“That’s not cheap.”
“No, it’s not. But the premiums were fully paid up.”
“Okay, but I doubt that Haas listed ‘drug dealer’ as his occupation on the application. I can’t believe a legit insurance outfit would have sold him a policythat large. His odds of dying early were way too high.”
“The policy wasn’t written by an American company. It was an overseas outfit that we’ve tried to find out about, but so far we’ve run into a stone wall. It could have just been a way for his family to be paid off in exchange for his lying about my two agents.”
“Life insurance again,” said Decker thoughtfully.
“Right. But how’d you know we’d find out Haas was terminal?”
“Because I believed he lied about your guys. He set them up to take the fall. They weren’t rogue. I think they had stumbled onto what was happening here in Baronville and they had to be taken out. And Haas, who was already a dead man with a family to take care of, was the one to help do it. He made you think your guys were bad,and the real bad guys killed them. And his family reaped the benefit of hislyingdeclaration. For all we know, he injected that fatal dose of morphine himself.”
“Okay, we have a major fentanyl ring operating in Baronville. And they’re using the fulfillment center to bring it in. What do you think Ross does with it?”
“He must take it from the center and pass it on to others.He’s got a duffel bag in his office. I think that’s how he’s getting it out. I found out he goes to the gym after work. But why carry your gym clothes in with you to work when the gym you’re going to has locker rooms and showers? Why not just leave them in the car until you get to the gym?”
“But don’t they have security there to check bags and stuff?”
“They have magnetometers,but that wouldn’t catch powder like this. Now, they do search bags. But I’m betting the duffel has a false bottom. I opened it up when I was in his office, and it seemed to be shallow for how large the bag was. And it wouldn’t take much space to hide bottles like these.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
Decker indicated the bottle. “So educate me on the economics of this.”
“Thecost to make a kilo of heroin and a kilo of fentanyl is about the same, about three to four grand. A kilo of heroin will fetch sixty thousand on the streets. But because fentanyl is so much more potent, one kilo of fentanyl can be made into about twenty-four total kilos of drug product, making it far more lucrative than heroin. And a kilo of fentanyl can produce nearly seven hundred thousand pillsthat sell for about twenty-five bucks each.” She looked more closely at the bottle. “This is about five thousand milligrams of powder.”
“There were twenty boxes in his office. The one I opened had five bottles inside it. If all the others had the same number of bottles, what would that be worth on the street?”
Kemper mentally calculated this. “If it is fentanyl, you’re lookingat nearly nine million bucks sitting in the guy’s office.”
“I wonder how many shipments are coming through there?”
“I wonder too,” said Kemper worriedly.
“Why does it strike me that the dollar amounts we’re talking about make this seem less like a small-town conspiracy and more like an international one?”
She nodded. “You just read my mind, Decker. I cantell you that the Mexican cartels are all in on fentanyl. They either import it directly from China, where it’s manufactured both illegally and by legit pharma corporations, or they buy the stuff they need to make it from the Chinese and do the lab work themselves. They sell it in powder form like in this bottle, or they cut it with heroin. But they’re also pressing millions of fentanyl pills. Andthe thing with fentanyl, when you put it in pills, the dealers usually have no idea it’s in there. And the consumers don’t either. But people who don’t want to snort or smoke something because they’re afraid, or it makes them feel like addicts, will take a pill because they think it’s safer and it feels more legit. You know, sort of like taking a prescription. The pills will look like an oxycodonepill, or you can cut it with Xanax or other pain pills. They’re even stamped with the dosage amount of eighty because that’s a typical dose of Oxy. ‘Shady eighties,’ they’re called on the street. As I said, they can cost about twenty-five bucks a pill and a typical addict will take twenty pills a day.”
“Five hundred bucks a day. Expensive habit.”
“I’ve arrested dealers whoroutinely sell a minimum of a thousand pills a day. That much is called a ‘boat’ on the street. And there are dealers who do a lot more than that.”
Decker looked at the powder. “Do you think the plan is to make pills from the powder?”
“That would be my guess. Which means this powder is going to a pill press operation probably somewhere close by. I mean, why else ship the stuffto a place like this?”
“How much space would it need?”
“You can do it in your bedroom, or the back room of a legit business. But they would need to bring in equipment. That would include a pill press, quarter- or half-ton or bigger, depending on your output requirements. A quarter-ton unit can produce three or four thousand pills an hour. And you need people to process andpackage the stuff. You have to be careful while handling it. I’ve had local cops go in on drug busts and touch the fentanyl without using gloves. Next thing you know they’re on the floor turning blue. It’s that dangerous.”
“Well, there are a lot of empty buildings around here. In fact, I was thinking about the empty house where your two guys were found. With a whole house, you couldprobably have a bunch of pill presses going. And that would explain why the power was turned on even though no one was living there.”
Kemper’s eyes widened. “You think?”
“Like I told you before, they probably had a drone flying over the street that night.”
“Yeah, but you never told me why.”