFleur had that much insider knowledge, he didn’t need much prep time.”
“Precisely. LeFleur knew enough about the supply-and-demand cycle to leave five full boxes containing the real OxyContin on top of two different stacks-”
“So how-”
“I’m getting to that.” Turnbull held up a hand, waving the waitress over for a refill. “The original manufacturer’s boxes were still in the individual locked storage areas at the facilities, but the prescription bottles inside the boxes had been replaced.”
“Replaced with what?”
“Everything from bottles filled with Flintstones vitamins to bottles filled with Tic Tac breath mints to bottles filled with Hot Tamales candies.”
“So if the inventory manager looked in the storage area, he or she would see the stacks of boxes of OxyContin and assume everything was A-okay?”
“Exactly. That’s why the actual time frame is unclear. Nothing was discovered until one of the reservations in North Dakota cracked open a box at the bottom of the stack, at the end of January, and found the tampered products. But we’re guessing they struck right after the shipments were delivered.”
“No surveillance cameras?”
“We checked. They were disabled on two separate occasions, two weeks apart.”
Disabling cameras would’ve been child’s play for J-Hawk, whose military job required high-tech breaking and entering.
“LeFleur maintained ties with the other warehouses, in addition to relationships with the other warehouse managers.”
The brotherhood vibe in the Native American community was strong, so LeFleur had an easy in, especially if he’d been hung out to dry by his white bosses on the sexual-harassment issue. “How long did it take the other hospitals to check their inventory?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“Why wasn’t it prioritized?”
“It was. It would’ve taken longer due to infighting between the hospitals and the tribes. We had to call in the DEA, and they ran the rest of the physical checks with permission from the individual tribal councils.”
“How many bottles of OxyContin are we talking about?”
“Total? Four thousand.”
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “That much OxyContin is prescribed on the reservations?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s the street value?”
His gaze slid away. Then back. “The average street-sale price is about a dollar a milligram. For easy math, let’s say a bottle of one hundred eight-milligram pills sells for eight hundred bucks on the street. Multiply that by the number of missing bottles…”
I did a quick calculation. “That’s over three million dollars.”
“Not exactly chump change.”
“Why haven’t I heard about this on the news?” Seemed every media outlet loved to release stories about Indians that held a negative slant.
Agent Turnbull lifted a brow. “What part of covert ops is confusing, Sergeant Major?”
“What part of arresting Jason Hawley for interstate drug trafficking is confusing, Agent Turnbull? Especially if you knew he was involved?”
“The agencies didn’t originally connect Major Hawley-who we’re aware is a decorated war veteran-to the thefts.”
“Why not?”
“Because like you said, Hawley wasn’t Indian. He was only partnered with Ellis LeFleur for a short time. According to people who knew LeFleur, he vanished at the end of January. Hawley was a family man who stuck around the area. Initially, we focused on tracking LeFleur because we suspected an inside job.”
“Did you find LeFleur?”
He nodded. “About two months ago in a mangled mass of metal after a high-speed chase in Kansas City that didn’t end well.”
“Did LeFleur point the finger at Hawley?”
“No, he died in the accident. But his girlfriend survived. We recovered seven hundred fifty bottles from their residence. There wasn’t enough cash on hand to convince us LeFleur had taken the whole lot of four thousand. When we offered the girlfriend immunity from prosecution, she admitted LeFleur had a partner but swore she didn’t know his name. So we backtracked. During the search, we learned Jason Hawley had been diagnosed with incurable cancer.”
I kept my face neutral.
“Why was a dying man spending all his time on the road, away from medical treatment, away from his family? It sent up a red flag.”
“And you’d been following him for the last month, waiting for him to… what? Make a mistake? Make a sale?” Die? I could not wrap my head around that devious, thieving side of my friend.
The maroon fake leather had no give when Turnbull sank back. “We’d been waiting for him to make a sale.”
“You know who the buyer was?”
“Again, suspected. And it was confirmed when Hawley contacted Cherelle Dupris. He had contact with Cherelle on three separate occasions, that we know of. Which indicated to us that Saro and Victor were playing hardball with him.”
“Why?”
“Who knows what goes through drug dealers’ minds? Probably Victor and Saro demanded a reduced price and it pissed Hawley off because he knew exactly what his product was worth. We’re ninety percent sure Hawley decided not to sell to them the last time he met with Cherelle.”
The night he was killed at Clementine’s. No need for either of us to point that out, but the picture for motive was becoming clearer. “Had Hawley sold much out on the open market?”
“Near as we can figure he was down to eight hundred bottles. So assuming he and LeFleur made an even split, he’d managed to dump twelve hundred bottles over the last five months.”
“Where?”
Agent Turnbull’s face shuttered. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“So it’s pointless to ask if you’ve tracked down the other six hundred sixty bottles that weren’t in Jason’s hotel room or in his vehicle?”
“Where did you get the information about Hawley’s personal effects?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” My neener-neener response made him mad, although he tried to hide it. “Where’s the money? If J-Hawk was hocking drugs, he’d have a lot of cash. The omnipotent feds haven’t been able to track it down?”
“No.” His eyes turned hostile. “Thanks to you, we’re right back where we started.”
“How can you blame any of this on me?”
“We know you discovered that Cherelle was Saro and Victor’s screen and approached Cherelle at Clementine’s. Instead of walking away when Victor and Saro showed up, you followed them and kept up the pretense of campaigning for sheriff. Any law enforcement sniffing around spooks them.”
“Ah ah ah. Wrong, bucko. No pretense. I am campaigning for sheriff. Anything I said to Victor and Saro dealt with my campaign. Since I assume you or one of your G-men were in the vicinity, you also know I never wavered from keeping the conversation about getting their votes. So try again.”
“Then explain last night at Stillwell’s? What the fuck were you doing going after Benji Bad Wound? Showing him up in front of an entire bar full of witnesses?”
“I had no freakin’ clue who he was. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not the type to sit around and let a bully have free rein to beat the shit out of someone. No one else stepped in, so I did.”
“Why do you think no one else got involved?”
It occurred to me, for the first time, that everyone in the bar probably knew Benji was Saro and Victor’s nephew. The reason no one-including Steve Stillwell-had stepped in? Nobody wanted to incur the wrath or attention of the reservation bad boys. But I’d heard that blasted “Underdog” theme song inside my head and jumped in, fists flying.