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“About eight months ago, some guns went missing from Naval Base San Diego. It was the third time in as many months. My boss sent me undercover to see if I could figure out who was stealing the weapons and how they were doing it.”
The waitress arrived at their table. “Aloha, how are you this evening? Is this your first time here?” She was in her early twenties with a big smile pasted on her face. When they all stared at her in silence, her smile faltered. “Um, would you like to see menus?”
“Just bring us four Big Swell IPAs,” Cain said.
“Alrighty then,” she said and walked back toward the bar.
“You were saying?” Mac prompted.
Sinclair picked up his story again. “Anyway, I went undercover and found one guy who helped get the weapons out, but he didn’t know anything about what happened to them from there. He had no clue who was in charge or even who was next up the ladder from him. He was paid to drop the weapons in a certain spot on a certain date and keep his mouth shut. The only thing he did know was that the weapons were headed for Hawai’i, and he only found that out because of sheer happenstance.
“He was walking along a pier, picking up some stuff that he’d ordered for the Navy, and saw the crates he’d dropped off being loaded into a container. He asked the guy where it was going, and he said Honolulu. It was just blind fucking luck.”
“So how did you get in with the Coast Guard?” Mac asked. This whole thing was blowing her mind. What the hell had she fallen into? Was her life always going to be such a mess? Her stomach churned, and her head started to bang again.
“My partner and I came over and tried to track what happened to the crate, but there was no paperwork. It was like that crate didn’t even exist. We asked around but got nowhere. Then we asked other agencies for help. The DEA told us they were aware a drug smuggling ring was operating in Honolulu. Drugs were being brought in by ship but then disappearing before they got into port. The searches they’d conducted, looking for the stuff, had gotten nowhere. They knew meth was coming from Mexico, but once it left San Diego, like the weapons, it seemed to disappear into thin air.
“Who figured out it was Owens and his crew?” Dane asked.
“No one. We realized the only way the drugs and stolen weapons could disappear like that was if they were taken off the ship at sea, but it’s a huge friggin’ ocean, and how were we going to track when the stuff disappeared?”
The waitress arrived to deliver their beers.
“Thanks,” Mac said. She knew she shouldn’t drink with a concussion but with everything that was going on and now Rutledge AKA Sinclair’s revelations, it was too much. She took a deep swallow of hers. This day was just full of surprises. The way things were going, she was going to need a lot more beers.
“We decided to track the next shipment. We got the information from the clerk for the next drop. We’d left him in place so we could maybe figure out what was going on. We watched the guns, saw them get picked up and loaded onto a container ship. A smaller one. We watched it via satellite as it made its way over here. When it got to port, we had the DEA board and look for the container. They found it, but there was nothing in it except the toys that had been loaded in California. The guns only took up a small part of the crate. But here’s the kicker. The only thing that happened on board that ship was a visit from a Coast Guard vessel.”
“That’s what made you suspicious?” Mac asked.
“It was the only logical answer. My boss reached out to someone high up in the Coast Guard, and the plan was born. I was to come over here and work for CGIS. See if I could get wind of what the hell was going on.”
Mac took another sip of beer. Sinclair being undercover made sense when she looked back. The hushed phone calls and the stopped conversations when she entered the room. The disappearances on occasion and the constant searching of containers at the port.
“But something happened back in California,” Cain said.
Sinclair nodded. “Yeah. Three months ago. The guy we initially found, the clerk, was killed.”
Mac broke out in a cold sweat just hearing those words. “Oh, my god,”
“Yeah.” Sinclair took a pull of his beer. “It was bad. Hit and run. They left him to die in a ditch.”
“Shit,” Dane mumbled.
“We lost the trail at that end, but the shipments kept coming. We knew because stuff was still going missing. The agents in my office tried to figure out who was doing the stealing now, but it was impossible. It wasn’t one guy in the warehouse anymore. It was all done by computer. Things were being re-routed, and by the time someone realized they were missing, they’d vaporized. Deleted out of the system.” He took a swallow of his beer again. “Anyway, by that time, I suspected Casper was involved somehow.”
“How did you know?” Mac demanded. “What did I miss?” That was the crux of the situation for Mac. Not only had she missed that Casper was crooked, but she’d missed that Sinclair was Sinclair and not Rutledge.
Sinclair shook his head. “You didn’t miss anything. You knew something was off with Casper, just like I did. The only difference was, I had the resources to track it down. Casper was a gambler. That’s where he would disappear to all the time. He would say he was out investigating a case and take off to see his bookie, and since Hawai’i is one of only two states where all gambling is illegal, it’s done in bars and parks and all kinds of underground places.”
Mac tapped her beer glass. “So are you saying he didn’t screw cases up on purpose? That he was just trapped by his addiction?” Guilt hit her hard in the stomach. She’d been so quick to condemn Casper. What he’d needed was help.
“Don’t go feeling guilty just yet. Casper has been blackmailing people to feed his habit for a while now. He also ran a couple of hookers to make some cash. He had a problem, but his moral compass was crooked long before gambling got its claws into him. Besides, we think he killed Owens.”
That stopped her cold. Her lungs refused to inflate. Casper killed Owens? She blinked in shock. That thought had just never occurred to her. The possibility hadn’t remotely entered her brain. Which begged the question, had she lost her edge? Maybe all the shit in Minnesota with Karl had affected her ability to do her job. She stared at the table. How could she have not seen Casper as Owens’s killer? Dane squeezed her thigh under the table. She covered his hand with her own, drawing strength from it. The hits seem to be coming hard and fast. She needed an anchor. “Why would Casper kill Owens? Besides, he didn’t dive. He said he was claustrophobic, and being underwater freaked him out.”
Sinclair nodded. “We think he had a partner who did the diving. We think Owens was killed because Casper’s partner wanted Owens dead. Somehow, he’d become a liability.”
Because of the motherboards? Were they worried that he knew about the motherboards and he was a loose end to tie up or was it because he was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the action? Either one would fit his personality.
