Chapter 11
Mei entered the building twenty minutes later, feeling worse. The aftershocks of fear had settled in, creating waves of something that felt like sickness. She’d been shot at. Sophie had been shot. She might have died. Beyond that, the call with her father had upset her. She was angry at the way he spoke to her, at his comment that it was a good thing Andy was here. Like she needed a keeper. She hated herself for allowing him to make her feel like she was a disappointment.
Worse yet, she was plagued by the reality that she was a disappointment to her parents. Maybe they didn’t know it yet, but they would. There was no avoiding it. If she was going to live the life she wanted, her parents would find out. What would it be like with them after? Whatever happened, she’d have to find a way to accept—and make peace with—her decision and its consequences.
Back at the department, Mei went to the bathroom to wash her hands and face. The woman in the mirror was a stranger. Her eyes were dull with a hint of panic. Her black slacks were dusty from sitting on the floor of the elevator, and she had some sort of grease streak across her right sleeve. The lab had a shower space and lockers, but Mei had yet to bring a change of clothes. Instead, she crossed to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands, splashed cold water on her neck which always grew red and speckled after a fight with her parents. Then, she rolled up her shirtsleeves, dusted the dirt off her slacks and marched into her office. No voicemails. There were a few administrative emails to respond to, but they could wait.
Down the hall, she entered the lab’s main office where a young man was seated in one of the hard-backed orange chairs that, together with a handful of years-old magazines, made up their waiting area. No one else was around.
“Someone helping you?” Mei asked.
“Got a delivery.” He stood up and slid a white box out from under the seat. He held it under his left arm and handed Mei a clipboard. “Sign on fourteen.”
He checked her signature carefully before handing over the package. The package was addressed to Alice, the office secretary, so Mei left it on her desk and headed on into the computer lab. A central console took up the far corner of the space. Beside it was a flat screen large enough to fill Ayi’s living room where they could project images from anywhere on the network.
Aaron Pollack was in his regular spot in front of the corner console, hunched over a Dell computer that had been seized as part of a killer-for-hire case. He didn’t look up. Aaron had been on that computer for three days now, and Mei was starting to wonder what was taking so long. Questioning Aaron wasn’t easy. He had been the second in charge in the computer lab since computer crime officially got its own division almost ten years earlier. When David Tilley retired, Aaron had assumed the head job would be his. As had several other members of the team. Mei wasn’t privy to all the reasons Aaron hadn’t gotten the job, but some were obvious. While Aaron was a computer genius, his inability to communicate made working with him a challenge. Not to mention that he wrote emails without the use of any punctuation or capitalization, which made it seem like corresponding with a seven-year-old. Still, his GQ-esque looks and affinity for nice clothes made Aaron a sort of poster boy for the computer lab. Their Sergeant, Grace Lanier, seemed particularly fond of him, and Mei’s attempts to discuss her issues with Lanier had received a frosty response. Luckily, Aaron was very well suited to and very adept at his specialty, so Mei had little reason to manage him too closely.
At the moment, Mei was giving Aaron an especially wide berth as he adjusted to her presence. She’d all but stopped asking what he was working on, as any question, no matter how casual, seemed to make him feel like she was spying on him. This had come out after he’d called in sick three days in a row the month before, and one of the other lab techs, Amy Warner, had explained to Mei that all her questions were making his psoriasis act up.
“That and he’s still taking the demotion kind of hard,” Amy Warner told Mei, her eyes barely making it as high as Mei’s knees, which was a feat considering that Amy was a few inches taller than Mei.
“Demotion?” Mei had asked.
“Well,” Amy said, shrugging until it looked like her head might fit all the way down between her shoulders.
Mei wasn’t surprised that Aaron was taking it hard, but the team’s support of him was harder for her to grasp. He was misanthropic to a fault and unpleasant even to those who considered him a friend. Despite that, the team was very protective of him. Mei had learned quickly that she had no ally in the lab when it came to the subject of Aaron or his myriad of quirks. Not that Mei wasn’t used to that. Quirks were prevalent all across law enforcement, but they seemed particularly rampant in computer forensics.
“Morning, Aaron,” she called out as she passed.
Aaron didn’t look up but made a noise that, before Aaron, she would have called a grunt. Now, she recognized it as acknowledgement. She ought to get her dad and Aaron together some time.
Her other two lab techs, Blake and Teddy, stood at the far table dressed in white coats and purple gloves. Between them was a computer that Mei assumed had come from the police storage facility. A small orange feather duster and a plastic container of matching orange powder sat on the table. As she approached, Mei could see the fine layer of florescent powder on the computer. Off to one side were the cell phone and battery pack that had been attached to the computer in the image Sydney had shown her. Both were covered in the same fine powder.
She picked up the camera and flipped through the images Teddy had taken. Images of the computer with the cell phone and battery bundled, from every angle. Nothing else. If there had been fingerprints, Teddy would have documented them.
Mei watched the light scan across the computer. Nothing lit up. They would begin with the computer’s exterior then take it apart. She couldn’t help but feel impatient. “No luck?”
“Nada,” Blake said.
“Nope.”
Holding only the edges, Blake turned the computer over, and Teddy scanned the bottom and each edge with his battle light. Blake then opened the computer to reveal the screen and keyboard. He dusted while Teddy waited with the light.
When they had searched the surface of the computer, Blake released the disk drive and they printed that. Nothing. Blake set the computer back down.
“You try a blue light?” Mei asked.
Teddy shook his head. “Not yet.”
The blue light was used to check for biologicals like semen or urine. A computer wasn’t necessarily a likely spot for either, but she’d seen stranger things. Teddy unscrewed the tip of his battle light and replaced the orange light with a blue one. The two men put on orange goggles. Mei used the third pair and watched as Teddy shined the blue light across each surface. Computer, cell phone, battery. Nothing.
Mei took a glove from the box on the table and pulled it on to her right hand. Tucking her left hand behind her as a matter of habit, she lifted the battery pack and turned it over with her right hand.
“Cool, right?” Blake said. He pointed to a spot of welding at one end with the working end of a very long, thin slot screwdriver.
“Homemade?” Mei said.
“Definitely,” Blake agreed. “And well done.”
“Guy knew what he was doing,” Teddy added. “It’s still got juice.”
“LiPo,” Blake said with awe.
“Right?” Teddy agreed.
She figured they were referring to the fact that the battery was Lithium powered. Both Teddy and Blake had engineering degrees. She knew from his file that Teddy had spent some time in his late teens as a Black Hat, getting his start hacking into his school to change his grades. He went on to teach himself to hack into a few of his favorite online video games and give himself extra credits rather than buying them. Caught when the hacking escalated to adding his own credit card account to the automatic bill pay of the company where he had spent a summer internshi
p, Teddy was a find for law enforcement because he still had some fingers in the Black Hat world.
Blake wasn’t nearly as well-versed in the hacking universe, but he had a mechanical engineering degree from Cal Poly, which made him very talented with the hardware. They were twenty-three and twenty-four, respectively, but to Mei, they seemed much younger. Considering she was only thirty-two, the gap shouldn’t have felt as large as it did.
The three took off their goggles, and Blake set the computer back down. “So we have nothing,” Mei said.
Teddy shook his head. “No.”
“We’ll take apart the battery pack and the jammer to see if there are any latents inside,” Blake said. “I don’t expect anything inside the computer or the cell phone since they don’t appear altered, but we’ll check.”
“Any chance we can track the computer?”
“We can probably find out where it was purchased. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the buyer, but it’s a cheap brand. Whoever sold it probably sells a lot of them,” Blake said. “Couple hundred bucks.”
“If that,” Teddy pitched in.
“Totes,” Blake agreed, using a vernacular Mei had just learned, short for “totally.”
“The battery pack is homemade,” Blake continued, “so we might get something there, but there are no unusual pieces.”
“Right,” Teddy agreed. “Everything here could’ve come from RadioShack.”
“Or Walmart,” Blake added.
“Exactly.”
Mei wondered if there was any sense in separating the two of them to eliminate the echo. “How about registration on the computer?”
The two shook their heads in unison. “Nada,” Teddy said.
“Nothing,” Blake agreed.
“The phone?”
“Prepaid,” Blake told her.
Before Teddy could agree, Mei cut in. “Let’s try to find out where it was bought and get records on where it’s been used. Any other numbers outgoing or incoming.”
“I’ll work on it now,” Blake said.
“Then see if you can find out where the computer came from.”
Blake nodded.
“Teddy, can you start it up and see if there’s any trace of the programming?”
“Waste of time,” Aaron announced from across the room.
“Right. It’ll probably be wiped clean, but maybe we’ll get lucky,” Mei said.
“Not probably,” Aaron said. “Definitely a waste of time.” He hadn’t turned away from the screen, his shoulders still hunched over the keyboard.
“Why so sure, Aaron?” Mei asked, trying not to sound frustrated. Maybe it was FBI versus police or maybe San Francisco versus Chicago, but she felt like she was in middle school around this group.
“Aaron, man, she’s talking to you,” Blake said.
Aaron spun around in his chair, wearing a smile. Aaron was not the stereotypical computer nerd. He was five ten and well-built. Most women probably thought he was good-looking. He wore his hair the way the guys did in GQ magazine at the moment—not that she read GQ other than in the grocery store line. It was cut close on the sides, longer up front with a dab of gel to create a little lift right above his forehead. He dressed nicely, surprisingly metro, in button-downs that were pin-striped on the outside and had checks or paisley under the cuffs. She’d heard from a woman in the ballistics lab that he was quite the chick magnet, too. According to gossip, he was currently dating someone from the “San Francisco social scene,” whatever that meant.
Despite that, Mei couldn’t separate the sound of his voice from the spine-crawling reaction she had to the pompous nerds who were her peers as a computer science major at Northwestern. Amazing what links the brain made without conscious input.
Lover of the pregnant pause, Aaron waited until Mei asked again. “Why are you so sure?”
Aaron rose from his chair and pulled his white lab coat off a hook that hung over the edge of his cube. The professor coming to lecture. “Generic everything,” he began.
“You mean the computer.”
“An Acer, to be exact,” Aaron said. “The most popular brand sold at Walmart, Kmart and Target, among other retailers.”
Mei hadn’t had a chance to look at the brand name yet. “And the phone is a prepaid,” she added.
“But not new,” Aaron said as though correcting her. “Probably picked up at a pawn shop, and I’d be willing to bet it hasn’t been scrubbed. But whatever is on it isn’t from this guy.”
Mei looked over at the worn flip phone. It was true. It didn’t look new. It would be near impossible to track a phone bought at a pawn shop.
Aaron straightened his shirtsleeves from under his jacket and crossed the room to her. “Not just that. I looked at the jammer. There’s no personalization at all.”
“There has to be something we can get from it.”
Aaron crossed his arms and shook his head. “No,” he said with utter certainty. “I’m afraid not.”
“Someone wrote ‘on’ and ‘off’ on it. That’s something.”
Aaron shrugged. “Perhaps. If you find a way to match the handwriting.”
Mei looked over to see Blake and Teddy nodding in agreement. “You could be right, Aaron,” she said carefully. “This guy probably thinks he has us.”
As suspected, Aaron frowned at her use of the plural. He certainly didn’t want to be included in the group that was “had.”
“Maybe he’s smarter than we are,” she went on.
Aaron’s mouth fell open just slightly as though he’d just developed a bad taste.
Mei had to resist the urge to continue. Aaron wasn’t dumb, and baiting him with the idea that this was a puzzle he couldn’t solve might land her straight on her face. Instead, she did what the FBI had trained her to do. Play to his ego. “What do you think is our best chance?”
Aaron seemed to relax. “I’d start with the battery pack. It’s a three cell and the cells are held together with double stick tape. It’s hard to work with sticky tape wearing gloves. If we’re lucky, there might be a print there.”
“Good idea, Aaron.”
Aaron nodded and turned back to his desk.
“I suggest checking the cell tabs, too,” Mei told Blake. “Likely there was some sort of hot glue used to insulate them. We might find something there.”
“Good idea. I didn’t think of the insulate,” Blake said.
“Also, as I recall, there is an optimal temperature for LiPo batteries. If our guy used any type of heat sink or fan to keep it cool, there’s a greater chance of being able to identify where that came from. Hard to build one of those yourself.”
Mei glanced over to see Aaron watching her intently. As soon as she caught his eye, though, he turned back to his computer. Mei heard her phone’s ringtone, a quacking duck.
“It’s over here, I believe,” Aaron said, motioning to the empty workspace behind his desk. Mei crossed the room. The iPhone was bulky. Mei often set it down when her hands were full. She was going to have to get one of those goofy holsters for it before she lost it. Last week, it had ended up in the administrative office because she’d left it on the coffee cart. The screen showed a text from Ryaan Berry.
Meeting in TL conference room. You avail?
Mei responded. TL?
Triggerlock.
On my way.
Mei told Teddy and Blake that she was heading into a meeting and asked them to leave the components disassembled so she could see them when she came back. “Text me if you find anything.”
On her way out the door, she ran into Amy Warner coming in with a carrier full of Starbucks coffees. “Oh,” she said, her eyes on the floor.
“Hi, Amy. I’m going upstairs for a meeting.”
Amy nodded dumbly, and Mei glanced at the coffees on her way out the door. Four of them.
One for everyone but her. Eventually, she told herself. Eventually.
Chapter 12
J.T. had followed the kid from the police station down Van Ness then in reverse again. At first, it looked like maybe the kid had figured out he was being followed. Seeing Dwayne push the gun back out onto the street was surprising. People were usually more predictable than that. Still, it didn’t change the plans. J.T. merely gathered the returned gun and dropped it, along with the rest of them, to a place where they were sure to be appreciated.
San Francisco was losing its edge in gang violence. Oakland was so much cheaper, after all. But there were still a few choice areas left. One of J.T.’s favorites was near the corner of Eddy and Mason in the Tenderloin. If Dwayne didn’t appreciate the gift, certainly the kids there would. J.T. considered taking the load over without help. How fun to be like Santa delivering a bag of toys to all the kiddies.
It was only caution that prevented it. With the abundance of cell phone videos, the risk of being filmed was too great, even to enjoy the thrill in those young faces when the delivery was made. J.T. arranged to pay Karl six hundred in cash to drop them off late that night.
J.T. loaded the guns into a 1988 brown Ford Focus bought with cash in Arizona by Hank. J.T. had suggested that Hank register the car in his name and Hank, not the brightest or sharpest student, had agreed readily. He had liked the idea of owning all the cars, which J.T. offered as additional payment when the jobs were done. J.T. had registered the vans in his name for the same reason. Forfeited now, of course. But that wasn’t J.T.’s fault. Hank had that coming.
Karl was to park the car, pop the trunk and walk away. The vehicle’s VIN had been removed, the plates were stolen. The keys and cash were under the driver’s seat. It had taken J.T. the better part of an hour to load the guns and park the car in General Hospital’s parking garage.
Guy’s expecting a full delivery. J.T. had told Karl via text.
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