When Barb arrived at her building, Fernando stepped out to open the car door for her—and to warn her of a stranger asking after her. She looked around, seeing no one, but the moment she stepped out onto the pavement, a bicyclist dressed head to toe in Spandex materialized from around the corner of the building—heading straight for her.
Fernando stepped into his path, trying to block him, but the man swerved around him and screeched to a halt in front of Barb. When she held up her hands to defend herself, he shoved an envelope into them. He leaned back in his saddle, whipped out his phone, and snapped a quick photo.
“You’ve been served,” he said before pedaling off to intrude on someone else’s peace of mind.
Barb waited until she was upstairs to open the envelope. When she did, she was confronted by a complaint from “Jackery Ventures,” accusing her of improperly enriching herself and demanding the return of all monies paid for her shares in Simitri. She turned to her contacts, this time retrieving the number for Julian Sands, Esquire. A quick call revealed that Julian was finishing up a trial and not currently available, but one of his associates would be happy to look over the complaint and get right back to her.
She messaged the document over, and an hour later her phone rang. The caller introduced himself as Martin Sands.
“How bad is it?” she said.
“It’s a steaming pile of crap,” he said. “Insinuation piled on innuendo, all wrapped up in a tangle of citations that sound good on the surface, but really don’t amount to anything. I can’t see a chance in hell of it prevailing.”
“That’s good.”
“It is…”
“But?”
“Jackery’s counsel of record is a woman named Marsha Black. She’s a named partner in a top-drawer firm, and this garbage is, to say the least, way beneath her. Something doesn’t add up, and that makes me nervous. She’s also got a reputation as a barracuda in the courtroom.”
“Better than Julian?”
“No one’s better than my uncle,” Martin said with a laugh. “But she’s not an adversary to take lightly. I made a call to her office to try to back her off, but she laughed in my face and said she’s ready to take your deposition as early as tomorrow morning. I can stall her if you want.”
“No need. Unless of course you’re not up to the challenge.”
He laughed. “I may not be able to manage Uncle Julian’s courtroom pyrotechnics, but I can handle a deposition—that is, if you’ll let me. Marsha Black has a reputation for getting under a witness’s skin. She’ll do her best to provoke you into saying something to use against you later. You’ll need to keep your head and look at me before answering—especially when she finds a sore spot. And don’t tell me you don’t have any sore spots.”
“Of course I do,” said Barb. “I’m human. But I’m also smart enough to listen to the people I pay to protect my interests.”
“That’s all I ask.”
#
Barb had sent her opening shots across Evers’s bow. The job now was to build the pressure, to rattle him. But before she made another move, she wanted to arm herself with as much knowledge as she could gather. From her conversation at the Santa Monica Pier, she knew that the Evers report was buried deep. But that didn’t necessarily mean the facts of the case were equally out of reach. Her first impulse was to ask the private detective to look into it, but before she did that, she had another option to try.
She’d had some experience with AI and quickly found it to be overhyped and undependable for serious work. But there were some things it could do better than people. One of those was sorting through a large amount of data and surfacing relationships between seemingly disparate items. She decided to give it a try here.
First, she looked up David Evers’s date of departure from the LAPD. Then she used that to construct an AI prompt that searched through all publicly available records for females arrested in Southern California by ICE within the previous 6 months. When she had the prompt ready to submit to ChatGPT, she hesitated. She felt she was on the right track, but her intuition spoke up, whispering that she was missing something.
Asking for arrests would return a haystack of names. If she wanted the AI to find the needle hidden within, she needed to give it more. There had to be a special reason for the LAPD to bury the case; officers coercing sexual favors was sadly not that shocking. There must be more to the story. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, putting the question to her intuition. It wasn’t long before she had an answer that felt right.
Something must have happened to one of the women, something bad enough to provoke outrage. She amended her prompt to filter the results by women who’d died in custody.
#
Joey had never seen his partner this agitated. Big Dave was not easily thrown off his game. He had an almost supernatural ability to keep his head when the shit was going down. But a few texts seemed to have done what gang bangers with nines and AKs couldn’t.
“What’s going on, BD?” he said, climbing into the passenger seat of the Shelby. “Talk to me.”
Big Dave shook his head. Joey knew from past experience that when the man didn’t want to talk, he didn’t talk. They drove in silence to Gerrity’s, the dive Dave called his home away from home. It was the perfect cop bar, owned and operated by a retired sergeant who made sure the taps were kept flowing and the shelves stocked with Jameson. Dark and noisy, it was packed with uniforms coming off shift and looking to smooth the transition back to the “real” world.
Joey watched uneasily as his partner proceeded to drink himself into a stupor. One shot after another, like a robot. Even Ginny, Big Dave’s current choice among the badge bunnies, was uncomfortable with the sight.
“Dave, honey,” she said. “Don’t you think you should slow down?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Dave without heat.
At last, he seemed to reach the state of inebriation he was shooting for, and he stopped, leaning forward on the bar. He was utterly absorbed in his inner world. It was as if Joey and the rest of them weren’t even there. Ginny, with her perfect figure and honey blonde hair hanging straight down to the top of her ass, was not used to being ignored, and she clearly didn’t like it. She pulled on Dave’s arm, breathed in his ear, rubbed her tits against him, and did everything short of sticking her hand down his jeans. It was no use. She might as well have been a ghost.
At last, with a pout, she pushed herself away and strutted off to find someone who would appreciate her fine self. Joey watched her attach herself to a uniform from Crosstown. She ran her usual routine of flirting, touching, and laughing too loud. Every so often she glanced over to Dave to see if she was making him jealous. She needn’t have bothered. The man was on his own planet. Not even his partner could reach him.
Joey took his duty as a partner seriously, and he moderated his own intake to stay alert for whatever was coming next. His loyalty was deep, and he would lay down his life in a heartbeat, but there were times when he had to admit he just didn’t understand the man. This was definitely one of those times.
Just when he was thinking Dave would never let him in, his partner turned and said, “Some bitch is stirring up trouble from my past.” He showed Joey a text saying as much and then an email warning that his old department was going to hang him out to dry.
“What’s this about?” said Joey.
“Some bullshit charge. Internal Affairs didn’t even file on me.”
“So, there’s nothing to worry about, right?”
But Dave had disappeared back inside himself, apparently having said all he intended. It was clear to Joey that even if Dave didn’t take another drink for the rest of the night, he’d still be in no state to drive home. Anticipating a fight, he suggested Dave sleep it off in one of the upstairs rooms that were ostensibly for that purpose but which saw more use as fuck pads for cops and their side pieces. To Joey’s surprise, Dave gave in without an argument. Joey led him upstairs, docile as a lamb. Once he had his partner settled, he called Danita to let her know Dave wouldn’t be coming home. She didn’t seem overly surprised or concerned, responding to Joey in a flat voice.
Joey ended the call, and looking around, decided he had done all he could do.
#
Danita put down her phone. Dave wasn’t coming home. She’d have the house to herself for the night. Her whole body relaxed. She felt almost lightheaded with relief. An evening to herself with no walking on eggshells. The mere thought was heaven.
She thought seriously about using the time to pack her few things and drive away, carrying out the fantasy that had sustained her over the months of hell. It would be so easy to set off with no destination in mind, the only goal being to get far, far away. Then, as always when she thought about leaving, reality set in. Dave had made it clear he regarded any attempt to escape him as an offense punishable by violence—or even death. She had no doubt he could find her no matter where she tried to hide. He had the resources of the vast law enforcement network on his side. And if he did kill her, he’d know how to get away with it, too.
She forced herself to break the dark train of thought before it took her all the way down. More than once, in the grip of despair at her situation, she’d considered saving Dave the trouble and killing herself. But something had always stopped her, some remnant of the spark of life she’d carried since she was a girl.
Danita’s phone buzzed. It was Kyra, her coworker at the coffee shop.
“Hey,” she said, answering the phone.
“I got a message from that woman,” said Kyra. “She said to tell you to keep holding on. It won’t be much longer.”
“Did she say anything more?”
“Just that,” said Kyra. “What do you think?”
“Well, he has been distracted and anxious about something.”
“Any idea what?”
“Not a clue.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I guess I’ll keep holding on,” said Danita, “and pray she’s not full of shit.”
#
ChatGPT had done its job, returning a list of three female ICE arrestees who’d died in custody, along with the official reports of their deaths. One of them was over sixty, a grandmother whose hearts had broken under the rigors of detention. One was 10, a diabetic whose insulin hadn’t been confiscated during the sweep. Barb spared a moment to grieve for these strangers, victims of a senile man and his cult of cruelty. But that was not a problem she had the power to solve. So she turned her attention back to the matter at hand.
The third and final death report was for a girl named Alma Maria Garcia-Torres. She was a Nicaraguan refugee whose family had made the long and arduous journey north to seek asylum. This part of her story was depressingly familiar. There were two details, however, that made Barb’s breath catch in her chest—details that explained everything.
The first was the girl’s cause of death: suicide.
The second was her age: sixteen.