Broken Ferns (Lei Crime ) (3 page)

Lei walked back over to him. “Look for a disgruntled employee. We found a letter that seems particularly strong.”

“Okay. I’ll flag that. Like I told Agent Yamada, they don’t have a whole lot of information in the online employee database, but that should be there.”

“Thanks.” She strode over to the elevator, punched the button.

“You’re welcome,” the NAT said to her back as she got on, already shrugging out of the crumpled gray linen jacket she wore over a white button-down shirt, Glock in a shoulder holster, and black slacks. The pants were now creased and smeared from the trip to the Smiley estate that morning. Unlike Marcella’s bandbox perfection, Lei seemed to be a magnet for every spot, stain, and wrinkle, and the formal look of the FBI’s dress code was one of the changes in her job that grated on her most.

She hit the Ground button and brushed at the jacket irritably, which did a whole lot of nothing. The doors opened in the dim garage, and she walked to her own vehicle this time, an extended-cab silver Tacoma truck. A brand-new replacement for the Tacoma destroyed on Maui, it had waited for her in storage while she was at the Academy. The vehicle gleamed opal in the dim yellow overhead lights and beeped a greeting, lights flashing, as she hit her Unlock button and climbed in.

Getting in the truck never failed to remind Lei of another thing she’d lost—her Rottweiler, Keiki. The dog usually sat upright beside her on the passenger seat, tongue hanging in a happy doggy grin to be going somewhere, expressive eyes with mobile brown eyebrow patches alight with excitement.

“Oh, Keiki.” Lei’s chest felt tight with unshed tears as she turned the key, the truck roaring into life. “Damn.” She missed her dog so badly.

Not that the hours she put in with the Bureau set her up to be a good dog owner; nor was the apartment she currently lived in the right situation. She navigated the dim garage and got on busy Ala Moana Avenue, heading toward the airport. Paradise Air’s business headquarters was among the maze of ancillary buildings beneath the freeway.

Lei bumped along awhile in traffic on the Nimitz Highway, a choked thoroughfare that fed into Pearl Harbor’s naval and military installations as well as the airport. Only the arc of brilliant blue sky punctuated with whipped cream clouds showed the beauty of the island—this downtown area could have been any industrial city. Her fingers tapped the wheel impatiently at yet another stoplight.

The tapping of her hand reminded her of when she’d worn Michael Stevens’s ring. It had been a pretty, old-fashioned daisy pattern of marquise-cut diamonds until the fire they’d been through on Maui melted it into slag. She reached into her pocket and slipped the disc out, and holding it in her right hand at the top of the steering wheel, turned it in her fingers as she drove the busy highway. As always, she was comforted by the disc’s weight, heft, and the roughness of embedded and indestructible diamonds. Michael Stevens had taken the blackened and melted ring to a jeweler. He’d had them clean off the black and hammer it, diamonds and all, into a shape she could carry and rub.

Was that the act of a man who didn’t love her? A man who was going to marry someone else only months later?

She found herself squeezing the steering wheel too hard, vision blurred, diamonds in the disc digging painfully into her palm. Her stomach reminded her it was there with a clench of pain, and she spotted a Burger King and pulled off the Nimitz and into the drive-through.

Maybe some food would help.

It didn’t take long to buy a couple of burgers and a Diet Coke, get back on the road eating mechanically, and pick up thick folders of personnel records from an aloha-shirted secretary at the Paradise Air building.

Lei pulled into her assigned slot at her apartment building, a forgettable beige cube in the run-down McCully Avenue section of town. The building’s only redeeming feature was a huge multicolored shower tree by the entrance that shed pink and yellow petals. Even now, handfuls of petals spiraled down to decorate the hood, misplaced wedding decor.

A bad association, weddings. The food hadn’t helped after all—her stomach still hurt. She sucked a deep draft of Diet Coke and got out of the truck, hauling her backpack and the files with her.

No one was around, as usual, and she liked it that way. She climbed the metal stairs on the outside of the building to the third floor, walked down the open walkway with its aluminum baluster to the door of number 314. Sun-faded pistachio, the door looked ordinary enough—but she hadn’t sent any misleading messages with jute mats that said Aloha or Welcome.

Lei didn’t like visitors. Never had.

She unlocked three different dead bolts with three different keys, and just inside the door, punched in a code to deactivate the alarm. When the dead bolts were back on, she rearmed it and put a bar across the door for good measure. She’d chosen the corner unit so no one could reach her little balcony from any of the other units—the side of the building dropped away to the ground in three stories of blank stucco security. She pulled up a sawed-off broom handle from the track of the sliding door and unlocked it, sliding it open to let in a draft of warm Honolulu evening air, scented from the tree out front.

Lei spread the files out on her low yard-sale coffee table. Even as she opened the top one, she knew she couldn’t concentrate—her nerves were too jumpy, her chest still tight with loss and anger—all those jumbled thoughts and images she’d held at bay jostling for attention. She stood and walked to her bare bedroom and stripped the stained and crumpled clothes off a lean, athletic figure, tossing them into the hamper in the corner. She hauled on running shorts, wrestled into an athletic bra, slid socked feet into a new pair of Nikes, and bundled her unruly hair into a ponytail.

A few minutes later she was on the road, headed for downtown Honolulu. As always, she tried to vary her route—but this time her path took her toward another kind of unfinished business.

Chapter 3

Lei felt the green-tinted glare off the windows of apartment buildings and storefronts along the avenue. She felt anonymous, shielded by Ray-Ban aviators, curly hair further restrained by a ball cap she’d added and pulled low. She turned up the speed a bit to get her heart rate where she wanted it—and to drown out thoughts of Stevens married. Stevens in bed with the striking Thai woman they’d rescued from human trafficking aboard a cruise ship.

Dark honey skin, wide doe eyes, and a waifish build made Anchara an appealing damsel in distress if there ever was one. Anchara, in danger of deportation back to the home she’d tried to escape, offering Stevens the only currency she had. Stevens, ever the gentleman and rescuer, rebuffed by Lei and lonely…

Lei could see how it had happened, how she’d let it happen. Stevens was a traditionalist at heart. He wanted a family, a white picket fence, someone to cook and greet him with a kiss when he came home from work. Anchara would be thrilled to provide all that, and more.

Probably a lot more.

Lei ran faster, until her breath tore through her lungs in ragged gasps and thoughts of Stevens with Anchara in his arms were pushed out of her mind by the need to concentrate on the sidewalk, passersby that became roadblocks, the inevitable stoplights, which she ignored, racing across the street between cars.

She finally began to tire, slowing to a more reasonable jog, and pulled up in front of a Pepto-Bismol-colored apartment building. Sun-dried magenta bougainvillea tangled in cement planters beside a glass front door whose tinting was peeling.

Lei didn’t know what she was looking for. She didn’t know why she’d ended up here, but this was Charlie Kwon’s old building. She’d come here more than a year ago to confront her childhood rapist, fresh out of jail—and confront him she had.

His murder was still unsolved.

She put her foot up on one of the planters, stretching her hamstrings and tightening her shoelace at the same time.

“Lei Texeira?” A deep male voice.

Lei dropped her foot and spun to face whoever was addressing her. Tall, dark, and handsome didn’t do Detective Marcus Kamuela justice—there was something elemental about him. He had a quality of charisma and power that laid-back detective attire of chinos and aloha shirt did nothing to disguise.

“Detective Kamuela! What’re you doing down here?” Lei had met Kamuela at a mixer for FBI and Honolulu PD, an attempt by the brass to encourage interagency cooperation. She’d been impressed with what she’d heard of Kamuela’s work ethic, not to mention his looks.

“Nothing much. I have an old open murder case here, and I keep hoping something’s going to break on it. When I have a little downtime, I come by, observe, see who I can talk to.”

“Yeah, I heard you’re like a dog with a bone when you get a case.” Lei felt her heart thudding with anxiety as well as her hard run. Of all the Honolulu Police Department detectives, Kamuela had to be the one investigating Kwon’s murder. She put her other foot up on the planter and tightened that shoelace to hide her betraying face.

“I like to keep a good closure rate.” He moved in next to her, leaning on the planter with his hip so he was looking at her. “So you live nearby?”

“Not really. Came down from my place off McCully. I just stopped for a stretch out here. So what case was this?” Might as well see what she could find out.

“Child molester named Charlie Kwon. He hadn’t been out of jail ten days before someone popped him in his apartment. What I got on it is too many people with motive and nothing sticking to any of them—there was virtually no physical evidence at the scene. Wish I could let it go; the guy was scum…But he paid his debt, and the parole board swears he was a changed man.”

“Stats don’t back that up. Child molesters are usually repeat offenders.” Lei busied herself with leaning over to place her palms on the warm, rough sidewalk. The feeling of the cement against her palms grounded her. Kamuela didn’t have a clue. He had nothing on her, and he didn’t know about her abuse, let alone that Kwon was her abuser. “Anyway, nice to run into you.”

“Likewise.” He smiled a slightly crooked grin with a dimple in one cheek and really white teeth. “And if you hear anything about this Kwon case, let me know.” He handed her a card. Her fingers almost wouldn’t close over it, but she managed to slip it into her shorts pocket.

“Of course. See ya.”

She felt his eyes burning into her back as she jogged up the sidewalk toward her apartment. A platinum-blond woman in a bright pink jean jacket had been spotted at the building the afternoon Kwon was shot and was still wanted for questioning—Lei knew from the news. Marcella had given Lei a pink jacket and platinum wig for fun after the fire—items never seen again in Lei’s possessions.

And Marcella had never asked Lei where they were.

Or if she’d shot Kwon.

Marcella might not have noticed the missing items. Lei certainly hoped so. But if she ever needed them, the jacket, rubber gloves, and platinum wig were hiding, gunshot-residue free, in the hollow beam of a storage shed at the police safe house in Kahului.

Just Lei’s shit luck that the time her conflicted feet brought her to the building, Marcus Kamuela was waiting outside, a big tiger shark smelling for blood in the water.

The bitch of it was, she hadn’t killed Kwon. She’d had him at her feet, all right—the Glock wobbling in her hands as she heard his apology. It hadn’t made anything better. If she had shot him she’d at least know what she was up against. As it was, the crime hovered over her life with all the potency of a ticking time bomb.

The answer was obvious.

She needed to somehow solve the case herself. It was the only way she could be sure to be safe—and a part of her really wanted to know who had pulled the trigger.

Lei sped home, barely feeling the miles, she was so preoccupied, and set the detective’s card on the edge of the bathroom sink. She stripped out of sweat-soaked running clothes and got into the shower. Half an hour later, turning pruny from hot water, she was ready to get out. She dried off with a threadbare white towel.

Stevens had loved her through broken bones, human bite marks, and terrible bruises. He’d shaved her head when she was injured, his fingers tender on her sensitive scalp. He’d never thought she was anything but beautiful.

Objectively, she knew she looked better than she had many times when they were together. She’d describe herself as a five-foot-six mixed-heritage female of 120 pounds, athletic build, with a taut stomach, small round breasts, and graceful, well-turned arms. Her hair had grown out to touch her shoulders in ringlets that, when orderly, were charming and softened her angular face with its wide, full mouth.

She had nice bones, she concluded, tracing along the length of one collarbone, marked with a jagged scar where a perp had bitten her. But her eyes were her best feature—big, tilted, long-lashed, and a warm brown that changed with her mood.

He’d liked her mouth, too. She remembered how he’d traced her lips with his fingers and gently sucked the pillow of her lower lip into his mouth. She remembered his hands on her breasts, weighing them, flicking and circling her pale tawny-pink nipples with his thumbs until they filled her with a hungry ache. She remembered a necklace of kisses he’d laid across the freckles on her chest.

Yes, she’d been well and truly loved in all the ways a woman could be.

She wrenched her mind away from the memory and walked into the bedroom to dress.

An hour into reviewing the files, Lei found a possible candidate for the burglary—Tom Blackman, age twenty-one, hired for “general duties and baggage handling.” Blackman had worked at the airline for six months and used a general delivery mailing address. The file included several write-ups for insubordination, lateness, and one for “calling Mr. Smiley a Nazi and threatening bodily injury against him.” A termination notice dated two months ago topped the paperwork in the slim folder.

Lei ran the name in her secure database. Blackman had a sealed juvie record that would take a little doing to open, but no current warrants. She sat back a moment, sipping a glass of water and considering.