Chapter 10 - The Midnight Storage Lockers
The hospital room felt suddenly freezing, the hum of the overhead lights turning into a low, menacing drone.
I held the receiver tight against my ear, but the line had already gone dead with a sharp, echoing click. The anonymous caller had known my exact military title, my current hospital room, and the existence of a hidden storage locker I hadn't even told CID about yet.
"Who was that?" Caroline asked, seeing the sudden pallor of my skin.
"Get Agent Miller back here right now," I said, my voice hardening into steel. "And call the military police detail. We need a search warrant for a storage locker downtown before midnight."
An hour later, operating under an emergency federal warrant issued by the magistrate judge, a tactical team of military investigators and local police converged on MetroSecure Storage on the industrial outskirts of the city.
I wasn't about to sit in a hospital bed while answers waited in the dark. Supported by two military police officers and seated in a heavy-duty medical wheelchair provided by the base hospital, I rolled right down the concrete corridor of the storage facility behind Agent Miller and his team.
Locker 412 was a heavy corrugated steel door secured by a digital keypad and a high-security rotary padlock.
Miller stepped aside, nodding to an explosives and breaching technician who immediately went to work with a heavy-duty bolt cutter. With a loud, metallic snap, the padlock fell away, and the heavy roll-up door was pushed open into the dusty, concrete-floored cube.
The beam of Miller’s tactical flashlight swept across the interior.
There were no old holiday decorations. There were no boxes of vintage clothes.
Instead, lining the walls of the locker were rows of identical black metal filing cabinets, labeled with meticulous, bureaucratic precision. And sitting dead center on a wooden work table was a large, open leather ledger book surrounded by stacks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in bank bands.
Miller walked over, put on a pair of latex gloves, and flipped open the heavy leather ledger.
He shined his light across the top page, and his face went completely white. He looked back over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide with shock.
"Lieutenant," Miller said, his voice trembling slightly. "These aren't just financial records for your husband's shell companies. These are detailed surveillance dossiers on half the high-profile business owners and military officers in this entire state."
I wheeled myself forward, my hands gripping the metal wheels of my chair until my knuckles turned white. I looked down at the open page under the flashlight's beam.
There, clipped to a photograph of a sleek black Escalade parked outside a downtown restaurant, was a dossier bearing a familiar name and face:
Ian Miller. Restaurant Owner. Primary Target.
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And right beneath Ian’s photograph, written in my mother-in-law Patricia’s sharp, venomous handwriting, was a single handwritten note:
Phase One complete. Target's brother is neutralized. Time to execute Phase Two.
