Twisted Vine Part 12

"No. Stopped working the scene after I called Dispatch."

"Okay, thanks. Is there a note?"

"Yes. It was in a sealed envelope, and she was holding it. Where she got it was another inconsistency. The mother, name of Annie, said she'd brought the stationery in for Betsy to use a couple weeks ago. Said that was around the time Betsy bought the nightgown. Annie hadn't seen it since. So Betsy must have hidden it."

"Interesting." Lei glanced over at Betsy's body. "She's wearing makeup. Where's the makeup kit?"

Reyes pointed. The kit was on a bureau across the room. Lei caught Ken's eye, and the senior detective turned to Reyes. "Thanks so much. Can you secure the scene outside, move the mother out? We're going to treat this scene as a homicide for the moment. We've already called the medical examiner."

"Okay," Reyes said, giving his golf shirt a tug downward over his potbelly. "Please keep me posted on what you find."

He left and Lei put on gloves, tucked her hands behind her back, and began a slow perambulation of the room in "see mode"-a state where she let her vision roam over the scene without overly focusing, just allowing the information to register and "blip" into consciousness-until something caught her attention.

It was a humble room, with a cheap pressboard bedroom set, a bulbous purple china lamp beside the bed, along with various toiletries where Betsy could reach them, and an empty water gla.s.s. Beside the water gla.s.s was a pill bottle. Ken photographed it before picking it up, shaking it.

"Ambien. Empty. I bet we find that they were kept elsewhere. I can't imagine Annie Brown leaving this where Betsy could reach it. She had to have some idea of her daughter's state of mind."

"Maybe Betsy could still walk and was concealing that for some reason," Lei said. "Let's check the soles of her feet."

"Good idea. I'm done shooting, so we can move things now." Ken set the camera back in the case, and they lifted the rose-covered comforter up to reveal Betsy's body.

The first thing Lei noticed was a smell of urine and feces wafting up from under the comforter when it was removed, but nothing marred the perfection of the pristine, lace-trimmed cream satin nightgown. Through the fabric, around the woman's hips, Lei glimpsed a bulkiness. She poked the woman's waist. A crinkling sound answered.

"She's wearing adult diapers. Do you think she'd have worn those if she could walk?" Lei looked at Ken.

He shook his head. "Seems unlikely." He bent to inspect Betsy's feet. "They look totally clean."

Lei bent down, shone a high-powered flashlight on them. The toenails had been recently painted. In fact, everything about this woman was perfectly groomed. She'd ritualistically prepared for her suicide, had apparently wanted to look her best. Lei touched the sole of the foot, pressed gently. Rigor was setting in, so the flesh was hard, but the skin was thin and soft.

"She wasn't walking, Ken. This skin on her feet is like a baby's b.u.t.t. It hasn't touched the ground in months." Lei straightened back up. "She was planning for this."

Dr. f.u.kushima, in scrubs and with her medical kit, appeared in the door. "Got another suicide, I see."

"Looks like. But we're thinking it's another one of those fishy ones," Lei said.

"I'd imagine, if you two are on the scene."

"We interviewed this woman a few days ago in connection with a website we're investigating. She had ALS."

"Interesting." f.u.kushima advanced, her sharp brown eyes moving quickly around the body. "I think it's significant that from the waist down mobility was compromised, but she still had full functioning in her breathing and arms. ALS doesn't usually progress that way. Maybe I can tell something more in the post."

The two agents straightened up, looking at each other. "We were trying to establish if she was walking, because her makeup kit is across the room and she is dressed in this fancy nightie from that box over there." Ken pointed.

"Aha. Where's the note?"

"Actually, don't know. Can you find Reyes, Agent Texeira, and locate the note?"

"Sure." Lei had begun to find the smell of Betsy's diaper suffocating, and she was happy to walk through the tiny apartment to the front stoop. Reyes and his partner had strung crime scene tape around the area and helped Betsy's mother pack a bag. The woman sat weeping on the steps while the detectives interviewed some neighbors who had gathered.

Lei sat beside her on the wooden step. "Mrs. Brown. I'm so sorry for your loss."

More weeping. Mrs. Brown had long dark hair threaded with silver, and the streaming face she lifted to Lei was surprisingly young and unlined. "She didn't need to do this. She wasn't a burden. It was my joy to take care of her!"

Lei reached out, rubbed the woman's shoulder. "I need the suicide note. Do you know where it is?"

"The detective tried to take it. I wasn't ready to give it to him." Mrs. Brown reached into the pocket of the flowered muumuu she wore, took out a crumpled card-stock envelope, handed it to Lei. Lei stifled the apprehension she felt about opening it. It had been torn open roughly.

"Where was this found?"

"She was holding it in her hands." Mrs. Brown covered her face with her hands, but the sobbing had stopped, to Lei's relief. Crying still made her edgy.

"May I?" Lei held up the note.

"Yes."

Lei eased the note out of the envelope with gloved hands. The card was a plain drugstore style, printed with Thank You in gold leaf.

"She asked me for a box of *thank you' notes. For when people brought her things, which they did sometimes." Annie Brown stared ahead. "She never wrote any though, until this one."

"Did you have any idea she was suicidal?"

"Yes. I didn't think she was dealing with her diagnosis well. She would get angry and throw her food, then cry when she saw it just meant I had to clean it up. Lately, though, I thought she was improving. She was still on that site a lot, but her mood was much better. She was even cheerful. I thought the worst was behind us. I knew the illness would progress and she'd get more paralyzed, but I thought she was working through it. Accepting it."

Lei was familiar with the burst of happiness and generosity some suicide victims exhibited once they'd made a commitment to kill themselves. She wondered if she'd have made the same choice Betsy had if she'd had ALS. She didn't say anything, not wanting to interrupt Annie's flow. "She bought that nightgown, said she wanted to pretend she was going to have a wedding night. I thought it was sweet, a good sign." Annie shook her head. "I was wrong."

"What did you know about DyingFriends? Did anyone from their organization stop by, ever visit your daughter in person?"

"No. She got a lot of comfort from that site, from socializing on there as everyone else in her life dropped her as a friend. They didn't seem to know what to say or do around her."

"Did you see or hear anything unusual last night?"

"No." Annie turned red-rimmed eyes on Lei. "Do you think someone came in? We keep the back door open, and someone could have. Because I wonder how she got her nightgown on herself. It was on the dresser across the room when I tucked her in last night. Also, I keep the Ambien in the bathroom. She only needs it once in a while, and I'd never leave it where she could reach it."

Lei didn't respond to that, asking another question instead.

"Could she walk? Enough to get those things?"

"No. Her nerves were damaged. At the doctor's, they even poked her with a needle to her feet and she couldn't feel it, let alone walk."

"Thank you, Mrs. Brown. I can't imagine how this must be for you. We've got your contact information. We'll call you if we need anything more." Lei got up and went back into the apartment, meeting Ken coming out with a box full of evidence-bagged items.

"Done for the moment. Dr. f.u.kushima has the scene. Let's go back to HQ and report in to Waxman."

Chapter 19.

Sophie carried Betsy Brown's laptop, which Ken and Lei had brought in from the latest scene, down to her office after the team meeting with Waxman. Her quads were still a little stiff from the running hikes she'd done over the weekend. An unfamiliar tenderness on her nose and shoulders reminded her that even with her dark complexion, sunscreen was a good idea.

Sophie had discovered a new interest over the weekend-outdoor run hiking. She enjoyed the challenge of running hiking trails with their uneven surface, vegetation and rocks, and spectacular views. She'd done Diamond Head on Sat.u.r.day and another one on Sunday, a famous route called the Makapu'u Trail. Looking down at the old lighthouse off the trail had lifted her spirits in a way she couldn't explain.

Sophie went through her protocol in working with a new computer, hooking it up to the write-block imager being the first part of that. When the copy of the computer's data was complete, she could look at what Betsy had been up to.

She sat down at her rigs, thinking about the latest news in the case. Most interesting was a finding just in from the ME's office on Corby Hale. His blood work had come back confirming AIDS, and the tox screens had come in positive for GHB as well as heroin. Gamma hydroxybutyrate, a date-rape drug, and enough heroin to put down a rhinoceros. The boy's heart hadn't stood a chance.

Someone had drugged him, then injected him. But why would that be necessary, if he'd written the suicide note himself and planned to die? She opened the case file on Corby, viewed the photos. She uploaded the photos from the Betsy Brown scene, dragged one to compare them side by side. The similarities were striking in the way the bodies were posed. She wondered what the tox results would be on the young woman with ALS.

Adding pressure to the investigation, Waxman told them that Senator Hale had reacted badly to the news that his son's death was neither accidental nor suicide. The FBI office had begun fielding calls from politicos as highly placed as the mayor and the police commissioner for them to find out who'd killed Corby and find that unknown subject soon.

Sophie popped open a data entry box in DAVID. No one had to know she'd run the case on DAVID; she'd keep the results to herself. But it continued to feel like a compulsion to check the conclusions she came to in "old-fashioned" police work against statistical probability.

She inputted all the new scene information on Betsy into DAVID, including oddities like no prints on the nightie box that was too far across the room and the poignant photo of the woman's suicide note: Dear Mama, Thank you. This thank-you note was always for you, the woman who put her life on hold to take care of me. Well, there's worse ahead for both of us, and I've decided it's just not right for me to do that to you; nor should I have to endure the inevitability of this terrible disease. If I had anything to leave to anyone, I would leave it to fund research for a cure for ALS. Since I don't, I hope my gift to you, of the next few years of your life free of me, will be enough.

I love you. Please don't cry. The day we found out I had ALS was the day we mourned, and it was enough for me. I'm going to a place where I can run and swim and dance again, and it's heaven.

Love you. See you there someday, Betsy Sophie felt her eyes fill as she read. Imagine having a mother who loved her so much she'd give up her life and work to care for her if she was sick. Imagine a daughter who loved her mother too much to be a burden. That such a terrible disease still ravaged people every day was a crime-a crime Sophie couldn't do a thing about. It twisted her insides with a visceral horror.

Sophie set DAVID to work, searching for suicides with similar commonalities, and while Ying was working on that, went into her e-mail on Janjai.

The now-familiar icon from DyingFriends was there, providing a link to the "next level of support, sharing, and commitment in your dying journey." She clicked on it, read and recorded a screenshot of the agreement not to disclose, share, discuss, or otherwise disperse information about this level of the site.

Once through that portal, she grimaced at what she saw. The page was laid out with gallery tabs of photos of suicides at their death scenes. They ran the gamut from what looked like peaceful drug overdoses to an image of a woman in a bathtub-she'd slit her wrists and appeared to be bathing in blood.

The photos weren't named, just captioned, and the central blog was an opinion piece that was strongly right to death and, once again, written by KevorkianFan.

Sophie frowned, her long brown fingers racing as she scanned through the pictures. She stopped at a photo of Corby Alexander Hale III's beautiful young face.

Angel Gone to Heaven was the caption.

Here was the solid link they'd been looking for, between the suicides and the site. She took scores of screenshots of the various aspects and pages, adding comments and admiring emoticons through her ShastaM ident.i.ty. There were hundreds of suicide photos, and finally she came upon Alfred Shimaoka, seated in his car with his fingers in lotus position and his suicide note propped on the gear changer.

Who had taken the picture and uploaded it to the site? Had it been Corby Hale?

Betsy Brown must be here somewhere.

Her fingers beginning to ache, her neck seizing up with tension, Sophie kept searching-filling her drop cache with screenshots, moving to the next one, aware even as she looked at them of the hypnotic suggestiveness of the pictures. Even the hideous ones, like the one of a man's broken body on the sidewalk from jumping, or the one with a face empurpled by hanging, began to have a surreal cachet.

This gallery would be a very bad place to spend time if you were feeling depressed.

She finally found Betsy's photo, captioned, Arrayed for her Wedding in Heaven." Betsy really did look like a beautiful bride, taking a nap before her wedding night. Sophie punched the intercom b.u.t.ton on her phone and called Waxman.

"Chief, I think you should come down here, I want to show you something. I found the tie between our suicides and the DyingFriends site."

Chapter 20.

Lei walked to her truck in the cool dim of the underground parking garage. She'd been able to keep her mind off Stevens's departure by immersing in the case: reviewing the evidence collection from Betsy's site, sorting and reviewing that of the other victims. She'd gone down to the lab with Ken and Waxman, and they'd all perused the "suicide gallery" on the DyingFriends site.

"Someone is uploading these pictures," Ang had said, sitting on her big exercise ball and flicking through the gruesome, sad roster so they could see the range of it. Ang highlighted the photos of their known victims. "Which means these suicides were, if not a.s.sisted, at least witnessed and photographed by a DyingFriends member. I'm waiting to be invited to some further commitment to suicide." She'd explained how ShastaM's persona was being invited deeper and deeper into the site.

Once again Lei was impressed with Ang's creativity in how she found a way to burrow into the site-but Lei could see it cost her something too. The agent's eyes were ringed with darkness like bruises, and she looked like she'd lost weight. Lei's stomach had turned as well, but she kept a stoic exterior as she visually toured the gruesome images with the rest of the team. DyingFriends was definitely behind these cases-but how, exactly?

Lei was now on her way to stake out the Woo house in Kahala, and Ken was taking the "bu-car" to monitor their remaining identified DyingFriends member, Robert Castellejos in Kaneohe. They'd debated whether or not to reinterview the two men, see what "level" they'd reached, but Waxman had decided the danger was too great that they'd share the investigation with others on the site and spook the administrator. For now they were going to surveil them to see if anyone paid an "angel of mercy" visit to either of the houses.

Lei's phone rang in her jacket pocket just as she unlocked the truck and hopped in. She took it out, and her throat tightened as she saw DET KAMUELA. She got in, closed the door, debated, and finally answered. "Special Agent Texeira."

"Lei, it's Marcus."

"Hi." She cleared her throat to get her voice to work. Somehow she'd managed to forget the Kwon fiasco over the weekend. Stevens had been a big help with that.

"I'm calling as a courtesy to tell you I'm on the way to interview your grandfather in connection with the number you found. I also need you to go on record with a statement about why you called that number and where you found it." His tone was flat.

He was doing his job, she reminded herself, and she knew right now he didn't like it. Knowing that helped her reply.

"I am happy to do so. Let me know where and when. I will not be repeating what I told you about Kwon though."

"And I won't be asking you to. At the moment."

He was going to try to keep her deeper involvement out of it. It was something, probably all he could do. "Thanks for letting me know, Marcus. You didn't have to."

"Yes, I did." He sighed now, and she heard the strain in his deep voice. "Have you told Marcella any of this?"

"No. It's been killing me, but no. Only Stevens knows. My partner Ken Yamada. And you."

"Okay, then. Let's try to keep it that way. Things could get very messy very fast."

"I'm aware." She gave a tiny bark of laughter. "Thank you for believing me."

"For the moment."

"For the moment." She waited a beat, but he just hung up. She put the phone away, thinking about her grandfather, imagining Kamuela pulling up to his peaceful home. She pictured Soga's face going immobile with affront at Kamuela's questions. Whatever the phone number in his wife's writing meant, she didn't think he'd known about it.

On the other hand, last year when she asked him about Kwon and if they'd known about her abuse, he'd told her not once but twice to "let sleeping dogs lie."

Trouble was, she'd never been able to resist giving a sleeping dog a poke.