by Toby Neal
A few minutes later, Fogarty walked to the door with her knees close together, tugging at her skirt, and called out into the hall, “Detectives?”
They bundled up their trash and Bunuelos handed his to Lei. “Captain will kill us if we leave any food stuff in here. I’ll get the recording set up.”
“I’ll run this to the break room.” Lei moved quickly down the hall, dropping off the trash and washing her hands. After all the intensity of hunting the killer, it appeared he might be sitting right there in the room—but somehow she couldn’t find the anger she’d used for fuel.
She’d wanted the killer to be Frank Phillips, and now he was going to move on with his life, a rich man. Deflated by the pettiness of Danielle’s murder, the pointless waste of it, Lei felt exhaustion tug at her.
Back in the interview room, Bunuelos had turned on the video. Lei reminded Perreira of his rights.
“Would you like to begin by telling us what happened on the dive the other day?”
“Which one was that?” The whites of Perreira’s eyes were yellowish, indicating liver trouble.
“The day you and Rodriguez had to ‘shut that lady down.’” Lei pretended to consult her notes. “Your cousin. He was telling us all about how you did the deed.”
“Oh, really?” Perreira lunged toward Lei, an abrupt movement brought up short by cuffs clipped to the table. Fogarty jerked farther away with a little cry. “That numbnuts. I goin’ kill him.”
“Don’t say anything, Mr. Perreira,” Fogarty warned. Her voice wobbled. She was afraid of her client, and Lei didn’t blame her.
“Yeah, he was happy to rat you out for a reduction in charges.” Lei fiddled with the file, a satisfied smile tugging at her mouth. “Not the brightest bulb in the box, Mr. Rodriguez.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Perreira said. “It was my cousin’s!”
“Oh?” Lei’s brows climbed. “He didn’t exactly strike me as a criminal mastermind.”
“No, my other cuz! Angie!”
“Negotiate.” Fogarty put a tentative hand on Perreira’s arm.
“Yeah, I like one deal!” Perreira said. “Angie! She the one!”
“Oh, really? Your cousin Angie, she went diving out at Molokini using Costa’s boat. She dove down with tanks and caught illegal aquarium fish. She saw a woman shooting pictures, swam over, and nailed her with a speargun. Then, because that just wasn’t sure enough, Angie pulled Danielle Phillips’s regulator out of her mouth, watched her drown, and then stuffed her under a coral head for the sharks to snack on? Angie did all that?” Lei’s voice had risen to a shout. She’d found her anger again, and it felt damn good.
“Angie! She called me that morning and told me to do something about the woman that was going to come out diving. She said there would be one big payday for us when she married that CPA. And when the girl came, taking pictures, I had to. She caught me with the illegal fish!” Perreira shouted back. His tanned face had drained of color, and so had Leslie Fogarty’s. Lei wasn’t terribly surprised when Fogarty stood up. Perreira turned toward Fogarty and opened his cuffed hands in mute appeal toward her. “It wasn’t my fault. Angie. She told me to. I had to.”
Just then the radio on Lei’s belt went off. It was Dispatch. “Got a nine-one-one call from a residence in Wailuku Heights, claiming a home invasion and asking for you by name.”
“You two, stay here,” Lei said to Fogarty. “Who’s the vic?” Lei turned away from Perreira and his lawyer, pushing out the door of the interview room with Bunuelos right behind her.
“Barbara Selzmann. One forty-nine Valley View Lane, Wailuku.”
“We’re on it.” Lei and Bunuelos broke into a run as they headed down the hall.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Dark had fallen as Lei and Bunuelos streaked toward Wailuku Heights. Lei tried to get more information from Dispatch as Bunuelos, driving, sped with emergency lights toward the address.
“Dispatch. What was the situation?”
“The caller said someone had broken into her house. That she was in the bedroom and afraid for her life.”
“Any other details?”
“No, Sergeant. She hung up before telling us more.”
“Roger that.” Lei clicked off the radio. “Damn. Dispatch has some units on the way to back us up, but I want to get there first.”
Barbara Selzmann’s house was in one of the exclusive planned communities off the main highway, a commanding architectural design of angles and views atop a plateau. Bunuelos’s SUV roared up the turnaround driveway to park behind a nondescript blue Honda CRV.
Somehow Lei didn’t think that was Barbara’s car.
“I’ll go around the back,” Lei whispered. “You take the front. Make some noise.”
Bunuelos nodded, and Lei drew her weapon as she trotted around the side of the house, bending to stay below the sight lines of the windows.
“Open up! This is the Maui Police Department!” Lei heard Bunuelos boom from the front of the house. Off in the distance, she could hear sirens, which went abruptly silent. She navigated some decorative shrubs in the dark, still trying to stay close to the house and out of range of a shooter. She heard a disturbance coming from the bedroom window above her.
“You won’t get away with this. The cops are here,” Barbara Selzmann’s haughty voice said. Lei heard the distinct sound of something hard hitting flesh, a kind of muffled smack, and the woman gave a cry.
Lei glanced at the window above her. Light spilled out into the darkened yard. The windowsill was too high for her to pull up into and she hadn’t yet reached the back door, which was likely locked anyway.
Bunuelos continued to yell and pound on the front door, creating a distraction. Lei looked frantically around. If she could get up higher, she might be able to cover the home invader until backup arrived.
A door in the lattice led under the house. Lei pushed the hinged section in, wrinkling her nose at a damp mushroomy smell. There was light enough to see a garden bench and a wheelbarrow.
Lei pushed the barrow out and over to the window. Standing in it elevated her the necessary three feet or so to look into the bedroom. She eased up, blinking as the light of the bedroom shone into her eyes.
Selzmann was lying on a bed directly in front of Lei. Her hands were bound. Lei could see blood on the side of her face and hair. Soft sobs shook her. There was a dark figure at the door, but even as Lei tried to get a look at it, the bedroom light went out.
Lei ducked down into the wheelbarrow, considering her options. She’d turned her radio off so that the perp didn’t hear any calls, but that also meant she didn’t know how far away backup was. She could hear Bunuelos still making noise at the front of the house.
“Come out with your hands on your head, and we won’t shoot!”
Suddenly the screen above Lei burst out with a clatter and a rending sound and landed on top of Lei. She hunched smaller in the wheelbarrow, hoping the dark and the fallen screen would hide her.
“You have to die, bitch,” she heard a voice say above her, guttural with rage. And before she could stand or react, she heard the loud report of a weapon inside the room. Selzmann screamed and kept on screaming.
Screaming meant Selzmann was alive, and that was something.
Lei stood up, knocking the screen aside, turning toward the jamb with her weapon out, just as the dark figure jumped out of the window. The falling perpetrator crashed into Lei, tipping over the wheelbarrow and crushing her to the ground in a bone-jarring collision that knocked the wind out of her.
Tiny white explosions filled Lei’s vision as she struggled to draw breath and drag some air into her lungs. The metal edge of the wheelbarrow stabbed her in the hip. She felt the weight of her assailant smothering her, then lift away. Lei rolled over and hauled herself to her knees, finally breathing again.
She could see the assailant running away across the yard.
“Stop! Police!” Lei yelled, with all the volume she could muster.
>
The dark figure kept running, gaining ground across the lawn lit here and there with spotlights on clusters of palms and shrubbery. Lei scrambled to her feet and ran after the fleeing figure, grabbing her radio off her belt.
“On foot in pursuit of the suspect, moving out of property boundaries.”
“Roger that,” Bunuelos said. “Backup units arriving.”
“Need medical assistance at the house,” Lei panted, pouring on as much speed as she could. “Selzmann is down.”
She stowed the radio and focused, gaining on the fleeing figure as the perp dodged bushes and lawn furniture, finally reaching the road.
Lei wasn’t far behind. Running was one of the things she did best. Reaching the asphalt road, she poured on effort, digging deep to tap the place where her own demons lived. They provided bloodthirsty fuel for a burst of speed that brought her up to the straining runner, tackling the suspect around the waist and knocking him to the ground.
But Lei could tell right away that the perp, flattened beneath her weight on the asphalt of the road, was definitely a woman by the soft feel of her body. Lei sat up, retrieving her cuffs from a back pocket. She pulled the woman’s arms behind her back, snapping the metal bracelets on. Lei could hear the wail of an approaching siren as one of the backup units came down the road. She stood and waved her arms, one foot pinning the suspect down.
The unit stopped. The siren shut off, but the headlights still blazed over them in a harsh spotlight. Lei rolled the woman over with her foot and got a good look at her face.
A. Vargas, Receptionist, spat a chip of bloody tooth at Lei.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“So let’s sort this out,” Captain Omura said the next morning. The whole team was gathered at the conference table, including Dr. Gregory; Kevin Parker; Jessup Murioka; Pono, back on duty; Lei; Bunuelos; and District Attorney Hiromo.
Lei, her head bandaged from a cut she didn’t remember getting the night before, stood up with her Styrofoam cup of black station coffee in hand. Her mouth tasted bitter from two Tylenol she’d just swallowed. She hadn’t made it home at all last night and was grateful that Jared had spent the night with Kiet and taken care of the dogs. She felt stiff, grubby, and older than her years. She took a sip of coffee and picked up an erasable pen.
“Yes, sir. Let me talk us through the case, make sure we have all the holes filled in.” She turned to the board, where their timeline and suspects were already mapped out. “First, some setting events. Danielle was pregnant from her affair with Mark Nunes of the DLNR and was very active in helping catch poachers. Meanwhile, Frank was sleeping with two women: his receptionist, Angela “Angie” Vargas, and Barbara Selzmann. Danielle owned valuable land that Frank wanted to develop, which was attached to any offspring she might have.” Lei looked around to see if everyone was on board and saw nodding heads.
“At approximately six a.m. on the morning of the murder, Danielle and her husband, Frank, went out for a dive at Molokini atoll, leaving from Ma’alaea Harbor, towing their kayak behind and using the University of Hawaii’s Zodiac. According to Frank, he and Danielle argued, not surprisingly, about the disposition of her land in their upcoming divorce and parted ways at Molokini. Frank went in on his kayak, got ticketed, and called Angie for a ride from Kamaole Three Park. He then went in to work after a shower with Angie and later on sneaked out of the office, as he often did, for his affair with Barbara.”
“Po’ ting. He must have been so tired. No wonder he wasn’t up to making sure Selzmann got hers,” Pono said, to general snickering. Her partner had spent time reviewing the interview tapes at home to stay up to speed on the case. Omura’s mouth quirked at the comment, but she made a “go on” gesture.
“Angie, Frank Phillips’s enterprising receptionist, had her eye on marrying Frank after the divorce.” Lei paused. “Angie has a good lawyer. She denies having anything to do with Danielle’s death. After her initial statement, Angie and her lawyer blew me and Gerry off all night. Wouldn’t say a thing or answer any questions. She did submit a written statement. According to her statement…” Lei retrieved the statement the receptionist had made with her attorney present and held it up to read aloud. “She suffered temporary insanity, leading her to think that the only way forward with Frank was to eliminate her competition, Barbara Selzmann.”
Lei set the document down. “Fortunately for her, Selzmann appears to be recovering from her gunshot wound.” She took a sip of coffee and went on. “This is what we currently believe and can cobble together from Angie’s actions and statement. She knew about Danielle’s DLNR activities and was related to Perreira and Rodriguez, the poachers. She told her cousins to take Danielle out so she could share the land profits and life insurance benefits with Frank—and her family, too, eventually. Meanwhile, Frank Phillips adamantly denies knowing anything about Angie’s plot, let alone any plans to marry her. ‘She’s a crazy bitch,’ Frank said, in the interview we just did with him. ‘I’ve known she was psycho jealous for a while, but I didn’t know how to get rid of her.’”
“Yeah. We got statements backing up the accusation against Angie from Keone Perreira and his dimwit cousin, Emilio Rodriguez,” Bunuelos said. “Perreira, the actual murderer, is trying to pin it all on Angie Vargas. But they say she was in her right mind and cool as a cucumber about marrying Frank next. Talked to them like it was a done deal.”
“Phillips did admit that he texted Angie the morning of the murder, told her that he was trying to finalize the divorce with Danielle and that they were going out to Molokini. He then texted her again that they’d fought and he was leaving and would need a ride from the nearest beach, which was Kam Three, where he was ticketed. But he denies that he had any involvement with Angie’s plan to kill Danielle,” Lei said.
Omura snorted disbelievingly, and Lei nodded in agreement.
“I’m not going to go for Angie as the main perp.” District Attorney Hiromo had a way of speaking as if his words were too precious to waste, his lips barely moving as he eked them out. He smoothed a slippery-looking blue tie. “No one held a gun to Perreira’s head and forced him to shoot the victim with his speargun, then pull her regulator from her mouth so that she drowned. I’m going for first degree on him, second degree for Vargas, and conspiracy to commit for Rodriguez. I don’t feel I have enough on Phillips to charge him.”
“Sounds good to me,” Omura said. “Go on, Texeira.”
“Well, Perreira did the deed out at Molokini and tucked Danielle’s body under a coral head to delay discovery. They took their fish catch and reported in to Vargas, who thought she’d done her lover boss a favor. Rodriguez let slip to Costa what had happened when they delivered the fish, so he knew about it but didn’t ask any questions. Then Angie Vargas lost it when she found out that Phillips was two-timing her. It’s a good thing for Frank he was in custody when the attack on Selzmann went down, or we might have been looking at him as being behind it. But he has been in jail all weekend. Couldn’t have put Vargas up to it.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to release Phillips,” Hiromo said. “And sadly, he will likely get his wife’s land and life insurance, unless we can show that he was behind the plot somehow.”
“We got nothing tying him to the murder at this point,” Bunuelos said. “Though I’m with you, Lei. I want to see that slimy bastard pay. Instead it looks like he’s going to walk away a rich man.”
“I think we can contact Danielle’s remaining relatives and get a civil suit going against him for possession of her land,” Omura said. “Kind of like the O. J. Simpson case—he might get away with murder, but he won’t get rich, too. The burden of proof is lighter in a civil case. Still, those phone calls can’t come from this office.”
“I’ll figure out a way to get that to happen.” Lei’s phone beeped with a text. “Excuse me.” Without waiting for permission, Lei darted into the hall, reaching into her pocket for the satellite phone.
But it wasn’t her husband’s p
hone. The chime had come from her regular cell, with a text from Marcella: Baby Kamuela is on the way! We’re headed for the hospital. Get here ASAP!
A wave of mixed feelings rose up in Lei, everything from excitement to worry—and, deep down, grief over the child she and Stevens had never had. She texted back.
On my way as soon as I can get out on a plane. Don’t have that baby until I get there!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was early afternoon by the time Lei left the meeting, made an anonymous phone call to Danielle’s Hawaiian family to get the civil suit against Frank Phillips started, went home, packed up Kiet, and got the next plane to Oahu. Due to hospital regulations forbidding visits from children under twelve, Lei dropped her son off with her grandfather, Soga Matsumoto, at his immaculate little bungalow near Punchbowl. She borrowed his car to get to the Queen’s Medical Center in downtown Honolulu and found her way to the maternity floor, where she asked for Marcella.
She was led to a private room, where Marcella, propped up in bed, turned a shiny, beaming face to grin at her. Her friend was holding a wrapped bundle, and the blue color of the blanket told Lei that Baby Kamuela was a boy.
Lei hurried over to hug her friend and gaze at the child’s crumpled, sweet face. The baby had lovely caramel-colored skin, and his eyes were shut tight, the tiny plump mouth working as if he were sucking in his sleep.
“What a cutie. He sure has a lot of hair!” Lei touched the thick black shock peeking out of the blanket. “You didn’t wait for me.” She put her hands on her hips, eyeing Marcella accusingly.
“Holy crap, seestah, Jonas Egidio Kamuela was waiting for no one!” Marcella exclaimed, snuggling the dark-haired bundle close. “I barely got my feet up before he came shooting out!”
“Where’s Marcus?” Lei looked around for Marcella’s big Hawaiian detective husband.
“He was wiped out after all the screaming and the mess,” Marcella said. “I mean, I’ve done some scary shit as an agent, even been shot, but having a baby natural is the most intense thing I’ve ever been through, hands down. He was great, with me every step of the way, but now that it’s all over, he went down to the cafeteria for a snack and to call all his relatives. You came at the perfect time, actually. We just got settled in this room, and you’re our first visitor. Though I warn you. My parents are on their way, and they’re pretty hysterical. You know, Italian first-time grandparents.”