Stolen in Paradise (A Lei Crime Companion Novel)

by Neal, Toby

  “Agent Scott?” Sophie Ang stood up from a module across the room. “Looking for me?”

  “As a matter of fact, but any live body would be nice.” Marcella moved toward her. Unlike the rest of the building, IT’s floors were padded with a sound-deadening felted carpet, and she seemed to glide over it.

  Ang rolled a cushy office chair over to her. “I’m still going through the lab computers. Got one more to go.”

  Marcella sat. “What are you looking for?”

  Ang shrugged. “Anything. I’ve cloned the hard drive. Now I’m mining it for hidden data, searching the Internet activity, and searching for key words related to the investigation in any capacity.”

  “Got anything more than you told us about in the meeting?”

  “Yeah, a little. I found a cache of e-mail between Kim and a lab in Korea. Appears he was negotiating with them for advance preview of BioGreen. Disappearance of the formula seems to have hung him up.” Ang pulled up the correspondence, all in Korean. “I’ll print it out in English for the next briefing.”

  “Good. I can see how maybe he’d off Pettigrew if he thought she was going to give away the research out from under him. But why would he kill Cindy?” Marcella frowned, rubbed her chin.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she was onto him? I mean, I heard she tried to speak to you.” Ang switched on another monitor, a stream of data flowing by as her fingers flew over the keys.

  “Yeah. I feel really bad about that. I was in my wet suit, about to dive in the Ala Wai Canal, and I was hot and distracted. I wish I’d taken the time to try to get her to talk to me right then.” Marcella felt the lump in her throat that hadn’t really gone away since the young scientist’s death.

  “You couldn’t have known.” Ang turned on a third monitor. “We have to sift through so much information all the time, and at any given time any bit of it could be irrelevant—or the turning point of the case.”

  “Yeah. Ain’t that a bitch.” Marcella noticed the corded muscles of the tech agent’s forearms as the woman’s blunt fingers flew across the keys. “You work out.”

  “Mixed martial arts. I’m in a women’s fight club. Keeps my combat skills up for the Bureau, too.” Ang shot her a sideways glance. “Want to come out sometime?”

  “What, to watch or to compete?”

  “Either. I’m sure you’ve got something more going on than just looks or you wouldn’t be in the Bureau.”

  Marcella’s arched brows shot up. “Gee, thanks.”

  A small beep sounded. Ang zeroed back in on the first monitor.

  “Looks like we have a suspicious upload to an online site from this computer, Fernandez’s usual workstation. Keywords “Dr. P” and “shot.” Ang opened another window. “It’s a private blog. Let me break in.” She drag-and-dropped another window, typed something into it. They watched an hourglass spin; then the blog popped open.

  Both women leaned in and their heads bumped. “Sorry,” they said at the same time, still looking at the blog.

  Ang sucked in her breath. “Let me tag this and print the content. We don’t want to lose anything in case he rips the site down.”

  The poem on the blog seemed to burn Marcella’s eyes. “Sick son of a bitch. He blames Cindy for making him kill her.”

  Ang was preoccupied with her tech tasks. The laser computer spat out pages of the blog’s text. Marcella grabbed them. “This is big. Could be some important intel inside.”

  “I’ll say it is. Let’s brief the team ASAP tomorrow morning.” Ang hit another key. “I’m setting up a trace on the blog. Next time he logs in and posts, I’ll be able to trace the computer. I’m running an alert to my computer and my phone, so wherever I am, I’ll know.”

  Marcella gathered the pages of the blog out of the printer.

  “I’d like to go study these back in my office. Let me know if anything else pops. I’m not planning to go home tonight. Extension 334.”

  “Pulling an all-nighter? Me too. I’ll call you if anything more surfaces. And give the Fight Club some thought. You might like it.”

  Marcella nodded and left, the pages tucked under her arm. Outside the womb of the IT lab, her hot-pink heels rang on the echoing floors. She stepped into her office and shut the door. Cleared the crap off her desk with a few sweeps of her arm, then turned on the halogen desk light. Sat down with the cleared surface and the stack of pages.

  Blog Entry

  I don’t like cops. Even ones

  That are pretty like

  The Fed who stood there all shiny hair and teeth

  She’s dangerous. Him too, the other one with

  A stupid accent, slow as cold honey

  But sharp eyes. Smart blue eyes that see more than they should.

  They remind

  Me of Dr. P’s eyes. Her blue eyes

  Were so surprised when

  I shot her.

  She never expected it of me.

  Everyone underestimates me

  But I’ll show them in the end like

  I showed her.

  Posted 11:24 p.m.

  Blog Entry

  Black hair soft hands your beautiful eyes.

  Cindy.

  Your real name was

  Cinderella Kealoha Anuhea Moku

  A mouthful of singing that

  You cut short because you wanted

  To break out.

  Conquer the haole world. Be

  A big-shot doctor.

  And you would have, too.

  I could have loved you, if I

  Loved like other people do.

  I tried.

  I wanted to.

  But you figured it out and

  You had to ask me.

  Stupid girl, so stupid. You

  Made me do it!

  I hate you for that.

  I can’t forget your eyes

  So disbelieving even as the rope

  Got tighter until

  They bulged and went blank.

  This wasn’t like Dr. P.

  I hated killing you.

  You made me do it.

  Posted 1:30 a.m.

  There weren’t many pages. Marcella noted the dates and times, but the clues weren’t much more than what they already knew—Pettigrew was shot and fell backward into the canal. Doubtless he lured her there with something important to discuss. And Cindy—Cindy found him out.

  This did narrow the search to someone having a relationship with Cindy, though—which narrowed the suspect pool to two, maybe three. Fernandez had to be the main suspect since he was both involved with Cindy and the posts came from his computer.

  But could it be a set-up? It seemed almost too easy. Still, as Lei often said, “Usually the obvious is the obvious.”

  Marcella prepped for the next day’s briefing and meeting with the team with a list of what they now knew about the unsub from the blogs and the additional financial intel on Kim. She called over to the unit keeping an eye on the lab at UH—no activity. Reminded them to contact her the minute anything moved.

  Her eyes finally grew heavy, and she reached under the desk for a thin, marshmallow-like camping mattress, an inflatable pillow, and one of those silver thermal blankets used for disaster victims—her home away from home. She rolled out the mattress and went to sleep, vaguely comforted by the thought that, a few floors away, Ang was still there too.

  She didn’t feel so lonely with Ang there.

  Chapter 12

  Marcella and Rogers stood at Fernandez’s door at what Rogers liked to call the “ass-crack of dawn.” Marcella had updated him on the blogs on the way, impressing him with the urgency of this interview—they might even be able to make an arrest.

  The doctoral candidate lived in an off-campus apartment at the University of Hawaii Manoa, in an older low-rise building, and rosy morning-lit clouds filled the sky. Marcella’s third cup of coffee still hadn’t started working, and she’d paid for her long night on the office floor with various aches and pains that reminde
d her she was closing in on thirty way too quickly.

  Marcella put some of her bad mood into pounding on the door. “Open up! FBI!”

  She stepped back when the door opened. Fernandez stood there in a drooping pair of boxers. “What do you want?”

  “We need to ask you some questions.” She pushed past him into a dim interior, ripe with the smell of fetid human and leftover pizza. She went into the living room, piled with laundry and empty takeout boxes, and swept some of the debris onto the floor. Sat. Set the camera phone on a cleared edge of the coffee table.

  “Please, make yourself at home.” Fernandez let some attitude creep into his voice. “I hope you don’t mind if I put on some pants.”

  “That would probably be best,” Rogers said as the intern went into his bedroom. “My, aren’t we grumpy,” he said, eying Marcella. “Is that yesterday’s shirt I see?”

  “Guy’s got some explaining to do,” Marcella said. She ignored the question about her shirt.

  “How can I help the FBI this morning?” Fernandez walked past her, clad in a T-shirt and sweatpants. He went into the kitchen, turned on the light. “I’m making coffee. Want some?”

  “She does,” Rogers answered for Marcella.

  “Did you hear about your colleague, Cindy Moku?” Marcella carried the phone with her as she went to the kitchen door.

  “I did. I’m…very sad and disturbed that she would take her own life.” Fernandez busied himself with the coffeepot, keeping his face turned away, a belching sound emerging from his throat. “I apologize. I have trouble with tics, and they get worse when I’m upset.”

  “Who told you she took her own life?” Marcella asked.

  “Dr. Truman called me. He told me. I’ve been too upset to go out. I took a pill and went to bed yesterday.”

  Marcella stalked into the kitchen, stood next to him. Tried to get eye contact. “Cindy didn’t kill herself. She was murdered—strangled and hung to look like suicide.”

  Jarod Fernandez became very still, the water flowing into the coffeepot, filling it, overflowing. Marcella reached out, turned him by the shoulder. He kept his head turned away, long hair flopping over his pale face. Another belch ripped from his throat.

  “Look at me. She was apparently your girlfriend. What do you have to say about that?”

  “Nothing. I can’t—I can’t imagine that. Not Cindy. No.”

  “Is that why you didn’t answer the door when the officer came by the other day?” Rogers asked. “We held interviews down at the Bureau offices, and everyone else showed up but you.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything.” Abruptly Fernandez’s legs folded, and he slid down the side of the sink to sit on the floor, his back against the cabinet. He wrapped his arms around his legs. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I can’t believe she…” He put his head down, the rest of his words lost in a welter of grunts and belches.

  Marcella walked through the jumble of food containers to the closed drapes in the living room, threw them open. Rogers reached over and turned off the water. The apartment was exposed in all its bachelor-slob glory.

  “Pull yourself together. We need to know all your movements on the day she died. We also have your number as the last one on Dr. Pettigrew’s cell phone before it went into the water,” Marcella said. She stalked back into the kitchen and was dismayed to see Fernandez was on his cell phone. He held up a hand toward her.

  “Uncle Bennie? I have FBI agents here questioning me about my girlfriend’s death.”

  “Shit,” Marcella mouthed over her shoulder to Rogers. The intern closed his phone and made eye contact for the first time.

  “Uncle Bennie says not to say anything and that he’s on his way.” Fernandez’s eyes and affect were flat. He wasn’t easy to read between the tics, floppy hair, and uneven emotional response. Marcella narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Your lack of cooperation is duly noted,” she said.

  Her phone toned and she strode away to answer it when she saw ME OFFICE in the little window.

  “I have my report on Cindy Moku ready, if you want to come down,” Fukushima said. “Otherwise I’ll just fax it to your office.”

  “Fax is fine. We’re in the middle of interviewing a witness,” Marcella said. “Anything of note? Any trace on her?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. She had some epithelials on the rope and a hair caught in it—matching back to Fernandez.”

  Marcella swiveled to look at Rogers, jerked her head toward the kitchen, where Fernandez was still sitting, silent but for the occasional croak. “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll look for your report back at the office.”

  She went back into the kitchen. Turned on the overhead light so she could get a good look at him. “Medical examiner says there was a hair of yours caught in the rope around Cindy’s neck and skin cells from your hands. Got any explanation for this?”

  Fernandez’s mouth opened. His eyes still looked flat, vacant. “Bitch,” he said.

  She reached out to yank him up, but Rogers held her back as Fernandez cried, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Sometimes the tics are swear words! Cunt! Whore!”

  Pounding on the door penetrated the haze of rage that nearly had Marcella kicking the shit out of an unarmed man. She became aware of Rogers’s hand on her arm, and she yanked it away.

  “Your lawyer’s here,” she snarled, and went to the door. Checked through the peephole—it was never a good idea to pull open a door without checking—and opened it to a rotund little man in an aloha shirt covered with parrots.

  “Hi. I’m Jarod’s uncle Bennie. Bennie Fernandez.” He smiled cherubically, a pure white, neatly trimmed beard framing a shiny white grin.

  Even new to Hawaii, Marcella had heard of Bennie Fernandez the defense attorney—a man whose Santa appearance had lulled many a prosecutor into losing.

  “Come in. Your client’s in the kitchen.”

  “What have you been doing to him?” Bennie rounded on her and Rogers as he spotted the young man curled in the fetal position on the floor, weeping theatrically.

  “He was calling me swear words just a minute ago,” Marcella said. “And we haven’t laid a hand on him or had time to even ask him anything.”

  “This man is having a psychiatric emergency. He is under the care of a physician. I’m going to call that professional now and lodge a complaint with your office for harassment of a handicapped witness.”

  “Hold on a minute, now,” Rogers said, letting out his drawl, twinkling with male camaraderie. “The boy just crumbled when we told him his girlfriend was murdered. In fact, he engaged in verbal assault of a federal officer, calling Agent Scott a bitch, cunt, and whore. She’s

  been a real lady about it, too.”

  Bennie Fernandez squatted beside his nephew. “Be that as it may, this interview is over.”

  “We’ll be back,” Marcella said.

  Bennie handed her a card. “All inquiries will be going through me from now on. Now, I suggest you back off before I follow through with that complaint.”

  Chapter 13

  Marcella had taken a moment to brush and retwist her hair, roll on some deodorant she kept in her desk, and make sure all her buttons were up before the briefing. Still, she felt gritty and sticky, and the contretemps at Fernandez’s house hadn’t done anything good for her temper. She stalked into the conference room and handed Rogers a pair of dry-erase markers.

  “You’re up, partner. Everyone’s bound to notice I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes if he makes me stand up there again.”

  “You got it, babe.” Rogers added bullet point marks to the two lists they’d started the previous day.

  Marcella knew the exact moment Kamuela arrived by the prickling of the hairs on the back of her neck. She kept her face turned away but felt him sit beside her.

  Waxman took his seat at the head of the table with his anointed, Gundersohn, at his right hand. Ang took the seat to his left. Waxman gestured to Marcella. “You asked
for this meeting, Agent Scott. What’s the update?”

  “Several, in fact. Agent Ang, want to fill the chief in on what you found last night?” Marcella inclined her head toward the other woman.

  Ang tapped a pile of papers in front of her. “Last night Agent Scott and I discovered an online blog that was being uploaded from one of the lab computers. This has a lot of implications and narrows our suspect pool, as we were hoping.” She stood up, distributed copies of the blog posts. “This is quick reading. You’ll see where Agent Scott highlighted the areas that help us narrow down the field.”

  Marcella gave the other agent a grateful look from under her lashes. Ang could have taken credit for the blog discovery, but she hadn’t—instead, taking care to prep for the briefing and give Marcella credit.

  “I also uncovered correspondence between Kim and a lab in Korea.” She distributed the translated e-mails. “The bad news on this is that when we closed down the lab, the correspondence was disrupted, so we don’t know if he was the one to steal the research and sell it—only that he was working on that prior to Dr. Pettigrew’s death and that her discovery of it makes for a powerful motive.”

  “Between the interviews and these e-mails and blog posts, I think we can narrow the field to Kim, Fernandez, and Abed. Natalie Pettigrew, while benefiting financially from Pettigrew’s death, doesn’t have the means or motive to kill Cindy Moku. Truman doesn’t have a relationship with Moku, unless there’s a serious love quadrangle going on we aren’t aware of. And there’s this.” Marcella distributed copies of Fukushima’s latest report. “Hair and skin cells from Fernandez were found on Moku’s body.”

  “Why didn’t you bring him in?” Waxman looked up at her from over his narrow steel reading glasses. She saw him notice her outfit from yesterday by the slight pinch of his nostrils.

  “We confronted him at his residence this morning. He reacted emotionally to the news of Moku’s murder and called his uncle. Unfortunately, his uncle is Bennie Fernandez,” Rogers said.

  Ching and Kamuela both groaned. “That man is a menace,” Ching said. “Judges and juries can’t seem to resist him.”