“What if they aren’t after what you have physically? You know, your home, horse, vehicle, money, or stuff like that.”
“What are you saying?”
“First, answer this, did you lose any memory from when Randy beat you enough to put you in the hospital?”
Myrna gave him a funny look and reared back like she wanted to get away from him, but she stared out into space. It took several moments before she looked at him with a confused look and answered.
“I think so. Besides the bruising, I had a severe concussion. Thank goodness he didn’t break any of my bones, but the concussion is what kept me in the hospital as long as it did.”
“Okay, and who came to your hospital room to take your report?”
“Officer Mosher.”
Pedro nodded. “How did you get to the hospital? Who called for the ambulance? Where were you when he beat you? What led up to the beating?”
Myrna looked at him in shock and shook herhead. “I can’t answer those questions. I remember making a mental grocery list on my way home from work. The next thing I remember, I woke in the hospital. This was nine days after I remember I left home.”
Pedro nodded, then jumped to his feet and hurried into the kitchen to grab the pad of paper they wrote their current grocery list on. He came back and wrote the questions down.
“I’m not going to call Agent Wilson with this tonight. We can brainstorm what we think the issue is, then they can investigate. I don’t know who they have as your friend coming to visit, but maybe she can help us come up with a reason as to why an ex-boyfriend of yours, someone you had no contact with for eighteen months with, would suddenly show up, beat the ever f-ing hell out of you, and then steal your horse.” He looked at her and nodded. “Were they after Sally all along? Or was it something else entirely? Where did you work? What did you do?”
Myrna again looked at him with confusion and shook her head. “My job, what does that have to do with anything?”
‘Humor me, please. It might not mean jack shit, but it might be just the littlest thing that you might have forgotten because of your hospital stay. It might be nothing, but then again, it might be something.” He paused, shook his head, and studied her intently. “Again, humor me, if it’s nothing, then we won’t tellthe FBI when we meet with them tomorrow. If it’s something, we can give them our theory.” He smiled then. “From what I gathered, they’re grasping at straws now.”
“Yeah, I got that impression too,” she said as she rose to her feet, and went to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of water for each of them. She handed him his, and settled into the corner of the couch while facing him. While pointing to the paper in his hands, she nodded.
“I was a shipping clerk at a factory.”
“What type of factory?”
“Import export.”
“What was the merchandise?”
“Automotive parts.” As soon as she said that, she straightened up and stared at him in shock. He shook his head at her.
“What was your exact job?”
“The front office would get an order, they’d give it to me, I’d fill out the paperwork, pass it over to the warehouse supervisor, he would pass it to the guy in charge of that shift.” She shook her head with a snort. “Talking about it out loud makes me realize now that a lot of people touched just one order. Anyway, the shift lead would pass the order to the picker.” At his frown, she sipped her water and settled back against the arm of the couch.
“The picker is the person that takes the order and physically picks the items from the shelves, boxesthem up, prints the labels, then, depending on the size of the order it’s either put on a pallet, or if it’s just a couple of boxes, then it’s put in a different location.”
“Why?”
“Pallets get shipped out on freight trucks, boxes are sent several different ways. Mail, UPS, Fed-Ex.”
“Okay, what happens once the order is completed?”
“The picker signs off on it, by putting their initials on it, the shift lead does the same. They put the paperwork in a certain spot, and when the truck is loaded, the paperwork is brought back to me, I do my thing, then call the proper shipping venue that needs to be used. They don’t come right away, it’s a daily thing.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Okay, not all trucking companies go to all areas of the country. Certain ones are local, certain ones are over the road, or they take the pallets to the airport for overseas orders. Yet other trucking companies take the packages to the docks for shipment via boats. For the domestic orders, we have certain companies that go west, and others that head east.”
“Ah, so if you have an order going to California, then another one to New York, they won’t leave your facility on the same truck.”
“Not if it’s a pallet. If it’s a box, then either themail, UPS, or Fed-Ex will come and get all of those boxes, then do what they have to do once they get back to their terminal. Once it leaves my facility, I’m done.”
