Chapter 23: Bikini Clasp and a Phone Call
The late afternoon sun had a weight to it, a honeyed thickness that poured over the Brentwood hills and pooled in the hollow of Jennifer’s spine. For a few weeks now, this had been the rhythm: stolen afternoons at Marcus’s rental, the silent understanding that what they were doing lived in a gray area the size of a canyon. It was wildly inappropriate, taboo, and that was precisely where its forbidden charm flickered, a low flame in the shadow of their shared history and isolated present.
She straddled him on the wide teak lounge chair, the rough texture of the wood a faint imprint through the thin cushion. Her bikini was a simple cobalt blue, and the sun had warmed her skin to a deep gold. His hands, large and capable, rested on the swell of her hips, thumbs making slow, idle circles. They kissed slowly, a lazy exploration that tasted of the iced tea they’d been drinking and the specific, sunbaked quiet of a Thursday with nowhere else to be.
His fingers found the clasp at the small of her back, a tiny metal hook. He fumbled, the pads of his fingers unfamiliar with the delicate mechanism. She broke the kiss, a soft puff of laughter against his lips. “Decades of disarming suspects and you’re defeated by a fastener.”
“This requires a more subtle touch,” he murmured, his voice gravelly with desire and amusement.
“Here.” She reached back, guiding his hand, placing his index finger and thumb precisely. “Lift and slide.”
He did. The tension released. She felt the straps go slack. A smile touched her mouth, private and pleased, and she leaned back into him, deepening the kiss as the top loosened. The world narrowed to the heat of his mouth, the solid plane of his chest against hers, the scent of chlorine and his cheap, citrusy candle and something fundamentally, undeniably him.
Her phone, buried in the terrycloth folds of a discarded towel on the deck, buzzed. Not a ring. A text. A sharp, insistent vibration against the teak.
She ignored it.
It buzzed again. And again. The LAPD’s version of a Roman candle.
“Goddamn it,” she whispered into his mouth. Reluctantly, she pulled back, the sun suddenly too bright, the moment fractured. She reached for the towel, dug out the phone. The screen glowed with a message from Ruiz.
NEW MURDER CASE. CALL ME.
The words were a cold splash. The case. Always the case. She let out a long, frustrated breath, her shoulders slumping.
Marcus watched her, his eyes already shifting from lover to colleague, a transition he could make faster than blinking. “Duty calls.”
“It always does.” She stood, quickly re-fastening her bikini top with an efficient twist. The warmth of the sun on her skin felt different now—not sensual, just hot. “I have to go.”
At the precinct, the air conditioning was a brutal shock, raising goosebumps on her still-sun-warmed arms. She’d thrown on a linen shirt and jeans, her hair piled in a messy knot. Captain Ruiz was in his office, the door open. He looked up as she approached, his expression a mixture of grim business and something else—paternal obligation.
“Wu. Thanks for coming in fast.” He gestured to the young man standing awkwardly beside his desk. John Ruiz stood a little too straight in a new-looking blazer, his tie knotted tight. He had his father’s strong jaw and his mother’s dark, observant eyes. The last time Jennifer had seen him up close, he’d been twelve and trying to stay up past his bedtime to watch horror movies she’d explicitly forbidden.
“You remember John,” Ruiz said.
“I do. Mostly for his impressive disobedience regarding the Chucky franchise.” She offered a small, professional smile. “Hello, John.”
“Detective Wu,” he said, nodding, a flicker of a childhood crush visible in the quick way he looked down. “It’s good to see you.”
Ruiz cleared his throat. “John’s first assignment as a junior detective. I told him he’d be learning the ropes.” He paused, his gaze landing squarely on Jennifer. There was a reluctant pride there, hard-won. “From the best.”
The concession, coming from him, was monumental. It warmed her more than the afternoon sun had. She allowed herself a genuine smile. “I’ll try not to make him regret it, Captain.”
“See that you don’t.” Ruiz slid a case file across the desk. “Jogger found a body in Griffith Park, off one of the fire roads near the old zoo. Male, mid-thirties. No ID. Single gunshot wound to the chest. Looks clean. Too clean.”
Jennifer opened the file. The crime scene photos showed a man in expensive running gear, sprawled artlessly in the dust among dry chaparral. “Execution.”
“That’s your starting point. Take John. Show him how it’s done. And Jennifer?” Ruiz waited until she met his eye. “Keep it tight.”
“Always.”
As they walked out of the office, John falling into step beside her, he finally let out a held breath. “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. With you.”
“Try to contain your enthusiasm until we at least see the corpse,” she said, her tone dry but not unkind. She led him toward the garage. “First rule: the scene is a story. Our job is to listen without adding our own narration. You watch, you absorb, you ask questions after. Got it?”
“Got it.” He was practically vibrating with nerves.
“And lose the tie. You’re not going to a funeral.”
“We kind of are.”
“Exactly. But you don’t want to look like you expected it.”
Meanwhile, across town in a sterile, overlit office suite in Century City, Marcus Cole sipped tepid coffee from a paper cup. His client, a nervous-looking boutique owner whose storage unit had mysteriously burned down, sat across from him, shuffling papers.
“The insurance adjuster’s report insists it was faulty wiring,” the woman said, her voice tremulous.
Marcus scanned the fire department’s preliminary findings. The pattern of burn marks near the unit’s door was all wrong for an electrical fire. It spoke of an accelerant, something applied by a human hand. It was small-time, sad even. A desperation play for a payout. After the intricate, lethal chess game of the Hawkshield case, this insurance fraud felt like checking grocery receipts. But it paid the rent on the Brentwood rental, and it kept his mind occupied while Jennifer was off playing mentor.
He pointed a blunt finger at a paragraph in the fire report. “See this? They note a ‘distinct odor of petrochemicals’ but dismiss it as potential runoff from a nearby vehicle. That’s lazy. That’s your in. We get an independent lab to test the residual samples they collected. If it’s gasoline or kerosene, their ‘faulty wiring’ theory evaporates.” He looked at the woman’s hopeful face. “Don’t thank me yet. This is just the first move.”
In the passenger seat of her car, John Ruiz was silent, watching the city blur past. Jennifer could feel the questions stacking up behind his teeth.
“Just ask, John. Before you explode.”
“Was it like this for you? The first one?”
She thought of her first major case, a domestic that had gone horrific. The smell. The overwhelming sense of being an intruder in someone’s final, terrible moment. “No. It’s never like anything you expect. You just have to trust your eyes, and trust that the weird little detail that nags at you is usually the one that matters.”
They pulled up to the taped-off area in Griffith Park. The medical examiner’s van was there, the coroner already packing up. The scene had a still, watchful quality. Jennifer ducked under the tape, John following clumsily.
The body was gone, only a chalk outline and a dark, stained patch on the dirt remained. Jennifer walked the perimeter, her eyes scanning the ground. John stood by the outline, looking lost.
“Don’t just look at where he ended up,” she said, not unkindly. “Look at everything else. The path he likely took. The crushed vegetation. Any trash, any footprints that aren’t ours.” She pointed to a scuff mark in the dry soil a few yards away. “See that? Drag mark. He was shot somewhere else, maybe up the trail, and moved here. Poorly.”
John crouched, his new dress pants be damned, and peered at the mark. “Why move him?”
“To buy time. To confuse the initial scene. Or because the shooter panicked.” She moved further up the fire road, her trained eye picking out minute disturbances. Then she saw it. A glint, half-buried in a gopher hole near the base of an oak tree. Using a pen from her pocket, she nudged it free.
It was a shell casing. 9mm. It rested in her gloved palm.
“They missed one,” she said, holding it up for John to see. “The shooter policed his brass, but this one rolled. It’s the story. It’s the first chapter.”
John’s eyes widened. The theoretical was now a cold, tangible piece of metal. “So what’s the next chapter?”
Jennifer bagged the casing, sealing it with a practiced twist. “We find out who the runner was. And then we find out who wanted him stopped mid-stride.” She looked at John, seeing the dawning comprehension, the thrill of the first real clue. “You ready for that?”
He nodded, his earlier anxiety hardening into focus. “Yeah. I am.”
Back in Century City, Marcus closed his file. “We’re done for today. I’ll have my contact at the lab expedite the test. You should hear from me by Monday.”
He drove back toward Brentwood as the sun dipped behind the hills, the sky bleeding orange and purple. The empty lounge chair by the pool awaited, a ghost of the interrupted afternoon. He thought of Jennifer, knee-deep in a new story with the captain’s kid in tow. He smiled slightly to himself. She was teaching. He was chasing a liar over a few thousand dollars. The asymmetry of it was almost funny.
His phone rang. Not Jennifer. His lab contact.
“Cole. You were right. The sample from the storage unit? Ninety percent match for standard unleaded. It’s arson. Plain and simple.”
“Good. Send the official report to my client and blind copy the insurance company’s fraud department. Let them clean up their own mess.” He ended the call, the small victory feeling hollow in the quiet car. He missed the complexity, the high stakes. He missed the partnership.
He pulled into his driveway, the house dark. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and stood at the edge of the pool, watching the last light die on the water’s surface. The city’s pulse was a distant hum. Somewhere out there, Jennifer was following a trail of evidence, and a new killer was just realizing they’d made a mistake.
The game, he thought, taking a long pull from the bottle, was always waiting. You just had to know which one you were playing.
The beer was warm and tasted of regret. Marcus tipped the rest into the potted citrus tree, the bottle clinking softly against the ceramic. Inside, the silence of the rental was absolute, a vacuum waiting to be filled by the next case, the next problem. He thought of Jennifer’s hands guiding his on the bikini clasp, the specific texture of her laugh against his mouth. Then he pictured her now, across the city, doing the real work. He was playing checkers on a porch while she was in the arena. The disconnect itched under his skin.
At the morgue, the air was a manufactured forty-five degrees and smelled of industrial cleaner and something sweetly organic beneath. Jennifer signed the log, her handwriting a quick slash. John’s pen hovered, then he scrawled his name with too much force.
“You good?” she asked, pushing through the double doors into the bright, tiled hallway.
“Yeah. Just… cold.”
“It’s supposed to be.” She led him to a viewing room where a tech waited by a draped sheet on a stainless steel tray. “You don’t have to look if you’re not ready. No shame in it.”
“I’m ready.” His jaw was set, mimicking his father’s stubborn line.
The tech, a young woman with tired eyes, nodded at Jennifer. “Single GSW to the chest, close range. No defensive wounds. Clean.”
“Let’s see him.”
The tech pulled back the sheet. The man’s face was pale, waxy, the athleticism of his running clothes now a cruel joke. The wound in his chest was a neat, dark punctuation mark. Jennifer leaned in, studying the features. Late thirties. Good cheekbones. Expensive haircut, now matted. A familiar face from somewhere, maybe a magazine? Finance, maybe. Or tech.
She heard a sharp, wet intake of breath beside her.
John had gone perfectly still. His eyes, wide and unblinking, were fixed on the dead man’s face. All color drained from his own, leaving his skin a sickly olive under the fluorescent lights. His hand rose slowly, fingers trembling slightly, and pressed against the observation window as if to steady himself.
“John?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared, his breath fogging the cold glass.
“John. Look at me.” Jennifer’s voice was low, a command. He turned his head slowly, his eyes glassy with a shock so profound it looked like physical pain.
“I know him,” he whispered. The words seemed ripped from somewhere deep inside his chest.
“Talk to me. Who is he?”
John swallowed, his throat working. “His name is… was… Kyle. Kyle Brennan.” He looked back at the body, confirming the horror. “He was a friend. From school. UCLA. We lost touch after graduation, but…” He shook his head, as if trying to clear the image. “He was a good guy. He was an architect.”
The pieces Jennifer had been calmly assembling shifted violently. This wasn’t a random jogger, a disconnected target. This was a thread that led directly to the person standing next to her. To his family. Her mind instantly recoiled from the coincidence, landing on calculation.
“How close?” she asked, her voice all business now, a shield against the emotional tremor in the room.
“What?”
“How close were you? Best friends? Casual friends? Did he ever come to your house? Did your father know him?”
John flinched at the rapid-fire questions. “We were in the same fraternity. Not best friends, but we hung out. He came to a couple of parties at my parents’ place years ago. My dad might have met him once, in passing.” He dragged a hand over his face. “Why? What does that matter?”
“It matters because nothing is random.” She turned to the tech. “I need everything you have on him. Full toxicology, clothes analysis, the works. And I need his personal effects. Now.”
The tech hurried out. John was still staring at Kyle.
“Why would someone shoot Kyle?” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “He designed buildings. He wasn’t into anything… dark.”
“Everyone has something,” Jennifer said, but her tone was softer. She saw the kid’s idealism cracking apart in real time, right here on the cold linoleum. She remembered feeling that same fracture. “Look, you’re compromised. You need to step back. I’ll call your father, have him assign you—”
“No.” The word was sharp, surprising them both. John turned to her, and the shock in his eyes was now burning into a hard, desperate focus. “You said to trust the weird detail. The detail that nags. This is it. I’m the detail. I knew him. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a connection. You can’t bench me for seeing the connection faster.”
He had a point. A terrible, dangerous point. Keeping him close was a risk. Cutting him loose might mean missing the very thread that could unravel everything. She weighed his pale, determined face against a decade of procedure.
The tech returned with a clear evidence bag. Inside was a fitness tracker, a set of keys, and a thin, water-resistant wallet. Jennifer took the bag, putting on fresh gloves. She unzipped the wallet. Credit cards. A driver’s license confirming Kyle Brennan, age thirty-four. A faded photo of a golden retriever. And tucked behind everything, a business card.
It was simple, elegant cardstock. The embossed letters caught the light.
Forrester-Vance Holdings.
Asset Management & Strategic Security.
A phone number. An email.
No named employee.
Jennifer’s blood went cold, colder than the room. Forrester. Vance. The names were tombstones in a case she’d just closed, a case that had nearly swallowed Captain Ruiz whole. She looked from the card to John’s confused face, then back to the serene, dead face of his college friend.
This wasn’t a new game.
It was the same ancient, vicious game, and they had just invited John Ruiz to the table.
The embossed letters on the card seemed to pulse under the morgue’s flat light. Forrester-Vance. Jennifer’s grip tightened on the plastic evidence bag. A cold, precise fury ignited in her chest. This was a message, bold as a billboard. They hadn’t just found Kyle Brennan. They’d been meant to find him.
“What is it?” John asked, leaning in. His voice was unsteady. He was still staring at his friend’s face.
“Look at this.” She held the bag up, turning it so the card faced him. “Tell me you’ve never seen this before. Tell me Kyle never mentioned this company.”
John’s eyes, wide and liquid with shock, dropped from Kyle’s body to the bag. They focused. He blinked once, then again, as if trying to clear a smudge on a lens. His brow furrowed not in confusion, but in a slow, dawning recognition that was far worse.
“I… I have seen that logo.” His words were careful, measured against a rising tide of panic. “Not on a card. On a folder. A thick, legal-sized folder. In my dad’s home office.”
The air in the room grew thinner. Jennifer felt the walls contract. “When?”
“A few weeks ago. After the whole Hawkshield thing blew up. I was over for dinner, went to borrow a charger from his desk.” John’s gaze went distant, internal, accessing the memory. “The folder was just sitting there, half-open. That logo was on the tab. Forrester-Vance. I didn’t think anything of it. I figured it was just leftover case stuff.”
“Did you see what was inside?”
He shook his head.“No. But he was… different that night. Agitated. My mom asked him if he was still having trouble sleeping. He just grunted.” John looked back at the card, then at Jennifer, the connection solidifying into something monstrous. “You think my dad is involved with this? With… Kyle?”
“I think your dad is a target,” Jennifer corrected, her mind racing down dark corridors. “And so are you, now. This card wasn’t in Kyle’s wallet by accident. It’s a flag. It’s a goddamn neon sign pointing back to your family.” She zipped the evidence bag shut, the sound final. “We’re leaving. Now.”
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere not here. Somewhere they won’t expect us to talk.”
She didn’t call Marcus. She didn’t call Ruiz. Every official channel felt suddenly porous, suspect. She drove with a controlled aggression, checking her mirrors every seven seconds. She took a route designed to spot a tail, cutting through Silver Lake’s labyrinthine streets before arrowing onto the 101.
John sat silently, clutching the evidence bag in his lap like a toxic relic. The youthful eagerness he’d worn just an hour ago was gone, sandblasted away.
“He was a good guy,” John said, staring out at the bleached concrete of the freeway. “A little intense. Always talking about sustainable materials and ‘architectural integrity.’” A weak, heartbreaking laugh escaped him. “He hated that modern glass-box crap. He wanted to build things that lasted.”
They did not go to the precinct. Jennifer drove instead to a quiet branch library in Los Feliz, its wifi open and anonymous. She commandeered a study carrel in the back, under the brittle gaze of a dusty philodendron. John sat beside her, the evidence bag now hidden in her own oversized purse.
For two hours, they dove into Kyle Brennan’s digital footprint. Jennifer used her phone as a hotspot, bypassing any departmental firewall that might trigger an alert. She pulled property records, business licenses, and social media archives. The architecture firm was legitimate, small but respected. Kyle’s life looked like a model of upward mobility: sleek apartment in the Arts District, a curated Instagram of concrete textures and minimalist interiors, a marathon time from six months ago that suggested a fierce, controlled discipline.
Then they found the LLC.
It was buried in county filings, a shell company named Kaito Design Solutions. Jennifer traced its registration to a law firm she recognized from old financial crime indictments. The registered agent was a name that made her stomach tighten: a known fixer for the remnants of the Forrester network. Kaito Design showed zero architectural projects but had received six substantial wire transfers over the past eighteen months from an offshore entity.
“They didn’t buy his firm,” Jennifer muttered, her fingers flying across the laptop’s keyboard. “They bought a hole in his life and filled it with their money.”
John watched the screen, his face pale in the blue glow. “He wouldn’t just take dirty money. Not Kyle.”
“Nobody just takes it,” she said, her voice low. She pulled up foreclosure notices. A year and a half ago, Kyle’s mother’s house in Reseda had been ninety days from auction. Medical debt. The notices stopped abruptly two months later. “They find the crack. The sickness, the debt, the secret. They wedge it open and pour their poison inside. He was coerced. Blackmailed into laundering for them, using his firm’s legitimate transactions as a cover.”
She dug deeper into his recent emails, accessing a cloud backup through a forensic portal she shouldn’t have. The last month of his correspondence told a stark, desperate story. Terse, encrypted meeting reminders. Then, a draft of an email, never sent, addressed to the FBI’s white-collar crime tip line. It detailed the shell company, the transfers, the names of two mid-level operatives. The final line read: I can provide documents. I want immunity.
Three days later, Kyle Brennan went for a run in Griffith Park.
Jennifer leaned back in the hard library chair. The hum of the HVAC was a dull roar in her ears. This is dire, she mused. The tendrils of Forrester’s empire, supposedly severed, were gripping from the grave. And as she looked over at John’s sullen, shocked face, she knew this was a very heavy case for a rookie to deal with. Maybe too heavy, even if he was the captain’s son.
“Close it,” she said, her voice hoarse. She shut the laptop. “We’re done here for now.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’re going to eat. You haven’t, and you’re running on shock. It’s a bad fuel.”
She drove to a 24-hour diner off Sunset, a place with sticky vinyl booths and the greasy, comforting smell of fried onions. The fluorescent lights were unforgiving. She slid into a booth and didn’t hand him a menu. When the waitress came, Jennifer ordered for them both. “Two cheeseburgers, extra fries. Two black coffees.”
John stared at the Formica tabletop, tracing a hairline crack with his finger. “I’m not hungry.”
“You will be. Or you’ll fake it. Your body needs the distraction and the energy to keep going.”
The food arrived, a greasy, beautiful monument to simple calories. She nudged his plate toward him. “Eat.”
He picked up a fry, then put it down. “How do you do this? See someone you knew like that, and then just… eat a burger?”
She sipped her bitter coffee, recalling her own rookie days, the first time a victim’s face hadn’t been a stranger. The nausea, the cold sweats in the squad room bathroom. “You compartmentalize. Or you drown. Right now, the job is the life raft. The burger is part of the job.”
He finally took a bite of the burger, chewing mechanically. She let the silence sit, the clatter of plates and low chatter from the counter providing a mundane soundtrack. After a few minutes, she spread her notebook between the condiment bottles.
“Okay. From the top. Kyle was compromised. They owned him. He grew a conscience and tried to flip. They erased him. The card in his wallet is a signature. It’s arrogance. They’re telling us they’re still here.” She looked at him, her gaze unwavering. “The heaviness you’re feeling? It comes with the job. This is the weight. You can either let it crush you, or you can use it as ballast.”
John swallowed another bite. “What does that mean?”
“It means you have to prove it. To me, to your father, to the department. That you’ve got the stomach for the real work. Not just the paperwork and the perimeter tape. The feeling that you’re carrying a dead friend in your head while you hunt his killers. You in or out?”
He held her gaze, a conflict warring behind his eyes—the idealist versus the newly initiated. He took another, more deliberate bite of the burger. “I’m in.”
“Good.” She finished her coffee, the dregs cold and gritty. “Now we sleep. Or you do. I’ll take the couch. We crash at my place. It’s clean.”
“We have a lead?”
“While you were staring at your fries, I cross-referenced the shell company’s address. It’s not an office. It’s a self-storage warehouse in Vernon. Unit rented by Kaito Design six months ago.” She tossed a twenty on the table. “We go at dawn, before the management office opens. See what Kyle stashed before he tried to talk.”
John stood, his body moving with a new, weary determination. “And if someone’s waiting for us?”
Jennifer led him out into the night air, which now felt charged and sharp. “Then we’ll have finally found someone who can give us a straight answer.” The neon sign of the diner buzzed overhead, casting a sickly pink glow on the sidewalk. Jennifer adjusted the strap of her oversized purse, her fingers brushing the cold metal of the evidence bag inside. The weight of it felt heavier now. Not just evidence. A warning.
John walked beside her in silence, his shoulders hunched against the night air. The city hummed around them—distant sirens, the bass thump of a car stereo, the laughter of a group stumbling out of a bar. Life went on, oblivious.
Jennifer unlocked her car—a sleek black BMW M5, a splurge she justified as a necessary expense for undercover work—and they slid inside.
The interior smelled like leather and her favorite citrusy perfume, the same one Marcus teased her about leaving on his sheets.
She adjusted the rearview mirror, her eyes scanning the empty street beyond. No immediate tails, but that meant nothing. She pulled out her phone, dialing a private number without waiting for the dial tone to finish.
A man answered on the third ring, his voice rough with cigarette rasp. “You know it’s late, Wu.”
“Hey, Frank. The storage unit at 2234 South Alameda? In Vernon?”
“Yeah. Kaito Design’s little love nest.”
“Need you to run the plate on the rental car parked in front of it right now.
Get me the driver’s name before the sun’s up.”
A pause. Frank exhaled smoke. “You’re off the books on this, Wu.”
“I know.”
“If Ruiz finds out—”
“He won’t.” She didn’t blink at the rearview. “I’m asking you as a friend.”
Another drag. “I’ll text you.”
She hung up. The car idled quietly in the neon glow. John was still staring straight ahead, lost in the weight of what he now knew.
Jennifer reached into her purse, pulled out a slim burner phone she kept just for these moments. She powered it on, waited for the screen to flash life. “We need to talk to the right people.
Fast,” Jennifer said, tucking the burner phone away. “Frank’s going to run the plates for us. In the meantime, I'll drop you back at your place, get some rest. We’re no good to Kyle if we’re running on empty.”
John didn’t argue. He just nodded, his face still haunted but his jaw set. She pulled away from the diner, navigating the maze of Sunset’s traffic with practiced ease. The city at night felt different—less like a playground and more like a chessboard where every move carried the weight of life or death.
Jennifer’s BMW hummed along the 101, the headlights cutting through the smoggy darkness. John Ruiz sat in the passenger seat, silent except for the occasional crack of his knuckles.
Jennifer’s fingers drummed against the steering wheel in a rhythm only she could hear. “You sure you don’t want to tell your dad about this yet?”
John exhaled sharply. “And say what? That I just found out my old friend was murdered by some corporate shell company, and now I’ve got a target on my back? That his murder is tied to something Dad’s already tangled up in?” He shook his head. “He’d lose his mind.
And he’d want to protect me.” John’s voice cracked slightly. “I don’t need protection. I need answers.”
Jennifer glanced at him, his profile sharp in the dashboard lights. “Protection is just another word for answers when you come right down to it. Kyle didn’t have protection.”
John flinched.
She pulled off the freeway at the Vermont exit, heading east into Koreatown. The neon glow of karaoke bars and 24-hour Korean BBQ spots painted the night in electric pinks and blues. It was a place where people came to lose themselves, to scream, to eat pork belly until they could barely walk. Right now, Jennifer wanted to do all three.
Her phone buzzed again, the burner’s screen lighting up in the dark. A single text from Frank:
“Rental plates trace to a Mid-City storage depot. Driver listed as Trent Cole. No priors, but the plate’s been flagged in two credit union robberies in the Valley last month. Guy’s a ghost. Vanishes after each job.”
Jennifer’s fingers tightened on the wheel. Trent Cole. The name meant nothing—yet—but the pattern was unmistakable. A phantom, a specialist in disappearing acts. “That’s our shooter,” she muttered.
John glanced at her. “You sound sure.”
She tapped the burner phone against the dash.
“I’ll drop you at your place, we rest, and tomorrow we’ll dig deeper. No heroics. No lone wolves.” The neon blur of Koreatown strobed past the windows as she pulled into the quiet residential streets of Los Feliz Hills, where John’s family home sat behind an automatic gate.
He exhaled through his nose, staring at the gate. “Fine. But if Trent Cole is still out there—”
“Then he’ll still be out there tomorrow,” she cut in, shifting the car into park. “You need to sleep.