Page 36 of Patch

Patch

Church was already running when I came through the doors, which tells you what kind of week it had been.

Surge had the laptop open on his forearm at the far end of the table.

“Go again from the top,” Fox said. “He needs it.”

“Supply chain runs Arkansas, Tennessee, north Mississippi.” Surge turned the screen so the table could see. “Rural veterinary suppliers, all of them with legitimate DEA registrations. Purchase volumes that don’t match prescribing. Antibiotics, pain management, anesthesia. Ketamine’s the money.”

“How much are we talking?” Hornet asked.

“Aggregate the whole network and you’re seventy percent over what the population in those counties can account for.” Surge pulled up a second map, overlaid. “That’s the reason nobody’s flagged it. Nothing’s wrong until you add it up, and there’s no single agency whose job it is to add it up.”

“Explain the agricultural piece,” Fox said.

“Veterinary anesthesia is Schedule III. Agricultural use isn’t scheduled at all. So they register as both. Order under the agricultural account, ship to the veterinary address.” He shrugged. “Paper says feed store. Box says operating room.”

“Son of a bitch,” Brazil said.

“That’s clever as hell,” Knox said, and he didn’t say it kindly.

“It’s very clever.”

Surge pulled up a third screen. Purchase orders, dates, quantities, supplier codes.

“Then the tech would’ve caught it,” Brazil said.

“She caught what went through her cabinet. She counts that twice a day and it balances, because what’s in her cabinet is exactly what a one-vet practice ought to have.” Surge turned the laptop. “The rest never gets that far. It comes off the truck, and it goes straight into that backroom, and it’s gone again before anybody opens the cabinet in the morning.”

“So the room’s the whole thing.”

“The room’s the whole thing. She was never supposed to know the room had anything in it.”

The room went quiet.

I felt it come down on me in pieces. Gerry’s backroom. The alarm company that wasn’t. A cabinet with a lock that needs a thumb on the bottom edge to catch, in a building where one woman works alone at night.

“Sixteen months,” I said.

“Sixteen that I can prove. Probably longer.”

“She’s been in that building six years.”

“Yeah,” Surge said. “She has.”

* * *

Gunner opened a folder without a word and slid the top sheet across the table, face up.

Photograph. Man of about forty-three, thick through the chest, broken nose set badly a long time ago. A face that vanishes into a job site.

“Bogdan Tarasenko,” Gunner said. “Worked directly for Grigori Popov.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

“Say that name again,” Hornet said.

“Grigori Popov.”