He wandered down a little farther and found several more locked doors that didn’t have security card readers. He checked to see if any cameras were in this area but didn’t find any. That concerned him too. He snorted. “It’s a wonder they aren’t missing a ton more drugs.”
He had his wallet out and his tiny pick in hand a moment later. He’d learned a lot of skills on the job, and making sure he was never stuck without a way to get in and to get out of places was one of them. He had the lock picked and the door open in thirteen seconds flat.
By the time he slipped in and turned on the light, he could see he was in yet another storeroom full of boxes. He just didn’t know what they were full of.
He wandered through, looking at shipping labels, trying to tell what the boxes held. He quickly took photos and sent them to Levi. But, interestingly enough, nothing that he did allowed the photos to send. The icon on his phone just kept spinning. Studying the concrete walls, he noted he was too deep underground and the walls were too thick to allow the signals to go through.
He wandered through the boxes before taking out his pocketknife and cutting one of them open. It appeared to be medical supplies, but nothing he opened revealed any drugs. Just cotton swabs and tongue depressors and medical tape mostly. Why were medical supplies here? Was this just an overflow area for the real lab down the block? Like a place to store stuff they couldn’t take all at once? But why would you do that? That’s a recipe to lose things. Plus, if all this was for the big lab down the street, how the hell did they do inventory if stuff was left here? Johan shook his head. “Not a profitable way to do business.”
The shipping docks weren’t here, so somebody would have to hand truck all this stuff here from the bays and leave it. Then hand truck it all back out to retrieve it to possibly transport it to the lab. Granted the truckers making the deliveries couldn’t know what was inside these boxes any more than Johan could tell, not without opening them up. Yet the random labels Johan had checked were all for this building. Why?
Frowning, he stepped out of this storeroom, with as much intel as he could get from that room in one efficient visit, then went through the next room and did the same thing. Again he found more stuff, but this stash was separated into different groupings. One area appeared to be office stuff. Another had old newspapers, cages, feeders, and that type of thing for animals. Shaking his head, he went through the whole room, spot-checking and taking pictures again, then headed to the third and last locked room on this level. He wondered what the hell was going on here, and what kind of a crazy filing system they had for all the random stuff stuck down here.
He bet that Joy knew nothing about all this and that her records wouldn’t entail any of it as well. What was going on here?
As he stepped through the door into the last room, he froze because it sounded like somebody was inside. Then he noted a flashlight beam. So Johan didn’t turn on the overhead light and immediately dropped to the ground and crept onto the other side behind the doorway. He waited and listened. He was a pro at this. Whoever was in here had to be aware that he’d entered, and now they would be worried about what he was up to.
He smiled at that, because when it came to playing a game of cat and mouse, Johan was definitely the cat. He heard a semiscuffle, as if somebody was to his right and was sliding closer to the doorway. Amateur. Silently Johan shifted across to the boxes in front of him, keeping out of sight, but leaving the pathway open for whoever it was who wanted to escape.
He heard another movement and another, as Johan slid a little bit closer. What the stranger didn’t know, possibly because of the angle of the doorway and how it entered the small hallway, was whether Johan had come in or whether he just opened the door and then left. Now Johan could hear his heavy labored breathing, panicked and moist.
Johan let his eyes adjust to the darkness, hoping to see a shape, a shadow, something. With the next movement, an outline took form. Male, five feet, eight inches, maybe 160 pounds. Casually dressed. The stranger took another step forward. Johan pondered his options. He could give himself away by catching the stranger now, or he could see who this person was and do a check on him before approaching him later. Then the man raced to the door in a sudden panic and opened it.
He disappeared into the darkness.
Maybe because he didn’t want to get caught in the act of stealing? Johan thought. Or maybe because he had just stumbled onto this too? If he’s one of the good guys, he could have run because he might have thought I was one of the bad guys.
Johan stayed where he was and immediately noted the impressions of what he’d seen on his phone, hoping to match this guy’s description with a name soon. He’d check all the photos in the personnel files. Then he stood, turned on the light, and checked out the room. This room was a different matter entirely. This was completely full of medications. All with labels for Westgroup. Johan took several photos of multiple cases, and, when he was done, he stepped out into the hallway, took a photo of the hallway with these doors.
There was one more hallway around the corner, which he took. It led to more stairs. As he walked up the stairs, it took him directly to the loading docks. Johan looked back, wondering if he’d missed an elevator somewhere. Because it would make more sense to go from the loading dock with all these cases of inventory via an elevator to these storage rooms on another level.
He retraced his steps and, sure enough, against the wall in the half-darkness was an elevator. He immediately looked for a control panel, but it was flush against the wall. Johan was surprised when he got it opened with no security card needed at all and stepped inside, checking out what the options were inside the car. What he saw caused him to whistle. Because that elevator led right to the top floor. No other choices were given. All the way to the penthouse and the corner offices of this building.
He quickly took a photo of the two elevator stops, designated simply as P and B3, and stepped back out again. Then he went up the stairs and stepped out into the loading dock bays. Several men unloaded a bunch of materials, as several others, and what looked like a trucker, stood there, talking. Johan quickly scanned the men, looking for the stranger he had crossed paths with in that last storeroom. He sighed when nobody matched up.
At his sudden presence, they all turned and stared at him. He gave a half smile and didn’t make any explanations as he walked over to the truck and studied the interior.
“Hey, who are you and what are you doing here?”
Just enough anger was in his voice that Johan immediately spun around to look at him.
One of the bigger of the six men came toward him.
“Just checking out what you’re doing,” he said, noting this guy had a Westgroup employee photo ID badge. Yet his workers did not. So Westgroup had hired the foreman, probably letting him dole out the work to independent contractors, field laborers even. Did Westgroup have enough trucking needs to have a full-time foreman on hand? Maybe the foreman was part-time. More questions. “I’m part of a two-man team of investigators here, looking into some specific issues,” he said calmly. He deliberately kept his voice mild as he waited to hear what the other man would say.
The foreman took a step back, his hands on his hips. He wore one of those yellow safety vests, with his employee card dangling from a lanyard on top. Grabbing the front edges of the vest, he glared. “Well, your investigation doesn’t have anything to do with anything down here.”