by Toby Neal
She spun on a heel and stomped across the room, ending up at the sink with its small pile of unwashed dishes left over from before Sophie left for the Big Island five days ago. Bits of dried food had attracted a trail of ants into the sink. Marcella turned the water on and splashed noisily as she began washing the dishes.
She was just trying to get a handle on her hot Italian temper. Sophie refilled Ginger’s water bowl and began blowing up her air mattress, which had lost air as she slept the night before. She groaned as the blowing strained her bruised ribs.
Marcella returned to the bedroom, sat down beside Sophie, took the plastic mattress from her, and finished blowing it up. She rearranged the sleeping bag on top of it, each fussy, decisive movement a sign of how much she cared. Gratitude warmed Sophie’s bruised chest.
“Are you sure I can’t talk you into coming and staying with us?” Marcella finally said.
“Thanks, Marcella. I’m fine. But can we get those noodles now?” Sophie asked plaintively. “I’m really hungry.”
“Absolutely.”
Ginger gave a sad bark as Sophie locked her in and they left.
Sophie’s favorite saimin house, a spot she used to walk to in her previous neighborhood, was quiet on a weeknight in the early evening. The burly proprietor, a fan of Sophie’s MMA fighting, wiped his hands on a towel and raised a brow at her appearance. “I hope you gave the other gal plenny lickins!”
“Not this time,” Sophie said. They usually sat at the long, worn wooden bar, but this time the women took a table. Huge, steaming bowls of saimin arrived in short order. After sucking in several mouthfuls of noodles, Marcella lifted a brow. “So what does your dad think of your move?”
“He’s worried.” Sophie shrugged. “He’s always worried.”
“I would be too if you were my daughter. So tell me about your new partner.”
Sophie lifted her bowl for a deep sip of the savory broth. The hot soup felt so good in her empty, sore belly. She set the bowl down and dabbed her bruised mouth gently with a paper napkin. “Dunn is a good operator. He’s impulsive, too much of a risk-taker at times—but this is the first time I’ve worked so much out in the field, so what do I know? He hung in there, waiting for me on stakeout, even though the inactivity was killing him. When I didn’t call to check in on time he created a good distraction that gave me a window to escape. Even though we haven’t worked together long, I know he’s got my back.” Sophie told her friend about the case. “I really wish Waxman hadn’t pulled the plug on the case when it came to the FBI. That was part of what pushed me over the edge into resignation.”
“I think it was a bad call, too. Waxman’s still on the warpath.” Marcella chased a bit of egg with her spoon. “He’s the one that provoked you into quitting, but I swear he’s acting like you did it to spite him. Never seen him so grouchy.”
“Not my problem.” Guilt stabbed Sophie anyway. Waxman on the warpath was never a good thing. She had such mixed feelings about her former boss. She actually missed him, too.
“So. He’s hot?” Marcella’s eyes gleamed with a teasing light.
“Who? Dunn? I already told you he was.”
“When do I get to meet this mystery man?”
“I could call him right now. He’d probably come.”
“Are you serious? He’d drop whatever he’s doing and come, just ’cause you called?”
Sophie considered, then nodded. “Pretty sure. He might have a little crush on me. It’ll pass.”
“Ha! I bet his little crush just gets worse, poor sap.” Marcella gestured to Sophie’s phone. “I want to meet him. Put your theory to the test.”
Jake Dunn, entering the noodle house, drew every eye. It wasn’t just his size, though that was imposing. It wasn’t just his appearance, though he was handsome. It was something more—a crackling energy, a charisma. Sophie was amused by the way Marcella’s eyes widened, by the way her unflappable friend got tongue-tied as Sophie introduced them. Dunn charmed Marcella with bantering small talk as he sat down beside Sophie, who diligently addressed her noodles.
“So. Tell us about yourself, Jake Dunn. What brought a guy like you to a place like this?” Marcella gestured to the noodle house, encompassing Hawaii. Her natural insouciance and flirtatiousness had rebooted after the initial overwhelm.
“Ex-Special Forces. I was looking for something to do after my tours were up and Hawaii seemed like a great place to live.” Dunn’s white smile was as brilliant as Marcella’s. Too bad her friend was already taken; Marcella would have been a good match for him. “I like Hawaii. The surf, the mountains. The women.” He gestured between the two of them as if making a point, and Marcella laughed. “Private contracting is a good gig. Been here three years now, and we even get some pretty hairy action, right, Sophie?”
Sophie kept her eyes on her bowl and nodded. “Right.”
“I’m making you do stakeout next time. How are you feeling, by the way? You look like hell.” Dunn touched her cheek gently with the back of his fingers.
Sophie moved away, uncomfortable with the gesture. “I’m fine. I’ll be back at work tomorrow. Slept all day, today, though.” She lifted her bowl to sip the last of the broth.
Marcella cleared her throat. “You got a family?”
“Divorced parents. Two sisters. Single, but looking. You?” Dunn’s brows rose. His saimin order arrived, and he picked up the spoon.
“Taken, I regret to say, now that we’ve met,” Marcella said.
Dunn laughed. “He’s a lucky guy. So what does it take to get your friend here to give a guy a chance?”
Marcella shook her head. “Years of selfless adoration finally earned the last guy she went out with one date.”
“Hey!” Sophie set down her bowl abruptly. “It was a complicated situation. I’m not ready to joke about it.” The wound of Alika’s departure throbbed like a bruise when poked.
“I’m sorry.” Marcella’s full mouth turned down. “You know me, always trying to lighten the mood.”
Sophie was having none of it. She turned to Dunn. “You want to know a little more about why I don’t date? Right out of school when I was too young to know better, I married a sexual sadist who abused me in ways you can’t imagine. Is that enough for you?”
Dunn’s eyes widened as he raised his hands. “Hey, whoa. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s in the past. But even if I’d date a partner, which I’m too intelligent to do, you don’t want to be with me. I’m all messed up.” Sophie tried the American phrase and it felt right. Old, familiar darkness seemed to rise around her, a paralyzing fog. She stood, fumbled in Mary Watson’s straw bag for a couple of twenties, and threw them on the table. “Sorry I’m not more fun.”
Marcella grabbed her purse to leave as well. “See you around, Jake.”
Dunn put his hand on Sophie’s arm. His full attention on her felt weighty and his touch seemed to burn. She twitched her arm away and he opened his hands in appeal. His gunmetal eyes shone with sincerity. “Sophie, I’m really damn sorry I put my foot in your private business. Please sit down. I finally got my saimin, and we were just getting to know each other outside of work a little bit. You told me a ways back to mind my manners, and I will. I respect you. We’re partners, and I want that to work.”
Sophie vibrated with the need to flee as she looked down at him. She absorbed the regret in his gaze. His playful mouth was a serious line.
He seemed to mean it.
“Okay. As long as I never have to talk about that again. Or deal with your off-color jokes and attempts to ask me out. It is not happening, so forget it.” Sophie sat back down.
Dunn whooshed out a breath in exaggerated relief, wiping imaginary sweat off his forehead. “My passes are usually better received.” He was irrepressible, just as Connor had said. Sophie felt a smile tug her mouth. Dunn addressed Marcella. “She always this touchy?”
“You got away without her punching you,” Marcella said. “I usually get slugged
when I piss her off.”
So Sophie knuckle-punched Dunn in the shoulder, hard, and he howled in mock anguish. The rest of the evening passed with too much Kirin beer and enough laughter that her ribs were doubly sore the next morning.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sophie returned to her office after a lengthy morning meeting with Dunn and Bix. Frustration tightened her muscles and made her breath short. Dunn followed, but she shut him out of her office with a firm bang of the door.
She pushed the small conference table to the side and unloaded her gym bag, taking out a weighted jump rope. She took a few moments to remove a large rubber exercise ball from the bag, inflating it with a small handheld pump. Set up, she got on the jump rope, and soon the rhythmic thwack of the rope smacking the carpeted floor began to soothe her jangled nerves.
Even with her bruises and sore ribs, only movement would help.
“There’s a gym one floor down,” Dunn said, through the door.
“But then I would have to see other people,” Sophie snarled. “Like you.”
She felt rather than heard Dunn’s footfalls as he beat a retreat.
Their Skype conference with Hilo PD had not gone well. Sophie had shared her notes and showed her physical damage to an impassive Lieutenant Ohale. The station chief and two detectives had reviewed all that she and Dunn had submitted, but finally Ohale shook his buzzcut head.
“The cult has strong legal representation and we need a clear reason to search the premises.” Ohale’s big brown hands shuffled the notes Sophie had faxed over. “Without some physical evidence connecting the cult, the cult leader, even this enforcer Dougal Sloane to the missing women, I don’t have grounds for a search warrant. No missing persons reports have been filed in Hawaii on the women.”
Sophie had known that, from her experience as an agent. Still, hearing it out loud, when her body ached from a near-fatal beating, was another thing.
Her role in the FBI had been a layer of protection like a bulletproof vest. Secure in that role, within the bounds of the law, her work had clear consequences even when cases didn’t end the way she wanted them to.
Now she was just another civilian, and getting beat up was part of her new job.
The frustration made Sophie jump harder, her breath rasping against her bruised ribs. Her clothing was soon soaked with sweat. The fervent exercise was the only thing keeping the depression at bay.
Maybe she should try therapy. Perhaps even medication. It wasn’t just her circumstances she was fighting; it was her family history. Her mother’s crippling depression had overshadowed everything in Pim Wat Smithson’s life. Sophie could sometimes sense that same fog bank waiting, waiting, waiting for her guard to be down so it could roll over her permanently.
Sophie switched to the exercise ball, lying on her back to do ab crunches, but they hurt too much. She rolled out a yoga mat for some gentle stretches.
There had to be something she could do. Ohale had said, “Find me something actionable. Find me some legitimate reason to get into that compound and search it, and I’ll bring cadaver dogs.”
DAVID was the only way. Perhaps DAVID could find a financial trail leading from the women to Jackson’s cult, a way to lever open the cult so that its real, rotten core could be revealed. The FBI had used tax evasion to bring down mob bosses for years when no witnesses or evidence could be obtained of the murders that they had committed. This cult might be the same.
Sophie finished her workout, drank some water, and got behind her desk, firing up the laptop with DAVID on it.
She inputted Dougal Sloane and the names of the women, family members, and the new wife she had met. She sent an algorithm to monitor the cult’s online activity, and searched for their tax records. Setting up a new confidence ratio, she queried DAVID about the probability that reported income was truthful given the cult’s known asset portfolio.
DAVID did not take long to produce a low probability of twenty-four percent.
This meant that tax evasion was a definite possibility if she could track the flow of money. Maybe more digging with the families of the missing women would turn up information leading to where their assets had gone.
Several phone calls later, it was time for another interaction with Dunn. She had to steel herself for it—his personality was so intense. He was exhausting for an introvert like her. A few yoga stretches later, Sophie was ready to deal with him. She collected her laptop and went to his office.
Dunn was behind his computer, but his eyes brightened at the sight of her as he looked up. “Feeling better?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.” Sophie smiled and set her laptop down on the table. “I have some thoughts I want to share.”
Dunn joined her, lacing his big hands together and resting his elbows on the table. Even in a passive pose, he always looked ready to bound up and tackle something or someone. “I was thinking we could do a raid. Get all those kids out of there. Hand them over to child welfare.”
Sophie shook her head. “It won’t work. The children are not being abused. Yes, they work, but on closer observation, it’s not inappropriate lengths of time except for maybe all the hours in the taro patch. They’re healthy, fed, clothed, and educated, even if it isn’t the way we would like to see it done. Child Welfare won’t have a case, and the children will be traumatized by being forcibly removed.”
Dunn cocked a brow. “I’m surprised to hear you say that. You seemed so—motivated regarding those children.”
“I got to see their lifestyle up close and personal. It’s unconventional, but the children are happy from what I can tell. Jackson is their father. If we get Jackson for the murders, the children’s world will change as a result, and we really have no control over what that will look like. Some of them might end up in foster care, and I’m not sure that’s an improvement over their current situation.”
“Okay, but I think we should hold that as a back pocket strategy. So what’s this update you have for me?”
Sophie filled him in on her inquiries using DAVID and her idea to follow the money trail and get the families to file missing persons reports. “We have to focus on finding a reason for a search warrant. Once Hilo PD has that in place, they can take in cadaver dogs based on the hearsay testimony of our client. When they do, I feel confident they will find the women’s remains.”
“So what do you need me to do?”
Sophie slanted Dunn a glance. That was one of the things she liked about him: he was never afraid to get in and do whatever needed to be done, including a stakeout that had probably driven him close to crazy.
“You’re going to hate this. I want you to pull together copies of all of the cult’s tax returns and call the women’s parents for copies of their wills, and while you’ve got them on the phone, encourage them to file missing persons reports with Hilo PD. DAVID has already confirmed that the income streams into the cult do not match their reported income. If we can find where the gap is, we can alert law enforcement to move in on them for tax evasion. I also think that the women’s families would not want their daughters’ estates going into Jackson’s pockets. Maybe we can prompt them to challenge the women’s financial arrangements, and drag the cult into court.”
“Yeah. Without death certificates, the women’s money will keep rolling into the Society’s coffers. I’m sure they won’t want that to continue.” Dunn gave a brisk nod. “I’m on it.”
By the end of the next day, Dunn and Sophie had shepherded the families of the missing women through filing missing persons reports with the Hilo PD. They also obtained copies of the women’s wills and copies of the Society of Light’s tax returns going back years.
Sophie programmed DAVID to dig deeper into tracking the sources of income in the Society’s accounts. She set the algorithm to drilling all night, and locked up her office.
Dunn clapped her on the shoulder in the hall outside her office, and Sophie winced. He lifted his hand away as if burned. “Sorry, sorry. I keep forge
tting you were just in a major fight.”
Sophie gestured to her face. “I would think you would remember, having had to look at this all day.”
“I don’t know. It must be a kind of a normal look for you, with your MMA fighting.” His bantering tone reminding her of all the days that she’d dressed so carefully in Hong Kong, hiding the damage that Assan had done—but he’d always been careful to leave her face unmarked, and perhaps that was why she didn’t mind the bruises that she got in the MMA ring. They were honestly won. But Dunn was right—her face was bruised more often than not.
That had begun to bother her. Mary Watson, with her flowy dresses, didn’t look right with a black eye and a split lip.
Sophie gave a brief wave goodbye and turned into the company locker room, where she changed into Watson’s modest floral exercise clothes: a tank top and pink shorts—and walked downstairs to the battered truck, wondering, not for the first time, what and whom she was hiding from.
Assan was behind bars, his case tied up in extradition orders; the IA agents had already visited and could summon her any time they wanted. And the Ghost? She wanted to meet him face to face, anyway.
And still she felt compelled to don this other identity, and hide in a dingy apartment to sleep on a blow-up mattress with her dog.
Maybe it really was time for therapy. She could always call Dr. Wilson, the consultant whom she’d worked with several times on FBI cases. The petite blonde psychologist had been helpful more than once. But she’d liked Dr. Kinoshita, the Security Solutions psychologist, too…
Long evening shadows fell, wafting in the gold-edge galleons of cumulus cloud that were such a part of the Waikiki skyline at dusk. After picking up Ginger from doggie daycare, Sophie drove down to Ala Moana Beach Park.
She bought hot dogs at a street vendor, and after eating, she and Ginger walked briskly through the park. Sophie listened to the chatter of hundreds of mynah birds settling into one of the banyans to sleep as she passed by a knot of homeless people setting up tents for the night. Her workout earlier in the day had taken the edge off of her need to exercise, but Sophie was still troubled on some deep level.