“You get Mr. Stafford what he needed?” he asked without preamble. He did not like Mrs. Johnson, and she did not like him.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “Who is that man, anyway? Nobody can figure him out.”
“He’s an auditor from DLA,” Carson said. “It’s nothing special to do with us. DLA’s looking for a pattern on some old fraud cases, apparently. Which files did he want, exactly?”
“He wanted all the personnel files. Well, not actually— he wanted access to all the files. Including yours, by the way.”
Carson kept his expression neutral “That’s fine. There’s nothing here that DLA doesn’t already have on file in Washington. Give him whatever he needs. And bring me Mr. Lambry’s file. He apparently was serious about quitting, so we need to start the termination paperwork on him.”
He looked back down at his own paperwork as she started to leave. Then she stopped in the doorway. “Oh,” she said. “He wanted a map of Georgia.
Ella Mae had one in her car.”
Carson looked up again, perplexed. “He say what for?”
“Nope. That man don’t exactly talk it up, you know what I’m sayin’?”.
“Okay. Close that door on your way out, please.”
After she left, Carson swiveled around in his chair. He thought about the Georgia map in his own desk. She hadn’t said city map. She’d said state map. Hadn’t she? He picked up the phone and called her back.
“Did Mr. Stafford want an Atlanta map or a state map?” he asked.
“State of Georgia. Said he had an Atlanta map. I believe the motor pool provides a city map in all their cars.,” Mrs. Johnson sounded a little hurry.
He hung up without replying. So it was a state map. Now why in the hell would Stafford want a state map?
And what was that bit about the fraud hot line? The more he thought about it, the more uncertain he was about what Stafford was doing here.
The buyer hadn’t been thrilled, either. Tangent had called him from home, using the usual code, but Maude had been across the street visiting a sick neighbor, so Carson didn’t have to go find a pay phone.
He’d told Tangent why Stafford was there, and expressed the opinion that he wouldn’t be there very long. Tangent had requested Stafford’s full name, civil service grade, and home organization.
“Why?” Carson had asked after giving Tangent the information.
“We’ll check him out. See if he’s telling the truth about why he’s there.”
“You can do that?”
“In our business, Carson, we always do that. Lots of people say they’re one thing, turn out to be quite another. It doesn’t take long, which is good, because we don’t have all that much time.”
Carson was alarmed by that last. “Has something happened? Is the Army—”
“No, nothing yet,” Tangent. “But we have to operate on the assumption that they’ll discover it’s missing. If they don’t, great. If they do, a sale might become very tough to pull off. You do understand that, right?” Carson had said that he did, and Tangent said he’d call in the next day or so with a reading on Stafford.
Now Carson thought about his million-dollar prize. This damned Stafford was definitely not a complication he needed right now, especially if he pulled the string on Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance. Carson knew he should be doing something about that, but he wasn’t at all sure what to do.
Stafford closed the oversized three-ring binder and plopped it back onto the desk. He’d been skimming through the DRMO reference binders for the past hour and a half, doo VJ dling on the blotter pad as he thought about the case. Most of the people who had been caught fiddling the surplus material system had been tripped up by their own runaway greed: GS-us and GS-12s who suddenly sported Cadillacs or second homes on a mid-five-figure salary. Coworkers would always notice, always.
Eventually, someone would call into the Defense Department fraud hot line. The usual pattern was a small scam that got bigger and bigger, until the scammer attracted attention by overreaching..
But headquarters knew that there had to be guys out there who were smart bad guys. Tap the honey pot, but do it infrequently, with lots of cutouts between you and the actual stuff, and make your money after the fact through kickbacks from the people who were getting an unfair bidding advantage, not from stealing or selling stuff directly.
He’d been telling the truth when he told Carson that he’d picked the Atlanta DRMO partly because of its size. But now that he was here, he wasn’t sure about what to do next. Carson was a potentially interesting guy, but that alone didn’t make him a suspect. He shuffled through the personnel folders to find Carson’s file. He went immediately to the DD-398 form, the security personal-history questionnaire, and read it.
If there was an auction scam in place here, Carson would just about have to know about it. If Carson was running something, Stafford’s request for access to the personnel files and that throw-away mention of the DOD fraud hot line should have seemed like opening shots. He thought he’d seen the man’s face tighten up when he’d asked those questions, although it was hard to tell. Carson had perfected one of those civil-servant masks of workday insouciance, an expression of blandness of which dirt would be proud.
He decided to get some early lunch, then spend the rest of the day walking around by himself through the DRMO industrial areas to see what he could learn by getting people to talk to him. Maybe stir up the employees a little bit, see if there were some grudges out there. It wouldn’t be long before that action got back to Carson, and maybe that would shake something loose. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.
He started his walking tour an hour and a half later, beginning in the outside lay-down area. Talking to the employees wasn’t as easy as he had thought it would be, since most of them were driving forklifts in and around the warehouse complex. He did notice that no one seemed interested in challenging him when he went into areas clearly marked with restricted access signs. He finally came upon the employee lunch room in warehouse two and went in for a cup of coffee, but his efforts at conversation with the half a dozen or so people in there were politely rebuffed. He left after a half hour of getting nowhere, then remembered his cover story: He was a DLA auditor. Auditors brought only trouble, so of course the employees weren’t going to invite him to their coffee breaks. They might even be afraid of him.
He wandered through some more of the warehouses, which by this time had all begun to look alike. He ended up in the warehouse immediately adjacent to the demil machine. The Monster apparently was not running.
The feed-assembly area contained both the feed and back loop of the demil machine’s conveyor system, which snaked around this warehouse’s floor, surrounded by a pair of waist-level safety railings that paralleled the course of the belt. The belt-loading area was in the back of the warehouse, where three heavy steel doors admitted forklifts from other warehouses. The belt, carrying the material to be destroyed, exited this warehouse through the connecting wall, entering the demil building through a screen-shielded aperture that was draped with stiff strips of rubber in front of two steel flap doors. There was a normal walk through door with a small window in it just to the right of the interbuilding aperture.
A crew of foifr men was loading the conveyor belt with material as it was brought in by roaring, smoky forklifts. Three of them were black; the fourth, a stupid-looking man of indeterminate age, was white. They would pile the components into plastic cartons on the belt, and then one of them would advance the belt a few feet to make room for the next pile. Stafford walked to the back of the room and watched for a few minutes. The crew ignored him except for the white man. Finally the last forklift backed out and the warehouse was silent. The three black men walked toward the back, where there was a small coffeepot on a table.