by Neil Plakcy
A Smart car came speeding out of the intersection with Aleo Place, turning onto Manoa Road in front of Dr. Z’s Lexus, but when the driver saw my flasher behind her, she swerved right off into a semi-circular driveway.
Dr. Z ran through the intersection where Manoa Road met up with East Manoa, narrowly avoiding a crash with a minivan, which ran off the road and into somebody’s front yard. I heard on the radio that cops were blocking Manoa where it met up with Ahualani on one side and Piper’s Pali on the other. They hoped to run her into the tennis courts on the makai side.
Dispatch said that the courts were being cleared, and I recognized Kitty Sampson’s car number among those that were being positioned around the courts. I kept up with Dr. Zenshen, trying not to cause any accidents but at least keep her in view. It wasn’t easy; the cars around us didn’t seem to care about getting out of our way. Dr. Z pulled up behind a couple of tourists in a convertible and blasted her horn, then swerved around them.
A late model Nissan pulled right in front of me off of Linohau Way, despite my flashing lights, and I could see the driver on his cell phone, oblivious to the chase going on around him.
Suddenly there were cop cars everywhere, pulling in off the side streets with sirens and flashers, all in pursuit of Dr. Z. The guy in front of me dropped the cell and grabbed his steering wheel with both hands, veering quickly off to the side of the road.
Our shepherding techniques worked, and we forced Dr. Z to turn into the tennis courts behind Berwick Field, where she blasted through the shrubbery in front of the middle court, smashing into the chain link fence. She brought the car to a stop and jumped out, looking right and left.
There were a couple of patrol cars between me and her, and the officers in those cars jumped out and pulled their weapons on her. She looked down at the gun in her hand and realized she had been outmaneuvered. She tossed the gun away from her and put her hands up in the air.
I didn’t wait around for formalities. There were plenty of cops there to cuff Dr. Zenshen and take her downtown. I made a U-turn and headed back up to Gladys Yuu’s house, listening to the radio for any report of damage or injury. All I heard was that there were fire engines on the scene. Well, duh.
Traffic was a mess in the wake of Dr. Z’s chase. I took East Manoa Road, because it would bring me up to Hillside, and even with getting away from Dr. Z’s original route it took a lot longer than it should have to climb back into Manoa. I wove in and out of residential streets until I reached where Gary Saunders and his patrol car were blocking the turn.
He waved me through, but I still had to park a block and a half away from Gladys’s house because of all the fire trucks. As I jogged toward the house I passed Mike’s truck, with its distinctive flames painted down the side. He’d never admit it, but he loved that decoration.
Parents and kids were standing in clusters on the street. I saw the skateboards the kids had been playing with, abandoned beside a mailbox, and a black slash in the grass where some fiery debris must have landed.
Overhead I heard the whirr of one of the news station helicopters. In a gesture of brotherly solidarity, I called Lui as I dodged around another family group, a mom and dad and three kids sharing a big bowl of popcorn, as if they were watching a movie.
“You have somebody out here in Manoa you want me to talk to, brah?” I asked, when Lui picked up.
“You’re a prince, Kimo. My truck is stuck a couple of blocks away but I have Ralph Kim and a cameraman on their way on foot. I’ll tell him to call you.”
Ray was leaning against one of the trucks as I ran up. He was sweating and his face and shirt were streaked with black soot. He shook his head. “I tried to get in there but the place was already an inferno. I heard a woman screaming.”
I grabbed him into a bear hug. “We can’t save them all, brah,” I said. “All we can do is try.”
He hugged me back, and then pulled away. “Your partner’s up there,” he said. “I talked to him for a minute. They found two bodies in the house, both women.”
“Most likely Gladys and her mother.” I told him about the car chase, how I’d turned around once I saw cops taking Dr. Z down. “You okay?”
He nodded. “Still a little shaky, but I’ll manage. Go see what you can find out.”
I walked toward the house. One wall was completely gone, sections of the roof had been destroyed, and there was still smoke coming from the interior.
Mike was in conversation with one of the firemen near the ruined wall. He spotted me, and motioned me over. “I’m not quite sure what we’re looking at here,” he said. “The explosion was localized on the exterior of the house, on this side.”
The fireman walked away, and Mike continued, pointing at the ground. “There are fragments of glass and metal there, and there. I think they might have been part of the electric meter. I looked at a couple of other houses on the block, and they all had exterior meters mounted on this wall.”
“The woman I chased down is some kind of electrical engineer,” I said. “So she probably knows her way around a meter.”
I filled him in on Dr. Zenshen and what we suspected.
“It’s going to take me a while to figure it all out. I’ll get you a copy of my report when I have it done.”
“She’s a smart woman,” I said. “You may be looking at something pretty sophisticated.”
“I can do sophisticated.” He looked over to where Ray was slumped against a kiawe tree, still sweating heavily. “You’d better go look after your other partner.”
INTERROGATION
I snagged a couple of bottles of water from one of the EMTs I knew through Mike and carried them over to Ray. As we were drinking, my cell rang, and a couple of minutes later I was on camera with Ralph Kim, a newscaster I’d had a couple of run-ins with in the past.
He set up the shot with the ruined house in the background, the last fire truck still hosing down the embers. I gave him a quick sound bite on the explosion. “There are at least two potential victims,” I said.
“Any idea what was going on?” Ralph asked.
“Right now, all I can say is that this is connected to an open investigation, as well as to the car chase through Manoa earlier today. But I believe you’ll see a resolution very quickly.”
“As always, Honolulu’s finest are on the job,” Ralph said, turning to the camera. “We’ll have a full report on the late news.”
Ray was feeling better by then, and we drove downtown. I was hyper-careful in traffic, figuring I’d used up all my good driving karma earlier in the chase with Dr. Zenshen.
As we drove, we talked about the interrogation. “There are a lot of parts to this case, so we’re going to have to start in the right place in order to get the information we need,” I said.
“So where do you think that is?” Ray coughed and hacked up something from his throat, then opened the window and spit it out. When he pulled his head back in he said, “Not with Zoë Greenfield’s murder. That came later.”
“I agree. But how far do we go back? Her coming here from China? The technology her company uses?”
He shook his head. “I’m thinking we start with Wyatt. We get her to talk about him and how he got hold of the information he had. From there, maybe we can get her to talk about taking him out on the boat.”
“Sounds like a plan. You want to take lead?”
He coughed again. “My voice is still raw from the smoke. You take it and I’ll jump in when I think I should.”
Lidia Portuondo and Kitty Cardozo had teamed up to shepherd Dr. Z through the booking process, and they were almost done by the time we arrived. Dr. Z was quiet and poised as we walked her to an interview room before transporting her to the jail.
She sat down in a wooden chair, and I sat across from her and switched on the tape recorder. Ray lounged against the wall behind me. I read her rights; since it was clear that she couldn’t just pick up and walk out, it was important that we got everything on the record and follo
wed the rules.
“Do you understand these rights?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to speak out loud for the recording.”
“Yes, I understand,” she said. “I am just glad to get a chance to explain what has happened. You will see that I am the victim here.”
I love a suspect who’s willing to talk. “Then let’s get started.” We went through the formalities, getting her name, address and so on.
Then I jumped in, where Ray and I had decided we would begin. “You have an employee named Wyatt Collins?”
“That is correct. He works for my company, Néng Yuán.”
“Tell us what happened this afternoon.”
She smiled. “My company owns a boat, so that we can go out into the ocean regularly to check on our research projects. One of the wave attenuators has been returning anomalous data, so I went out to see what was wrong. I invited Mr. Collins to accompany me.”
Her back was erect, her hands folded in front of her on the table. She was a very cool customer, I had to give her that.
“When we reached the wave attenuators, Mr. Collins made some threatening remarks. He indicated that he had been working with a woman at the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, the agency that regulates our research. That he had been feeding her false data, and that he was going to put the blame for that onto me if I didn’t pay him a very large sum.”
“That must have been upsetting,” I said.
She nodded. “And then he began threatening me, physically. I grabbed the first thing I could find, a gaff we use to pull in the attenuators to check them. In defending myself I hit him with the gaff, and he fell overboard.”
“What happened then?”
“There was another boat approaching. I was frightened for my safety, Detective, so I left the area immediately. I worried that the approaching boat might have had friends of Mr. Collins, and that I would be in danger if I remained there.”
“What did you do after that?”
“I returned the boat to the slip behind my office,” Dr. Zenshen said. “And then I determined to go and speak directly with the woman Mr. Collins had implicated.”
She spread her hands out then. “I know it was not the wisest decision, but I was very upset. I should simply have called the police and reported Mr. Collins. Did you know that he is an ex-convict?”
“Yes, I am aware of that fact.”
“Well, I was not aware, when I hired him. I can assure you that I never would have hired such a person if I had known.”
“Why did you hire him?”
“He came very highly recommended,” she said. “By the woman who I learned was working with him. Gladys Yuu.”
“So Gladys recommended him? Not Zoë Greenfield?”
She played her part well. “I don’t recognize that name.”
“Really? She’s the analyst at the state bureau who reviewed your data.”
“Ah, that is the reason, then,” she said. “There are safeguards, you see, to keep the reviewers separate from those who are being reviewed. All my contact with the office went through Gladys Yuu. The same was true for my employees, including Mr. Collins.”
“Let’s get back to this afternoon,” I said. “You went to speak with Gladys Yuu?”
“Yes. But I never got the chance. As I approached her house, an explosion occurred. I ran away, once again, frightened for my life. I was chased by a man in a Jeep, and I thought he was another associate of Mr. Collins and Ms. Yuu.”
“Even with the blue police light on the roof of the Jeep?” I asked.
For the first time, her confidence faltered. “Excuse me?”
“I was the one chasing you, Dr. Zenshen. In my Jeep. With the blue light flashing on the top.”
“I was very upset,” she said. “I had just discovered that my employee had been stealing from me, and then I was physically threatened.”
She leaned forward. “He told me that he had killed Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose, and that he would kill me, too.”
“Miriam Rose?” Ray asked. “Who’s that?”
We could tell from Dr. Zenshen’s face that she knew she’d screwed up. How would she know Miriam’s name, if she had pretended not to know Zoë because she was shielded from the state employees?
“He told me,” she said, her voice becoming more shrill, her accent even stronger. “He told me that he had been working with Gladys, and that Zoë and Miriam had discovered what he was doing. He killed them, detective. He would have killed me.”
My cell phone rang, and I could see from the display that it was Mike. “I have to take this call,” I said, standing up. “Detective Donne will stay with you until I return.”
I flipped the phone open as I walked out the door. “What’s up?”
“I’m still up at the blast site. But one of the guys here spoke to a crime scene tech working on your suspect’s car. They found fuses and ammonium nitrate. It looks like that stuff will match what was used in the blast.”
“Thanks. I’ll probably be home late.”
“Me, too. I’ll call my dad and get him to walk Roby.”
We both said that we loved each other before we ended the call. I walked back into the interview room and asked, “What is ammonium nitrate used for, Doctor?”
She looked confused for a moment, then recovered. “I suffer from migraine headaches, detective. I carry ammonium nitrate with me in my car because you can mix it with plain water to make a cold pack, which I used to relieve the migraine pressure.”
“It can also be used as an explosive, can’t it?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Come now, Doctor. You have a PhD in electrical engineering. I’m sure you’re quite familiar with the properties of most common chemicals.”
She just smiled at me.
“I think we’re done for now.” I turned off the recorder, and Ray and I stepped outside. We got an officer to escort Dr. Zenshen to the holding cells, where she would wait for her arraignment.
“She’s smart,” Ray said.
“You bet. But we’re smarter. We’ll catch her.”
We went over to the Queen’s Medical Center, where Wyatt Collins was resting in a private hospital room after a doctor had stitched up the wound from the gaff. “Guess I’m unemployed, huh?” Wyatt said.
“A gaff in the chest is a pretty harsh termination notice,” I said. “You want to tell us what happened this afternoon?”
“I was working at my desk around three, when Dr. Zenshen came in. She said that she had to go out and check on some of the wave attenuators, and it would be good for me to see what it was I was working on.”
He shifted in the hospital bed and I could see the pain etched on his face. “I didn’t want to go. I’m a lousy swimmer, and I just didn’t trust her. But she was very persistent, and, well, up ’til then I figured I had to do whatever I could to hold on to my job.”
“Did she have a gun?”
“No. Why?”
“The receptionist thought she might have,” I said. “That’s what convinced us you were taken onto the boat against your will.”
“Good for her.” He sighed. “She didn’t talk much as we rode out toward the wave attenuator area. But then when she shut the engine down, she started asking me all these questions. About Zoë, and about the numbers we submitted to the state. I was trying to dodge around things, but she was on to me.”
“What do you mean, she was on to you?”
“She knew that Zoë had two different sets of data, and she was sure that I’d given her the second set, the true numbers. She started cursing at me, first in English and then I guess what was Chinese. I just kept denying it, and darting around the boat.”
“And then?”
“Then we heard this other boat coming up. Neither of us knew who was in it, but it made her even jumpier. All of a sudden she grabbed this fishing pole with a hook on the end and st
abbed me.”
“A gaff,” I said. “They use it to bring fish in.”
“All I know is that it hurt like a son of a bitch, and I was doubled over with the pain. She dropped the pole and pushed me, and I went over into the water. I was sure I was going to drown until you grabbed me.”
We went back over his story a couple of times, even asking him to repeat the events backwards to be sure he wasn’t making stuff up or leaving stuff out. He came through pretty well every time.
The assistant district attorney was waiting for us at headquarters. She was a young haole woman, only a few years out of law school, but she seemed to know her stuff. We went over the case, and everything we had on Xiao Zenshen. Finally, she said, “I have enough for the arraignment. I’ll be back in touch with you tomorrow.”
It was late, and neither Ray nor I had gotten dinner. I sent him home to Julie, then grabbed takeout from Zippy’s on my way home. While I ate, Mike and I traded information. “You going to be able to nail her?” he asked, when we were done.
“Hard to say,” I said. “Like I said, she’s a smart woman. I still don’t know if she killed Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose, or if Gladys Yuu did. And if Gladys did, was Xiao Zenshen pulling the strings? But it’s up to the ADA to make the case, now. Ray and I just have to testify.”
“What’s your gut reaction?”
“My gut says that Dr. Z was behind it all, but I think Gladys did the actual killing.”
“She was Chinese, right?”
I nodded.
“She had to do whatever she could to keep her mother going,” he said. “It’s what good children do, especially when they come from cultures that demand that kind of behavior.” He looked at me, as I was crumpling up the paper from my dinner. “We haven’t shut the door on kids yet, have we?”