Page 43 of Flash and Bang
Jarrett flopped back down and rolled his chair across the aisle toward Tim and Sarah’s cubicle as Thayne did the same.
“You mean you looked into Suki Chang for us?” Thayne asked quietly, glancing over his shoulder in the still quiet office.
“Yeah,” Darcy said. He handed Thayne a piece of paper and Jarrett rolled his chair close so they could read it together. “I looked as far into her personnel file as I could without raising suspicions.”
Thayne glanced up from the report he’d just been handed. “How’d you do that?”
“I used to date Cindy Tyler in Human Resources so I took her to lunch yesterday. She was reluctant but she finally gave me a peek at Chang’s file.”
Jarrett grinned and reached out and gave Darcy a high five. “Word.”
Tim grinned, gesturing at the report Thayne still held. “Anyway, the long and the short of it is that before coming to the ATF as an investigatorthree years ago, she was a graduate student at UCLA. She has bachelor’s in criminal justice and a master’s in chemistry. Her file also states that she’s fluent in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Russian as well as English.”
Thayne exchanged a glance with Jarrett, knowing that he was going to want to follow that up. “Anything else?”
Darcy shook his head. “Naw, man. She’s got the cleanest file I’ve ever seen.”
Thayne looked over at Jarrett again, communicating with him silently. They both knew what that meant. If it looked too good to be true, it probably was. When Thayne had gone undercover with Mills Lang’s crew, the ATF had not only given him a whole new identity with a long arrest record, they’d thrown in stuff that looked like it could appear to be real, like a tendency to fight dirty and a penchant for playing the horses which he was never really good at. But, they’d also included things like having good grades in school until he lost both parents and then started hanging out with troublemakers. No one was perfect and because Chang appeared to be, at least on paper, her whole file read as super fishy.
“Yeah, no one’s that clean on paper,” Jarrett said.
“Even her evals are stellar,” Darcy added. “I mean, I’m a psych major and a sharpshooter and I don’t score the way she does.”
“It’s suspicious, I have to agree,” Thayne said. “But let’s not jump to conclusions.” He looked around to the rest of them. “What? I just think we have to be careful here. None of this points to Chang being complicit in this fireworks case regardless of how damning it looks at the moment and…” He held up his hand when Jarrett opened his mouth, probably to argue with him. “None of us would want to be accused of something we didn’t do. There’s a religious fanatic connotation to these crimes, and you have to remember she’s got a Buddhist shrine in her house. I think we have to give her the benefit of the doubt here. That’s all I’m saying.”
Jarrett nodded. “She may have a Buddha in her house, but she wears a cross around her neck. I think you’re right to some degree, Wolfe. Profiling someone’s religion gets us into dangerous territory. Don’t get me wrong. That don’t mean it don’t have merit. We have to give her the benefit of the doubt until we prove otherwise,” he said. Then he turned to Tim. “Thanks a lot, Darcy.”
“No problem. I live to serve.”
“So…,” Jarrett said, pushing off and rolling his chair backward toward his cubicle where he did a perfect one-eighty to face his desk. “How should we divvy up the rest of the chores, boss?”
Thayne snorted. “Boss. That’s really funny. Pick a task and finish it and I’ll do the same until it’s all done. It looks like we’re both gonna have a long day riding a desk chair, Evans.” When Jarrett was silent he turned to stare at him. He was wearing a devilish expression and he winked at him.
“Sounds like a plan, Wolfe.” Jarrett smirked.
Thayne grinned and picked up the phone.
****
Jarrett decided he should be the one to call Ada Carrillo for a couple of reasons. First of all, even though he’d apologized for being a complete ass to her when they were down in San Diego, he still felt bad for having been so abrupt with her and he wanted to mend more fences. Second, he didn’t think that she was going to have a lot of luck with figuring out who the bomb maker was that tried to blow up his Jeep. They might have the name in their database but Ada didn’t have Jarrett’s level of security clearance and Jarrett’s best guess was, even though his partner did, Thayne still wasn’t going to get thekind of information about the bomb maker that he could.
Now that Jarrett knew someone targeted him specifically in the burning barn down at the border, he was pretty sure whoever tried to blow up his Jeep, was the guy who’d been on the wet works team in the Mideast way back when. When everything had been happening at breakneck speed down at the Fernandez farm, Jarrett thought he’d recognized the operative running into the barn. Hell, the guy had turned and shot at him. After the whole melee, he was wondering whether a lot of it had been his memory playing mind tricks on him. It was all a little fuzzy now. He didn’t know the guy’s name so he couldn’t do a check on him anyway. All Jarrett knew was thatsomeonehad it out for him. That was clear. The bottom line was, Jarrett had a better chance of getting a look at a file that wasn’t completely redacted than Thayne did. He really wanted to find out who and why so he could keep breathing a little while longer. It wasn’t that Jarrett was particularly afraid of the afterlife; he just didn’t want to put Thayne in danger any more than he already suspected he was. The “someone trying to kill us” theme was getting really old as far as Jarrett was concerned.
Before calling Ada, he sat at the desk and looked at the photos she’d emailed them from theMiramar blast site and wasn’t surprised that Thayne had been absolutely right. There were field strips in the photos and Jarrett had totally missed them. Next, he checked his email to find that Ada had forwarded the autopsy report the M.E. had sent over. It confirmed Cornwall’s suspicion that Greg Mason had died from being hit with an object prior to the explosion. She concluded that whoever struck him did it with such force that it had pushed a perfectly circular piece of his skull two centimeters into his brain. Her best guess was the blow had been caused by a hammer and had concluded Mason’s death was homicide due to blunt force trauma. Now, didn’t that just narrow down their suspect pool? The real question was why had Mason been killed. Jarrett glanced over at Thayne to tell him what he’d found out but at the moment his partner was on the phone.
“There’s no way to get names?” he was asking. “But then, how do you know…? Okay, but you check everyone’s…? Okay. Thank you, Sergeant. I appreciate your help.” Thayne hung up the phone and turned to look over at Jarrett. “That was the guard at the gate out at Miramar. They check visitor’s IDs against a list of those invited onto the base. They cannot come onto the base without some reason for being there. On the day of the fireworks show like other community events, because it’s open to the general public, the screening process was slightly different. The guards checked vehicles with bomb sniffing dogs including opening trunks and they checked IDs, but they didn’t require everyone to have an invitation.”
Jarrett frowned. “That seems really foolish.”
“Right? You’d think after 9/11 they’d be a little more careful with the general public. I guess they think they can handle any infiltration.”
“Sure. Tell that to a suicide bomber who’s packed explosives in his car, ready to take a run at a guard gate. I’ve seen that more than once and it sucks.”
Thayne nodded. “You’re right. It’s definitely a hole in security but for our purposes, we now know that just about anyone could have gotten onto the base that day and we’d have no idea if they were there for a nefarious reason. It’s looking more and more like one of the remaining three people on the Mason crew planned this. I don’t think we can rule out Mary Mason, do you?”
Jarrett shook his head. “No way. She might be the grieving widow she appears to be but she may be a member of the Freedom Brigade or just a plain nutcase for all we know. I ain’t ready to rule her out.”
Thayne looked over at Jarrett’s computer screen. It still had the blast scene photos from Miramar open. “What did you find out from the autopsy report?”