AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

left.”
    Yamaguchi drove to the end of the street.
    “That must be the school up ahead,” he said.
    Yamaguchi saw a three-story building that looked quite old and forbidding. There were no houses immediately near the school, which looked like her idea of a Dickens’ orphanage. Many of the windows were broken and a high chain-link fence surrounded the building.
    “This is where they go to school here?”
    “Where they used to go to school. I looked it up. Hasn’t been used for 10 years,” he said.
    She parked their unmarked police car slowly, and took time to put the car into park, set the brake, turn off the engine and turn off the headlights. She put her hand on the door handle and paused.
    After a few seconds, Munroe asked, “Something wrong?”
    She answered after a beat, shaking her head and saying, “I don’t think anyone’s here.”
    Munroe had already looked at the building in infrared.
    “Nope, there are people here. Most of the building’s cold, but there’s quite a lot of heat from the south end of the building and I can see two shapes moving around.”
    “OK,” she said, but her hand still didn’t pull the handle. She laughed, a quick little sound. “Kind of creepy.” Then she pulled the handle and stepped out of the car.
    Once outside, she confirmed Munroe’s observation. There was music coming from the direction of the school and once standing, she also saw a few cars parked on the other side of the fence. She went around to the other side of her car to let Munroe out.
    “Can you see the people now?” he asked her.
    She said “uh huh,” which the terminal translated as unintelligible. She was busy getting her video camera and a flashlight. She put the flashlight into a pants pocket and put the small camera into a coat pocket. She was in plainclothes and her coat covered her gun belt. She locked the car afterward.
    “Let’s go,” she said.
    She approached the chain-link fence and saw that the gate was still locked. She wondered how the cars had ended up on the other side of the fence, thinking it unlikely the kids had a key, or that they would lock it up after each car.
    She walked to the south along the fence and now saw five young people, teens and twenties standing in a circle, shoulders hunched against the cold. Then she saw how the cars had gotten inside the fence. Someone had simply mowed down the fence, but whether it had been done recently she couldn’t tell.
    One of the kids had seen her, and he walked up to her.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey,” she answered back.
    “What’s up?”
    “I’m here for the …” she let her voice trail off, confidentially, nodding in the direction of the music.
    He looked at her, thinking she looked a little older, but also thinking she looked really fine.
    “Is that your car?” he asked, pointing to the white Dodge Neon they’d used.
    “I got out of it,” she said, not sure why she said it that way, but the response made him smile.
    “Cool, but we’re supposed to park it inside the fence.”
    A young girl from the group called out to him. “Forget it, J.D. no one’s gonna see it. Nobody’s alive in this hick town anyway.”
    “Rache says no one’s gonna see it.”
    “Yeah,” Yamaguchi said. “I heard.” She made a move toward the building.
    “Wait a minute,” J.D. said. “You get the password off the site? Cause if not, you know, I can tell you what it is.”
    “Just let her go in J.D.,” the woman said.
    For a split second, Yamaguchi had an image of herself playing out a scene in a movie: hooking a leg around this acne scarred twenty something, flicking her tongue against his ear and whispering something like “fellatio” in the throatiest voice she could manage, when she heard Munroe’s voice in her ear say “flower rainbow.”
    “What?”
    “That’s the password, Linda. ‘Flower rainbow.’”
    “I said I can give you the …”
    “Flower rainbow,” Yamaguchi said, thinking it the stupidest password she’d ever heard.
    “Oh,” J.D., said, looking crestfallen. “Yeah, go on in.”
    She stepped past him and his four friends. The young girl who’d admonished J.D. gave her a look as if to say “men are idiots.”
    “Are you spacing out on me, partner?”
    She ignored Munroe until she passed beyond earshot of the group.
    “They’re just kids. I don’t think we got this right, Alex. They don’t look like an international gang of soul snatchers.”
    “International?”
    “Pardon the