Major Crimes
The team looked miserable. Nobody slept and everyone was on edge. They drank their coffee, mostly silent.
Commander Taylor came in with a case. There had been a break in at the gun store on Sepulveda.
When they got there, ATF Agent Kim was already there. There were missing Ar-15s, ammunition, and carrying cases. The surveillance camera had been shut down.
"When did the break in occur," Provenza asked.
"The owner noticed the weapons missing this morning, but he had been taking care of his sick wife." Agent Kim responded. "The guns were here last Thursday, but he has no idea when they were taken."
Tao asked to see the camera. The robbery likely happened soon after the camera went down.
The team dusted for prints. There wasn't much of interest. The lock to the store had been kicked in. The gun safe showed no signs of forced entry. The owner was the only employee, so one of the thieves probably cracked the safe.
They headed back to the squad room and got to work.
Pope's Office
Pope sat at his desk with Andrew.
"So we just sit and wait?" Pope asked him.
"Looks like it. They haven't found him or his associates yet."
"Any progress?"
"Not that anyone has shared with me, but who knows what that means."
Pope sighed. He knew it was better if he stayed out of it, but it still felt pretty lousy.
FBI Office
Fritz stared blankly at his computer screen. His brain couldn't do anything. I may as well be dead, Fritz thought to himself. I wouldn't feel so lousy.
Washington, DC
Griffin finally got a lead from the ICE records of who came into the country over the past week. He found a jewel thief that went to college with Potovsky and a man who was a suspected arms dealer to paramilitary groups around the world. Both of them came to the US with fake passports. The jewel thief went to LA and the arms dealer went to DC. He updated the team on both men. They weren't at LA yet. He wanted someone to find the jewel thief now. He probably was the key to financing Potovsky's scheme.
Griff remembered that Peaches married an FBI agent. Maybe he could help.
Oklahoma
The team had been driving almost non-stop. They figured their boss was hiding in a safe house somewhere in the west, but they didn't know which one. They also figured there was a team in Seattle waiting to smuggle Potovsky and his associates into Canada once their mission was over. He probably knew or would know soon that the hit squad he sent to DC was dead. They waited for Griffin to get them some intel on where to find Brenda or Potovsky. Until then, they drove west.
Major Crimes
Tao stared at the pictures from the robbery. Something was familiar, but he was too sleepy to think about it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep at his desk. The Chief appeared in his dream. "How would she solve this?" he thought.
Provenza noticed him sleeping. "Earth to Tao!" he threw a pencil at him, waking him up.
"What!" he muttered. When he looked down at the photo again, he finally got it. He put the photo of the robbery next to the photo of the Chief's front door.
"What are you doing Tao?" Provenza thought he lost it.
"The same man broke both of these locks," he finally said.
"You think the men who ransacked Chief's apartment broke into the gun store afterwards?"
"No. They broke in before, stole the guns and then had them when they broke into the apartment, but she was already gone."
Tao pulled up the security camera. It went off in the early morning the same day Brenda's apartment was ransacked.
"How do we find them when they shut off the camera?" Gabriel didn't know what to do about any of this information.
"We use any camera we can get, red light camera, neighboring store cameras, everything on that block and the surrounding ones."
"Didn't Pope tell us to stay out of this?" said Gabriel, not that he wanted to listen to Pope. He just wanted some plausible deniability.
"We're investigating the robbery as we were told," said Provenza.
Tao found a green Ford that drove passed the store three different times shortly before the camera went down. They were probably checking to make sure no one was around. The license plates on the car were missing. Tao searched for the car after the robbery, while Sanchez looked for any signs of the car being stolen before the robbery.
"I found nothing," Sanchez said.
"Try missing persons," suggested Provenza. If they stole a car to steal guns, maybe they killed the owner.
Sanchez found a bunch of missing people. He cross-checked them with DMV records. He found a man, Michael Mahon, who drove a 2005 green Ford Explorer. He was reported missing by the daycare when he didn't come to pick up his daughter. A uniform checked the house and saw no sign of foul play. They assumed he bailed when they didn't see him or his car. Sanchez went up to the driveway. He saw what looked like blood. He forced open the garage and found Mahon dead, a gunshot to the back of the head.
The smell was awful. He had been dead for a while. Now, they knew what car to look for.
Nevada
The silence was deafening. Brenda didn't want to alert anyone to her presence, so she stayed in the basement. She was waiting for as long as she could before she was going to head for New York. She thought about where Potovsky would look for her, maybe trying to escape to Mexico or Canada. She had no connections to New York, so she figured no one would find her there or be looking for her along the way. As far as she knew, Potovsky's men were circling the tri-state area, waiting for her to surface. She was trying to wait them out. Hopefully, they didn't get to Elaine.