"The Brinks truck was transporting this gold bullion to the airport, where it was scheduled to go to Switzerland," Jeb said, reading a page from Detective Carters case binder. "An L. A. outfit called Latimer Commodities Exchange was in charge of the transport. We need to find out if Latimer is still in business. According to Carters notes, they brokered gold, silver, and platinum contracts."
He licked his fingertips, taking more pages of case notes out of the binder. After reading, he handed each off to us one at a time. "Says here that the standard gold bar used for bank-to-bank trade is something called a London Good Delivery Bar."
Hitch and I had nowhere to sit, so we stood in front of the desk reading the pages after Jeb was finished.
"There were three guards assigned to this truck," Jeb said. "Driver was Alan Parks, age thirty-four. Married, two kids."
Jeb looked up at Hitch, who was in the midst of transferring this info into his snazzy red leather journal.
"Get another crime book, will ya, Hitchens? That fancy writers journal is really starting to piss me off."
"Sorry, Skipper. I'll lose it as soon as I can." Hitch looked up from his writing. "We should probably see if Mrs. Parks and those two kids are still around."
"Wife was named Patty," Jeb said, as he found that on another page. "Carter and Briggs really shorthanded these write-ups. Didn't even put down the names of the children. Both were boys, ages six and eight, is all it says here. That makes them in their thirties today."
"Okay," Hitch said, and jotted that down as well. "We'll find out where Mrs. Parks and her two sons are. If they're available, we'll go talk to them."
"Damien Deseau, African-American, age twenty-nine, was the Brinks truck swamper," I said, reading a page in the late Detective Carter's binder. "That's probably the guy we just pulled out of the passenger seat. Unmarried. The GIB was Sergio Maroni, also unmarried, age thirty." GIB was patrol division slang for Guy in Back.
"We need to get these two skeletons sorted out," Jeb said. "Find out who's who. Fey Ray will do the bone scans and dental matches. He's got a forensic orthodontist on the way over here, but we gotta figure it's gonna take a while to find their X-rays 'cause we gotta run down their original dentists from over twenty-five years ago if they're even still around."
The forensics team found two old thermoses in the front seat of the truck. There was dried coffee residue in the bottoms. Both containers were quickly sent to the CSI techs, who were busily assembling a makeshift lab in the old ER and getting what equipment they needed sent over from the new Forensic Center at Cal State.
An evidence tech found the first bullet. It was buried in the passenger-side door panel of the Brinks truck's front seat. A.38 caliber standard-size round.
"We need to find out what kind of sidearm each of those Brinks guys carried," I told Hitch, who wrote down that note.
We were in a holding pattern until the crime techs got through with the truck and the assayer arrived, so we went outside again for some fresh air, sat on the loading dock, and worked on to-do lists. Ten minutes later a blue Lincoln Town Car pulled up and honked the horn. I walked over to the car.
"I'm from the Jewelry Mart," the driver called to me as I approached.
I directed the Lincoln to pull into the drive and park. When the driver got out, I could see he was a middle-aged dark-haired Hispanic man with a sagging beltline and a patch of male pattern baldness on the crown of his head about the size of a coffee saucer. He pulled a large rolling suitcase from the trunk, then turned to greet us.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Jose Del Cristo."
"Assayer?" I asked.
"You don't need to call me names," he quipped.
Great, I thought. All we needs is another goofy character.
Chapter 40.
Jeb didn't want the assayer to know that we had two dead guards and a Brinks truck from an '83 bullion heist stashed in the deserted ambulance bay. He instructed us to escort Jose Del Cristo up to the fourth floor and tell him as little as possible.
Jeb had set up a work area for the assayer in the old hospital administrator's office.
The three of us waited on the ground floor for the elevator. When it arrived we stepped inside.
"I was told you guys wanted me to do a gold assay and that it's very hush-hush, but nobody will tell me what it's about," Del Cristo said as he dragged his rolling suitcase onto the elevator.
"That's right and that's how it's gonna stay," I replied.
" 'Zat why you're hanging out in this old deserted hospital?" he pressed.
"No comment."
I pushed the fourth-floor button on the elevator panel and we rode up in silence.
The doors opened and we stepped out into a long corridor with green walls and linoleum floors, with Jose pulling his rolling suitcase behind him. Jeb was at the end of the corridor waiting for us. I introduced him to Jose and we entered the office.
Jeb had chosen this room because it was spacious with a built-in desk and two badly functioning chairs. He had randomly selected a gold bar out of one of the strongboxes and had personally carried it up here. The brick was approximately the size of a paperback novel and was now sitting in the center of the large wooden desk, glittering in the flickering ceiling light.
Jose walked over and peered down at it. "London Good Delivery Bar," he said. "First test is the easiest. Just gotta lift it."
He picked up the bar. I could tell by the way he handled it that the brick was extremely heavy.
"So far so good. 'Bout the right weight," he said, setting it back down.
As he unpacked his equipment, he started a running monologue. Aside from being a character, Jose was also a nonstop talker.
"London Good Delivery Bars weigh exactly four hundred troy ounces, which, if anybody's interested, is about twenty-seven pounds."
"When I picked it up to bring it here, I wasn't prepared for how heavy it was," Jeb commented.
"Very few metals are as dense as gold," Jose rambled on. "For instance, gold is twice as dense as lead and two and a half times as dense as steel. That's why it's hard to counterfeit a gold bar. Even if there's a lead core, it's still way too light. One metal that's heavy enough to substitute is platinum, but its actually more expensive than gold, so what's the point?
"Tungsten has enough density but its impossible to work with because tungsten has a melting point one thousand degrees higher than most commercial furnaces or kilns can reach. Also its an extremely hard metal. Gold is very soft. You can actually scar it with a fingernail like this." To prove his point he did just that.
He took a scale about the size of a shoe box out of the suitcase, then a bunch of vials full of different-colored liquid and a black sanding stone.
"Another metal that would work from a weight standpoint is depleted uranium," he went on. "Its heavy enough, easy to melt down, and at its heart not too expensive, but there are other drawbacks. Unless you're a government with a nuclear program, it's real hard to come bv, and of course it's radioactive so if you make a mistake and touch it you're dead in a few days, which most counterfeiters tell me is a major drawback."
Jose lifted the gold bar onto the shoe box-sized scale that had PN 2100 PRECISION BALANCE stamped on the side.
"Four hundred troy ounces to the hair," he reported as he read the printout. "Means your bar here is most likely legit because it's soft like gold and it's exactly the right weight. But you can't be absolutely, positively sure without more tests."