Lori Armstrong - Mercy Kill

The almighty Mercy Gunderson, who prided herself on her cool-headed, rational approach, had gone off half cocked. The thought of losing the election wasn’t nearly as excruciating as the suspicion that I’d lost something even more important.

Agent Turnbull stared at me. “You all right?”

No. I wasn’t in the mood to play nice. Or to reveal my insecurities on any level to a fucking fed. “As I’m a candidate for sheriff, you should’ve told me about this task force earlier.”

“Why?”

“Because if I win the election, I’ll be in Dawson’s position, looking like an idiot when it appears I’m not doing my job, when I’ve sworn I’d handle things differently than he does specifically for that reason.”

“I warned you not to make blanket statements.” He rested his elbows on the table, the picture of earnestness. “Look, this caught you off guard. I’ll tell you what I know, but I’ll need your word it won’t go farther than you.”

“Fine.”

“Early this year, across North and South Dakota, four Intertribal Co-op Health Hospital storage facilities were hit, and their inventory of OxyContin was stolen. The problem is, no one knew when the thefts occurred, outside of a general time frame.”

“Why not?”

“The ICHH buys in bulk twice a year, based on the previous six months’ sales, then distributes to the individual hospitals’ storage facilities. The pay-in-advance business model has been standard practice for years.”

“Why?”

Bitterness flickered in his eyes. “From the advent of the formation of the ICHH, none of the pharmaceutical companies trusted the tribes to pay their bills. They refused to offer them credit and required advance payment and advance orders. No exceptions.”

“Even now?”

“Yes, except if an individual hospital needs additional prescriptions, it can reorder in small quantities. Cash up front.”

“Is the bulk-ordering mandate common knowledge within the ICHH?”

Agent Turnbull shook his head. “Just among the key adminis-trators, and they’re subject to nondisclosure.”

I held up my hand. “Interesting, but what does this have to do with Jason Hawley? He’s not Indian. Chances are slim he’d know about this arrangement.”

“Major Hawley received the information about the separate storage facilities at ICHH and delivery of pharmaceuticals from his Titan Oil coworker, Ellis LeFleur. Near as we can figure, LeFleur was fired by the ICHH about two months before he started working for Titan Oil.”

“Why was he fired?”

“Suspected sexual harassment. He claims a white female office worker falsely accused him, and the hospital administration didn’t back him up. No charges were ever filed, but they fired him outright.”

“What was his job at ICHH?”

Agent Turnbull looked chagrined. “District warehouse manager. Plus, LeFleur was a registered member of the Standing Rock Tribe. So Titan Oil hired him as their token Indian.”

“Token Indian?” I repeated.

“Titan Oil needed the Indian landowners around the various reservations to get on board with the pipeline, and LeFleur was their Native American man to offer a convincing argument.” Turnbull scowled. “Rumor had it LeFleur could charm the bees from the flowers. But he was young and inexperienced in sales, so the executives paired him with a more seasoned pitchman.”

“Jason Hawley.”

He nodded. “Information from here on out is speculation because we’ve got no official documentation. We assume LeFleur told Hawley about the warehouse setup. Whose idea it was to steal the product… again, pure supposition. Maybe LeFleur wanted revenge. Maybe it was strictly about the money. LeFleur and Hawley didn’t have much planning time, roughly two months.”

“But if LeFleur had that much insider knowledge, he didn’t need much prep time.”

“Precisely. LeFleur knew enough about the supply-and-demand cycle to leave five full boxes containing the real OxyContin on top of two different stacks-”

“So how-”

“I’m getting to that.” Turnbull held up a hand, waving the waitress over for a refill. “The original manufacturer’s boxes were still in the individual locked storage areas at the facilities, but the prescription bottles inside the boxes had been replaced.”

“Replaced with what?”

“Everything from bottles filled with Flintstones vitamins to bottles filled with Tic Tac breath mints to bottles filled with Hot Tamales candies.”

“So if the inventory manager looked in the storage area, he or she would see the stacks of boxes of OxyContin and assume everything was A-okay?”

“Exactly. That’s why the actual time frame is unclear. Nothing was discovered until one of the reservations in North Dakota cracked open a box at the bottom of the stack, at the end of January, and found the tampered products. But we’re guessing they struck right after the shipments were delivered.”

“No surveillance cameras?”

“We checked. They were disabled on two separate occasions, two weeks apart.”

Disabling cameras would’ve been child’s play for J-Hawk, whose military job required high-tech breaking and entering.

“LeFleur maintained ties with the other warehouses, in addition to relationships with the other warehouse managers.”

The brotherhood vibe in the Native American community was strong, so LeFleur had an easy in, especially if he’d been hung out to dry by his white bosses on the sexual-harassment issue. “How long did it take the other hospitals to check their inventory?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“Why wasn’t it prioritized?”

“It was. It would’ve taken longer due to infighting between the hospitals and the tribes. We had to call in the DEA, and they ran the rest of the physical checks with permission from the individual tribal councils.”

“How many bottles of OxyContin are we talking about?”

“Total? Four thousand.”

My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “That much OxyContin is prescribed on the reservations?”

“Apparently.”

“What’s the street value?”

His gaze slid away. Then back. “The average street-sale price is about a dollar a milligram. For easy math, let’s say a bottle of one hundred eight-milligram pills sells for eight hundred bucks on the street. Multiply that by the number of missing bottles…”

I did a quick calculation. “That’s over three million dollars.”

“Not exactly chump change.”

“Why haven’t I heard about this on the news?” Seemed every media outlet loved to release stories about Indians that held a negative slant.

Agent Turnbull lifted a brow. “What part of covert ops is confusing, Sergeant Major?”

“What part of arresting Jason Hawley for interstate drug trafficking is confusing, Agent Turnbull? Especially if you knew he was involved?”

“The agencies didn’t originally connect Major Hawley-who we’re aware is a decorated war veteran-to the thefts.”

“Why not?”

“Because like you said, Hawley wasn’t Indian. He was only partnered with Ellis LeFleur for a short time. According to people who knew LeFleur, he vanished at the end of January. Hawley was a family man who stuck around the area. Initially, we focused on tracking LeFleur because we suspected an inside job.”

“Did you find LeFleur?”

He nodded. “About two months ago in a mangled mass of metal after a high-speed chase in Kansas City that didn’t end well.”

“Did LeFleur point the finger at Hawley?”

“No, he died in the accident. But his girlfriend survived. We recovered seven hundred fifty bottles from their residence. There wasn’t enough cash on hand to convince us LeFleur had taken the whole lot of four thousand. When we offered the girlfriend immunity from prosecution, she admitted LeFleur had a partner but swore she didn’t know his name. So we backtracked. During the search, we learned Jason Hawley had been diagnosed with incurable cancer.”