Based on the blast damage, the Fire Department had approximated the general vicinity of the blast. Harvath circled that cluster of storage units as his ground zero and started there.
“What information do you have on these?” he asked. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-six, and thirty-seven.”
Mr. Logan walked back to his file cabinets and began searching for the paperwork. Though he and his wife kept some things on computer, he preferred pen and paper. Every rental agreement required a signature and he had kept copies of everything.
“Are there any unusual customers that stand out in your mind?” Harvath asked as the man conducted his search.
“You see all sorts of people in the storage business. ‘Unusual’ is kind of a loose term.”
“How about suspicious?”
“We get our share of those, too,” said Logan, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he combed the files. “We always have to watch out for people using the units for illegal activities. Sometimes, people will take one of these deeper units to hide a stolen car until it can be chopped up. Sometimes they even do the chopping inside, late at night. That’s why we make sure the police have the gate code, so they can patrol any time they want.”
Harvath remembered seeing the keypad. “Does everyone use the same code?”
“No. Each customer gets their own unique code. That way, if they don’t pay their bill, we can freeze them out. We put an additional lock on their unit, too.”
“Do you keep a record of when the gate is accessed?”
“We do. It feeds to our computer system.”
Harvath looked at Nicholas, who was sitting across one of the desks from Mrs. Logan. “I’m on it,” the little man said.
“The other thing we have to watch out for is people trying to cook meth,” Logan added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what caused the explosion. Chemicals stored in one of the units.”
Harvath doubted it. It would take a lot of chemicals to cause an explosion that size, but anything was possible.
After locating the agreements for the four units, Logan returned to the table and handed them over.
Harvath placed them in a grid and looked at the names on the top sheets. “Ring any bells for you?”
Logan turned each of the rental agreements to the last page and laid them in a row. Each contained a photocopy of the customer’s driver’s license. As he studied them, Harvath asked Mrs. Logan to come over and look at them, too.
“Nothing?” Harvath asked after several minutes.
Both of the Logans shook their heads.
Harvath looked at the third photo in their impromptu lineup. He could barely make the guy, Todd Thomas, out. “Why is this one such poor quality? It looks like a copy of a copy.”
Mr. Logan picked it up and examined it more closely. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t done with our Xerox machine.”
“How do you know?”
He picked up the other applications, looked at their dates, and said, “Because our machine’s in excellent condition. We bought it new and barely use it. Besides, look at the other copies. They’re fine.”
Harvath looked for himself. Logan was right. The two agreements that had been processed before the blurry Thomas photo were crystal clear, as was the one that came after.
“I’ve never heard of a Xerox machine just having a bad day.”
Mrs. Logan drew her husband’s attention to something on the Thomas agreement by tapping the bottom of the page.
“What is it?” Harvath asked.
“We didn’t take this application,” Mrs. Logan said. “Donald did.”
“Who’s Donald?”
“Don is our manager,” replied Mr. Logan, shaking his head. “He’s a nice young man, but he doesn’t always have the greatest eye for detail.”
“My husband is being generous,” Mrs. Logan interjected. “He means Donald is lazy. Half the time I lose sleep at night wondering if he remembered to lock up, or if he left all of the lights burning.”
“Do you know where he is now?” said Harvath.
“Probably at home asleep.”
“Do you have his number? I’d like to talk to him.”
Mr. Logan nodded and fished a worn address book from his breast pocket. As he searched for the number, Harvath waved Urda over and asked him to run the names and driver’s license numbers of the clients on the four storage unit agreements.
Urda wrote them all down and then stepped to the front of the hangar to make his call. When Mr. Logan had found the page with his manager’s phone number, he held it up for Harvath to see.