Page 43 of Shadows of Justice

I blink. “What?”

“At the station,” Leo says, his gaze going to my mouth for a moment and then back to my eyes. “Are they inappropriate with you? Do you run into that a lot?”

I scoff, rolling my eyes. “Really? If I were a man, you’d never ask me that. I can handle myself and those guys just fine. And don’t worry, all of your nuts are conveniently in the same place. Or as I like to call them—the off switch.”

I feign a knee to his balls, stopping just before I make contact. It was meant to be a warning, to playfully get him to back off, but now I’m touching him, my hands on his exposed torso.

And very, very close to . . .

He holds my gaze with fire in his eyes. He didn’t even flinch, the bastard.

“So,” he rumbles, arching a brow, “the Dogs.”

I clear my throat and straighten, retrieving my coffee to hide the redness in my cheeks.

“Lead the way.”

If I thought that Leo’s car was the Bat Mobile, then his office is the Bat Cave.

Eight giant screens are mounted on the wall, and more are set up on the impressive desk space that faces them. Some of them are showing a grid of surveillance camera footage of four different properties, including this one. Expensive looking equipment lays haphazardly around the room, in what I can assume is chaotic order to his brilliant mind. Adjacent to the technology are worktables of power tools, chemistry sets, hardware, stacks of stored weapons crates, and barrels of chemicals with warning labels that make my mouth run dry.

The room smells like motor oil and rubbing alcohol.

“Wow,” is all I can think of to say as I peer around the space.

Leo starts shuffling some things around, appearing nervous to have me in his workplace. It’s cute, in a spicy-scientist-mastermind kind of way.

My eyes run over fancy drones, microphones, and audio amplifiers. Tiny cameras hidden in glasses, crucifixes, and pens. There are Wi-Fi scramblers, white noise generators, GPS detectors, and a fancy wand that, when I hold it up questioningly, Leo nonchalantly explains: “Hidden camera detector.” A bucket labeled “audio recording” brims with little devices disguised as pens, key fobs, wrist watches, and even a calculator.

I hold up a clear plastic case with small, flesh-colored earpieces the size of my pinky nail and wiggle it in the air. “This is some serious Mission Impossible shit, Leo.”

“Don’t sound so impressed.” He smirks. “You’d be shocked at what you can order online.”

He leads me to the computer and types in multiple passwords, unlocking what appear to be layers upon layers of security precautions. He pulls up a map of LA and types in an address. A part of the city I’m vaguely familiar with zooms into the screen, and I see markers for Koreatown. He places a pin at a cross street.

“This is where the Ahn and Chun wedding is taking place,” he says, and then draws a circle in a wide berth around the pin. “And this is the blast radius of the MG-T12. It’s a complicated make, and I know that they’ll need some pretty specific materials in order to build it. Things that they wouldn’t just have, you know, lying around.”

“Okay,” I say, beginning to gnaw on the skin of my thumb. “What if we start tracking imports of those materials? Maybe if we can get a list going, that’s enough solid evidence to get the captain’s attention. We could say the info was provided by the Chuns, or another K213 member.”

Leo nods. “We could, and it’s a good start, but they’re also used for a lot of other things, so we could easily follow useless leads and be too late. We need more manpower than just you and I.”

“That’s not an option, Leo,” I say. “With being under investigation, I half expect to be called any minute now to be told I’m suspended until further notice.” Leo frustratedly pushes out a breath and then slams his fist on the desk, cursing in Spanish.

“How can they turn their backs on a fucking bomb threat?” he shouts. “To make an example out of you?”

“You don’t know my dad. Jennings is just as much at risk here as me,” I explain. “If he vouches for me, with my history, he’s risking his own ass too. The chief would just love to make that much noise and clean house. To get the article coverage about how he ‘doesn’t tolerate insubordination,’ and he ‘shakes things up to keep ‘em tight—for the good of the people.’” I roll my eyes. “I can just see the headlines now.”

“It still doesn’t make sense. It seems like even if the source of the information was questionable, they’d still want to do the work to make sure it wasn’t really a threat.”

Leo’s words cause my memories to flicker back to my exchange with the captain—how eager he’d been to cut me off, throw me out, even seeming to keep it off the chief’s radar.

“He didn’t want the chief to know . . .” My words trails off as my mind starts to run.

“Qué?” Leo quirks a brow.

“It’s just something about how the captain acted yesterday . . . it bothered me at the time, but I couldn’t think about it clearly until now. It was really weird how much Jennings didn’t want me pursuing this. It was like he was intentionally boxing me out of looking into this tip. And then, when my dad walked in, he could have lit my ass up right in front of him, but he covered for me. Or, at least that’s what I thought he was doing, but what if he was trying to keep it quiet?”

“So that the chief wouldn’t know what you were reporting?” Leo asks, and then narrows his eyes in thought. “You think Jennings could be dirty?”

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