“A woman has come forward claiming to be Shen Li’s grandmother.”
“Her what?”
She felt her heart sink as she thought of the frightened little girl who had buried her head in her chest as a guard dog snarled and tore into her mother. She couldn’t imagine what Shen Li was feeling without either of her parents — one who had died to prevent an attack engineered by the other.
“Her grandmother,” Camron repeated.
“That’s bullshit, Camron.”
“I know it is,” he said. “But the State Department received a formal request from the People’s Republic of China to assist in reuniting the orphaned girl with family.”
“Camron…”
“Which is why I’m calling you,” he said. “If there is anybody who can sniff out the truth, it’s you. If Tan Lily really is a Ministry of State Security operative, then there’s a good chance the woman claiming to be Shen Li’s grandmother is somehow connected to their network here.”
“Where does she live?” Punky asked, feeling the familiar stir of excitement of a new investigation.
“In the Bay Area. The Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose.”
Punky turned and looked through the window to see Andy leading Jenn to the car. If she drove them to Jenn’s place in Escondido and continued north, she could be in San Jose before dark. “I’ll look into it,” she said. “Send me an address.”
Camron ended the call, and Punky turned as Andy opened the rear door.
“Welcome home, sailor.”
60
Punky sat behind the wheel of the borrowed Ford Fusion, lamenting the loss of not one but two marvels of automobile craftsmanship. First, her father’s vintage Corvette Stingray had been destroyed in a crash while fleeing armed gunmen taking orders from China’s Ministry of State Security. Then, her replacement — a brand-new Dodge Challenger Hellcat Redeye — had been destroyed when a Ministry assassin stole it after shooting her at point-blank range.
I need to find a new job.
She yawned and forced herself to stare at the screen broadcasting images of the mid-century house, one block over and adjacent to the neighborhood park. There hadn’t been much activity since she’d arrived, and she was beginning to think it was a waste of her time driving all the way from San Diego with such little information.
But she had done a lot more with a lot less before. Sometimes a hunch was all it took.
Her cell phone rang, and she reached for the steering wheel to answer it when she remembered the government sedan didn’t have the same bells and whistles as her damaged Challenger. Swallowing back a curse, she plucked the phone from her pocket and answered.
“Yeah?”
“How’s it going up there?” Camron asked.
“It’s not,” she replied, then lifted her wrist to look at the time. “I’ve installed two pole-cameras, but I don’t know how much longer I can sit here and observe the mundane goings-on of normal life in suburbia.”
Her supervisor sighed, and she could tell he was working up to something. But before he got the chance, a pair of headlights swept across her parked car. She watched the older Jeep Cherokee pass, then turn the corner onto the target’s block. On the computer monitor, she saw it come into view and stop in front of the target’s house.
“Punky…”
“Hold up, Camron,” she said. “Something’s happening.”
“What?”
She ignored the question and scrambled for the camera’s controls resting atop fast-food wrappers crumpled up in the passenger seat. Putting her cell phone on speaker, she set it down in the center console’s cupholder and panned and tilted the camera toward the Jeep.
“Talk to me, Punky.”
She zoomed in on the Cherokee and focused on the driver’s door. “Somebody just pulled up to the house,” she said. “Blue Jeep Cherokee. Late nineties. Lifted with off-road tires and a roof rack.”
“License plate?”
She panned the camera to the rear of the SUV, but a shrub at the park’s southeastern corner blocked it entirely from view. “Not from this angle.”
“What about stickers or decals?”
The driver’s door opened, and she quickly focused on the man exiting the vehicle. Though the closest streetlamp was one house over on the corner, it cast enough of a glow that she could make out his features. “Hold on. The driver just exited. Male, white. Mid-twenties, about as tall as the Jeep, with a slim build.”
“Doesn’t sound like a Ministry guy to me,” Camron said.
As she studied the man on the computer screen, she watched him walk around the Jeep’s nose and approach the front door, kneeling next to a potted plant and tipping it slightly as if fishing for a spare key. “Well, he sure acts like he owns the place,” she said.
Just as he set the plant back down, a light turned on over a pair of chairs on the front patio. He appeared startled but only stood tall and faced the door. He didn’t shy away as if he had been caught red-handed trying to break in, and when the door opened, Punky zoomed in on the slight woman dressed in a simple robe.
“What’s going on?”
“You know you can access the live stream on your own, right?”
She heard some rustling on the other end as Camron opened an application on his smart phone to receive the video her pole-cameras were broadcasting wirelessly. “Who’s she?”
“The grandmother?” Punky replied with obvious sarcasm.
More rustling. “Okay. Her name is Fu Zan. Age fifty-eight, she and her husband, He Gang, a computer engineer with Adobe, immigrated from China a little over thirty years ago.”
Punky saw the surprise on Fu Zan’s face fade into happiness as she held her arms out and pulled the stranger on her patio in for a hug. “What the…”
“She definitely knows him,” Camron said, stating the obvious.
“Yeah, well, who is he?”
Her phone crackled with static as Camron scrambled to come up with an answer. “The only information I have is on the two occupants of the house — Fu Zan and He Gang. I wonder…”
But Punky was tired of waiting. She set the camera’s controls onto the seat next to her and pressed the button on the dash to start the anemic two-liter four-cylinder engine. It cranked over immediately with an unsatisfying purr.
Damn, I miss my Challenger.
“Shift to the other camera,” Camron said.
“Hold your horses. I’m moving closer to get a shot of his license plate.”
“Punky…”
But she ignored his plea. She put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb, rounding the same corner the Jeep had taken onto the target’s street. She looked through her side window at the house just as Fu Zan pulled the stranger inside and closed the front door. A moment later, the patio light winked off.
“They went inside,” Punky said. “Stand by for the license plate.”
She continued rolling forward on Cherry Avenue and plucked her cell phone from the cupholder, then opened the camera app and aimed it at the Cherokee’s license plate. She snapped several pictures and dropped them into an open text message.
“They’re coming your way,” she said.
“Got them,” Camron said a few seconds later. “Stand by.”
She dropped her phone on the seat and rolled past the parked Cherokee to continue north. Though she was eager to learn the stranger’s identity, she really didn’t think it factored much into the reason she was there. She figured she had collected all the intelligence she would get that night and set her sights on the uncomfortable bed in her room at the Sonesta in Milpitas.
“Punky.”