Chapter Eighteen
Bone
“Run that back.”
Dave sighed through the laptop speakers. “I’ve run it back four fucking times.”
“Make it five,” I ordered.
“You know watching it again isn’t going to magically make the picture clearer.”
“Dave,” I drawled.
“Yeah, yeah.” The video jumped backward.
I leaned forward, bracing my forearms on the table.
The clubhouse common room was quiet, which wasn’t normal. Getting this many Grave Prowlers in one room usually meant somebody was talking shit, Taco was running his mouth, or Rowdy was laughing loud enough to drown out everyone else.
Nobody was doing any of that.
Myth sat on my right. Humpty stood behind us with his arms folded over his chest. Dealer was pacing near the end of the table.
Bull had a notebook open in front of him.
Breaker sat beside him. Hose was at the bar with his coffee, and Taco and Rowdy had pulled chairs around to face the laptop.
Even Munch had managed to keep his mouth shut. That was how I knew shit was serious.
“Here,” Dave said.
The video slowed. It was shitty footage.
Black and white and grainy as fuck. The timestamp in the corner read 2:13 A.M.
The camera pointed toward a section of the Milwaukee transfer facility I’d seen plenty of times over the years. Loading docks lined one side. Trucks and trailers sat in rows farther back.
Nothing happened.
Two thirteen became two fourteen. A truck moved in the distance. Then a man walked into view.
Owen Mercer.
At least, Dave said it was Owen Mercer.
The footage wasn’t good enough for me to swear to it, but the height and build matched.
Owen walked directly toward the camera, stopped beneath it, looked up, and then the screen went black.
“Stop.”
Dave froze it.
I stared at Owen. “That’s him?”
“I’m as sure as I can be without having a clear shot of his face.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Thirteen days ago.”
Myth leaned closer. “His wife reported him missing nine days ago.”
“Right,” Dave said.
I looked at the frozen image.
“So four days before he disappeared,” Bull calculated.
“Yep,” Dave agreed.
“What was he doing there?” Taco asked.
Dave tipped his head to the side. “Officially?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing,” Dave sighed.
Dealer stopped pacing. “What does that mean?”
Dave shifted on the screen. “It means there wasn’t a service call that night.”
I frowned. “You said Northline had him there.”
“They did. Eight days before his wife reported him missing. That was the work order I found before.”
“But not this?” Hose questioned.
Dave shook his head. “Nope.”
I sat back. “So Mercer was there but he shouldn’t have been.”
“Looks that way.”
“Why?”
“If I knew that, we could all stop watching the same thirty seconds of footage,” Dave chuckled.
Taco leaned toward the laptop. “What happens after the camera goes black?”
“Nothing.”
He frowned. “Nothing?”
“Camera stays down for seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds.”
Myth looked at me.
“What happened during those seventeen minutes?” I asked.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” Dave clicked something.
The frozen image disappeared. Another camera feed came up. Different angle with the same timestamp. “This one’s on the other side of the facility.”
We watched.
A semi sat backed against a loading dock.
Two box trucks were parked farther down.
Nothing moved.
Then headlights appeared at the far edge of the screen. A vehicle drove into view.
Dark van with no markings and no windows along the sides. It moved slowly through the yard.
“Plate?” Bull asked.
“Can’t read it.”
“Can you clean it up?” I asked.
“That’s not how this shit works,” Dave sighed.
Bull looked at the screen. “Movies make it look easy.”
Dave frowned. “Movies are full of shit.”
“Good to know,” Bull muttered.
The van disappeared behind one of the buildings.
“Where’s it going?” I asked.
“Toward the section covered by the camera Mercer shut down.”
My jaw tightened.
“Then what?”
Dave fast-forwarded.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then the van appeared again. It was moving in the opposite direction.
Timestamp read 2:29.
“Sixteen minutes,” Myth muttered.
“Sixteen and change,” Dave said.
The van disappeared from view.
A minute later, the original camera came back online. Owen Mercer never appeared again.
“Fuck,” Hose muttered.
I agreed. “What do we know about the van?”
Dave leaned back in his chair. “Not much. Dark color. Ford Transit, probably. Could be a few years old. There are about a billion of the fucking things on the road.”
Dealer resumed pacing. “So Mercer shuts off a camera, van rolls in, van rolls out, camera comes back.”
“That’s what we’re looking at,” Myth said.
“Sounds like Mercer was helping somebody,” Bull pondered.
“Maybe,” I said.
Dealer looked at me. “You got another explanation?”
“Could’ve caught somebody doing something and killed the camera because he was trying to see what the fuck was happening.”
“Why shut it off?” Humpty asked.
“Don’t know.” I didn’t know fucking shit. I was just spitballing, trying to find something that made sense.
“Then mine makes more sense,” Bull pointed out.
“For now.” It did, but still, who? I wasn’t putting Owen on either side until we knew. Dead men didn’t get to explain themselves, and assuming shit was how you missed something important.
I looked at Dave. “Where’d you get this footage?”
He smiled.
I stared at him. “Never mind.”
“Good choice.”
Shadow appeared behind him. He’d been somewhere offscreen for most of the call. Minnesota’s president dragged a chair over and dropped into it. “You show him the good part yet?”
I looked at him. “What good part?”
Dave grimaced. “I was getting there.”
“What fucking good part?”
Shadow leaned back. “Show him.”
Dave clicked around again. The video disappeared and a document came up.
It looked like some kind of shipping record.
Rows of numbers. Dates. Company names. Nothing that meant shit to me at first glance.
Then I saw ours.
GRAVE CASKET CO.
I leaned closer. “What am I looking at?”
“Transfer logs.”
“We already went through those,” I sighed. This wasn’t anything new.
“The official ones,” Dave muttered.
Myth turned toward me.
I looked at Dave. “And these?”
“Deleted.”
Nobody moved.
Dave continued. “I found a secondary log buried in the system. Somebody deleted it, but whoever did it wasn’t as thorough as they thought.”
“How far back?”
“Seven months.”
Breaker sat forward. “You’re telling me somebody’s been fucking with our shipments for seven months?”
“I’m telling you somebody created entries involving Grave Casket shipments and then deleted them.”
My hands tightened. “How many?”
“Four.”
Silence.
Four.
I stared at the screen. “Show me.”
Dave enlarged the first line.
Bull studied the screen and then flipped through his notebook. “February seventeenth.”
Breaker looked at him. “You remember that?”
“I have the shipping records right in front of me, dipshit.” He turned pages. “February seventeenth. Six caskets. Chicago distribution center. Everything delivered.”
Dave nodded. “Official record says the same.”
“Then what’s different?” Myth asked.
Dave pointed at another number. “This.”
I stared. “What is it?”
“Secondary movement.”
I waited.
Dave sighed. “Your shipment arrived at the Milwaukee facility at eleven forty-three that night. According to the official record, it sat there until five twenty the next morning, when it was loaded for Chicago.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The deleted log shows one of those caskets was scanned out at one eighteen in the morning.”
Myth went still beside me. “Scanned out where?”
“That’s the problem,” Dave sighed.
“No destination?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“When did it come back?”
“Three oh-six.”
I stared at him. “You’re telling me one of our coffins disappeared for almost two fucking hours.”
“According to this,” Dave said.
“And then went to Chicago?” Myth asked.
“Yep.”
Breaker shook his head. “The customer never complained.”
“Maybe nothing happened to the coffin,” Hose said.
Dealer stopped pacing again. “Then why move it?”
Nobody answered because there wasn’t a good fucking answer.
“Next one,” I ordered.
Dave pulled up another.
April.
Same thing. Different shipment.
One casket scanned away from the Grave Casket load in the middle of the night returned two hours later, then shipped normally.
Third happened in June.
Fourth was last week.
My stomach tightened. “Last week,” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“When Mercer was there?”
Dave nodded.
Myth leaned back. “Son of a bitch.”
“Which coffin?” I asked.
Dave didn’t answer immediately.
“Dave.”
“That’s where it gets fucked up.”
Taco snorted. “Because everything before this was completely fucking normal.”
Nobody laughed.
Dave pulled another document onto the screen. “The coffin that got separated from your shipment last week wasn’t the coffin Jackson brought back.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Different serial number.”
“Then where the fuck did this one come from?”
“I don’t know.”
I pushed back from the table and stood. I walked a few feet away. Turned and came back.
Someone had been pulling our coffins out of shipments for months. They disappeared for a couple of hours, came back, and then continued on as if nothing happened.
Nobody at Grave Casket knew.
Nobody receiving them knew.
And now Owen Mercer was dead, delivered to us in a strange casket.
“What about the serial number?” Bull asked. “The damn thing looked like ours, too.”
Dave looked straight into the camera. “It doesn’t exist.”
I looked at Dave. “Could somebody have removed the original serial and replaced it?”
“Maybe, but why?”
“Taco, Hose,” I called.
Taco looked up. “Yeah?”
“Go look at the coffin. See if it’s ours or a fake.”
They headed toward the warehouse.
My phone vibrated against the table, and I glanced at it, but didn’t recognize the number.
“Bone,” Shadow said.
I looked at the laptop. “What?”
“You seeing where this is going?”
“I’m trying to.” Someone knew our routes, transfer facility, and our shipping schedules.
Enough to get a coffin separated without anybody noticing, to erase records, to get it put back. And apparently enough to get a completely different coffin loaded onto Jackson’s truck and sent straight to us.