Zero Break (2 page)

A hibiscus hedge with yellow blossoms that matched the paint job marked the boundaries of the back yard, separating it from its neighbors, but there was no fence to keep out predators.

Lidia pointed at the smashed door and then stepped back. A metal lawn chair lay sideways on the small paved lanai next to the door; it looked like that was what had been used to break in. We stepped up and peered into the living room.

As Lidia had described, the body of a slim woman in her early thirties lay on the floor, curled into the fetal position, facing the windows. Her shoulder-length dark hair swirled on the carpet next to her, a single strand falling across her forehead. She wore an oversized UH Warriors T-shirt in dark green. It looked like she’d been stabbed, multiple times. Her blood had soaked into the faded beige carpet and dried the shirt to her skin in places.

The air inside felt almost as hot as it was outside as Ray and I stepped gingerly through the broken door. I’m no pathologist, but I’ve seen enough bodies to know that she had been dead for at least a couple of hours. The blood had settled toward the side of her body on the floor, and her skin was as pale as a TV vampire’s. I phoned the ME’s office while Ray called for a crime scene tech. Then we both put on rubber gloves to avoid contaminating the scene with our own prints.

Lidia stayed out front by her cruiser as we evaluated the house. The first thing we did was begin taking pictures, before we touched or moved anything, beginning with exterior shots of the lawn chair and the broken door.

The living room décor was a real contrast to the gruesomeness of the dead body on the floor. Kids’ toys were scattered over the sofa and coffee table, and framed photos of two women and two small girls hung on the walls. One was the haole on the floor, though her brown hair was longer in the pictures and she had more of a tan. The other woman was somewhat slighter, most likely Chinese, with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. The girls looked like they were a mix of both races.

In one of the photos, the haole woman was perched on a surfboard at Makapu’u Point, the lighthouse in the background of the shot. The picture had been taken with a telephoto lens, and the woman smiled exuberantly. Her evident happiness reminded me of how I felt when I was out on the water.

Somehow that made it worse, knowing that a fellow surfer had died.

At my friend Harry’s urging I had bought a netbook a few weeks before, and started using it to keep my notes. When I finished photographing the scene and the victim, often at multiple angles and from wide to narrow shots, I popped the memory stick from the digital camera and plugged it into the netbook. I transferred the photos from the stick to the same folder I had created on the case, which would grow to hold my notes, as well as relevant websites, the autopsy report, copies of all the forms we had to fill out, and so on.

Once the crime scene was documented, Ray went right, toward the kitchen, and I went left, into the master bedroom. The walls had been painted with a beautiful seascape that stretched around the whole room. The artist had captured the sense of a beach at dawn, with a few shorebirds, a dolphin’s fin just offshore, a couple of palm trees and lots of sand.

The room was dominated by a king-sized bed with a rattan frame. A duvet patterned with palm trees had been thrown off to the side. An old air conditioner, turned off, filled the window that faced the street.

The bureau drawers had been dumped out, their contents strewn across the floor. A jewelry box had been turned over on the bureau top. A couple of earrings and a pewter necklace lay next to it. I took photos of the disarray.

In one corner, a plain door had been laid on top of two low filing cabinets to form a desk. The drawers had been pulled out, and papers and manila folders were scattered on the floor. I glanced through the ones I could see without touching anything. Mostly paid bills and articles on childcare.

I went back into the hall and turned into the second bedroom, which had been painted with a mural of jungle animals and brightly colored tropical birds. Two tiny beds took up most of the room. They had both been made and piled with stuffed bears, lions, and other animals of indeterminate species. The closet was hung with shirts and pants in sizes that ranged from two to three years. The old-fashioned upright chest that held their other clothes had been turned over, all the tiny undershirts and panties dumped on the floor.

“Ray,” I called. He was at the door of the small bedroom a moment later. “The little girls in those photos have been living here.”

“Yeah. I found a bunch of kid food in the kitchen, little plates and silverware and stuff.”

“But where are they? If they were here when their mother was attacked…”

Neither of us wanted to say out loud the gruesome possibilities. “But these beds haven’t been slept in,” Ray said. “Little kids like this, they’d have been in bed long before their mom would have gone to sleep.” He shivered. “Reminds me of some fairy tale.”

“One with an evil ogre,” I said.

Ray’s our expert on kid stuff; he grew up babysitting his little brothers and sisters. I was the youngest kid in my family and I was always too busy surfing or reading to worry about taking care of any neighbor kids.

Lidia appeared at the back door. “I called in for the home ownership records,” she said. “Two women are co-owners. Anna Yang and Zoë Greenfield.”

“Anything about two little girls?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Want me to check birth records?”

“Yeah, please. See if you can come up with anything that matches either woman.”

She went back to her squad car and Ray asked, “So where are the kids? They’ve got to be priority one. Think we should call out a Maile alert?”

Back in 2002, after a little girl disappeared, the state set up a program to notify the public of an abducted child through radio and television bulletins and electronic highway billboards. “Let’s see what we can find first,” I said. “Maybe Anna Yang has the girls with her, and she’s got a cell phone.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. The ME’s team arrived then, one male tech and one female, and we spent a couple of minutes with them. We couldn’t turn the air conditioning in the bedroom on until the ME had finished with the body, because we didn’t want to disturb the ambient temperature of the house, so we had to suffer with the heat and the humidity.

As soon as the ME’s team was situated, I walked back into the bedroom, plugged the Bluetooth gizmo into my cell phone and called my best friend, Harry Ho. Harry can do the kind of computer searches in minutes that would take me a day, or take our police computer techs, who like their paperwork, even longer. I gave him Anna Yang’s name and address. “Can you see if she’s got a cell phone?”

“This is too easy.” I heard Harry’s fingers at his keyboard as Ray and I put on rubber gloves. We found a wallet in the bedroom debris; our deceased was Zoë Greenfield. There were more pictures of her, the Chinese woman, and the two kids in her wallet.

We sweated as we searched, stopping frequently to wipe our foreheads with paper towels. A couple of minutes into our search I heard Harry’s voice in my ear. “Got a pen?”

“Better. Got the netbook.” I picked out the number Harry read off to me on the keypad. “Thanks, brah.”

I hung up and dialed the number Harry had given me. When a woman answered I asked, “Is this Anna Yang?”

“Who’s this?” a woman asked, with a strong Chinese accent.

“My name is Kimo Kanapa’aka,” I said. “I’m a police detective. Is this Ms. Yang?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s me.”

“Do you have the children with you?”

“Yes, it’s my week. What is this about? Where’s Zoë? Is she all right?

I gave Ray a thumbs up, and relaxed. It was good to know that the two little girls hadn’t been kidnapped or killed. “I will tell you what I can, if you can just answer a few questions for me. Do you still reside at the house on Lopez Lane?”

“No. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

“I’m afraid Ms. Greenfield has been killed,” I said. “Someone may have broken in during the night in a home invasion robbery.”

“My God…” I heard her choke back a sob. “Who would do such a thing? Zoë is such a good person.”

“I’d like to talk to you about her,” I said. “Can I reach you at this number?”

“I have to see her. I’m coming right over.” She ended the call before I could say anything else.

HOME INVASION

Ryan and Larry, two crime scene techs we often worked with, showed up to take fingerprints and look for trace evidence. Ray and I continued our search of the house, documenting everything we saw with notes and digital photos. There was no murder weapon evident, so I had the crime scene techs make sure to search the trash, inside and outside.

Ray and I could guess from the stab wounds that a knife had been used to kill Zoë Greenfield, so we inventoried all the knives in the household, then looked for evidence that might tell us more of what happened that night. Had the deceased eaten dinner at home? An empty microwave popcorn bag, an open DVD case on the player, a pair of wine glasses or beer mugs—all those are clues that can explain a sequence of events resulting in murder. There was a single glass in the sink, with the residue of what smelled like iced tea, and the TV section from the
Star
-
Advertiser
was folded open to Sunday night.

As the female ME’s tech bagged Zoë Greenfield’s hands and feet, I asked if she had an idea of time of death. “Doc Takayama will have to tell you that.”

The male tech said, “Given the temperature in here, I’d say you’re looking at six to twelve hours ago.” She glared at him. It was obvious she was new, because he added, “We can give them a window so they know where to get started.”

Ryan, Larry, Ray and I were all dripping with sweat by then. Working around the body, they began taking samples from the carpet as Ray and I went into the kitchen to consider.

Six to twelve hours before gave us a window of between 11 pm and 5 am the night before. “What do you think?” Ray asked. “She made herself a big glass of iced tea and settled down to watch TV in her T-shirt?”

“I think she must have finished her program, put the glass in the sink, and went to bed,” I said. “She was either asleep or drowsing and she heard the door smash in.”

“Why didn’t she call 911, hide in the bathroom?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she heard someone outside, went to the living room to check, and didn’t have time to get away once the burglar broke the door in.”

Lidia knocked on the front door. “Ms. Yang is here.”

Behind her I saw the woman from the photos. She was smaller than I expected, barely five feet tall, in her early thirties, like Zoë Greenfield. She wore a dark sleeveless blouse that showed impressive muscles in her arms, and white shorts, with a tiny purse on a long strap over her shoulder. She tried to peer around Lidia into the house.

“Bring Ms. Yang to the back yard,” I said. “We’ll meet you there. I’d like her to identify the body.”

We stepped back out through the broken door as Lidia led the woman around the corner. “Where’s Zoë?” she demanded, her accent making the words sound harsher than I figured she intended. “I want to see her.”

She moved quickly, darting to the broken door and looking in. “Oh, my God!” she said, and she burst into tears.

Lidia took her by the elbow and led her to the picnic table by the swing set. She fished a tissue from her pocket and gave it to the woman. I sat down across from her, Ray next to me, and I introduced us. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “Is the woman on the floor Zoë Greenfield?”

She nodded, dabbing at her face with the tissue.

“Can you tell us what your relationship was with Ms. Greenfield?”

“Zoë and I were partners for seven years,” she said. “We met when I was starting my own business. She was doing some pro bono accounting work for an artists’ cooperative that I belonged to. She helped me organize my books and set up a billing system.” She spoke pretty well, but still had trouble with words like billing, which came out more like birring.

She blew her nose. “We were attracted to each other, and I moved into her condo. Three years ago, we decided we wanted children. Zoë was very businesslike about the whole thing. She found this house, and recruited a sperm donor, and she carried the twins. Their names are Sarah and Emily.”

“Sweet names,” I said. “But you’re no longer together?”

“About a year ago, things started to go sour. Three months ago, Zoë finally decided it was over.” Her speech was deteriorating the more upset she got, and the increased accent didn’t make it easy to understand her.

Ray asked, “Can I get you some water? Iced tea?”

“Tea,” she said. “There’s always a pitcher in the refrigerator.”

She crumpled the tissue in her hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the girls. You don’t have to call the state, do you? They’re my girls, too. Not just Zoë’s.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“When we split up, I moved to an apartment above a restaurant in Chinatown. The woman next door is like my adopted grandmother, and she babysits for us.”

“The girls are with her?”