Twisted Vine Part 5

Lei was glad, in that moment, that she hadn't had to see the Hales again-she didn't think she'd ever forget Mrs. Hale's white face contrasting with the blood on her collar from the torn earlobe.

Ang punched some b.u.t.tons on her computer, and a website, DyingFriends, popped up, appearing on the screen. "I know there's a lot of pressure, sir, and I asked for this meeting because I thought it was time that discussed what's happening with these *odd' suicide cases." She made air quotes. "I was the one to ask that we take the Hale boy's case. There's a reason for that, and I'll get into that in a minute-but for now, I wanted to tell you that in addition to the anomalies at the sites of the two suicides, both Shimaoka and Hale belonged to a website called DyingFriend.com."

A pause as the team digested this. "DyingFriends? Why would a healthy young guy like Corby Hale belong to something like that?" Lei asked. "I didn't find his name or that site when I was just searching his name in general."

"I don't know why. Don't you have a meeting with f.u.kushima about his autopsy later? Maybe there will be some answers there," Ang said.

"So this is the commonality between them? Did you find anything else connecting the two?" Waxman asked. "I haven't had time to read all your case files so far."

Ken spoke up at that. "We got the call for the Shimaoka site when one of the HPD detectives lifted a print of Corby Hale's off duct tape on Shimaoka's tailpipe. We did a full search of the house and car yesterday, but so far, no other trace of Corby Hale."

"My guess is that they'll be connected somehow on this website. The problem is, Corby's and Shimaoka's ident.i.ties have already been deleted by the system admin of DyingFriends. Which implies knowledge of their deaths, something none of their other online accounts seem to have." Ang typed rapidly, and they were able to view the error message 404 pages. "There's something about this site that's fishy. I'd like permission, sir, to develop a profile and impersonate a DyingFriends member. I will see if I can figure out what really is happening on this site behind the fire wall and track the system admin."

"Permission granted. Please submit all particulars on this to me-ident.i.ty, details, et cetera-before you initiate the impersonation. Yamada and Texeira, where are you with your part of the investigation?"

Ken cleared his throat. "We're still sifting through the trace and evidence collected at both the crime scenes. Now that we're aware there was some sort of crossover between Hale and Shimaoka, we're planning to go back through everything we found at Corby Hale's. We also have some follow-up interviews to do, including one with Senator Hale. We didn't find any foreign trace at Corby's scene-what's notable was that there were no prints at all on his heroin kit. The syringe had his prints on it, but awkwardly placed. The setup was for a right-hander when Corby was left-handed, a difficult maneuver to pull off."

"So these are the anomalies." Waxman switched to photos of the scene on his computer, and they flashed on the screen overhead. Lei was struck again by Corby's beauty, the posed quality of his body like an angel on a tomb.

"We're also still waiting for toxicology reports from Dr. f.u.kushima's office," Lei said. "She can give us preliminary findings on the autopsies as early as today."

"What about the suicide notes?" Waxman pulled images of those up-the enigmatic handwriting of Corby's beside the elegant finality of Alfred Shimaoka's. "They look genuine-what did handwriting a.n.a.lysis reveal? Any trace on the paper?"

"No trace but the vic's prints," Lei said. "Handwriting a.n.a.lysis came back as consistent. These notes are real, and they were handled only by Corby and Shimaoka."

"So what's going on here, exactly?" Waxman looked up at them over the narrow steel rims of his reading gla.s.ses. His icy eyes tracked their faces and made Lei's bladder cramp, reminding her of her old boss, Captain Omura on Maui. Omura's exacting standards had both challenged and improved Lei's work-and Waxman's had too. "I'm still not getting a clear enough picture of what happened to these two victims and why. Let's have these dots connected by the next briefing. And how did you come up with this trend in suicides, anyway?" That sharp, pale gaze had come to rest on Sophie Ang.

For the first time Lei could remember, the tech agent shifted in her seat and looked uncertain-though with her exotic features set in an immobile mask, it was hard to tell. Ang kept her gaze on her laptop screen while her fingers worked their magic, and the overhead filled with a log-in portal over a plain white screen labeled "Data a.n.a.lysis Victim Information Database."

"This is how I detected a trend nationwide in suicides with oddities. I decided to narrow my search to local suicides, and DAVID twigged the Hale case."

"DAVID." Waxman had become very still. "I am not aware of that software. And I'm aware of all of our Bureau software."

A flush stained Sophie Ang's high cheekbones. "DAVID is my program. I have been building it on my own time for the last two years." Lei knew Ang had been at the Bureau in Honolulu for three years, and until this moment, she was the only agent Lei had never seen come under Waxman's hammer.

"So this is an unsanctioned, untested program."

"Yes, sir." Ang's eyes stayed down.

"Are you running our confidential data on it? Are you using Bureau computers to run it? Have you taken any of our information off-site to work on at home?"

The flush deepened. Lei could see stress in Ang's wide brown eyes as she looked up at their boss at last, and Lei felt the tech agent's anxiety as Ang answered. "Sir, I'm aware this is a breach in protocol, and I'm willing to submit the program to the most stringent of reviews with the national tech department. I didn't want to do that until I was confident of the value DAVID could offer the Bureau and had worked out the bugs in the program. I was waiting for the right time to talk with you about it."

Waxman let a long beat go by as he stared at Ang. Then he turned to Lei and Ken. "Go see the medical examiner. Get a rush on those tox results. Agent Ang, you stay here while we discuss the repercussions of this."

Lei wished she could find a way to show the Sophie Ang some support or sympathy- Ang was brilliant, and she had no doubt that the DAVID program was going to be a huge a.s.set, no matter how it worked. Lei looked over at Ang, but the other agent had folded her hands in her lap and looked down. There was nothing Lei could do but say, "Yes, sir," and follow Ken out.

The click of the conference room door shutting behind them had never sounded so final. How well Lei knew the feeling of being under a superior's scrutiny. She said a little prayer for Ang as she walked down the hall.

Chapter 9.

Sophie kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes down as the conference room door closed behind the other agents. Her back was to the gorgeous view of a sunlit ocean dimmed by shaded gla.s.s. She wished she hadn't sat with her back to the window. It might have calmed her racing heart to sneak a look at it now and then.

"Agent Ang." Waxman waited a long beat until she looked up. "I'm disappointed in you."

Hurt showed in the tightness at the corners of Waxman's light blue eyes, the line of his mouth, the way he removed his gla.s.ses, tossing them down.

"I'm sorry, sir. I only ever have wanted to help the Bureau and our cases."

He cut her off with a hand gesture. "I'm not disappointed that you used your considerable gifts to try to build something new to help the Bureau. That doesn't surprise me at all. It surprises me that you didn't tell me about it early on. It would have made this stage, when we tried it out on a case, so much easier."

"I'm . . ." Sophie opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, her fingers twisting in her lap. "I didn't think you'd approve. I wanted to show you it could work." She looked back down at her log-in screen. "I thought you'd shut me down if I didn't prove DAVID's worth first."

Waxman shut his eyes, rubbed them with his forefinger and thumb. "I'm doing something wrong as special agent in charge that you don't know how much I value you. How much confidence I've come to have in your skills and your integrity."

"I'm sorry, sir," Sophie said again, feeling her face heat up. She didn't know how to respond to Waxman's praise, his personal disappointment. She'd misread him, and it wasn't the first time she'd done that. Once again she wished she understood people half as well as computers.

The SAC sighed, replaced his gla.s.ses, sat forward. "From here on out, you get an idea, come to me. Right away. I promise I'll hear you out and try my best to facilitate your project, whatever it is. The Bureau is getting hammered these days because we've created a bureaucratic culture where individual incentive isn't rewarded. Our best people are leaving for other agencies or the private sector. I've tried hard not to be that kind of director, but I see I've failed, and that's for me to correct." He tapped his laptop. "Now, damage control. This program has to be submitted through the proper channels or defense attorneys will have a field day-we always have to keep the end in mind as we pursue a case, right?"

"Right," Sophie agreed.

"So, if DAVID generated the original lead, what we need to do is come up with another reason we were *twigged' to the Hale case, which is pretty easy-the senator's high profile. And we need to submit DAVID to the review process. As to your working with confidential data off-site, that has to stop immediately."

"But, sir. I often work at home late at night . . ."

"I can't allow that. The premises of your building may not be secure, and if our data were stolen somehow, it's an unconscionable security breach."

Sophie couldn't tell him she'd replicated her entire lab at home and that everything was networked together. She'd known it was against regulations, but to her mind the efficiency justified the risk, and she had a good alarm system in a high-security building. Sophie had long ago moved to a cloud computing mentality: Individual computers were merely outlets plugging in and out of a seamless information flow rather than individual repositories, which was how the Bureau still operated in many areas.

"Yes, sir."

"So tell me how this program works. Walk me through what you did to come up with the Hale case."

Sophie felt herself regaining confidence as she entered her pa.s.sword and broke open DAVID to her boss, explaining how it mined the other criminal databases, including local and state police. She demonstrated how DAVID searched out commonalities depending on variables entered in search parameters and how the confidence ratios worked. She walked Waxman through her process with the suicides, which she'd begun running in DAVID after a news report on an upswing in suicides caught her attention.

"So this program can basically go hunting for types of crimes nationwide, looking for common MOs and other variables such as weapons, et cetera?" Waxman clarified at last.

"Yes. But it can work only with what's been inputted, so the more we digitize criminal records, the more effective DAVID is going to be."

"What about DAVID's unauthorized access to local and state police department records?"

"I'm sure that's going to be something to be worked out, sir, but don't you think the greater good justifies it?"

"Of course it does. That doesn't mean we'll all be able to sit down and play nice in the sandbox." Waxman sighed, rubbed his eyes again. "Save a copy of the software and deliver it to my office by the end of the day. I've got to make some calls."

"I'm sorry, sir," she said again.

This time the look he shot her was hard. "One apology is enough. Never apologize more than once."

"Yes, sir." Sophie unplugged her laptop and fled as he reached for the triangular conference phone in the center of the table.

Chapter 10.

Ken pushed the doorhandle bar to open the hermetically sealed door of the morgue. Ever since Lei's friend had died on the Big Island, Lei had trouble with morgues. She'd begun her relaxation breathing in the hallway-in through the nose, out through the mouth, counting to three-but even with that and with a dab of Vicks under her nose, every muscle in her body tightened at the chemical-over-biology smell.

Several draped bodies decorated wheeled tables in the big, chilly room with its range of sinks and steel wall of closed box doors. Dr. f.u.kushima and her a.s.sistant were bent over the brightly lit chest cavity of some unfortunate as they entered. The medical examiner looked up, her gloved hands covered with gore. "I'll be right with you."

"We'll be over here," Ken said. They pulled back against her desk, an island of normality behind a transparent shoji. They sat on a couple of folding chairs until f.u.kushima arrived, her mask lifted onto the top of her head, snapping off the gloves and tossing them into a biohazard bin.

"We were able to get the posts done on your two suicides-luckily things haven't been busy lately, though there was a big pileup on the H-3 and I'm backed up now. I sent your blood and tox results off; we should have them by tomorrow since you told me to put a rush on it."

"Thanks, Dr. f.u.kushima," Lei said as the doctor sat down in her wheeled chair.

"Well. I'm curious too. Suicides that look like suicides but just aren't right." The doctor picked up a file. "I'll e-mail these to you, but so far it's looking much as we suspected. Alfred Shimaoka died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. All the physical signs are there for that. And Corby Hale died of heart failure, no doubt due to a heroin injection. But what was interesting- and will be confirmed in his blood work-is this." She pa.s.sed Ken the file on the young man and opened it to a picture Lei wished she hadn't had to see. "Lesions inside his mouth. The boy likely had AIDS. Signs just weren't generally visible yet."

"Ah," Ken said. Lei noticed a slight tremble in his hands as they held the folder.

"Maybe that's why he took his life. Didn't want to go through that. Though people can live a normal life span now. It's not the death sentence it once was," Lei said.

"The point I'm making is that both of these men, while they might have been ill, died well before they would have naturally. Alfred had pancreatic cancer, and according to his records kept here at the hospital, he refused treatment. Wouldn't do anything-chemo, radiation, nothing. By the state of his pancreas and the cancer I found elsewhere, I'd have said he had six months. Most people want every day they can get." Dr. f.u.kushima set the folder down. "I'm ruling these deaths as a.s.sisted suicides."

"That gives our case some momentum," Lei said. "We think there's some sort of online connection that they made. Our tech department's looking into it."

"Well, I'm glad you agree. I was really in two minds about this, but the amount of time both of them would have had left makes this a crime worth pursuing."

Lei noticed Ken was still gazing down at the images of Corby Hale. His face was pale and rigid. She took the folder out of his hands and set it back on the desk. "Thanks, Doctor. We'll look forward to the tox results."

Ken followed her out into the shiny, fluorescent-lit linoleum hallway. The whoosh and click of the morgue door behind them felt like liberty to Lei. She turned to Ken and put a hand on his arm as they walked down the hall.

"Want to get some coffee?"

"Okay." They turned in to the cafeteria, one floor up. Lei got a tray and loaded it with coffee as well as some Portuguese sausage, a scoop of rice, and scrambled eggs from behind the cafeteria counter. It was almost midday, but she hadn't eaten yet today. She joined Ken with his lone Styrofoam cup of coffee in one of the vinyl booths.

She tore open packets of salt and pepper, sprinkled them over her breakfast.

"Something's up. What's going on with you?"

"Bugs me. That kid." Ken stirred creamer into his coffee with a red-and-white-striped stir stick. He tapped the stick, lay it down, took a sip of the coffee, grimaced. He set the cup down. "So young. Shouldn't be dead that way."

"Or sick that way."

"Or sick that way," Ken agreed. "He should have known better."

"He was so young." Between them lay the awkward topic of Ken's s.e.xual orientation, the fact that he was in the closet about it. "Kids always think they're going to be the exception."

"Someone might have infected him on purpose. I've heard rumors of someone doing that. Here in Honolulu."

"That should be a crime we could investigate."

"It should, but it's not." Ken took another sip of the coffee, winced. "Man. This stuff is really bad."

Lei had made short work of her breakfast and now she sipped the coffee. It really was bad. "Lot of us with our own side projects going on." She'd never told Ken about her connection to the Kwon murder. "What do you think of Sophie's DAVID program?"

"It's going to be amazing when it gets okayed. Though I'm trying to imagine a world where DAVID gets to freely roam through all the criminal databases of all the states-I can't see that getting approved. Everyone wants to guard their cases and data."

"We should keep the bigger picture in mind, though. I think of one of my cases early on, before I was a detective. Serial rape case. The perp had been preying on girls on different islands. If we'd had that communication easily available, we could have seen it was all connected sooner." Lei took a sip of the coffee for something to do, and regretted it.

"Well, it will be interesting to see how Waxman handles the DAVID thing."

"I felt sorry for Sophie. Maybe I should call her, see how it went."

Ken looked up. His face had lightened a bit. "She'd be shocked. You aren't exactly the BFF type."

"Hey." Lei stood, picked up her empty tray. "Marcella's teaching me some manners. I'm getting better."

"Speaking of Marcella. Did you see who she's dating?"

"I did. They seem pretty into each other."

"Yeah. So when's your boyfriend coming over from Maui?"

Lei tossed her trash, stowed the tray, pushed the gla.s.s door open with her shoulder, Ken right behind her. "Don't know. But I'm hoping soon. How about your boyfriend?"

Ken raised a brow at her, and she laughed. "Fine then. Back to work."

Sophie arrived at her workstation and felt the dim coolness of the IT lab, her comfort zone, bring her heart rate down after the stress of the meeting with Waxman. She stowed the laptop in the slotted shelf she'd set aside for it. She liked to have her work area clear. She fired up her computers, and while they booted, she got out the big ball, lay facedown on it, rolled it down under her feet, and began doing push-ups.

"Everything okay?"

Sophie continued her push-ups without looking up. "Sure. Why wouldn't it be?" Sophie sped up, feeling the exertion discharge stress from the meeting. "Pull out another ball and join me."

Bateman, a pudgy geek fresh out of Quantico, seemed to have developed a crush on her. He swung by her station way more often than she'd like, on one pretext or another.