Motive

by Dustin Stevens

“Very,” Kimo replied. “That’s where I was when you called, running this stuff down. As far as I, or the girl I sweet talked at the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs into helping me dig could tell, they exist on paper only. None of them import or export anything. None of them have done any business or hired a single employee yet.”

  Again Kalani could tell the information was important, she just couldn’t decipher quite how it all fit together. She knew that if she kept Kimo going, eventually, somewhere, a piece would come out that would make it all fit together.

  “Tax returns?” she asked.

  “None,” Kimo replied, “because all four were formed in January, all within ten days of each other.”

  Running the math in her head, Kalani’s eyes lit up. She glanced across at Rip, his hands still resting on his head. “January. After the budget came out.”

  “Yup,” Rip agreed, his attention still aimed at Kimo. “Who owns the companies?”

  The same cocksure smile returned to Kimo’s face, the look of triumph Kalani had recognized earlier. She couldn’t help but think the final morsel of information was coming, the last bit that would force things into place.

  “A guy named Thomas Zall,” Kimo said, “who I’m guessing you’ve never heard of. I sure hadn’t, and with good reason. The guy has been a ghost since arriving here a couple years ago.”

  He paused again, the look growing even stronger. “After a boating accident in New York.”

  The air slid from Kalani’s lungs. She had been right. All it took was one single piece of information to fall in place for everything to make sense. The timing, the motivations, the political tie-ins.

  “And he suffered some form of injury?” Kalani asked.

  “Him? No,” Kimo replied. “But his son was left in a vegetative state.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The first call had gone to Tseng, requesting a meeting back at his office. His initial response was to ask if it could wait until the next day, Kalani able to hear the sound of meat sizzling on a grill, children yelling as they splashed into a pool. As much as she hated to interrupt his afternoon, she told him there was just no way to postpone. Time was of the essence.

  The second question out of his mouth was to ask if they could meet him at his home, relaying that he was hosting a barbecue for some of his neighbors. There was no small amount of dread in his voice as he did so, though Kalani couldn’t tell if that was from not wanting to meet with them or not wanting to endure the cookout any longer than necessary.

  Either way, she declined again.

  The last thing she mentioned before signing off the call was that he should have Sturgis and Li both up on standby, as there was a good chance she had information directly related to their case as well. To that Tseng muttered some sort of response, the words too much of a garbled mess to decipher.

  Kalani hung up the phone without bothering to ask for a clarification. She could guess at what they were without having to hear them, the very same ones having gone through her head many times already.

  Standing in the parking lot of the med school, the three debated whether to bring Kimo with them to the meeting, ultimately opting against it. While they would make no effort to hide the role he had played in aiding them, they had not exactly gained clearance in bringing him into the fray. Having him come with them might be a display of defiance they weren’t quite ready for.

  Being just a few blocks away, Rip and Kalani went straight over and were seated on the front steps when Tseng arrived, both sitting in silence, chewing on all they’d just learned. After fumbling along one foot at a time for so many days on end, having a veritable windfall of information hit them was almost too much to process. Again and again Kalani ran it back through her mind, making sure the pieces fit the way she thought they did, that in their haste they hadn’t overlooked an important aspect. As badly as she wanted this to be over, to stop having innocent young women turn up on the streets, their even more innocent unborn children ripped away, it had to be done right.

  While this was the kind of case that could catapult her back into the life if she so chose, it was also the type of thing that could take the choice away from her if she wasn’t careful. Never had she heard of Thomas Zall before, but everything Kimo relayed about the man displayed he wasn’t someone to be made a fool of publicly. If they went after him, they had to make sure it was for real. There was no coming back from it if they were wrong, as he would exert everything he could to bury them moving forward.

  “Sorry for pulling you away from your family,” Kalani said as the chief reached the stairs, noting his t-shirt and canvas shorts, the rubber sandals on his feet. His hair was semi-combed across his head, windblown from a day by the pool, and he carried the faint scent of smoke as he passed.

  “You kidding?” he grumbled, stuffing his keys in his pocket and jerking open the front door. “My wife planned that thing weeks ago. The last thing I want to be doing is playing nice with those people with all this going on.”

  Kalani and Rip exchanged a glance, Rip raising his eyebrows, as they followed him in silence up the stairwell. It being early on Saturday evening the station was subdued as they passed through, no more than a stray person or two sprinkled amongst the first-floor desks, heads down.

  Tseng remained quiet as he used the key ring to open his office door and stepped around his desk, allowing Kalani and Rip to enter behind him. He waited until Rip had shut the door before motioning towards the chairs across from him, settling down into his own.

  “Alright, let’s hear what you’ve got,” he said, forcing his elbows into the arms of the chair, the pads of his fingers pressed together in front of his chin.

  Starting with the scene workup the previous night, Kalani ran through all they had uncovered in the preceding hours. She rattled off everything Dr. Watari had told them, how they believed it all fit together, and supported it with what Kimo had found.

  When she was done, a deep set frown encompassed the bottom half of Tseng’s face, the skin burrowed into a pair of parentheses on either side of his mouth. He remained silent a long moment before pushing out a breath through his nose.

  Without responding in any way he reached out and shook the mouse on his desk, calling his computer to life. A moment later the fluorescent glow of the screen illuminated his face, Kalani and Rip both watching as he began typing. After a moment he stopped, drawing a fist up and resting his chin on it, reading the screen before him.

  “Thomas Prescott Zall was born in 1953 in Hoboken, New Jersey to parents Charles and Irene Zall. He was educated at Princeton and Columbia Business School before following his father’s footsteps into finance.”

  He rattled off the information with a detached tone, his gaze never moving to them as he read from the screen.

  “In 1989 he married Marilyn Wanston and six years later they had a child together, a son named William Prescott Zall.”

  He paused again, his forefinger scrolling with the circular control on the mouse, the clicking sound it made the only noise in the entire office.

  “Says here he specialized in healthcare stocks before moving into the tech sector, riding the dotcom boom to quite a fortune before going to venture capital. Lived in the city until 2009, at which point he and his son, fourteen year old William, were in a sailing accident. Although an investigation occurred, he was eventually acquitted of all charges, though he did lose his wife and two years of his life to the process.”

  Once more he paused, glancing over to them. “This was all part of the file the NYPD put together on him regarding the case. Apparently because it was just the two of them, and the son was left with massive brain damage, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.”

  “The state tried to prosecute for a sailing accident?” Rip asked, his face, voice, relaying his surprise.

  “The mother,” Tseng said, shaking his head. “She pressed charges for reckless endangerment and criminal negligence. Like I said though, insufficient evidence
for a conviction.”

  Kalani nodded, her gaze aimed at the bookcase above Tseng’s head, adding the new data to what she already knew. “So she left with half his money, he moved to the islands and started becoming quite interested in stem cell research.”

  Another long, slow sigh slid out of Tseng. “It would appear that way.”

  “Where is the son now?” Rip asked.

  “Doesn’t say,” Tseng answered, glancing over to the screen, but finding nothing new.

  Silence fell over the office as Kalani kept her attention aimed up at the bookcase on the wall in front of her. Along the top shelf were a number of framed photographs following the chief through his life on the force, beginning when he was a young beat cop and following him through. In another time she would have focused in on the attire and the odd choices of facial hair made over the years, but at the moment her mind was preoccupied with the mountain of information before her.

  In her limited experience with investigations, this was how they seemed to go. Little bits added up along the way, working their way into an amoebic jumble until the one key thing that was needed fell into place. Once it did, the others seemed to file in right behind it, each thing fitting as it should.

  For the first few days, they had nothing more than the jumble, an odd assortment of mismatched facts and ideas. Not until they flipped their point of emphasis, moving from the victims to the motive behind them did things start to come into view.

  What that view had afforded was a man that was desperate. His desperation had turned into a timetable that was too fast, a plot that required too many moving parts to be successful.

  “Where is Zall now?” Kalani asked.

  Tseng went back to the computer, the reflection on his face changing colors as he shifted from one screen to the next. “It lists here a home address on Tantalus Drive, up above Punchbowl.”

  “What about the businesses?” Rip asked, glancing to Kalani and back to Tseng. Before waiting to be asked, Kalani passed across a list of names and telephone numbers Kimo had given them, the chief accepting them without comment.

  Three full minutes passed as Tseng entered them one at a time into the database, checking each one in turn. By the time he was done the frown on his face was even deeper than before, stress, agitation, beginning to exude from him.

  “I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

  “What?” Kalani asked.

  Tseng paused a moment before reaching out and rotating the computer monitor towards them. On it was a screenshot from Google Earth, an overhead view of a neighborhood stretched across most of the screen.

  “All four corporations list the same address in Hawaii Kai, a location that is strictly residential.”

  The backs of Kalani’s legs lifted from the chair she sat on as she leaned forward, peering at the screen. The name of neither the street nor the image before her rang any bells, though from what she could tell it was a cul-de-sac tucked away a few blocks in from the sea. Neighboring properties abutted it on either side, the entire street parceled off and developed into dwellings.

  She stared a moment more before retreating back into her seat, glancing over to Rip. “What do you think?”

  Extending an arm, Tseng slid the monitor back into place, his attention also affixed on Rip, awaiting his answer.

  Rip watched as the screen rotated back out of view before running a hand through his hair, a loud breath escaping his nose. “I think, at this point, we obviously have to go and check out both of those locations, the home on Punchbowl, and the business listing in Hawaii Kai. And as much as I hate to say it, we have to go tonight, no matter how ill prepared we are.”

  Kalani stared at Rip a long moment, waiting for him to continue. She wasn’t sure she agreed entirely with preparing two surprise visits on short notice, but trusted Rip enough to know he had some sort of reasoning for thinking such a thing.

  “Why’s that?” Tseng asked.

  “Mary-Ann Harris,” Rip replied, flicking his gaze between them before settling on Tseng. “We know she was accepting campaign donations from him, and we know she was the conduit for him to get information to the press.”

  “Assuming it was him,” Kalani inserted, careful to point out that while they did have an overwhelming amount of evidence stockpiled, it was still mostly conjecture.

  “Assuming it was him,” Rip agreed, nodding his head for emphasis. “We also know she up and disappeared late last night and said she would be returning on Monday. Whatever it is these guys have planned, it’s probably happening soon.”

  The words made sense as Kalani fitted them over what she knew, shaping the information to align with what was already proven. “That, or they knew we were getting close and she was sent away to let things die down for a few days.”

  “Which again,” Rip added, “means we’re getting close enough to make someone uncomfortable.”

  Tseng waited until they were both done before shoving the mouse away and leaning back in his chair. He folded his arms across chest and scratched at his chin with the side of his hand, his face scrunched up in thought.

  Even as Kalani sat and watched him work his ways through the paces, she knew there were boulder-sized holes in their case. At the same time, there was simply too much pointing at Thomas Zall to not at least go have a look around.

  After several long moments Tseng slapped his hands down against his thighs, rubbing them along the front of his shorts. He shook his head from side to side and muttered, “Damn Randle to hell for sticking us in the middle of this.”

  Chapter Forty

  Ducks on a pond. That was the expression Thomas Zall’s father had used to describe maintaining sanity in the face of certain adversity. He would always tell his son it was okay for the feet to be churning under the surface, fighting to keep control, to push yourself in the direction you need to go. Just so long as all anybody saw was serenity above the water, everything would be okay.

  Those words, that expression, came to Zall’s mind as he stood off to the side, watching as Dr. Saiki unpacked the stainless steel valise he had brought with him, lining up one vial of clear liquid after another with precision. Beside every one he placed an oversized syringe with a needle as thick as a pencil, each with the plunger all the way depressed, ready to be loaded.

  The doctor was silent as he deftly transferred the small glass containers onto the table, the only sounds that of their bottoms tapping against the steel surface.

  The table stretched almost five feet in length, brought in special for the procedures, the first of what Zall hoped would be many. Brand new and polished clean, it reflected the last of the day’s sunlight that filtered into the room, throwing bright streaks across the wood floor beneath it.

  Standing in harsh contrast barely five feet away was the oversized medical bed of William Zall.

  Extended seven feet long and five feet wide, it was constructed of white plastic, a full array of adjustable knobs lining both sides of it. By day the bed was reclined at a forty-five degree angle, allowing for sunlight to pass over William, his head aimed out the window. Each evening, just after sundown, the bed was laid flat, allowing for him to sleep comfortably.

  Neither of the movements was at all necessary, something Zall himself had instituted when they first moved into the house years before. Deep within him, without fully knowing why, he found the action cathartic. Not once since they had arrived in Hawaii had his son even opened his eyes, a shell of a human, being kept alive entirely by the myriad machines spread behind him. Bit by bit his figure had dwindled away, receding from a young, vibrant man into a weakened corpse of a being.

  Still, Zall had insisted the adjustments be made twice a day, a directive that nobody in the house dared object to.

  The incident that had brought all this about was something Thomas Zall replayed in his mind constantly, even now, years later. It had started out like most any other late spring morning in New York, glorious sunshine spewing in through the windows of their Upper East
Side home, warming the hardwood floors beneath their feet.

  The decision to go out on the water was made at the urging of William, youthful exuberance pouring from him as he beseeched his father to untie their boat for the first run of the season. Despite a growing list of tasks that needed Zall’s attention he relented, as he usually did, unable to tell his son no. His entire reason for buying the boat, a beautiful seventy-five foot Jamaican sloop, just big enough for the two of them to handle, was so they could spend time together, isolated from the world.

  It was that isolation that led almost directly to the situation they were now in.

  The Sunday morning boat traffic was thin as they cast off, William working the two masts, Zall at the wheel. They kept the sails down and used the V-8 engine to motor out of the Hudson, waiting until they were well into the Atlantic, the cityscape fading in the distance, before raising the sheets. Once they did, they let the strong North Atlantic current press tight against the canvas awnings, pushing them along the coast line.

  With a cooler of sandwiches and soft drinks, the sun splashing across the water around them, a more perfect day could not have been planned. Many times over the years since Thomas Zall had looked back at those last few fleeting moments on the deck of his boat as the last times in his life that he was truly happy.

  To his eternal horror, Zall wasn’t there when it happened. He had gone into the ship’s hull to relieve himself, a sizable morning breakfast demanding to be evacuated. When he returned his son was sprawled out on the wet surface at the far end of the topside, his eyes closed, a gash opened on the back of his head. Blood had coursed out from the wound, mixing with the seawater spread across the polished wood, long strings of red striping the deck.

  Those few moments were ones Zall had relived no less than a million times, emerging from the darkness below, stepping into the sunshine, only to have everything he cared about in the world ripped from him in one moment.

  On pure instinct he rushed to his son’s side and tried to revive him, dragging his limp body back the length of the deck, bloody water staining his white sailing togs. Propping him up on the padded bench chairs lining the back end, he tried in vain for over five long minutes to revive his son, attempting everything from slapping his face to spraying him with water.