Stolen in Paradise (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (18 page)

Chapter 14

Marcella pulled the Honda up to the curb, taking one of the pay-by-hour slots near the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, a picturesque maze of floating docks and crowded slips. The clang of boats and hum of wind against rigging filled the ocean-sparkling air with the song of the marina, the curving yellow arc of the beach just beyond. The whole setting invited leisurely walks in paradise, and the nearby Hilton Hawaiian Village, with its iconic rainbow-tiled high-rise, capitalized on that.

Marcella parked directly opposite the former Cheese Soufflé Bistro—the place her parents had offered on. She got out of the car, did a quick scan as she always did for possible threats, and strode across the narrow street to a dilapidated glass front door decorated with expired band and show posters. Anna Scatalina, obviously keeping an eye out, pushed the door with its tinkling bell wide.

“’Cella! Come into Café Scatalina!”

“Mama.” She kissed her mother on both cheeks as she stepped into the dim interior. “You sure that’s a good name?” Marcella’s voice was hesitant.

“We not ashamed of our name,” Papa Gio rumbled—an old argument—from across the room.

Marcella ignored this sally, instead putting hands on her hips and swiveling to survey. “Well, it’s got a good location.”

The black-and-white checkered floor was gritty with tiny gecko droppings, though none of the indoor-dwelling lizards ubiquitous to Hawaii were visible in daylight. Round tables were stacked in a corner, bent-backed café chairs towering in a stack beside them. A glass deli-style counter fronted the kitchen, separated from the dining room by an open pass-through window and swinging half doors.

“You know the economy, she no good,” Papa Gio said. “So we get the café cheap.”

“Was your offer accepted?”

“Yes. We the owners!” Anna gave a little hop and clapped her hands. “I can’t wait to get to work on the kitchen. Come. I show you.” She bustled through the swinging doors into a kitchen redolent of old grease, a crusty-looking gigantic steel stove its centerpiece. Piled dishware and pots and pans were stacked haphazardly on every surface. The smell of greasy, burnt things clung to Marcella’s throat like a film.

“Mama, it’s terrible in here. You need to have the cleaning included in the final price.”

“I call the agent already.” Papa Gio put his hands on his hips and drew down his brows. “Anna, she just want to get to work. We still need to decide what food we selling.”

“I think we go with Italian theme,” Anna said. “Like us.”

“Are you going to do dinners? Or just breakfast and lunch? All three?” Marcella walked over to the floor mats, looked at them cautiously. They seemed downright sticky, and the heels of today’s Jimmy Choos would sink right into the round holes that marked the thick rubber surface.

“Breakfast and lunch only. Perhaps little appetizers in afternoon,” Anna said. “We old. We like go to bed early.”

“Yes. And I’m worried—this is a big project, even after you get it cleaned. You have to decorate, set up a menu…”

“That’s the fun part. And I already have employee coming—the Guatemalan boy you meet the other day. Eduardo. He come to work for us, help with the heavy work.” Anna’s brown eyes, so much like Marcella’s, were wide with excitement. “I have new friend at college. She a photographer. She make big prints for walls. We paint, we buy new china and napkins, and we go!”

“So it’s the Café Scatalina, eh?” Marcella pursed her lips. “Sure about that?”

“Yes, and we feature a brown turd as our logo,” Papa Gio said.

Marcella spun around to her father, her mouth open. Both her parents burst into laughter.

“Oh, oh, oh,” Anna gasped. “Oh, your face, ’Cella! The horror!”

“You got me good,” Marcella said, succumbing to a chuckle. “Well, I’m glad we’re finally joking about it.”

“Your name Little Shit, you gotta laugh about it,” Papa Gio said, pulling Marcella to him in a side hug. “We said on the way here how your hair would turn white if we named the café Scatalina and made a little turd for the sign.”

“You were right. You guys know me too well. What can I help with?” Marcella sneaked her eyes to her watch. She was due for a briefing back at the Bureau in half an hour.

“Toasting.” Papa Gio worked the cork on a bottle of champagne, while Anna produced plastic glasses from the pockets of her muumuu.

Marcella took hers reluctantly. It was ten thirty a.m. on a workday; it wouldn’t do to arrive in front of Waxman with alcohol on her breath. But she couldn’t turn her parents down either. She waved a halt to her father’s pouring and cleared her throat.

“I’d like to toast. To the success of the Scatalinas in Waikiki—may everything we do prosper.”

“Salute,”
her parents chimed, and they all drank. Papa Gio held his brimming cup high, flicked a few drops from the rim over the greasy stove.

“Everything this kitchen make taste
delizioso
,” he said. “Thanks be to God for our good fortune, and for our daughter to live nearby.”

“Salute,”
Marcella said, and they all took another swig—this could go on awhile. “Papa, darling. I have to run.” She kissed him, set the plastic cup down on the counter. “Keep me posted on how I can help.”

“Ciao, bella,”
her mother called as Marcella headed for the front door.

“Ciao
. See you soon,” Marcella called back.

She pushed out into the breezy sunshine, light sparkling off the moored boats of the marina. Tourists milled by en masse only a block away on Ala Moana Boulevard, but the area of the restaurant, while near major traffic, had a restful feel. She took a big deep breath of fresh salty air and blew it out. Her midsection sent back tingles, pummeled during last night’s sparring.

The bistro was a good thing for her parents. And who knew? They might make a success of Café Scatalina, with a brown turd as a logo. Yep, they’d got her good that time. She laughed aloud as she got into the Honda.

Marcella took a minute in the women’s room to comb her hair, disordered by the wind off the yacht harbor. She was stabbing bobby pins into the latest incarnation of FBI Twist when the door opened, admitting a petite blonde wearing a khaki skirt and purple polo shirt.

“Dr. Wilson!” She spat the last of the pins into her hand and turned with a big smile to greet the police psychologist. “I didn’t know you came this far afield—thought you were based in Big Island.”

“Got a new job—I’m consulting with the FBI now as well as state and local police,” the psychologist said. “Great to see you, Marcella. You’re looking amazing, as usual.”

“It’s a curse.”

“I’m sure you find a way to make it work,” Dr. Wilson said with a smile.

Marcella had met the psychologist on Maui at her friend Lei’s police station, where the peripatetic consultant was doing a training for the island’s detectives. Lei had worked with Dr. Wilson on several cases and personal business over the years, and through her glowing reports, Marcella felt like she knew the woman. She finished her touch-ups as Dr. Wilson used one of the stalls and then washed her hands.

“So are you here on a case?” Marcella asked, blotting lipstick off her lips. Waxman was bound to give her a hairy eyeball if she had much on, but she wanted to look her best for the briefing—not that she was hoping Kamuela would be there or anything.

“Possibly. SAC Waxman sent me over some information to review and come up with a ‘profile’ for one of the cases.” Dr. Wilson’s sharp blue eyes met hers in the mirror. “Guess we’ll have to see what conference room we end up in.”

“Well, I’m hoping it’s my case. I could use a psych profile on our three main suspects. I was going to ask Waxman for a consult; maybe he beat me to it.” The two women walked down the hall together toward the main conference room.

“Are you in touch with Lei?” Dr. Wilson asked. “I’m a little worried about her.”

“We just talked the other day. What’s going on?”

“She’s stressed—big transitions. Wondered if she’d called you.”

“Yeah. She’s coming over in a few weeks.”

“Well, get her to talk to you.”

“Spoken as her therapist?” Marcella knew Dr. Wilson had been the one to help unlock Lei’s memories on the Big Island.

“Speaking as a friend and colleague. There’s always a lot at stake in your profession.”

“For her and me both,” Marcella said, as she opened the main conference room with its whiteboards and oval table. She turned to the psychologist with a grin. “Looks like you’re on my case.”

Waxman stood up from where he was holding court at the end of the table. “Dr. Wilson, so glad you could make it on such short notice.”

“Yes.” Dr. Wilson opened the leather valise she’d been carrying and distributed some printouts to the team gathered around the table: Waxman, Gundersohn, Ang, Rogers, and Detectives Ching and Hernandez from HPD. Kamuela was not in evidence, and Marcella felt a stab that felt suspiciously like pain.

“Where’s Detective Kamuela?” she asked Ching as she helped hand out the papers. She knew he said he’d ask to be transferred, but she didn’t want to believe it.

“He had some other cases come up,” Ching said. His gaze was guileless; Marcella doubted Kamuela would have told his partner the real reason for his departure.

An unfamiliar feeling—rejection, loss—sank into the pit of her stomach and lay there like a lead ball. She’d known things couldn’t end well; it didn’t make it any easier to have been right.

Marcella sat next to Dr. Wilson, who smiled graciously as Waxman took them through the high points of the case to the current situation: three main suspects, surveillance teams on each, the lab being watched.

“We just released the lab back to Dr. Truman, and he’s getting back to work today,” Waxman finished. “We have some additional staff from HPD in the lookout room at the moment.” Waxman liked to make up new phrases like “lookout room.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Wilson stood up, went to one of the whiteboards. “I worked up some patterns on each of your suspects. I haven’t had much time to go in depth, but I wanted to give you some initial impressions and see if they assist in narrowing the field. Let’s start with Kim.”

Rogers put a blowup of Peter Kim’s driver’s license photo into a clip at the top of one of the whiteboards, the Korean scientist looking earnest and conservative in a brush cut and button-down. Dr. Wilson slid on a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses and consulted her notes.

“According to comments from various other lab partners, Kim is the most standoffish of the interns. He came from Korea seven years ago. He has well connected family here in Hawaii, and two mysterious deposits to his account in the amount of nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine dollars. An e-mail trail connecting him with a lab in Korea has also been uncovered. He reputedly doesn’t have a girlfriend; nor does he appear to be gay.”

She took a sip of water from a glass Gundersohn poured for her, pulled the glasses off to dangle by a beaded chain, and looked up to address the group. “Kim strikes me as a classic first-generation immigrant from an Asian family. He’s a loner, ambitious, hardworking, and focused. He doesn’t have time for extraneous entanglements. He’s focused on success and making his mark, adding to his family’s established successful track record, and making money. He seems to evaluate others in terms of usefulness and will curry favor with those who can help him with his goals. He doesn’t appear to have any sort of religious orientation, which will tend to make him someone who does the expedient thing. In other words, he’d have wanted to profit from BioGreen.

“His motivation for a murder would be something related to his goals. He fits a profile of someone who’d kill for profit or ambition, but not passion. Ergo, I could see him shooting Dr. Pettigrew to prevent her from giving away the BioGreen formula, but not strangling Cindy Moku—a very personal murder that was then dressed up to look like a hanging.” She paused, looked around the table. “How seriously have you considered that there are two killers?”

No one answered immediately; then Marcella spoke up. “I’ve been thinking about that more and more, but the thing that brings us back is the blog entries. They point to one killer.”

“The blogs could be faked, planted to point to someone—namely Fernandez, as they were uploaded from his work computer,” Rogers said.

Waxman waved a hand. “We’ve thought of that. We’re considering the blog entries as one aspect of this investigation, not definitive in themselves. Go on.”

“Well, Kim does not have the markers of a psychopath or antisocial personality disorder—some early ones include cruelty to other children and animals, fire setting, crimes, and conduct problems. From everything I can tell, he’s been a model citizen, if a little cold and detached.” Dr. Wilson slid the glasses back on and picked up another folder. “Let’s discuss Fernandez next. The blog’s uplink location aside, he’s a strong candidate for several reasons: He had a relationship with Cindy Moku. He openly disagreed with Dr. Pettigrew regarding BioGreen’s distribution rights. He’s known to have an abrasive manner, a diagnosis of Tourette’s, and an early record of fire setting. He has engaged in some potentially suspicious behavior since being surveilled, though again, nothing that couldn’t be explained by the pressures he’s been under.”

Rogers slipped an eight-by-ten photo of Fernandez’s surly face under one of the clips at the top of the whiteboard as Dr. Wilson went on. “Apparently, he is also quite brilliant and contributed an essential piece of the BioGreen research that broke the formula through to the next level. Coworkers say he felt he had a proprietary interest in BioGreen and did not agree with any free distribution of the research.”

“That’s all information we already gave you, Dr. Wilson,” Waxman said impatiently. “What we want is your take on it.”

“I’m getting to that.” Dr. Wilson gave the SAC a quelling look over her glasses. Her crystal-blue gaze was authoritative. “Fernandez is a complex individual with some definite mental health issues. He meets criteria for a schizotypal personality disorder, with additional markers for antisocial personality disorder and the accompanying Tourette’s.