Stolen in Paradise (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (12 page)

Rogers came back in. He looked shaken, gelled spikes on his military haircut misdirected, as if he’d run his hands through it. “Mrs. Truman was very upset. But the coast is clear now; they’re gone. She said she thought he was having an affair and followed his phone’s GPS here. Guess you could say she was right.”

Marcella looked down the hall to where the NAT was picking up tossed magazines and the upended coffee table. “Looks like Julie Truman is a force of nature. Any woman that pissed is going to get through her divorce just fine.”

Marcella’s phone toned as she rode the elevator down a few minutes later to meet Mama for lunch at a nearby deli.

“Agent Scott here.”

“Hey, it’s Lei. Finally got you! I’m trying to get away to come over for a training for

a case—you going to be around in a couple weeks?”

“Of course.” Marcella looked unseeing at the potted palm in front of her, wondering whether or not to tell her friend about the situation with Kamuela. In the end, she didn’t. Neither of them were good at the chatty girlfriend thing, and in her heart, Marcella knew Lei would never understand her membership in the Club. Lei, a childhood sexual abuse survivor, had finally been able to have a consistent boyfriend in the last couple of years—long-suffering Michael Stevens. That relationship hadn’t lasted beyond Marcella’s own invitation to Lei to join the FBI.

They arranged a meet in a few weeks. Marcella hung up, feeling conflicted but glad to have heard her friend’s voice. She whisked through the front doors and strode down a sidewalk dotted with planters of palms to the corner deli, Lokal Grindz. Anna Scatalina was already inside, chatting volubly with the Guatemalan counter attendant about some arcane spice usage.

“Marcella! I was just telling Eduardo here you are single, you are beautiful, and you speak some Spanish as well as Italian!”

Eduardo turned a plum color and busied himself with a rag behind the counter.

“Mama, for godsake. I’m not going to meet you for lunch anymore if you keep trying to set me up everywhere we go,” Marcella hissed. “I only have a few minutes. Did you order for us?”

“Of course. Oh, all right. Well. Your papa, he is not a happy man.” Anna, bright in a peacock-blue sundress and strappy sandals, brought a tall glass of iced tea for each of them from the counter to a little table in the corner. “He gambling again, Marcella, and buying him some short pants not going to solve the problem.”

“Of course not. He needs to make some friends though, and a few hands of cards can’t hurt.”

“I wish I believed that.” Anna shook her head. “He needs to work, I think. He no liking Waikiki. He need something to do.”

Marcella racked her brain. What could a retired Italian shoe importer do for work?

“Why don’t you two consider a new business venture? Maybe a shoe boutique where you can have coffee, food, things you make. Maybe there’s some way you can do something together.”

Anna’s busy hands went still on the table for a moment; then she picked up a sugar packet, ripped the corner off, stirred it into the glass with the long metal spoon. The tinkling sound of the stirring went on awhile.

Marcella noticed the shadows under her mother’s eyes, the droop to her mouth. It was usually hard to see signs of stress in her mother because she was always in motion, but now they were evident.

“Mama.” Marcella put her hand over her mother’s. “You aren’t that happy here either, are you?”

“I miss my friends. I miss the seasons. The leaves, they almost gone in Jersey,” Anna said. She looked up with a bright smile as Eduardo approached.
“Grazie.”

“Two salads,” Eduardo muttered, sliding the loaded plates in front of them.

“Gracias, Eduardo. Me llamo Marcella,”
Marcella said, presenting the dimple as a tip. He retreated, blushing, as she dug into her salad.

“You have a good idea, ’Cella,” Anna said, moving salad around on her plate. “I think maybe we need something more for us to do. We thought we see you a lot, but you so busy. I think about this idea of a business. I talk to Egidio.”

“Well, it can’t hurt,” Marcella said. Her phone toned and she slipped it out of her pocket. “Agent Scott here.”

“Marcella, IT came back with some info on the phone and camera chip you retrieved from the canal. Meet me in the lab in ten and we can go over it with them.” Rogers’s voice was charged with excitement.

Marcella stood up, waved. “Mama, I have to run. Eduardo, can I get this to go?”

Chapter 11

The Information Technology Department had their own climate-controlled lab deep in the maze of the Bureau’s offices, dimly lit as a subterranean cave. Marcella swiped her card at the steel door and stepped inside.

Rogers turned to greet her. “Marcella, you know Agent Sophie Ang, right?”

“You were at our team meeting.” Marcella shook the rangy black woman’s hand anyway. “What have you got for us?”

“Take a look.” Ang sat back down in front of her workstation, a shallow bay lined with several outsized monitors. “I was able to get the last few days of phone calls off Dr. Pettigrew’s SIM card. Some of the older information, like her contacts list, was degraded, but those last few days of recents were still available.” The woman hit Print, and a nearby laser spit out a list of numbers, many of them already identified with names.

“Then the real bonus.” She activated another monitor and photos came up. “Appears she photographed each page of the missing lab books.”

“I know the interns said they were missing, but I don’t get the significance,” Marcella said, looking at the graph paper sheets filled with handwritten hieroglyphics and hand-lettered charts and numbers.

“Real working labs do every bit of research by hand and hand record it,” Ang said. “This is to prove authenticity for replication and publication and to prevent work being stolen or hacked before it’s published. Anyone wanting to verify results in a lab should be able to show up at the actual premises, request to see the lab books, and reconstruct the work from what’s there. Looks like Dr. Pettigrew was taking her own precautions by photographing the lab books.” Ang pointed to a date/time stamp in the corner of each photograph. “Seems like she updated it daily. So since we recovered this, the research isn’t really gone.”

Marcella felt her spirits lift. “This will be great news for the university and the team,” she said. “Let’s print some copies of this for Truman at least.”

She picked up a nearby phone and updated Waxman on the latest developments.

“Let’s use this,” Waxman said. “This is the perfect opportunity to see who wants to suppress the information about the lab books. Finish setting up the interviews with the remaining interns and Truman and let them know we’ve come into possession of the information. Maybe we can set a trap.”

Marcella wound the phone cord around her finger. “Yes, sir. I’ll keep you posted,” she said. She hung up, turned to Rogers. “Waxman’s got an idea. A good one, damn him.”

She informed Rogers of Waxman’s idea as they made their way back to their office, printouts of the many pages of research in a thick file folder.

“That’s why he’s the boss and we are mere foot soldiers,” Rogers said. “I know you think he’s an ass, and he is—but he’s a pretty good chief for all that.”

“He doesn’t make you get in front of the whiteboard with a marker,” Marcella grumbled. “Okay, how shall we play this?”

“Let’s see who we can get in first, go from there.”

Peter Kim perched on the edge of the angled seat of an armchair in Conference Room A. Marcella brushed a strand of hair back, adjusting the near-invisible earbud in her ear, which piped to Waxman and Gundersohn in the monitoring room next door.

“Start off slow,” Waxman said.

Marcella suppressed irritation. She’d done a few interviews in her time. “Thanks so much, Peter. We so appreciate you coming in on such short notice.”

“No problem,” the Korean doctoral candidate said, his smile stiff.

“You speak English like a local boy,” Marcella said. “How’d you get so fluent?”

“I grew up bilingual—my father had dual citizenship. I made visits to Hawaii ever since I was a kid, to visit my aunt and uncle here—Councilman Kim.” Reminding them of his connections, not a bad move.

“That’s great. That why you chose the University of Hawaii?” Marcella asked.

“Exactly.”

“So what was your relationship with Dr. Pettigrew like?”

“Cordial. She was my principal investigator and my doctoral supervisor. I had enormous respect for her.”

“Some people have said she could be a little abrasive. Any of that ever come up for you in the lab?”

“No. She told me what to do, and I did it.” Tiny shadow of something in his words. Marcella moved in on it.

“Sounds like she was a bit of a dictator.”

“She was. But she was the PI and that was her job.”

“Speaking of job. We pulled your financials, and there are some irregularities.” She slid a copy of his bank statement over to him. The deposits for $9,999 were highlighted. “That seems like a little more than the usual monthly support you were getting from relatives.”

“How did you get this?” Kim’s square jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed. “You have no right.”

“Actually, we do. Remember that disclosure agreement you signed with the university as part of your immigration application? You agreed to submit your financials to any federal or state agency requesting them. We requested them.”

“I don’t remember signing that.”

“Fine print.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for these cash deposits?”

“You’re not being charged with anything,” Rogers said, leaning forward. “This is just a little longer follow-up interview of all Dr. Pettigrew’s lab crew. We’re talking to everyone one more time, especially in light of what happened to Cindy.”

“What happened to Cindy?” His angled brows drew together.

“Figured you might have heard she’d died by now. She was murdered,” Marcella said. “Strangled and made to look like a hanging. Know anything about that?”

Kim’s olive skin went waxy. He stood up, looked around frantically.

“Trash can,” Marcella snapped, and Rogers grabbed a nearby plastic-lined rubbish container and shoved it in front of Kim just as the student doubled up and vomited.

Rogers handed over a box of tissues. Kim yanked out a handful, wiped his mouth. “I apologize. Cindy was a good friend. I am—upset.”

“I can see that,” Marcella said. “Did you have anything to do with it?”

Kim bent and retched again. Nothing much came up. The young man wiped his mouth again, sat back in the armchair. Rogers stood and put the trash can in the hall.

“I’m not sure what I should say,” Kim said.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Marcella said, soothing. “Only we were so hoping to clear you quickly, because as soon as we clear each of you, we can let you back in the lab. And in all this tragedy, there’s some good news: We recovered Dr. Pettigrew’s photographed records of the missing lab books. So you all can go right back to work when this is over. We’ve already put the records back in the lab—the university doesn’t want us delaying your team even another day when you can get back to work on BioGreen.”

The bait was cast.

Kim had taken out his phone and now he put it away. Wiped his mouth again. “Those deposits were a loan from a family member who doesn’t want it getting out that they helped me. And I didn’t know anything about Cindy dying. It’s horrible. But I know who might.”

Zosar Abed’s big brown eyes filled. “Cindy? Murdered? Surely, no. This is too much!”

Marcella was prepared with not one but two boxes of tissues and a fresh trash can on hand. The Indian student scorned the tissues, letting the tears stream down his cheeks, catching on his full lips, dripping off his chin. “Fernandez. He must have done it!”

“Funny. Someone else pointed the finger at you,” Marcella said. She got up, paced a bit near the door, though there was little room what with all the bolted-down furniture. “Apparently, according to this source, you were in love with Cindy.”

“I was. I loved her.” Fresh sobbing. This could take a while. Marcella rolled her eyes skyward, looked at Rogers.

“I’ll be right back.” She swiped her card and the door unlocked. Marcella strode down the hall. She could still hear the interview through the multidimensional earbud as she headed to the lounge to get a much-needed cup of coffee—Zosar Abed was an emotional roller coaster.

“What makes you think Fernandez had anything to do with Cindy’s death?” Rogers’s voice, low and kind, crackled a bit as she got some distance from Conference Room A. She went to the sleek black coffee machine, a dispenser style that kept it warm at a temperature that never burned the delicate brew. She got her favorite mug, the one with the chip in the handle and the FBI logo on it, and dispensed a black stream into it. “They were having a thing. Cindy liked him—more than liked him. I don’t know why. He was an ass to her and everyone else.” Zosar’s voice had an edge of bitterness.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and, startled, she whirled around, splashing hot coffee on her hand. “Shit!” she exclaimed, shaking the hot liquid off.

Marcus Kamuela loomed way too close.

“Oops, sorry,” he said. “Looks like it’s going well in there.” She narrowed her eyes, made a throat-cutting gesture. He looked puzzled, an eyebrow cocked. She reached up and turned the earbud off.

“We have all-way sound comms,” she explained. “I was listening in on the interview.”

“Seems like you needed a coffee break. Mind if I have some?”

“Help yourself.” Marcella shook her head. “Dammit. I can’t handle that whiny dude. I don’t know why. He gets on my nerves. Anyway, I better get back in there. Didn’t know you were here.”

“IT needed more help with all those computers. I’ve got some skills, so I was helping down there. Mind if I observe?”

“Up to Waxman,” Marcella said. “Room right next to Conference Room A.”

She brushed by him, and damn if her nipples didn’t pucker up and send a message that set off an unwelcome throb south of her beltline. The man emitted pheromones or something.