Letty and Kaiser made statements at the FBI offices in Midland, and to the Santa Anna Sheriff’s Department and led two Midland FBI agents and an ATF explosives agent to the tanker truck and the building next to it, only to find them gutted by fire. Nobody had reported the fires, probably because they were far out in the countryside.
The ATF agent, whose name was Burrell, sniffed at the building and truck and said, “Doused them down with gasoline and touched it off. Won’t be anything to work with, I’m afraid.”
The metal building was still warm from the fire, which Burrell thought must have happened before dawn. “But, hell, I’m no expert on residual temperatures. Seems likely that it wasn’t much of a fire and not long ago. If they burned it before daylight, the fire wouldn’t have been too visible, and you wouldn’t see the smoke at all.”
“There’s an outhouse in the back,” Letty said. “Couldn’t you get some biologics out of that?”
“Somebody could,” Burrell said, wrinkling his nose. “Not me. I don’t do poop. Ask the FBI.”
The FBI agents agreed that somewhere in the FBI’s ecology there probably was a guy who did poop and they’d look for him, if that became necessary. They took the VIN off the tanker truck, and before they left the site, it had been traced to Roscoe Winks.
“No help there,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser and Letty kicked through some of the rubble in the shed. The remnants of the mattress on the steel bunk smelled like burnedchicken feathers. The cardboard boxes that Letty had searched had been removed, along with the rifle.
“What do you think?” Kaiser asked.
“Somebody tipped them off to the shooting at Winks’s, and they hustled up here and burned everything they couldn’t move. Didn’t need the truck anymore with Winks dead. We got them worried.”
“Where would they have gotten the tip?”
“A cop,” Letty said. “Cops would have been the people who would have known about this in the middle of the night, early enough that these guys could feel confident about coming out here and setting the fires...”
“Yeah. That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Kaiser said.
“Now we call Rhodes and see if he’ll let us in Winks’s office,” Letty said. She looked around the site. “There’s nothing more for us here.”
Letty and Kaiser,trailed by an FBI agent in a separate car, drove out to Winks’s early in the afternoon and found two sheriff’s deputies sitting in the shade of an oil tank, reading their phones. Both bodies had been removed, the deputies said, and the crime scene crew had finished their work.
Winks had used a Windows laptop, which was sitting on his desk, lid closed. His cell phone was sitting beside it. The FBI agent opened the computer, brought it up. The computer asked for a password.
“What do you do here?” Letty asked.
The agent was digging in his briefcase, and took out a thumb drive. “I’ve got an offline NT password and registry editor here... I can edit the registry and reset the password.”
Kaiser: “It’s that easy?”
“Yeah, it is,” the agent said. “Of course, if he’s encrypted his files, we’re out of luck...”
They stood around, watching as he worked: five minutes later, he said, “We’re in, and the files arenotencrypted. Dummy. What are we looking for?”
“Let me in there,” Letty said. “Emails first.”
They found dozensof receipts for oil pickups by a half-dozen different oil service companies, but nothing that suggested a connection to the suppliers of the oil, the thieves. Winks had saved a number of websites, but all but one were commercial and routine. The FBI agent pointed to a link in the browser and said, “Click on this.”
They did, and found it led to an empty website.
“I’m thinking what they did was, they talked here,” he said. “Whoever is on the other end wiped it out after every conversation. Or Winks did.”
“Why do you think that?” Kaiser asked.
Letty: “Because of the website ID.”
“Exactly,” the agent said. “Fifteen random numbers and letters dot com. Not something anyone would find by accident. The only way you could find it would be if you came to this machine, or the other one, and found it like we did. But with nothing there... we’re shut out.”
“What about his cell phone?”
“That will take a while, unless you find something written down somewhere. We’ll have to go fight Apple about it.”
