Zero Break (30 page)

“I agree. But how far do we go back? Her coming here from China? The technology her company uses?”

He shook his head. “I’m thinking we start with Wyatt. We get her to talk about him and how he got hold of the information he had. From there, maybe we can get her to talk about taking him out on the boat.”

“Sounds like a plan. You want to take lead?”

He coughed again. “My voice is still raw from the smoke. You take it and I’ll jump in when I think I should.”

Lidia Portuondo and Kitty Cardozo had teamed up to shepherd Dr. Z through the booking process, and they were almost done by the time we arrived. Dr. Z was quiet and poised as we walked her to an interview room before transporting her to the jail.

She sat down in a wooden chair, and I sat across from her and switched on the tape recorder. Ray lounged against the wall behind me. I read her rights; since it was clear that she couldn’t just pick up and walk out, it was important that we got everything on the record and followed the rules.

“Do you understand these rights?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to speak out loud for the recording.”

“Yes, I understand,” she said. “I am just glad to get a chance to explain what has happened. You will see that I am the victim here.”

I love a suspect who’s willing to talk. “Then let’s get started.” We went through the formalities, getting her name, address and so on.

Then I jumped in, where Ray and I had decided we would begin. “You have an employee named Wyatt Collins?”

“That is correct. He works for my company, Néng Yuán.”

“Tell us what happened this afternoon.”

She smiled. “My company owns a boat, so that we can go out into the ocean regularly to check on our research projects. One of the wave attenuators has been returning anomalous data, so I went out to see what was wrong. I invited Mr. Collins to accompany me.”

Her back was erect, her hands folded in front of her on the table. She was a very cool customer, I had to give her that.

“When we reached the wave attenuators, Mr. Collins made some threatening remarks. He indicated that he had been working with a woman at the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, the agency that regulates our research. That he had been feeding her false data, and that he was going to put the blame for that onto me if I didn’t pay him a very large sum.”

“That must have been upsetting,” I said.

She nodded. “And then he began threatening me, physically. I grabbed the first thing I could find, a gaff we use to pull in the attenuators to check them. In defending myself I hit him with the gaff, and he fell overboard.”

“What happened then?”

“There was another boat approaching. I was frightened for my safety, Detective, so I left the area immediately. I worried that the approaching boat might have had friends of Mr. Collins, and that I would be in danger if I remained there.”

“What did you do after that?”

“I returned the boat to the slip behind my office,” Dr. Zenshen said. “And then I determined to go and speak directly with the woman Mr. Collins had implicated.”

She spread her hands out then. “I know it was not the wisest decision, but I was very upset. I should simply have called the police and reported Mr. Collins. Did you know that he is an ex-convict?”

“Yes, I am aware of that fact.”

“Well, I was not aware, when I hired him. I can assure you that I never would have hired such a person if I had known.”

“Why did you hire him?”

“He came very highly recommended,” she said. “By the woman who I learned was working with him. Gladys Yuu.”

“So Gladys recommended him? Not Zoë Greenfield?”

She played her part well. “I don’t recognize that name.”

“Really? She’s the analyst at the state bureau who reviewed your data.”

“Ah, that is the reason, then,” she said. “There are safeguards, you see, to keep the reviewers separate from those who are being reviewed. All my contact with the office went through Gladys Yuu. The same was true for my employees, including Mr. Collins.”

“Let’s get back to this afternoon,” I said. “You went to speak with Gladys Yuu?”

“Yes. But I never got the chance. As I approached her house, an explosion occurred. I ran away, once again, frightened for my life. I was chased by a man in a Jeep, and I thought he was another associate of Mr. Collins and Ms. Yuu.”

“Even with the blue police light on the roof of the Jeep?” I asked.

For the first time, her confidence faltered. “Excuse me?”

“I was the one chasing you, Dr. Zenshen. In my Jeep. With the blue light flashing on the top.”

“I was very upset,” she said. “I had just discovered that my employee had been stealing from me, and then I was physically threatened.”

She leaned forward. “He told me that he had killed Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose, and that he would kill me, too.”

“Miriam Rose?” Ray asked. “Who’s that?”

We could tell from Dr. Zenshen’s face that she knew she’d screwed up. How would she know Miriam’s name, if she had pretended not to know Zoë because she was shielded from the state employees?

“He told me,” she said, her voice becoming more shrill, her accent even stronger. “He told me that he had been working with Gladys, and that Zoë and Miriam had discovered what he was doing. He killed them, detective. He would have killed me.”

My cell phone rang, and I could see from the display that it was Mike. “I have to take this call,” I said, standing up. “Detective Donne will stay with you until I return.”

I flipped the phone open as I walked out the door. “What’s up?”

“I’m still up at the blast site. But one of the guys here spoke to a crime scene tech working on your suspect’s car. They found fuses and ammonium nitrate. It looks like that stuff will match what was used in the blast.”

“Thanks. I’ll probably be home late.”

“Me, too. I’ll call my dad and get him to walk Roby.”

We both said that we loved each other before we ended the call. I walked back into the interview room and asked, “What is ammonium nitrate used for, Doctor?”

She looked confused for a moment, then recovered. “I suffer from migraine headaches, detective. I carry ammonium nitrate with me in my car because you can mix it with plain water to make a cold pack, which I used to relieve the migraine pressure.”

“It can also be used as an explosive, can’t it?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Come now, Doctor. You have a PhD in electrical engineering. I’m sure you’re quite familiar with the properties of most common chemicals.”

She just smiled at me.

“I think we’re done for now.” I turned off the recorder, and Ray and I stepped outside. We got an officer to escort Dr. Zenshen to the holding cells, where she would wait for her arraignment.

“She’s smart,” Ray said.

“You bet. But we’re smarter. We’ll catch her.”

We went over to the Queen’s Medical Center, where Wyatt Collins was resting in a private hospital room after a doctor had stitched up the wound from the gaff. “Guess I’m unemployed, huh?” Wyatt said.

“A gaff in the chest is a pretty harsh termination notice,” I said. “You want to tell us what happened this afternoon?”

“I was working at my desk around three, when Dr. Zenshen came in. She said that she had to go out and check on some of the wave attenuators, and it would be good for me to see what it was I was working on.”

He shifted in the hospital bed and I could see the pain etched on his face. “I didn’t want to go. I’m a lousy swimmer, and I just didn’t trust her. But she was very persistent, and, well, up ’til then I figured I had to do whatever I could to hold on to my job.”

“Did she have a gun?”

“No. Why?”

“The receptionist thought she might have,” I said. “That’s what convinced us you were taken onto the boat against your will.”

“Good for her.” He sighed. “She didn’t talk much as we rode out toward the wave attenuator area. But then when she shut the engine down, she started asking me all these questions. About Zoë, and about the numbers we submitted to the state. I was trying to dodge around things, but she was on to me.”

“What do you mean, she was on to you?”

“She knew that Zoë had two different sets of data, and she was sure that I’d given her the second set, the true numbers. She started cursing at me, first in English and then I guess what was Chinese. I just kept denying it, and darting around the boat.”

“And then?”

“Then we heard this other boat coming up. Neither of us knew who was in it, but it made her even jumpier. All of a sudden she grabbed this fishing pole with a hook on the end and stabbed me.”

“A gaff,” I said. “They use it to bring fish in.”

“All I know is that it hurt like a son of a bitch, and I was doubled over with the pain. She dropped the pole and pushed me, and I went over into the water. I was sure I was going to drown until you grabbed me.”

We went back over his story a couple of times, even asking him to repeat the events backwards to be sure he wasn’t making stuff up or leaving stuff out. He came through pretty well every time.

The assistant district attorney was waiting for us at headquarters. She was a young haole woman, only a few years out of law school, but she seemed to know her stuff. We went over the case, and everything we had on Xiao Zenshen. Finally, she said, “I have enough for the arraignment. I’ll be back in touch with you tomorrow.”

It was late, and neither Ray nor I had gotten dinner. I sent him home to Julie, then grabbed takeout from Zippy’s on my way home. While I ate, Mike and I traded information. “You going to be able to nail her?” he asked, when we were done.

“Hard to say,” I said. “Like I said, she’s a smart woman. I still don’t know if she killed Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose, or if Gladys Yuu did. And if Gladys did, was Xiao Zenshen pulling the strings? But it’s up to the ADA to make the case, now. Ray and I just have to testify.”

“What’s your gut reaction?”

“My gut says that Dr. Z was behind it all, but I think Gladys did the actual killing.”

“She was Chinese, right?”

I nodded.

“She had to do whatever she could to keep her mother going,” he said. “It’s what good children do, especially when they come from cultures that demand that kind of behavior.” He looked at me, as I was crumpling up the paper from my dinner. “We haven’t shut the door on kids yet, have we?”

“No, I don’t think we have. But I think the next move has to be Sandra’s. When she’s ready to have a baby, she can ask us again, and then we’ll decide.”

“I don’t like leaving big decisions about life up to other people,” Mike said. “We have to know what we want first. Then we decide if we want to work with Sandra and Cathy, or go on our own—with some other woman, or adoption, or maybe even fostering.”

“You’d want to do that? Raise a kid who’s not biologically either of ours?” I asked.

“What does it matter, in the end? You and I both know that families come in all shapes and sizes. Whether we adopt or foster or donate sperm or whatever, we’d still love the kid the same.”

“I agree. I mean, you look at Aunt Mei-Mei, and how she took in Jimmy Ah Wong. To see her with him, you could never tell he wasn’t her blood.” I hesitated, not sure how to say what I meant.

I sat down on the far end of the sofa from him, and lifted his feet into my lap. “I love you, you know. I feel like my life is here, with you. But we’ve only been living together for what, eight months? We’ve still got some adjusting to do before we bring someone else into our lives.”

“You’re right,” he said, as I started to massage his feet. “And nobody says we have to have kids to be complete as a family.”

Roby came up to sniff Mike’s hand. “Roby will look after us in our old age,” he said. “He’ll be our seeing eye dog. He’ll open doors for us and dial 911 with his nose when we fall and break our hips.”

Roby put his front paws up on Mike’s thighs and looked back and forth between us. “You going to do that, boy?” I asked, scratching behind his ears.

He nodded his head vigorously, and Mike and I both laughed.

FINALE

Over the next few weeks, Ray and I pulled together additional evidence in the deaths of Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose. Gladys Yuu’s only surviving relative was a distant cousin on Maui, and she gave us permission to take Gladys’s fingerprints and compare them to the one on the stolen pendant, and to make a cast of Gladys’s tires. The print matched, and so did the tire track.

The DA had to get subpoenas for both women’s bank records to verify what Harry had found, that there were payments going from Dr. Z’s offshore account in China to Gladys’s account in Honolulu. Because of the difference in banking laws between the US and China, that was taking a long time.

The only evidence we could count on pointed toward Gladys Yuu, rather than Xiao Zenshen. The good doctor was too wily to admit to anything, and we couldn’t find that one thing that would conclusively put her behind the two women’s murders. The ADA had to settle for fraud in the payments Néng Yuán had collected from the state, and assault on Wyatt Collins. It wasn’t going to be much, but at least Dr. Zenshen would serve some time, and then be deported back to China.