Interference

by Danielle Girard

  Ayi normally kept the living room lights off, but tonight the room shone brightly as Mei climbed the stairs. Close to the top, she peered through the front window and saw Ayi offering a plate to a man sitting on the couch.

  The two looked up and seeing Mei, the man stood, smiling. Mei pressed herself into the banister for support. The bolt on the door clicked. Mei forced herself to climb the last stair. The door opened, and he rushed to hug her. “Baby, I’ve missed you so much.”

  Mei pressed herself to his chest and closed her eyes, hoping that her husband didn’t see the dread on her face.

  Chapter 4

  Triggerlock Inspector Ryaan Berry reached for the cell phone on the bedside table that was quacking like a duck. “Berry,” she said and let her head fall back on the pillow. She’d been dreaming of Kevin Durant. She and Kevin. On a warm beach. With cold drinks.

  “It’s Wyatt.”

  Ryaan made no effort to open her eyes. Hailey Wyatt was a colleague at the department, a Homicide Inspector. “Jesus, Hailey. What time is it?”

  “Don’t ask,” Hailey warned her. “There’s a backup storage facility near Oyster Point in South San Francisco. You know about it?”

  Ryaan sat up slowly and stifled a yawn. “Backup storage for what?”

  “That’s what I figured. I guess the department rented a warehouse down here to store evidence in some untried cases—nothing biological but there were guns.”

  Fully awake now, Ryaan swung her feet onto the ground and rested her elbows on her knees. “How many?”

  “It’s going to take a while to get a firm count.”

  “Shit. You mean like someone has to go through case by case?” She wondered if she wouldn’t end up being that someone.

  “I don’t think it’s that bad,” Hailey told her. “Supposedly there’s a log somewhere.”

  “Why are you on it?” Hailey was Homicide so Ryaan thought she knew the answer.

  “Officer pulled over a van about a mile from the scene. Guy ran a red. Officer was shot through the van’s side window. Hal and I are up.”

  “Damn, anyone we know?”

  “Keith Reynolds. Was only eight months out.”

  The two were silent a moment. It was hard to lose the rookies. Felt like losing children.

  “Text me the address,” Ryaan said.

  “Thanks, Ryaan. Sorry to wake you up.”

  Ryaan groaned. “You should be. I was having a hell of a dream.”

  “Hope he was cute.”

  Ryaan pictured Durant. “Damn right he was.” Ryaan ended the call and rested her head back against the soft suede headboard and told herself not to go back to sleep. She’d been on the force more than ten years, but she never got used to the night calls.

  She pulled herself from bed and padded to the bathroom where she splashed water on her face. Her mother was in the hall when she came back out. Ryaan jumped backward. “Mama, you scared the heck out of me.”

  “Sorry, cub. I’m just not sleeping.”

  Ryaan looked at her mother’s worried face and softened her voice. “I got called to a scene. I’ll probably go straight to the station afterward, so I won’t be home until tonight.”

  Her mother touched her face, and Ryaan felt the fine wrinkles on the rough dry pads of her fingertips. “You be careful,” she whispered as she did every time Ryaan left the house.

  Ryaan arrived at the scene just as the light in the sky was shifting from purple toward red. Sunrise would happen within the hour. Maybe it would even warm up. For now, it was cold, and the wind whipped the thick strands of chemically straightened hair across her eyes and cheeks. It felt like getting slapped by a belt made of ribbon. Her hair wasn’t long enough to tie back, so she used one hand as a headband and walked toward the two squad cars and two detective cars that created a poorly formed circle around what must have been the location of the shooting victim. The Crime Scene Unit’s van was parked across the street.

  Hailey Wyatt’s partner, Hal, stood with his back to Ryaan as she approached. He was partially leaned over, his arms crossed and the sweatshirt he wore cut across his back. He didn’t even look cold. He and Hailey made an odd couple. She was barely five-three while Hal had to be almost six-four, just a little taller than her own brothers. Hal had the same skin as Antoine, darker than hers and Darryl’s. Antoine must have gotten it from their father though Ryaan barely remembered him.

  She had always thought Hal Harris was one of the good ones. Rumor was he had a crazy wife but they’d been divorced for as long as Ryaan had known him. He was friendly enough to Ryaan but nothing more, and she wasn’t about to make the first move. Women did that, she knew, but her mother’s Southern culture had seeped into her like a poison that made asking men out on par with putting on pasties and dancing on a pole.

  Hailey greeted her as did the two crime scene techs and the patrol officer who was first to respond to the scene.

  “Morning, Ryaan,” Hal said.

  “If you can call it that,” she said with a little smile that probably looked more like a grimace. She was a miserable flirt.

  The body was gone, leaving just a blackish stain where the officer had bled out. Judging from the outline and the distance of the spray, he had died quickly. Amazing the things that were considered blessings in their field.

  “No casings,” Hal said to catch her up. “It was an older model van or truck.”

  “Reynolds’s camera would have images, right?” Ryaan asked.

  Hal nodded. “The lab is getting us some stills of the van.”

  “Any images of the perp?”

  “Lab’s working on enhancing some of the video,” Hailey said. “They might be able to get a partial reflection in the rearview mirror, but—”

  “The quality on those cameras isn’t great,” Ryaan finished.

  “Right.”

  Ryaan crossed her arms and tried not to shiver. “I was hoping maybe the guy got out of the van.”

  Hal shook his head. “No such luck.”

  “Two perps,” Hailey corrected. “Reynolds was shot through the rear side window of the van.”

  “So someone was sitting in back,” Hal said.

  “You been to the warehouse?” Ryaan asked, looking around for where it might be.

  “It’s a few blocks from here. I’ve got to wait until these guys are done,” Hailey said, motioning to the crime scene techs. “But you and Hal can head over.”

  Ryaan nodded. “Great.”

  “I’ll ride with you,” Hal said. “We’ll see you over there,” he told Hailey.

  Hal stepped aside and put his hand on Ryaan’s lower back as they started toward her car. Inside, Hal rubbed his hands together and blew into them. “Cold out there.”

  As they drove, Hal sang to the radio. He had a nice baritone voice that filled the car and while he didn’t seem particularly shy about the singing, he also didn’t seem to be boasting. She enjoyed it.

  They drove about three blocks before she came around a corner and saw two squad cars and another Crime Scene Unit van. Ryaan followed Hal around the side of an office building. The building was sleek with a tall entryway, the glass mirrored and bright blue. The entryway was set back from the street, and a sculpture which looked like a couple of shiny pipes bent around each other was visible in the foyer of the building. Around it was a fountain lined with overflowing fern plants. “We have a storage facility here?” she asked.

  “First I’d heard of it, too.”

  Ryaan scanned along the front of the building. “There must be a camera here.”

  “Yep. They’ve got a few.”

  Ryaan glanced up at him and saw that he wasn’t done. “But?”

  “Someone vandalized all three of them two nights ago along with four others along the street.”

  “A Friday night. Hard to get someone
out over the weekend. Figured they were safe until Monday morning.”

  Hal nodded. “And they were right. We’ve got that guy on film. Mask, gloves, black head to toe, clean shoes—like out of the box clean.”

  “Not your average street kid.”

  Hal shook his head. “The building’s shared by four businesses: an accounting firm, an architecture firm, a pharmaceutical R&D company, and a law firm that deals mostly in estate law. The management company turned the film in to the south San Francisco station. For all the good it’ll do.”

  “Five businesses, right? What about the police warehouse?”

  “Technically, it’s not the same building.” He led her around the corner and pointed to a sad-looking side entrance. “The warehouse is next door. I guess there was a dispute over the property line when the new building went up. The developers thought they’d bought this warehouse, but it turns out they hadn’t.”

  Ryaan looked at the warehouse. It wasn’t much of a prize. “The owner didn’t want to sell it?”

  “Oh, he did. But for a pretty penny more than fair price. Developers told him he could keep it. Then, he stopped paying taxes.”

  “In comes the state,” Ryaan guessed.

  “Right,” Hal agreed. “California waives his back real estate taxes in exchange for a ten-year lease on the biggest space in the building.”

  Ryaan looked up at Hal. “You got all this in the last two hours?”

  “I got all of it in ten minutes from the building’s management company. I guess this warehouse has caused a few issues in the past. They were hoping the police presence might help.”

  “Fat chance.” Ryaan stopped and looked across the warehouse’s green chipped facade. It was definitely an eyesore. “And there are no cameras here at all?”

  “Not a one.”

  The two entered the warehouse where three crime scene techs were collecting evidence. Small, numbered orange markers were placed across the floor where evidence had been marked for collection.

  “Guns were this way.” Hal led and Ryaan followed, carefully avoiding the markers.

  The room in the corner of the warehouse was, in fact, a cage like one might buy for an aggressive dog. Its ceiling was maybe eight feet high, and the walls were constructed of a solid metal grid, the openings approximately three-inch squares. The cage had been lined on three sides with flimsy metal supply cabinets that reminded Ryaan of the teacher’s supply cabinets from elementary school. The doors were flung open, their contents emptied.

  Sydney Blanchard appeared at the door. Maybe five-three, Sydney was a triathlete with strong, wide shoulders and solid legs. She always seemed to be moving, even when she was standing still. She shifted now from foot to foot. “Hey.”

  “Got anything good?” Hal asked.

  Sydney shrugged. “Not much. Some footprints in the dust, men’s size eight and another size ten and a half so we’re looking for two perps. One comes straight in here—” She pointed to the cage. “The other wanders a bit. Spent a little time down the middle row. We’re getting a list of the cases stored there, especially in one area with the most disturbances in the dust. Nothing yet.”

  Hal frowned. “You thinking they were here for something other than the guns?”

  Sydney shrugged again. She had shifted to bending one knee at a time, kicking her foot up to bump her in the backside. It made Ryaan wonder if the same sort of fidgeting would help her take off the ten pounds she’d put on in the last couple of years.

  “There’s not much of value in this place other than the guns,” Sydney said.

  “So maybe the guy was just nosing around,” Hal suggested.

  “There’s a good chance.”

  “What about the guns?” Ryaan asked, wishing she’d made coffee at home. “How many were there?”

  “Seventy-two.” Sydney opened her notebook and removed a list and handed it to Ryaan. “Here’s the complete inventory of what was stored here.”

  Ryaan scanned the list as Hal read it over his shoulder.

  “Some nice guns,” Hal commented.

  “There’s nothing nice about these,” Ryaan said, the familiar anger cranking into her jaw. “There are a lot of nasty ones on this list,” she added, pointing to the fully automatic weapons that were only useful for all-scale attacks—in wars or nowadays in places like movie theaters and schools.

  “Of course,” Hal agreed and Ryaan shrugged awkwardly, wishing she’d said nothing.

  “How long do you guys need here?” Hal asked Sydney.

  “It’ll take us another couple hours to process then we’ll be back at the lab and see what we’ve got,” Sydney told him.

  Ryaan’s phone buzzed on her hip. She pulled it from the holster and looked down at the screen. The message was from Patrick O’Hanlan. Paddy O—or the Leprechaun as he was known to some of the Triggerlock team—was a dark-haired, freckled man with green eyes, who looked like a teenager. Ryaan was the only one of her teammates who simply called O’Hanlan by his given name. Most probably thought it was because she was also the only woman on the Triggerlock team. In reality, Ryaan called him Patrick because she didn’t want anyone coming up with nicknames for Ryaan or Berry. She’d heard plenty of those in middle school. Ones like Ryaan Scary and Try-on Cherry and those that made even less sense like Fucking Fairy and Fryin’ Hairy.

  Ryaan read Patrick’s message. Mission and Third. Multiple gunshots reported at the main branch of Pacific Bank. Just then, the phone rang. “Berry.”

  Hal’s phone buzzed, too.

  “Ryaan, it’s Patrick. I’m heading downtown.”

  “Pacific Bank? I saw the call.”

  “This is about to be a media shit storm.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got two dead and six more wounded. Thankfully, it all went down before the bank opened for regular hours. Suspect is a fourteen-year-old kid. Arrested him with a semiautomatic rifle. No parents to contact. Kid supposedly lives with his grandmother up in Bernal Heights, but we can’t get Grandma on the phone. I’ve got a squad car heading over there now.”

  “Where did the gun come from?” Ryaan asked, glancing toward the empty cabinets in the cage.

  “No damn clue. Kid won’t talk.”

  Someone was talking in the background.

  “Is that Lomez?” Ryaan asked.

  “Yeah. Hang on.”

  The line was silent a moment before Patrick came back. “He just ran the gun through the database. The serial matches an unsolved from 2009.”

  “Let me guess, the gun is supposed to be in police custody,” Ryaan said.

  Hal raised his eyebrows.

  “How did you know?” Patrick asked.

  Ryaan blew out her breath. “I’ll meet you at Bryant in twenty minutes.”

  With that, she left Hal and Sydney and headed back to her car. Seventy-two guns out there. She needed coffee.

  Chapter 5

  “Hell, no,” Dwayne said to the text on his phone. Like some guy was going to give him a whole bunch of guns and didn’t want nothing up front. 25% on the backside. That kind of deal didn’t exist. This J.T. was some sort of cracker if he thought Dwayne would fall for that shit. He texted back.

  U a cop. Fuck off.

  He’d paid his debt to society and all that shit. No way he was going back. He had Tamara to think about. She had a good gig at the city’s engineering office. She was taking classes at community college. She had moved out of the neighborhood. She had plans, and he had a chance to be part of them… if he didn’t screw things up.

  He had never known a woman like Tamara. She wasn’t boy-crazy. She didn’t talk about wanting a ring and babies. She wanted a career. Every day on the inside, he’d written to her, telling her what he was reading, about the classes he was taking toward his GED. She didn’t answer him. Not once. But he kept writi
ng.

  “These boxes ain’t moving theyselves,” Rhonda shouted as she waddled across the warehouse like a gimpy penguin.

  Dwayne pocketed the phone and started toward the stack of boxes. “I’m on it now, Rhonda. I was just telling my mama that I’ll be bringing home dinner. Maybe some chicken soup,” he added. “She sick.”

  “Yeah, Dwayne. I hear you. I been texting my daddy, too,” Rhonda said, her mouth full of food. Something chocolate maybe. Her mouth was always full of food. “Just get your ass back to work.”

  While Rhonda stood too close, Dwayne loaded boxes until the handcart was full and rolled it to the van in back, unloaded it, then came back for more. He shouldn’t have been thinking about that text, but man, would he love to ditch this loser job. He spent a lot of nights driving home imagining the way he’d tell Rhonda off if he could quit. No choice now. Not a lot of people want to hire an ex-con and he didn’t have a lot of skills either. Not yet. He would soon. Tamara had him taking a statistics class with her. She’d been proud of him, finishing his GED inside.

  He thought that would be the end of him and school, but Tamara wanted a college man so that’s what he was going to be. Right now, he had to keep his head down until he had some classes under his belt. All this job required was a driver’s license and legs that worked, and a shit load of patience to deal with Rhonda.

  Rhonda followed him as he went out the warehouse door on another run. As she walked, her face got all puckered up about the pain in her ankles. She reached the door just as he was putting the last boxes into the back of the van. She was busy licking the remains of her donut or muffin or whatever she’d been stuffing into her face. When she got it all, she wiped the hand on her pants. She had diabetes, which caused swelling and pain in her ankles. The pain didn’t keep her up in that office, though. Dwayne sure as hell wished it did.

  Dwayne walked by with the handcart. One more load and he could get out of there.