Cheating Justice (The Justice Team) by Misty Evans, Adrienne Giordano Page A

reaching for her. No way. Not now. Not when she had to concentrate. His hands on her muddled her normally surgical thinking.
    She smacked him away and a second later another screen popped up. She and Mitch leaned in.
    “Notes,” he said, grabbing the notepad on the desk while Caroline skimmed the contents of the screen.
    She rattled off the manufacturer, the model number, and serial number. And how fascinating that the gun shop where the gun was purchased and the purchaser information had been left blank.
    Bastards .
    Beside her, Mitch scribbled. On his best day, his handwriting was atrocious. What he had in front of him, he’d better be able to interpret.
    She clicked on the download arrow. “I’m downloading it. Don’t have a coronary.”
    “What’s that code number?” he asked, pointing to a five digit alpha numeric code next to the where the purchaser’s name should have been.
    Government agencies were chock-full of codes and acronyms, but she’d never seen anything like this on a trace report. “I have no idea.”
    “I’ve got it. Shut it down.”
    Mitch dropped his pen and jumped back like the chef in one of those television cooking shows that had reached his time limit.
    Now, now, now . Dragging the arrow to the logout button, she clicked. There. Done .
    Career in flames.
    Worrying about it wouldn’t help her. She spun away from the desk, found Mitch tapping the screen on his phone. “What now?”
    “We call Brice. If you don’t know what that code is maybe he will. It could be an ATF thing.”
    Within three minutes, Mitch opened the motel room door for Brice.
    “What’s up?”
    Caroline shoved Mitch’s notes at him. “We were able to get a copy of the ballistics report.”
    “Get the fuck outta here.”
    Mitch smacked him on the back as he strode past him. “Welcome to the dark side.”
    “How?”
    “I don’t kiss and tell,” Mitch said.
    Caroline sighed. “Meaning, in this instance, you don’t want to know. All you need to know is the gun Ethan found on Tommy’s body is indeed the weapon used to kill him, and even though it probably just ended my career, I ran a trace on that serial number.”
    “Lady, you’ve got some solid steel balls.”
    Working around loads of testosterone-filled men each day gave her a warped sense of achievement because a man telling her she had steel balls, in her world, was the absolute king of compliments. She waved the paper again. “The trace came back with a GBL code. I don’t recognize it.”
    He skimmed the paper, flicked his eyes back to her, then to the note again. “This was in the trace report?”
    “Yes.”
    Mitch leaned against the windowsill, crossing his arms. “You recognize it?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
    Caroline paddled her hands. “And?”
    “When I was in ATF, we used the GBL codes on a couple of taskforces to track guns bought by identified straw buyers. That code lets an agent know to go to a separate database for more information on the gun, the straw buyer who purchased it, if known, and where the weapon turns up—say if it’s used in crime.”
    Guns being legally purchased by people—straw buyers—was nothing new. People with criminal records had to acquire their guns somehow and since they couldn’t purchase said guns themselves, they paid others to do it for them. The guns would be purchased by the straw buyer and then simply turned over to the third party. If the gun were traced back to a crime, the straw buyer would say the gun had been stolen.
    Gun shop owners routinely reported suspected straw buyers to ATF, but it was a matter of catching the buyer off-loading the weapons.
    “Jesus, with all the databases,” Mitch said. “How the hell do we get into those files?”
    Caroline cocked her head. Hold the phone . “Wait. This gun has an ATF tag? As in the taskforce agents knew it was purchased by a straw buyer but it was still on the streets?”
    “If that code was in the report, yes.”
    If the ATF, and