Page 96 of Under Cover
“We arenotsending him back in there,” Natalia said, and it was so rare that she ever contradicted anything Harding said that the shocked silence was actually puzzled, because nobody could believe she’d done that.
“Let’s get through the briefing, Tal,” Harding murmured. “I don’t want to make any promises in case we can’t come up with a better plan.”
She growled. Actually growled, but Crosby looked at her evenly.
“Your wife and kids, Natalia,” he said. “They’re exactly the people we’re trying to protect here.”
She growled again but subsided when Harding glared at her.
“Okay, so Crosby took his rest day seriously and spent it studying the data we’ve pulled up on Marcy Beauchamp and Courtland Cavendish, and he discovered something interesting.”
All eyes turned to Crosby, who picked up the thread. “Cavendish has ties to Jimmy Creedy,” Crosby told them. “The paper called him a union leader, but I know that’s bullshit because I hear him badmouthing the real union leader of warehouse and dock workers as a pussy. His words. Don’t get mad. So Jimmy apparently got enoughcommunityclout to not get anyone up in arms about that, and he’s cozy with Cavendish, which is good. We know at least one member of McEnany’s brass that he keeps trying to please.” He paused for breath, and Garcia took his turn.
“And Crosby sent this to me to ask for facial rec, and I think we have another.”
Crosby grinned at him through his still healing face, looking excited to have helped. Garcia wanted to lay on the praise thick because nobody else had seen Jimmy Creedy’s nasty, ugly mug in that series of pictures they’d pulled on Cavendish, but then, Crosby had been to Creedy’s apartment once every other day for the last six weeks. Crosby was maybe the only one of them who could.
“It wasn’t Creedy,” Garcia told them. “But Crosby’s been pretty good at sending me pix of his known associates, as well as any info he’s got. Most of them work in the same warehouse Creedy works at, so I did two things. The first is I took a look at who owns that warehouse. Crosby’s been telling us that meth is what’s for dinner in this sitch, and two things hit me today. One was that a warehouse would be really spiffy place to get shipments of drugs in from God-knows-where, and another is—”
“Holy shit,” Harding said, and Garcia grinned at him and nodded.
“Yessir. We all missed it.”
“What’d we miss?” Gail asked. “I did the deep dives on Beauchamp and Cavendish—what’d we miss?”
“What’s Beauchamp do for a living?” Natalia asked, sounding frustrated, like she should have gotten it too.
“Oh my God,” Gail said.
“Could we share with the class?” Manny asked desperately.
“She’s in charge of immigration through the ports and harbors,” Chadwick said, shaking his head. “So all that meth coming in through the harbor is….”
“Oh my God. Coming in through the warehouse where Creedy works!” Manny filled in. “Shit! That was bothering me. What did the meth have to do with anything? Where was it coming from?” He looked at Crosby apologetically. “I know that meth is usually really easy to cook up, and fentanyl is supposed to be everywhere, but what you got hit with was high-grade stuff. All those samples you gave us? They were super consistent. This wasn’t backyard kitchen meth—this was cooked by a skilled chemist and cut with exact proportions of fentanyl. When it’s not being dumped in your water and glugged down, it’s optimum design for addicting people but not letting them overdose until their money is all gone and they don’t have any teeth.”
“Great,” Crosby muttered. “At least it was good bad stuff.”
“Not even funny,” Harm said quietly to Harding. “Get this shit off the street. I saw three overdosestoday.”
They all shuddered, and then Joey Carlyle spoke up. “So Beauchamp is getting the stuff through the harbors, and let me guess. DoesCavendishown the warehouse?”
Garcia groaned. “That was going to be my second big reveal, but yes! Carlyle wins all the prizes for the giant intuitive leap, everybody. Somebody get our boy an extra slice of pizza.”
Joey grinned at everybody, a feral smile that hinted at the blood he’d spilled just to be sitting there in Garcia’s living room, and grabbed his own slice of pie.
“Okay, then,” Natalia said, calming the whoops and cheers—a sign of stress relief, yes, but they weren’t out of the woods yet. “So, you’ve got their function in the Sons of the Blood organization, but do you have the connection for how they met?”
Garcia failed to not look smug. “Oh yes. Like I said, we’ve got pictures and histories ofallthe assholes Crosby’s been feeding us. Including this one.”
He’d printed out a folder at work and then wiped his browser history off the work unitandthe cloud. A competent forensic technician could figure out what he’d been researching, but unless somebody was specifically after what he’d been doing, it wouldn’t jump up and bite anybody on the ass.
He opened the folder he’d kept balanced on his lap and pulled out a picture and a history and passed them both around.
“Meet Donny Mazursky. He works security at the warehouse, which means his best talent is being a thug and a bruiser, and he’s got the minor-crimes rap sheet to prove it. Donny has a family of brothers, three of whom went out to Texas to work for… anyone? Anyone?”
“Border patrol,” Crosby said, getting it.
“Winner, winner, pizza dinner!” Garcia proclaimed. “So I went back and cross-referenced Mazursky and Beauchamp, and I came up with….” He waggled his eyebrows in the pause.