The Gumshoe Diaries (17 page)

“Did I hear right, the boss thinks Dr. Looney
may have done this,” Rebecca asked, tapping pursed lips with an
index finger? She continued to tap while she waited for Iggie to
answer her rhetorical question.

“That’s not what he said. What he said was
that this guy is dead because we blew the surveillance and lost
track of the Looney broad,” Iggie answered, slightly agitated that
she wasn’t really listening. That was so rude he thought.

“So, she was here, maybe working, maybe
horsing around,
whatever
, and she left. Why would she come
back here to kill him? Why didn’t she do it before she left? Why
would she risk being seen coming and going twice? That doesn’t make
sense to me,” Becca wondered aloud.

“I dunno, maybe she didn’t kill anyone? Maybe
she witnessed it? By the way rookie, the lieutenant didn’t imply
anything more than we fouled up. You’re reading too much into his
nickel lecture sweetheart,” replied Iggie.

Ignoring him, Becca turned and walked over to
the soda machine, drumming her fingers against it for a second
before squatting down beside it. She looked back at Iggie and then
got down on her hands and knees, putting her face flat on the floor
and looked under the machine. Becca reached as far as she could for
a shadow toward the back. She could feel his eyes on her ass and
was more than a little uncomfortable.

“I better not catch you smiling Detective
Ingram,” she said.

“Don’t flatter yourself Tran, I’ve seen
better,” quipped Iggie defensively!

“No you haven’t Iggie, I’ve got a world class
tush and you know it,” she grunted as she strained to reach further
back.

“Damn it! I pushed the darn thing out of
reach,” Becca exclaimed, standing abruptly and brushing off her
slacks. She turned to Iggie and gestured for him to come and help
her.

“Come on Iggie; help me scoot this thing away
from the wall. There something under there that the CSI guys
missed. It could be important,” she asked.

“That thing must weigh a ton Becca, let me
find something to stick under there and swat whatever it is out
from under it,” Iggie complained.

“Oh come on, we can move this together. It’ll
give you a chance to show off for me,” Becca teased, forcing a
smile.

Iggie sauntered over to help her
begrudgingly. He walked past her and wedged as much of his skinny
frame as possible between the soda machine and the wall. The darn
thing was as heavy as he had feared and his first attempt to
impress her failed miserably. Grunting he tried again
unsuccessfully. He pried himself out from behind the big ice box
and looked around for his helper. Becca appeared before he could
bellow for her, handing him a back-scratcher she had found on a
bookshelf in the lab.

“Here, try this,” she said.

Iggie swiped it from her hand with a jerk and
gave her the universal
“are you kidding me”
look that every
father dishes out in exasperation at least thousand times or better
in life!

“You could have told me to wait before I
ruined this sport coat,” he whined as he squat down to swipe at
whatever was under the soda box. He reached in from the side and
swept the back-scratcher toward the wall. The object slid out and
rested against the wall, easily within reach. But before he could
straighten up to grab the thing Becca leap-frogged over him and
intercepted it. She stood quickly and held the thing to the
fluorescent light above, examining it closely.

“Jesus Becca, you almost broke my back
jamming your knee into me like that, what the hell?”

She ignored him and studied the object.
Picking away at some lint and crud she placed the small thing into
the palm of her hand. It looked to her like a USB flash drive, but
it was much smaller than anything she had ever seen, smaller even
than the SIM chip for her cell phone? It wouldn’t fit into any
computer she that knew of? Nevertheless it was electronic, she was
certain of that much. After all, her father was a Boeing EE and her
mother was an IT programmer at the same company, so Becca had been
around devices like this from an early age. In addition, her older
brother Brandon was a computer geek of epic proportions, and she
meant that in a good way, because the guy was brilliant!

“So, what’ve we got there,” Iggie
pressed?

“I’m not sure? But judging from the Ernie’s
outline down there it’s possible that he either dropped or tossed
whatever this is? I have a hunch that whoever killed Ernie may have
been looking for this,” answered Becca.

“You’re way too green to have hunches rookie.
Let me see that thing,” Iggie said condescendingly. Becca rolled
her eyes and glared at him slightly.

“
Really?
Tell you what, I’ll hand this
over if you can tell me what a USB is,” she replied, closing her
fist around the tiny devise.

“USB,
right
, how about
U SURE
BETTER
hand that over detective, and I mean right now!”

Becca frowned realizing that he could pull
rank. Reluctantly she gave the evidence to her superior. Half
pouting and half pleading she gingerly placed the devise in the
boney hand he held out to her just like an old schoolmarm would.
Iggie retrieved a small envelope from his coat pocket and dropped
the devise into it without breaking eye contact with his young
charge. Rebecca held his gaze but if looks could kill there would
be second outline on the floor right where Becca was standing.
Lowering her eyes she shuffled past Iggie toward the exit. At least
the ride back to the station house would be quiet for a change.
Rebecca Tran decided that thinking militant thoughts might be
cathartic; but acting on them is often suicidal, career-wise.

****

(“Well I bet you wish you could cut me down with
those angry eyes…”)…Loggins & Messina…1972

Chapter Twenty-three

UCLA, Molecular Sciences Building…Monday,
Feb 23, 2009…9:30pm

When I left Judy’s place she and Ronnie were
packing for a well timed vacation. It was a no brainer that Hassan
had tailed me to her apartment and I was equally certain that if we
split up he would follow me over her. What I wasn’t sure of was
whether or not he worked alone? My gut said that he did and so far
my old gas factory has kept out of more jambs then I cared to
remember. I had given Judy specific instructions as to who to look
up once they got to Vegas. My old partner Wally Price was a
Lieutenant now with the LVPD working homicide. I hoped that he was
as good at preventing one as he was at solving one. Wally would put
her in touch with someone at UNLV which, believe it or not, has an
excellent computer sciences department,
who’d have thunk it?
In any event the two of them would be in good hands with my old
friend. I’ve trusted the Chief with my life on more than one
occasion, both on the job and in the Nam.

Me, Wally Price and Bob Ingram go way back.
We served together in Southeast Asia from late 1967 to the summer
of 1969. Iggie and I were one of the lucky few to be drafted into
USMC. We first met each other at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina,
right after basic. Wally on the other hand had been in the service
5 years already, a Navy corpsman, by the time we met up with him.
The three of us became fast friends while stationed at the US
combat base in Khe Sanh near the Laotian border in the
Quảng Trị
Province
, South Vietnam, Republic of. Unfortunately we
arrived in country at exactly the wrong time in history! Because
not two months later the whole goddamn North Vietnamese Army and
their rat bastard lackeys, the Viet Cong decided to take one big
ass swing at Uncle Sam, striking simultaneously from the DMZ all
the way down to Saigon. It was a pretty bold move but a costly one.
Historians speculate the real objective was to shock US citizens
back home and incite them to insist we get the hell out there and
bring the troops home. They were right I think; it worked! What
happened over the next several weeks as we fought off the TET
offensive will stay buried within ourselves forever, along with all
those ghosts we left back there. Such a beautiful country and
culture, what a waste! That’s all I want to say about that.

Anyway, I don’t want to traipse down memory
lane anymore,
so
, back to the business at hand. Whatever was
on that
nano nano chip
that Judy was so excited about was
likely to get us killed unless I could throw Hassan and his Russian
bosses off the scent for a while. I needed a diversion, possibly
something from this lab? This is where I should logically find
something useful. In any event I needed to buy Judy time to extract
whatever was on that micro chip; I needed to keep Hassan’s focus on
me. He has to think that I’m onto something here in California. If
I fail, Judy and Ronnie are goners. For that matter, so am I, but
Hassan will kill me last and he’ll kill me slow just for shits and
giggles.

I parked my beat up jalopy of a car
(Ronnie refers to it as the rat-mobile)
around the corner,
wedged in between a Hummer on one side and one of those giant
off-road pick-up trucks that have probably never actually been
off-road on the other.
Basically out of sight.
I was about
to get out and walk to the building when I spotted Iggie’s new
partner, Rebecca Tran. She strolled past my car without noticing
me. Rookie mistake, she should have sensed my presence! Observe
everything; be aware of your surroundings at all times, that’s the
detective’s mantra. I quickly lay down across the front seats
anticipating Iggie to be right behind her. If I was lucky his eyes
would be on her shapely little ass and he wouldn’t notice my old
heap, which by the way he has ridden in at least a hundred times! I
held my breath for a ten count and sure enough here he came. I
heard him huff and puff as he raced to catch up to Becca.

“Wait up rookie,” he bellowed!

“The Lieutenant’s on the phone, he wants to
talk to you,” he said, sailing right past me.

Whew,
I must have stepped over every
crack in the sidewalk this week because this was my lucky day!
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred Iggie would have spotted me. But
I could tell he was distracted by more than Rebecca’s fine little
backside, he was pissed! I could hear it in his voice and could
picture the small blue vein at his right temple popping out like it
always did when he blew a gasket. I had to stifle a laugh. I could
hear the two of them talking faintly and then I heard two distinct
door slams. Good, they were leaving. I waited a good fifteen
minutes before sitting up and looking around. When I felt the coast
was clear I got out of the car and slowly walked to the building.
No rushing, I wanted to make sure Hassan was convinced that I felt
unobserved and safe. Secretly I hoped he was not using binoculars
because I was nervously sweating like a pig!

The doors were unlocked, and even though part
of the building was still taped off there was a fair amount of the
normal activity that one would expect on a busy campus. I dodged a
student exiting with her nose inside a textbook and a cell phone
plugged into her ear, she never even saw me, kids! As the door
closed behind me I saw the crime scene down the hall, stage right
and turned to look in the opposite direction, stage left, checking
for potential witnesses to my inevitable breaking and entering
misdemeanor. The coast was clear and I headed down the hall to the
SEM Lab. I stopped short after about five steps and listened
intently. I thought I heard more than my penny loafers echoing off
the high ceiling? There was no sound other than my breathing and an
occasional door slam further down the hall behind me. I shook it
off but still had the feeling of being watched, Hassan maybe? I
didn’t think so; he was more direct than that. If he were around
he’d want me to know it. I continued on to the lab and stopped at
the barrier tape, paused then went under it and into room 1187,
bypassing the gory display on the floor. Dead is dead, if you’ve
seen one bloody outline you’ve seen them all.

The room was dark and I pulled out my
penlight to help me navigate. Sneaking around always charges me up,
makes me feel like I’m getting away with something, like an
eight-year old. Frankly I had no idea what I was looking for, or
for that matter what would be worth looking for. Everything in this
room was over my head except the furniture and even some of that
was sort of high tech, like the weird contraption at what must have
been Ernie Namura’s desk? I guess could be a chair of some kind,
but I had no idea how you were supposed to sit in it? Actually I
think it’s Scandinavian because I’m pretty sure I saw on in the
IKEA circular that I receive monthly like clock work. So few trees,
so much spam! You’d think they would have figured out by now that
most men only look at the two catalogs religiously, Sears and
Victoria’s Secret!

Enough of that, I’m getting sidetracked.
Spying a regular chair on the other side of the room I walked over
and sat down. I used the penlight to peer around the room, mentally
cataloging each piece of confusing equipment. I saw the SEM unit,
conveniently under the sign that read
SEM
, and studied it in
the dim light. It wasn’t as big as I had imagined. The way Judy
talked I was expecting something huge with flashing lights and
eerie vapors emanating from its hidden recesses. Nope, it was the
size of the dryer at my Laundromat and painted a dull battleship
gray. It didn’t look so special, but what did I know? I almost
moved on to the rest of the room when something caught my eye. My
penlight had run by the meter console and something blinked at me,
a super bright green light. What the hell was that anyway? I got up
and walked over to have a look, keeping the penlight on the
blinking green
whatever it was
every step of the way.