Twisted Vine (6 page)

“I hope it brings some happy memories and thoughts,” Soga said, rising to follow her as she walked to the front door. “And that it helps you know your mother a little more.”

“I hope so too.” She leaned over and impulsively kissed his leathery cheek at the front door. “I’ll call you when Alfred’s house is okay to enter. Do you know who his next of kin was, by the way?”

“A nephew. Saiki Shimaoka. He lives in Honolulu.”

“Thank you.” She carried the box out to the truck and set it as gently as a bomb on the passenger seat. In a way, that’s just what it was. She turned the key, waved goodbye to her grandfather still standing in the doorway, and pulled away for home.

With herself and the dogs exercised, fed, and showered, Lei was finally ready to have a look at the contents of her grandmother’s lap desk. Sitting at her little round Formica table with the orchid plant on it and a fortifying local-brewed Longboard Ale at her elbow, Lei lifted the glossy lid.

The smell of sandalwood wafted up from a pile of photos and letters lying in wait for her. The contents of the desk had probably been neatly stacked at one point, but they had become jumbled in transport. Lei took out some Japanese writing implements: a set of sumi paintbrushes with bamboo handles, bound with a fraying rubber band; a green jade stone with a well in it for mixing the ink stick she found in a little plastic bag.

A stack of thick, deckle-edged writing paper filled with Japanese characters and tied with string was next. Lei couldn’t read Japanese. She felt cheated as she lifted her grandmother’s correspondence and set it aside.

A pile of photographs greeted her next, and in them she recognized her mother’s pale lily of a face, black hair long and straight, her clothing simple and immaculate. In the series of photos of Maylene that progressed from babyhood into high school, her mother’s face was always serious, her posture demure.

A good little Japanese girl until she met Wayne Texeira, the wild
paniolo
cowboy, at that fateful long-ago rodeo.

Lei found a picture of Maylene wearing what
Wayne had described meeting her in—a white eyelet sundress, flounced to the knee, her slender torso and legs set off by the full skirt and red cowboy boots she wore with a cautious smile. She’d been married in that dress, at age eighteen, holding an armful of wild orchids. Lei still remembered the rain-swept night on Kaua`i when her father had told her the story of her parents’ whirlwind romance. 

The next picture was of a baby. A baby with big tilted brown eyes, a full rosebud mouth, and a tuft of curling brown hair.

Lei turned the photo over. Written on the back, in her mother’s round precise writing, was
Leilani Rosario Matsumoto Texeira, b. Nov. 27, 1985
.

Was this really the only photo her grandparents had ever had of her? The photo was yellowing, its edges curled as if it had been handled a lot.

At the very bottom of the box was a letter. Lei opened it, and a slip of paper from a fortune cookie fell out.
Shape your destiny
, the fortune said. On the back was written a phone number in her grandmother’s calligraphic handwriting. She picked the letter up and read it.

Dear mother and father,

I wanted you to have this picture of our beautiful daughter, Lei. She is healthy and happy, and I am too. I know you said I was not in the family since I married Wayne, but I wanted you to know that the family will go on anyway. Our name is a part of my daughter’s name and heritage. I hope you will consider being in her life. She is a gift to us and will be to you too.

Sincerely,

Maylene

Lei folded the paper, feeling bittersweet emotion tighten her chest. Her mom had tried to connect her with her grandparents, but they had chosen to keep them cut off, and in the end,
Wayne had been a bad influence on Maylene. He’d been dealing, and she’d become addicted.

Thank God for Aunty Rosario. Being adopted by her at age nine, after Maylene’s death, had been best thing that could have happened, given the situation. Still, Lei wished that she’d at least met her grandmother, wished she’d had her grandfather in her life even longer. She picked up the slip of fortune thoughtfully and slipped it into her wallet, a reminder.

“Shape your destiny,” Lei said aloud. Keiki and Angel, snuggled on the rag rug at the back door, both lifted their heads to look at Lei. “We’re doing that. Aren’t we, girls?”

She folded the letter, stacked the photos, repacked the writing items. At the bottom of the box, she spotted a slender silvery chain decorated with a tiny child-sized cross. She’d bet it had been her mother’s, and it was just right for that other important pendant she’d been needing a chain for.

Lei walked to her room and picked up the little black jewelry box from her bedside table. Inside, nested on the white cotton, was a disc about the size of a nickel. A hole with a loop had been drilled through it. Polishing had removed the last traces of black and char on white gold embedded with a roughness of diamonds.

Melted in the fire they’d been through, Stevens’s grandmother’s wedding ring had been pounded down and given to Lei by Stevens when she left for the FBI—a talisman for rubbing when she was anxious.

Lei no longer needed that comforting habit and had cleaned the piece up to wear as a pendant. She slid the disc onto the chain and fastened it around her neck. It felt satisfyingly solid resting there, the tiny silver cross dangling over the white-gold circle. She’d wear it always, she decided. Against her throat, resting on her pulse, reminding her of what really mattered.

Sophie arrived at her workstation dressed in her usual easy-movement clothes and carrying a thermos cup of strong tea. She glanced over at the row of computers beside her computer bay: A sleek black Mac had been added to the lineup, with an evidence tag attached identifying it as coming from the recent suicide site of Alfred Shimaoka.

The suicides needed to slow down. She barely had time to keep up with all the tech stuff as it was.

She took a sip of tea and opened a window in the DAVID database. Her fingers flying, she inputted all the new information on the most recent case, including the fingerprint from Corby Alexander Hale III, mysteriously captured on duct tape from the tailpipe of Alfred Shimaoka’s SUV.

DAVID agreed this was an anomaly, along with the fingerprint-free door handle and the existence of a small beloved dog left to starve in the house. Confidence interval of 78 percent that Shimaoka’s death was an assisted suicide, or murder.

The answer to how these two disparate victims were connected lay in the computers stacked up on her desk. She was sure of it.

Sophie saved and closed DAVID. She hooked up two small, square black write-blocking units to Corby’s and Shimaoka’s computers. The devices cloned and saved a complete record of the computers’ hard drives, and even Internet use patterns, allowing her to virtually access the computers without disturbing the data and time stamps. Defense attorneys had successfully argued that computers were tampered with by forensic technicians, but with the data imaging systems they currently used, nothing on the original computer was marred by a single keystroke.

The write blockers needed several hours to copy everything, so she turned her focus to finishing the work for Marcella’s embezzlement case.

Some hours later, that work done, Sophie rose and went through her stretching routine. She did some push-ups and sit-ups, finished her tea, and unplugged the completed write blocker copy of Corby’s computer. She had three computers she’d nicknamed Amara, Janjai, and Ying, and Ying had the most powerful processor. She plugged the write blocker into Ying’s back port and dove into the virtual clone of Corby Alexander Hale III’s computer.

A lot of what Sophie was looking for would be found in his online searches, and sure enough, the boy hadn’t deleted his cookies. She was able to trace his online activity, and using the handy set of passwords on the Post-it, access his most-frequented websites. The kid had been active on several gay sites, done some dabbling in World of Warcraft, been a regular on Reddit. He’d had a fair amount of gay porn highlighted. She wondered if the Hales had had any idea about their son’s sexual orientation. She’d heard Senator Hale was targeting the White House, and this would have been an interesting but not insurmountable situation to winning the election.

A pie chart generated by her FBI-issued software analyzed online site visitation time. It showed that the majority of time he spent logged in was on a site called DyingFriends. Sophie had developed a template to categorize users’ online usage, and she developed his profile as she went, including links to his most-visited sites, his profiles and access codes. His main e-mail was cluttered with spam, indicating he didn’t use it much.

She began backtracking through his online activity and logged into DyingFriends.

A portal screen opened. “About Us: We are a community of people who are wrestling with the knowledge that our lives are ending. We offer an agenda-free supportive atmosphere to explore issues we are facing.” A series of exterior links on the front page led to various resource websites. Accessing the actual site with its interactive forums required a password.

Sophie tried various username variations on
Corby’s name to no avail. Finally, she hit “Lost Username” and asked for a new one to be sent to e-mail. “Username sent to e-mail” appeared, but when she went back to his e-mail, nothing had arrived.

Little bastard had a secret e-mail. She hated when that happened, but fortunately she had another program for that. Sophie dragged and dropped that program from another monitor, and it began tracing companies with storage containing Corby Hale’s IP address. After some minutes, it dredged up Yahoo, Bing, and Gmail.

“You sneaky boy,” she muttered, entertained by this mild challenge.

On the three major search engines, she was able to identify and hack into
Corby’s various identities and retrieve the username for DyingFriends on his Gmail account, surferboyOahu@gmail.

Once she had that, it was easy to reset the password and log back into his account on DyingFriends—only to find herself at a dead end: “Account deleted by admin” flashed at her from a blank screen.

Sophie sat back from the desk, automatically beginning to exercise as she regrouped. She lifted her knees to touch her chest for forty core-strengthening exercises, stretched backward and cracked her long golden-brown fingers. Realized she was hungry and it was almost ten a.m. She stood, did a sun salutation, and ended folded over with her forehead against her knees, thinking.

“Deleted by admin” implied that the site administrator had removed the account, something that hadn’t happened with any of
Corby’s other accounts. All of them were still active, and the boy’s body was barely cold.

So it was quite possible the admin of DyingFriends had known he was dead.

She stayed jackknifed over and unzipped her backpack on the floor, removing a fortified protein drink and a hard-boiled egg. She walked across the felted carpet to stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling tinted windows.

Something wasn’t right about the DyingFriends site—why would his account, which had been used the day
Corby died, be deleted already? She didn’t need DAVID to tell her that was unlikely. She hoped the write blocker on Alfred Shimaoka’s computer would be done soon; DyingFriends could be the link between the two men. In any case, it was time to bring Waxman up to speed.

She drank the protein drink, ate the egg mechanically, refilled her plastic cup at the water dispenser, and tapped the Bluetooth headset at her ear. “Chief? Can we hold a team meeting on the suicide cases? I have some information and ideas I need to discuss.”

Lei brought her coffee into the spare conference room, with its window overlooking the ocean, wraparound white boards, and large FBI plaque over the head of the table. Special Agent in Charge Waxman was already seated. He had a way of always being there first; Marcella said it was so he could assert dominance over the pack.

Marcella had a theory that his leadership style was to “copy the wolves” and had told her he’d let it slip that he was a sociology major in his undergrad program. Lei sat one seat down on the left from the SAC. In the eighteen months she’d been with the Bureau. Waxman seemed to have turned his critical attention to working over the NAT, Gupta, instead of her and Marcella.

“Good morning, Chief.” He was even letting them get away with such loosenings of protocol as a nickname title.

“Good morning, Agent Texeira.” Waxman, immaculate in a light gray gabardine suit, adjusted his laptop microscopically to the right and pushed a button. A screen trundled down over the FBI plaque against the wall behind his head. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

Ken slid into the seat beside Lei, a faint scent of lemony aftershave in his wake. “Good morning.”

Sophie Ang, moving with the grace that had always reminded Lei of a cat, sat down with her laptop at his right side. “Can I start, sir?”

“You may. You asked for this meeting. But first I want to tell you that we need to give our full attention and effort to solving what happened to Corby Hale. The senator and Mrs. Hale have powerful friends, and either they or their connections been calling the office daily and demanding updates. I just got off the phone with the mayor, and that’s no way to start the day.”

Lei was glad, in that moment, that she hadn’t had to see the Hales again—she didn’t think she’d ever forget Mrs. Hale’s white face contrasting with the blood on her collar from the torn earlobe.

Ang punched some buttons on her computer, and a website, DyingFriends, popped up, appearing on the screen. “I know there’s a lot of pressure, sir, and I asked for this meeting because I thought it was time that discussed what’s happening with these ‘odd’ suicide cases.” She made air quotes. “I was the one to ask that we take the Hale boy’s case. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll get into that in a minute—but for now, I wanted to tell you that in addition to the anomalies at the sites of the two suicides, both Shimaoka and Hale belonged to a website called DyingFriend.com.”

A pause as the team digested this. “DyingFriends? Why would a healthy young guy like Corby Hale belong to something like that?” Lei asked. “I didn’t find his name or that site when I was just searching his name in general.”

“I don’t know why. Don’t you have a meeting with
Fukushima about his autopsy later? Maybe there will be some answers there,” Ang said.

“So this is the commonality between them? Did you find anything else connecting the two?” Waxman asked. “I haven’t had time to read all your case files so far.”

Ken spoke up at that. “We got the call for the Shimaoka site when one of the HPD detectives lifted a print of Corby Hale’s off duct tape on Shimaoka’s tailpipe. We did a full search of the house and car yesterday, but so far, no other trace of Corby Hale.”

“My guess is that they’ll be connected somehow on this website. The problem is,
Corby’s and Shimaoka’s identities have already been deleted by the system admin of DyingFriends. Which implies knowledge of their deaths, something none of their other online accounts seem to have.” Ang typed rapidly, and they were able to view the error message 404 pages. “There’s something about this site that’s fishy. I’d like permission, sir, to develop a profile and impersonate a DyingFriends member. I will see if I can figure out what really is happening on this site behind the fire wall and track the system admin.”

“Permission granted. Please submit all particulars on this to me—identity, details, et cetera—before you initiate the impersonation. Yamada and Texeira, where are you with your part of the investigation?”

Ken cleared his throat. “We’re still sifting through the trace and evidence collected at both the crime scenes. Now that we’re aware there was some sort of crossover between Hale and Shimaoka, we’re planning to go back through everything we found at Corby Hale’s. We also have some follow-up interviews to do, including one with Senator Hale. We didn’t find any foreign trace at Corby’s scene—what’s notable was that there were no prints at all on his heroin kit. The syringe had his prints on it, but awkwardly placed. The setup was for a right-hander when Corby was left-handed, a difficult maneuver to pull off.”

“So these are the anomalies.” Waxman switched to photos of the scene on his computer, and they flashed on the screen overhead. Lei was struck again by
Corby’s beauty, the posed quality of his body like an angel on a tomb.

“We’re also still waiting for toxicology reports from Dr. Fukushima’s office,” Lei said. “She can give us preliminary findings on the autopsies as early as today.”

“What about the suicide notes?” Waxman pulled images of those up—the enigmatic handwriting of Corby’s beside the elegant finality of Alfred Shimaoka’s. “They look genuine—what did handwriting analysis reveal? Any trace on the paper?”

“No trace but the vic’s prints,” Lei said. “Handwriting analysis came back as consistent. These notes are real, and they were handled only by
Corby and Shimaoka.”

“So what’s going on here, exactly?” Waxman looked up at them over the narrow steel rims of his reading glasses. His icy eyes tracked their faces and made Lei’s bladder cramp, reminding her of her old boss, Captain Omura on
Maui. Omura’s exacting standards had both challenged and improved Lei’s work—and Waxman’s had too. “I’m still not getting a clear enough picture of what happened to these two victims and why. Let’s have these dots connected by the next briefing. And how did you come up with this trend in suicides, anyway?” That sharp, pale gaze had come to rest on Sophie Ang.

For the first time Lei could remember, the tech agent shifted in her seat and looked uncertain—though with her exotic features set in an immobile mask, it was hard to tell. Ang kept her gaze on her laptop screen while her fingers worked their magic, and the overhead filled with a log-in portal over a plain white screen labeled “Data Analysis Victim Information Database.”

“This is how I detected a trend nationwide in suicides with oddities. I decided to narrow my search to local suicides, and DAVID twigged the Hale case.”

“DAVID.” Waxman had become very still. “I am not aware of that software. And I’m aware of all of our Bureau software.”

A flush stained Sophie Ang’s high cheekbones. “DAVID is my program. I have been building it on my own time for the last two years.” Lei knew Ang had been at the Bureau in Honolulu for three years, and until this moment, she was the only agent Lei had never seen come under Waxman’s hammer.

“So this is an unsanctioned, untested program.”

“Yes, sir.” Ang’s eyes stayed down.

“Are you running our confidential data on it? Are you using Bureau computers to run it? Have you taken any of our information off-site to work on at home?”

The flush deepened. Lei could see stress in Ang’s wide brown eyes as she looked up at their boss at last, and Lei felt the tech agent’s anxiety as Ang answered. “Sir, I’m aware this is a breach in protocol, and I’m willing to submit the program to the most stringent of reviews with the national tech department. I didn’t want to do that until I was confident of the value DAVID could offer the Bureau and had worked out the bugs in the program. I was waiting for the right time to talk with you about it.”

Waxman let a long beat go by as he stared at Ang. Then he turned to Lei and Ken. “Go see the medical examiner. Get a rush on those tox results. Agent Ang, you stay here while we discuss the repercussions of this.”

Lei wished she could find a way to show the Sophie Ang some support or sympathy— Ang was brilliant, and she had no doubt that the DAVID program was going to be a huge asset, no matter how it worked. Lei looked over at Ang, but the other agent had folded her hands in her lap and looked down. There was nothing Lei could do but say, “Yes, sir,” and follow Ken out.

The click of the conference room door shutting behind them had never sounded so final. How well Lei knew the feeling of being under a superior’s scrutiny. She said a little prayer for Ang as she walked down the hall.