Zero Break (28 page)

“A middle-aged Chinese woman pawned a piece of jewelry we traced back to the first woman who was killed,” Ray said. “Both the secretary, and the head of the company, fit the description, but the pawn broker can’t be more specific.”

“Both women live near each other, in Manoa,” I said. “Someone picked up a cat from that area last Thursday, and we found it near where Miriam Rose’s car ran off the road. So either of the two women could have been the one to manipulate the accident.”

“This case is going on too long,” Sampson said. “Wrap it up. If you have to, bring both women in and question them.”

“Will do, chief,” Ray said, and I nodded along.

“Let’s step back,” I said, when we were back at our desks. “Zoë and Wyatt are talking one day, and they figure out there’s something screwy going on with Néng Yuán—they’re not getting the results they’re reporting to the state.”

“Either Dr. Z or someone working for her broke into Zoë’s house and killed her, and took her laptop, not realizing that Zoë had an online backup, too,” Ray said.

“But how did anyone besides Zoë and Wyatt know that Zoë had the data?”

“Must have been Gladys,” Ray said. “Nishimura said that Gladys monitored the analysts very closely.”

“But there’s no connection between Gladys and Dr. Zenshen. Gladys works for the state. Why wouldn’t she be happy that Zoë uncovered a problem?”

Ray crossed his arms. “Dr. Zenshen must have been paying Gladys.”

“I wonder if Harry dug up anything on either of them. Let me call him.”

Harry apologized that he hadn’t gotten back to me. “More drama with Brandon last night. He had another test today, and he was sure he was going to fail. I had to spend a couple of hours going over the material with him before he could settle down and go to bed.”

“Ah, the life of a father,” I said, looking over at Ray as I did.

“Give me an hour, and I’ll have something for you,” Harry said. “Why don’t you come over here?”

“Remember, Harry, nothing illegal,” I said.

“You’re breaking up. Gotta go. See you later.”

“We’re both on land lines. Nobody’s breaking up.” But he had already hung up.

We spent the next hour doing paperwork, then drove up to Harry’s. “Don’t get mad at me, Kimo,” he said, as he led us back toward his office. “You know once I get curious it’s hard to shut me down.”

“And you know that anything you find when you’re curious can’t be used in a court of law, so it does us no good.”

“But it can show you where you should be looking,” he said.

I looked over at Ray, who shrugged. “He’s your friend.”

“I looked up the first woman, Gladys Yuu,” Harry said, sitting down at his computer. “Up until about a year ago, she was pretty broke. She had a savings account with about a grand in it, and she was always overdrawing her checking account. She even took out a home equity line against her house, drawing down about twenty grand.” He turned to face us. “A lot of her money was going to this company called Island Care, so I looked them up.”

“She has an elderly mother living with her,” I said. “Must be some kind of nursing agency.”

Harry looked deflated. “Yeah, that’s it. She pays them close to four grand a month, which swallows up almost all her take-home pay.”

“You said up ’til a year ago,” Ray said. “What happened then?”

“She started getting transfers from an offshore account,” Harry said. “The first deposit was $25,000. Then six months later, another twenty-five grand. A couple of weeks ago, she got an extra boost—fifty grand. She paid off the home equity line and closed it out.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“So then I switched over to that other woman you asked about, Xiao Zenshen. That was harder, because she has all these connections back to China. But I kept digging. And then I hit pay dirt.”

“What? What did you find?”

“She gets payments from the same offshore account,” he said. “Nothing like Gladys Yuu, but more regular. A couple of grand a month.”

“There’s the connection between the two of them,” Ray said. “Somebody’s paying them both.”

“Hold on, cowboy,” I said. “Dr. Z comes from China. Maybe that’s her offshore account, and she’s drawing down living expenses for herself, and paying Gladys, too.”

“You can’t deny that it’s a connection,” Harry said, siding with Ray.

“Yeah, but we can’t do anything with it.”

“We can use it to confront Dr. Zenshen,” Ray suggested. “We should bring her in for questioning.”

“She’s a smart woman. We need something more, some detail we can catch her on.”

“And those spreadsheets aren’t enough?” Harry asked.

I shrugged. “I think we could get her on fraud. But murder? No. We don’t have enough to get a warrant for either woman’s tire treads or fingerprints yet.”

“You’re a real party pooper, you know that?” Harry asked.

We went back to headquarters, but even after laying the case out again and again, we still couldn’t come up with enough to justify a warrant. And we didn’t want to tip our hand by bringing either Gladys or Dr. Zenshen in for questioning until we had something more.

BOAT RESCUE

Later that afternoon, Ray and I met Levi at the Koko Marina shopping center in Hawai’i Kai, adjacent to where he kept his boat. “It’s nice of you to take us out like this,” Ray said.

“I thought it might help you to see the different kinds of technology,” Levi said, as he swung up onto the boat. “Kimo, untie that bow line, would you?”

I walked up to the line at the front of the boat, just as my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and I was tempted to let it go to voice mail, but I gave in to my obsessive nature and answered.

I could barely understand the woman on the other end of the phone, because her Chinese accent was so heavy. “Wyatt?” I asked. “You’re calling about Wyatt Collins?”

“
Shi
,
shi
.” That was yes in Chinese. “He go out on boat, with doctor.”

I didn’t understand, so I repeated what she’d said.

“Shi, shi,” again. “I think she have gun.”

Gun is a word I always understand. And then it clicked. “Dr. Zenshen,” I said. “She held a gun on Wyatt and made him get on a boat?”

“Shi, shi,” she said.

I remembered the boat we’d seen when we talked to Wyatt. “The boat docked behind the office? What’s its name?”

She didn’t understand. I struggled to remember the little bit of Chinese I had learned from Uncle Chin, my father’s best friend, who had enjoyed teaching me and my brothers a few phrases. “
Nei giu mut ye meng
,” I said. That meant
What is your name?
but I hoped that by adding “The boat” at the end she’d understand.

“Shi, shi,” she said. “Wave Walker.”

Well, that’s what I figured out she meant—but it took a while. I hung up and told Ray and Levi what I’d heard. “Come on,” Levi said. “She’s probably going out to the wave articulators. We can head her off there.”

I hustled to cast off the bow line while Levi started the boat, and both Ray and I jumped on board. We weren’t sure where Dr. Zenshen was going, and we didn’t even know for certain that Wyatt Collins was an unwilling passenger, so I didn’t want to call for official backup. I could just imagine what the dispatcher would say if I did.

We powered slowly out through the marina, and then under the Kalaniana’aole Highway bridge, and then Levi revved the engines up and we almost hydroplaned out into the ocean. I climbed up to the flying bridge, where Levi stood at the boat’s helm. “You know where you’re going?” I shouted over the noise of the engine.

He held up a chart. “Always good to know what the competition is up to.”

I picked up a pair of binoculars and climbed back down. I walked around to the bow of the boat, where Ray was sitting with his back against the window into the lounge. “Might as well enjoy the ride,” he said. “Damn nice boat.”

I sat next to him and put the binoculars up to my eyes. I couldn’t see anything except open ocean, and I hoped that Levi knew where he was going. I hoped, too, that it was where Dr. Zenshen was going, and that we’d be able to get there before she did anything to hurt Wyatt Collins.

He might have been an ex-con, but I hadn’t seen him do anything yet to make me think he hadn’t reformed. Chances were pretty strong that he had worked hard to make a new life for himself, come out to Hawai’i on the word of an Internet friend, and then found himself on his own once again, this time in a strange place. Hell, the receptionist at his office could barely speak English. That had to be tough for a guy from Kentucky.

Following some unseen marker, Levi turned the boat to starboard, keeping the engines at full, and then, in the distance, I could make out another boat. I handed the binoculars to Ray. “Can you make out the name on the transom?”

He squinted for a while, until we got closer. “Yup, that’s it. Wave Walker.”

“Damn.” I was impressed. Although I spent a lot of time in the water as a surfer, I never got more than a few hundred yards off shore, and considered the open ocean an unknown territory. Levi, though, had been able to find a boat out there, with nothing more than a guess to its destination.

As we got closer, I saw that the Wave Walker was holding steady near what looked like a bunch of pontoons strung across the waves. I remembered how Levi had tried to describe Dr. Zenshen’s research into wave articulators.

Levi cut the engines down, and we moved more slowly toward the stationary boat. Ray and I traded the binoculars back and forth; he was the one who saw the man and woman first, standing together at the boat’s stern. “That must be them,” he said, handing the glasses to me.

I was watching Dr. Zenshen when she looked up and spotted us approaching. She was holding a long, bright blue pole in her hand, and as we got closer I saw that it had a wicked hook at the end. I recognized that it was a gaff, used to help bring sport fish into the boat.

She swung the gaff toward Wyatt, and the hook slammed into his mid-section. Wyatt stumbled backward from the impact. With her left hand, Dr. Zenshen pushed him, and he went back over the edge of the boat, into the water. Then she disappeared into the boat.

I handed the glasses to Ray. “I’m going to tell Levi what I saw. Keep an eye on her.”

I scrambled around to the stern of the boat and started to climb the ladder. As I did, I heard the engines of the Wave Walker start up.

“Want me to chase her?” Levi asked, as I got up to the flying bridge. He looked like he was enjoying himself.

“She hit Wyatt with a gaff and then pushed him over the transom.” The Wave Walker took off, its wake rattling the wave articulators. “Can you get us in there to try and save him?”

Levi nodded, his enthusiasm gone. I went back down the ladder, and found Ray standing at the stern. “I should tell you, I’m not the strongest swimmer in the world,” he said.

“I’m good.” I unbuttoned my aloha shirt, kicked off my deck shoes, and pulled off my khakis. It was cool there in only my boxers, especially as I leaned around the port side, scanning the waves for Wyatt.

Ray looked out the starboard side. The closer we got to the wave articulators, the slower Levi took us. I spotted Wyatt in the water, tilting his head back and flapping his arms to try and keep his mouth above water.

I yelled up to Levi, pointing, and he slowed the boat to a crawl so our wake wouldn’t swamp Wyatt as we approached.

There was blood in the water around him. He went under, then struggled back to the surface. He was unable to keep his mouth above water long enough to breathe properly. Without air, he couldn’t wave or shout at us.

I knew that his lungs must be filling with water, making him less buoyant. And he was a skinny, muscular guy, without a lot of body fat, which would make him more prone to dropping below the water than a fat guy.

Ray was scanning the horizon. “Uh, Kimo?”

I clambered up on the transom, ready to jump in the water. “Yeah?”

“Is that a shark?”

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw the telltale dorsal fin knifing through the water.

“Yeah. Keep an eye on it and shoot it if you have to.”

I jumped into the water, feeling the cold all over me, and swam overhand to Wyatt, trying to ignore the fact that we were miles off shore and the bottom was way, way below us.

I heard Ray’s gun go off and hoped that if he was shooting at the shark he’d hit it, or at least scared it away. But I was too intent on keeping an eye on Wyatt to look around. If Wyatt went under again I might not be able to find him.

He sank again just before I reached him. I took a deep breath and ducked under the surface. I bumped into him, then reached out and grabbed him under the arms. Then I pushed upward, breaching the water and taking deep gulps of air.

Wyatt was gasping for air, too. I hooked an arm around him and turned back toward the boat. “Kimo! Behind you!” Ray called.

I didn’t want to waste the energy to turn around, but I knew I had to. I twisted my head and saw the shark approaching. “Shoot him!” I called to Ray, my voice hoarse.