Zero Break (6 page)

Miriam worked at a tiny cubicle, just big enough for a worktable and a rolling chair. The walls were plastered with photos of what looked like her family – middle-aged parents, Miriam, a younger sister and an even younger brother. She was a cat lover, too; there were pictures of a fat calico sunning on a white sofa, Miriam holding the cat, the cat playing with her brother and sister.

She smiled at Ray and I could tell from the way she held his hand a little longer than she held mine that he was the best one to take lead. “Is there someplace we can talk?” he asked her.

She led us down the hall to a small lunchroom that smelled of stale coffee. “Sorry,” she said, lifting the glass pot off its warming stand. “Somebody always leaves the coffee to burn.” She began cleaning the pot. “I was so upset when I heard about Zoë. We were friends—well, not out-of-work friends, or anything. Zoë was quiet. But we ate lunch together sometimes. We both like sushi, and we’d bring in different stuff for each other to try.”

She filled the pot with water, ripped open a bag of coffee and poured it into the filter, then joined us at a round table.

“Did Zoë ever mention any problems she was having?” I asked. “Anyone threatening her, for example?”

“I got the feeling she was having problems with her ex,” Miriam said. “She never came right out and said he was harassing her, but sometimes she’d get a call, and she’d be angry. I never asked about him, though.”

And never knew that the ex was a woman, I figured. That’s a big problem when you’re investigating what happened to a person in the closet, whether gay or lesbian. They don’t talk about their personal life at work, because they’re always worried about using the wrong pronoun. So they say little or nothing, and then when you go to interview the co-workers, they’re clueless.

Miriam didn’t know anything else. She introduced us a couple of other co-workers, but none of them had anything to add. We handed cards around and asked them all to call if they thought of anything. Miriam took us back to Gladys, who showed us the cubicle where Zoë worked. There weren’t any personal items there – not even snapshots of her daughters. It was sad.

Gladys promised to look through the things Zoë had been working on and let us know if there was anything that looked odd. “Miriam will help,” she said.

We thanked them both, and Miriam led us back to the elevators. “I feel so bad for Zoë. I wish there was something I could do.”

FINDING A DRAGON

A scruffy guy with a t-shirt that read ‘I said no to drugs, but they wouldn’t listen’ passed us as we walked back to where I’d parked the Jeep. It was clouding over, and a light breeze tossed the palm trees around us, skittering a paper cup down the street.

My stomach grumbled. “Lunch?” I asked.

“That sour coffee smell put me off my feed,” Ray said. “But I guess I could eat.”

We decided to get some lunch at a Zippy’s down the street. It had stopped raining, but the sky was still full of heavy clouds. “I feel like trying something different,” Ray said, as we stood in line.

“Mike loves the soup with
mandoo
—they’re Korean dumplings, and the
kim
chee
fried rice. He says it reminds him of stuff his grandmother made.”

I preferred to stick with the old Hawaiian specialties my mother had made when I was a kid, stuff like
lau lau,
steamed packages of pork and fish, and
kalua
pig, baked in a traditional oven pit. Or chicken rolled in
mochiko
flour and fried, or sweet and sour spare ribs. But I’d been putting on a few pounds lately; I wasn’t surfing nearly as much living with Mike up in Aiea Heights as I had when I lived on Waikiki. So I opted for the
so
men
salad instead, skinny Japanese noodles like vermicelli over lettuce, eggs,
char siu
pork and imitation crab meat. I wasn’t sure it was that much healthier, but it was a salad.

Ray decided not to experiment after all, and got a teriyaki burger with fries. The restaurant was crowded but we managed to squeeze into a side table. As we ate, I told Ray about Levi Hirsch and his interest in wave power. “I’m thinking maybe we call him and see what he knows about Néng Yuán before we go over there.”

He agreed, so I flipped open my phone and found Levi’s office number at Wave Power Technologies. The receptionist put me through to Levi, and he agreed we could stop by the office after lunch. “You’re lucky you caught me here today. I’m heading to Idaho tomorrow.”

“Idaho?” I asked. “You hungry for potatoes?”

“It’s my daughter’s spring break. We’re going skiing in Squaw Valley. It’ll be the first time Danny has seen snow.”

Danny was Terri’s son, and I was glad to see that things were moving forward between Levi and Terri well enough that the families were meshing.

When we got to his office, I showed him the paperwork Gladys Yuu had printed out for us and asked if he could interpret it. He put on a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses and took a look at it.

“They’re one of our competitors,” he said, after reading through it. “There are lots of people looking for the magic ticket, and a bunch of different ways to approach harnessing wave power. Néng Yuán’s approach is different from ours. I’ve heard that Dr. Zenshen really knows her stuff, but I don’t understand all the tech stuff. I’m not even on the staff here; I’m just an angel investor and I help out where I can.”

“Angel? Like with wings?” Ray asked.

Levi laughed. “It’s a venture capital term. Angels rush in where mortals fear to tread. We get in on the ground floor with new businesses. Sometimes they pan out, sometimes they go bust. But if they make it big, the payoff can be huge.”

“Huge enough to be a motive for murder?” I told him about Zoë Greenfield’s death.

He frowned. “Can’t say. Of course, there are millions of dollars floating around these days, even in tough economic times. Renewable energy is a buzz word, and there are foundation grants, corporate investments, and lots of greedy people trying to make a buck. I don’t see how killing a mid-level government bureaucrat could benefit anybody, but I’ll keep an ear to the ground for you.”

The radio crackled as we were leaving Levi’s office. Dispatch reported that a pawn shop in an industrial neighborhood out by the Aloha Stadium, just beyond Pearl Harbor, had responded to our bulletin about Zoë Greenfield’s pendant.

After navigating the tourist-clogged streets of Waikiki, we picked up the H1 and headed
ewa.
We don’t use directions like north, east, south and west on O’ahu;
makai
means towards the sea, while
mauka
is toward the mountains. Diamond Head is in the direction of the extinct volcano that towers over Waikiki, while
ewa
means the opposite way, toward the city of that name.

We pulled up a half hour later in front of Lucky Lou’s. He ran a tourist trap operation out front, catching visitors on their way to Pearl Harbor with counterfeit Guccis and Cartiers, and rows of shiny gold chains that would turn your neck green about a day after you got home from your vacation. Around the back, there’s another entrance for the pawn shop, and that’s the one we took, scrambling to close the flaps on the Jeep and scurry inside as a light rain started to fall.

Lucky Lou was about three hundred pounds and balding, a crabby New Jersey transplant. “Hey, Lou,” I said, making my way past racks of nearly new guitars, stereo equipment that would probably be warm to the touch, and cameras that troops from Schofield Barracks pawned to pay for working girls and their tender ministrations. “Let’s see that pendant you got.”

“I gotta tell you, it’s expensive cooperating with the boys in blue,” he said. “I gave out fifty bucks on this.” He pulled a tray out of a glass-topped cabinet, and pawed through the earrings, chains and watches until he found the dragon pendant.

I unfolded the picture Anna Yang had drawn and compared the two. It was an excellent match, down to the chip in the dragon’s hind claw. “Who brought this in?” I asked.

“Chinese lady, maybe fifty-something. Dressed nice. Said it had belonged to her grandmother, but her husband was out of work and they needed cash.”

I looked at Ray. That didn’t fit with our idea that Zoë Greenfield’s killer had been an ice addict. But it was a damn good lead, the first one we had. “You got information on her?” I asked.

He pulled out the pawn form, which listed her name and address. I copied it down. “If it turns out it’s the wrong pendant, you’ll get it back. Did she bring anything else in?”

Lou frowned. “Some crap. There wasn’t much pawn value, so I bought it from her for the gold. But I don’t know which pieces came from her—I just throw all that stuff into a box and eventually I sell it to a guy.”

If the dragon pendant was a match, I figured that we could bring Anna Yang out to the pawnshop and have her look through Lou’s box, though most likely we could make a case just from the pendant.

I looked at the information from the pawn slip the Chinese woman had left. “You know this address?” I asked Lou.

He shook his head. “The zip is 96817. That’s Chinatown. May be some little alley.”

I pulled up a mapping program on the netbook, but couldn’t locate Yu Chun Street. So I called Mary Luo, a detective I knew who worked out of the Chinatown Substation, at the corner of Maunakea and North Hotel. She had been on bicycle detail there before getting her shield, so if anyone knew the back alleys she would.

“You know where Yu Chun Street is in Chinatown?” I asked.

“Spell it.”

I did. Mary laughed. “I thought so. Yu Chun means silly or stupid in Chinese. Sounds like somebody gave you a fake address.”

I thanked her, hung up, and turned back to Ray. “Curious. How did this woman get hold of Zoë Greenfield’s pendant?” An idea flashed in my head. “Anna Yang said she’s living next door to a Chinese woman who’s like a grandmother to her. Maybe this was all a set-up—Anna killed Zoë and gave the pendant to grandma to pawn.”

“We could interview the grandma and take a picture of her, then show it to Lucky Lou,” Ray said.

My phone rang. I looked at the display. “Well, what do you know. It’s our reporter friend Greg Oshiro, grand pooh-bah of the fourth estate.” I wasn’t surprised to hear from him, but I did think it odd he’d waited so long to call.

Greg and I had worked well together for a couple of years, until I was dragged out of the closet. After that, Greg had turned as cold to me as a morning just before sunrise on Haleakala. It was Ray’s contention that Greg was gay but closeted, leading him to envy me my freedom.

I doubted that, until a year before, when a guy Greg had slept with was murdered, and since then, he’d been carefully edging out of the closet and warming up to me. He’d come to our house a couple of times for parties, and while I wouldn’t call us friends, our working relationship had improved.

“I need to talk to you about a case, Kimo,” he said. He was breathless, as if he’d been running, though it was hard to imagine Greg, a slow, heavyset guy, moving too fast.

“Which one?”

“Zoë Greenfield.”

“You know something about the case? Or you just looking for information?”

“I know something. I’m the father of her children.”

THE BABY DADDY

Greg was agitated, but he had a doctor’s appointment he couldn’t cancel, so we agreed to meet at the Kope Bean coffee shop at the Central Pacific Bank just after three. “Poor guy,” Ray said. “Were they friends, did he say?”

“He didn’t get into much detail. And Anna Yang called him the sperm donor, so I’m not thinking they were best buddies.”

“Still, it’s got to be a shock.”

“I wonder why he waited so long to call,” I said. “I read about the murder in the paper this morning. If he knew Zoë Greenfield he should have been all over us for more information.”

We went back out to the Jeep. “Should we interview the grandma?” I asked.

“Do we know her name?” Ray asked.

I looked back through the notes on my netbook. “Never got it. But I’m sure we’ll be talking to Anna Yang again soon. Let’s hold off on chasing down grandma until we know all the right questions to ask.”

We returned to headquarters, where we sent the dragon pendant downstairs to be dusted for fingerprints, on the off chance that the thief might be in the system. I didn’t hold much hope, though.

The ME’s report came in. As expected, Zoë Greenfield had died from multiple stab wounds. The lesions were long and narrow, indicating a flat blade, and the width of the wounds suggested a double-edged blade. The characteristics of the gashes were similar enough that Doc Takayama established that the same or similar knife had been used for each of the cuts on Zoë’s body.

I went back to our inventory of the kitchen. The evidence techs had identified and packaged every knife they found, though when they used the blue LED ultraviolet light none had traces of blood. But knives are often sold in sets, so there was a possibility that we could identify a weapon by figuring out which knife was missing.

No luck there. No two knives from the house on Lopez Lane matched each other. They looked like a typical collection of hand-me-downs and what was on sale at Sears or some other discount store. There was an 8” sushi knife, a santoku knife, a sort of narrow-bladed cleaver, a bread knife, and a couple of steak knives with serrated blades.