by Toby Neal
Pono Kaihale, Lei’s long-time Hawaiian partner, strode across the grass toward them. He folded muscular arms across his barrel chest as he reached the area. “Of course you girls found a body,” he said, brown eyes creased in brackets of good humor. “You couldn’t just do pedicures like normal ladies.”
“You’re married to Tiare,” Lei said from inside the pit, speaking of Pono’s highly industrious and competent wife. “You of all people should understand that work comes first. Get your lazy butt down here and help me check this out.”
“Looks muddy. I can see just fine from here.” Pono squatted to look down at the body. “What have we got?”
Sophie recapped the little that she knew. “I think it’s a man I met recently. Seth Mano.”
Lei put a gloved hand into the man’s pocket and removed a wallet. She flipped it open. “Yep. Seth Mano. Five foot eleven, one ninety, black hair, brown eyes, aged forty-seven. No cash here.”
“Dr. Gregory is on his way.” Pono said.
Lei patted the man’s pockets, pulling out an empty money clip. “Could be a robbery gone bad.” She held her flashlight up to shine upon his wrist, where a tan line showed. “Did he wear an expensive watch?”
“I think so.” Sophie remembered something gleaming and heavy on the man’s wrist. “He’s the head of the Hui’s board of directors.”
Both Lei and Pono’s sharp dark eyes pinned her. “You were telling me there were issues,” Lei said. “Apparently, they came to a head.” She shook her head, looking down at the man’s body. “Bad pun, sorry. So, this is no simple mugging gone wrong with a convenient body dump. At first glance, it looks to me like someone was angry with this person and sending a message.”
Pomai Magnuson’s set face as she glared at Mano in their last meeting came to mind. But no…Pomai seemed like such a nice woman. She wouldn’t do such a thing. Would she? But Sophie had learned that most people had the capacity to kill when the motivation was right. “I’ll have to tell you two everything I know about what’s going on at the Hui,” Sophie said. “I am so new on the job here, though. Brett Taggart is the one who will know more, and all the players involved.”
Pono was already jotting the name on a spiral notebook.
“Detectives!” The voice of one of the officers snapped all three of their heads around. “Come see this!”
Pono gave Lei a hand up out of the pit as she ascended the ladder, and the three of them hurried across the field to an area just outside the front gate.
The two officers shone their lights on a scuffed area of dirt near the gate. Sophie must’ve walked right past it when she entered less than an hour before. One of the officers held his light on a smooth, round black stone fetched up against the chain-link fence. The rock was roughly the size of a pineapple and was one of many used to construct a low stone platform that marked the entrance to the site.
“Looks like it could be the murder weapon,” Lei said, shining a light on the rusty bloodstain on the stone. “Tape this area, will you?”
Pono took out his recorder. “Sophie, mind if I get an official statement from you in the trailer?”
Just then the medical examiner’s van pulled up. Portly Dr. Gregory, in an Aloha shirt decorated with rainbows, and his assistant Dr. Tanaka, pulled their gurney out of the back. Lei went to speak to them as the officers cordoned off the crime scene.
“Of course I’ll give you a statement.” Sophie led Pono to the trailer, battling a sense of displacement and a nagging jealousy.
This was her job. Her crime scene. And now she was just a bit player in whatever came next. She was tired of being jealous of her friend Lei. She needed to get over that, and fast.
She gave Pono her statement and everything she could think of about the Hui and its inner workings, and he eventually flipped his notebook shut and turned off the recorder. “I better get out there. You can…” He looked around at the barren setting, the monitors filled with activity as the investigation progressed and more MPD staff arrived. “I guess you can watch from here.”
“I’ll stay here in case you need me,” Sophie said stiffly. “I have some phone calls to make to inform Security Solutions and the Hui.”
“Don’t give any details,” Pono said. “In fact, hold off on any of those calls except to Security Solutions. We need to control all communications and observe reactions to the murder.”
Sophie tightened her lips. “Of course.”
Pono pushed out the door, letting it shut with a bang and leaving her to watch the investigation on the monitors.
“I have an incident on the job to report,” Sophie said to Kendall Bix, Vice President of operations and her immediate supervisor, when she reached him on the satellite phone Security Solutions had issued her. She repeated the information about the body discovery.
“So how long was the site unmonitored between when the Hui’s watchman left and you came on duty?” Bix was sharp enough to catch on to that and ask that question—he was always paying attention to the bottom line, and how it would affect their company.
“About an hour.” Sophie pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. “This was not my fault.”
“I never said it was. I just asked you how long the site was empty and unmonitored, providing a window for murder.”
“I had dinner with friends. I thought things were covered enough considering the level of threat, which was burglary. Not violence.” Sophie’s stomach churned and she wished she hadn’t eaten so much shoyu chicken.
“And the surveillance monitors you installed?”
“They were off when I arrived. They do not use them during the day, and they had not turned them on prior to my arrival.”
“Who’s the day personnel?”
“A woman staffer associated with the Hui. I just told them to hire someone during the day, or keep it covered with existing staff…”
“This is bad.” Bix’s voice was uncompromising. “You were in charge of security. You should have vetted any staff having anything to do with the monitoring of the site. You should have known and trained anyone covering the site on the equipment and established a protocol so that the site was never unmonitored, no matter the threat level.”
Sophie swallowed. “I can see that now. I am not used to…that is, I have never devised and covered a job like this before. Clearly, I allowed a window of opportunity for someone to take advantage.”
“We will discuss this thoroughly on your return. I’d be surprised if you aren’t fired immediately. I’d fire you, if I were the Hui, and I might still fire you when you get back.” Bix hung up his phone.
Familiar depression rose around her. Sophie wanted to curl up in a ball under her desk.
But if she did, she might never come back out, and Lei and Pono might still need her help—so instead she dropped to the dirty floor and began pushups. Took out her exercise ball and sat down on it and began sit-ups.
She was still doing those when Lei poked her head into the trailer. Lei’s curly hair was escaping her ponytail in a backlit nimbus and her tilted eyes were bright with the excitement of the hunt. “You can go back to your condo, Sophie. We’re going to search this and the entire grounds with a fine-toothed comb for any evidence and line up interviews with all the names you gave us, starting with Magnuson and Taggart. I’ll let you know if there’s anything more we need from you, but you might as well get some rest. At least one of us can.”
Sophie’s body felt like lead as she stood and stowed the exercise equipment. “I just feel sick that this happened on my watch. Literally.”
Lei shrugged. “Murder doesn’t play favorites. Yeah, you could have had a tighter eye on things here, but it just would have meant his body turned up somewhere else most likely—and from my perspective, the body dump being here is convenient. The window between the daytime watch and your return gives us a narrow time frame for the murder, which is good in terms of catching the doer. But I’m not having to answer to a boss about it.” Lei smiled,
and patted Sophie’s shoulder. “You can always go back to the FBI if Security Solutions fires you.”
“Ha,” Sophie said humorlessly, preceding her friend across the brightly lit field to the gate. That wasn’t going to happen. Ever. “More likely I’ll apply with Honolulu Police Department. Don’t worry about me and my job. Catch this killer—and let me help you, any way I can.”
“Will do.” But the sound of the gate clanging shut sounded very final as Lei closed Sophie out of the site.
Chapter Seven
The condo, with its peeling whale decals and smell of plastic cleaner, oppressed Sophie the minute she came in. It was still early, only eight p.m., and sleep was out of the question. Sophie tossed her backpack onto the couch and opened the slider. Warm, damp night air smelling of the ocean washed over her. She walked out onto the little balcony and leaned on the metal railing, looking out over Ma`alea Harbor.
Stars pierced a black velvet sky, and palms framing the building floors below shushed in the wind off the sea. The moon wasn’t visible yet, but it would come out by one a.m., as she had reason to know from her graveyard shift at the Kakela site.
If only she knew Maui better, enough to find somewhere to run late at night. There was a beach nearby, but the talons of depression had already begun to clamp down on her brain.
There were too many triggers: Lei’s home and family. Making a mistake that had opened Kakela up to become a crime site. Being sidelined and displaced from what should be her case—but wasn’t.
Somehow, that it was her friend Lei displacing her increased the sting. She wondered when she would be done second-guessing her choice to move to the private sector.
Sophie missed Connor with a sudden ache, and reached for her phone—but then, she’d have to talk to him like he was her boss, report the problem, endure his reaction to her oversight with Kakela’s security…and she just didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with it right now.
She set the phone back down.
Only her computer world could comfort her right now and head off the depression. That, and some yoga.
She booted up her laptop and took a quick shower, washing the sweat of the crime scene and stress away.
If only she could wash away her discouragement so easily…
Sophie towel-dried, and then spread the big, thick beach towel provided for guests on the floor. Still nude, as she liked to be in private, she did several sun salutations facing the black expanse of the unseeing ocean, and finally sat cross-legged, with her laptop open on the coffee table.
Maybe DAVID could find something that would help the investigation. The rogue program’s ability to penetrate and mine law enforcement databases for information using keywords was totally unsanctioned, and the fight for possession had ultimately tipped her into leaving the FBI. Ever since she left the Bureau and went to work at Security Solutions, she had avoided using the program with its unresolved privacy and consent issues, but tonight she felt the frustration driving her back to that comfort zone.
She plugged in her Bose headphones and pulled up the program’s search window as her favorite Beethoven sonata filled her ears…and that made her think of Connor again.
Connor played violin like she worked computers: instinctively, with a loss of self, and a perfectionism honed by intense self-discipline. He’d finally played for her, this very song—and missed a note somewhere along the way.
He’d begun again, and she’d enjoyed it just as much the second time: the afternoon light from the window falling over his tilted head; those muscular arms holding the delicate instrument like the hollow, fragile wooden shell it was, while attacking it with passion—coaxing an incredible range of sound from it that reminded Sophie of a human voice singing.
She’d had a music appreciation class at her finishing school in Geneva, and had always been drawn to classical as the proper background music for her computer work—but never had she been so close to this level of skill and focus, and it was unbearably arousing.
She’d kissed him after, rising from the couch where she was sitting and hooking an arm around his neck, drawing him down to meet her mouth…and it had been so good.
Connor was the one to slow things down, setting aside the violin and touching her lips with his thumb. “Not yet. I want to date you first. Let’s go slow. Anticipation is the spice of life.” He was so disciplined about everything he did—and he was right. But so far, they’d only had one date, and she felt more than ready for more.
These recollections were not helping her get anything done but feel more depressed and sexually frustrated as she sat in this awful condo alone, unable to contact him without dealing with the shitstorm she was caught in.
Sophie refocused on the search keyword box that popped up on DAVID’s opening screen. She typed in Seth Mano’s name and began a search for his background. While DAVID sifted through the cyber sphere for information, she opened up one of her old caches.
She hadn’t checked on the Ghost’s activities since she had left her father’s apartment the first time—the truth was, she hadn’t wanted to know. Now she couldn’t resist looking, like picking at a scab.
Her eyes widened and her body stiffened as she read.
The cache was full of mysterious situations in which the Ghost’s invisible vigilante influence was readily discernible: bank robbers who turned their guns on each other. The CEO of a petrochemical corporation who called in to blow the whistle on his own company. Stock traders who turned in those giving them illegal tips. Dirty cops caught returning money they’d skimmed off of drug busts to the evidence room.
Gang leaders meeting to parley, and shooting each other instead.
That was one of the Ghost’s favorite moves: hacking the cell phones of crime lords and sending them texts that turned them against each other. It was almost a signature move.
“They have their uses, and they have expiration dates when those uses are done,” he’d told her when she confronted him.
Sophie swallowed at the crime scene photos of that case.
He had never even slowed down his vigilante activities through the whole eight months they had been aware of each other. According to DAVID’s collection, he was pulling off a vigilante coup of some kind at least weekly.
Sophie slammed the lid of the laptop down. Her breath heaved through her lungs as if she’d been running.
She had told him how she felt about his activities: that she couldn’t support it or agree with it; that she couldn’t believe it was right for one man to be judge and jury.
“You’re a hypocrite, Mary Watson,” he’d said, referring to the identity she used when she went off the grid.
And in the end, she’d admitted that she was a hypocrite, that she understood the utility of what he did in reaching criminals that the law never would, and she’d even had him extract her sadistic ex’s child bride from her gilded cage.
They’d left it that they would agree to disagree on the issue…but somehow she’d believed he heard her, that he was changing, that he understood and respected her enough to listen to her on something so important.
Tears of anger and disappointment pricked her eyes. “Demon spawn of the accursed,” Sophie swore in Thai.
Her phone dinged with a text message, and her eyes widened when she saw it was from Connor. The timing was awfully coincidental.
She wouldn’t put it past Connor to be spying on her through her laptop—certainly he had the skills to do that…but he wouldn’t, would he? He had before, but that was back when they were adversaries.
Rage filled Sophie at the thought of her laptop’s camera eye being used to watch as Sophie sat naked in front of it…and of course, the Ghost would have cloned her machine and would be observing what she was doing on DAVID, and online.
He’d have confirmation that she knew that he was still up to his vigilantism.
She clicked on the text message.
Every chiseled muscle was poetic in its clarity in the black-and-white composit
ion of a photo of Connor playing violin, naked from the waist up. Anubis, his Doberman, gazed at his master with devoted focus, the dog’s head even with Connor’s waist.
The picture was good enough to blow up and frame on the wall—excellent, like everything he did. Sexy and refined, artistic, a carefully chosen bit of theater for her appreciation—one that he knew would get to her.
It was like Connor was reading her mind—but he was probably just spying on her!
Another text message arrived from him with an innocuous ding.
Was thinking of you as I played this piece.
Sophie stood up and stalked back and forth to discharge her anger, gathering her thoughts and deciding how to respond.
She picked up her phone and stabbed out a message with her thumbs. Quit spying on me or you’ll see things you don’t want to see, just like I did when I logged into DAVID and saw what you’ve been up to. Clearly my feelings and convictions don’t mean anything to you, so I don’t know where that leaves us.
Sophie set the phone down again, and stomped into the bedroom to change. She came out dressed in the short black Lycra dress with the flirty skirt she’d brought for social occasions. By all that was unholy, her alter ego Mary Watson was going out.
Sophie was done waiting, waiting, waiting…to be healed and not so afraid, then to be in love, then for the right moment, the right mood, the right man.
Maybe there was no right man for her, and she’d always be alone.
But she didn’t have to be celibate. It was time to get over the issues left over from her violent marriage, and just ‘get laid’ as the Americans called it.
Sophie slid her feet into the sensible strappy black sandals she’d brought, grabbed her square wallet and keys, and headed for the door, turning off the already-vibrating phone.