There’s a safety rule you’re supposed to follow—don’t wear both earbuds when you’re driving or riding a bike or jogging so that you can hear potential danger.
But walking? I always wore both my earbuds. Partly because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, partly because I enjoyed being lost in my thoughts. Or, in this case, listening to LA with A&I. Their latest podcast was about the housing project in Venice. With Will’s blessing, I had sent them everything we knew about the project—the cost, the contractors, the financing, and what the city was getting for two hundred million dollars. Basically, taxpayers were paying $1.1 million a unit to house .002 percent of the homeless in the city. I had also included information about Angel Homes, the organization that received a three-million-dollar annual grant to manage the facility. Angel Homes had two full-time employees and were already managing three other transitional housing buildings that served a total of 410 homeless people. For those projects, they were paid $4.5 million a year. Add the new grant? That made $7.5 million a year.
Sure, they could be contracting out services and hiring staff on-site and any number of things, but no one knew. Why didn’t the city know how they were spending the money? Because the grant didn’t require any documentation, paperwork or transparency. They didn’t have to prove they did anything for the money. As Will always told me, nearly every city operates the same way, from Seattle to Portland, to here in Los Angeles.
But Amy and Ian went one step further for their podcast: they started digging into Angel Homes and learned that Los Angeles County Supervisor Lydia Zarian’s sister, Muriel Coplin, ran the nonprofit.
I hadn’t known that. I don’t know if Craig knew, either, though he had been investigating all the nonprofits that Will and I had identified. I was excited to tell him...because this new information about Zarian and Coplin fit extremely well with what I found yesterday when I went into city hall.
One of the benefits of working in the IT department is that I can come and go anytime of the day or night and no one paid much attention, even on a Sunday afternoon. I told the guard that I had to run a virus scan and he pretty much ignored me. I had finally worked out the coding problem and used my administrator access to reverse engineer the virus that had taken down the entire system.
I learned far more than I expected. And what I found both excited me...and scared me.
Someone much smarter than me had written a program that was ingenious. The files weren’t deleted in the backups. When the backup was run, the files were deleted at the point of download. I would never have figured it out except for nineteen missing gigabytes of data. The backup drive from the day before the crash was nineteen gigabytes bigger than the data that was uploaded to the system after the crash. The virus was in the boot code. Every time someone tried to re-create the problem, they would never find it.
The only way I could access the missing data was either to go to the data warehouse and retrieve the drive there—and they would never let me leave with it—or install the backup without any security protections into a brand-new drive. But because of the size of the backup, I couldn’t handle it on my own computer.
I wrote out the plan, but I would need access to a large network to be able to replicate the city hall mainframe. It was very illegal for me to do, so I wanted to talk to Craig about it first. The easiest thing would be for him to get a warrant for the original backup, which would have the missing files. But I worried that if he got the warrant, someone would have time to destroy the data on-site.
I was thinking about all of this, half listening to Amy and Ian discuss what they called “the biggest scam on Los Angeles taxpayers” related to the Angel Homes project in Venice Beach, and walking diagonally through the park on my way to Craig’s office when I heard a loud backfire, so close I thought a car was going to run me over.
I stopped, stood on the edge of the path that merged onto the main sidewalk. Looked toward the street. I pulled my phone from my pocket to pause the podcast when I heard another backfire—and that was when I realized it wasn’t a car. It was a gun. A man fell onto the sidewalk not twenty feet from me.
Three more gunshots hit another man—I recognized him. David Chen. The human trafficker that Craig Dyson was prosecuting.
He fell, blood spreading across his white shirt.
I turned to run and saw the shooter.
He wore a black face mask covering his nose and mouth, and sunglasses blocked his eyes. He was taller than me—six-one at least. Brown hair. He saw me.
He turned the gun toward me.
I stared at his hands.
I knew him.
I ran. I had never run so fast in my life. I didn’t hear a gunshot but my heart was beating so fast I didn’t know if I could hear anything else but the rush of blood in my ears. I ran all the way to the Fifth Street park, where I surprisingly felt safe.
“Miz Violet?” Toby said. “You okay?”
I shook my head. I would never be okay. “I need... I need...”
I called Will. “Will. Will—I saw... I saw David Chen. Shot. Come here. Fifth Street. I... I’ve seen the killer. I think. I know him.” I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Stay there, I’m on my way.”
Relieved, I walked slowly through the park. I saw Midge, who’d been living here a few months. She was in her fifties, close to my mother’s age. She was petite and skinny, but with a bloated stomach, a sign of heavy drinking. I didn’t know her story yet—she was wary of everyone—but when she saw me, she asked, “What happened?”
“Can I—can I sit in your tent for a minute?”
“Go ahead, sweetie.”
Her tent was stuffed with plastic bottles. She collected them from trash cans all over downtown and turned them in when she had a shopping cart full. Then she would buy as much alcohol as she could and drink until she passed out. When she woke up, she’d start collecting again and repeated the cycle.
The tent smelled of urine and alcohol and vomit. But I felt safe here for now. Will was on his way. He would come for me.
I sat there for five minutes when I heard someone shout, “Hey, that’s mine!”
There was a general disturbance and rustling in the park, a titter of voices, an angry yell, a woman’s scream.
Hands shaking, I parted the opening of Midge’s tent.
Three men wearing sagging pants and angry expressions sauntered through the park ripping open the tents. The homeless here were both mad and scared at the intrusion. They retreated to the edges of the park, letting the men storm through. One of the thugs pushed Toby; he fell down and lay there. Was he hurt?
“Where’s the girl? She ran in here. Are you hiding her?”
How did they know? Why were they looking for me?
I stared at the phone in my hand.
I knew who killed David Chen. He was a cop.
And he tracked me here because this was where I first saw him. But since he was a cop, he might also be able to track my phone.
I couldn’t risk it.
I stuffed the phone under Midge’s blanket and crawled out of the tent. I ran between two buildings, past sleeping men and women who littered the alley, under blankets and sleeping bags and jackets. I exited on Sixth Street and saw a bus coming toward the stop.
I made it. I didn’t know where the bus would ultimately take me, but I knew where I was going.
I stuffed my hand into my pocket and felt my key ring.
After I buried my mother, Colton said the investigation was heating up, and if I was scared or worried, he had a safe house for me.
My fingers circled around the key Colton Fox had given me that day.