The Missing Shipments: A Robert Johnson Investigation
Copyright© 2026 by Alexander Winston
Chapter 8: The Next File
Merek dispatched again the following night, more slowly than it liked. Every outbound load was counted onto its trailer by a person with a handheld scanner that reported nowhere near the gateway, and no shipment was marked released until the carrier’s driver had signed for the count. Green spent the day on calls with customers and the evening on a call with his regional office, and by the sound of it neither went easily. Redmond was back on the gate. Jenson had a warrant application to write and a receiver to find.
Ten days after the interception, a search of a unit in an industrial park in Compton turned up most of the camera lenses and all of the surgical sets, still in Merek’s shrink-wrap, along with a receiver who preferred to discuss his arrangement with Wilson rather than carry it alone. Wilson had said nothing since asking for his phone call, and as far as Robert ever heard he never did. It turned out not to matter much. Nothing in the receiver’s account, or in anything else Jenson’s people turned up, touched Green, and the detective put that in writing. The money trail would take months and belonged to other people.
Robert’s report went to Rita the morning after that. The recommendations took up less than a page. Loading evidence captured independently of the scanner gateway, so that at least one record of every dispatch came from a source the others could not overwrite. A check of each release against the receiving carrier’s own acknowledgment. Maintenance access to the gateway restricted, individually attributed, and reviewed by someone other than the people who held it. No transfer closed without a confirmation from where it was going.
Rita read it at her desk with a pencil, and he sat across from her and tried not to watch the pencil.
She stopped twice. The first time was at the section on the restart, where his original draft had said that Green’s intervention suggested an attempt to conceal. The sentence now said that Green had restarted the scanner interface in response to documented faults, that the substitution rule predated the restart by fourteen days, and that no evidence connected him to it. The second was at Dock Six. He’d kept the door counter to exactly what it was: unreported operation of the door, twice, within a bounded shift, cargo and time unknown. The identification of cargo he had placed where it belonged, six pages later, on the night of the interception, when twelve pallets had been read label by label in the back of a trailer.