The White Vans: PART 7
During the meeting in the mayor’s office, a special agent with the FBI explained that his agency considered the incidents with the three vans, a mass casualty event. The special agent continued, “All together, we recovered a total of 14 bodies from the three vehicles. As far as we have been able to determine, they were all males between the ages of 20 and 35 years of age. All these young men wore medical scrubs, sky blue in color. We’ve determined that all of them worked in the production of illicit narcotics in a lab or warehouse in another part of the state. Based on material recovered from the fires, fingerprints, and DNA, not a single one of the 14 individuals had been reported missing by their families. That is one of the unique challenges this case poses. We’re operating on the theory that they were likely recruited from different houseless groups and communities throughout California. I realize the information I just discussed could’ve been shared during the press conference, but we weren’t sure about the update ourselves. Before you ask, yes, you can resume the press conference and tell the press everything I just told you.”
Almost everything the FBI agent told those who had assembled in the mayor’s office was a lie. Yes, the incident was a mass casualty event, but the victims were not drug-addled homeless guys estranged from their families, as the special agent suggested. The truth is, the bodies recovered from the burnt-out vans all had identical DNA. They were clones, the result of highly illegal experiments, none of the bodies more than a few weeks old and all were in various stages of development.
The authorities arrested the team of rogue doctors and medical researchers responsible for the clones, but the people hired to dispose of the vans and the cloned bodies were a loose-knit crew of petty criminals who were supposed to take the vans to an abandoned gravel pit in Tuolumne County in the Sierra foothills and torch them. Instead of following orders, the van drivers figured the $10,000 they got paid up front would be enough. They were happy with that. A couple of miles north of California State route 132, also known as Yosemite Blvd. in Modesto, they found a couple of tree-lined streets in a quiet neighborhood and a nearby park. They did not realize that the organization that hired them installed powerful explosives carefully hidden under each van that could be triggered with a cell phone signal. They did not know that their movements were tracked using GPS. They did not know about the tiny microphones in the cab of each van. Despite all this, the drivers had enough sense to plan their strategy. Before their scheduled departure, they met in a nearby coffee shop in an unnamed central California city to plan their route. While they talked, they also wrote notes on a piece of paper. They decided to discard the burner phones provided by their employers as they approached the Modesto city limits. They used the map application on their other phones and decided on where they would abandon the vans. The drivers did not set the vans on fire; their employers set off the explosives with cell phone signals in a desperate attempt to destroy evidence of their crimes.
The criminal organization that hired the men could’ve cared less. About a week after the explosions and fires in my neighborhood, there was a discussion in an office attached to a warehouse, the place the vans left from.
“Can you believe those guys? They each got paid ten large ones up front, then they didn’t finish the job and ran off with the money. We gonna do something, like look for them?”
“Naw, man… look, those doctor nerds paid us a boatload of dollars up front to handle this. It was almost $400,000 and all we did was deliver some crappy old vans to them and find some drivers. They put their stuff in the vans and probably did some other stuff, like I’m sure they rigged the vans up with explosives, bombs, whatever. You saw the news, right? They were gonna blow up everything anyway, and probably planned to blow the drivers up with whatever, whoever they had in those vans. As far as I’m concerned, we made a big-assed profit on the whole mess. Those guys took off with their money? I would’ve done the same thing.”
“You put it like that, I guess I woulda kept the money too. Hey, I’m gonna go to my favorite donut shop. You want anything?”