“Stop! You two, stop,” Susan said finally, catching her breath.
I took Sasha’s offered hand and stood. I was wrong. I wasn’t to her chin, more like her lips. She leaned in, and I backed away a little bit. Hand contact was enough for now. Later on it’d be more intense, I hoped. By every indication and Jo’s teachings, the body language I was getting here meant it would be an early night for me, spent in bed. Not something I was going to complain about.
“You going to follow us?” I asked Jo.
“Not damned likely,” Jo told me.
* * *
My door was thrown open, and I had half a moment to pull the blanket over me as a figure stood in my bedroom doorway.
“Why are you naked?” Johanna asked, turning away to stand with her back to me.
“Why are you in my bedroom?” I asked, walking towards the doorway.
It must have been important if she’d come to get me. I had no clue of the time, but I did know it was either really late at night or early in the morning. I could still hear Sasha’s snores from the other side of the bed.
“The DVR info you asked for. The kid cracked it and did something with the encryption. O’Hara’s going to get a BOLO out on the…” Jo turned. “Jesus, go put some pants on,” she almost screamed at me.
I walked back to the bed and pulled on a pair of boxers and then turned on the bedside lamp. It was 4:30 a.m. according to the clock. I looked at Johanna in puzzlement. I’d made her mad again. She was stomping towards me, and I was sure she wanted me to jump to attention, but my mind was fuzzy from sleep and it wasn’t like I was going to—
She threw back the covers to show Sasha’s nude form. The woman immediately squirmed and awoke from the cold air and tried to cover herself. I felt the stirrings of desire again and looked to Johanna, who was backing away from the bed, her fists clenched. She was already dressed in her business attire, and it made me wonder if she ever slept. It was a new suit, and her hair appeared to be recently washed, so it had to be because…
“O’Hara and Ralston have a hit on the van. They want us there, like, yesterday,” she said.
“What are you doing, are you crazy?!” Sasha demanded, pulling the blankets back and covering herself, much to my regret.
“Fun time’s over. Time for Daddy to work now,” Jo said to her in a flat voice.
Sasha actually giggled and fished down the side of the bed for her clothes, pulling several articles of clothing under the covers, where an explosion of blankets and hair happened in a frenzied fashion.
“Daddy?” I asked her. “Dad died,” I said.
“You, Daddy, I mean… just shut up, ok?” Jo asked.
“So you sat outside the door?” I asked her.
“You need to stop,” Jo said, pointing at me. “Or I’m going to hurt you.”
“Is that one of those sarcastic things? I’m getting better, and I think you’re being sarcastic because I know you wouldn’t hurt a friend like that—”
“Get dressed, or so help me God, I’ll end you,” Jo said, her fingernail almost hitting me in the nose.
“Ok, if you’ll show Miss Sasha out when she’s ready. I need a shower.”
“We don’t have time for that!” Jo scolded.
“Do I have time to join him?” Sasha asked, knowing how her presence rankled Jo.
“You have time to get out of here and do the walk of shame to your car,” Jo said, her voice low and intimidating.
For sure, she was mad. I knew that one, so I wisely shut up and hurried. When I got out of the shower, Sasha was gone.
“Did she leave a phone number?” I asked.
“No,” Jo said, her face stormy.
“Oh. Oh, well. She knows where I live,” I shrugged.
“You’re unbelievable,” Jo said, looking at my room.
Indeed, it had looked like a circus had run rampant through it. It had been a wild and fun night, one I hoped to repeat at some point.
“So, about the van?” I asked her.
“It was stolen two days before the kidnapping,” Johanna told me, holding the door open so I could exit. “And the BOLO came back almost immediately. It’s parked outside an old warehouse near the water.”
“Good. Hostage rescue team and police going in first?” I asked, because Jo didn’t seem to be wearing a bazooka or machine gun in any visible places.
“Of course. While you were,” she glanced at the bedroom, “having a tryst, Skye set up a trace on the mayor’s phone number just as the first ransom call came in. The FBI didn’t even realize she’d done it, so she traced the cell. The phone number is a burner, but she says it came from the same warehouse. She texted Susan, Pete, you, and me.”
“Then let’s move. By the way, don’t either of you sleep?” I asked her.
“For what you’re paying us, sleep is optional between cases,” Johanna said, a smile tugging at her mouth.
“I still think you’re mad at me,” I told her, despite the smile.
The smile dropped. Shit.
“I am not mad at you,” she said, her voice quiet.
“Ok, let’s go.”
“The Lincoln?” she asked.
“Let’s take the Suburban,” I told her.
She nodded and headed to the rack to get the keys. The wonderful thing about being me is that the company owned many, many different cars in the basement parking garage. I couldn’t drive any of them, but they came in handy on stakeouts or say… showing up with the FBI and running a raid. Urban camouflage worked well when you wanted to avoid being shot at.
5
“Clear, clear, clear!” came over the handset radios as the HRT team worked their way through the warehouse. I’d used ear protection so I didn’t damage my hearing when they threw in flash bangs. Jo and I had sat outside, waiting on everything to go down one way or another, and I had gotten bored. I walked over to the white panel van and felt the hood. It was still warm.
“Susan,” I called. She came walking up with Pete Ralston, who glowered at me and Jo.
“Yeah?”
“What time did the BOLO call come in about this van?” I asked.
“About the same time it went out. One of the patrol cars had noticed this van coming and going this past week, and we knew we were looking for a white one, just no clue which of the million potential vans in this city was the right one. When the plate number went out, he called it in.”
“So it’s only been an hour and a half at the most?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. She put her hand on the hood as well. “It’s still warm,” she said.
“They were just here. Let’s hope they don’t have another car stashed,” Jo said.
We waited forever for the word, and when it finally came in, the sun had already risen and I was getting hungry.
The handheld radio Susan was holding crackled to life: “Get the computer guy in here,” a male voice said.
“Show’s on,” Susan said.
Jo, Susan, and I walked in. I started to choke at the acrid fumes still in the air from the flash bang grenades and followed the voices towards an office at the back of the wide open area.
“So were her boobs that big?” Susan said, holding her hands up to gesture.
“No, more like this,” I said, holding them out a little wider.
Jo hurried up and left us behind.
“She’s mad at me again,” I told Susan.
“You have no clue, do you?” Susan said, stopping.
I stopped walking. “I usually miss out on body language and sarcasm, jokes and other non-literal meanings, but when it comes to clues, I think I’m pretty good. I mean, I kept the business going and—”
“She’s got it bad for you,” Susan said, starting to walk again.
“Bad? Bad what?” I said, hurrying up.
“Don’t hurt her feelings. She’s liked you for as long as I can remember her being around. Since you were kids.”
“Liked me?” I asked, wondering if she was pul
ling a joke on me.
That kind of joke had happened several times. Jo had intervened once in the tenth grade. A note had been passed to me, asking me if I wanted to go out with so and so. I circled yes, not fully understanding, and then the bullies started in on me. They had tricked me into thinking a certain girl had feelings for me. I already knew Jo liked me; she was my friend, and she wouldn’t be if she didn’t like me.
“Jo’s been my friend since the third grade. If she didn’t like me, she wouldn’t be here, I don’t think,” I told Susan.
“And how many girlfriends has she seen you with in the last, what, six to eight months you’ve been together?”
“I don’t have girlfriends. And we’re not together. That means a relationship, and I don’t do relationships because I’m not sure if I can handle the sort of emotional support that would be needed in the—”
“Shut up,” Jo yelled over her shoulder, walking into the office.
“Wait, she likes me like that?” I asked Susan, felling horrified.
“Yeah,” she said, stopping again and looking me in the eye.
“That’s uncomfortable,” I told her after thinking about it for a moment.
“How do you think she feels?” Susan asked me suddenly.
I was caught off guard. Empathy was something that I sucked at. Like, I just couldn’t put myself in somebody else’s shoes. Ever. I sucked at it so bad that it was epically horrible.
“Not good?” I asked her.
“How many women this month?” she asked me.
“Three,” I admitted.
When my mom died when I was younger, Susan had come over and helped Dad take care of me. She wasn’t that much older, but something about her dad being friends with my dad and her being old enough to babysit… It worked out. She knew quite a bit about me, maybe more than Jo on some things, so when she deigned to give out advice like this, I did listen. Mostly.
“See? And how many did she bring home?” Susan asked.
“You guys coming?” Jo asked.
“Just a minute,” Susan called.
“What?” I asked.
“How many guys did she bring home?” Susan repeated.
“That Carl guy she met at the nightclub we were watching for a skip, a job,” I told her. “Maybe twice.”
“She didn’t sleep with him, dummy. She was trying to make you jealous,” Susan said, her hand hesitating on landing on my arm.
I reached up and took her hands between both of mine and held them there.
“How can you know?” I asked, not realizing how ridiculous this looked.
Susan looked at my hands over hers and swallowed, knowing how big a step this was for me. Trusting people was hard, and it was different than being on top of a woman during sex or vice versa. Hands were a more intimate part of the body for me. With them, you held the power to touch, to feel, to create and shape, to heal, and sometimes destroy. Powerful instruments, hands were… and one of my biggest phobias.
“Girls know things,” Susan said, dropping her hand to her side, breaking contact. “Let’s go.”
“They know not to touch anything, right?” I asked her. “They’re not supposed to.” I frowned when I saw Jo come stomping out of the office with a laptop in her hand.
“The screen is locked if you can… wait, that’s weird, it’s dead now,” she said, hitting the keys while balancing it with one hand.
“Nobody touch anything in there,” I yelled and gave Johanna a reproachful look.
I took my phone and tablet out of my pocket and set them aside and walked into the small office with Jo on my heels. The room was about ten by twelve feet, with a chemical toilet in the corner and a chair set off to the side. Lengths of rope had been cut and left on the floor, as if someone bound had been cut loose in a hurry. At the other end sat a desk with a single lamp and landline phone. Above it was a badly painted picture of Lake Huron. Interestingly enough, there was a cord hanging down from the picture and plugged into the power strip at the desk. It all looked neat, too neat. Staged maybe?
“But it was just working…”
“Stop,” I shouted. Everyone including the HRT team froze.
I pulled the picture away from the wall, showing lengths of copper wire in a coil. I unplugged it and went and got my stuff. I pulled my phone out and said a silent prayer that she was up and put it on speaker.
“Tech Support,” Skye’s voice chirruped in my ear.
“Look at this,” I said, turning on the video conference button and pointing it at the wall. “Does this look like a homemade degausser to you?”
“Yeah, pretty standard design. Can’t pass by it without frying out anything with a hard drive or LCD if it’s plugged in,” Skye said.
“It was,” I said.
“Oh shit,” she whispered, but it was so loud in the room that everyone heard it, and they all turned to stare at Johanna.
“Oh shit,” she said, tears in her eyes as she set the laptop on the table and walked out.
“Is it wiped?” Skye asked.
“Probably. Went through it twice,” I told her.
Virtual Skye winced.
“We could try remounting the hard drive and seeing if we can pull individual cylinders apart to start data recovery,” she said after a moment’s thought.
“You know how to do that?” I asked her, incredulous.
When I said I don’t do hardware, I really meant it.
“Yeah. I’ve never recovered something that has been degaussed twice, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”
“Skye, you manage that, and I’m going to double your salary.” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Then it will be done. Unplug the degausser and bring me the hard drive. Unless it’s an SSD, I should be in pretty good shape.”
“I already did, otherwise my phone would be fried.” I looked at the agents, who suddenly checked their personal devices with horror-stricken faces.
Jo looked relieved, but I knew how hopeless this was. I’d read about them, and unless this one was flawed, which happened quite a bit on homemade units, we’d need a miracle. The only way I’d heard about effectively testing a degausser is to test it. Since nobody wants to ruin expensive electronics, nobody really tested them, especially the home built ones. When I was researching Skye and Anonymous, I’d run across many plans for these things. That way, if they were ever raided, it would be the one last Hail Mary that the cops almost never looked for, and when the files were all wiped, so was the case.
That was what had happened here. Twice. I didn’t believe in miracles, but I’d set the kid loose on it and talk to Johanna when I wasn’t upset.
“Ok Skye. I’ll be back there soon,” I said, ready to end the call.
“Wait, Jarek!” she called.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Take me off speaker,” she said.
I did, and she told me to not be so hard on Johanna. Over video phone, Skye could see it was obvious Johanna had done it, and she was confident she could fix it.
“I wish I was as confident as you are,” I told her.
“Don’t worry, you hired the best,” she bragged.
“I hired a script kiddy with a fetish for Japanese porn cartoons,” I told her.
She busted up laughing and after a moment said, “I thought you didn’t make jokes?”
“I don’t,” I told her, which made her laugh even harder for some reason.
“Next time you call, use the tablet. You could throw your phone away and just use that. It’s much better,” she told me.
A short time working for me, and she was already bossing me around like Jo. What was the world coming to?
“Yes boss,” I said and hung up.
“You ready?” Jo asked, her tone defeated.
“Yeah, let’s go break this down and see what we can save from it,” I told her.
Jo’s shoulders slumped.
“Have your FBI guys check that out.” I pointed to the dega
usser. “But make sure it isn’t booby-trapped first.”
That caught everyone’s attention and, as we left, Susan came out with an evidence bag and her notebook, trying to log the laptop into the chain of evidence as we were leaving.
“Dammit, stop,” Susan said before we made it to the big overhead doors.
“Ok,” I said, waiting patiently.
“I’ll go get the car,” Jo said.
“Thank you,” I called out after her.
“Don’t take it out on her,” Susan said when Jo was out of earshot.
“I’m angry, but I’m not taking anything out on anyone,” I told her.
“I know, but she doesn’t. She’s new at this. You grew up in this business. Sort of,” she said, looking at the laptop in my hands.
“Skye told me the same thing,” I told Susan.
“Hey, let’s get out of here,” Pete Ralston said, coming up from the parked cars.
“He been sitting out there the whole time?” I asked her.
“Yep,” Susan said quietly.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because your girl handed him his ass in front of three cops and the mayor. He’s now being asked to retake his fitness test to see if he’s fit for duty. I don’t know how he’s passed it so far…”
“Yeah, he’s like the cop from Beverly Hills Cop. Taggart,” I said, picking the name out of my memory.
Susan chuckled. “Yeah, but Taggart in the movie was smarter than Ralston,” she said, grinning.
My car pulled up, and I gave Susan a little wave as she finished writing the slip and handing it to me. I got in behind Jo and sat back, the leather seat feeling luxurious to me.
“I’m sorry,” Jo said softly as we rolled for a couple of minutes.
“I’m sorry too,” I said, meaning more than the laptop.
“Sorry for what?” she asked me, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“Susan sort of explained things to me. I’m sorry I didn’t get it,” I explained to her.
“Get what?” she asked, her voice sounding curious now rather than sad.
Kidnapped: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 1) Page 5
