“You actually got quite a bit.”
“I’ll send Greet an email tonight,” Letty said. “We’ll have something by tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” Kaiser said. “I’m feeling kind of spooked out here in the dark. In Iraq, we were the guys in the night. It was the targets who were out driving around.”
They continued north without lights, until they could no longer see the glow from the shack. Kaiser stopped, stripped the T-shirts off the taillights, and they turned toward the interstate.
* * *
Letty was silent, thinking, then said, “I hardly touched anything in there. I dug through a bunch of boxes, but I restacked them before I left. I got out and locked the door on the way, maybe . . . she saw my flashlight in the window? I was careful to keep it pointed at the floor.”
Kaiser thought about that, then said, “Maybe she smelled you?”
“I smell?”
“You use a little perfume,” Kaiser said.
“Not very much . . . a dab in the morning.”
“But I bet you smell like nothing that’s ever been in that fuckin’ hut. She might have walked in, and instead of smelling microwave burrito farts, she smelled a flower . . .”
“She thought I was Vic or Terry. That’s the names she was calling . . .”
“She might not have known why she thought somebody was there. She sensed it. Sometimes that happens when you go into a place. You don’t know why you know, but you know there’s somebody inside. Or was just inside.”
Letty said, “Huh.”
“If we go after her, you might switch perfume, ’cause she seems like the aggressive sort,” Kaiser said.
THIRTEEN
Letty sent an email to Greet at DHS, got towels from the bathroom, spread them on the carpet, lay down, and cleared her mind. When she’d thoroughly relaxed, she brought a couple of considerations to the surface.
First: she had to pay more attention to Kaiser. He knew things that were valuable to her, but he was not an instinctive teacher. That valuable information remained dormant until something occurred to bring it up.
She hadn’t spent any time thinking about how vehicles were seen in the night, but he obviously had, or at least he’d had training that impressed itself on him. Without any heavy thinking, he’d blacked out the Explorer so they could invisibly travel midnight roads without being seen, and he’d anticipated the need in advance.
He knew what might give her away—perfume—when surreptitiously entering a building. Or perhaps it had been sweat, she thought. She’d been restacking those boxes in a hurry.
Kaiser hadn’t panicked or argued when she’d told him to drive away from the metal building without her. He hadn’t called her when she was being shot at. He could pick locks with silent manual picks. He knew a lot about a lot of guns, she knew a lot about a few.
Second: she’d considered the trip to Oklahoma City and then to Midland as an interesting and even entertaining research opportunity. It was that, and more: tonight, she’d been shot at, and if the woman had been better at stalking, she might have killed Letty, instead of firing wildly up and down the creek bed. I am not on a lark, Letty thought. I’d better start paying attention to that.
Though she had done some things correctly, she thought. They’d solved part of the puzzle: who was stealing （in the bigger picture） a relatively insignificant amount of oil. She hadn’t yet learned what was being done with the money that came from the thefts. Whatever it was, it was important enough for at least three killers to have cooperated in executing the Blackburns.
That suggested that the oil thefts would continue. If the killers had simply wanted to seal themselves away from detection, and were willing to give up the thefts, they could have killed Roscoe Winks. As it was, Winks was still out there and could give them up. She would not, she thought, rest easy if she were Winks.