I never steal from the hand that feeds, Karl texted back.
J.T. was certain that wasn’t true but left it at that. Likely this would be the last interaction with Karl.
J.T. dropped the burn phone in a trash can before catching the bus back to the apartment.
Dwayne, Karl, Hank and Sam were cogs in the plan. The only one left to deal with was Sam, and surely he would be done by now.
Chapter 13
Ryaan and Patrick were set up in the Triggerlock conference room, which smelled of scrambled eggs and cheap breakfast sausage patties from that morning’s Captains’ meeting. Spots of half-dried orange juice made finding a clean spot on the table a challenge. Already one of Ryaan’s forearms had stuck to the faux wood veneer.
Ryaan opened her file and pulled out the list of guns that had been stored in the facility at Oyster Point. Ten seconds later, Hailey Wyatt came through the door. Hal followed behind, looking like he was not having an easy time keeping up. The sight of him rushing in behind a woman who was at least a foot shorter made Ryaan smile for the first time in hours.
Hal seemed to know what she was thinking. “She’s faster than you’d think.”
Hailey glanced between them without a word. “Six more shootings,” she said out loud, although they already knew the count.
Ryaan nodded. She’d heard about the one downstairs. In the damn police department.
Mei pushed through the door in a rush. “Sorry I’m late.”
Ryaan watched as she crossed the room and found an empty chair. She looked less pressed than usual. Mei glanced in her lap before adjusting her shoulders back and raising her head.
“Any word on injuries from this morning?” Patrick asked.
“Four wounded, no fatalities,” Hal said.
“You see it, Mei?” Ryaan asked.
“No. But I was close. Sydney Blanchard and I were in the elevator. Doors opened on the main floor and we could hear it. We helped a victim onto the elevator. Sophie something. Sydney knew her.”
“Sophie Turner,” Hailey said. “She works in administrative. Is she hurt?”
“Not sure. I stayed with her until the paramedics came.”
Hailey nodded. “I’ll find out how she’s doing.”
“Thanks,” Mei said.
Patrick turned a page in his notebook. “We’ve identified the shooter from footage taken outside the station.”
“How did that guy get away?” Mei asked.
Hal sighed. “Crazy, isn’t it? The station is the last place we were ready to defend. Guy just slipped through the cracks and was gone.”
“There’s going to be some hell to pay,” Patrick added.
A moment passed while Ryaan considered whose neck was on the chopping block for letting the shooter escape. Likely they were all thinking the same thing. It wasn’t theirs, she knew that much.
“Guy’s name is Justin Sawicki,” Patrick started again. “He’s twenty-three. Applied to the department in ‘11, ‘12 and again this past March. He failed the test the first two times. This time, he passed the test but was turned down after a psych assessment.”
“Any idea why?” Hailey asked.
“The recruiting officer I talked to was vague. All he told me was that Sawicki did three tours in Afghanistan.”
No one had anything to add. Three tours might explain a failed psych exam.
“Watch the table,” Ryaan warned Hailey before she set her notepad on the desk.
“What happened in here?”
“Captains’ meeting,” Ryaan explained.
Hal grabbed a stack of paper towels from the end of the table and handed them to Hailey who laid them out like a table cloth before setting the file down again.
“Okay, in order, we have Jacob Monaghan, fourteen, a sophomore at Lowell High School,” said Hal, sticking a picture of Monaghan on the whiteboard. Kid didn’t even look fourteen.
Ryaan thought of the pictures in her mother’s living room. Of Antoine in his Christmas suit a month before he was killed, only thirteen when he was hit by a spray of bullets as regular in their New Orleans neighborhood as the spray from sprinklers was in others. Of Darryl with a basketball tucked under one arm, his gangly dark legs jettisoning out of a pair of frayed shorts. His hair was as big as the ball, his grin bright except for the space between his two front teeth. Her mother swore the picture was taken the day he was killed. The metal picture frame was blackened on the side where her mother had clung to it, grieving.
“Monaghan lost his grandmother about a week ago,” Hal said. “No parents in the picture.”
“How did the grandmother die?” Mei asked.
“Heart attack. In bed.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“After Monaghan, we have Albert Jackson. Jackson is sixty-seven. Homeless, Vietnam vet, arrested a half-dozen times for indecent exposure—” Hal turned to Hailey. “You got a picture of him?”
She handed it over. Hal clicked his tongue. “I’ll be damned. That’s the guy from McDonald’s.”
Patrick looked up. “What?”
“You don’t recognize him?” Hal asked.
The others shook their heads.
Hal laughed and scratched the top of his bald head. “He hangs out near that McDonald’s down the block. He seems to have trouble keeping his pants up.” No one said anything. “Guess you all don’t eat at McDonald’s.” He looked around the table. “The guy seemed harmless.”
There was a brief silence before Hailey spoke again. “So, Jackson had two weapons but only discharged one. Fired nine rounds at the bus depot. Didn’t hit a single person.”
“Nine rounds isn’t much,” Ryaan said. “How many were in his weapon?”
“Both magazines were fully loaded,” Patrick said.
“AKs?”
He nodded.
“So, Jackson had sixty rounds. Why not shoot them?” Ryaan asked.
Hal checked the paperwork. “Witnesses say he fired the nine shots slowly, and then set the guns down and started to walk away.”
“And why is he all the way over at Sansome if he lives down here? And why only fire nine bullets out of sixty?” Hailey repeated.
No one answered.
Hailey made a note and looked up. “After Jackson, we have Sawicki?”
Patrick nodded. “Another vet.”
“Can we connect him to Jackson? Maybe through some vet program?” Mei asked, her head down as she worked on her tablet with a stylus. She held it up so the others could see the bubble diagram. In each circle was a victim’s name and she was drawing dotted lines between them. Between Sawicki and Jackson was the word “vet.”
Ryaan made a note. “I’ll look into it.”
“Sawicki had two weapons and fired from both. Twenty-seven rounds.”
Hailey looked down. “Last on our list is Martha Witter, thirty-four.”
Hal tacked up a picture of a woman smiling. Under one arm was a little boy, maybe seven, holding a basketball. “Her kid died two weeks ago,” Hal told them.
“Of a toothache,” Hailey added.
“A toothache?” Patrick said. “How the hell do you die from a toothache?”
“No insurance,” Hailey said. “Kid had an untreated infection in a molar. Bacteria spread to his brain.”
“And the mom didn’t shoot the dentist?” Patrick said then caught himself.
“No,” Hal said soberly. “She shot herself. Left behind her husband who has been out of work since ‘09 and two other kids.”
The room went still. Sometimes the heartaches were brutal.
Ryaan looked over Mei’s diagram where she’d drawn a fourth bubble with Witter’s name. “This list doesn’t even make sense,” said Ryaan.
“Unless this is all Sawicki’s design,” Mei offered.
“How so?” Patri
ck asked.
“Well, you’ve got a guy who didn’t make it into the department. He’s got a beef. What better way to get retribution than to throw a bunch of guns out on the street and create a mess for us to clean up.”
“But why be a shooter himself?” Hailey asked. “Why not just keep the guns going?”
“The psych assessment suggests he’s not all together there,” Patrick agreed. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be logical.”
“How many shots have been fired so far?” Mei asked.
“They’re estimating forty-eight rounds fired in all,” Ryaan said.
“Why do you ask?” Patrick said.
Mei nodded to the list Ryaan had. “I was wondering where the ammo came from. There’s none listed in the warehouse inventory, is there?”
Ryaan shook her head. “Nope. Perp had to have bought it. We’ll get the manufacturer information from the lab and see if we can track down where it was purchased.”
Patrick made a note. “I’ll go through Sawicki’s credit cards, track his whereabouts in the last few days, see if I can find something there.”
“By some miracle, we’ve only had the three fatalities,” said Hal.
“It’s possible that one of the AKs Jackson had was jammed. He never fired it. Ballistics is testing it,” Patrick pointed out.
“Were the other guns fully loaded?” Ryaan asked.
Patrick nodded. “All but the one.”
“Which one?” Ryaan asked.
“Witter’s,” Patrick said.
“I’m thinking she got rid of the extra bullets,” Hailey said. “In case one of the kids found the gun with the body.”
No one argued. The logic made sense. The only mother in the room, Hailey would know better than any of them.
“It’s not that many rounds fired if you figure six guns had thirty rounds each,” Mei said.
“Well, Witter only shot herself,” Hal said.
“The numbers are encouraging until you realize we’ve only found six of the seventy-plus weapons,” Ryaan said. At that rate, they might easily have another twenty-five bodies. The thought made her sick. Triggerlock tended to attract officers who loved guns. That was not Ryaan.
“Anything useful on the computers?” Hailey asked Mei.
Mei’s head came up. “Not yet. There are a few possibilities to track down some peripherals. No prints though.” She glanced at her watch. “They should have some results on the programming by now, if there’s anything left to find.”
“Let’s keep in touch, then.”
Ryaan stood and gathered her papers as Patrick and Hal left the room talking. Mei had closed the cover to her tablet but she remained seated.
“You okay?” Ryaan asked her.
“It’s been a long day.”
Hailey pushed in her chair. “This your first shooting?”
Mei nodded.
“Sophie Turner is fine,” Hailey told her. “Her wound wasn’t even from a bullet.”
“It wasn’t?”
Hailey shook her head. “A piece of debris, probably loosened by a bullet. She was lucky. Didn’t even need stitches. Just a couple suture bandages. She’ll be at work tomorrow.”
“Good,” Mei said.
“It gets easier,” Hailey told her.
“Or else you learn to let it out so it doesn’t weigh you down,” Ryaan added, thinking hers was the more truthful answer.
“Rookie Club dinner next week,” Hailey told Mei. “You have to come.”
“Maybe by then we’ll have this thing cracked,” Mei responded.
“I would definitely drink to that,” Ryaan said.
“Me, too,” Hailey agreed.
The three women walked from the room in silence. It was a hell of a long shot to think they could solve this thing in a week, but some things were better left unsaid.
Chapter 14
Mei went directly from Triggerlock to a meeting with finance on the third and fourth quarter budgets and another with the Captain of Forensics, Lance Findlay, to discuss how to allocate the increasingly limited resources for her computer forensics group. When she finally surfaced from the meetings, she had forty-two emails waiting in her in-box. Mei decided they could wait until morning.
In the lab, Blake was still running test programs on the warehouse computer. It was nearly six and everybody else had left. “How’s it going?”
He stood tall and rolled his neck. “I’ve been working on this thing all afternoon. I’ll have to pull the battery apart tomorrow to start looking for prints.”
“Maybe Amy can help you,” Mei suggested.
“I think she’s working on something for Aaron,” Blake said without looking up. Of her team, Amy was the one Mei thought least qualified, and she always seemed to be working on something else. Often for Aaron.
“How much longer on this?” she asked.
Blake glanced up at the screen. “Says eighty-three minutes.”
“Let’s lock it up and go home. We’ll check it in the morning.”
One of the department’s new toys was a walk-in, fireproof safe with a whole bank of electrical outlets. Because so much of computer forensics required tedious processing, it was useful to be able to continue that process even when they weren’t there. The “docking safe,” as the team called it, enabled them to make forward motion without the risk of interrupting the chain of custody.
While Blake stored the computer, Mei looked over the pieces of the LiPo battery that had powered the computer and cell phone. At the sight of the heat sink, she felt a surge of satisfaction. “You find out where the heat sink came from?”
“Teddy’s working on it. It’s a deepcool mc3002 gx. He’s requested a search for matching models for sale. We should hear back tomorrow. We should have some results on the glue then, too.”
“Good. Thanks for your help today, Blake.”
Blake nodded and began to pack up while Mei took out a glove and turned the pieces over, looking at the cells and the casing. The soldering was home done, and they might be able to learn something from the markings. The tape was still adhered to the individual batteries. They hadn’t gotten around to dusting it for prints yet. Mei could do it herself, but she was tired tonight, unmotivated in a way that felt distinctly unusual for her. Plus, she was supposed to meet Andy and Ayi.
Blake was still getting everything put away for the night and when he came to retrieve the battery pack, Mei moved her attention to the jammer. It, too, had been pulled into pieces, but more thoroughly than the battery pack. The aluminum box was open, the antennae off one side along with the nine volt battery. The UHF connectors had been detached. What remained was the small minicircuit, no bigger than a thumb drive and a fourth as thick. Mei used a penlight to shine in and look at the components.
The surface was free of dusting powder. Too small and uneven to capture a print. There appeared to be a drop of something inside. Maybe a glue of some sort, maybe not. She pulled a cotton swab out of one of the station’s drawers and broke off the protective plastic top. Carefully, she swabbed the spot and returned the cotton swab into the cap, clicking the plastic down to seal it. She wrote the case number on the outside to drop it off at the lab on her way out.
“What’d you find?” Blake asked, returning from the safe.
“Not sure. Some sort of liquid inside.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be blood,” Blake said, smiling.
“Not sure we’ll get that lucky.”
Blake gestured to the jammer. “You done? I can get it put away.”
Mei looked down at it. Not quite ready to let go. The text message from Andy said he was meeting her at the restaurant at six thirty. If she left in the next five minutes, she would be on time. As much as she dreaded it, she had to go. There would be time tomorrow, she told herself. She pulled off the purp
le gloves and tossed them. “Thanks, Blake.”
The two left the lab together; Mei crossed to chem to leave her sample while Blake headed to the elevator. Sydney Blanchard was gone. Only a tech Mei didn’t know was in the lab to log in the evidence. With a sigh, Mei left.
She walked down the quiet hallway and opened the door to the stairs, colliding with someone coming through the door from the opposite side.
“Oh, my God,” Mei said, pulling the door open. “I’m so sorry.”
On the other side was Sophie Turner. She held her nose.
“Are you okay?”
Sophie removed her hand and looked at it as though expecting blood. “Fine. You scared me. You must be in some hurry to get out of here.” In her free hand she held a bundle of Gerber daisies in bright colors.
“How do you feel?” Mei asked.
“Fine. It wasn’t even a bullet,” she said. “Doctors think it was something that came loose with a bullet.”
“No stitches?”
Sophie raised her shirt. “Nope. Not even stitches.”
Mei saw three thin strips of white bandage running across her side. She also noticed that Sophie wasn’t wearing the same clothes.
“You changed?”
“I went home from the hospital and showered.”
“Then you came back to work?”
Sophie smiled awkwardly. “Actually, I was just going to put these on your desk?”
Now it was Mei’s turn to feel awkward. “My desk?”
“As a thank-you. For today.”
Mei felt the heat rise up her neck. “Wow. Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. I appreciate you staying with me. Offering to come in the ambulance and everything.”
“They wouldn’t let me.”
Sophie nodded. “I know. But still.” She handed Mei the flowers.
“Thank you. They’re so bright.”
“You heading out?” Sophie asked.
Mei nodded. The two women walked up the stairs together. There was nothing weird about a female coworker bringing her flowers after the ordeal earlier. That was what Mei was telling herself. Maybe it was a little strange that Sophie had come back to the station after being shot. But maybe she lived close by. She couldn’t have known that Mei would still be here. Don’t read so much into it, Mei scolded herself.
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