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“I want in. Let me help find Violet.”
“Go for it,” Elena said. “Tap into any resources you have in the FBI and if you find her, great.”
Kara was surprised that Elena gave in so easily. Was she missing something? She asked, “Where does Will Lattimer fit into all of this?”
“After Chen’s arrest, Lattimer heard about the housing scandal and went to Craig, who he’d met through Colton.”
At the mention of Colton’s name, her stomach twisted. “Why Craig?”
“Because he didn’t know who else to go to,” Lex said. “Craig looped us in and we put together an operation. And here we are.”
“You’re leaving a lot out between then and now,” Kara said.
“I’ll talk to Campana,” Elena said quietly. “Until I do, this is the best I can do. I hope you find Violet.”
“Where was the last place she was seen?”
They both hesitated.
“Really? You tell me you hope I find Violet and then clam up?” She stood. She was done with this runaround. Elena and Lex were hiding something from her, as if they didn’t trust her. It hurt. Damn, it hurt. “I talked to Will today,” she said. “He told me that Violet called him and he was supposed to meet her at a homeless camp off Fifth. But she disappeared and left her phone behind because some thugs scared her off. Has she been seen since?”
“No,” Elena said.
“Neither of you are telling me the truth. Maybe parts of the truth, but not everything. I don’t know why, but I will find out what you’re hiding.”
“And I will remind you, Detective Quinn, that we are your superior officers,” Elena said.
Kara walked out without responding.
Monday, October 7
24
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.
