by Alyssa Breck
The club was slowly moving away from the drug trade. Paul wanted all the money to be clean before he retired. But they were still recouping the losses from the lost vehicles when the rat in their midst was killed by the Russian mafia. Of course, Hem and Hunter had settled the score to quiet the chatter. And the Russians had been quiet lately. Like calm-before-the-storm quiet. The Knights had no beef with them now. The score had been evened. But Hem was still on alert. He’d been the trigger man.
Paul covered some financial information and then opened the floor. “Anyone have new business they want to introduce?” he asked.
Nobody spoke up, so Paul turned to Hem. “What’s next on our charity schedule?” Paul tapped his fingers on the table.
Hem pulled up the spreadsheet that kept track of the club’s charitable endeavors. They tried to do at least one a month. Charity also helped mask illegal income, and the club donated quite a bit.
“Looks like we have the animal shelter fundraiser here in Dallas on the last Saturday of this month.”
“Nice. Anyone here looking to adopt a pet?” Paul asked. The light from the overhead fixture glinted off the silver rings he wore on almost every finger.
“After the wedding, Holly will probably want to add a furry baby to our family,” Hunter offered.
Paul raised an eyebrow. “No real babies?”
Hunter paled. “Not right away. I’m not sure I’m ready to be a dad.”
Paul laughed. “You’ll be a good dad. And Holly will be an awesome mom.”
“I hope so,” Hunter answered. “But in any event, I’m sure she’d love to help with this fundraiser. She loves dogs.”
“Okay. Great. So Holly and Hunter can show up for that one.” The leather of Paul’s chair squeaked as he shifted his weight. His gray beard was getting long, nearly touching his chest now, and he stroked it.
“Me and Kol can go too,” Hem said. Truth be told, Hem would really like to adopt a dog. He’d never had one as a kid and felt like he’d missed out. Time was an issue, though. He just wasn’t home enough. “Maybe we should consider getting a pup for the club.”
There were stray dogs wandering around when he’d been in Afghanistan. All the soldiers fed them and gave them water. Those animals were as close as Hem had come to having a pet of his own.
“That’s something to consider,” Paul said. “Let’s wait until after this charity event, and then we’ll revisit it.”
“Got it.” Hem added a note next to the animal shelter entry in Excel to bring it up again at the next meeting. He was already mentally picturing a sweet pooch running around the club. There was a small grassy area behind the building where the dog could do its business.
While the other guys made small talk, Hem took a swig of his coffee and opened up the website for the shelter and looked at the available dogs.
Chapter Two
Calliope
Calliope yawned and blinked her eyes. Four more hours and she could climb into bed and sleep like the dead. Spending most of her time working behind a desk wasn’t her favorite gig, but everyone had to do rotations in the department. Like everyone else, she’d spent two years on patrol before going into detective divisions.
She’d just come off a rotation in burglary, and that division hadn’t excited her at all. It was fucking boring. Property crimes held no passion. Assholes who broke into homes or cars and stole shit to sell for drugs wasn’t where she pictured herself retiring from. There just wasn’t much satisfaction in nabbing petty thieves. And if anyone was killed during a burglary, it automatically went to homicide, so Calliope didn’t get to work much on the complex cases, and she liked working on complex cases. Four years in college for a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice was wasted on bullshit crimes.
Criminal cases were like working a jigsaw puzzle that had been dumped out of the box onto a rickety table where some of the pieces might be missing or had fallen on the floor or through a crack. Cybercrime wasn’t too bad. It definitely utilized her base of knowledge and training. Together with the crime scene techs with expertise in categories like authenticating photos or handwriting analysis, the computer crimes division was intellectually stimulating. She was in the process of learning more about how to identify forged documents or doctored pictures. She could already spot when computer signatures were faked, or accounts had been hacked. It would really broaden her investigative skills to be able to differentiate those things in physical form as well.
She wasn’t sure where she hoped to land for the rest of her career, so she was trying out different divisions. Computer crimes seemed a natural fit after the time she’d spent in the military.
Calliope had more than six weeks of vacation time banked, and she was going to use some it; two weeks of it, to be precise. Most of her colleagues planned out elaborate vacations like going on a cruise or jetting off to Europe. Not Callie. She just wanted some downtime to rest and relax, maybe take a drive to Austin and see a show. There was also a spa gift certificate sitting at home in her jewelry box that her mom had given her last Christmas. Perhaps a day of getting pampered would be nice.
The phone rang on her desk. She cradled the receiver between her ear and shoulder. “Cooper.”
“Hey. It’s Leah.”
“What’s up? How’s sex crimes treating you?”
“Every day, I lose a little more faith in humanity.”
“I heard that.”
“So, we confiscated two computers today from a perv. We need the hard drives cracked.”
“All right. I’ll come down and get them.”
“Cool. Thanks. You wanna grab some lunch after we do the custody paperwork?”
“Sounds good.”
Calliope grabbed her purse and hopped into the elevator to go to the second floor where the major crime units were located. Sex crimes was situated between the homicide and missing persons bureaus. A lot of homicides also had a missing person or sex crime component, so it made sense to sandwich the three together on one floor.
Leah Diaz had been one of four women in Calliope’s academy class. They’d become fast friends over sleepless nights of homework memorizing radio codes and penal code sections and physical conditioning to ensure they could keep up with the men in their class. While Calliope was still figuring out what division she wanted to lay down her roots in, Leah had found her calling in sex crimes. She had the compassion to deal with victims and the grit to go after the bad guys.
Leah’s office was located toward the back of the sex crimes division. Her name was emblazoned on a bronze plaque that slid into a slot beside the door.
Calliope peeked her head inside the door and knocked on the jamb. “Hey.”
Leah’s dark hair was cut into a smart bob without bangs and was tucked behind her ears. With little makeup, she was still gorgeous with the face of a doll. She wore a pale yellow blouse beneath a charcoal blazer. “Come in.” Leah waved Calliope toward a chair on the opposite side of her desk. On the wall behind her was a framed degree from UTA. Leah had a bachelor’s degree in business administration, which wasn’t entirely helpful in police work, but it was a degree nonetheless. After graduating, Calliope’s colleague had decided that working a nine-to-five job wasn’t going to satisfy her thirst for adventure. Like Calliope and most other cops, Leah was an adrenaline junkie.
“The computers are in the evidence locker. One is a tower, the other is a laptop.”
Calliope dropped down into the chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Okay. So, what did you bust this guy for?”
“Initially, he was picked up for drugs, but when his DNA was put into CODIS, it hit on a couple of unsolved rapes from about two years ago.”
“So, he’s a druggie and a rapist. Real winner.”
“Yeah. We’re wondering what he’s hiding in his computer since it was pretty well locked up with a lot of layers of security.”
“What kind of drugs is he into?”
“He was selling and using black tar. He’s curren
tly detoxing in county.”
“All right. That dude is suffering.”
“And he deserves that and more.” Leah smiled and pushed a file across her desk. “Here’re copies of the arrest report, DNA reports, and investigation notes.”
“Did you get anything off his phone?”
“Nope. We figure he was using a burner for business.”
“Most of them do. Technology is both a blessing and a curse.”
Leah stood. “Let’s run down to Whataburger. I haven’t had a cheeseburger in like a month.”
“Sounds good to me.”
The two women took an unmarked Crown Vic and headed off to lunch.
* * *
Calliope plugged the tower in and stuck a specially coded USB drive into the port to copy the hard drive. There was a misconception that cops literally broke through passwords and encryption. Most times, the hard drive was just copied to another operating system, which would lay it all out. She put a second USB drive into the laptop. It would take a while to copy everything, so Calliope popped a K-cup into the Keurig on the veranda and placed her homicide division coffee mug underneath. “Our day begins when yours ends” was written in black on a red toe tag on the cup. Gallows humor was a must to survive working in homicide. Too many cops ate a bullet after dealing with that shit for too many years.
While the coffee brewed, she walked down the hall to the vending machine. The burger and fries she’d eaten at lunch had kept her full, but now she wanted something sweet to eat with her coffee.
She fed a dollar into the machine and picked the Reese’s peanut butter cups. The machine spat out a quarter in change. Calliope dropped the coin into her pocket and fed a second dollar in. She grabbed a package of Starburst for later. With her candy in hand, she walked back to her office to look over the file Leah had copied for her.
Carlos Rubio was twenty-eight years old and born in the U.S. to Mexican immigrant parents. His brother was doing a nickel in Hutchins for possession for sale of methamphetamine. No surprise there. His parents were law-abiding and likely disappointed that their offspring were criminal pieces of shit. Carlos had an extensive rap sheet for low rent crimes like public intoxication and simple assault. No known sex crimes until now. How does a gangbanger drug dealer turn into a rapist? There was no real formula that would predict someone was going to take that fork in the road. His brother had no sex crime convictions.
Calliope turned her attention to the victims. Both were young women who lived alone in bottom floor apartments in a decent neighborhood in Dallas. If two had called police and reported the rapes, it was likely there were others who hadn’t reported. The statistics on sex crimes were difficult to quantify, considering that only twenty percent of college-aged women reported the crimes. Even though it made it her job harder, Calliope understood why some just wanted to forget and move on rather than go through the justice system. Rape was the only crime that a victim had to prove they weren’t asking for it. Nobody asked a carjacking victim if maybe they wanted it.
It would be Leah’s job to handle the victims. Calliope’s responsibility was to pore over the data on the hard drives to see if they could nail Carlos for anything else. If he was a sex offender, chances were that he’d have some shady shit on his computers.
Calliope took the cappuccino from the Keurig and kicked back in her chair, resting her feet on the desk. She unwrapped the peanut butter cups and nibbled on one. The salty-sweetness of the candy was the perfect combination. She washed down the first bite with a sip of the steaming coffee. The Starburst were stored in her desk drawer for when she needed a sugar high later in the day.
The first hard drive was finished copying, and she put it into her work computer and opened the files. Carlos watched a lot of internet porn and saved sexy pictures of celebrities. He wrote some shitty angst-filled poetry that was pretty bad and really should never see the light of day. There was a file named “pets” that she clicked on. Carlos had also saved pictures of shelter dogs and dogs needing to be rehomed online. They were mostly big dogs like Great Danes and German Shepherds. Not much about Carlos made sense, but if he was high a lot, well, people did weird shit when they were strung out on heroin or blow. The meth-heads were the worst, though. Those assholes would take apart their damned stove and put it back together three times in a night, and if you happened to pick one up, they wouldn’t shut the hell up. She was glad she wasn’t working narcotics.
Chapter Three
Hem
As Hem stood, his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and hit the accept button.
“What’s up, Cally-Ope?” He purposely mispronounced her name because it irritated her and amused him.
“Hello there, Mr. Silvereagle of the Nez Perce tribe.”
Hem laughed. “Touché, Callie.”
“Hey, I’m working a case and came across something that we need to talk about in private.”
Hem’s ears perked up. “Okay. Name the place and time, and I’ll be there.”
“Eight tonight at the Devil’s Lair?”
“Yeah, okay. See you then.” He disconnected the call. Cops had RIs or reliable informants. Calliope Cooper the opposite. She was his police informant. They’d been friends in the Army and went Hem had assisted in Callie’s AIT training. They’d both worked in intelligence. They’d split ways after they were discharged. Callie had used her GI Bill to get a degree in criminal justice and became a cop with an eye toward Quantico. Callie wanted to be a fed. She was using her hacking skills for good.
Hem used some of his college money to go to welding school and ended up a biker in a one-percenter motorcycle club. He wasn’t sure why Callie helped him. There wasn’t really anything in it for her besides being a good friend. Maybe that was enough for her. The club was evidence that the bonds formed in the Army were strong and transcended other allegiances. A lot of the members were former military.
Hem cleaned up the paperwork from the meeting earlier that day and shredded the minutes and agenda. He didn’t leave paper trails about the club, and he’d challenge any computer forensics team to break into his laptop. He might not be sophisticated in other ways, but his security was top notch. He’d learned from the best and had even worked on the network at the Pentagon. All of the club’s records were safe under Hem’s watch, and if anyone tried to hack into his computer or copy his hard drive without a two-layer password, the machine would wipe itself clean. While that sounded catastrophic, it really wasn’t. Everything was also safely stored in a cloud-based file on the dark web.
He had two hours to kill before meeting Callie at the Club’s bar down the road. His curiosity was definitely piqued. It had been a while since he’d heard from her, and it had to be something important for her to call and ask for a meeting. Generally, she’d just drop whatever info she had or needed over the phone. But she knew that Hem wouldn’t want her sharing any sensitive info over an unsecured line.
Everyone had left, save for Hem’s younger brother. Kol was leaned over the bar with headphones over his ears. He was watching something on a tablet. Hem wiped down the counter and went to the kitchen. There wouldn’t be time for a proper dinner between now and eight o’clock.
The Devil’s Lair didn’t serve real food, so he dug through the club’s refrigerator and found some lunchmeat and cheese. A bag of wheat bread sat atop the microwave. He went about making a sandwich. He made two and carried both back to the bar. Hem threw a balled-up paper towel and hit his brother in the forehead.
“What the fuck, man?” Kol pulled the headphones off his head.
“Eat, asshole.” Hem pushed a paper plate toward Kol.
“Oh, thanks.” His brother smiled. “No chips?”
“This isn’t Subway, bitch.”
“You don’t have to be a dick, bro.”
“I can’t help it.” Hem cracked a grin. “What’d I tell you about watching porn out in the open?”
Kol rolled his eyes and took a bite of the turkey and Swiss sandwich.
“If it was porn, there’s nobody here anyway, But I’m watching a serial killer documentary.”
“New aspiration?”
“Shit. If I wanted to be a serial killer, I’d be the motherfucking Unabomber.” Kol’s specialty in the military had been pyrotechnics. Hem’s little brother was an expert in blowing shit up. “I picked up one of Plato’s books on this sick fucker named H.H. Holmes. Dude was like taking people into his home, then killing them and selling their skeletons to medical research and shit. He got rich doing that.”
“Damn. That’s hardcore. Most of these serial killers were smart fuckers. I mean, look at Bundy. That bastard was a lawyer or a law student or something.”
“What a waste of knowledge, you know?”
“For sure. I’d never spend that much on law school just to end up trying to represent myself in a mass murder trial. And that sorry sack of shit got the death penalty.”
“He was a shitty lawyer then. Fucker deserved to die.”
Chapter Four
Calliope
The parking lot was getting full when Calliope parked her black Dodge Challenger in a spot beside a beat-up pickup truck. It had probably been a year since she’d last seen Hem.
She zipped up her hoodie and pulled on the heavy wooden door. Inside, rock music pumped through the surround-sound speakers near the ceiling. The smell of beer and whiskey mingled with cigarette smoke hung in the air. Calliope scanned the room. A row of bikers were seated at the bar laughing and carrying on with the bartender. He was a tall, buff dude with a bald head and gap-toothed smile.
Hem stood at the end of the bar. He was easy to spot with his height, and long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. While everyone else was pounding drinks, Hem held a stainless-steel travel mug in his left hand. Calliope smiled. Hem and his coffee.
