5 Twisted Vine

by Toby Neal

  Chapter 12

  Lei walked into the Starbucks near Ala Moana Shopping Center the next morning. Her curls were still damp from the shower, but she’d managed to get to the meet with Ken and Ang within fifteen minutes of the phone ringing and waking her up from the best sleep she’d had in days.

  “Hey, you looking sassy,” Ken said as she joined the agents at a table off in the corner, away from other customers.

  Lei knew her grin was huge. Exploring the new world of phone sex had done wonders for her mood. “Life is good, that’s all. What’s up, Sophie? You wanted to meet us here?”

  “Yeah.” In contrast, Sophie Ang didn’t look like she’d slept well, her dark eyes circled by shadows. “I got some names and addresses of Honolulu members of DyingFriends, and I thought we could save some time by meeting here. I was hoping you could go out right away and interview these people.”

  “Definitely,” Ken said. “How did you get that so fast?”

  Ang explained her process of phishing on the site. “My identity is getting a lot of sympathy and attention. I keep saying I want to ‘get out early,’ and so far, no bites from the system admin or any organized effort to encourage suicide. But there are more people right here on Oahu in this group than you would believe.”

  “Is that bothering you?” Lei asked, concerned by Ang’s demeanor.

  “It’s depressing, that’s for sure. But no. I’m having to disconnect my home network and not bring work home anymore, and DAVID is offline for the review process, so I’m kind of at a loose end.”

  “I wondered what Waxman was going to do to you.”

  “It actually wasn’t that bad.” Sophie sighed, took a sip of her tea. “It’s just a buildup of things. Alika asked to put me up in some bouts in the MMA women’s fight circuit; I had to say no. I’m sure it’s not something I should do as an agent.”

  Ken’s straight brows drew together. “You’re probably right. It could make you a target, and you know the Bureau policy of keeping a low public profile.”

  “I think it sucks,” Lei said. “You should be able to do what you want.” Sympathy for the tech agent, stymied on several levels, rose up. Sophie had so many talents, and it bothered Lei to see so few of them expressed.

  “Life is never that simple,” Sophie said, with a grateful glance at Lei. She slid a paper over to them. “Here are the names and addresses.”

  “Thanks.” They watched her go, her tall, lithe figure weaving through the coffee shop.

  “If I weren’t gay, I’d have a crush on her,” Ken said.

  Lei smiled. “If I were, I would too. Okay, what’s the plan?"

  Ken looked at the list, pulled up his navigator app on his phone. “Let’s figure out where they are, plot a route.”

  The first address was in the ritzy suburb of Kahala. Lei enjoyed warm morning air blowing by her through the open window and the sun on the ocean as they rounded Diamond Head and wound into a neighborhood of gracious estates. She let her mind wander back to Stevens and her building need to see him, as they drove up to an Asian-styled mansion with a cobalt-blue tiled roof.

  They parked the Acura in a pea-gravel turnaround and walked over a tiny arched bridge spanning a koi pond. Fat fish in oranges and yellows swam lazily in the water below.

  Ken rang the bell. A sound of celestial chimes rang somewhere deep in the house. He rang the bell again and finally a third time—and when the lacquered door finally opened, they understood why. A tiny man stood there, shrunken and frail as a Chinese Yoda, swathed in a lustrous brocade smoking jacket that brushed the floor. “Yes?”

  “Good morning. My name is Special Agent Ken Yamada, and this is Special Agent Lei Texeira. We have a few questions for you regarding an investigation.” They both held open their cred wallets.

  “What is this about?” Yoda peered at the wallets. He appeared to be clinging to the door for support. Lei glanced at the note in her hand. “Clyde Woo” was written in Sophie’s distinctive hand.

  “Perhaps we could sit down? And you’d be more comfortable, Mr. Woo?” Lei asked. Without a word, the gnome let go of the door and shuffled off, leaving them to follow him into the dim recesses of the house. A vast living room opened up before them, with a bank of sliders framing the view of a sculptured garden. Mr. Woo made a short gesture to a low red couch and settled himself into a motorized wheelchair.

  Lei looked around at the collection of exquisite sculpture against one wall and the shrine to Buddha on the other.

  “What is this regarding?” Mr. Woo asked again. He had a wet rattle in his voice.

  They’d decided on what to say back at the coffee shop. “We are investigating a website—DyingFriends. We understand you are a member on it,” Ken said.

  “Yes.” Mr. Woo dug in the pocket of his robe, pulled out a pair of startlingly thick plastic-framed glasses, and put them on. “What are you investigating?”

  “Well, that’s confidential. All we can say is that DyingFriends may be involved in some unethical practices. Can you tell us what the site has been like for you?” Ken asked.

  Mr. Woo took a while to think this over, and Lei found herself squirming a bit under his magnified gaze as it switched between herself and her partner.

  “Well, as you may have guessed, I’m dying,” he said. “I have a caregiver, but she’s out. I have no family that I am speaking to, and DyingFriends is a place where I can be dying and not be shame.” He gave a phlegmy cough. “I don’t get out much anymore.”

  “We understand,” Lei said. “It seems like it’s a place where people who are in the same situation can get support. Has anyone ever talked with you about suicide on the site?”

  “There are always people talking about it. We’re dying. Suicide is a way to take control of that.”

  Lei was struck by the power of that simple sentence. She’d thought she was definitely against suicide, but she was finding the issue much more complex and heartrending than she’d ever known.

  “Do you feel like suicide is being promoted at all on the site?” Ken asked.

  “It’s a chat site. There are all kinds of people there—and lots of religious people who think suicide is a sin. So no.”

  “Have you ever been approached by an administrator of DyingFriends?”

  “No.” Even the small effort of talking seemed to be wiping Mr. Woo out, and he hunched in a storm of coughing. Lei stood up. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

  He nodded, still coughing, and she went into the vast kitchen and filled a glass, brought it back. His liver-spotted hand trembled as he drank, but he calmed his breathing.

  “Thanks so much for helping us,” Ken said. “And sorry to disturb you.”

  “High point of my day, having FBI agents come to my house,” Mr. Woo said. “I’m sure I won’t see you again, but good luck with what you’re looking for.”

  They let themselves out, and Lei took a deep breath of fresh, sunshiny air. “God. What a way to end. You can tell by all this he was a successful man at one time.” She gestured toward the house as they crossed the bridge.

  “I know. Depressing.” Ken unlocked the SUV and they got in. “This is brutal. I think I understand why some people want to ‘get out early,’ though he didn’t seem to be one of them.”

  “That’s a kind of courage. To live to the end, looking death in the eye.” Lei sighed. “But I’m beginning to understand the reasons better, and why people might even want help ending their own life.”

  “It’s a slippery slope,” Ken said. Silence fell as they got on the road, each occupied with their thoughts. Lei spent the drive researching Clyde Woo. A businessman worth millions, he owned a chain of convenience stores. According to the most recent news article she could find, he was “graciously retired and enjoying his days golfing.”

  It looked like it had been a long time since Clyde Woo had golfed, but the article was dated only a year ago.

  She looked up their next listing, a woman named Betsy Brown. There was no inform
ation in the system but the driver’s license basics and nothing on her personally. She was a thirty-two-year-old Caucasian female who shared a residence with her mother.

  The house they pulled up to was modest, and Betsy Brown was in bed with a laptop on her lap when the caregiver let them in. She was puffy, with the indoor look of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in months. The smile she gave them was strictly for form’s sake.

  After they’d stated their purpose, she made a little gesture to the keyboard. “I can still type, and I can still eat and breathe on my own—but I don’t know how long that will last. I have ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  Lei must have looked blank because Betsy continued. “It’s a neurological disease that causes progressive paralysis until finally all the body’s systems shut down. However, I’ll have all my marbles up until the very end.”

  “We’re very sorry to hear that,” Ken said. Lei felt any words she could think of clogging her throat, “oh shit” being the first thing that had come to mind.

  “So yeah, DyingFriends is a place I can rant and rave; I can network with other people in my situation. I’ve found a whole ALS subgroup, since ALS is its own special hell and is virtually always fatal within five years. So frankly, if I decide to get a little help getting out early, I figure I’m doing myself and the world a service.”

  Lei and Ken left without anything specific, but Lei knew she’d never forget the woman’s hopeless but defiant eyes. She was only a few years older than Lei and had been living an athletic life up until she began stumbling and falling on her daily runs.

  Back in the Acura, Lei did some relaxation breathing and restrained herself from rubbing the pendant around her neck. “Didn’t think it could get worse than the old guy, but that was worse.”

  “I know. I think we need a break.” Ken drove them to a nearby Zippy’s. Lei ordered a bowl of chili and a salad and made herself eat. Being sad for these people and their horrible situations wasn’t going to solve the case—though she’d begun to wonder if there was going to be any real criminal that could be brought to justice.

  Ken held a mug of coffee and looked at her over the rim. “Awfully quiet, Texeira.”

  “I know. I’m really . . . I don’t know. Betsy Brown. She was a runner before the ALS.”

  “I know a little about it. It actually occurs a little more frequently in athletes. Terrible disease.” He set the mug down.

  “So do you think it’s criminal for her to have someone kill her before she eventually smothers to death, trapped in her own body?”

  “Not for us to judge.” Ken shook his head. “Just for us to figure out who’s setting this up and catch them.”

  “That’s true, and I get that. Thank God our position is clear. But shouldn’t people have some choice, some control, as Mr. Woo said, in how and when they go when they know they’re going?”

  “I guess. And probably, functionally, there is a degree of that through families receiving end-of-life care.” Ken blew on his coffee. “I’m sure there’s a bigger dose of morphine than normal here and there that no one’s looking into. But legislating that? It just opens a door with potential for too much abuse.”

  “I’m just sick, thinking about Betsy.” Lei stirred the remains of her chili. “Corby too. Why did he want to die? It’s so weird.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out. Glad we got involved with these cases—I think they’re going to get way too complicated for HPD to track.”

  Lei was still thinking about a young athletic runner struck down with progressive paralysis. “I wish I’d never heard of ALS. I was better off not knowing about it.” Her hand trembled, and she reached up and held the pendant at her neck, rubbing it. “Think I need a cup of coffee too.”

  “I’ll go call Waxman and check in.” Ken set a couple of bills on the table and stepped outside.

  Lei waved the waitress over and ordered a coffee to go. She opened her wallet and spotted the fortune from her grandmother’s lap desk. Shape your destiny.

  She turned it over, looked at the phone number written on the back in her grandmother’s precise handwriting.

  Life was short. Maybe this was someone who had known her grandmother, someone special who could help Lei know Yumi a little more. On impulse, she took her phone out and punched the number in.

  It rang. And rang. And rang. No voice mail came on the line, and she punched off, feeling deflated.

  She took her coffee in the to-go cup and left cash on the table, pushing out through the glass doors to get on the road to the next DyingFriends member’s house.

  Robert Castellejos had once been a tall man, but age and pain had bent him over. He was bowed with a tension that was evident in deep grooves beside his mouth and tightness around lashless, browless eyes. He served them tea, hot and sweet with honey from his own hives in the avocado orchard out back.

  “Lost all my hair a month ago. Chemo.” He rubbed his shiny pate. There was a tremor in his hands that never quite went away. “DyingFriends is a godsend. I can just be real on there. No one knows how to talk to a dead man walking.” He gave a little bark of a laugh.

  Ken began his spiel on what they were looking for when Lei’s phone toned. She looked down and saw it was the mysterious number from the back of the fortune. She held up a finger.

  “Gotta take this.” She strode rapidly through the modest house and out onto the front porch. “Hello?”

  “Hello.” A deep voice with a little bite to it. “Who is this?”

  “You first. Who is this?”

  “You called me. So you first.”

  Lei frowned. He didn’t sound very friendly. “Okay. My name is Lei. I found this number in my grandmother’s things. I was calling to see if you knew her. Yumi Matsumoto.”

  “Lei? Lei Texeira?”

  A frisson of alarm shot through her at being recognized. “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  “This is Marcus Kamuela. Why are you calling this number again?”

  “Marcus! Is this your phone?”

  “No. Please answer the question.” His voice was all cop.

  Her brain raced. The phone must have been picked up somewhere in the course of a crime if Marcella’s boyfriend the detective had it. The less she said, the better. She decided to go on the offensive.

  “Why do you have the phone if it’s not yours?”

  “Police business. Answer the question, please.”

  “I already did.”

  A long pause. He must have decided to back off, because when he next spoke, his voice was conciliatory. “Lei. Listen, I was just surprised to have this phone ring and have it be someone I knew. So, you said something about the number and your grandmother?”

  “You still haven’t told me why you have the phone.”

  “Well, it’s a burner. And it was in the possession of a man who’s been murdered. So you can see why I need to find out why you were calling.”

  Lei’s throat closed. She couldn’t think. A long moment went by, hissing in space, and she saw the ghost of Kwon laughing at her. Anything she said could make things worse.

  She hung up on Marcus Kamuela with an abrupt punch of the button.

  Somehow she got through the rest of the interview with Robert Castellejos, which was mostly over by the time she went back in. She accepted the jar of honey he insisted each of them take. “I’ve got a month or two to live, and it makes me happy to give this to you. Would you deprive a dying man of feeling happy?”

  Throughout, she felt numb and terrified. Her muted phone vibrated repeatedly and angrily in her pocket.

  Chapter 13

  Ken drove as they headed back toward Honolulu. Their last interview had ended them up near Sunset Beach on the North Shore, so they’d done a complete circle around the island. The wide-open fields between Haleiwa and the downtown Prince Kuhio Federal Building where their offices were located gave Lei’s dry, gritty eyes somewhere to rest. She leaned her head against the doorframe and watched the bowl of sky an
d sea of green flow by.

  “What’s going on with you?” Ken asked, darting a glance over at her. “Something’s wrong.”

  She’d never told her partner about the debacle with Kwon. “Nothing. It’s just these dying people. So depressing.”

  “You got that right. Rich or poor, doesn’t seem to matter. Everyone is alone in the end.”

  Lei looked over at him, concerned by an odd note in his voice. “You won’t be alone. I would never let that happen.”

  “You’ll be off with Stevens. Probably raising a family. I’ll still be working. Hopefully I’ll go down on the job.” His jaw was bunched as his hands squeezed and released the wheel.

  “You’re thinking you’re never going to find someone to love. You will.” Lei didn’t know how she knew, but she did. “You might have to come out of the closet, though.”

  “You don’t know what’s at stake. It would kill my parents.”

  “I’m sure that’s what Corby thought too, but I think his mother, at least, would have wanted the truth.” She looked over at her partner. Maybe unburdening herself to him, sharing her fears, would lighten his. She was tired of keeping secrets from someone so close. Ken, in spite of his sometimes-rigid adherence to protocol, was someone she knew she could trust. “Okay. I’m going to tell you something big, and you’re going to have to believe me.”

  “Lei, you’re not a good liar.” His grin was a flash that made his face startlingly handsome. “I’ll be able to tell.”

  “Well, this situation began a long time ago. Remember I told you I was abused as a kid? It was sexual abuse. The doer was my mom’s boyfriend, a guy named Kwon. She was an addict, and he moved in on us after my father was popped for dealing.”

  Ken frowned. “Wow. I knew you had it rough, but that’s quite a story.”

  “Yeah. Prepped me for a job in law enforcement. Anyway, Kwon raped and abused me over a period of six months when I was nine. After he left, my mom died of an overdose. I still don’t know if she meant to or not.” Old pain made Lei’s hand steal up to rub the white-gold pendant hanging around her neck. “After I became a cop, I found Kwon. He was in prison for pedophilia.”