Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  We widened the search. Nick had already cordoned off the area where Miriam’s body had lain, and we scanned every inch. Then we moved outward, in concentric circles. I moved aside some underbrush and startled a white cat there. It turned to run, but Ray scooped it up.

  “Hey, what’s up, kitty?” he asked, keeping it snug in his arm and stroking its fur with the other hand. “What are you doing way out here?”

  I walked over. “It have a tag?”

  “It’s a she,” Ray said. The cat had stopped struggling. He felt around her furry neck. “Yeah, there’s a collar here. Shine that flashlight over here. Just don’t get it in her eyes or she’ll spook.”

  I focused the light at his hand, which was showing a heart-shaped metal tag. “Hillside Avenue,” I said. “That’s down in Manoa. How’d you get all the way up here, kitty?”

  “She looks healthy and well-fed,” Ray said. “Not like she’s been living wild for a while.”

  There was a phone number on her tag. “Somebody’s probably missing her,” I said. “We might as well call and let them know she’s all right.”

  I found my cell and dialed the number on the tag. The woman who answered sounded impossibly old, and didn’t speak much English. It took a while before she put a kid on the phone. “Hello?”

  I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. “Hi, I’m a police officer, and I found a cat with this phone number on its tag.”

  “How?” the kid asked.

  “How did I find it? In the woods, off the Pali Highway.”

  “No,” the kid said. “Her name is Hao. It means white in Chinese.”

  “Oh. That makes sense. This cat’s white. How long has she been missing?”

  “I just saw her this morning,” the kid said. “Hold on.” He started speaking to the old woman in Chinese. Then he came back to the phone. “My grandmother says she put Hao out this afternoon. How did she get all the way up there?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “We’ll get her back to you a little later, okay?”

  “Okay.” He – or she—I still couldn’t tell—hung up.

  We put Hao in the back of the Jeep, with the flaps rolled down and the car locked. “Don’t scratch up the car, okay?” I asked her.

  We looked around the area more, but couldn’t find Miriam’s purse, laptop, or the flash drive. By eight o’clock it was full dark and I knew we weren’t going to find anything else. When we got back to the Jeep, Hao was curled up on the driver’s seat, sound asleep.

  Ray lifted her onto his lap, and she purred a couple of times, then went back to sleep. We drove down to Manoa, and found the address on Hillside Avenue. It was a small, well-kept house with a beat-up old Toyota sedan in the driveway. I rang the bell, while Ray carried Hao in his arms.

  A middle-aged Chinese woman came to the door. She looked uncertain for a moment, until she saw the white cat. “You found Hao!” she said. The cat jumped out of Ray’s arms and ran through the open door.

  The woman invited us in. “Where did you say you found her?” she asked, after we’d introduced ourselves.

  “Way up the Pali Highway,” I said. “Any idea how she got up there?”

  The woman looked baffled. “My mother let her out around three,” she said. “When my son came home from school.”

  “There’s no way she could have gotten up there on her own so quickly,” I said. “Anybody in your household drive up that way?”

  She shook her head. “I work in Ewa Beach. My mother doesn’t drive. Hao must have jumped into a neighbor’s car.”

  We left it at that. I dropped Ray back at headquarters and headed home for the second time that day. Mike was sprawled on the couch with Roby when I got home, though the big goof jumped off him and raced to the door when I walked in.

  I rubbed behind his floppy golden ears and wondered again how the white cat had gotten all the way up to Nuuanu Pali Drive. But Roby didn’t have any ideas, so I settled for joining him and Mike on the couch.

  THE CAT IS THE KEY

  I met Ray outside headquarters the next morning, and he drove us back up to the crash scene to look at it in daylight, playing an old CD from his Philly days of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes with a rocking horn section.

  There was a stiff breeze blowing, with an earthy scent. We took the Nuuanu Pali Drive exit, pulling off the road a few hundred yards beyond where Miriam’s car had crashed. The area where her body had landed was still roped off with yellow crime scene tape, and the tree her car had hit was bowed in. But the car had been taken away the night before, and the area was quiet and peaceful, roofed over with tall trees that filtered the sunlight.

  We spent a good hour combing the area and we were just about to call it quits when we found what looked like fresh tire tracks, a few hundred feet down Nuuanu Pali Road from the accident. The soil there was light and loosely packed, and we could see where a car, a sedan mostly likely, had pulled off the road and parked.

  “We were all parked up by the highway,” Ray said.

  “Could be hikers. People go up the trail all the time. There’s a waterfall at the top.”

  There was a faint whiff of engine oil in the area. I knelt down and sniffed. “I think these tracks are pretty fresh.”

  “The cat,” Ray said.

  “Excuse me? You think the cat drove up here and parked?”

  “No, idiot. I think somebody drove the cat up here.”

  “Go on.”

  He started walking around the area. “We had this case back in Philly. This woman was mad because her boyfriend was breaking up with her. He had this little Doberman puppy, and she went to his house and got the puppy from the back yard.”

  He shook his head. “She hid in the shrubbery by his driveway, and when he drove in, she threw the puppy in front of his car.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He swerved to avoid hitting the dog, and ran right into the front of the house.”

  “I get you. Maybe someone drove up here with the cat, and threw the cat in front of her car as she was exiting the highway.”

  “We know she loved cats,” he said. “All those cat photos in her cubicle. And that would explain how a cat from Manoa ended up here.”

  I wondered what would happen if someone threw a puppy in front of my Jeep. I couldn’t even consider someone tossing Roby in front of me; he was just too big and squirmy. But a puppy? A cute little golden retriever puppy? I’d have swerved, too.

  It took an hour for a crime scene tech with a plaster cast kit to get up there. There was an unusual wear pattern, like the car the tire came from needed an alignment, so there was a good possibility that if we had a suspect in mind, we could use the tire to connect him or her to Miriam’s accident.

  We stopped on the way down to Miriam’s office for coffee and malasadas, and thus fortified, went up to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Gladys Yuu met us at the receptionist’s desk. “Good morning, detectives,” she said. She looked tired, with dark circles under her eyes, and she was clutching a Kope Bean travel coffee mug like the caffeine was feeding into her system through it. “How can we help you this morning?”

  “We’re here about Miriam Rose,” I said.

  “Miriam? She’s not in yet. I don’t know where she is.”

  “Can we speak to you inside?” I asked.

  She led us back to her desk, outside Nishimura’s office. “I’m afraid Miriam was in car accident last night,” I said. “She didn’t survive.”

  Gladys frowned. “I always told that girl to wear her seatbelts. But she said she was a good driver.” She made a spitting noise. “I’m not surprised something happened to her. And that tiny car! What kind of protection does a little car like that give you in an accident?”

  “May we look around her cubicle?” I asked.

  Gladys looked suspicious. “Why? Wasn’t this just a traffic accident?”

  “We’re investigating. We haven’t made any determination yet.”

  �
�What are you looking for?”

  “She didn’t have her purse with her,” I said. “We found that strange. Thought maybe she left it behind in a desk drawer.”

  “It probably flew out of the car.”

  Ray and I stood there and looked at her. “Well, come on then.” She led us through the maze of hallways to Miriam’s cubicle, then stood there, hands on hips.

  “We can find our way out,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Whatever is here is state property. Aside from her personal belongings. I think I should stay while you search.”

  “If you want.” Ray handed me a pair of rubber gloves, and Gladys watched us in a combination of fear and horror as we searched through Miriam’s desk, her drawers, and the cubbyholes attached to the cubicle divider. We didn’t find her purse, or her flash drive. But all those photos of her and her cat made me think that Ray was on to something with his theory that someone might have thrown the cat in front of Miriam’s car.

  “What time did Miriam leave yesterday?” I asked Gladys.

  “I don’t know. We don’t clock in and out.”

  I looked at her. I was sure she knew exactly who came in late and who left early. She must have felt something in my gaze, because she said, “My mother’s aide had an emergency yesterday afternoon, so I left early to get home and take over for her. I assume Miriam left at five. That’s when we usually close down.”

  We stopped for lunch at Zippy’s. While we waited in line we were both quiet, thinking, but by the time we sat down with our food we both started to talk at once, then stopped. “I guess that shrink was right,” I said. “She said you and I were in sync.”

  “Really? Because we both went after those kids?”

  “Yeah. She seemed to think I did it because I know that I can’t have kids of my own.”

  “You have something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “You know what I mean.”

  “She wanted to know how I felt about Julie getting her PhD. Like I might be resenting her for not wanting to drop everything and have a couple of babies.”

  “When does she finish?” I asked.

  “She’s taking her last two classes this semester. She’s been fiddling around with proposals for her dissertation. It’s going to be something about how the geography of the islands has influenced their development patterns.”

  “Better her than me,” I said. “Kids?”

  “Funny you should ask.” He looked down at the table, then back up at me, with a wide grin. “She just took one of those pregnancy tests last week. And, well, it looks like I’m going to be a dad in around eight months.”

  “Wow! Congratulations, brah. You happy about it?”

  He laughed. “Are you kidding? I’m over the moon. But the women in Julie’s family have some history of trouble, so we’ve been trying to keep things quiet. You know, don’t want to jinx anything too soon.”

  “You tell Dr. Lewis?”

  He shook his head. “She had enough to analyze me on.”

  We went back to our two cases. Though the Sheriff’s office was the official investigative body on Miriam’s crash, we knew that her death had to be connected to Zoë’s, and to the data we had asked her to analyze.

  “You think she asked the wrong person for help?” Ray suggested, as we ate.

  “Could be. I mean, I thought we were clear to her about staying quiet, but it turns out she wasn’t the most sensible girl in the world.”

  “You mean the seat belt thing?”

  I nodded, and took a bite of my sandwich. When I finished chewing, I said, “I mean, who’s stupid enough to drive a convertible with the top down and no seat belts?”

  “Half the tourists on O’ahu?”

  “Yeah, but she wasn’t a tourist.” I shook my head. “And Gladys knew that she didn’t wear the seat belts. I’ll bet everybody who knew her knew that.”

  “Making it easy for someone to figure she’d get thrown out of the car if she crashed. And anybody who saw her cubicle knew she was into cats.”

  “So where does that leave us? I suppose we should get a list of the people who work in that department and see what we turn up.”

  Ray crumpled his paper coffee cup. “And we still need to know what’s in that database. Think Harry should take another shot at it?”

  I pursed my lips. “He already said he couldn’t get much into it. We need somebody who’ll know what’s there. Too bad Levi Hirsch is skiing. He could probably get someone to read the data.”

  I stared up at the posters on the restaurant wall, trying to think of anyone else I knew. I focused on one advertising a surf competition. And then I remembered seeing my nephew Jeffrey surf, and that my cousin Selena had been there.

  Selena had a lot in common with Zoë Greenfield, I realized. Both of them came from flaky family backgrounds. Zoë had grown up in the commune with Sunshine and Colorado, while Selena’s mom was my Aunt Pua, who had always been a goofball.

  Aunt Pua had three kids, each from different fathers. Not that any of the men had been in the picture for long. My cousin Ben’s dad had been her third husband. They’d gotten married in Vegas, and then divorced six months later.

  Aunt Pua had been an astrologer, had sold tie-dyed t-shirts at the Aloha Stadium flea market, wholesaled herbal tea, and who knows what else. She’d finally settled into a career that suited her, as an aromatherapist in Hawai’i Kai.

  Selena, on the other hand, had always been a quiet, studious girl. She was a couple of years older than me, and while the rest of our cousins were outdoor kids, surfing, swimming, and hiking, Selena was a reader. She had big round glasses and frizzy hair, and whenever there was a family party you could find her in the corner, reading. I liked to read, too, and our best conversations had been ones about books, particularly once I was a teenager and she was in college.

  She majored in engineering at UH, and went to work for a consulting firm after graduation. I just couldn’t remember her married name, or where she worked.

  So I called my mother. “I’m still shaken up from that school shooting,” she said, when we’d gone through the ritual greetings, asking after her health and my father’s. “Every time I see something terrible on the news I worry that you’re there and you’re going to get hurt.”

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You’ve got Lui and Haoa. I’m just the spare.”

  “Kimo! How can you say something like that!” She laughed. “So what do you want? You never call me unless you need something.”

  It was my turn to feign horror. “How can you say that, Mom? I called you last week when I was walking Roby. And I saw you on Saturday when we watched Jeffrey surf.”

  “Lui calls me every day.”

  “It’s not a competition, Mom. What’s Selena’s last name? And do you have her phone number?”

  “Her last name is Mitchell. Hold on and I’ll get you her number.”

  “You don’t know it by heart? I’m surprised.”

  “Don’t start with me. I’m your mother.”

  “So you say.”

  “No one else would have put up with you. Here it is.” She read the number off to me. “What do you want with Selena?”

  “I need a little help. Thanks. Kiss Dad for me. Love you.”

  I hung up before she could probe any further. Selena’s receptionist put me through to her, and she said, “I was just thinking of you, Kimo. It was nice to see you last weekend. We should get together more.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. “You have any time this afternoon?”

  She laughed. “Is this in a professional capacity?”

  “I have a couple of spreadsheets I need some help with. I’m thinking maybe an engineer can make some sense out of them.”

  “I could use a break from load factors,” she said. “When can you come over?”

  Selena worked in one of the high-rise buildings near the Iolani Palace, just a couple of blocks from headquarters. Ray and I walked over there after lunch. The receptionist was a young
haole woman with an asymmetrical haircut and glossy makeup that made her look like a fashion model.

  She buzzed Selena. “Ms. Mitchell will be right out,” she said, then punched a button to take an incoming call. I was fascinated to see how she managed the multi-line phone with the tips of her fingers, protecting the finish on her long, manicured nails.

  Selena appeared a couple of minutes later, looked at Ray and me, and shook her head. As she led us back to her office, she said, “Even gay guys can’t resist Marisa,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen anyone with nails like that who can actually work,” I said.

  “If you can call what she does work. I call it decoration.” She motioned Ray and me to chairs across from her desk and sat down facing us.

  Her office was organized for efficiency, much like Selena herself. The credenza, file cabinet, phone and computer were all within easy reach, and she had a slanted table alongside one wall with plans laid out on it. She could swivel her chair over with a minimum of effort.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said. I handed her the flash drive and explained what I thought we had. She popped the drive in and started hitting keys. It was a lot like watching Harry work—that same sense of complete concentration on the task at hand. After a couple of minutes she looked up at us.

  “Harry was right, in part. The first couple of spreadsheets here are engineering data.” She shifted the monitor so we could see it, and Ray and I both leaned forward. “This sheet represents kilowatt hours generated by some kind of power project.”

  She clicked a tab at the bottom of the screen. “Now this sheet represents the same time period, but the numbers are much lower.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that the first sheet here is bullshit,” she said. “Somebody is trying to make a bad project look good.”

  She opened a new window and pulled up a different spreadsheet. “These numbers here are dollar figures. It looks like the first sheet is what they would have submitted to whoever was funding them—notice how the figures are in black? That means they’re making money.”