by Mark Nolan
The dog handler looked at the grenade in Easton’s hand, and his eyes went wide. “Yeah, we might want to locate that pin,” he said.
Easton signaled for the man with the remote controlled robot to go ahead. Everyone took cover behind parked cars as the robot rolled toward the van on small tank treads. At the van, the robot’s arm extended and pulled on the door latch. There was a small explosion and the door flew open with a burst of flames. It smashed into the robot, broke its arm and sent it flying backward. Burning metal shards from the explosion flew through the air leaving smoking trails behind them.
“Send the robot back,” Easton said. “Use the working arm to open the other door.”
Easton had his pistol drawn and pointed at the van, ready to shoot anything that moved. In his other hand, he continued to hold the grenade in a tight grip. The robot handler set the device right-side up on its treads and sent it back to the van. This time, when the robot opened the other back door, there was no explosion. Easton was aware that if he’d tried to open the rear door instead of the driver’s door, he would be seriously injured right now. He might be in an ambulance on his way to the emergency room, possibly missing a hand or an arm, maybe blind from the shrapnel.
The dog and handler found the pin to the grenade, and Easton carefully inserted it back into the mechanism. He let out a sigh of relief, then held his pistol in front of him and approached the open back doors of the van to look inside. When he saw the body, his professional opinion was that the man seemed to have already been dead for several hours. He had seen more than a few dead bodies when he’d been in the Army. He also noted some leftover firecrackers that had not gone off. The criminal who had set this up probably thought he was a funny fellow. Easton wanted to find him and shoot him. “Clear! Get a fingerprint kit over here.”
One agent fingerprinted the dead man and took a DNA sample. Another took photographs and then found and peeled off the facial disguise from the half of the face that remained.
Easton saw the mask of Jake Wolfe’s face being removed and revealing a different person beneath. He spoke to Agent McKay on his small microphone. “McKay, your instincts were correct. This man must be a decoy. He was wearing a mask to look like Jake Wolfe. It appears that he’s been dead for several hours. We’re running his prints and DNA through the system now.”
“Understood, the actual shooter is on the run, and I doubt if he’s still disguised as Wolfe, he probably has an entirely new and different appearance now.”
Easton spoke into the microphone in his fist, alerting the other agents of the current situation.
McKay knew that in the meantime a picture of Jake Wolfe’s face had been sent to every police officer’s in-car computer screen all over the state of California. Every cop was hoping to take him down and be a hero. Their orders were that he was armed and dangerous, and his dog was a threat too. They were authorized to shoot to kill the man or dog if either appeared to be a threat to public safety.
McKay sent this new information to the SFPD and the FBI. Explaining again that the suspect had disguised himself as the reporter named Jake Wolfe and by now probably had a new facial disguise. When the update arrived at the San Francisco Police Headquarters it was routed to the person in charge of the case. Sergeant Denton ignored it and deleted it.
The reporters at the dedication ceremony were all furious at Jake Wolfe. He was one of their own, and they felt sick at heart about what he’d done. They wanted him to go down hard.
Jake’s rival, reporter Dick Arnold, was especially thrilled with this bad news. Arnold was dedicating all of his time and effort to this news story and was regularly updating an ongoing special report about Jake. Arnold called the police officer he’d briefly talked to at the golf course shooting, the one named Denton. His call went to voicemail, and he left a message.
“Hello Officer Denton, my name is Dick Arnold. I’m a television news reporter. We spoke recently at the Paradise Golf Course crime scene. I’m doing a story about this Jake Wolfe criminal, and I’d like to include a quote from you in the news story if that’s okay. Please call me back at this number.”
Arnold left his number and hoped Denton would call back, both for his story and because he wanted to get to know her better too.
Secret Service agents were out in force at the hospital where Katherine Anderson was being cared for. They guarded the hallways, staked out the rooftop, and secured the surrounding buildings.
Katherine had suffered from shock, but she was in stable condition and resting. Her friend, Doctor Rachel Brook, was in the room. Daniel was there too, holding his wife’s hand and not leaving her side. Dr. Brook had a nurse take an ultrasound of Katherine’s abdomen and send the images to the computer on her desk. She then went out of Katherine’s room and down the hall to her office to view the ultrasound in privacy.
Dr. Brook closed her office door, sat at her desk and studied the reading. Judging by what she could see, the baby appeared unhurt. And as she looked closely, she also noted that it appeared to be a girl. Dr. Brook was about to go back to Katherine’s room and tell her the good news but she stopped when she saw the recent test results regarding Katherine’s overall health.
Dr. Brook leaned closer to the computer screen and read the report, again and again, not wanting to believe what it said. After studying the findings several times, she felt her heart sink. A drop of cold sweat dripped down the back of her neck, and she clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails dug into her palms.
“Please no, it can’t be,” she whispered. “Please not that. Not now.”
Chapter 74
In the Homicide Detail squad room, Sergeant Denton was in her element, hunting down a man she hated... Jake Wolfe.
“Get me cellphone tower dumps from every tower near Wolfe’s condo, the yacht harbor and his place of employment,” Denton said. “I want all of the phone company’s stored data from those towers for the past year.”
“Working on that now,” Kirby said.
“And somebody give me updates on Wolfe’s phone,” Denton said. “What is his current location and who is he talking to right now?”
A man sitting at a nearby desk said, “I’m logged into his phone company’s private portal for law enforcement, and I’m pinging his device. His phone is changing direction and moving South on Highway 101 toward the airport.”
“Alert the TSA and airport security, and call the taxi cab companies. Tell them to be looking for Wolfe and ask them which cabs are on route to the airport right now.”
“Half of the taxis in the city are going to the airport and back all day.”
“So what, tell the companies to call those cabs and ask who they are transporting. If it’s a man and a dog, we’ve probably found our suspect. That other taxi driver called in and said Wolfe had his stupid animal with him. What kind of idiot fugitive brings their pet along when they are on the run from the police?”
An officer said, “The electronic surveillance van has been in pursuit of the signal from Wolfe’s phone. They think he’s riding in an airport shuttle, and they’re closing in on it right now.”
“Do we have backup for the surveillance van?”
Everett, the squad boss, was monitoring unit movements on a tablet computer he held in his hand. He said, “Two units are close, one is ahead of the shuttle, and the other is coming up fast from behind.”
The police undercover surveillance van came alongside the airport shuttle, and Sergeant Roxanne Poole used a homing device to confirm that Wolfe’s phone was indeed on board that vehicle.
“Suspect’s phone location confirmed on board the airport shuttle,” Roxanne told the officer driving the van.
The driver spoke into his mic and said, “We have confirmation on the shuttle, units may proceed.”
The police car that was coming up from behind the shuttle van moved in close on the shuttle’s bumper, and the cop turned on his lights and siren. The police car up ahead started slowing down, which forced the
shuttle driver to press on his brakes. The surveillance van turned on its lights and drove so closely alongside the shuttle that it almost bumped up against it.
The frazzled airport shuttle driver was being boxed in by three police vehicles with their lights on. The only place to go was to his right onto the shoulder of the highway. The driver looked to his left at the van and saw a window go down revealing a police officer pointing an assault rifle at him. He was afraid that one of his passengers was a wanted criminal, and this could turn into a shootout.
The police car behind the shuttle turned on its speakers, and a cop said, “Airport shuttle driver, this is the San Francisco Police. Pull over to the right, turn off your engine and put your hands on top of your head.”
The shuttle driver was nervous and sweating as he pulled the shuttle off to the side of the highway and parked. Several police officers ran to the shuttle with their guns drawn, and surrounded it. Two cops wearing body armor and high-tech helmets came into the van. One of them put handcuffs on the driver and made him get out and lie face down on the ground. The other cop shouted, “Everybody in the shuttle put your hands behind your heads and interlace your fingers.”
He was holding a device in one hand that looked like a typical handheld GPS, but it could “ping” any mobile phone and determine its location. In his other hand, he held a pistol. He walked up and down the aisle of the shuttle and stopped in front of a frightened woman. He waved the device over her and her possessions. A low tone sound emitted from the device when he pointed it at her shopping bag.
From behind the cop’s plexiglas face shield came a deep voice that said, “Dump out the contents of your bag. And no sudden moves.”
The tourist began sobbing and nodding her head as she carefully upended her shopping bag onto the empty seat next to her.
The cop saw the mobile phone, and he held his high-tech device close to it. There was a fast tone sound from the device, and he picked up the phone in his gloved hand.
“Where did you get this phone?”
She looked at the phone as if it was a poisonous snake and she shook her head.
“I’ve never seen that phone before in my life.”
Her husband just sat there with his mouth hanging open. The officer took the phone, exited the shuttle and went to the electronic surveillance van. He handed the device to Roxanne, the Computer Forensics Unit technician.
Roxanne was referred to as Rox by her friends, and “box of rocks” when being teased. Rox was a geek genius when it came to anything high tech. She looked at the phone and then at her colleague.
“Let me guess, this phone was taking a ride on the shuttle but the suspect who owns it was nowhere to be found,” Rox said.
“Looks that way.”
“Clever son of a gun, you’ve got to give him credit for that.”
Several black SUVs with federal government license plates raced up to the scene and stopped with a screech of tires. Men and women in dark suits and dark sunglasses got out and waved their FBI credentials at the police.
“FBI, we’ll take it from here,” one agent said, as several other agents surrounded the bus.
The police officer in charge of the scene said, “This is a city case, we can handle it ourselves.”
“No, this is now a federal case, and the FBI has jurisdiction.”
The SFPD officer called headquarters, and he was advised to hand over the scene to the FBI agents.
Rox looked out the window of the surveillance van and saw what was happening. She picked up a handheld data extraction device called a CelleBrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) and plugged it into Jake Wolfe’s mobile phone.
In a few seconds, Rox had cracked the phone's password and downloaded a copy of the entire memory. She extracted all of the phone’s existing and hidden phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, photos, videos, internet browsing history and GPS data. The device even found everything that had ever been deleted, and it copied all of that too.
Rox put the phone back into the plastic baggie and spoke to the driver.
“Can you give this phone to the FBI folks? That way if they ask you about it, you can honestly say you don’t know anything.”
The driver nodded and took the evidence bag from Rox. He got out of the van and gave the phone to the nearest FBI agent and explained that it was Jake Wolfe’s phone. Rox saw the FBI agent say something, but her driver only shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
Most of the SFPD cops were happy for once to give away a crime scene to the feds. The power play would usually make them angry, but this time they knew it would be funny to let the feds get embarrassed by the traveling phone trick instead of them. The cops drove away with smiles on their faces. They were looking forward to seeing the FBI Agents on television explaining how the phone was on the shuttle, but the suspect wasn’t.
While the surveillance van drove back toward the police headquarters on 3rd Street, Roxanne called in and gave Denton her report on the situation. As Rox was talking she plugged the forensic extraction device into her vehicle’s police computer and sent a file of Jake Wolfe’s phone data to Denton as an email attachment.
Denton cursed at Rox when she heard about Wolfe’s trick of sneaking his phone onto the shuttle, as if it was the technician’s fault somehow.
“Get everything Wolfe has. His online purchase history, his Google searches, his deleted email and any images from his phone that are stored in the cloud. None of that is ever fully erased. They keep a copy forever.”
“Working on it as we speak,” Rox said, tapping on her computer keyboard as the van moved through the streets. Rox wanted to say that she was well aware of how to do her job and did not need the uptight Sergeant Denton telling her how.
“I’m also getting his internet service provider and his anti-spyware software company to give me his web browsing history for the past several years,” Rox said. “They both track you the entire time you are online.”
Denton ended the call abruptly and she started scanning through the electronic file of Wolfe’s phone that Rox had sent. It was obvious that the suspect was a photographer. He had an amazing number of pictures on his phone. She quickly scrolled through the photos, looking for sexy selfie pics. But she was disappointed when she didn’t find any nude photos.
“Someone get the post office to do a mail cover,” Denton said. “Their mail imaging computers take photographs of the exterior of every piece of mail sent in the United States. Request the stored images of all mail received by Wolfe for the past three years.”
A cop said, “No problem, making the call now. Most people have gone paperless though so there probably won’t be much to look at except junk mail.”
“Where are the phone numbers on those prepaid phones Wolfe bought?”
“I’ve been trying to get them, but the gift shop people can’t seem to find the records,” Kirby said.
“Oh really? Send a uniformed officer there, a big scary guy like Randall, and see if it helps to jog their memory. If they still don’t cooperate, have Randall start searching the place inch by inch and asking everybody for ID.”
“I’ll call Randall right now.”
“Does Wolfe have any emails or online purchase activity going on?”
“He just paid his electric bill with a travel points credit card, why would a fugitive on the run care about that?”
“You’ve never heard of automatic bill pay?”
“Oh right, other than that he is receiving lots of text messages and emails asking him WTF, but he has not sent out any texts or emails himself in the past few minutes. His most recent phone calls and texts in the past hour went to SFPD officers Hayes and Cushman, a local FBI agent named Knight, and an unknown number in Washington D.C. that is not listed in any database.”
For a moment, Denton felt a twinge of doubt about Wolfe’s calls to the mysterious Washington D.C. phone number. But her hatred of Wolfe overrode her doubt, and she shrugged it off. Tha
t filthy criminal had to go down, and she had to get promoted so she could protect this city from lowlifes like him. She wanted that lieutenant’s shield. It would help her destroy more criminals. That’s all that mattered right now. She had to win at all costs.
Denton began to pace back and forth in the squad room again, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Everett, the squad boss, sat at his desk and watched her as she paced. He was giving Denton a lot of latitude in this case, but he was also keeping a close eye on her because she seemed to be acting with too much emotion and not enough professional discipline.
Chapter 75
Jake’s brand new throwaway phone buzzed but the display didn’t show what number was calling, it only said “Unavailable.” Nobody had this number; the caller must be someone in law enforcement. Jake answered the call.
“I’m sure popular today.”
“Jake, this is Agent Knight at the FBI, what the hell is going on?”
“How did you get this number when I just bought the prepaid phone less than half an hour ago? Oh wait, I know. You got it from Agent McKay, my new friend at the Secret Service. Never mind, you guys are good.”
“I got the number because I’m in the FBI, and we know what you’re going to do before you even think of doing it. We know where you were last night and what you had for breakfast this morning. Now tell me your side of the story and it better be good.”
“Yes sir, in a nutshell, a woman called me from work to say I’d been taken off of my photography assignment at the Moscone Center. I was sent to do a lifestyle photo shoot at the Marina Green instead.”
“Who called you from your work, what was her name?”
“She told me she was a new hire named Pam, but that could be a fake name. Next, someone impersonated me at the convention center and shot a paintball at Mrs. Anderson. And when I used my remote to start my car there was a small explosion that blew out the windshield.”
“An explosion inside your vehicle?”
