5 Twisted Vine

by Toby Neal

  Lei moved through the living room, carrying the items they were taking back to the Bureau. Alexis Hale spotted her and hung up on her sister, dropping the phone with a clatter into the cradle.

  “What did you find?” she cried, eyes wide and fastened on the paper evidence bags Lei carried. Ken intercepted her. “We do have something to discuss with you, but please let my partner put away our equipment first.”

  He sat beside her on the acre or so of creamy leather couch, and Lei walked out to the black Bureau Acura nicknamed the “bu-car,” securing the evidence in a small, locked box in the back. She stowed the crime kits and beeped the vehicle locked, aware of the long lenses of the photographers trained on her through the bars of the gate, the voice of a reporter on camera behind her. They were probably Googling her, and she was relieved that even though Kamuela had left in his beige department-issued SUV, he’d left a black-and-white HPD cruiser parked at the gate, barring illegal intrusions.

  Lei hurried back into the house, carrying the small video camera they used for interviews. Mrs. Hale was sipping a glass of water, Ken’s hand on her shoulder, when she returned.

  “Is it okay if we tape this? We need to get a little more information from you, and if we tape we won’t have to reinterview you at headquarters.” This usually worked to allow the taping, and today was no exception.

  “All right.”

  Lei turned on the video, and Ken said to Alexis, “Do you have any samples of Corby’s handwriting we can see?”

  “Why?” Her eyes widened and filled with tears as her hand covered her mouth. “Is there—is there a suicide note?”

  “There appears to be.”

  “No. No.” She shook her head. “No.”

  “It appears to be a suicide note, but there are some inconsistencies at the scene, and we aren’t drawing any immediate conclusions at this time,” Lei said. Ken narrowed his eyes at her, but Lei’s comment worked to distract Alexis.

  “What do you mean? Like, someone else killed my son?”

  Ken pulled her gaze back in his direction. “This is an investigation, Mrs. Hale. We are trying to figure out what happened to Corby, whether accident, suicide, or something else. Please tell us again what you told Agent Texeira before about his behavior and how it had changed.”

  “Yes. Okay.” Mrs. Hale took another sip of water, smoothing her hair with a gesture that also wiped the pain from her face. Lei was again impressed with the woman’s ability to master her emotions. “He’d been withdrawn. Quiet. Pulled away from us. Didn’t want to come to dinner, didn’t want to tell us where he was or who he was with. Like I said before, I thought it was a phase. He was growing up.” She covered her mouth with her hand, closed her eyes. Went on. “I didn’t like all his friends. I didn’t like the online thing.”

  “Online thing?” Lei had cursorily looked around the computer in his room, but they hadn’t taken it since it hadn’t seemed a large part of this outdoorsy young man’s life.

  “Yes. He had some sort of game or something. When he was home, he was always on there, with that awful hard metal music playing. I complained about it, said it was bad for his social life, and he said he was making friends online. People who understood him.”

  Lei barely restrained herself from jumping up to go grab the computer. Instead she stood, out of view of the video recorder, and paced a bit. This was what she and Ken had worked out—she had to move when she was agitated, but he didn’t want her running off in the middle of an interview. They’d also discovered that Lei’s background restlessness seemed to motivate interviewees to talk faster, infusing them with urgency to unburden themselves. Mrs. Hale was no exception.

  “I think maybe this is connected with that online thing. I don’t know, but he was so secretive about it.”

  Lei could well imagine that if it was some kind of gay chat room or porn-sharing site, Corby certainly wouldn’t have wanted his mother to know about it. “We’ll need to take his computer.”

  “Of course. Just find out what happened. And I’d like a copy of that note, if you can get us one as soon as possible. I want my husband to see what his work did to us.”

  “Yes. I’ll fax a copy to you as soon as we are done processing the paper,” Ken said. “But what do you mean about your husband’s work?”

  “It took over our lives. I think we made too many sacrifices for my husband’s ambition. I, for one, am done.”

  Lei felt conflicted hearing this, hoping Mrs. Hale was just venting her grief in anger. The senator was a popular lawmaker, known for his environmental policies and trying to bring Hawaii into the forefront of ecotourism, even make the little island state a power player in national policy. This loss could derail his bright career and have repercussions on a national scale.

  “I hope you will just take some time to grieve,” Lei said. “I hope you will turn to each other and not against each other. You’ve both lost your son.”

  Alexis Hale looked at Lei a long moment, blue eyes narrowed. “You have no idea what I’ve lost. I’ll go get you those handwriting samples.” She got up and walked out.

  Just then Jessie the maid, a pretty Filipina girl in a bright fitted muumuu, opened the living room door, admitting a weeping blond woman. “Mrs. Hale’s sister,” she said.

  Lei pointed down the hall. “She went to the bedroom.”

  It hadn’t escaped Lei or Ken that the Hales had separate bedrooms. The woman ran down the hall, and they heard the noisy greeting of the sisters. Ken stood, pressed Off on the video camera.

  “Let’s get back to the office, brief SAC Waxman. I’ll get the handwriting samples from Mrs. Hale.”

  “I’ll get the computer.”

  Back in the boy’s room, Lei unplugged his laptop, detaching it from a monitor, printer and Internet ports. Taped to the side of the printer was a Post-it with a series of passwords.

  “How handy,” she whispered. “Thanks, Corby.”

  Lei took a last look around the room, the life already gone from it, the stripped bed a stark reminder. She felt her chest go tight with sorrow, and she walked out with the computer in her arms. The only thing she could do for the young man was investigate—but she had a feeling Corby’s parents weren’t going to like the answers they found.

  Chapter 2

  Ken carried the computer and Lei, the rest of the packaged evidence, as they rose in the elevator of the Prince Kuhio Federal Building to the tenth-floor FBI offices. The door opened on the gracious lobby with its marble floors, leather couch, and fan of Guns & Ammo magazines on the coffee table, a fresh-faced New Agent Trainee behind the bulletproof glass booth. The NAT, Amit Gupta, a clean-cut young Indian man, gave a big grin at the sight of them. “Let me help!” he exclaimed, coming out of the cubicle.

  “We got it,” Lei said, smiling back. It wasn’t that long since she’d been sitting where Amit was, and she still remembered the boredom of answering phones and running background checks, which went with the training period—a period that had been extended especially for her due to some procedural mishaps on a case.

  Ken waited, his arms full as she juggled her armload of packages, fumbling for her ID badge. Amit took it from her, swiping it through the lock that opened the steel-cored automatic door leading to Bureau headquarters.

  Lei took back her badge. “Thanks, Amit.” The NAT nodded and went back into the booth as Ken and Lei’s black athletic shoes squeaked down the hall.

  Marcella poked her elegant head out of her office. “Lei, stop a minute. I want you to meet someone.”

  “Let me drop these off first.”

  “Sure.” Marcella pulled back into her office. Lei noticed the blind was down over the door as she passed, and she frowned. Who could be in there? Marcella sometimes liked to “surprise” her, like the time she’d tried to set Lei up again with Alika Wolcott, whom she’d disastrously dated, at the gym. Lei was still in limbo relationship-wise.

  Lei had chosen her career in the FBI and left her boyfriend Michael Stevens be
hind on Maui. Ever the gentleman rescuer, heartbroken and rebuffed, Stevens had married Anchara Mookjai to help the Thai woman get citizenship. While Stevens and Anchara had tried to make their marriage work, Lei’s career choice of the FBI had been rocky.

  After they’d worked through the drama of his doomed marriage last year, Stevens had gone back to Maui and she’d buckled down and focused on regaining her credibility at the Bureau while they waited for his wife Anchara’s citizenship to come through. They were in touch, but only minimally, as phone calls and Skyping just reminded them both how hard it was to wait to be together. Both of them had plenty to do at work without stirring up emotions.

  “Let’s use Workroom One,” Ken said. “I want to get the case file going, and we can inventory these items before we brief Waxman.”

  “Okay.” They turned into the workroom, a functional space with a locked temporary evidence locker, worktables with bright halogen lights over them, computer stations, and various analysis equipment. Lei was eager to fingerprint the heroin kit and the suicide note, but she’d told Marcella she’d be back. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, stowing her armload of evidence in the locker.

  “You can leave it unlocked. I still have to inventory it,” Ken said, setting down the computer on a table. “I’ll take this down to Information Technology in a minute, see how soon Sophie can take a look at it.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll be right back,” Lei said. She grabbed a water bottle out of the little fridge and hurried back to Marcella’s office. She knocked on the door and gave it a push. It swung inward and bumped into Marcus Kamuela. Wrapped in his arms, looking disheveled and thoroughly kissed, was Marcella.

  They sprang apart. “Uh—this is Marcus Kamuela, Lei. My boyfriend.”

  Lei felt a hollowing under her sternum. “The night marchers walking over her tummy” as her aunty Rosario used to say. Of all the people in the world to be dating her best friend, why did it have to be the detective investigating that nemesis from her past, the Kwon murder? “We’ve met. Saw each other this morning, in fact. Hi again.”

  “I didn’t realize you were the friend Marcella’s always talking about,” Kamuela said, looking a little sheepish as he straightened his shirt. “Sorry I was irritated this morning. I hate to miss a case.”

  “I know how you feel about your cases,” Lei said, remembering Kamuela’s hard cop face in front of the television cameras on the day Charlie Kwon was murdered. She and Kamuela had had a conversation outside Kwon’s apartment a year later about the unsolved case. The murder of her childhood molester still held the potential to ruin her life. Lei pasted a smile on her face. “So this is the mystery detective you’ve been dating, Marcella. Turns out Marcus and I met when I first got to the Bureau.”

  “Well.” Marcella smoothed escaped bits of hair from what she called the “FBI Twist” back into their pins. “I wanted to be sure Marcus and I were going to . . . you know. Be a thing. Before I introduced you.”

  “She’s commitment phobic,” Kamuela said, with that crooked, attractive white grin Lei had noticed more than once.

  “Well, happy for you guys,” Lei said. “Listen, I’d better get back . . .”

  “So when is Stevens coming over? We need to do something together, a double date or something,” Marcella said.

  “I’m not sure.” Lei lifted the water bottle in a little toasting gesture. “I’ll let you know. Well, gotta run. Carry on.” She pulled the door shut on Marcella’s laugh, imagining Kamuela sweeping her friend back into his arms and continuing to mess up her hair with kisses.

  It made Lei feel a little sick with loneliness and worry. What if Kamuela ever connected her with the Kwon murder? It would devastate Marcella and drive a wedge between all of them. Lei had confronted the pedophile in his apartment on the day he was shot, dressed in a disguise Marcella had unwittingly given her.

  Lei ducked into the unisex bathroom and flipped the lock on the door. She did a nervous pee, washed her hands. Her oval face with its sprinkle of cinnamon freckles reflected pale in the silver metal of the paper towel dispenser as she yanked out a handful of towels, running a little water on them and patting her face.

  Lei’s full mouth tightened as she remembered Charlie Kwon: her mother’s boyfriend, drug pusher, and pedophile. Just when she started to forget about it, his unsolved murder would bubble up with its taint of the past. Charlie Kwon, on his knees in front of her with his eyes shut, saying, “Do what you came to do!”

  The Glock had wobbled wildly as she absorbed the blow that he didn’t even remember who she was, and she was frightened that she might actually shoot him by accident. She’d hit him with the weapon and he’d folded up like a beach chair, unconscious but alive.

  Someone had come in after her and shot him point-blank. If she was ever identified as the woman seen leaving Kwon’s building, all she had was her disguise and a gunshot-residue-free pair of yellow rubber gloves to say she hadn’t killed him.

  Her curly hair was a disaster after being held captive in a hairnet for an hour or so. She took a couple of handfuls of water and splashed it on, scrunching the frizz back into ringlets. This took some effort, and she couldn’t help remembering Stevens’s voice, full of affection as he pulled on a curl, watching it stretch and spring back as he said, “Your hair. It’s like a pet or something.”

  Oh, to be in Stevens’s arms, stealing a kiss behind a closed door like Kamuela and Marcella. It would be heaven. They’d decided not to sleep together while he was married, but there’d been many times Lei had wished she could just hop on a plane and go over to Maui and spend a weekend with him.

  She’d earned this purgatory. Seeing Marcella’s happiness just reminded her of all she was missing. It was just better not to think about it.

  Chapter 3

  Sophie Ang sat in her computer bay with three large screens ranged around what she called “the cockpit.” The low lighting of the FBI’s information-technology floor, the sound-deadening walls and carpet, gave the space a womblike feel—but the cool temperature kept the computers humming and agents alert.

  And right now, Sophie was feeling more than alert—she was what she’d heard called “wired in.” Time seemed to stop, and she entered a state of total synchronicity between the computers, her brain, and her body. Sophie called it “the zone.” If she could have, she’d be plugged directly into the mainframe, but such technology didn’t yet exist. She knew it was only a matter of time, and she’d be one of the first to sign up.

  Sophie had a mug of strong Thai tea at her elbow, and her long golden-brown fingers flew over the keys as she typed in the latest information on Corby Alexander Hale III direct from the scene, piped to her from Lei and Ken through their secure laptop. The photos Lei had taken, their notes, pictures of the suicide note, porn, and heroin kit all flowed through her fingers into the program she’d built.

  She’d named it DAVID. The Data Analysis Victim Information Database was designed to analyze crimes into trend-driven subgroups. Unbound by geography or human bias, DAVID was able to mine law-enforcement databases and use statistical probability to hunt down trends that would be missed any other way—and this time, she was finding a trend with an 80-percent confidence ratio. She could add and take away variables that reconfigured the data based on information as it came in. Nationwide, there was an uptick in suicides. Suicides with inconsistencies. Suicides that weren’t really suicides.

  Sophie still vividly remembered watching the news report a few weeks ago that had caught her interest—a series of odd suicides in Portland. One of the victims, a woman with chronic depression who’d overdosed on sleeping pills, looked uncannily like Sophie’s mother.

  When she’d entered all the data and hit Submit, DAVID hummed a long moment, the screen blank.

  DAVID didn’t produce conclusions. It used a probability algorithm that had taken her almost a year to write to provide a percentage of confidence that a given hypothesis was true or false. She had typed in the code
for “suicide,” having ruled out accidental death herself because of the note and posed quality of the body.

  A window popped open: “30-percent chance suicide.”

  That made it 70-percent probable that Corby Alexander Hale III had been murdered, or assisted in his suicide by someone else—still technically murder.

  Sophie pushed back from her bay and stood up, stretching her arms high above her head, arching her back. She bent back down to lay her palms flat on the plastic chair guard on the floor. Other agents dotted around the room didn’t look up; they were used to Sophie’s frequent workout breaks.

  At five foot nine and a hundred and fifty pounds, Sophie Ang was a tall woman with a rangy build and the long muscles of an athlete. She wore loose black rayon pants and a stretchy white blouse with black rubber-soled athletic shoes, well within Bureau guidelines but an outfit that was all about comfort.

  Sophie rolled an exercise ball out from under her desk and lay backward, arching all the way over it to stretch. She picked up and crossed two dumbbells on her chest and began a series of sit-ups. When she’d done a hundred, she put down the weights, turned over on her stomach, rolled the ball down to her feet, and did a hundred push-ups.

  It was hard to keep fit at a desk job, but Sophie loved mixed martial arts too much to let sitting all day make her soft. After she joined the FBI and learned combat skills, she discovered the Women’s Fight Club at her local gym, and she’d been hooked on the intense sport that was a combination of boxing, wrestling, and martial arts.

  As Sophie did the push-ups, her busy brain ticked over this new information on the Hale case—information she knew Special Agent in Charge Waxman wouldn’t like. In fact, she still had the DAVID program under wraps. She dreaded the moment she had to tell the SAC she was running her own software on the Bureau servers. Truth was, she’d hoped to get some results before she disclosed how she’d come to them.

  Any defense attorney would have a field day with the fact that an untested, unsanctioned computer program had generated results pointing to their client. Which was, in fact, a good reason to keep the program secret for the moment—there wasn’t a suspect yet to point to, just a confidence ratio that said the boy’s death wasn’t suicide.