Faint Trace by M. P. Cooley

 
    Faint Trace
    2009
    â€œM OTHER T ERESA ?” E RNIE held the plastic bag at arm’s length, a letter visible inside. “Is nothing sacred, Lyons?”
    I rose from my crouch next to a box of thousands of signed Alex Rodriguez Texas Rangers baseball cards, the rush of blood leaving me dizzy. This was the sixth file cabinet of counterfeit goods I had cataloged. The metal roof of the storage facility conducted heat, and inside this glorified tin can it felt like 120 degrees, easy. I was ready to ditch, keep walking until I reached the San Francisco Bay, and jump in.
    After all this, we better catch Hu. Or the Saigon Death Squad. Or both. I wasn’t picky.
    I looked closely at the letter that had offended Ernie. Apparently from Mother Teresa, the note was dated May 19, 1987, the 7 slashed through, the Gs big and loopy, almost girlish, encouraging good works for God’s glory. I pulled the plastic tight over the paper, squinting at the greeting.
    â€œThis one was addressed to Pope John Paul II,” I said, and Ernie was back on a rant. He grabbed for it but I pulled it out of reach, tsk-­ing. “The FBI has no jurisdiction over blasphemy, Aguilar.”
    This room full of counterfeit goods had something to enrage everyone. From cabinet after cabinet of autographed baseball cards to handwritten letters from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the breadth and scope of the forgeries and fakes was staggering. One of the crime scene techs was ready to torch the place when he found twenty-­two baseballs signed by Barry Bonds, dated August 7, 2007, the day Bonds hit his record-­breaking 756th home run.
    The group of us were taking pictures of the contents of the cabinets, boxing the goods, and sending them off to air-­conditioned labs, but it was slow going. There were two bright spots. Our first win was in evidence processing. The forger had been very diligent about keeping the items in pristine condition, which meant that all the evidence came pre-­bagged. Our second break was bigger. We found files full of shipping manifests, bills of ladings attached to each one directing trucking companies from the port to locations around Oakland, including storage facilities but also, oddly enough, private residences. This was a very big win because the one thing the Death Squad had stolen when they broke down the door of the business office and beat the clerk half to death was the contact information for the trucking company that had dropped off the cargo.
    The lilac blouse I wore was streaked with sweat, and the fabric pulled against my lower back as I took one last photo and sealed the box I was working on, initialing the tape to prevent tampering. I picked it up and carried it outside to the waiting van.
    We were close to the Baylands, just outside the port of Oakland. In the port, giant cranes that had been the model for Star Wars’ Imperial Walkers stood guard, vigilant against the silicon menace creeping across the Bay Bridge, dragging ironic T-­shirts and artisanal coffee shops in its wake.
    Ernie dragged behind me carrying two stacked boxes, his face flushed with either heat or anger—­I wasn’t sure. I felt bad. In the past he and I’d worked heavy undercover, pretending to be tweakers buying drugs from the Rolling 88s in a Fremont suburb or doing stakeouts for months at a time to bust the Mara Salvatrucha in the Mojave Desert. Officially, this detail wasn’t on a white collar squad but it might as well have been, the two of us cataloging countless fakes while the rest of the agents chased down the Saigon Death Squad.
    The Vietnamese gang, based out of New York City, had made a special trip to the West Coast to shoot up a storage pod full of goods that gang considered their property. Ernie probably would have been assigned to a reactive squad raiding an Eastlake neighborhood home right this minute, but instead we were here. I was benched, with my husband in his