Kara had convinced Michael that she needed to track down Tom Lee. Something was very strange about how he was still on duty when the other known officials who’d been bought off were out of the picture. Now was the easiest time in the history of LAPD to get rid of a corrupt cop, so why let him stay?
She’d been thinking about it all night.
It didn’t take her long to learn Lee was on shift from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., so they waited outside the precinct, arriving at two thirty.
They sat in silence for a while, then Michael said, “You never told me what happened the day your informant was killed. Did you suspect the FBI had leaked it to Chen?”
“I knew someone had leaked to him, but I didn’t even think it could be the FBI. I assumed it was someone in LAPD.”
“Like Lee.”
“Yeah. Except I didn’t suspect him. He wasn’t there. Apparently, Elena had doubts so moved him before the raid, but I didn’t know that until yesterday.”
“What happened that day?”
“You really want to know?”
He nodded.
Kara didn’t like talking about it, but this was Michael, her partner. And if you couldn’t trust your partner, who could you trust?
So she told him everything.
Kara had built the case over nearly a year, spent eight months undercover with a big-box store and finally had enough to nail David Chen, his asshole bodyguard and a half dozen others who were complicit in keeping human beings as slaves. What else would she call the nearly three hundred girls and women—and a few old men—he’d illegally trafficked from China to work in his sweatshop? They were not free to leave—they lived in an apartment building Chen owned—and they weren’t free to find work elsewhere. They worked fourteen-hour days in a business he ran, and based on the books Sunny had obtained for her, it would take each person eighty years to “pay off” what Chen said they owed him.
Chen’s tyranny would end today.
Knowing she had to be up before five in order to stage with SWAT and a dozen cops, she stayed at Colton’s small house in Echo Park, much closer to Chinatown than her Santa Monica condo.
The sex was an added bonus.
For the last two weeks Colton had helped with the case by playing the part of a homeless drunk sleeping in an alley with line of sight on the shipping doors. He’d put the final pieces together—documenting shipments, individuals, schedules. So, they were having an early celebration. They didn’t work together often, and they hadn’t hooked up in months, so it was a nice evening.
He woke her up at 4:30 a.m.
“I have to bolt, need to build my next cover,” he said. “I made coffee.”
“You’re a god,” she muttered, stretching.
He chuckled, kissed her. “Hardly. See you when I close the next case.” And he left.
Kara didn’t know then that it would be the last time she saw him. He’d be murdered three weeks later after his cover was blown by the media.
She drank coffee, ate a banana that was a couple days overripe and was heading to the precinct when her cell phone rang. It was her undercover cell, and she glanced at the number.
Sunny.
She answered. “Yep,” she said neutrally. Sunny knew it was happening today. She was supposed to stay in her apartment until Kara got her.
Kara tensed when she heard machinery in the background. What was Sunny doing at the factory?
“He knows,” she whispered, and the phone went dead.
Kara pressed the gas and called Sunny back—no answer. She then called Lex. “Kara, I’m on my way, sh—”
“Chen knows we’re coming. My informant is at the warehouse. She’s in danger.”
“Fuck. Okay, meet me—”
“No! Activate SWAT now. We can’t wait.”
“Dammit, Kara, you can’t go in alone!”
“I’m going to stake it out, see what’s going on, try to make contact with her. I’m not going to be reckless, Lex, but I can’t wait two hours!”
The plan was to stage at 0600, raid at 0700, based on the intel that Kara and Colton had put together.
“Don’t get dead.”
“No plans to die today. Me, or Sunny.”
She ended the call, sent Lex her tracking information so he could see her movements in real time and headed to Chinatown.
Chen owned two square blocks in Chinatown. Street-side he ran shops that catered mostly to tourists; in the back was a network of warehouses where his slaves worked. All trafficked from Shandong in China, all threatened that their families would be killed if they disobeyed, talked or ran.
Except Sunny. Sunny learned from a new arrival that her only relative, her mother, had died, and now Sunny had no one. When Kara approached her, at first she didn’t want to help. Terrified for her life. But she was sad, lonely, desperate and angry, and Kara pushed.
Kara had a way of getting people to work against their own self-interest. And over time, she turned Sunny, pulled her in. Without Sunny, Kara would never have been able to build the case against David Chen.
Kara parked her beat-up undercover car in an alley. She was dressed in tactical pants and a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt. She pulled a larger T-shirt, this one dark gray, over her vest as she walked.
She knew the secret way into the main factory where Sunny worked. Down the alley, through a nondescript door that had no outside knob, but a hidden panel revealed a code box. Sunny had uncovered the code six weeks ago, and that was when the case began to steamroll.
Before Kara entered, she texted Lex and informed him of her plans. She pocketed her phone before he responded, knowing he’d order her to stand down. If she didn’t see the order, she wasn’t disobeying.
Most of the workers hadn’t yet come in. In fact, while she heard the machines, Kara saw no one.
The facility made clothing—designer knockoffs that were sold in the shops on the street, and generic brands sold to big-box stores. Stamped with a big fucking Made in the USA but nowhere did the stamp also admit that the clothes were sewn by trafficked Chinese nationals who made no money for their labor.
Kara headed down narrow metal steps into the basement, where a hall led to the main floor. With the help of Sunny, Kara had been here before to take photos and copy documents. Sunny knew how to avoid or temporarily disable the security cameras. She was a smart girl who deserved more than life had handed her. She had to be okay.
Over the hum of the old machinery, Kara heard no voices. As she proceeded down the faintly lit corridor, glancing into each dark room as she passed by, she still saw no one. Empty. Empty. Empty.
She walked briskly but cautiously, all her senses in tune with her surroundings. Sounds. Movement. Smells. She heard voices in the main factory room, followed by a stifled scream.
Then silence, except the damn machines.
Kara stopped. A plastic sheet blocked the doorway, obscuring her view. She listened, wishing she knew who was in there, what they were doing, if it was Sunny and if she was in danger.
A clamoring sound of falling metal had Kara running onto the factory floor, gun drawn.
At first she didn’t see anyone. Machines took up the center of the building—she had no idea what they did. More than a hundred sewing machines were set up in rows along the far wall, though no one was working now.
Keeping her gun close to her body to avoid someone jumping out at her and grabbing it, she ran down a narrow hall toward where she heard the sound. A scream echoed in the cavernous room followed by two gunshots.
Kara ran around the machine and saw David Chen racing down the hall opposite from where she’d entered.
“Stop! Police!” Kara shouted.
He didn’t stop.
On the filthy cement floor, Sunny lay in a pool of her own blood. She was gut shot and at first Kara thought she was alive.
She ran over, pulled off her shirt and pressed it on the wound. “Stay with me, Sunny!”
Kara pressed on the wound with one hand, pulled out her phone with the other and called 911. As she demanded an ambulance she saw the blood in Sunny’s hair.
He’d shot her in the head. She couldn’t find a pulse. She couldn’t feel Sunny’s heartbeat.
Sunny was dead. Kara didn’t hesitate—she jumped up and ran after David Chen, biting back a scream of rage bubbling in her lungs.
He would not get away with murder.
He’d gone up a staircase that she had seen on the map Sunny had drawn for her. The stairs went up three stories to the roof. As she pursued, a metal door clanged against the wall.
She took the steps two, three at a time, never slowing. She burst out of the door, barely hesitating except for her training telling her to pause, assess.
Chen was near the edge of the roof. She heard sirens all around, but Chen was here because he had an escape plan.
“Police!” she shouted. “Stop, keep your hands where I can see them!”
Chen didn’t stop, and he didn’t turn toward her. He ran, jumped from his roof to the adjoining building. It was only a ten-foot gap. She pursued, rolling as she landed, then popped up and followed.
Shoot him. He killed Sunny!
She couldn’t shoot him in the back. If he turned to her, she would fire. If he just turned to face her, she would kill him. He was evil, a monster who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as the women he exploited.
Turn and face me, you coward!
He ran, leaped to another roof, this opening narrower than the one before, and she followed, gaining on him, but not fast enough. The sun was just starting to break through the morning. Security lighting on the street barely reached the rooftops. The sirens were louder, and she could see whirling lights—the cavalry was almost here...
But Sunny was dead.
One more roof and he would be able to disappear into the heart of Chinatown. There were dozens of ways he could escape. She couldn’t let that happen.
She’d been slowly gaining, now only twenty feet away. He spared a look over his shoulder and then everything happened so fast.
He tripped over a vent and went sprawling...down, over the edge of the roof. She sprinted, her breath labored, and saw him spread-eagled two stories below, his leg at an unnatural angle. She was about to pull out her phone and call it in when a burning pain in her back had her grunt out a scream.
She turned and fired her gun at a large Asian man as she saw him reach into his waistband. Xavier Fan, Chen’s bodyguard. She fired three times and he went down.
She fell to her knees. She hadn’t heard a gunshot—but the pain told her she’d been hit. She turned her head best she could and saw the hilt of a knife that had barely missed her vest.
She called Lex as she lay down on her stomach. She didn’t dare pull out the knife.
“Quinn! Where the fuck are you? Quinn!”
“Roof. Three buildings south. Chen tripped, fell to the street. Officer down.”
“He shot you? Dammit, talk!”
“Fan—knife. I’m woozy. Fan is down. I need, fuck. Damn fucking hospitals.”
She was losing consciousness. “Sunny,” she muttered. “Chen killed her. I was too late.”
Michael didn’t say anything when she was done with her story. She didn’t tell him everything—he didn’t need to know, for example, that she’d been sleeping with Colton or that it was the last night she’d seen her partner before he was killed. But she told him about finding Sunny dead, chasing Chen, wanting to kill him but not being able to shoot him in the back.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
“Did I? All this would have been over eight months ago if I had killed him.”
“Shooting a man in the back as he’s fleeing—”
“Fleeing? Running because he killed a woman in cold blood.”
“You’re lucky the knife didn’t kill you.”
“Yeah. And for my trouble, the FBI almost let Chen walk because I apparently violated his civil rights. He claimed I targeted him because he was a Chinese American, and Bryce Thornton was happy to believe it.” She paused. “Sorry. I guess I’m still angry about the whole thing.”
“I would be, too.”
“And there he is,” Kara said, watching Lee’s patrol vehicle drive through the gate. They were sitting across the street. She would wait until he came out in his personal car—a late model Acura—and then she’d call him. “This is going to be fun.”
Michael groaned. “Really, Kara, you and I need to discuss your definition of fun.”
Tom agreed to meet with them at a pub well outside of his precinct. Though he was twenty minutes late, Kara didn’t doubt that he would come. She’d told him she’d show up at his house and make a spectacle if he bailed on her.
Tom Lee was a short, stocky cop of Chinese heritage. Kara had known him, but not well—they didn’t run in the same circles, didn’t work the same cases.
He eyed Michael with suspicion.
“Michael Harris, my partner.”
“You’re not LAPD,” Tom said.
“FBI,” Michael said.
“Shit.”
“Sit,” she told him. “This is off the record. For the next ten minutes, you have immunity. Besides, we haven’t read you your rights.”
Michael was obviously uncomfortable, but she ignored that. She knew she couldn’t offer Tom Lee anything official, but she could offer him the freedom to walk away tonight.
She needed answers.
She said to Tom, “I know why you were transferred, what I don’t know is why you aren’t sitting in prison right now.”
Suddenly, Michael got up. “I’m going to sit at the bar,” he said and walked away.
She was surprised, but grateful. He sat at the end where he could watch both her and the door.
“I thought it was just for show, you going over to the FBI,” Tom said, looking over at Michael. He gulped his beer.
“Nope, I’ve been working my ass off for them. The real deal.”
“Is DC as bad as LA?”
“I wouldn’t know. My boss runs the Mobile Response Team, so we’ve been all over the country. My team is solid. I don’t care about anyone else.”
Still, Tom had one eye on Michael.
“I had a long talk with Lieutenant Gomez last night,” Kara said. “She didn’t confirm or deny that you were on Chen’s payroll, but you were. And then you were transferred here right before the raid. I thought about this half the night, and my guess is you’re still on somebody’s payroll and feeding Gomez information.”
“Why don’t you ask her? Didn’t she train you? Aren’t you two besties?”
The snide comment had no place in this conversation, so Kara ignored it.
“I’m asking you.”
He didn’t say anything. She leaned back, sipped her beer. “Craig Dyson is dead,” she said conversationally. “I was there. It was a professional hit, no doubt about it. Chen? Not quite as professional but the killer took out the security cameras before he shot Chen on the street and walked away. It was a bold attack downtown when it would have been a hundred times easier killing him in the parking garage or his house or in the middle of a fucking restaurant. That tells me the killer wanted the splash to send a message or to force the courthouse into lockdown or any number of things. There had to be a reason because it was stupid.”
“It’s not stupid if he gets away with it,” Tom commented.
True, she thought. “So when Elena confirmed, more or less, that you were feeding her information, I was trying to think why. Here’s my guess. You were caught taking bribes from Chen while I was undercover. You were moved to the north division only a week before the raid. Tell me why I should believe you’re not the one who leaked the raid to Chen. You must have suspected something.”
“I saw you on-site months before. If I wanted to fuck with your operation, I would have told Chen you were a cop when you were pretending to be a clothing buyer.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer right away. He sipped his beer, looked down at his napkin as if something super interesting was written there. Then he looked her in the eye. “I took money from Chen to ignore what he was doing. To make reports disappear, to stay on that beat. To look the other way, you’d probably say. But I’d never set up a cop. Chen would have killed you, and I couldn’t live with that. So I kept my mouth shut.”
There were so many problems with Tom’s attitude, but Kara didn’t comment. She forced herself not to think about the women trapped in servitude, or Sunny murdered in cold blood. She blocked out the pain and suffering and inhumanity of Chen’s actions, which Kara placed firmly on Tom’s shoulders.
“How did Elena find out?” she asked.
“Not exactly sure. She might have been fishing, just suspicious, but when she confronted me, I admitted it. I suspected the raid was going to be coming down sooner rather than later. She told me she was moving me to the north division and for me to keep my mouth shut. That I would be called upon to testify against Chen and anyone else they caught during or after this investigation. If Chen reached out and asked why I had been transferred, I was to say that North Valley was short-staffed and I had no say about it. If anyone else reached out to me, I was supposed to call Gomez. After the raid, she fully debriefed me—I told her everything I knew. I kept expecting the shit to hit the fan, but it never did.
“Then, a couple weeks ago, Gomez and Dyson came to my house. Sunday night, my wife was making dinner. I thought this was it, I was being arrested in front of my family. I felt sick and disgusted with myself. But they didn’t arrest me. They said that they were in the middle of a major undercover investigation stemming from Chen and wanted to know if I had seen any specific people with Chen at any time. They showed me a bunch of pictures.”
“And?”
“I pointed out several people I recognized. I only knew the name of one—an inspector for the city named Connie. I didn’t know her last name. She came by the warehouse several times over the years. But I also recognized a man—didn’t know his name—who had been to the apartment building where Chen’s workers lived. He came by several times. I had no idea why, never asked.”
Elena had withheld a lot more information than Kara had thought.
“Then what happened?”
“They told me to just keep doing what I was doing and I would be called in front of a grand jury to testify within the next few months. If I kept clean and told the complete truth to the grand jury, I could keep my pension. If I lied, I would be prosecuted.” He finished his beer. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, Quinn. I don’t really care if you do. I did what I did, and there are cops who do far worse than me. I was just riding out my time in a thankless job and making a little green on the side. I have fifteen years on the force. I won’t get my full pension—they’ll make me leave early, after the hearing—but at least I’ll have something for my wife and kids, and no black marks on my record so I can get another job. Until then? I’m doing what Gomez ordered—staying clean, keeping my head down and telling her everything I know.”