David Rosenfelt - Dead Center

Two of Laurie’s officers have their guns drawn, though Laurie does not. “Step down from the truck, Mr. Drummond,” Laurie instructs.

Alan Drummond does as he is told. He may be intimidating to the youth of Center City, but he couldn’t be further from that right now. Unless I’m a very bad judge of emotions, he is close to panic-stricken at what is taking place.

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?” he asks.

Laurie instructs him on the proper position to assume, with his hands against the squad car and legs spread. He does so, and one of the officers frisks him, signaling with a shake of the head to Laurie that he is not armed.

“Is the back of the truck locked?” she asks.

“Hey, come on. I didn’t do anything wrong” is his answer. It comes across as a bit of a whine, reflecting his fear at the way events are moving.

“Is the back of the truck locked?” Laurie repeats.

“Yes.”

“Where is the key?” she asks.

His mind seems to be racing for a way out of this, so much so that he forgets to answer the question. Laurie repeats it, and he says that it’s on the key ring that is still in the ignition.

One of the officers gets the key, and he gives it to Laurie. He then handcuffs Drummond and leads him back to one of the patrol cars, putting him in the backseat. Laurie and the other two officers go around to the rear of the truck. They both draw their guns while Laurie unlocks the door and opens it.

The odor of cheese slams into us the moment the door opens. Looking inside, I can see about fifteen barrels, the type that would ordinarily contain cheese, but this time they had better not. The smell is not a good sign, and Laurie makes eye contact with me that indicates she doesn’t like where this is going.

It takes an hour and twenty minutes for the officers to search through the truck’s cargo, though it feels like about a week. They find nothing but cheese, which I suppose on some level makes sense, since they’re searching a cheese truck.

When they finish, Laurie just gives me a shake of the head to indicate what a waste of time this was. An officer takes Drummond out of the car and uncuffs him.

“What is R amp;W Dairies?” she asks him.

“It’s a… it used to be a dairy company in this county,” says Drummond. “They went out of business a few years ago, and we bought their stuff. We never bothered to change the name on the truck.”

“What was the cargo on the plane that just landed at the Center City airstrip?”

“Nothing… it was empty.”

Laurie asks him some more questions, but he’s feeling increasingly confident, and he deflects them. She doesn’t want to probe too much, so as not to reveal the little that we do know.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Drummond,” she says.

His face is a mask of surprise and relief. “I can go?” he says, to make sure he heard correctly.

“That’s correct,” Laurie says, and Drummond wastes no time in getting back in the truck and hauling his ass, and his cheese, out of here.

Laurie walks over to me. “Well, we did it, Andy. We smashed a Parmesan cartel.”

She and her officers get in their cars and leave, my humiliation complete. I have no idea what went wrong, but I’ll have plenty of time to think about it. Unfortunately, thinking has not been my strong point of late.

I was wrong about what was in the truck, but no matter how many ways I look at it, I don’t believe I was wrong about the big picture. Even if there had been no murders, and no one had expressed a fear of Alan Drummond, what took place today would still be absurd.

It is simply preposterous to assume that a cargo plane flew into that airstrip, set in the middle of a community whose only product is cheese, and delivered a load of cheese. Yet that is exactly what seems to have happened. What I need to figure out is why.

By the time Laurie comes over for dinner, I have it narrowed down to two possibilities. One is that our adversaries are watching Larson, and once they found out that he was still staking out the airport, they set us up to look foolish.

The other possibility, perhaps more likely, is that Laurie and I weren’t careful enough and left some evidence that we searched the airstrip hangar the last time the plane came in. It signaled that we were on to them and would continue to be watching. So they set us up.

Laurie, to her credit, is not angry about what happened. She accepts the responsibility, since she went along with it willingly. But even though we both agreed on what should be done, she will suffer the most for it. Stephen Drummond will certainly file a complaint over the way his son was treated, and Laurie will at the least receive a severe reprimand.

We talk about it through dinner and afterward. It’s only when we’re finished and heading for bed that I think of something that I noticed on the road but hadn’t thought about since. “Did you think Alan Drummond looked scared when he came down off that truck?”

She nods. “Petrified. That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised when we didn’t find anything.”

“I felt the same thing. And I think he really was afraid. He couldn’t be that good an actor, and he would have had no reason to even try.”

“Which means he thought he was in trouble.” Then, “Do you think it’s possible he didn’t know what he was carrying? That he was as surprised as we were when it turned out to be barrels of cheese?”

“Yes, I absolutely think it’s possible. But if he didn’t know what was in that truck, who did?”

• • • • •

I’M GOING TO have to adjust my goals downward. This will not be easy; downward goal adjustment has never been a specialty of mine. But it’s got to be done.

I’ve stayed in Findlay in order to identify the one or more people who killed Liz, Sheryl, Eddie, and Calvin. I now believe that those murders were committed to cover up a criminal conspiracy, the geographical center of which is the Center City airstrip.

My recent efforts, however futile and embarrassing, have been directed toward uncovering the details behind that conspiracy. I will continue in that vein, and I may or may not succeed. But even if I do, it’s a stretch to think that evidence will also be uncovered to make a charge of murder stick. So my new goal will have to be to get the bad guys put in jail for the criminal conspiracy, which will no doubt be a lesser charge than they deserve. What they deserve, as Jeremy Davidson said, is to be strapped down and have a needle inserted in their arms.

By the time Laurie leaves for work, we’ve come up with Plan B. I call it B even though it’s very similar to Plan A. It’s just that A was such a disaster it seemed logical to move on to a new letter.

We’re going to continue a stakeout of the airport, though this time Larson will not be involved. I’m going to have Marcus with me, taking him off his assignment of watching over Madeline Barlow. No one has made any kind of an effort to go after her, and Laurie will have Cliff Parsons make sure she is watched by one of their officers.

We’re going to be in Marcus’s car, so if anyone is watching me, my car will be parked in front of my house. Marcus will ensure that we are not followed, so there will be no reason for anyone to think the airport is being watched.

I’ve told Laurie I will call her, as before, if anything happens. What I’ve neglected to mention is that Marcus and I are going to take a more active approach. Before we call Laurie, we’re going to move into the airport and try to catch the bad guys in the act, whatever that act might be.

I’m not thrilled about deceiving her in this manner, but I don’t feel like there is any alternative. As civilians, Marcus and I do not have the right to do what we might wind up doing, and if Laurie had the knowledge of it, her job would compel her to prevent us from doing it.