Bone Hook

by Toby Neal

  But Stevens never called.

  The little boy finally down for the night, she left the bedroom door cracked and went into the office. It was time to find out a whole lot more about her husband’s deployment. She couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong.

  He’d taken his laptop with him, but she knew his e-mail password and went into his account on their shared desktop. Lei scrolled until she found the correspondence between Stevens and a recruiter from Security Solutions.

  She’d been tempted to do this before, but finding out that Kathy Fraser had known more than Lei did had quenched her desire to find out more—she was afraid she wouldn’t like what she found out. She’d also been trying to hope for the best, that it would all work out smoothly—but the broken communication was not reassuring.

  Lei then looked up Security Solutions’s website, scrolling through the slick-looking pages advertising the company’s services, which included everything from home security systems to bodyguards. They had headquarters in Virginia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and a satellite office in Honolulu. They even offered crack mercenary teams “dedicated to achieving whatever your goal is, from dealing with kidnappers privately to keeping your home secure.”

  From what Lei had understood, Stevens’s role was in providing investigation training to US military police at an overseas training camp. She searched and searched, but couldn’t find anything on their website that advertised that service.

  Lei went back to the e-mail and clicked through the progress of Stevens’s recruitment. First an e-mail reached out to him, dated a year ago, asking if he was interested in passing on his “unique and important skill set” in a “first-time-ever private-contract situation” and naming a ridiculous amount of money.

  “Holy crap,” Lei muttered under her breath. “No wonder he wanted to go.”

  The correspondence went on, a series of questions from Stevens’s side: How long? How would he be paid? What was the risk level? Was extra life insurance provided?

  “Damn it,” Lei muttered, reading the response. Yes, Lt. Stevens, we insure all of our operators for an additional three million in life insurance for the duration of their time with us.

  Michael had been so depressed and so tormented by PTSD symptoms. Could this be some elaborate suicide attempt on his part, disguised as a job opportunity? Her stomach churned at the thought.

  “No. He wouldn’t,” she muttered. She copied and pasted the address of the recruiter, the only real contact she could find, into a terse e-mail, squelching the worry that her husband would find out and be angry.

  Too bad. He should have called if he didn’t want her getting in his business.

  My name is Sergeant Leilani Texeira, and I’m writing to you after breaking into my husband’s e-mail correspondence. He has been incommunicado for an unacceptable amount of time after leaving five days ago for a deployment with your company. Please send a copy of his contract, job description, location, and a schedule of communication/visitation to me at this address or I will be reporting you to the Justice Department for mismanagement of government fee-for-service contracts.

  I suggest you get back to me immediately regarding my husband’s health and well-being or you’ll be hearing from outside agencies. This is the satellite phone number he left with me. I will wait for your call or a response to this e-mail.

  She punched Enter so hard her finger hurt.

  “Damn him. Damn them,” she muttered, shutting down the computer, filled with impotent, worried anger as she stalked down the hall. She needed a shower. Had needed one since that morning. Maybe then she could relax enough to get to sleep.

  Under the warm fall of water in the oversized stall, Lei gave in to the tears that had been threatening all day, having a good cry into her washcloth. She missed Stevens. Badly. And she was afraid.

  Her gut was telling her something was wrong. She’d learned to trust it, even when she didn’t like what it was saying.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Meg Slaughter was a short, apple-shaped woman wearing a flowing, ankle-length flax-colored dress, and her iron-gray hair in braids. Birkenstocks provided a solid foundation for a woman who would have looked at home as a garden gnome. She smiled with good humor at Lei, gesturing to a seating arrangement of beanbags in her office.

  “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “I’ll stand, thanks.” Lei wasn’t sure she’d want to get up once she sat on one of the plush, velvet-covered beanbags. “My partner, Detective Bunuelos, and I have come to talk with you about one of your clients, now deceased. Danielle Phillips.”

  “Yes. I’ve been expecting you.” Slaughter went behind her desk, pulled open a drawer, and extracted a folder. “I had my girl make a copy in advance of your visit.” She brought the folder out and handed it to Lei. “I’m so very sorry Lani is gone. She was a beautiful soul.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been hearing that.” Lei took the folder. “Is there anything you can tell us about what was going on with her? We’ve heard rumors there was a divorce in the works.”

  “Oh, yes.” Slaughter sat on a beanbag, crossing her legs under the shapeless dress like a plump female Buddha. “We had several meetings. I was waiting on her signature to finalize the paperwork and file for her divorce.”

  Lei and Bunuelos looked at the beanbags, each other, and finally sat. Lei sank into hers and was surprised by how supportive and comfortable it was. She gave an experimental wiggle and then opened the file Slaughter had provided. Inside were a series of worksheets, filled in with hieroglyphics.

  “I can’t read your writing,” she said.

  Slaughter laughed. “It’s shorthand. I’m dating myself. And it has the additional benefit of protecting my clients’ confidentiality further.”

  Lei looked up, realizing that Meg Slaughter’s smiling brown eyes, sunk in wrinkle fans of good humor, were coldly intelligent. She shut the file and leaned toward the other woman, deciding disclosure was in order.

  “Meg. May I call you Meg?”

  A nod.

  “Meg, I know protecting your clients is deeply ingrained. I get it. But Danielle is dead. Brutally murdered. Her last moments were a horror show of being shot with a spear and then having someone yank her regulator out of her mouth so that she drowned. And she was pregnant. So anything you can tell us about who she loved, hated, feared, what she was dreaming of, what she hoped to get out of being divorced—anything at all might help us.”

  Meg Slaughter blinked owlishly three times and then gave a slight head nod and a sigh.

  “She was over Frank. She knew he was having an affair with Barbara Selzmann. She was in love with someone, but she didn’t tell me who. And she was afraid of a couple of people—Ben Miller and T. J. Costa.”

  “She wasn’t afraid of Frank?” Lei thought of the Beretta she’d retrieved from Danielle’s nightstand.

  “No, but she probably should have been.” Slaughter proceeded to confirm much of what Lei and Bunuelos already knew. “She didn’t tell me she was pregnant, but I had seen her will and I knew about the clause reverting her Hawaiian family’s land back to her child if she had one. My money’s on Frank. He’s calculating, that one, and smarter than people give him credit for.”

  “Why was she afraid of Miller and Costa?”

  “Ben Miller was obsessed with her. She wasn’t sure how he was going to react to her divorce and her relationship with another man. She wouldn’t tell me who that was, though—said it was too early to share. But she was worried Miller would do ‘something crazy.’” Slaughter made air quotes. “As for Costa, she was onto his fish-poaching operation and suspected he was involved with the drug scene. She called him paranoid and violent, and she feared running into him alone.”

  “Thank you.” Lei unwound herself from the beanbag. “We really appreciate your cooperation, and it confirms some theories we’ve had.”

  Bunuelos, who’d been silent until now, got up and shook Slaughter’s hand. “I can tell you cared about her.
”

  Slaughter stood, much more gracefully than Lei had. “I cared about her greatly. And I want you to find her killer. You can count on my testimony when and if you bring in a suspect.”

  They got on the road back to the station in Lei’s truck. She was thoughtful. “Well, nothing really new there, but that Danielle was more afraid of Miller than I realized. He bears watching.”

  “But there’s his alibi,” Bunuelos said.

  “And therein lies the rub.” Lei used a favorite saying of Stevens’s. He’d minored in English lit and liked the occasional poetic or Shakespearean reference. The memory gave her a pang. She slid the cell phone out of her pocket to check it. Still no call.

  Back at the station, Lei’s desk unit rang with a call from Dr. Wilson. “Lei! Your captain asked me to do a post-incident debrief with you. Do you have time to talk? I’m in your area.”

  Lei sighed, ran a hand though her disordered hair. “Yes, Dr. Wilson, I’m available. When can we meet?”

  “Within the hour, if you can make it.”

  Lei held a hand over her phone and addressed Bunuelos. “Are you able to go out to the harbors and check on Nunes’s and Miller’s alibis? We need to go down now, in the morning, when the boats and crews are still there getting ready to go out for the day.”

  “Sure.” Bunuelos stood, grabbed a light jacket off the hook by the door. “I’ll take Abe. Get the big guy out of his chair.” He took off, clearly eager to see his old partner.

  The petite blond psychologist had reserved an empty conference room on the third floor for them to meet, where the bureaucratic machinery behind the Maui Police Department took place. Lei couldn’t help glancing at the closed door with LT M. STEVENS on it. A new plaque had been added above his name, emblazoned with SGT. K. FRASER. Lei’s gut churned at the sight. Maybe she’d pay the brunette woman a visit on her way back downstairs.

  Maybe Fraser has heard from Stevens.

  Lei wanted to vomit at the thought. Instead, she took a few calming breaths outside of the conference room, plastered on a smile, and went in.

  Dr. Wilson hadn’t changed much in the nine years since Lei had first met her. The petite psychologist was dressed in a pretty floral wrap dress, her feet in low-heeled slingbacks, shoulder-length hair all the colors blond could be from cream to bronze.

  “Lei. So good to see you.” She pulled back from the hug when Lei finally let go. “What’s wrong, my dear?”

  “I don’t know,” Lei said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe something. It’s Michael. He’s overseas somewhere and is out of contact. I have a bad feeling.” She sat down at the long conference table and filled Dr. Wilson in on recent events.

  “Oh my. Well. Let’s take a break from that subject and come back to it,” Dr. Wilson said. “Why don’t you tell me about your case?”

  Lei went through the whole thing, spending some time on the second visit to T. J. Costa’s house, which had gone so badly wrong, the shooting they were primarily assigned to discuss. “Pono’s supposed to come back to work in the next day or two.”

  “Yes, I spoke with him at his home. He’s doing well. Misses you and the office, though.” Crinkles bracketed Dr. Wilson’s bright blue eyes. “I think the inactivity bothers him.”

  “I know. Neither of us is good at that.” Lei felt better, having unloaded all her concerns in the last twenty minutes. Now they needed to sort through them. “I met Michael’s partner on the training task force. And I didn’t know he had a partner.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Wilson’s eyebrows climbed.

  “Sergeant Kathy Fraser. Pretty, blue-eyed brunette. Single, or at least not wearing a ring. He never mentioned her. And she’s in his office and had the cojones to tell me that she told him, quote, ‘months ago,’ unquote, not to go overseas. She knew his departure date, and he didn’t tell it to me until the day before.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Wilson sighed, in an entirely different tone. “But surely you don’t think…”

  “No, I don’t. But things hadn’t been good with us for a while. A year at least, more like two if I’m honest. And a goodbye screw in the shower doesn’t cancel all that,” Lei said. “Sorry for the crudeness.”

  “Well, there’s a lot going on here.” Dr. Wilson frowned. “I’ve been concerned about Michael’s state of mind for some time. I’m sure that’s not a surprise. As we discussed before, he has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “And a drinking problem,” Lei said baldly. There were no secrets between her and Dr. Wilson, and that was a relief. “But he wouldn’t ask for help. Wouldn’t talk about any of it. And this thing overseas—my biggest worry is that it’s some sort of one-way mission.” She stood up, rubbed her hands up and down her pants, and paced back and forth beside the table. “He did it for the money, at least in part. I broke into his e-mails. He made sure he had extra life insurance.”

  “Those are sensible things to make sure are in place when going overseas to a dangerous area,” Dr. Wilson said. “Doesn’t mean he was suicidal.”

  Lei sat abruptly. “You’re right. I’m just going nuts because he didn’t call me back last night when we had a plan.” She described their phone date and how she’d written Security Solutions a threatening letter.

  “There could be a dozen reasons he hasn’t called. You just have to wait until you have more information.”

  “And that’s hard to do.” Lei rubbed her gritty eyes. “Anyway, I really appreciate having a chance to hash through everything. So you don’t think I should worry about Kathy Fraser? What she is to him?”

  “You’re a cop.” Dr. Wilson gave a rueful chuckle. “Everyone’s motives are going to be suspect, especially with this case and all its layers of infidelity staring you in the face. You want my thoughts, honestly?”

  “Yes.” Lei braced herself.

  “I think the fact that he had a female partner and confided in her is symptomatic of your marriage being at risk, yes. But I’d be willing to bet my psychologist’s license he’s never been unfaithful to you.”

  Lei couldn’t help thinking of Anchara, Michael’s first wife, and the conflicted loyalties of that relationship that had died with her. Their love for each other had doomed that marriage to failure before it began. Could something like that happen again? For her or for Stevens?

  She was afraid to think about it. She already knew the answer.

  “I guess I better get back to it.” Lei stood. “Thanks.” She hugged the psychologist and left. She walked rapidly past the closed door behind which Sergeant Kathy Fraser, with her blue eyes, tight uniform, and shiny brass, worked at her husband’s desk.

  She didn’t have the courage to ask Fraser if she’d heard from Michael.

  Bunuelos was waiting for Lei in their cubicle a floor below. “Nunes’s alibi checked out. And no one has positively identified either Frank Phillips or Ben Miller at the harbor the morning of the murder.”

  “Damn it. I was really hoping something would break there.” Lei’s phone rang and she yanked it up, annoyance in her voice. “Sergeant Texeira.”

  “Sergeant?” A weepy female voice. “This is Barbara Selzmann. I have to come in and speak to you. I have some important information to share.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Barbara Selzmann didn’t look polished and put together this time as she walked into the interview room, preceded by her lawyer. They Mirandized her and turned on the recording equipment.

  “I want to make a statement.” Selzmann’s eyes were red-rimmed, her highlighted hair a tangled mass on her shoulders. “I suspect Frank of killing Danielle.”

  Lei kept her face and voice neutral. “This is quite a turnaround from your previous statements. What has changed since you were here last?”

  “I found out he’s being unfaithful to me.” Selzmann groped around until Chapman, her lawyer, handed her a tissue from his pocket. Clearly the waterworks had been on for a while. “Frank came over to my house several days before Danielle died. He was enraged. He’d fo
und out she was pregnant from a discarded pregnancy test box in their bathroom. He knew he wasn’t the father; they hadn’t slept together in six months according to him. Not since he started seeing me.” She blew her nose. “I know this sounds bad, but I said, ‘Who cares? You don’t love her; she doesn’t love you. Now we can be together publicly.’ And then he told me about her land.” She waved the tissue. “He had plans for that land. He had it surveyed already. Was beginning grading and infrastructure. He was planning to tell her his plans and present it as a nice fifty-fifty split for them at the divorce. Only he wouldn’t get anything if she had a child.”

  Lei leaned forward, frowning. “So why didn’t you tell us this the first time we interviewed you?”

  “I really didn’t think he did it. I mean, I saw him the day she died. It was just like we both told you earlier. He went in to work, did some stuff with the receptionist, and then went out the back and uploaded remote entries on a timer. It’s what he always did when he was meeting me. But he wasn’t with me until after lunch.”

  Lei made a note, glancing at Bunuelos. He’d have had time to go out on the boat with Danielle and come into his office at his usual ten a.m., then leave again to meet Selzmann.

  “I spotted pictures of him with another woman on his phone. And sexy texts. He’s seeing someone else. I don’t owe him shit.” Selzmann held out her hand toward her lawyer and he put another tissue in it. She honked her nose. “I think he killed Danielle to get that land. And I won’t stand by and let him get away with it.”