Grave Danger

Book 4: The Rookie Club

by Danielle Girard

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Asian American; LGBT Lesbian; Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Female Sleuths; Domestic Thrillers; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers; City Life; Women's Fiction; Mystery Anthologies & Collections; International Crime & Mystery; Police & Law Enforcement Romance; Romantic Suspense; Psychological Thrillers; Pulp Thrillers; Suspense; Fall & winter reads

Synopsis

Seventy-two guns are stolen from a San Francisco police storage facility, causing murders in the city to spike. The shooters appear unrelated—their only connection is that each uses a gun stolen from police storage. The police have no leads.

Mei Ling, recently brought in as head of the SFPD's Computer Forensics Team, recognizes a device installed in the same storage facility—one used for hacking. She's convinced this could be a new connection to help crack the case. But how?

When the bullets start flying through the window of her own home, Mei knows she's on to something. Now it's a race against time to identify the hacker.

Before she becomes the next victim.

Release date: March 25, 2015

Publisher: Saddle Peak Entertainment

Print pages: 404

Sample

 CHAPTER 1

Oyster Point was not where one expected to find a police warehouse full of guns. Over the past couple of decades, the area had actually become a rather attractive corporate park. The adjacent marina housed expensive yachts, and a well-developed trail system ran along the water. Natural grasses swayed in the wind. It was all very quaint and peaceful, not at all the way the place had been twenty years earlier when it was basically the cheapest available office space in the area.

J.T. wasn’t there to enjoy the view and didn’t give a damn about natural grasses. The whole place could have gone up in flames. The only concern was that economic prosperity meant tight security, which translated into extra time to set things up. Eighteen years was a long time to wait for payoff. But maybe the waiting was done. J.T. smoothed the gloves one last time and followed the trail.

Even in the dim predawn light, the phone box was easy to find. Phone companies hired human monkeys, then gave them an impossible-to-screw-up set of instructions. In J.T.’s experience, the monkeys still managed to do things wrong, maybe half the time. Evidenced by the fact that the phone box wasn’t even locked.

A pair of wire cutters and the lines would be down. Ten seconds tops, but first, Sam’s cell phone jammer had to be working. At this moment, Sam was in the small apartment adjacent to the garage, predictably huddled over his desk. He was likely working on the night’s third or fourth Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. The empties would be lined along the desk like fat children at the edge of the playground. Sam was waiting, something he did by playing Minecraft or breaking into small nonprofits and finding ways to occupy himself. Last week, he hacked into a San Jose animal shelter and changed the names of the residents. A six-year-old calico was now called Big Red Pussy, a Goldendoodle who had been named Betsy was now Curly Bitch, and a Rottweiler who had lost an eye in a street fight had been renamed One-Eyed Dick. Sam thought this was hilarious.

Thankfully, Sam was not a field guy. For one, he didn’t even have a driver’s license, but he was also about as stealthy as farming equipment. No, Sam was hardly even a behind-the-scenes guy. Sam was a train wreck, but Sam could also be managed. Mostly this was accomplished by keeping Sam away from other people, which wasn’t difficult because Sam preferred the company of other online nerds, sitting in their own dungeons, drinking their own Big Gulps, and eating some similar diet to Sam’s daily feasts of Cheetos and microwave burritos.

Now, to work. The backpack dropped gently on the ground. The cell phone jammer was in a small cardboard box, surrounded in bubble wrap. Sam tended to go overboard on packaging. The device was a silver box not much bigger than a box of Tic Tacs with a black antenna coming out of each end. In the center was a silver switch. In Sam’s girlish print, the left side read ‘off’ and the right side ‘on.’

Only gloves touched the box as the switch was flipped from ‘off’ to ‘on.’ The call to Sam’s number failed, which meant the jammer was working. The clippers made a satisfying snip through the wires and, in under a minute, the first step was done.

At the front of the building, Hank waited in the black van. Hank was a monkey, too, but of a different sort. J.T. might have brought Karl instead, but Karl was smarter, and J.T. didn’t want any extra questions. Plus, all interactions with Karl had been electronic. J.T. had never seen his face nor the other way around, and J.T. was hesitant to change that. The fewer people J.T. dealt with in person the better.

J.T. raised a hand, and Hank emerged excitedly from the van and slammed the door closed.

“Watch the noise.”

“Sorry, boss,” Hank said. He shouldered an oversized duffel that seemed mostly empty.

Monkey. “You have what you need?” J.T. asked.

Hank patted his bag and nodded.

“Okay. It’s your turn.”

Hank approached the warehouse’s back door with its 4-digit entry lock. He, too, wore gloves as he pulled a crowbar from the duffel bag and worked the end of it into the narrow opening between the door and the jam, rocking it up and down until it was wedged in far enough to begin to muscle it. The trim came off first with a loud snap as the thin metal broke away from the front of the building. Hank’s hands slipped, and he dropped the crowbar which made a loud clattering sound on the pavement. It rang out like a bullet shot. “Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry,” Hank muttered again. He removed a long pick-like tool and a rubber mallet from the bag and created a dent in the metal door just above the knob until the latch was fully exposed. With the crowbar, he wrenched it open. Hank was built like a tank. It took all of seven minutes before the door fell open.

They stepped into the warehouse together, and Hank let the door close behind them. Softly. A first. The space smelled of old paper and lemon cleaner. The smell meant someone still cleaned the place, so their footprints would be harder to track. That was good news. The lights were off across the warehouse and the temperature cool, not the kind of place where someone was working, especially not at this hour. Skylights lined the walls almost at the ceiling, which meant someone might notice if they turned on the lights.

J.T. pulled a flashlight out of the small side pocket of the backpack and flipped it on. “You got yours?”

Hank found his flashlight, and the two of them scanned their lights across the inside. The warehouse space was small and lined with shelves where boxes were piled high. Police case files. Overflow. This was not the interesting part. That was in the far corner.

“This way.”

Hank followed, finally quiet, as they crossed the warehouse to the last aisle where a cage took up the far corner. J.T. stood back. Hank used his crowbar to open the locked gate in under a minute.

The cage was lined with metal cabinets, some green, some gray, all old-style and flimsy. The first took Hank approximately fifteen seconds to jimmy open. Hank whistled at the contents, the shelves lined with semiauto assault rifles, each tagged with a case number.

“Load those up. And the other cabinets, too,” J.T. said. “We don’t need all of them. You’ve got four minutes.”

Hank pulled two empty black duffels out of the one that carried his tools and dropped them on the floor. He opened the first and started loading guns.

There was a more important task to be done while Hank stole the weapons. J.T. exited the cage and returned to the main area of the warehouse, using twenty precious seconds to scan the rows before deciding on the placement. The second row seemed the best, most out of the way. Against the wall, certainly, to allow Sam the best signal. J.T. chose a box from the second shelf, two down.

With the box carefully set on the warehouse floor, J.T. loaded the larger of two computers from the backpack into the box. The computer was an inexpensive one—an Acer—purchased at Walmart while dressed in a business suit and leather gloves and scarf for the chilly day. And a wig. With cash. Three months ago. Three others were purchased under similar circumstances in case Sam needed them. A disposable cell phone and an independent battery source were strapped to the computer with Hello Kitty duct tape. Sam’s idea of a joke. Sam had bought the tape himself.

None of J.T.’s prints would be on anything. Sam had been warned. J.T. had gone so far as to bring him a box of extra-large sterile gloves to fit his big, chubby hands. But Sam was sloppy. Hackers, in general, were sloppy creatures, J.T. had learned. Careless criminals, they coveted bragging rights over anonymity. The process over the results. Easily manipulated, too, by the right person. Sam was no different.

The second device was a Raspberry Pi, a computer that was no larger than a deck of playing cards. That needed to be higher. J.T. tested the shelves. The metal shelving was inexpensive. Empty, they would be easy to topple, but the weight of the old case files held them steady. Even spacing made scaling them relatively easy.

J.T. set the small computer, with its own battery pack and cell phone, on the top shelf before climbing up and reaching to the ceiling. The acoustic ceiling tiles were loose; the first one opened up without any trouble. It was almost too easy. Lousy security for police storage.

The bundle weighed maybe 20 ounces, mostly from the weight of the battery. J.T. slid it up into the ceiling so it sat against the building’s outside wall and rested on the metal crossbars between acoustic tiles. Checked it twice. The tile slid back down smoothly. It looked just like the others.

Everything was as it had been. J.T. climbed down, retrieved the backpack, and returned to the weapons cage where Hank was loading his last pack. As predicted, Hank had left nothing behind. The guns were superfluous, but Hank was a common thief and common thieves lacked awareness of when enough was enough. Without mention of his excessive exuberance, Hank loaded the remaining handguns into the duffel. Hank didn’t ask about the four minutes of absence. Lack of curiosity and brute strength were Hank’s best features.

Hank wiped his gloved hands on his pants. “That’s all of it, boss.”

The two made their way outside and pushed the door closed. Up close, there would be no missing the damage to the door. But, from a distance, it would be hard to see. J.T. flipped the cell phone jammer off before turning to the backpack to retrieve its packaging.

“J.T.?”

J.T. started and spun at the sound of Hank’s voice. “Jesus Christ.”

There was the sound of metal on metal. The jammer fell between the phone box and the exterior wall of the building. J.T. tried to retrieve it, but it was wedged down out of reach.

Hank backed up. “Sorry, J.T. I wanted to know if you wanted me to wait or go to the van.”

J.T. said nothing. The jammer was off, but leaving it was a bad idea. This was supposed to look like a smash and grab. The jammer was too sophisticated for an average burglar. J.T. dropped the pack. “Give me the pick.”

Hank rattled through the guns in search of the pick.

J.T. focused on staying calm. Eyes closed. Deep breath in, deep breath out. No breaking necks. Not yet.

“There it is.” Hank started to pull the tool free, but it caught up on a gun. Suddenly, a shot fired.

They both ducked as a bullet struck the passenger’s side window glass of a utility vehicle parked in back. Glass exploded.

Without hesitating, J.T. grabbed the backpack in one hand and one of the duffels in the other and started for the car. Hank was right behind with the other two duffels.

The jammer was gone. There was no getting it now.

“Shit, boss,” Hank said, panting. “I had no idea the guns would be loaded.”

“Don’t speak.”

“Did you think they would be loaded?” Hank went on, nearly whining.

“Do not speak,” J.T. repeated, fighting for control. Hank was disposable, but, at that moment, it couldn’t happen fast enough for J.T.

Thankfully, Hank went quiet, although he continued to make little sighs and huffs like a high school girl, the need to talk obviously making him crazy. Despite the broken glass, the streets were quiet as they opened the back of the van.

Hank was sheepish as he loaded the bags. J.T. slid in the side door and pointed to the driver’s seat. “You drive. I’m going to sit back here and see what we got.”

The take couldn’t have been less interesting. That was not the reason J.T. chose the back. It was about not being up front with Hank. Especially if something went wrong. Something else.

“We heading home?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Hank pulled away from the curb with a jolt that knocked everything, J.T. included, toward the rear of the van. “Sorry, boss.”

J.T. did not respond. It was over. A mile away, the text came in from Sam. “I can see the networks. Working to get in now.”

J.T. knew Sam would ask for the jammer. As much as J.T. would have liked it, Sam would not be distracted by the importance of his task. He’d want his toy back, and he would not take the loss well. J.T. would have to pretend the jammer wasn’t lost. Hopefully, Sam could be put off for a day or two while J.T. pretended to “find” it. Better to let him focus on one thing at a time.

The worst was over. Now it was a matter of some cleanup.

The light turned yellow and Hank accelerated hard. Again, everything slid to the back of the van. Then there was the loud honk of a siren turning on and the glow of flashing red and blue lights. A cop.

Fuck.

“Boss?” Hank called in a panic.

“Pull over, Hank. Stay calm.” The cop car parked, and Hank twisted his hands over the steering wheel.

“Take your gloves off, Hank. And don’t let on that I’m here. I’ll tell you when to go.”

The plates on the van were stolen. It wouldn’t do to have them run. Things were about to get messy, but J.T. was good with improvisation. Hank, on the other hand, was not. The cop car door opened and a single officer started for the van. He had a blond goatee and a wide upper body, the kind of young officer who probably spent a lot of free time at the gym. His left hand hovered on the butt of his gun. A left-handed cop was at a disadvantage. J.T. was surprised he didn’t come around the passenger’s side. Instead, he approached the driver’s side with his gun on the outside. Inside, the Sig Sauer P250, complete with silencer, was now aimed at his head through the van’s tinted side window.

When the officer reached the back bumper, Hank started to roll his window down. J.T. released the Sig’s safety.

The cop’s stride reached the middle of the van. The trigger eased back. One. Glass exploded. Two. Bullets lodged themselves in the cop’s head.

Hank screamed.

The officer fell to the pavement. There was a short twitch in his left foot, then nothing. Done and done cleanly.

“Let’s go, Hank,” J.T. whispered. The police car’s camera would pick up everything. J.T. didn’t want their voices recorded, but it would be hard to miss Hank’s screaming.

“Drive now,” J.T. hissed again, but Hank hadn’t heard.

J.T. crawled up toward the driver’s seat and, resisting the temptation to put a bullet in Hank’s head, too, whispered, “Come on. We have to go.”

Hank lurched forward, and J.T. held tightly as the van swerved into the street. At the corner, Hank turned right, driving in the opposite direction of home. He was hysterical. He made it around the corner and out of the view of the police car’s camera at least.

“Okay, stop here,” J.T. said. “I’ll drive.”

Hank stopped the car in the middle of the road. Obviously, he had never seen anyone shot before. And it was such a clean job, too. He ought to have been impressed.

The two switched places, and Hank sank down against the wall of the van and pulled his knees to his chest. He made moaning sounds for the remainder of the drive.

“It’s okay, Hank.”

There were no other incidents. The garage door slid open and soon the van was inside with the door closed behind them. Only with the engine off did Hank pull himself from his fetal position and move toward the door.

Hank had his hand on the van’s door handle, the back of his head cleanly exposed when the two bullets entered the back of his skull. The bullets didn’t break the glass, so the mess was contained in the van. At least that had gone right.

It would all stay there for a few hours. Right now, the only pressing matters were a shower and a beer. Even at 5:00 a.m., J.T. was ready for a drink.

 

CHAPTER 2

Mei Ling sat in the back corner of the Special Ops van and studied her computer screen in the strange glow of the van’s red interior lights. Around her, officers donned heavy raid gear: thick, black suits and combat boots and helmets with goggles. Mei was working to make herself small in the crowded space. Not that she was large to begin with. The van was maybe twenty feet long and had seemed spacious when they were all seated, but with ten team members, the captain, and equipment everywhere, it felt significantly smaller now.

Mei was working to hack the login on the computer they’d seized from Will Weigman, who the police believed was the meth ring’s money guy. If she could break into it before Special Ops got into the building, they could obtain additional search warrants and cast a wider net. Unfortunately, the Special Ops team was gearing up and the brute force password dongle she’d plugged into the computer’s USB port was still working on cracking the password. Mei was also waiting for AT&T to respond to their subpoena for the guy’s cell phone records. The lab had even gotten the DA’s office to issue a subpoena to Apple to gain access to whatever they could see from his Apple ID. Anything to give them some added insight. But waiting was a lot of what they did.

Computer forensics was never a speedy process, but watching the program from the inside of the Special Ops bus made it seem slower. Even glaciers melted faster than computer forensics these days, what with climate change and all. All around Mei, the Special Ops team was moving. Quickly. Efficiently, in a way the computer team never could. Mei wished she’d opted to do this from the lab, although then she would have had to deal with Aaron Pollack and her new team and that was less than ideal, too.

Cameron Cruz sat down beside Mei and pulled on a thick black jumpsuit. “What do you think of Special Ops?”

“Uh—”

“A little different from the lab?”

Mei motioned to Cameron’s suit. “No, no. I’ve got a suit just like that. I would’ve worn it, but it’s at the cleaners.”

“You’d look great in one of these,” Cameron told her. “And men love this look.” Diego Ramirez laughed and reached down to tie his wife’s boot, but Cameron elbowed him away playfully.

Diego laughed. “It’s true. We dig it,” he said, giving Cameron a quick kiss.

Mei glanced at her computer screen.

“Get a room already!” one of the other guys ribbed the lovebirds. Mei couldn’t remember his name.

“Seriously, you guys don’t spend enough time together off the job?” another one joked.

Cameron and Diego were the only couple Mei knew who both lived together and worked on the same team at the department.

Diego waved them off. “Hey, we’re making up for lost time.” Looking back at his wife, though, he couldn’t contain his smile and, when Cameron turned her back to pull on her Kevlar vest, she was grinning, too. It was like they were getting ready to go on a scuba diving trip rather than into the center of a known meth ring.

Despite the flirting, Cameron and Diego moved with purpose. No wasted time as they donned equipment—belts, helmets, gloves. Cameron might have been five-eight or nine, but she couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred and thirty pounds, and the equipment she had on had to weigh another thirty-five or forty. In law enforcement for more than ten years, Mei had never donned a bulletproof vest or a gun on the job. She did her mandatory firearms training, but she was way more at home with a mouse than a Glock.

Mei minimized the screen on the decryption program and pulled up the GPS coordinates. The tracking device they’d put on their mole still hadn’t moved.

“Anything?” Special Ops Sergeant Lau asked Mei.

She shook her head and glanced at the timer that recorded how long the device had been still. “Hasn’t moved in nearly fourteen hours.”

The group sobered. The tracking device was his phone. It was possible the small tracking chip had been discovered and left behind. In Mei’s experience, when a tracking device was discovered, it was usually dumped. She’d spent plenty of days tracking devices to dumpsters or off bridges and into lakes. It was also conceivable that their inside guy had left his phone. It was normal to see gaps in movement of between seven and ten hours. People slept, after all.

But, with the sensitivity of the tracker and her equipment, Mei could see the movement of the phone off the bedside table, even just a few inches, let alone if it moved across the room. People tended to bring their phones with them from one room to another. This one had not moved a millimeter in fourteen hours. That was not good. Nothing to do now but wait for the team to go in and check it out.

Ramirez led the team through the layout and plan, and Mei watched. Her phone vibrated. Her mother was calling again. She sent the call to voicemail and texted her mother for the third time that morning, At a scene. She’d take hell for that later.

Mei heard shouts. The team lined up, moved out. Sergeant Lau went with them and reached inside to close the doors. Mei was alone with her computer. Most days, she ran this kind of program while she was doing a half dozen other things. Computer programs always took twice as long when they were being watched. Mei heard the ding of the dongle. The password was Betsy1082. Quickly, Mei typed it in and, without a breath ran a recursive find command, looking for anything with a modified date in the last week.

Five seconds later, the images began to load. Mei moved through them quickly. The first two were black, most likely accidental. The next image was hard to see, taken from a distance. She double-clicked the thumbnail so the picture filled the screen. At first, the tint of the skin made it look like a costume mask tossed on a pillow. The skin was gray-green where the neck disappeared under the white sheet, the bulk of his torso under the covers. A dead man. Maybe Weigman, but she didn’t know what he looked like.

Mei loaded the next image. Somewhere else. Two large green soda bottles sat on a countertop. They looked old, their labels long gone. Each was partially full. Rubber was wrapped around the tops and a single tube ran from one to the other. Beside them was a glass bottle maybe half their size. Its label was turned away from the camera.

Mei quickly scanned the next few images. They seemed to document the place in a full circle. Empty bed through the doorway. A single ratty brown couch in the living room. Kitchen with a ’70s style refrigerator in yellow. In the center, a small card table with one chair and the counter lined with the soda bottles. She enlarged the photo. Beside the bottles was a small blue plastic bottle. Though blurry, she could read the words at the top of the glass bottle: ethyl alcohol, USP. Below that, in bright red letters, it read 200 Proof. Ethanol.

In the next image, she saw a label that read H3PO2. Her chemistry wasn’t good enough for that one. Instead, she Googled it. It was a substitute for red phosphorus in the production of meth and highly explosive. A meth lab. Mei scanned back through the images to the one with the body. In the background was a window and a single shade.

Mei jumped up from the computer, catching her foot on the chair that was bolted to the floor. She stumbled across the van and pressed herself against the windows. Stared up at the building as she had been doing when they arrived. The team was walking into a meth lab.

“No. No. No.” Mei turned and scanned the tabletop. The radio? Where the hell was it?

She sprinted for the radio on the dash. “Sergeant Lau, do not enter the building. I repeat, do not enter.”

The radio was silent.

“Send backup. Sergeant Lau’s team is entering a meth lab. Lau, don’t go in there!” she called more desperately. She watched out the window, anticipating an explosion.

When there was no answer, Mei opened the bus door and ran down the stairs. “Cameron! Diego!” she screamed down the block. She wasn’t exactly sure how they’d entered the building. “Get away from there! Clear the area.”

Were they already inside? Even a cell phone call could trigger an explosion. Call 9-1-1. She ran back onto the bus for her cell phone, dialed 9-1-1.

“Dispatch. What is the address of your emergency?”

“This is Officer Mei Ling. I’m with the Special Ops team and we have a potential ethanol leak. It hasn’t blown yet, but the team is up there. They don’t know it’s an active meth production. We need to get through to them and tell them to get away from that building before it blows. We need firefighters and a bomb squad and ambulances.”

“Officer, slow down.”

Mei glanced at the image on her computer. Two liter-sized soda bottles and ethyl alcohol. Maybe it wouldn’t blow. But there had to be enough ethanol in that air to kill Weigman. “Send backup. This place is a meth lab.”

There was a loud smack on the side of the bus and Mei jumped. Sergeant Lau’s face appeared through the glass. He gave her a tentative smile, which was followed by the comforting thunder of heavy boots on the bus stairs.

“What’s all the commotion?” Diego asked.

Mei watched them all flood back onto the bus. All ten of them, plus Lau. Only then did she finally take a full breath of air.

“What did you find?” Lau asked, coming up behind her shoulder.

Mei double-clicked on the image of the meth lab and turned the computer toward the group hovered around her.

“That could be anywhere,” one of the guys said.

“Mei, what made you so sure that picture is of this place?” Lau asked.

In the distance, Mei heard the low whine of sirens. She navigated back to the image and zoomed into the window. She pointed to the broken blind that hung asymmetrically in the window. “See that?”

“The shade?” Cameron asked.

Mei nodded. “Look up at the building,” she told them. “Farthest window on the right.”

The officers moved across the van. It took them a minute to find it. “Holy shit,” Diego said. “That place is a meth lab.”

Mei sank into her chair. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”