Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

“No, I don’t think we have. But I think the next move has to be Sandra’s. When she’s ready to have a baby, she can ask us again, and then we’ll decide.”

  “I don’t like leaving big decisions about life up to other people,” Mike said. “We have to know what we want first. Then we decide if we want to work with Sandra and Cathy, or go on our own—with some other woman, or adoption, or maybe even fostering.”

  “You’d want to do that? Raise a kid who’s not biologically either of ours?” I asked.

  “What does it matter, in the end? You and I both know that families come in all shapes and sizes. Whether we adopt or foster or donate sperm or whatever, we’d still love the kid the same.”

  “I agree. I mean, you look at Aunt Mei-Mei, and how she took in Jimmy Ah Wong. To see her with him, you could never tell he wasn’t her blood.” I hesitated, not sure how to say what I meant.

  I sat down on the far end of the sofa from him, and lifted his feet into my lap. “I love you, you know. I feel like my life is here, with you. But we’ve only been living together for what, eight months? We’ve still got some adjusting to do before we bring someone else into our lives.”

  “You’re right,” he said, as I started to massage his feet. “And nobody says we have to have kids to be complete as a family.”

  Roby came up to sniff Mike’s hand. “Roby will look after us in our old age,” he said. “He’ll be our seeing eye dog. He’ll open doors for us and dial 911 with his nose when we fall and break our hips.”

  Roby put his front paws up on Mike’s thighs and looked back and forth between us. “You going to do that, boy?” I asked, scratching behind his ears.

  He nodded his head vigorously, and Mike and I both laughed.

  FINALE

  Over the next few weeks, Ray and I pulled together additional evidence in the deaths of Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose. Gladys Yuu’s only surviving relative was a distant cousin on Maui, and she gave us permission to take Gladys’s fingerprints and compare them to the one on the stolen pendant, and to make a cast of Gladys’s tires. The print matched, and so did the tire track.

  The DA had to get subpoenas for both women’s bank records to verify what Harry had found, that there were payments going from Dr. Z’s offshore account in China to Gladys’s account in Honolulu. Because of the difference in banking laws between the US and China, that was taking a long time.

  The only evidence we could count on pointed toward Gladys Yuu, rather than Xiao Zenshen. The good doctor was too wily to admit to anything, and we couldn’t find that one thing that would conclusively put her behind the two women’s murders. The ADA had to settle for fraud in the payments Néng Yuán had collected from the state, and assault on Wyatt Collins. It wasn’t going to be much, but at least Dr. Zenshen would serve some time, and then be deported back to China.

  A few days after Dr. Z’s arrest, Anna Yang surfaced again. She petitioned for the right to stay in the US, based on her long-standing marriage to Greg Oshiro. Because Zoë’s murder was still an open case, Ray and I spoke up on her behalf in front of an immigration judge, who reinstated her visa and gave her a year in this country, during which time she could apply for permanent status.

  She and the girls moved in with Greg, and they seemed like a pretty happy family. Both of them were committed to raising the girls. “I’m not saying I’ll never find a guy,” Greg said, as we sat in a Kope Bean a few weeks later. We’d just traded information on another case, the murder of a newlywed by his wife of less than a week. “But if I find someone, he’s got to be willing to have the girls in his life.”

  “Anna feel the same way?” I asked.

  He nodded. “She was hurt pretty bad when Zoë broke up with her—especially since Zoë went for that guy. It was like their whole life together had been some kind of sham. I think it’s going to be a long time before she’s ready to date anybody.”

  Ray’s cell phone rang, and he stepped away from us to take the call.

  Greg took a sip of his cappuccino. “What happened to that guy, the ex-con?”

  “My friend Levi Hirsch gave him a job,” I said. “He already knew all the stuff about energy statistics. And Levi collects wounded cases, anyway.”

  “Like your friend Terri?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Terri and Levi had announced they were getting married in the fall, and Levi had already asked Harry, Mike and me to be his groomsmen.

  “I’m glad,” Greg said. “I was so scared when Zoë took up with Wyatt, because I was afraid it meant she was going to take the girls and go to the mainland, and I’d never see them again. But once I got to know him, I felt sorry for him. He seems to be trying to turn his life around.”

  Ray came back to us then. “Gotta go,” he said. “Julie’s getting her first sonogram. We’re going to see if they can tell what kind of creature she’s carrying inside there.”

  “I hope it’s human,” Greg said.

  Ray pretended to trip and spill his coffee on Greg, but the cup was empty. It was still kind of funny to see Greg jump back.

  When Ray was gone, I asked Greg, “So, how do you like being a full-time dad now, having Anna and the girls live with you?”

  “It’s not what I signed on for, and it gets rough sometimes, but you go with the flow, you know? I mean, what was I going to do? It’s important for Anna’s citizenship petition that we live together. And the girls are great, when they’re not screaming or crying or fighting with each other. Having them around all the time is a lot different from taking them for a weekend, with my mom and dad around to help.”

  He sipped his coffee, then looked at me. “How about you and Mike? You guys thinking of kids?”

  I blew out a big breath. “Yeah. But neither of us are ready for such a big commitment. We both love my nieces and nephews and our friends’ kids—but we like being able to say goodbye to them, too.”

  “It’s a different world today,” Greg said. “Imagine when we were teenagers – we couldn’t even imagine that gay couples could get married, have kids—all that stuff we thought was restricted to straight people.”

  “It makes things tougher, though,” I said. “I mean, right now, Mike and I could get married in a couple of different states on the mainland, but it wouldn’t make any difference back here, or to the Feds, either. But soon? I’ll bet we see same-sex marriage everywhere. And then we’ll all have to decide if we get married or not—something we didn’t even have to worry about just a few years ago.”

  I crumpled up my coffee cup. “And this whole baby thing? I mean, even ten years ago, who thought about it? Now everywhere I look gay and lesbian people are having kids. It puts that much more pressure on a relationship.”

  “There have always been pressures, brah,” Greg said. “They’re just different ones today. Ten years ago, neither you nor Mike could have been comfortably out at work, but today? Maybe not a cake walk, but it’s doable.”

  I sat there for a minute, thinking about all the changes. But I kept circling back to kids—to Julie’s pregnancy, and Pua’s. And to Sandra’s open-ended offer.

  Greg stood up. “We should both get back to work,” he said.

  I stood up, too. “One thing that doesn’t change is that people keep on killing people.”

  “Gives us writers something to write about, huh?” Greg said.

  “That it does,” I said. “That it does.”

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  An exclusive Mahu Investigation short

  A call from the boss on your way to work on Monday morning is never a good way to start the week. “Jogger found a body at an empty lot off Ahui Street about half an hour ago,” Lieutenant Sampson said. “Call Donne and go right over there.” He paused for a moment. “Sounds like a bad one.”

  Ray Donne was my partner in the Honolulu Police Department. I called him and arranged to meet him at the site, a short road that ran parallel to the cut leading into the Ala Wai Yacht Basin, where Gilligan and the Skipper left for their three-hou
r tour so many years ago.

  There were two police cruisers already on the scene, blue lights flashing. Across an empty lot I saw the back of the Children’s Discovery Center, with school buses already pulled up out front disgorging a flow of little keikis on a field trip.

  Lidia Portuondo, a patrol officer I’d known for years, was standing next to her car with a twenty-something Asian man in a sweat-soaked tank top, nylon shorts, and expensive-looking running shoes. “This is Wing Bing-Bing,” Lidia said, introducing us. “He found the body.” She turned to the man and said, “Detective Kanapa’aka.”

  “Can you tell me what you saw?” I asked.

  “I live Kaka’ako,” he replied in a heavy Chinese accent, pointing behind us to a row of high-rise condos a few blocks away. “I run here every morning. This morning I run past and I see pile of big plastic trash bag. I think bad people to dump trash here. Then I see foot.” He shivered. “I don’t do anything more, I just call police.”

  I thanked him, and made sure Lidia had his contact information. By then Ray was pulling up. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, which was probably true, since his wife, Julie, had given birth two weeks before. Little Vinnie had a big set of lungs and didn’t mind using them.

  Ray and I walked over to where another beat cop, Gary Saunders, was standing guard over a haphazard tumble of black plastic trash bags. The foot Mr. Wing had mentioned was clearly visible sticking out of a hole in the bottom bag. The toenails were painted pink and the heel was callused. The bags were already beginning to smell in the early morning heat.

  I got my digital camera, portable tripod, and an L-shaped measuring scale from the glove compartment. I made sure the date and time stamp was on, and began taking pictures of the scene, beginning with the widest angle. You never know what may show up in the background of a shot, after all. Then with Ray’s help I began shooting pictures closer and closer, positioning the measuring scale to document how close I was.

  When I was sure I had all the angles covered, I popped the memory stick from the camera and uploaded the pictures to my netbook computer. While we waited for the Medical Examiner’s van to arrive, I created a new folder on the desktop with the case number and put the files in there, as well as blank copies of many of the forms we’d have to fill out.

  A steady stream of fishing boats left the marina to head out in search of marlin, tuna and wahoo, rigged with fishing poles and gaffs. A half dozen cattle egrets pecked the barren land near the water’s edge, and a huge black frigate bird soared on a thermal around us. When I was a kid, my father told me that the old Hawaiians believed that the appearance of a frigate bird meant someone had died. I guess they were right.

  The ME’s van pulled up a few minutes later, and we let the techs load the bags onto the van, to be opened and inventoried back at the lab. When they were done, Ray and I walked around to the couple of businesses in the area to see if anyone had been around to notice the bags being dropped off, but we had no luck.

  By the time we got to the ME’s office, a low-slung off-white building on Iwilei Road, Doc Takayama had the body parts removed from the bag and laid out on a table. We dabbed some Vicks Vapo-Rub under our noses and walked in to the examining room.

  “You brought me a jigsaw puzzle this morning,” he said. “I don’t like jigsaws.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind for the future,” Ray said.

  The body parts had been laid out in a rough sort of order, and we could see the victim was a Hawaiian woman in her late teens or early twenties, nearly six feet tall and close to three hundred pounds. Her skin was pockmarked with acne, and her hair was lank and greasy. She had the start of a mustache on her upper lip.

  “Cause of death?” I asked.

  “Right now I’m saying evisceration,” Doc said. “Most of her internal organs are gone.”

  “Some kind of ritual killing?” Ray asked.

  Doc shrugged. “I’ll have more information for you once I finish the autopsy.”

  “No ID on the body, I assume,” I grumbled. “That would be too easy.”

  “Can’t help you with that. But she had a couple of tattoos.” He rolled her arm so we could see the words “da kine” on her upper back, and a dolphin on her right ankle.

  I snapped pictures of the young woman’s face and tattoos and then once again moved pictures from the camera to the netbook. Then we drove back to headquarters to try and track our mystery woman down.

  “Didn’t look like a prostitute,” Ray said, when we were at our desks. “And she looked plenty strong. So most likely she knew her attacker.”

  There was no missing persons report, so we were stuck until we got an ID. I emailed a good head shot of the girl to Greg Oshiro, a reporter I knew at the Star-Advertiser, and asked him to put something in the paper. I did the same thing with my oldest brother, Lui, who manages KVOL, a local TV station. Their motto was “Erupting News All The Time,” and they loved anything with a hint of sensation. I was sure that a “help us find out who this dead girl is” appeal would get us something.

  There wasn’t much else we could do without an ID, so we worked on other cases, slogging through reams of paperwork and making follow-up calls. I checked the TV in our break room at noon, and saw the girl’s photo broadcast on the KVOL news. A few minutes later, the tip line transferred a call to my desk.

  “Eh, brah, I t’ink I know da kine girl,” a man’s voice said. “Her name Alamea, and she work at da kine drugstore on Prospect Street in Papakolea.”

  “Thanks, brah.” I hung up and dialed the drugstore. I identified myself and asked if a girl named Alamea worked there.

  “Yeah, but she no come to work today,” the man who answered complained.

  I described the dead girl, and the man verified that sounded like her.

  On our way up to the drugstore, Ray pulled into a Kope Bean, our local island-based coffee shop. He pulled up at the drive-through window. “Gotta have some caffeine to stay awake,” he said, while we waited in line. “You want?”

  “Might as well. My usual.”

  He ordered himself a Longboard sized Macadamia Nut Latte, and a raspberry mocha in the same size for me. Then he turned the big SUV uphill to where the drugstore sat, at the foot of Mount Tantalus.

  We carried the coffee inside and sipped while we waited for the manager to come out from the back. He was a slim, slight Filipino named Luis. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said, when we showed him the dead girl’s picture. He stepped back and crossed himself.

  He led us to the office, where he pulled her original application from a file cabinet, and I copied her full name and address into the file I was building on the netbook.

  “What kind of girl was she?” Ray asked while I typed.

  Luis shrugged. “Slow. Not like retarded, but always take her longer to get things and do things. She work photo counter most of the time because it was same thing over and over, you know? Take film, scan, ring up.”

  “She have a boyfriend?”

  “Alamea? No way. Not even friendly with other staff.”

  We established that Alamea had worked her shift on Saturday, but she hadn’t shown up Sunday. Luis had called her cell phone and gotten no answer. “Now I think, she look sick on Saturday,” he said. “She keep shifting foot to foot, squeezing her lips together like something hurt.”

  Ray bought a monster-sized pack of dried mixed fruit sprinkled with li hing powder, a spicy treat he had become addicted to, and we drove the few blocks to the first-floor apartment where Alamea lived, in what looked like a converted motel. Ray knocked and we waited. No answer.

  He knocked again. We were about to start canvassing the neighbors when the door opened slowly to reveal a huge Hawaiian woman in an extra-wide wheelchair. We showed our badges and Ray asked, “Does Alamea Kekuahona live here?”

  “She my daughter, but she no home.”

  Ray broke the news to her about Alamea’s death. “She always babooze, dat one,” the woman said, meaning stupid. �
�What happen? She walk in front of bus?”

  “May we come in, Auntie?” Ray asked. It was awkward talking like that in the doorway.

  She backed the chair up and let us into a small, dark living room, partitioned down the middle with a faded floral-print bed sheet hung from the ceiling. There was a single bedroom to the left, a galley kitchen and a small bathroom. There was only one chair at the table.

  Her name was Betty Kekuahona, she said, and Alamea was her younger daughter. The older one had gotten married and moved out years before, and when Alamea turned sixteen, she had rigged up the curtain to give herself some privacy.

  Betty’s hair was pulled back and twisted into a bun that looked like the face of a small, yappy dog, like a Brussels Griffon or an Affenpinscher. Her forearms were massive and lightly dusted with brown hair.

  We put on gloves and searched the small space, but there were no clues as to what had happened to Alamea. “She had a cell phone, right?” I asked.

  Betty gave us the number. I pulled out the netbook and added it to the list.

  “Any friends?”

  “None she talk about. Alamea always too big and stupid to make friends.”

  We gave her the phone number for the medical examiner’s office. “How I gonna bury her?” Betty asked. “I got no money. And I got the diabetes bad. Can’t work, got to get my medicine from the free clinic.”

  I brought up the name and phone number for the department’s victim advocate from the netbook. I gave that to Betty. “She can help you out,” I said. “We’re sorry for your loss, Auntie.”

  She shrugged. “I always knew dat girl would do something stupid one day.”

  We got in Ray’s SUV and he backed out of the parking space. “Not exactly broken up, is she? That was her daughter.”

  “Makes me feel bad for Alamea,” I said. “Fat, homely, no friends, a boss who thought she was slow and a mother who thought she was stupid.”

  “Not the kind of person you’d think would end up the way she did,” Ray added.