I peeled back to my desk in the office and powered on my computer, cursing under my breath as it slowly booted. Oak wandered over, a several biscuits in hand.
“What was that about?” she asked. “Meryl slap you around a bit?”
“We’ve got approximately five hours to tie Luna Lampour’s kidnapping to a crank ring somewhere out here in the rural north that is enslaving children as a labor force,” I summarized.
Oak stared at me, a biscuit hanging half out of her mouth. She finished chewing. “So, a pretty light morning I’d say.”
“Can you run a background check on someone named Limuel Kasorsh?”
“You got it,” Oak said, taking her seat on the opposite side of the desk.
Meanwhile I opened the traffic violation report Meryl had just forwarded to me regarding Limuel Kasorsh. It sounded infuriatingly like any other traffic report. There had been a speeding ticket issued, then the discovery of the out of date registration, and a reprimand for this. The vehicle had been a white pickup. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything unique about it noted. The speeding ticket had been paid and the registration had been updated with Tersol County the following week. I opened a file of images the arresting officer had taken. The driver hadn’t been photographed, but the truck had from two angles. I squinted. On of the was a bad angle of the driver’s side door. There was something on it, an emblem, I thought.
“Ok here we go,” Oak said and I almost upended my chair in my haste to move around the desk to her side. “Looks like Limuel Karorsh was a farmer in Melspol County.”
“What?” I said, examining the very short report.
“Yeah, won best squash at the County Fair one year. Hunter too. Wife and one kid.”
“Is there an image of him?” I asked.
“No,” Oak said, glancing around the report. “But here’s his date of birth. Looks like he’s 73 this year.”
I blew out a breath, confused. By my calculation, Ulug should be in his mid to late 30’s. But we had to keep moving.
“Ok, look at this. This was the car our friend Limuel was driving. See that?” I showed Oak the image of the door. “Is there anyway to enhance this?” I asked, squinting at it.
Oak frowned at the image. Then she called Ashley over.
“Hey Ashley, we’re trying to get a better look at this image. Right here on the door. You think you can help us with that software you were showing me the other day?”
Ashley beamed. “Sure thing. Can you send it to me?”
I did so. Oak went back to browsing the file on Limuel. I began to rake through the old files on Ulug. There was a lot of info here but it was hard to know what might be relevant. Occasionally, with an uncomfortable twinge, I came across a name from my old unit. Eventually I gave up on the search and turned restlessly to gaze at where Ashley was dutifully working away at the other end of the office.
“You could go check on her instead of staring at her like a weirdo,” Oak muttered after a few moments.
I glared at Oak but stood none the less and headed over to Ashley’s desk.
“Hey Ash, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good. The image is low resolution, so I’m running it through this editing software the department has. It helps to improve the resolution, contrast, brightness, all that stuff. I’m running it through three different trials right now. This computer doesn’t have much processing power so it’s taking a while.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling like a luddite as I watched her rapidly shifting through screens and adjusting things.
“I can teach you sometime if you want, it’s pretty easy to learn once you get the basics,” Ashley offered, glancing up at me, her face slightly pink.
“Thanks,” I said, the feeling of being old and out of touch intensifying. “That would be great. Maybe once this case is over.” Then, thinking it would be appropriate to compliment her, I added, “it’s a good thing you know what you’re doing here.”
“Thanks,” Ashlee said, her face brightening even further.
There was an awkward silence while she continued to work and I hovered around, waiting impatiently.
“Is everything ok from yesterday?” Ashlee asked abruptly. “You seemed really angry when you left.”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I said curtly, turning away from her. I was definitely not going to discuss any of my issues with our 22 year old intern. No matter how old she was, she still felt like a kid to me. She didn’t need any of my problems thrown over her shoulders. Helping us work this case was bad enough.
“Here, this one’s ready,” Ashley exclaimed and I quickly turned to observe her screen.
“Nice work,” I said, motioning to Oak. All three of us stared down at the image. The emblem appeared similar to the one I had seen last night, a shield with a crosshatch pattern through it. I furrowed my brow.
“Can you zoom in right here on those letters?”
Ashlee did so. “This is as good as we’re going to get.”
“What are those letters, can you tell?”
“Looks like H J B to me,” Oak said slowly. “But that font is super weird. That could be an I too.”
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“Ashley, will you search HJB and HIB.”
Ashley typed away for a moment and then shook her head. “There are too many results. We need to narrow it down.”
“Ok, we let’s split up and run through some searches,” I said.
“On it,” Oak said, hurrying back to her desk. “I’ll take HIB.”
“I’ll help you,” Ashley volunteered.
Therefore, I embarked on searching HJB. I had access to the federal list of private citizens, companies and corporations through our department. However, after half an hour of fruitless searching and prying into every nook of the database, I came up dry. I looked over my screen to where Oak was feverishly typing away, and on a call at the same time. If she didn’t have anything, we were screwed. I glanced at Ashley, who was frowning at her own computer. As if she had detected my gaze, she looked up and motioned me over.
“I think HIB is a pharmaceutical manufacturer,” she said, pointing at her screen. She had pulled up what looked like a skeleton of a website, which read HIB Pharmaceuticals. The same logo was pasted up in one corner. The only other thing on there was a subheading.
“Fine botanicals and naturopathic medicines?” Ashlee read uncertainly. “That’s weird.”
I motioned Oak over as she hung up the phone. “What do you make of this?”
Oak stared at the page for several long moments. “I could use a new facial toner,” she quipped.
“Maybe this isn’t it?” Ashlee asked.
“Logo matches. I say we role with it. Where are they located, does it say?”
Ashley scrolled around for a bit. “Burkus, looks like.”
“Oak, get the local PD on the line and see if they can get us an address,” I said, already halfway back to my desk. “Ashley, if you can keep looking up any other info on this HIB or any other possible ones while we’re gone.”
“Sure,” Ashley called after us as I dragged Oak out the door.
We hopped in the car and I fired up the lights for good measure.
“A little overkill, don’t you think?” Oak asked as we pulled out of the driveway.
“We’re on a deadline here,” I said, zipping around lazy cars driving to work and onto the south highway towards Burkus. In about 15 minutes with my foot hard on the gas, we arrived and I cut the sirens as we entered the city. It was a little more developed the Cresel or Wiggins, with a proper downtown and main street which stretched for about five blocks. Oak, who had been talking to the Burkus PD, clicked off.
“There’s an address, 401 12th street.”
We proceeded that way and came upon a shabby looking warehouse with a rollup garage door and a loading dock. It didn’t look very active. We parked and got out, circling the building until we found a secondary entrance in an alleyway. I tried the door, which was locked.
“Now what?” Oak asked.
I glanced around. There was a window about eight feet up. Oak followed my gaze.
“Oh great,” she said.
“Let me give you a boost.”
I laced my fingers together and she put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself as I hauled her upwards and she was able to grasp the window ledge.
“It’s unlocked,” she grunted, managing to shift the window sideways enough to shimmy herself halfway in.
“What does it look like?” I asked.
“Empty,” Oak called down. “I’m going in, I’ll unlock the door.”
“Be careful,” I cautioned. If there was a meth lab in there, who knew what kind of security was lurking around.
But a few minutes later Oak had the door open. Inside, the warehouse was dark and gloomy. It did feel pretty empty and I cast around for a light switch on the walls, finally located one and clicking it on. Flickering overhead lighting illuminated a wide space mostly empty, with a few tables piled end over end against one wall, and large burlap bags against another. I went to examine these and found that there was nothing in them except more burlap bags. Oak, meanwhile was flitting around the edges of the room.
“Looks like there’s an upstairs,” she called, directing my attention to a narrow staircase running along one wall.
We head up this until we came to a sort of office room that had large windows facing outwards, apparently for observing activity below. However, it didn’t appear to be set up as an office. Inside were boxes piled everywhere along walls and stacked on a desk in the center of the room. We began to open and look through them.
“What is all of this?” Oak asked wonderingly. She took out her camera and began to shoot pictures.
Inside many of the boxes were components of what looked like some sort of equipment. There was brass piping, gauges, pumps, gas cannisters and any number of other oddments. There were also boxes of glassware, Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers and graduated cylinders.
“It looks like materials for a lab, but the lab never got set up,” I said slowly.
“Looks, here’s a receipt,” Oak said, recovering a crumpled bit of paper from in between two of the boxes. “Looks like the name of the company they ordered from is Profer Scientific. Maybe we can ask them about all this stuff.”
I pulled out my phone and quickly searched the company, finding a contact number. I dialed it. After a moment, I got an automated message, directing through several options of who to talk to. I decided on recent orders.
“Hello, Profer Scientific Industries, how can I help you?” a female voice said.
“Hi, my name is Detective Inspector Senel, I’m investigating a case and we’ve come across some of your merchandize in the course of the investigation.”
There was a pause on the line. “Um, are we being audited or something?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I just have a few questions about a recent order. We found a receipt for…” I glanced down the paper. “April 13th of this year. Order number 5259103. Do you have a record of the company which made the purchase?”
There was silence for a time, and the sounds of typing. “Yes, this order was made for HIB Pharmaceuticals.”
“How many orders has that company placed with you?”
More typing. “A total of 7 orders over the course of the past two years.”
“And, if you had to make a guess given the contents of those orders, what would you say the materials purchased are being used for?” I asked.
“Well,” there a longer than usual pause. “If I had to guess, I could see this equipment being used for extractions.”
“Extractions? Like chemical synthesis?”
“No. This equipment looks like it could be used for botanical extractions. Like to get essential oils or compounds out of plants. It’s a very common set for the cosmetic and herbal industry, we get orders like this all the time. These chemicals are very common for extractions.”
“Chemicals? What chemicals exactly?” I said, glancing around. We hadn’t seen any boxes with chemicals in them.
“Let’s see acetone, isopropyl, ethanol, methanol, and chloroform. These are all very common chemicals for extractions.”
“That’s very helpful,” I said. “Could you do me a favor, could you send all the sales documents that you have for HIB Pharmaceuticals to the Investigations office in Melspol County?”
“Well sure, I guess. Are we being implicated in something here?”
“Not at all, you’ve been very helpful, thank you.”
I clicked off and then looked at Oak. “Did you find any chemicals?”
Oak shook her head. She had gone through nearly all the boxes. I stared at them and then shook my head. “Either HIB already used all their chemicals, or those are being stored elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere?” Oak asked.
“Maybe this is just a storefront, so that HIB has an address to attach to their business. Maybe the real work is being done off the radar in a more secluded location. But this doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the sort of equipment used to make crank, as far as I know. And those chemicals aren’t right either.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “The emblems match, this must be the connection.”
“A 73 year old guy gets a speeding ticket. Happens to have the same sir name as Ulug. Happens to be driving an HIB Pharma truck. HIB makes plant extracts, not crank. I’m not quite sure how this is all lining up.”
I hesitated. Perhaps it was time to tell Oak about the additional intel I had discovered last night. I wasn’t sure I was ready to tell Meryl yet. His kindness might not extend to my reckless evening activities. But Oak might be trustworthy enough to let in on the secret.
“I should probably fill you in on a couple of things,” I said.