Paradise Crime Thrillers Box Set

by Toby Neal

  “Indeed. But I’m the one who was almost fucked, and still might be if I can’t find Lei in time.” Sophie sketched out events briefly as the elevator hummed downward through the floors. “I don’t know how much air she has left. But at least she’s in this building, for sure. I already checked all the doors down in the basement, but I must have missed something. Assan took me down there for a reason.”

  “Maybe he’s got a hidden room or something.”

  “Exactly.”

  The elevator dinged, and opened to the sight of Assan’s sprawled body, surrounded by a lake of congealing blood.

  “Damn, Sophie.”

  “Yes, I believe I’m damned. Always have been. Nothing ever works out for me.” Sophie was hardly aware of verbalizing her thoughts as she moved to the body. She patted Assan down more carefully. “I have to flip him.”

  Jake took hold of Assan’s shoulder and helped roll him on his back. Blood had soaked the entire front of his shirt and down the man’s pants, deeply saturating the material. Sophie kept her eyes off the massive grinning slash in his neck, feeling around his waist. “His belt. It’s thicker than it should be.” She pulled the belt out through the belt loops and handed it to Jake without looking at it, continuing to search the body. “Here.” She fished a chain out from inside his shirt and yanked hard to break it, holding up the key dangling from it in a bloody gloved hand. She wiped the key off on her pants leg and ran forward into the hall, shoving it frantically into the sturdy deadbolt locks.

  The third door opened.

  Sophie sucked in a breath as she hit the lights.

  Stark white walls, and a bed. A closed armoire on one wall. A screen with a sink and toilet behind it. And directly behind the bed, a massive wheel dangling with restraints, straps and irons.

  “I’m guessing this is what he brought you down for.” Jake’s voice was somber.

  “But where’s Lei? Why isn’t she in here?”

  “Maybe he never intended to let her go. Or maybe there’s a second room.”

  “Yes.” Sophie lunged across the room to grab the armoire. “Help me!”

  She and Jake shoved the cabinet away. Hidden behind it, a narrow outline marked the edge of a doorway flush with the wall. No handle marred the surface. Sophie leaned in, frantic, tracing along the edge of the opening, her gloves leaving smears of blood on the stark white wall.

  “It must be a pressure lock,” Jake said. “Push along the edge. He had to be able to open it somehow.”

  Working in tandem, they pushed and pressed around the door. Sophie heard a click, and the panel bumped out from the frame. She grasped the door and pulled it wide.

  The room beyond was pitch black. She felt along the wall inside the door. No light switch.

  Sophie fumbled Assan’s phone out of her pocket and hit the lights app on the video feed.

  Illumination bloomed brightly, revealing a tiny cubicle. A nightmare scene met her eyes: her friend Lei, motionless on a bed that almost filled the space. Lei was bound, blindfolded, and gagged, her tawny skin and dark, tangled hair a stark contrast to the whiteness of the sheets.

  “Lei!” Sophie rushed to her friend’s side, feeling for a pulse in her friend’s neck.

  Lei lashed out instantly with her legs, catching Sophie painfully in the side. Sophie leapt back as Lei continued to kick and struggle, clearly far from dead. Quick tears of relief filled Sophie’s eyes as she spotted the orange dots of earplugs in Lei’s ears, as well as the blindfold and gag—her friend didn’t know that she was being rescued!

  “Keep talking to her. I’ll hold her feet,” Jake grasped Lei’s ankles.

  Sophie leaned in to hold her friend’s shoulders. “Lei! It’s Sophie! We’re here to get you out!”

  Her friend’s struggling subsided abruptly.

  Sophie plucked the earplugs out of Lei’s ears and lifted the blindfold. Lei blinked red-rimmed eyes. She spat out the rubber gag ball with a curse as Sophie loosened the strap behind her head. “Where’s that son of a bitch? I’ll kill him!”

  “I got him first.” Sophie sank onto the bed to draw her friend into her arms in a long hug as Lei shook and trembled with shock. Jake pulled a combat blade from a holster at his waist and slashed the duct tape holding Lei’s feet together and arms behind her back.

  Lei groaned as circulation rushed back into her limbs. “He grabbed me right outside the police station. I wasn’t paying attention, just heading to my car.” She shook her head. “The boldness took me by surprise, I’m embarrassed to say. The guy was dark-haired, with a thick stocky build. Six foot or so in height. He hit me with a Taser and threw me in a van. I woke up here, totally in the dark, all my senses shut down.” She shuddered. “Gonna need some therapy after this adventure.”

  Sophie searched her friend’s body for the electrodes and identified them, taped onto Lei’s nipples beneath her bra and between her legs. “Can you get those off? Or do you want help?”

  “I can do it. Just give me a minute. And some privacy.” Lei shot a glance at Jake.

  Jake stood up and turned away. “I’ll step outside and make sure first responders are on the way.”

  “Yes, I called Lei’s husband. Hopefully he’ll be here shortly with backup,” Sophie said. “Listen out for them.”

  Sophie turned back to Lei and chafed her hands and arms as Jake exited. “Leave the electrode tape where it is so the CSIs can see. Did anything else happen? Did he—rape you?” Her skin went hot and cold with horror at the thought.

  “No, I’m okay,” Lei said. “And of course, I’ll leave the evidence in place.” Her hands still trembled, tracing the wires to their taped-on nodes.

  “Your attacker was my ex, Assan. He was using you as leverage to control me.” Sophie bit her lip. “I’m sorry I brought this down on you. But it’s over now. Permanently.”

  “Good. About time that dog was put down.” Lei plucked the wires off the taped nodes gingerly as Sophie removed the small, remote-controlled power pack that had provided the shocks from beneath Lei.

  “He said he had a control to cut off your air. Did you have any trouble breathing?” Sophie asked.

  “No, I was okay for air. I think.”

  Sophie frowned, beginning to scan the room for any devices positioned near ventilation openings.

  Michael Stevens, Lei’s husband, filled the doorway. His dark brown hair was mussed, his blue eyes blazing. Sophie stood up and moved away as the lieutenant rushed in. “Sweets! I was just getting ready to call this in when Sophie got ahold of me. Where are you hurt?”

  “I’m okay.” Tears welled in Lei’s eyes as Stevens gathered her up, his long arms winding around Sophie’s friend’s body and pressing her in close, his tousled head bending to kiss her. They rocked together for a long moment, murmuring incoherently, heedless of anyone who might see their passion.

  Watching their reunion stabbed Sophie with grief. With Connor gone, would she ever be loved like that? She’d only had a taste of such devotion. She moved to the doorway, re-entering the room they’d first come through.

  Jake was talking to two officers and Lei’s longtime partner, Pono. They all looked up at the sight of Sophie, and the expression on Pono’s face made Sophie’s chest constrict.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions for me,” Sophie said.

  “Yes.” Pono, his big square face grave, made a gesture to the hallway. “I called the crime scene tech and Dr. Gregory at the ME’s office to examine the body. We have to take an official statement from you down at the station.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The clock on the wall read eleven p.m. when Sophie sat down with her lawyer at a steel table in the interview room at Maui Police Department’s Kahului station. Sitting on the wrong side of that table felt surreal to Sophie.

  Pono, seated next to the station’s commanding officer, Captain C. J. Omura, recited the Miranda and turned on the recording equipment. The FBI was also being piped in via Skype on an open laptop.


  “My client has a well-established case against Assan Ang, currently on the FBI’s most wanted list. This perpetrator has made multiple attempts on Sophie Ang’s life.” Sophie’s lawyer, Davida Fuller, was an athletic blonde with well-developed biceps.

  “We are aware of the case.” Omura, immaculate in her tailored uniform and sleek hair, was all business. She was Lei and Michael’s boss and also their friend, and Sophie had met the well-groomed Japanese woman in a social context previously. “This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Fuller. We’ll lead this interview, thank you very much. Now, Ms. Ang. Why don’t you tell us, in your own words, how events unfolded?”

  Fuller turned to Sophie. “No comment. Let them make their case.”

  Sophie twisted her fingers in her lap, grateful she wasn’t cuffed and under arrest for Assan’s murder—at least, not yet. Her gaze found Pono’s warm brown eyes, then Omura’s cool stare. She looked at the laptop finally, and recognized the pixelated ice-blue gaze of her former boss, Special Agent in Charge Ben Waxman. “Hello, Sophie,” he said, gently.

  “Hello, Ben. My, how the mighty have fallen.” Sophie didn’t mean for her tone to sound so bitter. “I should never have left the FBI.”

  “And we certainly wish you hadn’t. You are surrounded by friends here. Just tell us what happened.”

  “No,” Fuller said, laying a restraining hand on Sophie’s arm. “This is all being recorded, and who knows what the DA and the Hong Kong authorities will do?”

  Sophie shrugged Fuller’s hand off. “I hear your recommendation and I choose to share my version of events.”

  Sophie told how she’d picked up a confidential clue to Assan’s whereabouts. “I should have shared that with Special Agent Marcella Scott, who gave me every opportunity to do so. But I suspected that Assan had killed the man I was dating, Todd Remarkian. Assan had also engineered the near-fatal beating of another man I cared about.” She looked down at her twisted fingers and straightened them deliberately. “As the records show, I turned Assan Ang over to the authorities the last time he tried to kill me, and he escaped. I considered that the ‘clue’ I had to Paradise Treasures was a trap—but I just didn’t trust anyone else to bring him in.”

  “What prompted you to break into Paradise Treasures?” Omura asked. “Your entry was illegal and resulted in destruction of property.”

  “I’m sorry about that, and will gladly pay any damages.” Sophie blew out a breath. “I had visited the gallery twice, as Jake Dunn can corroborate. He came with me the second time. Something was just…not right about the place, and the owner, Magda Kennedy. I couldn’t tell you exactly what. Perhaps it was just her demeanor, and the fact that she seemed to have a possible relationship with organized crime. Sergeant Texeira told me that she’d been investigated before. In any case, after the armed drone came after Jake and me and no trace of an operator was found in the area, I became convinced that Assan was hiding in the building, or at least had some connection to it. The sixth floor was labeled “storage” on the building’s specs, but looked residential from the outside. So, I surveilled the building and saw a shadow inside once darkness fell, matching Assan’s height and build. I decided it was time to go investigate more closely.” Sophie described the series of events. “Assan knew I was coming. He had lured me in, and when I got to the apartment where he was residing, he secured my ‘submission’ by showing me a live video feed confirming that he had kidnapped my friend, Lei Texeira, well known to all of us here.”

  Omura inclined her head. “We’ve had time to take Sergeant Texeira’s statement.” During the hours between Lei’s dramatic rescue and when Davida Fuller arrived at the station to represent Sophie, they’d likely also spoken to Jake.

  “Good.” Sophie looked up. “Assan frisked me in the apartment, and removed my weapons, leveraging me by torturing Lei. I’m sure she described how he used electricity to shock her, and you saw the evidence of how he did it. He threatened her life.”

  Pono nodded. “She said that he told you that he was going to suffocate her.”

  “Yes.” Sweat burst out on Sophie’s body at the memory of her frantic search for Lei. “He had a button on the phone app that he said controlled her air supply. I hoped that if I got the phone away, I’d have time to force him to tell me where she was. When I kicked the phone out of his grasp as the elevator opened, I was then able to pull a concealed knife that he had missed in searching me, and threaten him with it, asking for Lei’s location. He refused to tell me anything, only that she would die. He would never let either of us go. So, I killed him.”

  Sophie’s bald words fell like stones from her mouth to roll into the quiet, echoing room. They sounded too harsh. She expanded her reasoning. “Based on Assan’s statements to me and his previous history, this was the end for me. Assan was going to torture and kill me, and most likely, Lei, as well. He was a conscienceless sadist. He had no reason to let either of us go.”

  “And yet, he had blindfolded Lei and even stopped her hearing. She had only a general description of her attacker,” Omura said. “She could have been released with no real ability to identify him.”

  “But not me. Never me. The investigators saw the room he intended for me to occupy.” Sophie swallowed, suppressing panic. She hadn’t really thought she’d be under investigation for murder, when he’d so clearly planned to torture her! But only she and Assan really knew what lay between them, and only Sophie had seen the lust and deadly intent in his eyes. “And what you say may be true about Lei. Assan was very crafty. He would have wanted to have all options available to him, including releasing Lei as a bargaining chip. All I can tell you is that, in the moment that I held the knife to his throat, I knew that he despised me. He doubted my ability to follow through with my threat to his life. He had no intention of ever letting me leave that basement, except in a body bag—and he had anticipated all my moves and lured me in. I had to take advantage of my one opportunity to defend myself.”

  A long moment of silence followed. Sophie looked down at the table, reaching up to rub the scar on her cheekbone. “So ugly, now.” Assan’s voice reverberated in her mind.

  He could still destroy her life, even in his death.

  “My client was clearly acting in self-defense however it might have looked in the moment.” Fuller said. “There is a well-established history of domestic violence and multiple murder and kidnap attempts upon Sophie by this man.”

  “We are just trying to establish the chain of events, Ms. Fuller. The DA will determine what, if any, charges are brought against Ms. Ang for the death of her ex-husband,” Omura said.

  “And the FBI regrets being unable to apprehend this man and spare everyone involved stress and heartache,” Waxman said from the monitor. “Sergeant Texeira is our FBI liaison to Maui. We are grateful to you, Sophie, for getting her out in time. And we are glad you did what you had to, to survive.”

  Waxman’s support was a balm, and Sophie smiled at her former boss.

  Pono cleared his throat. “About that. The room where Lei was being held was sealed. She’d have eventually suffocated without the door being opened, though there was no device that we could find that changed the air circulation or connected to Ang’s phone app. So, he was…taunting you with that. But if no one had found Sergeant Texeira, she would have died within hours.”

  A long pause as they all digested this.

  “Here’s the problem I’m having with this whole scenario,” Omura finally said, steepling shiny red nails and leaning forward to make eye contact with Sophie. “Threats and coercion aside, Assan Ang was unarmed. You attacked him from behind and cut his throat. This killing looks a whole lot more like an execution than self-defense. What do you have to say to that?”

  This time, when Davida Fuller’s hand dropped to rest on Sophie’s forearm in restraint, Sophie lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap and stayed silent.

  “My client has made her statement. And now, unless you are going to bring charges and arrest her, we’ve h
ad a long night and have a trauma counselor to speak with in the morning.” Fuller stood up and straightened her sleeveless sheath dress. Her shoulder muscles gleamed like armor. “Let’s go, Ms. Ang.”

  They left the interview room, and no one tried to stop them.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Several days later, Sophie followed VP of Operations Kendall Bix across the dewy lawn of the Honolulu Resting Place, a small, tasteful cemetery specializing in cremation. Sophie’s chest ached and her eyes felt dry and hot, the pressure of tears pressing on the backs of them. She thought she’d cried all she was going to. Apparently not. But maybe when Connor’s memorial was over, she could begin to move on.

  A big sun hat shaded Sophie from having to look at anyone and one of Mary Watson’s floral sundresses swished against her legs as she led Connor’s Doberman toward the ceremony area. Anubis had been closest to him of anyone. The thought almost made the tears spill as the dog walked beside her in his stately way, ears pricked with curiosity, sun gilding his sleek coat. Ginger was with Sophie’s father, Frank, at his apartment, not trusted to behave at such a dignified event.

  Sophie recognized few but co-workers from Security Solutions in the small crowd. Marcella, who she hadn’t spoken to since their tiff over the phone, gave her a small smile and finger wave, angling over to walk with her. Sophie released a breath—her friend was there to support her on this tough day. She’d been forgiven.

  Bix had put together the service, and questioned Sophie if she had any contacts to be invited—but Connor had no family that anyone could find to notify of his death. The dearth of anyone but professional contacts smote Sophie. If she died, at least her father would mourn.

  Had his real name even been Connor? Had anything about him been real? Maybe only the emotion she’d felt in his arms…

  Sophie tripped a little, her slingback heel catching on an uneven tuft of grass.

  “Careful.” A male voice. A hand at her elbow, steadying her. Anubis turned his head, jerked and let out a short, sharp whine.