Twisted Vine (13 page)

Sophie carried Betsy Brown’s laptop, which Ken and Lei had brought in from the latest scene, down to her office after the team meeting with Waxman. Her quads were still a little stiff from the running hikes she’d done over the weekend. An unfamiliar tenderness on her nose and shoulders reminded her that even with her dark complexion, sunscreen was a good idea.

Sophie had discovered a new interest over the weekend—outdoor run hiking. She enjoyed the challenge of running hiking trails with their uneven surface, vegetation and rocks, and spectacular views. She’d done Diamond Head on Saturday and another one on Sunday, a famous route called the Makapu`u Trail. Looking down at the old lighthouse off the trail had lifted her spirits in a way she couldn’t explain.

Sophie went through her protocol in working with a new computer, hooking it up to the write-block imager being the first part of that. When the copy of the computer’s data was complete, she could look at what Betsy had been up to.

She sat down at her rigs, thinking about the latest news in the case. Most interesting was a finding just in from the ME’s office on Corby Hale. His blood work had come back confirming AIDS, and the tox screens had come in positive for GHB as well as heroin. Gamma hydroxybutyrate, a date-rape drug, and enough heroin to put down a rhinoceros. The boy’s heart hadn’t stood a chance.

Someone had drugged him, then injected him. But why would that be necessary, if he’d written the suicide note himself and planned to die? She opened the case file on
Corby, viewed the photos. She uploaded the photos from the Betsy Brown scene, dragged one to compare them side by side. The similarities were striking in the way the bodies were posed. She wondered what the tox results would be on the young woman with ALS.

Adding pressure to the investigation, Waxman told them that Senator Hale had reacted badly to the news that his son’s death was neither accidental nor suicide. The FBI office had begun fielding calls from politicos as highly placed as the mayor and the police commissioner for them to find out who’d killed
Corby and find that unknown subject soon. 

Sophie popped open a data entry box in DAVID. No one had to know she’d run the case on DAVID; she’d keep the results to herself. But it continued to feel like a compulsion to check the conclusions she came to in “old-fashioned” police work against statistical probability.

She inputted all the new scene information on Betsy into DAVID, including oddities like no prints on the nightie box that was too far across the room and the poignant photo of the woman’s suicide note:

Dear Mama,

Thank you. This thank-you note was always for you, the woman who put her life on hold to take care of me. Well, there’s worse ahead for both of us, and I’ve decided it’s just not right for me to do that to you; nor should I have to endure the inevitability of this terrible disease. If I had anything to leave to anyone, I would leave it to fund research for a cure for ALS. Since I don’t, I hope my gift to you, of the next few years of your life free of me, will be enough.

I love you. Please don’t cry. The day we found out I had ALS was the day we mourned, and it was enough for me. I’m going to a place where I can run and swim and dance again, and it’s heaven.

Love you. See you there someday,

Betsy

Sophie felt her eyes fill as she read. Imagine having a mother who loved her so much she’d give up her life and work to care for her if she was sick. Imagine a daughter who loved her mother too much to be a burden. That such a terrible disease still ravaged people every day was a crime—a crime Sophie couldn’t do a thing about. It twisted her insides with a visceral horror.

Sophie set DAVID to work, searching for suicides with similar commonalities, and while Ying was working on that, went into her e-mail on Janjai.

The now-familiar icon from DyingFriends was there, providing a link to the “next level of support, sharing, and commitment in your dying journey.” She clicked on it, read and recorded a screenshot of the agreement not to disclose, share, discuss, or otherwise disperse information about this level of the site.

Once through that portal, she grimaced at what she saw. The page was laid out with gallery tabs of photos of suicides at their death scenes. They ran the gamut from what looked like peaceful drug overdoses to an image of a woman in a bathtub—she’d slit her wrists and appeared to be bathing in blood.

The photos weren’t named, just captioned, and the central blog was an opinion piece that was strongly right to death and, once again, written by KevorkianFan.

Sophie frowned, her long brown fingers racing as she scanned through the pictures. She stopped at a photo of Corby Alexander Hale III’s beautiful young face.

Angel Gone to Heaven
was the caption.

Here was the solid link they’d been looking for, between the suicides and the site. She took scores of screenshots of the various aspects and pages, adding comments and admiring emoticons through her ShastaM identity. There were hundreds of suicide photos, and finally she came upon Alfred Shimaoka, seated in his car with his fingers in lotus position and his suicide note propped on the gear changer.

Who had taken the picture and uploaded it to the site? Had it been Corby Hale?

Betsy Brown must be here somewhere.

Her fingers beginning to ache, her neck seizing up with tension, Sophie kept searching—filling her drop cache with screenshots, moving to the next one, aware even as she looked at them of the hypnotic suggestiveness of the pictures. Even the hideous ones, like the one of a man’s broken body on the sidewalk from jumping, or the one with a face empurpled by hanging, began to have a surreal cachet.

This gallery would be a very bad place to spend time if you were feeling depressed. 

She finally found Betsy’s photo, captioned,
Arrayed for her Wedding in Heaven
.” Betsy really did look like a beautiful bride, taking a nap before her wedding night. Sophie punched the intercom button on her phone and called Waxman.

“Chief, I think you should come down here, I want to show you something. I found the tie between our suicides and the DyingFriends site.”

Lei walked to her truck in the cool dim of the underground parking garage. She’d been able to keep her mind off Stevens’s departure by immersing in the case: reviewing the evidence collection from Betsy’s site, sorting and reviewing that of the other victims.  She’d gone down to the lab with Ken and Waxman, and they’d all perused the “suicide gallery” on the DyingFriends site.

“Someone is uploading these pictures,” Ang had said, sitting on her big exercise ball and flicking through the gruesome, sad roster so they could see the range of it. Ang highlighted the photos of their known victims. “Which means these suicides were, if not assisted, at least witnessed and photographed by a DyingFriends member. I’m waiting to be invited to some further commitment to suicide.” She’d explained how ShastaM’s persona was being invited deeper and deeper into the site.

Once again Lei was impressed with Ang’s creativity in how she found a way to burrow into the site—but Lei could see it cost her something too. The agent’s eyes were ringed with darkness like bruises, and she looked like she’d lost weight. Lei’s stomach had turned as well, but she kept a stoic exterior as she visually toured the gruesome images with the rest of the team. DyingFriends was definitely behind these cases—but how, exactly?

Lei was now on her way to stake out the Woo house in Kahala, and Ken was taking the “bu-car” to monitor their remaining identified DyingFriends member, Robert Castellejos in Kaneohe. They’d debated whether or not to reinterview the two men, see what “level” they’d reached, but Waxman had decided the danger was too great that they’d share the investigation with others on the site and spook the administrator. For now they were going to surveil them to see if anyone paid an “angel of mercy” visit to either of the houses.

Lei’s phone rang in her jacket pocket just as she unlocked the truck and hopped in. She took it out, and her throat tightened as she saw
det kamuela
. She got in, closed the door, debated, and finally answered. “Special Agent Texeira.”

“Lei, it’s Marcus.”

“Hi.” She cleared her throat to get her voice to work. Somehow she’d managed to forget the Kwon fiasco over the weekend. Stevens had been a big help with that.

“I’m calling as a courtesy to tell you I’m on the way to interview your grandfather in connection with the number you found.  I also need you to go on record with a statement about why you called that number and where you found it.” His tone was flat.

He was doing his job, she reminded herself, and she knew right now he didn’t like it. Knowing that helped her reply.

“I am happy to do so. Let me know where and when. I will not be repeating what I told you about Kwon though.”

“And I won’t be asking you to. At the moment.”

He was going to try to keep her deeper involvement out of it. It was something, probably all he could do. “Thanks for letting me know, Marcus. You didn’t have to.”

“Yes, I did.” He sighed now, and she heard the strain in his deep voice. “Have you told Marcella any of this?”

“No. It’s been killing me, but no. Only Stevens knows. My partner Ken Yamada. And you.”

“Okay, then. Let’s try to keep it that way. Things could get very messy very fast.”

“I’m aware.” She gave a tiny bark of laughter. “Thank you for believing me.”

“For the moment.”

“For the moment.” She waited a beat, but he just hung up. She put the phone away, thinking about her grandfather, imagining Kamuela pulling up to his peaceful home. She pictured Soga’s face going immobile with affront at Kamuela’s questions. Whatever the phone number in his wife’s writing meant, she didn’t think he’d known about it.

On the other hand, last year when she asked him about Kwon and if they’d known about her abuse, he’d told her not once but twice to “let sleeping dogs lie.”

Trouble was, she’d never been able to resist giving a sleeping dog a poke.

Lei started the truck and rolled out of her surveillance spot under an overhanging jacaranda tree. Detective Reyes from HPD pulled up to take her place. They were collaborating with several detectives now that the bodies were piling up, and Reyes and his partner had been particularly interested in helping after their sad experience with the Betsy Brown case.

It had been a long, hot afternoon, and the sunset sparkling on the ocean off Diamond Head as she rounded the turn toward her grandfather’s neighborhood did nothing to lift Lei’s mood. She’d had way too long to sit with a pair of binoculars fixed on a dying man’s house with nothing to do but think about the trouble she was in and how much she missed Stevens.

“Shake it off,” she said aloud. “It is what it is.” Dr. Wilson-isms, she called them, those distillations of wisdom from her therapy work with the police psychologist in Hilo.

She did just that when she pulled up in front of her grandfather’s immaculate lawn in his Punchbowl neighborhood. Getting out of the truck, she stretched high, hung low, shaking out her arms and legs from the hours of confined inactivity. No one but the white Home Care Nursing van had come or gone from Woo’s house in the four hours she’d watched it.

She worked the knocker on the front door. Her grandfather eventually answered it, and she took one look at his pale face, lines etched deeply beside his narrow mouth, and said, “I’m here to take you to dinner, Grandfather.”

He just nodded, his silvery buzz-cut head wobbling on a neck she’d never realized was so fragile, and slid gnarled feet into a pair of rubber slippers on the top step. She drove them to their favorite noodle house and ordered saimin. When he’d had some sips of green tea, a little color came back into his face.

“Detective Kamuela told me he was coming to question you.”

Soga nodded but didn’t speak. Took a few more sips of tea, slurping it to cool it on the way down. She waited for him to put the tea dish down.

“What happened?” she asked.

He folded his hands, knotted with work and calluses, on the table in front of him.

“He wanted to know, did I know what this fortune cookie phone number was about? I told him no.”

“Tell me more.”

Soga’s eyes, with their heavy eyelids, pierced her with a sad and accusing stare. “He said you found it in the box I gave you, and you called it. The phone belonged to a man who’d been shot.”

“Yes. He told me that too.”

“He said that the victim was an assassin. That he’d killed a lot of people, including the man . . .” Words seemed to fail him. He took the wooden chopsticks out of a paper sleeve, ran them against each other to knock off splinters.

“Yes. Charlie Kwon, the man who abused me. I told him I called the number because I was curious. I had no idea it was anything but a possible friend of my grandmother’s.”

“Your grandmother. She had no friends.” Those deep brown eyes looked up at her again, then down. “She was angry, your grandmother.”

“You’ve said things like that before. That she was the one to keep me and Maylene out of your lives. Do you think—she had anything to do with calling this man? This assassin? Having him kill Kwon?”

“I don’t know,” Soga said heavily. The saimin arrived, a great steaming bowl of savory broth and noodles enlivened with strips of egg, chives, rice cake. They busied themselves eating for a while and Lei noticed that his color was better and he seemed to be relaxing.

“When did you eat last?” she asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“Does that happen often?”

“I don’t need much, at my age.”

“Grandfather. You have to take care of yourself.” She reached over, put a hand on his. “It’s not good to forget to eat.”

“For you to tell me these things . . .” He shook his head, a hint of a smile around his mouth. “You don’t eat well.”

“You’re right. We can both do better taking care of ourselves.” Lei finished her saimin, at least all that she could capture of the noodles amid the broth, and pushed it away. “Now. Tell me from the beginning. What did he say to you, and what do you know? I need to be warned about what’s coming.”

“He came with his partner Ching. They sit with me in the living room. They ask me what I know about the box. I say it’s my late wife’s things, and I gave it to you for keepsakes. They ask, do I know what’s inside? I say letters and photographs, maybe a small little thing or two.” He set the bowl aside, still half full. “I ask what this is about. They tell me about this man who shoots Kwon and other people, that he’s dead and your number on his phone. You said you got the number from the box. Now I’m worried.” His hands, when he brought the napkin up to dab his mouth, were trembling. “I tell them I don’t know anything. And I don’t.”

“But you do, Grandfather. You know my grandmother, what she was capable of.”

“Yes.” He did not elaborate.

“So would she? Have called an assassin?”

“I don’t know. I like to think not, but she an angry woman, your grandmother. She want to have someone to blame for Maylene dying, for you going to live with Rosario.”

Lei was increasingly glad that her loving, generous aunty Rosario was the one to have taken her in and not the Matsumotos. Despite the very real affection she had for her grandfather, her grandmother seemed to have been a hard and bitter woman.

“Well.” Lei touched his gnarled hand. “Hopefully, he will close his case quickly.”

“I hope you are right.” They drank more tea, and Soga insisted on paying the bill. On the way back to his house, he said, “When do I meet your fiancé?”

“Who?” A curl had escaped the FBI Twist and bounced in her eye as she turned her head to look at him. “You mean Stevens? He just came for the weekend.” Lei felt a blush rising in her neck and was glad the darkness hid it from her grandfather’s sharp eyes. “He’s not my fiancé.”

“But he was. And he should be again.” She’d told Soga she had someone when he’d asked, that they’d had problems but were working them out.

“You been spying on us?” She made her voice playful. “We want to be together; it’s true. But I don’t know how. One of us has to give up our work to be with the other.”

“You should get married,” Soga said, opening his door at his house. “I don’t have forever to see my great-grandchildren.”

The blush intensified as Lei pictured Stevens holding a baby. Their baby. It was a flash of vision—his face, filled with joy, smiling at her. The baby a wrapped bundle with a head of dark curls and tilted sleeping eyes.

It was the first time that idea had done anything but terrify her. Now she felt a tug of longing somewhere deep inside.
Probably my dried-up uterus casting a vote
, she thought. Trust biology to win over good sense. She wouldn’t know the first thing about being a mother.

“We’ll see, Grandfather. Next time he visits, I’ll bring him to meet you. You’ll like him, I think.” She walked him to the door. “Don’t worry about that other thing.”

“I will try not to.”

“Love you.” She leaned over, kissed his leathery cheek. “Good night, Grandfather.”

The next day’s surveillance was long, punctuated only by a phone call with Stevens. Lei  told him about Kamuela’s phone call to her, his interview of her grandfather.

“When do you go make your statement?” he asked.

“I have to go by Kamuela’s station after work. We’re doing stupid surveillance of these two DyingFriends members. Sophie said she’s seen them in the second level of the site, but not the third, where all the gory pictures are. My day is seriously dragging.”

“Better than being the lieutenant of a station with all these balls in the air, schedules to juggle, reports to fill out—and all I’m doing is missing you.”

Lei closed her eyes a second, dropping the binoculars into her lap. “I miss you too. My grandfather says we need to get married, get started on babies. He’s not going to be around forever.” A long pause. This was the weakness that had sent her running away two other times. Stevens must be scared to answer. “It’s not sounding like such a horrible idea to me.” Lei’s voice was small.

“You know how I’ve felt these last four years,” he said, that rough note in his voice. “It hasn’t changed.”

“Well, maybe I have,” Lei said. “I just don’t know what to do about me being over here and you being over there.”

“I don’t know either. But this is getting bad. I keep thinking about being with you. You know. Being with you. It’s really distracting.”

“Right,” Lei said, raising the glasses as she spotted movement at the door of the Woo residence. The old man was coming out, pushing his walker. He looked more like Yoda than ever. “Gotta go. Call you later.”

She punched off, set the phone aside. Stevens probably thought she’d freaked out again—she’d have to call him back.

The white care van had gone; Lei assumed the old man was alone as he made his way to the koi pond, pushing the wheeled walker up onto the little rounded bridge. At the top of it, he gave the walker a shove. It trundled down the other side of the arched bridge and tipped over at the bottom.

Clyde Woo clung shakily to the low rail that came to just above his knees, looking down at the water.

Lei wondered what the heck he was doing. And suddenly she knew, as he leaned forward and fell headfirst into the pond, his bright embroidered silk robe fluttering as it trailed behind him and settled over the splash where his body had been.