Interference

by Danielle Girard

  “Oh, yeah. There are a million ways to do it now.”

  “But not with my parents,” Mei added. “They’re traditional. Very Chinese.”

  Sophie nodded. “I understand.”

  Mei glanced out the window and felt the phone vibrate in her lap. The name on the screen was A Mā. “Ugh.”

  “Your aunt?”

  “My mother.”

  Sophie laughed. “Better answer it. I swear mothers know when you ignore them.”

  “Hi,” Mei said.

  “Everything is fine, A Mā. Ayi is with Hui and I stayed with a friend last night.” Mei felt Sophie’s gaze on her momentarily.

  “You could have been killed.”

  Mei wished her mother was speaking Cantonese.

  “We’re fine. There is a police officer at the house tonight.”

  “What about tomorrow night? Or the next one? Andy called your father today, Mei. He said you wouldn’t let him come, that you asked him not to.”

  “I did,” Mei admitted.

  “What is going on, Mei?”

  “Can I call you tomorrow morning before work?” Mei asked.

  “Mei, you can’t just put your husband on hold,” her mother said.

  Sophie pulled to the curb and shut the engine off. Mei looked up to see the sign in the window. Akiko Sushi.

  “Talk to you later, A Mā. Love you,” she added for good measure then hung up.

  Sophie turned in her seat. “Your mother is loud.”

  Mei grew hot.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I just heard the word ‘husband.’”

  Mei turned back to Sophie. “I am married. He’s in Chicago. I’m here.”

  “Now I’m the one who’s embarrassed,” Sophie said. “After the shooting… when we were in the hall, I thought you were gay.”

  Mei turned back to the street. “Guess I’m still figuring things out.”

  “Come on,” Sophie said. “They serve some amazing sakes in here, and it seems like you could use one.”

  “Could I ever,” Mei agreed.

  Chapter 24

  For the second night in a row, Ryaan got out of bed to go to a crime scene. First, Mei’s house and now a fire in Bernal Heights where they had found guns from the Oyster Point warehouse burglary. Patrick wasn’t answering his phone, otherwise Ryaan would have been able to sleep through this one. It was definitely Patrick’s turn although they’d already had one goose chase today. They’d spent the morning and half the afternoon trying to find Karl Penn, the man whose print were found inside the Ford Focus abandoned in the Tenderloin with a trunk load of stolen guns. The address on file for Penn led them to the home of a ninety-four-year-old Asian woman who had never heard of Karl Penn.

  When they asked her about her mail, she admitted that she hardly ever got it. Her daughter came on Saturday mornings and usually brought in the whole week’s worth. Ryaan got the daughter’s number to give her a heads-up about the mail fraud, but as far as the woman knew, nothing had gone missing. It was possible that Karl was just using her address to avoid the run-in that Patrick and Ryaan had planned for him. Which meant he probably lived close enough to visit the woman’s mailbox—one of the few in the neighborhood that wasn’t either a lockbox or a slot through the front door—but not too close to be recognized. Either way, it left Patrick and Ryaan with nothing on Karl. Patrick said he’d start on known associates tomorrow.

  Maybe that’s why he wasn’t answering tonight. That and the fact that they weren’t technically on call. Patrick was highly adept at getting out of these “off call” nights by not answering his phone. Ryaan hated to admit that the reality meant Patrick was smarter. “Not on call” equaled no phone. That was his rule. If there was a natural disaster, he’d turn on his phone.

  Ryaan’s phone was always on. She might have ignored it, but it wasn’t like she had anything else to do. Aside from sleep, that is. And she was going to need some of that pretty soon. Without so much as a glance in a mirror, Ryaan left a note for her mother and drove up to Bernal Heights. They’d found some of her guns on the scene. That was what had motivated her out of bed. Her guns. She had taken to thinking of the city’s guns that way. Stolen ones. They were hers to find and return to their owners, like children taken from parents. The guns were in danger. Danger of being put into the wrong hands and used to kill. She suspected there was something wrong with thinking about them that way. A department shrink could tell her what it was, but she didn’t want to know, not really. In the same way, the shrink might be able to explain why she was both obsessed with guns and repulsed by them.

  A man she’d liked had taken her out on a first date to a firing range where they could shoot high-powered rifles and an assortment of guns with high-capacity magazines. It was a first and a last date. Any man who would take her to a gun range was not someone she wanted to see again. Ever. And yet, how could he have known? Guns were everywhere in her life and she rarely shared her mixed emotions around them. Almost no one knew about her brothers.

  Out of bed, Ryaan wished that she’d gone to bed earlier. Instead, after dinner, Ryaan had spent a couple of hours on the case. First, listening to the emergency call from the woman, Erica Wilkins, over in the Tenderloin who had called in the Focus full of guns. Then, she read the transcript of the interview patrol had done with her, trying to glean some hidden jewel. There was nothing. From every angle, Erica Wilkins was what she said she was—a retired school teacher who saw something suspicious and called it in. Mrs. Wilkins kept a pair of binoculars by her bedside table. She said she’d been in bed when she heard an unfamiliar car. Before his death, Wilkins’s husband had been a mechanic for forty years and she had grown quite adept at hearing the small differences in motor sounds. When she heard the unfamiliar car, she used her binoculars to look out her window.

  Beyond that, it was the police’s fault that it had taken them almost twenty-five minutes to respond. They were lucky that the guns weren’t discovered sooner. According to Mrs. Wilkins, the car had sat quietly, undisturbed for almost fifteen minutes after her phone call before a couple of boys had come up the street and seen the trunk popped, the guns in full view.

  Wilkins hadn’t seen faces, she’d said, although Ryaan knew that wasn’t true. Erica Wilkins undoubtedly knew exactly which kids had taken guns from that car, but if she hadn’t told the police in the interview, it was unlikely she would offer names now. The only other lead they had on the Ford Focus was the old sticker from the golf club. When Ryaan had called them earlier, the country club had confirmed that the sticker was indeed a parking pass issued from their club, but they couldn’t tell her who it had been issued to. Another dead end.

  Ryaan followed her phone’s GPS to the street where the fire had been. As soon as she turned the corner, the building location was obvious. The fire engine was gone, but two fire trucks remained parked on the street alongside a patrol car, a detective’s car, a CSU van, and two civilian cars she didn’t recognize. No surprise visit from Patrick. Not that she expected one.

  There were a few residents standing on their porches or on the sidewalk in front of their homes, but Ryaan guessed most had already gone back to bed. Ryaan looked up at the building. The front door was located on the left side, which appeared to be two stories while the rest of the building was single-level, occupied by a double garage with two separate doors. It looked relatively undamaged considering there had been a fire, which was evident only in the broken glass of the upstairs window and in the splintered remains of the front door where the firemen had entered. Ryaan had no desire to go in, but with nothing left to do, she passed under the crime scene tape and showed her badge to the patrol officer guarding the perimeter.

  He gave her a strange look but pointed to the door. “Crime scene team’s inside.”

  Ryaan looked up at the building. “The structure is stable?”

  The off
icer gave her a half nod. “There’s a city engineer inside who says it is.”

  Ryaan headed for the door and heard voices coming from upstairs. “Hello,” she shouted up.

  There were feet on the stairs before Hal Harris appeared around the corner. “Hi there.”

  “Hi,” she responded, feeling awkward. “I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

  “Fire came with a double homicide,” Hal said like he was ordering french fries with his meal.

  Ryaan hated dead bodies. “Is Hailey here, too?”

  Hal smiled at her. “Nope. She’s with the family. How about Patrick?”

  “Same, I’m sure.”

  “It’s just us single folks, then,” Hal said, smiling.

  Unable to come up with a witty response, Ryaan nodded and hoped she didn’t look scary.

  Hal reached for her face. Ryaan jumped back but Hal laughed. “You’ve got some white stuff,” he explained, running his fingers across her cheek. “Soap, maybe.”

  It was only then that Ryaan remembered the cream the dermatologist had prescribed for her eczema. She covered her face with both hands. “Oh, God. I forgot all about it.”

  Hal laughed. “It looks like we got you out of bed.”

  Ryaan rubbed at her cheeks for several seconds before Hal reached over and pulled her hand away. “You got most of it,” he told her. “Come on.” With that, Hal turned and started back up the stairs. With a couple last swipes across her face, Ryaan followed.

  The city engineer stood at the top of the stairs with one of the firemen. They were tall white men, average-looking and about her age. Behind them, Ryaan saw a series of small orange markers indicating potential evidence. She was glad to know the crime scene team was already there. The place was a mess. Between the fire and whatever was used to put it out, things were wet and scattered across the room. The smell of burnt plastic and chemicals was almost overwhelming.

  Ryaan noticed the small refrigerator and a microwave with a melted door. On the other side of the room was a flat modern desk like an architect’s drafting table that might have been from IKEA. It was covered with computers, mostly in pieces. Ryaan rubbed her hand over the back of her nose and nodded hello. “We okay to be in here?”

  “Yep,” the fireman said. “Come on in.”

  The engineer shook his head. “There’s actually surprisingly little damage.”

  “The arsonist started with a lot of accelerant,” the fireman explained, “but with no windows, the fire pretty much choked itself off.”

  “Not an experienced arsonist,” the engineer speculated.

  “Definitely, not,” the fireman agreed.

  “The fire was almost certainly a cover up for the murders and maybe to burn some evidence,” the engineer said. Ryaan watched him and wondered how many crime scenes he’d been to. It seemed like a lot of speculation for a city engineer.

  “Well, thank you, gentlemen,” Ryaan told them and joined Hal who was standing with Naomi from Roger Sampers’s team. Ryaan took some comfort in the fact that even Naomi looked a little less fresh tonight.

  “Looks like someone was living here,” she said to Hal.

  “Definitely,” Hal agreed. “And doing something with computers. We’ve found two so far. Plus, a soldering iron, a glue gun, lots of small tools.”

  Ryaan looked over the contents on the desk then pointed to a pink mound of melted plastic. “What is that?”

  “I think we decided it was Hello Kitty duct tape,” Hal told her.

  Ryaan felt a little sick. “Any other evidence of kids?”

  “None,” Hal assured her. “And both bodies were adult males. That same tape was found on the two computers. No kids.”

  She exhaled. At least there was that. She glanced around. “Where are the bodies?”

  “Coroner took them out about an hour ago,” Naomi said.

  “When did the fire happen?”

  Naomi looked at her watch. “According to the firemen, they got a call around six fifteen, six thirty. It will be on their log, but that left with the engine.”

  Ryaan glanced at her watch. It was almost midnight. “You’ve been here since then?”

  Naomi shook her head. “No, we got here about ten. They had to clear the smoke and make sure there weren’t any hot spots.”

  Ryaan couldn’t imagine what it was like before. “What do we know so far?”

  Naomi caught Ryaan up. The first man had been shot and not recently. His body was well into decomp. “Coroner’s guy guessed he’d been dead a week,” Hal added.

  “The second man was killed early today, strangled,” Naomi finished.

  “We found the van that was involved in the robbery,” Hal said. “We confirmed it was the same one used in the cop shooting.”

  “Is one of the bodies our cop killer?” Ryaan asked.

  Naomi deferred to Hal who said, “Maybe. We’ve got an I.D. on one. He’s the hacker, we think, but we don’t know who the other one is. No I.D., and the fire did some damage to the bodies. Not so much the fire,” he corrected himself. “More the heat.”

  Ryaan put up her hands. “That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me any more about the bodies. What about the guns?”

  “There are a few here. Plus, some ammo,” Naomi explained. “I’ll get them to the lab to run prints.”

  Ryaan thought about the guns. “We’re still short.”

  “Safe to assume they walked out of that Ford when it was parked in the Tenderloin?” Hal asked.

  “That would be my bet,” Ryaan said. “Where are the guns that were found?”

  “Down in the garage.”

  Ryaan pulled out her notebook. “I’ll get the description before I go,” she said. Then she’d know exactly which guns were still AWOL. At last count, they were missing four of the big ones. She hoped they’d be here.

  “I’ll come with you,” Hal said then turned to Naomi. “You okay up here?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Cool,” Hal said then turned to Ryaan. “Let’s go.” As they headed toward the stairs, Hal called back to Naomi. “Text me if you find anything interesting.”

  Two other crime scene techs were at work in the garage. The smell there was worse. It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of flesh, rotting and burnt. Someone had opened the garage door several feet to allow fresh air to get in. It also made it colder. Ryaan zipped up her jacket and tried not to think about how tired she was.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Hal said.

  Ryaan nodded.

  Hal stepped in front of her. “Darren, you know Ryaan Berry from Triggerlock?”

  The man who looked up had nice eyes. He nodded hello. “I’d shake, but—” He held up gloved hands.

  “No worries,” Ryaan said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Where are the guns you guys found?” Hal asked.

  “Michael’s got them on the far side of the van.”

  Ryaan followed Hal around the van. There, Michael was photographing the inside of the van. Ryaan turned away.

  “Damn,” Hal said, covering his nose.

  “You’re telling me,” Michael said. He stepped out of the van and pulled the booties off his shoes. “Darren, did you call us a tow for this thing?” Michael shouted.

  “Should’ve been here already,” Darren called back. “I’ll call again.”

  “You want to see the guns?” Michael asked, returning his camera to the bag.

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” Ryaan said. Exhaustion was making her nauseated. She’d take a look, snap a couple photos and head home. She really had to curb her compulsion to respond to every call, no matter what the hour. What she really needed was a life.

  Michael led to her to a black satchel and knelt to unzip it. She followed, trying to shake the hold of exhaustion. What was it about being
tired that made her doubt everything? She was thirty-four. She knew better than to let herself get this way.

  “Here’s what we’ve got,” he said.

  It was the curved clip of an AK. That quickly, she felt alert again. She wanted all seventy-two guns off the streets, but mostly she wanted these big ones back. “You have an extra pair of gloves?”

  Michael pulled two gloves from his jacket pocket and handed them to her.

  Ryaan opened the satchel until she could clearly see the three guns. “Two AKs and a 10mm Glock with a high capacity mag.”

  “Good news?” Hal asked.

  Ryaan stood and thought back to the running list she was keeping of the stolen guns. “We’re down to eighteen missing guns. About ten of those have high capacity magazines, but only two assault weapons are still missing.”

  “That’s something,” Hal said.

  Ryaan nodded. “Definitely.”

  “Lab’s got this case on priority. We’ll get these printed first thing tomorrow,” Michael told her.

  “Thanks,” Ryaan said and struggled to suppress a yawn. She pulled off the gloves and tucked them in her pocket to throw away later. “I’ll follow up with the lab in the morning.”

  Hal followed her to the door then reached around to open it for her. Ryaan stepped into the cold night air. As tired as she was, she hesitated to leave.

  “Guess it’s kind of late to grab a drink,” Hal said.

  Ryaan laughed. It came out a loud, sharp bark, the side effect of being half-asleep and trying to flirt. It was only then that she realized he was serious. “Oh,” she said.

  Hal watched her.

  “Sorry,” she told him, leaning into the cool exterior. “I’m too tired to be charming.”

  “I think you’re doing okay,” he said.

  “I’d love to have a drink,” she told him.

  Hal smiled. “Really?”

  “Really. But not tonight.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not tonight.”