Zero Break (26 page)

We sat there for a few minutes, looking at Gladys’s house and thinking. Just as I put the car back in gear, the front door of the house opened, and a young Filipina in a nurse’s uniform pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair outside.

As they got closer to us, I could see the Filipina wasn’t so young; she was about forty, with a snaggle-toothed smile. The old woman was bundled up in a sweater, despite the morning heat, and her white hair blew around her like a halo. She was Chinese, and I heard her complaining loudly in a guttural voice as the aide bounced her down the broken walkway toward the street.

“That must be Gladys’s mother,” I said. “I remember she said something about her mother having an aide.”

“That’s tough,” Ray said. “Living so long that you end up in a wheelchair, some stranger wiping your behind.”

“Well, at least Julie’s growing a little stranger for you who’ll wipe your butt when you get old,” I said.

“Don’t even go there. We’ll be wiping the kid’s butt for the first few years.” He made a face.

“It’s not so bad. I pick up after Roby every day. I don’t usually wipe his butt, though, unless he has diarrhea.”

“TMI.”

We watched the aide, smiling grimly, as she pushed the old woman down the street. “Must be expensive to have an aide like that,” I said.

“And I’ll bet Gladys doesn’t make that much as a secretary.”

“I want to show you one more place.” It was only a couple of blocks to Puuhonua Street, which backed up against the lower reaches of Round Top. “See that house there?” I pointed to a ranch-style with overgrown foliage in the front yard.

“Who lives there?”

“Dr. Xiao Zenshen.”

Ray gave a low whistle. “So both of them live close enough to pick up the cat. We know if Dr. Z needs money?”

“You run a science project like she’s got, you always need money. Whether you get it from the state or from investors like Levi Hirsch.” I put the car back into gear. “Let’s see if Lucky Lou remembers either of them.” We drove out to Salt Lake and had to wait while a crew-cut soldier pawned a digital camera. He kept looking over at us nervously, and as soon as Lou gave him the money and the claim ticket he was out of there fast.

“You guys are great for business,” Lou grumbled. “What do you want now? Want to confiscate more of my merchandise? I could go bankrupt the way you guys keep coming back here.”

“Just want to see if you recognize someone.” I showed him the photo of Gladys Yuu.

He shrugged. “Looks like any Mama-san you’d see at the grocery,” he said. “I’m supposed to know her?”

“How about this one?” Dr. Zenshen’s photo was a headshot from Néng Yuán’s website.

Lucky Lou didn’t recognize her either.

“You think either of them could have pawned that dragon pendant?” I asked.

“That was like a two weeks ago. You know how many customers have been through here since then? They don’t have big knockers, I don’t pay any attention.”

A shy-looking young woman entered the pawn shop, carrying a rifle case. I didn’t want to get involved, so we left.

“How are we going to get Gladys’s fingerprints, to see if they match the one on the pendant?” Ray asked. “And we need a cast of her tires to see if they match the tracks we found where Miriam Rose got run off the road.”

“I don’t know if we’ve got enough evidence yet. We can ask Sampson, but I think that’s what he’s going to tell us.”

And that’s exactly what he said. We sat in his office and presented what we had. “She worked with both the victims,” I said.

“But the pawnbroker can’t ID her?”

“Nope.”

“What’s her motive? She have money problems? A history of beefs with the defendants? Any connection to this power company, what’s it called?”

“Néng Yuán,” I said.

“We’ll get into her,” Ray said. “A day or two, we’ll have all the answers to those questions.”

“And then maybe you’ll have enough for a warrant,” Sampson said. “Maybe.”

“We should have anticipated that,” I grumbled, as we walked back to our desks. “We’re not a pair of rookies.”

“We got over excited,” Ray said. “I’ll run the credit check. You see what else you can find out about Gladys and Dr. Zenshen. Maybe Harry can do some searching.”

“Good idea.” I called Harry and told him what we knew about both women. “Nothing illegal,” I said. “Just see if you can dig up anything on her that we can use to get a search warrant.”

I called Levi and asked if he had anything on Néng Yuán yet. “We’re trying to connect the company to a secretary in the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism,” I said.

“I found a guy you can talk to,” Levi said. “His name is Mike Cheng, and he used to work with Néng Yuán, but now he runs his own consulting business.”

Cheng agreed to meet with us, so we went over to his office, in a four-story building out Ala Moana Boulevard beyond the Kewalo basin, almost at Honolulu Harbor. It was some kind of office co-op, with a single receptionist out front. Cheng himself was a short, stocky Chinese guy, about fifty, with an accent almost as heavy as the receptionist at Néng Yuán.

He led us back to his office, a single room with a desk, a plan table, and a couple of visitor chairs. “Levi said you wanted to talk about Néng Yuán?” he asked.

We sat across from him. “You worked there?”

“I knew Xiao Zenshen back in Shanghai,” he said. “At the university. I was a lecturer and she was very smart graduate student. Both of us interested in wave energy. So when she come here and start business, she ask me to come, too. Get me visa and everything.”

“How come you’re not still working with her?” I asked.

He wrinkled his nose like there was a bad smell in the room. “I don’t like how she do business. If you scientist, true scientist, you go up and down with your experiments. Ride the wave, they say. But Xiao, she want to succeed, big time. When numbers don’t work her way, she make them work.”

He shook his head. “Not good way to do business. The hand that is always open never hold on to what matters.”

I looked at Ray. He didn’t seem to understand that either, so I pushed on. “Could Dr. Zenshen be giving incorrect data to the state government?”

When Mike Cheng smiled, I could see he had terrible teeth—some missing, some broken, others stained by tobacco. “Xiao do that all the time.”

“And nobody ever caught on?” Ray asked.

Cheng rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for money. “Easy to look other way when money involved.”

“Who did she pay off?” I asked. “Franklin Nishimura?”

Cheng shook his head. “His chair always empty. Woman who make everything go in that office is secretary. Gladys. She hand reports to Nishimura to sign, he say, okay, Gladys.”

“So Dr. Zenshen paid Gladys to get Nishimura to sign off on false data,” I said.

Cheng smiled again.

“You have any proof of this?” Ray asked.

Cheng shrugged. “Xiao, she always keep two sets of records. Actual data, and data reported to state. You find those records, you have proof.”

I pulled the little flash drive Harry had given me out of my pocket. “Can you take a look at the data on here?”

He put on a pair of reading glasses, stuck the drive into the side of his computer, and focused on the screen. He made a bunch of sounds in Chinese as he flipped from page to page. Then he took the glasses off and looked at us again.

“Where you get these from?” he asked.

“A woman at the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism,” I said. “She had this file on her computer. We found it while we were investigating her murder.”

Cheng closed out the file on his computer and returned the drive to me. “You have to give to lawyer, make demand for wave attenuator results. Then you compare to milestones Xiao met, and payments state gave her. Those your two sets of data.”

“Where do you think she could have gotten these?” I asked.

“Xiao very careful about her data,” Cheng said. “When I work there, only she and I have access. When I leave, she replace me with other analyst. Must be him.”

When we were back in Ray’s Highlander, I said, “So Wyatt saw something fishy at Néng Yuán, and he must have told Zoë about it. He gave her the data.”

“And she knew there was something hinky going on,” Ray said. “That’s why she hid the files on her backup drive with different names.”

“I think we need to talk to Wyatt again,” I said. “You can get back onto the H1 at the Pali Highway on-ramp.”

LUNCH BREAK

It took us a while to get all the way back to Hawai’i Kai, and it was lunch time when we pulled up in front of Néng Yuán’s building. Wyatt Collins was standing out in front of the building, smoking a cigarette and talking to a dark-haired young woman in a severe black skirt and white blouse.

“Hey, Wyatt,” I said through the window, as Ray pulled up at the curb. “Why don’t you join us for lunch?”

He looked at the woman and then back at us. “Why not,” he said, and he got in the back seat.

“There’s a good burger joint in the Koko Marina shopping center,” I said to Ray. “Down the street a couple of blocks.”

“Got a new girlfriend already, Wyatt?” I asked, turning my head to face him.

“She works down the hall,” Wyatt said. “It a crime these days to talk to a pretty girl?”

“No crime,” I said. “Now, stealing confidential data from your employer, that might be a crime.” I turned back to Ray. “Left in there, at the shopping center.”

I let Wyatt stew until we were parked and waiting in line at the burger place. “Go wild,” I said to him, motioning to the menu. “My treat.”

He looked like a dog that had been beaten and then offered a treat. But he ordered himself a burger and fries, and Ray and I did the same.

While we waited for the burgers, we took a table by the window. The shopping center was busy, cars pulling in and out, moms and kids and whole tourist families in matching T-shirts. “It’s not like I stole the data,” Wyatt said. “I mean, it was something Zoë should have seen anyway.”

Ray and I nodded, sucking on our drinks. Wyatt took in a deep breath, then let it out. “When you told me she was dead, I got scared. I thought if I told you about giving her those spreadsheets, you’d arrest me. And I don’t have anything but this job anymore.”

“Let’s start from the beginning,” I said. “How did you figure out there was something fishy going on?”

Wyatt laughed. “I may have turned over a new leaf when I came out here, Detective, but I still recognize a scam when I see one. I put together all the statistics for Dr. Z to submit to the state. I knew we weren’t meeting our targets, and I was worried that if we didn’t get the next installment of money from the state, Dr. Z might not have the money to pay my salary.”

They called our number, and Ray went up and got the platters, bringing them back along his arm like a seasoned waiter. “Your range of skills constantly surprises me,” I said.

“I worked my way through college waiting tables,” Ray said. “Baseball cap, skinny tie, all those little badges. Don’t have the crap any more, but I have the pictures.”

We started to eat, the three of us just making casual conversation about past jobs we’d had. Wyatt had worked with his uncle fixing lawn mowers and farm equipment back in Tennessee. “In a way, that was what started me on my life of crime,” he said. “Couldn’t stand going home every day with my hands full of grease.”

I’d finished my burger and was working through the rest of the fries by the time I asked, “You talk to Zoë about Dr. Z not meeting her targets?”

“I did. Like maybe a week before Zoë got killed.” He pushed his half-eaten burger away from him, as if he’d lost his appetite. “She was surprised. She said she’d just finished looking at the data, and Dr. Z had made every target. That’s when we figured out there was something strange.”

“Who else had access to the data?” I asked.

“Me. Dr. Z. She had a couple of investors who knew what was going on, too.”

“Did you worry that Dr. Z would track the data back to you?” Ray asked.

Wyatt shook his head. “I wasn’t supposed to know there was a second set of results. All I had was my data. Zoë put it together with the data Dr. Z had submitted to the state. That’s when we started to see what Dr. Z was up to.”

“Did Zoë talk to anybody about the discrepancies?” I asked.

“Miriam. This girl she worked with. You should talk to her. Cute Filipina chick.”

“Miriam Rose is dead, too,” I said. “Last week.”

Wyatt’s face paled. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. We went over to the office last week, showed her the data, and she said she’d take a look at it. The next day she called to say she needed to talk to us. We were on our way up to her house when somebody ran her off the road.”

Wyatt slammed his hand on the table so hard other people in the restaurant turned to look at us. “Goddamn mother fucker,” he said, way too loud.

“Inside voice, Wyatt,” I said.

“This is what you get when you try to go straight,” he said, lowering his voice. “See? What the fuck good is it trying to play by the rules when nobody else does?”