I pushed away from the computer and paced around the room, trying to make sense of it. 

Assumption: the Davis family was heavily into pot farming. Pot makes a lot of money and the state spends a lot of time and effort trying to stamp it out. But it isn’t a high priority item; not like cocaine. The President of the United States declares war on Colombian cocaine cartels, not on hayseed, backwoods pot farmers. State law enforcement makes an ongoing effort to control the business, and sporadic mass raids, but it is just enough to keep prices up. Almost a partnership. If the state tried harder, it could cut into profits. If the state stopped trying, supply would go up and prices would go down.

Daniel Cabral’s arguments were starting to make more sense to me, but they still ran up against the usual counter-argument. Most would-be conspirators aren’t smart enough to run a conspiracy.

So there was a connection, but it was a tenuous one. If I were into pot farming, I might want to infiltrate the local sheriff’s office, but why Cabral’s organization?

Cabral did have a staff dedicated to finding out all there was to know about drug enforcement, in order to discredit it. If I were a big pot farmer, and I wanted a pipeline to the agenda of the state law enforcement people, I might give a lot to tap into Daniel Cabral’s database. It would be safer to let Cabral’s people collect the information, and then steal it from him. The only other obvious possibility was that they wanted to derail Cabral’s attempts at legalization, and Susyn was too smart to believe that Cabral was going to succeed in this decade.

So, Cabral had useful information, and Susyn had infiltrated his organization to get it. It made sense, and nothing else did. Then one night Raven found Susyn where she should not be and blew the whistle. But no one listened, so Raven hired Harvey Jacks to pursue the matter further.

Harvey Jacks, whose cover was as a private detective, but whose real profession was blackmail.

Much of what I “knew” had come from Susyn. She had named Adrian Brock, and it was beginning to look like he was not part of the game. Suppose the story was true, with only the names changed. Susyn had said that Jacks did the investigation, found the connection, then sold his information to Brock. Change the name Brock to “whoever runs the Davis family”.

Then, according to Susyn, Jacks had tried to extort another payment and had been stepped on. To save his life, Jacks had claimed that he had copies of his report sent to Raven. It had not saved his life, but it had put Raven’s in danger.

When Jim and Alan Davis tossed Raven overboard, the Davis family must have breathed a sigh of relief – until Raven called home from Marseilles. And Susyn had been there to find out about the call. Then they had all their old problems back along with a witness who could identify Alan and James Davis for attempted murder, and implicate Susyn as an accessory. more tomorrow