Mercy Kill_ A Mystery - Lori Armstrong [86]
“Why was he fired?”
“Suspected sexual harassment. He claims a white female office worker falsely accused him, and the hospital administration didn’t back him up. No charges were ever filed, but they fired him outright.”
“What was his job at ICHH?”
Agent Turnbull looked chagrined. “District warehouse manager. Plus, LeFleur was a registered member of the Standing Rock Tribe. So Titan Oil hired him as their token Indian.”
“Token Indian?” I repeated.
“Titan Oil needed the Indian landowners around the various reservations to get on board with the pipeline, and LeFleur was their Native American man to offer a convincing argument.” Turnbull scowled. “Rumor had it LeFleur could charm the bees from the flowers. But he was young and inexperienced in sales, so the executives paired him with a more seasoned pitchman.”
“Jason Hawley.”
He nodded. “Information from here on out is speculation because we’ve got no official documentation. We assume LeFleur told Hawley about the warehouse setup. Whose idea it was to steal the product . . . again, pure supposition. Maybe LeFleur wanted revenge. Maybe it was strictly about the money. LeFleur and Hawley didn’t have much planning time, roughly two months.”
“But if LeFleur had that much insider knowledge, he didn’t need much prep time.”
“Precisely. LeFleur knew enough about the supply-and-demand cycle to leave five full boxes containing the real OxyContin on top of two different stacks—”
“So how—”
“I’m getting to that.” Turnbull held up a hand, waving the waitress over for a refill. “The original manufacturer’s boxes were still in the individual locked storage areas at the facilities, but the prescription bottles inside the boxes had been replaced.”
“Replaced with what?”
“Everything from bottles filled with Flintstones vitamins to bottles filled with Tic Tac breath mints to bottles filled with Hot Tamales candies.”
“So if the inventory manager looked in the storage area, he or she would see the stacks of boxes of OxyContin and assume everything was A-okay?”
“Exactly. That’s why the actual time frame is unclear. Nothing was discovered until one of the reservations in North Dakota cracked open a box at the bottom of the stack, at the end of January, and found the tampered products. But we’re guessing they struck right after the shipments were delivered.”
“No surveillance cameras?”
“We checked. They were disabled on two separate occasions, two weeks apart.”
Disabling cameras would’ve been child’s play for J-Hawk, whose military job required high-tech breaking and entering.
“LeFleur maintained ties with the other warehouses, in addition to relationships with the other warehouse managers.”
The brotherhood vibe in the Native American community was strong, so LeFleur had an easy in, especially if he’d been hung out to dry by his white bosses on the sexual-harassment issue. “How long did it take the other hospitals to check their inventory?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“Why wasn’t it prioritized?”
“It was. It would’ve taken longer due to infighting between the hospitals and the tribes. We had to call in the DEA, and they ran the rest of the physical checks with permission from the individual tribal councils.”
“How many bottles of OxyContin are we talking about?”
“Total? Four thousand.”
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “That much OxyContin is prescribed on the reservations?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s the street value?”
His gaze slid away. Then back. “The average street-sale price is about a dollar a milligram. For easy math, let’s say a bottle of one hundred eight-milligram pills sells for eight hundred bucks on the street. Multiply that by the number of missing bottles . . .”
I did a quick calculation. “That’s over three million dollars.”
“Not exactly chump change.”
“Why haven’t I heard about this on the news?” Seemed every media outlet loved to release stories about Indians that held a negative slant.
Agent Turnbull lifted a brow. “What part of covert ops is confusing, Sergeant