American Detective: From TV Rookie to Seasoned Cop

"Ugh..."

A group of people stood outside, vomiting against the wall. The beef burgers they had for lunch were completely wasted.

Jack stood upwind, handing Jane a bottle of water to rinse her mouth.

Jane swished the water around for a while and then gulped down half the bottle in one go, finally feeling a bit better. She turned to ask, "Did you know what was going on here before you came?"

Jack was a bit speechless. It seemed she hadn't listened to a word he said earlier, probably too shocked by the scene.

"We handled a similar case before. Three construction workers had walled in their contractor, but that time, the body was wrapped in thick plastic, so there was no odor. Compared to this, those hidden behind drywall were much harder to detect."

"Ugh..."

Jane turned and vomited the water she had just drunk. Jack, somewhat at a loss, casually cast a healing spell on her. While it made her feel slightly better, non-pathological vomiting would only subside once she mentally adapted to the situation.

The stench of a corpse is utterly nauseating. A rotting body indicates potential danger, and through evolution, humans have encoded a natural aversion to such smells into their genes to stay away from danger.

Even though they were standing more than ten meters away from the house with the bodies, everyone still felt as if the stench lingered in the air around them.

Jack was no exception. He had simply seen more corpses from past cases and had mentally prepared himself, which was why he wasn't reacting as strongly as Jane and the others.

At that moment, a faint sour, urine-like smell drifted over with the wind. Jack instinctively took a couple of steps to the side but still couldn't avoid it. He looked in the direction the smell was coming from, puzzled.

Two recently arrived Phoenix police officers were cleaning out a small tool shed.

They were moving junk out of the shed, which contained a few large blue plastic barrels. The officers were lifting the lids to inspect them, and the faint sour, urine-like smell seemed to be coming from those barrels.

The two officers were about to work together to move the barrels out to access a locked basement hatch on the floor.

"Hey! You two, get away from there! Move back, now!"

The two officers, though confused, sensed the urgency in Jack's voice and instinctively backed away, walking toward him.

"What's going on?" Jane, having finished vomiting, wiped her mouth and walked up to Jack.

Jack didn't respond immediately. He waited until the two officers were closer before asking, "Did you get a good look at what was inside the barrels?"

The younger officer shrugged dismissively. "Some kind of pale yellow granules. Definitely not drugs."

"Call EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), that's probably ammonium nitrate. Everyone stay away from that area."

Jack shook his head in disbelief. "Definitely not drugs"? Had these city cops never received basic explosives training?

Pure ammonium nitrate is a white, odorless crystalline substance. However, the type used as fertilizer is lower purity, appearing as pale yellow granules and giving off a faint sour urine smell.

Under sunlight, this stuff decomposes. The barrels scattered around the shed were obviously improperly stored, and the ammonia they were releasing was so strong that Jack could smell it from a distance.

Why would a drug dealer stockpile fertilizer in their home? Maybe last year's massive explosion at the Beirut port gave them some ideas, or maybe they were planning a trap for the police. In this vast desert wasteland, it's not like they were using it to grow anything.

Ammonium nitrate's TNT equivalence factor is 0.42, meaning one ton of it is equivalent to about half a ton of TNT. If all those barrels were filled with ammonium nitrate, it would be enough to create a small mushroom cloud.

Hearing Jack's explanation, everyone's faces turned pale. They quickly called the others to retreat, even preventing the CSI team that had just arrived from getting too close.

Unlike some countries where ammonium nitrate was banned as a fertilizer, the US merely added an inhibitor to it and continued selling it as fertilizer.

With just a bit of chemistry knowledge, someone could easily dissolve the inhibitor out of the ammonium nitrate and mix in some motor oil or aluminum powder. Or worse, add in something else, and a single barrel could flatten an entire building.

How did Jack know all this? It was clearly written in a certain god-tier book.

An hour later, as the sun began to set, the EOD team finally arrived. At the same time, a helicopter carrying Rossi and several high-ranking officials from the department slowly descended.

"How many bodies?" Rossi asked with a stern expression.

"There are fifteen bodies hidden along the corridor walls and at least twenty more behind partition walls. We haven't had a chance to check the attic or the floors. Jack discovered the suspected explosives, and EOD is handling it now."

Before long, the EOD report came in, confirming Jack's suspicions. Not only were the blue barrels filled with ammonium nitrate, but they also found a trap mechanism on the basement hatch.

Had Jack not stopped those two officers in time, they would have been blown to pieces, and the others nearby wouldn't have fared much better. The blast wave alone would have caused fatal internal injuries to anyone standing close by.

Don't believe the myth that "real heroes never look back at explosions." If you set the camera angle behind them, you'd probably see their backs full of glass shards and debris.

Rossi gave Jack a strange look. Jack could guess what he was thinking. It was probably something like: I asked you to find evidence, and you hit me with this massive news story, huh?

Jack felt pretty wronged. He had only just arrived that morning, and after barely finishing lunch, he was thrown into this mission. It wasn't like he planned for things to go so "smoothly."

---

"Discovering such a large number of bodies near Phoenix undoubtedly signals an escalation in drug cartel activity. Washington will definitely demand an explanation as to how such an incident could occur deep within the heart of the USA.

These victims could be casualties of gang violence or kidnapped migrants, but identifying them will take several weeks."

That evening, the case hit national news, with nearly every news channel running continuous updates on it.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that someone was pushing this story to the forefront, whether it was the CIA, DEA, FBI, or perhaps a combination of agencies.

Jack, bored, flipped through TV channels with the remote, but every news station was broadcasting the same thing.

He could guess the powers behind it and the political machinations in play, but he didn't care.

Jack put down the remote and picked up his phone. It was a long message from Justin.

After leaving Los Angeles, Jack had left his original phone with Jiejie as instructed and was now using an anonymous prepaid phone he'd bought along the way. Before that, Justin had given him a string of IP addresses to memorize.

From then on, no matter what device he used, as long as it had internet access, he could log into that IP address via a browser, enter a dynamic password, and Justin could instantly take control of it. The same applied to computers and tablets.

Jack thought this method was much more reassuring than any advanced AI seen in sci-fi movies. Justin, as a top-tier hacker, was just as effective, if not more so.

The long message from Justin mainly conveyed the concern of a few girls who had heard that Jack had just arrived in Phoenix, only for this huge news story to break.

Justin could have relayed the message in one sentence, but he broke it down, saying, "Hannah says... Zoe says... Maureen says... Jiejie says..."

Jack frowned as he read the message and replied with a simple "OK." The entire thread, including his response, vanished without a trace, as if it had never existed.

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