“That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw.”

“And you’re aware of this?”

He shrugged.

“But there must be somebody you could talk to—I don’t know, the FBI, the DEA…”

“I believe the federal agencies have their hands full at the moment,” Bose said.

“Okay,” Sandra said, “but what does all this have to do with Orrin Mather?”

“It’s not Orrin so much as the place he used to work. As soon as he got off the bus from Raleigh, Orrin was hired by a man named Findley. Findley operates a warehouse that holds and forwards imported goods, mainly cheap plastic crap from manufacturers in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Most of his hires are transients or immigrants without papers. He doesn’t ask for social security numbers and his guys get paid in cash. He put Orrin to work doing the usual lift-and-carry jobs. But Orrin turned out to be an unusual employee by Findley’s standards, which means he came in on time and sober, he was bright enough to follow orders, he never complained and he didn’t care about finding a better job as long his pay was regular. So after a while Findley took him off day work and made him night watchman. Most nights between midnight and dawn Orrin was locked in the warehouse with a phone and a patrol schedule, and all he had to do was conduct an hourly walk-through and call a certain number if he noticed anything unusual.”

“A certain number? Not the police?”

“Definitely not the police, because what passes through the warehouse, along with a lot of die-stamped toys and plastic kitchenware, are shipments of precursor chemicals bound for black-market bioreactors.”

“Orrin knew about this?”

“That’s unclear. Maybe he had some suspicions. In any case, Findley fired him a couple of months back, possibly because Orrin was getting a little too familiar with the details of the operation. Some of Findley’s black-market material comes in or goes out after hours, so Orrin would have seen a few transfers. The firing was pretty traumatic for Orrin—I guess he thought he was being punished for something.”

“He talked to you about it?”

“A little, reluctantly. All he says is that he didn’t do anything wrong and that it wasn’t time for him to leave.”

Sandra asked Bose for another Corona, which gave her time to think about all this. What he had said seemed to make everything murkier. She decided to focus on the only part of this she really understood or could affect: Orrin’s assessment at State Care.

Bose came back with a bottle, which she accepted but set down immediately on Bose’s ring-stained coffee table. He needed new furniture, she thought. Or at least a set of coasters.

“You think Orrin might have information that would be damaging to a criminal smuggling operation.”