Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (10 page)

She thought about it. I could tell she was weighing the pros and cons.

“Okay. But I’ll call you if I have my car back.”

I gave her my card. “If I don’t hear from you, what time should I plan to be here?”

She thought about it. “The day after tomorrow, my first house is the Olmsteads. They like me there by eight because Mrs. Olmstead heads out to her yoga class shortly after, and she usually has special requests.”

“So I should arrive here when?”

“The Olmsteads are on Dollar Point, fifteen minutes from here. So if you could come here at seven-thirty, that would give me time to load up and make sure Mia is comfortable with you and your car.”

I pointed to my Jeep. Spot was now awake, and he held his head out the window.

“My dog Spot likes to ride along. Do you think Mia would be okay with that?”

Evan looked over at the Jeep. “She loves dogs, but he’s bigger than any dog Mia’s ever met. I assume he’s friendly?”

“Very.”

“Would it be okay if I introduced Mia to him now? Then she can get used to the idea before you come.”

“Of course.”

Evan went inside and came back out with Mia.

“You remember meeting Owen?” Evan said, her hand on Mia’s shoulder.

Mia looked at me, and made a tentative nod.

I raised my hand in a little wave and said, “Hi, Mia.”

“Owen might be giving us a ride the day after tomorrow. He has a big dog named Spot.” She pointed toward my Jeep. Mia looked where Evan pointed. Her eyes widened when she saw Spot.

“You know how you like dogs, Mia? Would you like to meet Spot? Let’s go meet Spot.”

We walked over. When Spot saw us coming, he started wagging, his tail banging back and forth between the front and rear seat backs.

I grabbed Spot’s head to show that he was tolerant of any kind of touch. “Spot, meet Mia and Evan. Here, Mia, you can pet Spot. He loves it when you pet him.”

Evan knew exactly how to handle it. She stroked Spot’s head. “Oh, Mia, Spot loves a pet.”

Mia reached out, slowly. Spot’s head protruding from the rear window was at the same level as Mia’s head. Spot sniffed her hand, which made her pull it back. I put my hand over Spot’s muzzle so he couldn’t sniff her. She reached forward and pet him. He wagged. Mia made a huge smile.

“Spot likes pets,” she said.

“Understatement of the month,” I said.

Evan grinned, and I knew that Spot had once again given me entreé into someone else’s world.

“I’ll see you the day after tomorrow,” I said.

ELEVEN

In the morning, I took Spot with me in the Jeep, headed up and over Spooner Summit, cruised down to Carson City and then north to Reno on the freeway. The contrast from cloudy cool Tahoe to hot sunny desert was dramatic.

The Reno Armored company, northeast of the Reno Tahoe airport, was actually in Sparks, Reno’s twin city to the east. It didn’t seem fair that a Sparks company ignored its home territory and traded on Reno’s famous name. But then the Reno Tahoe airport, which itself was nearly in Sparks, traded on the Tahoe name and the allure of a mountain lake that was out of sight almost 2000 feet above and twenty miles southwest of Reno.

I pulled into the parking lot of a new industrial building that housed an auto body shop and a truck detailing store. Reno Armored was on the far right side.

I told Spot to be good, then walked to the entrance under the modern sign that said, ‘Reno Armored – Your Security is Why We’re Here.’

I pushed through the glass door.

The air conditioning inside was set to sub-zero. The thin young woman behind the counter wore a thick sweater over a long-sleeved blouse. A wool scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her lips were blue and her fingernails were purple underneath clear, glossy polish.

“Good morning,” she said, a hint of chatter in her teeth.

“Hi. I’m Owen McKenna, here to see Randy Bosworth.”

She looked down at an appointment book. “Yes, of course. I’ll let him know you’re here.” She picked up a phone, dialed three numbers and spoke in a high voice with a tremor of shiver in it. “Mr. McKenna is here to see you.”

She hung up and said, “Mr. Bosworth will be out in a minute.”

“Thanks.” I turned and looked at a wall that had several large, framed poster prints showing a variety of armored trucks, painted with cool-tone grays and blacks. The framed prints were displayed with fancy lighting as if the pictures were of fighter jets. Each poster had a slogan at the bottom. ‘We Preserve Your World’ and ‘We Treat Your Money Like It’s Ours.’

I heard the whoosh and click of a pneumatic locking system as a door opened.

“Mr. McKenna,” a voice said behind me. “I’m Randy Bosworth.”

I turned to see a young man with the skin of someone who’d spent all of his life in the desert sun without a hat and augmented his UV input with a tanning bed. He was only a couple of inches shorter than my six-six, and wide enough that he must have weighed 275 pounds. He wore navy trousers, and a white shirt with a stitched-on Reno Armored logo patch that looked similar to a sheriff’s logo. On his left hip was a holstered gun. He had on a narrow navy tie, loosened at the neck. Its presence suggested that Bosworth regularly met with clients or potential clients. Despite the early hour and the frigid indoor climate, his shirt already had sweat stains around his armpits.   He contrasted with the frozen, skinny receptionist the way an arctic walrus would with a young fawn trapped out on the frozen tundra.

We shook hands. Up close, the pistol protruding from his holster looked like a .45 Smith & Wesson.

“Thanks for coming down,” Bosworth said, not sounding thankful at all. “Where should we begin?”

The man had a metallic, fiery breath that would blister stainless steel. If you mixed hot chili peppers with something radioactive, plutonium maybe, you’d get close. I stepped back. “Let’s start with the truck that was robbed. I’d like to look at it.”

“Our number two lockbox,” he said. “Come with me.”

Now that I was talking to Bosworth face-to-face, his faint accent was beginning to sound Australian.

Bosworth turned and walked over to a heavy door set into an unusually heavy frame. He punched a code into a keypad, and I heard a locking bolt slide. He led me through the door out of the office area into a large garage. As he walked, he said, “The Douglas County cops spent hours going over the truck. But it sounds like all they found were our people’s fingerprints.”

There were two armored trucks inside the garage. Another man, dressed in multiple, thick layers like the receptionist, was polishing one of the trucks, making it shine like the ones pictured in the lobby. The other truck was somewhat dirty.

“Lockbox number two,” Bosworth said, pointing to the dirtier truck.

“How many trucks does your company have?” I asked as I walked up to the truck.

“Three lockboxes. Plus a longer-haul transport, which is out on a trip to the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. We also have a pickup for local errands. It doesn’t haul money, but it does have our same logo paintjob. Image is everything in the security business. Which is why having a lockbox emptied is such a big deal. Very bad for our image. Insurance covers the loss, but our cred still suffers big time.”

I walked along the side wall of the truck. The truck appeared to be like other armored transports I’d seen. Small, thick, bulletproof windows in a large squarish box. Heavy gauge steel body panels and door hinges. Locks that would take a crowbar and a sledge hammer to dent. Loopholes through which occupants could return fire if attacked.

There were video cameras at every corner of the truck and one in the center of the rear, above the rear door.

“You’ll notice that the cams are unobtrusive,” Bosworth said. “But they’re still obvious. Each lockbox also has six hidden cameras, in the body seams, the engine grill, at the inner edge of the wheel wells.” He pointed.

“So a naive robber can tape over the obvious cameras but still be a movie star,” I said.

“Exactly. Same for our outdoor microphones. You make a sound near our machine, it’s recorded for posterity.”

“You mentioned that your system is online continuously.”

“Right. But we’ve still got all the feeds recorded by the truck’s black box. Every aspect of our security has built-in redundancy. I gave the cops the downloaded copies of our computer log as well as those from the black box. They’re going to have their cyber expert look for anything unusual.” Bosworth reached into his pocket, pulled out a computer memory stick, and held it up. “The system records on the black box memory and a backup memory simultaneously. In addition to our computers, I’ve already saved another copy on this stick.”

“I will need to look at that.”

Bosworth looked irritated. “Whatever Mr. Timmens wants,” he said like a petulant child.

I walked to the back of the truck. “After the robbers sent your men walking away, what happened next?”

“The back door was already open from when Larry unlocked it and got out. The camera shows that one of the robbers had a large bolt cutter. He stepped inside and came out with two bags, which is all they had for the delivery.”

“How much is each bag?”

“Approximately fifty pounds.”

“I mean, how much money was it?”

“Oh,” Bosworth said. “Money in multiple denominations for an operation like a casino averages about five thousand dollars a pound.”

“So two fifty pound bags is one hundred pounds,” I said. “At five thousand dollars a pound, that would be five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Right.”

“Was the cash marked in any way?”

Bosworth shook his head. “No. And we didn’t record serial numbers or put dye packs in the bags. We only do that on what we call our dye-for-distance shipments, which is anything over one million dollars and one hundred miles one way. But this was a relatively small delivery and very routine. Statistically, it’s not cost-effective to go to the extra trouble when it’s small and close.”

“What is Reno Armored’s liability in a situation like this?”

Bosworth shook his head. “Nothing. Outside of the damage to our rep, insurance covers it all. As long as we meet all of their security parameters, we’re covered.”

“When you’re carrying cash for a client and it is stolen, how long does the client have to wait to be paid?”

“There’s barely any wait at all,” Bosworth said. “We belong to a virtual bank network. When a client gives us cash to bring to the bank, the moment we accept the cash, it’s like the client already deposited it in the bank. In fact, as we sign for the shipment on the iPad app, the deposit instantly shows up in the client’s bank account. It’s that immediacy that assures the client. Of course, if it turns out that there is a discrepancy in the deposit, the account balance is later adjusted.”

“But this was money going the opposite direction,” I said. “Instead of taking money from the casino to the bank, you were taking it from the bank to the casino. What happens then?”

“As soon as the robbery was reported, the virtual bank network worked in reverse. The bank that sent the cash got an immediate credit from the insurance company for the original amount. Then that bank simply sent out a new cash transfer. It went to the casino by a different armored transport company, I’m embarrassed to say. That hurts. But it really doesn’t matter to the casino. The replacement cash arrived less than two hours later. The cash is always covered by insurance, and a robbery doesn’t really interrupt business much beyond the loss of productivity when employees lose work time talking about it at the water cooler. The only people holding the bag, so to speak, are the insurance companies. But of course, that’s their business. They get paid healthy premiums to cover things like robbery or fire or anything else that takes cash out of the system.”

I looked around at the garage. “The money you haul. Where do you store it if it’s not on your trucks?”

Bosworth turned and pointed to the far corner of the garage. “See that garage door? It’s heavy-duty and secure and raises and lowers just like the others. But it doesn’t lead to the outside.”

“It’s a facade,” I said.

“Right. Behind it is our vault. It’s the same as the vaults banks use. Fireproof, bomb proof, impossible to break into. It has a timed entry system and requires coordinated inputs from two people who each have their own code and key.”

I nodded. I walked to the rear door of the truck. “Okay if I look inside?”

“Of course. The door is unlocked. Inside you’ll see that there are no windows, just a video screen and microphone. That’s the only way the rear guard can communicate with the men in front. There’s a touchscreen input so the guard can switch back and forth between any of the camera feeds.”

I lifted up on a heavy handle, pulled open the door, grabbed a handle at the side of the truck, and climbed a two-rung ladder into the truck.

The truck’s cargo area was spartan in extreme. It had large metal bins at the front wall. On the floor was a locker with a locking lid.