Interference

by Danielle Girard

  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 log-in 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 D.A.’s office to issue a subpoena to Apple to gain access to whatever they could see from his Apple I.D. 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, and 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 seventies-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, U.S.P. 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 phosphorous 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-size soda bottles and ether 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.”

  Chapter 3

  Mei was late for dinner with her aunt. Again. Ayi, as Mei had called her since she was little, was planning another feast in her celebration of the Chinese Ghost Festival. For two nights in the past week, Ayi had made hugely elaborate meals and served them to empty seats at her dining room table as though their dead relatives were dining with them.

  As a child, Mei had loved the Ghost Festival, her favorite of the Chinese celebrations. China’s version of Halloween, the Ghost Festival had appealed to Mei’s sometimes morbid curiosity about death and the afterlife. The Ghost Festival was a time when her mother filled their small apartment with the most delicious smells and everywhere in Chicago’s Chinatown, people burned incense, joss paper, and fake money to worship their ancestors. Traditional Chinese operas were held almost daily in the local parks. For years, Mrs. Luo from the market down the road gave out free rice candies to the children.

  Mei leaned back in the cab and tried to gear herself up for the evening. Living with her mother’s younger sister when she arrived in San Francisco had been the culmination of a long series of negotiations. Leaving Chicago at all was hard enough. Thirty-three in a few months, Mei was supposed to be having babies, not changing jobs. Her other sisters—one younger, one older—were both already married with children. Chinese parents didn’t believe in different lifestyles for different children. No, their daughters should all be married with children. Mei loved her nieces and nephew. Surely, she would have children, too. That was the life she’d always wanted. That had been her plan as recently as a year ago.

  Then came a seemingly innocent note on Facebook from Jodi, Mei’s closest friend from high school. Jodi who Mei hadn’t seen since college. Jodi who Mei was sure was living some alternative life in New York or L.A. or San Francisco. Jodi who, Mei discovered, was an estate attorney in Massachusetts, married to her female partner with two little boys. One boy born to each mom, nine weeks apart, with the same sperm donor. Two-year-old brothers who looked something alike, and Jodi with her partner Carrie. Not her partner. Her wife.

  Something shifted for Mei in those months. Questions she thought she’d put to rest resurfaced. Things that Mei used to enjoy—even looked forward to—had lost their appeal. Inside a nine month period, her entire personality was like a computer that had been restored from a different backup drive. She didn’t recognize the feelings that started to emerge. She was restless in a way she’d never been before. She started thinking about moving, looking at job opportunities outside the FBI.

  When the position came up with the SFPD, she applied. When it was offered to her, she accepted. Even before talking to her family. The department recruited her heavily, she told them. A lie. One of a hundred that Mei told herself were just little white lies. Some not so white.

  It was all a ruse to buy her time. She was suddenly terrified of the future. That safe, perfectly planned path seemed rife with danger. Coming to San Francisco was supposed to give her room to breathe. She had even imagined having her own apartment. Something tiny. Barely furnished or not at all; she didn’t care.

  But there would be no apartment. Since her mother’s sister lived in San Francisco, Mei had had to compromise. If Ayi didn’t mind, she would stay there. Surely her mother’s younger sister—an unwed woman in her late forties—would be less traditional than her parents, not more. Instead, Ayi was obsessed with Chinese culture. Her friends were Chinese; her coworkers at the insurance company where she was a translator for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers were Chinese.

  Since arriving in San Francisco, Mei had heard Ayi speak English only twice: once to a phone solicitor, asking him—with only a trace of the accent Mei always heard in her mother’s voice—to put her on the Do Not Call list and once on a call to order more capsules for her fancy Nespresso coffee machine.

  Looking at Ayi’s tiny feet in the brocade slippers she wore everywhere except to work, Mei considered the possibility that Ayi even bound her own feet.

  Mei spent a fair number of evenings at work, but Ayi had specifically requested her presence tonight. Normally, Mei would have taken the J train, but she was supposed to be home at six thirty. It was after seven. Plus, the idea of an hour on a noisy bus was not appealing.

  Halfway home, her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket and saw a picture text from Hailey Wyatt. Mei double-clicked the picture until it filled the screen. A small metal box with two antennae, it looked like a cell phone jammer.

  Mei called Hailey back.

  “Are you always working?” Hailey said in lieu of hello.

  “Are you?”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Me, too.” Mei didn’t say that, for her, work was better than the alternative. “What’s the deal with the jammer?”

  “Jammer?” a man in the background asked.

  “Mei, I’m here with my partner, Hal. Not sure if you heard about the officer shooting in Oyster Point.”

  “I did,” Mei said. News of an officer shooting spread quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” Hailey agreed. “We found this thing at a break-in at a police storage facility where someone—we think it was our shooter—made off with a lot of weapons.”

  “You found the jammer there?”

  “What the hell is a jammer?” Hal asked. Mei had to smile. So many officers were technophobes and luddites.

  “It’s a cell phone jammer. It prevents cell phones from being able to make calls.” Mei pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the image. “This one looks homemade.”

  “We found it behind the phone box on the outside of the building.”

  “Where the robbery happened?” Mei asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s not working now.”

  “How do you know that?” Hal asked.

  “Because Hailey call
ed me on her cell phone. A cell phone jammer jams cell phone calls so they can’t reach the satellite.”

  “That’s why they call it a cell phone jammer, Hal,” Hailey said with a smile in her voice.

  “It was most likely used to block a signal from going to the alarm company,” Mei explained. “Most alarms have a primary line that is a landline but then they also have a cell phone backup. The jammer would prevent that call from getting through to the alarm company.”

  “There was no alarm at all here.” Hailey sounded frustrated.

  “Then someone wasted some nice handiwork,” Mei said. “But it’s likely he didn’t know there wasn’t an alarm. I wonder why he left it there.”

  “I don’t think that part was on purpose,” Hailey told her. “It had fallen back behind the phone box.”

  “Now that we know what this thing is, can you find anything out from it?” Hal asked her. “Anything that might lead us to our perp?”

  “Maybe,” said Mei. “There might be some prints on it. If not on the outside, then possibly on the internal components.”

  “We’re leaving the scene now, but I’ll get it over to the lab. Maybe you can take a look tomorrow.”

  “If you get it over to the lab, I’ll go look at it tonight.”

  “What? No hot date?” Hailey teased.

  Mei made a sound she hoped sounded like a laugh. “Not by a long shot.”

  A few minutes later, the cab stopped in front of Ayi’s driveway. At least, getting to go back into the department later in the evening gave Mei something to look forward to as she headed up the short flight of stairs to her aunt’s funky yellow-green house. Ayi had bought the house for $75,000 thirty years ago. Now it was worth about ten times that. Two bedrooms, two baths in the Inner Sunset, it was a great place in a decent location. Rent free.

  Mei should have been happy, but instead she dreaded the sight of it. The fog that had shrouded the house that morning still hung like a gray tarp over the neighborhood. It seemed low enough that if she were to climb onto the house’s roof, she might be able to emerge above it and see blue sky.