by Toby Neal
“So this program can basically go hunting for types of crimes nationwide, looking for common MOs and other variables such as weapons, et cetera?” Waxman clarified at last.
“Yes. But it can work only with what’s been inputted, so the more we digitize criminal records, the more effective DAVID is going to be.”
“What about DAVID’s unauthorized access to local and state police department records?”
“I’m sure that’s going to be something to be worked out, sir, but don’t you think the greater good justifies it?”
“Of course it does. That doesn’t mean we’ll all be able to sit down and play nice in the sandbox.” Waxman sighed, rubbed his eyes again. “Save a copy of the software and deliver it to my office by the end of the day. I’ve got to make some calls.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said again.
This time the look he shot her was hard. “One apology is enough. Never apologize more than once.”
“Yes, sir.” Sophie unplugged her laptop and fled as he reached for the triangular conference phone in the center of the table.
Chapter 10
Ken pushed the doorhandle bar to open the hermetically sealed door of the morgue. Ever since Lei’s friend had died on the Big Island, Lei had trouble with morgues. She’d begun her relaxation breathing in the hallway—in through the nose, out through the mouth, counting to three—but even with that and with a dab of Vicks under her nose, every muscle in her body tightened at the chemical-over-biology smell.
Several draped bodies decorated wheeled tables in the big, chilly room with its range of sinks and steel wall of closed box doors. Dr. Fukushima and her assistant were bent over the brightly lit chest cavity of some unfortunate as they entered. The medical examiner looked up, her gloved hands covered with gore. “I’ll be right with you.”
“We’ll be over here,” Ken said. They pulled back against her desk, an island of normality behind a transparent shoji. They sat on a couple of folding chairs until Fukushima arrived, her mask lifted onto the top of her head, snapping off the gloves and tossing them into a biohazard bin.
“We were able to get the posts done on your two suicides—luckily things haven’t been busy lately, though there was a big pileup on the H-3 and I’m backed up now. I sent your blood and tox results off; we should have them by tomorrow since you told me to put a rush on it.”
“Thanks, Dr. Fukushima,” Lei said as the doctor sat down in her wheeled chair.
“Well. I’m curious too. Suicides that look like suicides but just aren’t right.” The doctor picked up a file. “I’ll e-mail these to you, but so far it’s looking much as we suspected. Alfred Shimaoka died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. All the physical signs are there for that. And Corby Hale died of heart failure, no doubt due to a heroin injection. But what was interesting— and will be confirmed in his blood work—is this.” She passed Ken the file on the young man and opened it to a picture Lei wished she hadn’t had to see. “Lesions inside his mouth. The boy likely had AIDS. Signs just weren’t generally visible yet.”
“Ah,” Ken said. Lei noticed a slight tremble in his hands as they held the folder.
“Maybe that’s why he took his life. Didn’t want to go through that. Though people can live a normal life span now. It’s not the death sentence it once was,” Lei said.
“The point I’m making is that both of these men, while they might have been ill, died well before they would have naturally. Alfred had pancreatic cancer, and according to his records kept here at the hospital, he refused treatment. Wouldn’t do anything—chemo, radiation, nothing. By the state of his pancreas and the cancer I found elsewhere, I’d have said he had six months. Most people want every day they can get.” Dr. Fukushima set the folder down. “I’m ruling these deaths as assisted suicides.”
“That gives our case some momentum,” Lei said. “We think there’s some sort of online connection that they made. Our tech department’s looking into it.”
“Well, I’m glad you agree. I was really in two minds about this, but the amount of time both of them would have had left makes this a crime worth pursuing.”
Lei noticed Ken was still gazing down at the images of Corby Hale. His face was pale and rigid. She took the folder out of his hands and set it back on the desk. “Thanks, Doctor. We’ll look forward to the tox results.”
Ken followed her out into the shiny, fluorescent-lit linoleum hallway. The whoosh and click of the morgue door behind them felt like liberty to Lei. She turned to Ken and put a hand on his arm as they walked down the hall.
“Want to get some coffee?”
“Okay.” They turned in to the cafeteria, one floor up. Lei got a tray and loaded it with coffee as well as some Portuguese sausage, a scoop of rice, and scrambled eggs from behind the cafeteria counter. It was almost midday, but she hadn’t eaten yet today. She joined Ken with his lone Styrofoam cup of coffee in one of the vinyl booths.
She tore open packets of salt and pepper, sprinkled them over her breakfast.
“Something’s up. What’s going on with you?”
“Bugs me. That kid.” Ken stirred creamer into his coffee with a red-and-white-striped stir stick. He tapped the stick, lay it down, took a sip of the coffee, grimaced. He set the cup down. “So young. Shouldn’t be dead that way.”
“Or sick that way.”
“Or sick that way,” Ken agreed. “He should have known better.”
“He was so young.” Between them lay the awkward topic of Ken’s sexual orientation, the fact that he was in the closet about it. “Kids always think they’re going to be the exception.”
“Someone might have infected him on purpose. I’ve heard rumors of someone doing that. Here in Honolulu.”
“That should be a crime we could investigate.”
“It should, but it’s not.” Ken took another sip of the coffee, winced. “Man. This stuff is really bad.”
Lei had made short work of her breakfast and now she sipped the coffee. It really was bad. “Lot of us with our own side projects going on.” She’d never told Ken about her connection to the Kwon murder. “What do you think of Sophie’s DAVID program?”
“It’s going to be amazing when it gets okayed. Though I’m trying to imagine a world where DAVID gets to freely roam through all the criminal databases of all the states—I can’t see that getting approved. Everyone wants to guard their cases and data.”
“We should keep the bigger picture in mind, though. I think of one of my cases early on, before I was a detective. Serial rape case. The perp had been preying on girls on different islands. If we’d had that communication easily available, we could have seen it was all connected sooner.” Lei took a sip of the coffee for something to do, and regretted it.
“Well, it will be interesting to see how Waxman handles the DAVID thing.”
“I felt sorry for Sophie. Maybe I should call her, see how it went.”
Ken looked up. His face had lightened a bit. “She’d be shocked. You aren’t exactly the BFF type.”
“Hey.” Lei stood, picked up her empty tray. “Marcella’s teaching me some manners. I’m getting better.”
“Speaking of Marcella. Did you see who she’s dating?”
“I did. They seem pretty into each other.”
“Yeah. So when’s your boyfriend coming over from Maui?”
Lei tossed her trash, stowed the tray, pushed the glass door open with her shoulder, Ken right behind her. “Don’t know. But I’m hoping soon. How about your boyfriend?”
Ken raised a brow at her, and she laughed. “Fine then. Back to work.”
Sophie arrived at her workstation and felt the dim coolness of the IT lab, her comfort zone, bring her heart rate down after the stress of the meeting with Waxman. She stowed the laptop in the slotted shelf she’d set aside for it. She liked to have her work area clear. She fired up her computers, and while they booted, she got out the big ball, lay facedown on it, rolled it down under her feet, and began doing push-ups.<
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“Everything okay?”
Sophie continued her push-ups without looking up. “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?” Sophie sped up, feeling the exertion discharge stress from the meeting. “Pull out another ball and join me.”
Bateman, a pudgy geek fresh out of Quantico, seemed to have developed a crush on her. He swung by her station way more often than she’d like, on one pretext or another.
“No, thanks.” Bateman watched her as she flipped back over and began her sit-up routine. “I don’t know how you make yourself do those all day.”
“Keeps me in shape for the gym.”
“What gym is this?”
“Fight Club down on Kalakaua.”
Bateman was silent. He had to have enough physicality to have made it through the Academy’s rigorous tests. She took pity on him. “You can come down sometime. It’s good for our tech skills for us to stay in shape, keep a balance.”
“I’d like that.”
Sophie resumed her sit-ups, and he drifted away to his station.
IT was like that. Everyone had their quirks—and now she’d challenged Bateman to something that he might even consider a date, which would be awful. Sophie felt a stab of loneliness. She’d definitely felt a tingle the other day as Alika demonstrated a hold, his steely arm around her waist . . . She suppressed the feeling by sitting on the ball in a V shape, carefully balancing, holding her legs straight out for a count of a hundred and fifty. Finally, trembling, she did some stretches, refilled her big water cup, and settled into her cockpit, all her screens humming.
She cracked her supple fingers and opened up the entry screen of DyingFriends.
Copying each piece of information as she developed it, she planted a dummy IP address in case the system admin was watching for law enforcement and began a profile: Shasta McGill, aged forty-three, sick with leukemia and not expected to live. Two children, divorced. Username ShastaM, password a transparent combination of numbers that were a fictional birth date. She imported a photo from the FBI stock photo archives of a wan-looking pretty blond woman.
All these details she saved into a text box and sent to Waxman per his request.
When her profile was complete, she hit Enter and was admitted to DyingFriends. Within the home screen were various topic areas, chat threads, and pages with links and resources. So far, nothing more than morbid, she thought, surfing a catalog of burial choices, featuring everything from caskets to crematoriums.
She supposed, for the dying, it must be comforting to be able to freely talk with other dying people. She cruised through the thread discussions: “When do I tell the kids I’m dying” to “I want out early.”
She zeroed in on that one. After all, their cases had involved suicide, and their two victims had met each other here.
The chat conversation started off lively, with a debate about the worth of such a choice and petered out with one respondent, CancerCurmudgeon, saying, “You have to live out the number of days God gives you.”
She typed in a response: “Hi, I’m Shasta, and I’ve got terminal leukemia. I’m sick and miserable and, frankly, I don’t see the point of many more days.”
She felt a twinge, the phantom pain of her own losses and the depression she battled with exercise. This wasn’t easy, imagining herself in this woman’s shoes.
CancerCurmudgeon responded. “Make your peace with God and accept his will. You’ll have more peace.”
“God has nothing to do with cancer, and if he does, I have a few words to say to him,” ShastaM typed back.
“God is sovereign, and we are eternal beings. It’s this life and cancer that are illusions.”
“I don’t buy that. I believe in reincarnation. This life is a revolving door, and I want out.” Sophie had to pause to consider what Shasta’s position was—and she realized she didn’t really know her own. It brought a hollowness to the pit of her stomach. She’d been so busy trying to live, she’d never really considered death.
“You’ll die, and it will be too late. You’ll burn in hell, and I’ll be laughing from heaven.”
“I get to believe what I believe,” ShastaM said, even as Sophie wondered how she’d so quickly locked horns with a “troll” on a forum. They were everywhere on the Internet, and dying or not, they were opinionated, rude, and hiding behind anonymity. Just as she was, she reminded herself.
Sophie abandoned that thread, hoping she’d planted some bread crumbs that would lure the system admin. She dropped other suicidal hints on a few more threads, then posted her e-mail in yet another chat room, asking for “emotional support.”
That done, she navigated around the site until she spotted “DyingFriends in Your Area.” She plugged in her zip code, and a list of identities popped up, along with how recently they had been active and their zip codes. She copied the zip codes and names into another window to track down. DyingFriends had at least twenty Hawaii members.
Armed with that information, she logged back out of the site and then set to work tracking down the identities of the Hawaii members. Their zip codes and fake names weren’t much to go on. She’d have to lure them into revealing more.
Sophie tracked the names to the e-mails listed and sent each of them a sweet introductory e-mail with a picture of the pale, smiling, pretty face of dying Shasta McGill, appealing for friendship outside the site in the big lonely town of Honolulu, where she’d moved to live her last days in paradise.
Sophie wondered how often that really happened. She felt her worldview shift just a tiny bit—lonely people, waiting to die, were all around and invisible. It made her wonder if she was just a few cancer cells away from being one of them.
The depression and loneliness Sophie’d battled on and off squeezed at her from the edges of her mind, and she had to look down at the tattoos on her arms to remind herself she was living life on her own terms. In freedom, with courage.
Setting up an online sting was like an elaborate form of cooking to Sophie, ending in a meal that brought her targets to the table. Cooking in Thailand was a lengthy production she’d watched their servants perform: first, harvesting the food. From the garden, farm, or sea came the raw ingredients. Then washing, hulling, seasoning, marinating, and prepping. After that, individual mini cooking of elements of the dish, and then the collection of all the ingredients into a cohesive whole, and finally, the presentation.
Right now, her “meal” was at the hunting, gathering, and prep stage. She’d left all those lures out there. Hopefully, a few would respond to the dummy e-mail address she’d set up. Then she could track their computers, find their addresses, and send Ken and Lei to check them out.
She switched back to digging into the innards of the black Mac that had belonged to Alfred Shimaoka. She tried not to think of his sad end in the SUV with his beloved dog barking a few feet away.
Chapter 11
Lei pulled into the Youth Correctional Facility. She held up her ID badge at the gate, and Vinnie, the guard, gave her shaka and waved her through. She was a weekly visitor here, a fact unknown to anyone but Marcella, who’d declined to come as she was having dinner with Marcus Kamuela at her parents’ restaurant in Waikiki.
Keiki and Angel sat on the passenger seat of the truck. They loved the drive over the Pali to Kailua, where the youth jail was snugged up against the wall of a green mountain. A slight breeze came down the valley, and Lei cracked the windows and left Keiki in the truck in the cool blue of evening.
Carrying Angel, who wore her therapy dog vest, Lei went through the security admission steps and finally arrived in the group rec room, where she visited the girl she’d captured last year during a burglary spree. She’d forged a permanent bond with the orphaned Consuelo Aguilar.
The pretty Filipina girl bounded up off the battered couch where she’d been lounging with some other adolescents. Lei set the wriggling, ecstatic little Chihuahua down, and Angel ran to Consuelo. Several girls waved to Lei from the couch. “Titas” all, the tattooed tough girls clustered aro
und Consuelo, exclaiming and petting Angel’s little domed head as the seventeen-year-old clasped the dog close.
Lei sat on one of the molded metal stools bolted to the floor. The corrections officer, a sturdy woman they called Aunty Marcie, came up and greeted her. Her graying hair brushed her waist in a braid as thick as Lei’s wrist. “So good you come fo’ see her,” Aunty Marcie said. “Consuelo, she look forward to you all week.”
“She jus’ like see her dog.” Lei had impulsively agreed to care for Angel last year when Consuelo was taken into custody, and so far she hadn’t regretted that decision for a minute.
“No, she talk about you all the time. She always in one better mood after you come.”
“That’s good. Me too.”
“You make all the girls feel good, like they can be somebody because you come,” Aunty Marcie said, her brown eyes warm. “These kids, they need role models.”
“Thanks, eh.” Lei looked up at the woman. “I’m sure you help all you can.”
“I do, but I only one CO, and sometimes I gotta bust them for something. You young, you one big-shot FBI agent, and still you come every week and bring the dog. It means more than you think.”
“Okay.” Lei was embarrassed, and Aunty Marcie walked off to break up an argument brewing in a far corner.
She sat quietly waiting at the round Formica table, and as she always eventually did, Consuelo came and sat across from her. The girl had left Angel with the other teenagers on the couch. She tucked glossy hair behind a small ear and smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi. How are things this week?”
“Pretty good. Almost done with my English class. When I finish, I’ll be ready to get my diploma.” Consuelo wore the bright orange overalls with a natural elegance that belied their coarse message. Her big dark eyes flashed something like defiance as she looked at Lei. “I’m going to college.”