Interference

by Danielle Girard

  Mei nodded. “I guess. I can’t quite remember—”

  “When the tox screen showed the Rohypnol,” Jamie told her, “Hailey called me.”

  “You okay to talk for a few?” Hailey asked.

  “I got sick,” Mei said. “I need to shower first.”

  Hailey looked at Jamie who stared at Mei. “It’s actually a good thing you didn’t shower,” Jamie told her.

  “Then, you obviously can’t smell me.” Mei felt the joke stick in the back of her throat.

  Jamie smiled again. “I can. But if you had showered, we’d have lost any physical evidence that might lead us to our suspect.”

  Jamie was from Sex Crimes. Mei tried to feel some part of her body other than the steady drumming in her skull. Her stomach was clenched and empty. Her throat sore. Her tongue rough. Her backside was numb from being in bed. But… no. She shook her head. “I wasn’t raped.”

  Hailey nodded.

  “I’d know if I’d been raped,” Mei said more emphatically.

  “Probably,” Jamie agreed. “Your clothes were intact and there was no outward sign of an attack, but if there is a chance, I want to collect a rape kit.

  “Plus, if you came into contact with whoever drugged you, there may be transfer. Rape is unlikely but transfer isn’t.” Jamie reached down and opened an evidence kit Mei hadn’t noticed before. She pulled out a pair of purple gloves and handed them to Hailey then put on a pair herself. “I’d still like to scrape under your nails and through your hair. Those and your clothes are our best bets for transfer.”

  Mei sat frozen.

  “Then you can shower,” Hailey told her.

  Embarrassment burned hot in her cheeks. She’d been passed out in her bed for thirty-six hours while her colleagues and friends had been in and out of her bedroom, watching her, smelling her vomit. Not to mention that she’d been sleeping in the same clothes, in her own vomit, for a day and a half. Maybe it was good news that she hadn’t showered, but Mei wished desperately that she had. Then, at the very least, she could pretend to herself that she’d retained some small bastion of self-respect.

  As though sensing her hesitation, Jamie and Hailey worked in silence. Between them, Jamie set out plain white butcher block paper across Mei’s lap then pulled out two paper bags, a metal tool for scraping under the fingernails, and a pair of clippers. While Jamie labeled the pages and sacks, Hailey lifted Mei’s right hand and set it on top of the paper. Working from the pinky finger in, Hailey scraped under Mei’s fingernails then lifted a set of nail clippers. “You mind if I take clippings?”

  Mei shook her head. With every inhale, the vomit smell grew stronger and she could hardly sit still, waiting for them to be done. She wanted to be alone. When they were finished, Mei watched them pack up the samples. Jamie pulled out a large paper bag and handed it to Mei. “I’d like to take your clothes with me, too.”

  When Mei didn’t reach for it, Jamie set it on the bed. “Why don’t we go get some lunch and we’ll come back in about an hour?”

  “Good idea,” Hailey agreed. “You up for a burger?”

  Mei was starving. “Sure. Thanks.”

  “There’s a great place down on Judah,” Jamie said. “We’ll pick something up and be back soon.”

  Jamie turned for the door, taking her evidence kit with her. Hailey stayed back. “It’s been a busy weekend. Take a shower and we’ll catch you up when we get back.”

  “Okay.”

  Hailey nodded and started for the door. It was only after she’d closed it behind her that Mei thought to say, “Thanks.” She realized she’d forgotten because she didn’t feel the least bit thankful.

  Chapter 31

  J.T. pocketed the two casings and stood over Karl Penn’s motionless body, listening to the predawn sounds. The radiator hissed and spit in the other room. A garbage truck was grumbling down a street a few blocks away. Other than that, the apartment was blissfully silent. So few people appreciated four a.m. the way J.T. did. And on a Monday no less.

  J.T. would have liked to handle Penn over the weekend but the police had held him until Sunday morning. Too many people coming in and out on Sundays—sleeping late or going off to church, shopping. Better to wait until Monday. And now it was done.

  J.T. watched the pool of blood around Penn’s head expand. A slow, viscous sea of red. There was something soothing about the sight of blood. It was time to go, so J.T. took three steps away from the body and unscrewed the silencer from the end of the Sig Sauer. A great little gun, J.T. would have liked to keep it. Unfortunately, there were plans for this one. Tucking the gun in one pocket and the silencer in the other, J.T. paused on the threshold of Karl’s apartment to scan the room. Clean. Pulled the hood up. Used a gloved hand to open the door. Outside, J.T. walked slowly down the stairs, blowing on cold hands as though just out for an early morning walk or a jog. To a passerby, J.T. was nondescript. Under that hood, not necessarily black or white. Not short, not tall. Medium. Average. Forgettable.

  J.T. walked three blocks to the car and got in and started the engine, pulling away quickly but without rushing. Another item checked off the list. One more stop, and then it would be a matter of planning the next series of moves.

  Before the planning, J.T. had to clean house. A good business practice in general, there was also something extremely cathartic about starting new. Out with the old, in with the new. Hank. Sam. Justin. J.T. paused a moment. J.T. had not anticipated that Justin would play more than a tiny part. After all, Justin’s role was to shoot up the police department. Who would have wagered that he’d get out of there alive let alone actually get away? That feat earned Justin some additional attention.

  He would have been useful a little longer, but you can never tell when some people are going to crack. Yes, shooting up the department and escaping was impressive, but going after Karl Penn on his own just because J.T. wouldn’t let him in on all of it? That was not impressive. After all, this was about J.T., not Sawicki.

  That J.T. had shared more of the plan, let Sawicki in on the delivery of the weapons to the young masses, had been an error in judgment. No, J.T. could be honest. It was ego. A flash of weakness when the temptation to share one moment of glory outweighed the risk. Sawicki had made you want to talk. The quiet ones were like that.

  J.T. had known it was an error. After the fire, J.T. severed contact with Sawicki. Knowing it would require cleanup eventually, J.T. had assumed Sawicki would lie low a while longer. With every police officer in the Greater Bay Area looking for him. But, no. Instead, Sawicki had immediately taken it upon himself to find J.T. through Karl Penn.

  It would have been very troubling if the police had gotten a chance to talk to Sawicki. That Sawicki had gone and gotten himself killed eliminated a step for J.T.

  Lesson learned, though. No more wasting time. J.T. liked to think judging character was a personal strength, but after Sawicki, there would be a little less faith in that skill. Which put one more person on the list.

  J.T. pulled up behind the battered Camry. The street was dark although the glow of dawn was beginning to cast its blue shadow over the street. J.T. rounded the driver’s side of the Camry and tested the door. Locked. J.T. had expected that. The car had been locked behind the office building when J.T. had practiced breaking into it.

  With the exact same motions, J.T. pulled the long, flat rod and slid it smoothly through the small slit at the top of the window. With three motions, J.T. maneuvered the rod until the lock released. Slid the hook back up the left coat sleeve then pulled out the gun. This, J.T. tucked well under the driver’s seat. The silencer, though, J.T. hid in the elastic pocket behind the driver’s seat, leaving only an inch of it visible.

  The owner of the car likely wouldn’t notice it. To the untrained eye, it might have been a random piece of pipe or a metal cylinder. Easily overlooked.

  The police would know
what it was, and that was what J.T. was counting on. Pulling away, J.T. thought about assembling a new team. Or better yet, maybe it was time to fly solo for a while. After all, there wasn’t much left to do before they could collect their rewards and leave town.

  Chapter 32

  Dwayne was actually getting the hang of his statistics class. The first days were like being in a foreign country. The teacher talking about stuff like probability, Bayes Rule, and correlation versus causation. A few of the students were nodding their heads like they understood perfectly, but Dwayne hadn’t been in a math class in four years and he hadn’t been paying attention then. He’d gotten his GED online and that had required some math, but nothing like this.

  The instructor gave little quizzes at the end of each two hour lecture and in those first classes, Dwayne thought he might just fail before the second week was over. He’d been ready to quit. If Tamara hadn’t been sitting next to him in that class, he’d have stood up and walked out. He certainly wouldn’t have come back. Nothing more frustrating than having some old white man talk about something like it was easy when you couldn’t understand a word of it. And that was exactly how he felt. Every once in a while, the guy would ask for questions and Dwayne would wait for some sucker in the class to ask the question Dwayne would ask if it wouldn’t be embarrassing as shit. He would ask, What the fuck are you talking about? No one asked that question. Even the questions people asked made no sense to Dwayne.

  He was only taking the two classes: statistics and an American history class, and he was doing okay in history. It was just reading and memorizing so far. But that statistics class was something else. He was afraid he’d have to drop it. If he dropped that one, then he’d only be in the one class and that seemed lame, which meant he had to quit it all. He was up one night at home, trying to figure out how he was going to tell Tamara that he wasn’t cut out for school. He was on the school’s website, looking for information on how to quit and get his money back, when he read something on the school’s website about a site for tutoring. Not tutoring, really, but a webpage where you could watch videos of a guy walking through problems. Dwayne followed the link and typed in “Introduction to Statistics.” The screen was a sort of blackboard where the guy worked out the solutions and all you heard was his voice, which was something between a cheesy narrator from one of those kids’ shows like Blue’s Clues and the dorky Indian kid who taught his stats recitation class.

  Dwayne could picture the guy with his pants riding up all high and his pocket protector and some shit, but he had to admit that guy made sense. Unlike his T.A., this guy explained it well. Dwayne watched some of the videos five and six times. Spent most of the night watching, same way he used to stay up watching YouTube videos of stupid skateboard tricks or nasty bike crashes. That guy on the Khan Academy website got through to Dwayne. By the time that night was over, he had started to get it.

  In class, when Professor Revis went on about the relationships between the data like it was some magical thing, Dwayne could kind of feel it. His quiz scores started getting better, and when it came to making predictions with the numbers, he was getting to be pretty good. Simpson’s Paradox made sense. He even helped another kid understand it. People always talked about things just clicking in school, but Dwayne had never had that happen before. Now it was. It was clicking. Clicking. Clicking. He had Tamara to thank. This whole school thing had been a ruse to get her to go out with him. But now he knew he wanted to stay.

  It wasn’t going to be easy though. It was hard to lay low in his neighborhood and harder to do anything as big as start college—even community college—without someone talking about it. Where he grew up people believed in sticking close to your roots. Some of the morons in his neighborhood would say that his going to college was disrespectful. They would believe it, too. That it meant he was getting ahead of himself, trying to act like he was better. He knew they’d think that way because he’d been one of them once. When he was in high school, he thought there was no getting out. Not just that it couldn’t be done, but why would you want out? It wasn’t like there was a ton of violence where he grew up, not like some places. They mostly worked no-end jobs, but they had family all around, kids they’d known since they were in diapers. What was so bad about that?

  There was a kid named Charlie Ware who left the neighborhood for community college when Dwayne was a sophomore. Some of Charlie’s old friends harassed him about school, going so far as to steal his books and slash his tires so that he couldn’t get to campus. Bunch of dickheads, those kids. Dwayne had personally slashed two of those tires himself. He wondered where Charlie Ware was now.

  What he needed to do was move out of the ‘hood. He’d been trying to convince Tamara to move in with him, but she said it was too soon. And why should she? She had a decent place that she shared with a couple of other girls who were in school and working like she was. Dwayne needed something like that.

  He thought about the guys he was supposed to hang with this weekend. Trevyn who was living at home and working at the Costco tire place and Ethan who was out of the army and looking for work. Dwayne had known these guys all his life, but they weren’t going to understand why he was going to college. His phone vibrated on the table. The screen said Kevin. Another person he couldn’t live with. Two years younger than Dwayne, Kevin grew up in the apartment next door. Already had a baby. She had to be almost two now. Dwayne waited for the phone to stop ringing before returning to his stats homework.

  Maybe he could post something on campus, find a roommate or two. Guys like that Khan Academy guy with the smooth voice who could explain stuff. Smart guys. A week ago he was driving a gun across town ready to sell it for cash. Now he was trying to figure out how to stay in college. Whatever happened, he had to hang on to Tamara. That girl was legit. One hundred percent legit.

  Chapter 33

  Mei didn’t want Hailey and Jamie coming back to Ayi’s. There, she was a victim. Before getting in the shower, Mei texted Hailey and told her she’d meet her downtown in ninety minutes. At the station, it would feel like work. At least that was what Mei told herself. She was desperate to transition this whole thing toward work.

  She showered quickly, ate two bowls of Ayi’s vegetable fried rice with peas, eggs and scallion and then, at Ayi’s insistence, drank a cup of Hui’s migraine tea. The tea might have helped her head, but it did nothing for her stomach. Since Ayi had taken the day off work, she sent Mei to the station in her car. At midday the traffic was light and the trip quick. Along the way, Mei thought about Saturday night.

  The memories appeared first in a random collage of images and faces. The faces were all in parts and pieces—a full or thin mouth, a large or small nose, blue eyes, gray ones, hair or height, a bright orange blouse, a blue silk scarf. The disjointed feel of the memories may have been partly due to the lighting. The club was lit by the combination of a large spinning disco ball and flashing lights, along with tiny floodlights whose beams swung, seemingly randomly, across the room. A person’s face was lit in patches and never for more than a few seconds.

  But some of her memory must have been affected by the Rohypnol. Even women she had spoken with before she felt the effects of the drug were no longer clear in her mind. Or maybe they were there but she just couldn’t loosen them. A redhead, tall with wavy hair and a bright pink lipstick that made her hair look like the wrong color. A blonde who tucked her hair behind her ear when she spoke and another who looked at the ground rather than at Mei, making her difficult to hear. A tall woman in a low-cut tank top whose height made Mei feel like she was speaking directly into her bra.

  Then, there were groups of women Mei could recall as a collective unit but not as individuals. Goth-looking women with cropped, dark hair who wore chains and boots. The women Jordan and Kendra had spoken to, people they knew from somewhere else, wearing short dresses and high platform heels or skinny jeans and boots. The three bartenders in black T-shirt
s and jeans. One with a tattoo of a tree that extended the length of her arm, the leaves a bright, clear green and pink-red cherry blossoms. The bartender had told Sophie her name, but Mei couldn’t remember now. Mei couldn’t recall the other two bartenders at all. They had been farther down the bar, she told herself.

  But it was more than that. Mei had given herself Saturday as a reprieve from the stress of work. Conscious of her alcohol intake, Mei had also largely ignored her surroundings. She was with friends, in a place that was exclusively women or almost exclusively. She should have been safe.

  When she could come up with no new faces, Mei tried to work through the night chronologically, beginning with the wine bar. The five of them—Sophie, Sabrina, Jordan, Kendra and Mei had sat in a back corner. It was Saturday, so the place was busy. Mei had been focused on her group so she hadn’t noticed the other patrons. Was it possible that someone had been following her the entire night? She’d have to ask the other women if they’d seen any of the same people at the club as the bar.

  Mei arrived at the department and dropped the paper sack with her clothes—minus her bra and underwear which she’d refused to bring—at the lab on her way in. Arriving at the conference room, Mei was unprepared for the number of people in the meeting. She’d anticipated seeing Hailey and Jamie, but Sophie and Ryaan Berry were there, too. It wasn’t the women who made her take pause at the door but the presence of her own captain, Lance Findlay. He and a huge man Mei thought was Hailey Wyatt’s partner in Homicide sat opposite one another at the far end of the table, making the room seem small and crowded. Next to Captain Findlay was Mei’s sergeant, Grace Lanier. Mei set her water bottle in the seat farthest from Findlay, pulled out the chair, and sank slowly into it.

  “Glad to see you in the office, Inspector,” Captain Findlay said. They had only spoken a few times. His expression looked now as it always had, but Mei couldn’t help but wonder if he saw her differently now. As a victim. As a gay woman. There were plenty of stories of how personal traumas had ruined police careers.