Because I now suspected that my new partner was afraid of ghosts, and because we were expecting to uncover a third skeleton inside, I did the honors.
I gloved up and pulled the door wide.
Chapter 38.
The truck was empty.
No third guard in the back, an interesting development.
"So the third guard probably did the deed," Hitch reasoned. "He jumped his buddies and made off with the fifteen mil in gold bullion."
He was visibly relieved a third skeleton wasn't lying around in the truck like some gruesome special effect from Pirates of the Caribbean.
"We need to get the identities of all three Brinks guards from the old case file and compare dental charts so we can identify the missing one," Jeb said. "That should tell us which one of these guys was the potential doer."
He turned to Ray Tsu. "You can remove the two guys from the front compartment now."
We were just getting set to let the CSIs eome in to do a trace evidence sweep when I noticed four closed strongboxes pushed up next to the bench at the front of the compartment.
"I wonder why they didn't take those," I said. "Be easier to carry."
"Because you'd need a forklift to move fifteen million in gold bullion. The killer probably took it out in individual bricks," Hitch replied. "What would that much gold weigh anyway?" He reached down with a gloved hand and opened the top of the nearest box.
That's when we got the first big surprise.
Resting inside the strongbox were at least twenty-five gold bricks. They glittered brilliantly in the fluorescent light.
"Get the fuck outta here," Hitch whispered.
We opened the second box and, like the first, it was also filled to the top with bullion. So were the last two.
"Let's back out of here and think this over," 1 said.
We jumped down and told Jeb, Alexa, and Dahlia what we had just found. After they had all looked at the gold, everyone stood behind the truck talking at once.
The question was, why steal an armored car, kill at least two of the guards, and then leave fifteen million in bullion behind, parked with two skeletons in a concrete well house for over twenty-five years?
"Unless this gold is bogus," I offered. "Maybe somebody switched it out with painted lead or something."
"I'll get a metallurgist out here right away and find out," Alexa said. "The Jewelry Mart should have somebody who can assay this. I'll get someone who's bonded and sworn to secrecy."
While she was working on that, the rest of us tried to come to grips with this new find. It changed all my theories.
"What is going on here?" Dahlia said. It was the second time in two days I'd seen her off balance. "Was this a gold bullion heist or not?"
"We'll know more once these bars are tested," Jeb told her.
Ten minutes later I saw Hitch getting some coffee from a portable urn one of the CSIs had brought in. He carried an extra cup over to me behind the armored car. We stood, blowing steam across the cup rims, considering the new developments.
"I think you're wrong," I finally told him, pointing at the gold. "That's our Act Two complication."
He smiled widely at me. "You're absolutely right, dawg, and since we have Act One in place and this kick-ass complication in Act Two, now it's all about…"
ACT THREE
Chapter 39.
An hour later, Alexa had returned to her office and Dahlia to her trial in progress at the downtown courthouse. There were now fifteen men and women from the MEs office and CSI assembled inside the deserted hospital building. Some wore CSI jumpsuits and carried satchels full of equipment, others were from the lab or the ME s office and wore white coats. None of them had been told why they were here. They stood listening as Captain Calloway filled them in on the old armored car case.
Hitch and I stood behind Jeb and listened. He finished with the briefing and then launched into a rant on security precautions.
"It s extremely important that you protect the confidentiality of this investigation," he said to the roomful of earnest-looking geeks. "You cannot tell anyone about this. Not your wife, not your brother nobody.
Because, while you may think you can impress upon them the severity of the situation, my experience has been once you tell anything to anyone outside the immediate scope of the investigation, it always leaks."
The tech team looked solemn, but who knew how seriously any of them were actually taking this warning.
Ray Tsu, as a supervising coroner, had agreed to personally wrangle the ME staff for us. He stood off to one side, looking like a wispy anime character: thin build, limp black hair pulled behind both ears, a hollow chest that was a concavity of bones. He may have looked frail, but he was well respected and one of the top MEs in the department.
"The perpetrators of this crime may still be around," Jeb warned. "We have to take every precaution to keep what were doing here absolutely quiet so they don't cut and run."
He paused for effect and looked at each face of his handpicked team. "Okay," he finally said. "You guys know what to do. Get at it."
Everyone broke ranks and the work began. The truck was already open. After a quick round of crime-scene photographs, the MEs went in and carefully removed the skeletons from the front seat, placing them on plastic sheets before moving them onto gurneys and wheeling them off.
The power inside the old, deserted hospital was still connected for the movie companies who shot there, enabling the coroner's crew to transport the bodies by elevator to the OR theaters on four.
After everything got going, there wasn't much for Hitch and me to do. I was out by the loading dock making notes when my new partner drifted outside to talk on his cell. I overheard a little of his conversation.
"You gotta slow it down, Jerry. This is better than even I thought, but I'm under a police department cone of silence. I can't tell you or anybody else what's going on. But when it breaks, you're gonna kiss me. Keep our auction warm, but don't bring it to a head quite yet. This is definitely going to be bigger than Mosquito."
He listened, then said, "Back attcha," and hung up. He noticed me sitting nearby and shot a wide grin in my direction. "Working on your second mil, dawg."
"Hitch, we need to stop trying to make money off all these dead people and just work the case."
"It's been my experience that the dead are extremely forgiving." This philosophy supplied by a man who seemed unreasonably terrified of them.
"Jeb is pulling the old Brinks case record. Like Vulcuna, it was in the hard-copy room at the warehouse. A runner is bringing the stuff over right now."
"You don't even care what UTA just told me?" He had a little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Not even a teensy-weensy bit interested?"
"Uh… well, I'm trying real hard not to think too much about all that money."
"It will make you happy," he teased.
"Not now. Can we just stay focused on the case, please?"
Twenty minutes later Jeb had a makeshift office set up in the ambulance dispatcher's old space. He had decided to watch over this part of the investigation personally, which was great by me. We were taking a big chance not telling Chase Beal what we were up to, and it's always good strategy to have a boss between you and any angry politician who's running for office.
The old hospital was basically without furniture. Hitch explained that on each production the set decoration department took care of that. Somebody had found a discarded desk and had moved it down to the ambulance bay along with an old scavenged sprung-back swivel chair. By the time the case file boxes arrived from the records warehouse, our captain was ready to go.
We started thumbing through two surprisingly thin case binders from '83 on the missing Brinks truck. The cops who had worked this heist were a couple of Metro Division bank squad dicks named Robert Carter and Jeremy Briggs. Hitch made a call downtown and found out both had retired in the late eighties and had subsequently gone EOW, which stood for End of Watch. Department-speak for dead.