Chapter 17: The Abandoned Solar Facility

The lease executed on a Thursday, through a second-layer LLC that Reyes had structured beneath Cerro Advisors — a New Mexico holding entity called Solano Properties LLC, registered in Santa Fe, which held a long-term lease on a former solar panel manufacturing facility in Edgewood, twenty-six miles east of the city on the I-40 corridor. The arrangement had taken Reyes eleven days. She had presented him the documentation with the quiet efficiency of someone filing a routine quarterly report.

Marcus had read every page.

The facility itself was a Butler building — prefabricated steel-frame construction, twelve thousand square feet of open floor, built in 2009 during a state tax incentive period that had attracted fourteen such facilities to the East Mountains corridor before the incentive expired and nine of them went dark inside three years. This one had manufactured photovoltaic panels for a Spanish company that had folded into a Chinese acquisition that had folded into nothing particular. The equipment had been removed in 2014. What remained was the building envelope: concrete slab, sealed, with a loading dock on the north face, a separate chemical storage annex attached to the east wall — this was the detail that had made it the obvious choice — and a grid connection that Solano Properties had reactivated through the county utility as part of a stated plan to repurpose the facility for dry-goods warehousing. The utility had sent a technician. The technician had confirmed the connection, filed his paperwork, and driven back toward the city without particular interest in what the building was going to store.