by Toby Neal
Lei had taken her little spiral notebook out of her pocket and she jotted this down. “How long had this been going on?”
“I noticed a change in him around the beginning of the semester. He started locking his door, didn’t want to join us for dinner. He was listening to all this angry music. Alternative, you know. I thought it was just a phase.” She suddenly hunched forward, as if from a body blow, and covered her face with her hands. “Oh God.”
“Please. Mrs. Hale.” Lei laid a hand on her trembling shoulder. “Please help me with this. Maybe we can find some answers.” Even as she said the words, she knew answers were not always comforting—sometimes they just led to more questions, or more heartbreak.
“It doesn’t matter. He’s gone.” Alexis Hale pulled another handful of tissues out of the dispenser, dabbed her whole face. “Okay. I’ll keep it together for a little longer, just to get you people out of my house.”
Lei felt the sting of the words but kept her voice soft. “Thank you. I can’t imagine how difficult this is. What kind of girl trouble did you think he was having?”
She didn’t have time to answer as Ken came back in. “Senator Hale became ill. I helped him to bed. We’ll talk another time.”
Lei stood up to block Mrs. Hale’s view out the window, where Dr. Fukushima and her assistant were pushing the gurney down the walkway, loaded with the strapped-down black body bag. The wheels of the gurney clattered and Alexis Hale looked up, then shot to her feet and ran to the door.
Lei followed her, but Mrs. Hale just stood in the doorway and watched them load the body into the ME’s van. The estate was fenced with a monstera-covered coral-stone wall, the giant tropical ivy curling up the ten-foot expanse, and guarded by an electric gate. Kamuela provided some cover from the jostling reporters beyond the gate trying to get the “money shot” with his bulk and intimidating stare. Mrs. Hale turned away as Fukushima slammed the back door of the van and the assistant got behind the wheel.
“Okay. I’ll see him later,” she muttered to herself, rubbing her arms briskly as she walked back to the living room. Lei trailed her and was grateful when Ken sat beside the grieving woman and picked up the line of questioning.
“So you said ‘this is all your fault’ to your husband. What did you mean by that?”
Alexis Hale straightened her linen slacks, picking at the creases in the fabric. “This. This life in the fishbowl, where everything we do has to be a certain way and everything we say has to be scripted. This life. It was hard for Corby, and it got harder for him the older he got, but neither of us had a choice. We had an image to maintain. My husband’s vision is set high, and we both always knew it.”
“You mean the White House?” Lei asked. She’d heard rumors to that effect. Senator Hale was even rumored to have a chance at the presidential nomination in a mere four years.
“Yes. So we lived under a magnifying glass. I had the feeling Corby was getting restless.”
“He might have turned to drugs to escape, you mean.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t have believed it, but . . .” She seemed unable to go on.
“Why don’t we call someone for you? We still have to search his room,” Ken said.
They called Alexis Hale’s sister, and it wasn’t long before they left Mrs. Hale tearfully explaining on the phone and were able to exit. Lei put on a hairnet to restrain her springing curls, unruly in the Kailua humidity.
“That was fun.” She grimaced as they put on fresh gloves outside the boy’s room.
“You did well with her.” Ken rarely praised her, so Lei felt the words’ value even more keenly.
“I’m getting better. I don’t say what I’m thinking the moment it occurs to me anymore.”
“Hopefully we’ll find something that tells us more about what went on here.” Ken opened the boy’s bedroom door and they stepped inside. He locked the door behind them. “No more interruptions.”
“Right.” Lei had brought a crime kit, and she opened her well-stocked case and clicked on her light. “I’ll take the bed.”
“I’ll start at the desk.” Ken headed toward the handsome antique, hidden by a bike propped on its corner.
Fukushima had bagged the sheets and pillowcase, so Lei scanned the mattress, got down on her knees and looked beneath the bed while Ken rooted through the desk. Two minutes later, as she was fishing a magazine out from under the bed, he said, “Here it is.” He held up a sheet of paper.
“Yes, here it is,” Lei echoed thoughtfully, her brows pulling together in a frown as she looked at the homosexual erotica magazine in her hands. “Don’t think Mama knows Corby’s taste runs in another direction. This isn’t girl problems I’m looking at.”
“Interesting. Well, there might be some answers here.” Ken cleared his throat as he read from the sheet he pinched by one corner, printed in a bold script Lei guessed was the boy’s handwriting.
“Dear Mom and Dad. I’m so sorry for doing this to you, but the pain I’d cause you if you knew the truth, if the world knew the truth about me, is so much worse. This was the best I could do. I love you, and I’m sorry. Love, Corby.”
“So this is a suicide?”
“Looks like it could be.” Ken slid the paper into an evidence bag.
“Because he was gay?” Lei held the magazine up so her partner could see it. “I don’t get it. In this day and age, it’s not a big deal for a politician to have a gay son.”
Ken’s jaw tightened—Lei knew her partner was gay and still in the closet. “No one knows what a struggle it is. Maybe there was more to it. He doesn’t say exactly what the ‘truth’ is.”
“Maybe his body will tell us more. Fukushima will find anything worth finding. I’m especially interested in the tox panel and blood work.”
They continued on, moving through a room that documented the life of a golden young man who’d had hidden depths, and other than a further collection of homoerotica stashed in a box in the closet, there was little to show what those had been.
“Mrs. Hale will need to identify his handwriting,” Lei said, waving the bagged suicide note as they were packing up the evidence that they’d collected—the pile of porn, the note, the drug paraphernalia. “Seems like this is one of those suspicious suicides Ang’s worried about.”
“More will be revealed.”
“Well, I might have done okay talking to Mrs. Hale, but I dread telling her it looks like it could be suicide.”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Hale.” Ken shouldered the upcoming encounter with his low-key heroism. Lei had come to love that about him—no fanfare or whining; he just did what needed doing whether it was facing down a Mob boss or a grieving mother. In their year and a half of working together, she still learned from him every day.
Lei moved through the living room, carrying the items they were taking back to the Bureau. Alexis Hale spotted her and hung up on her sister, dropping the phone with a clatter into the cradle.
“What did you find?” she cried, eyes wide and fastened on the paper evidence bags Lei carried. Ken intercepted her. “We do have something to discuss with you, but please let my partner put away our equipment first.”
He sat beside her on the acre or so of creamy leather couch, and Lei walked out to the black Bureau Acura nicknamed the “bu-car,” securing the evidence in a small, locked box in the back. She stowed the crime kits and beeped the vehicle locked, aware of the long lenses of the photographers trained on her through the bars of the gate, the voice of a reporter on camera behind her. They were probably Googling her, and she was relieved that even though Kamuela had left in his beige department-issued SUV, he’d left a black-and-white HPD cruiser parked at the gate, barring illegal intrusions.
Lei hurried back into the house, carrying the small video camera they used for interviews. Mrs. Hale was sipping a glass of water, Ken’s hand on her shoulder, when she returned.
“Is it okay if we tape this? We need to get a little more information from you, and if we tape we won
’t have to reinterview you at headquarters.” This usually worked to allow the taping, and today was no exception.
“All right.”
Lei turned on the video, and Ken said to Alexis, “Do you have any samples of Corby’s handwriting we can see?”
“Why?” Her eyes widened and filled with tears as her hand covered her mouth. “Is there—is there a suicide note?”
“There appears to be.”
“No. No.” She shook her head. “No.”
“It appears to be a suicide note, but there are some inconsistencies at the scene, and we aren’t drawing any immediate conclusions at this time,” Lei said. Ken narrowed his eyes at her, but Lei’s comment worked to distract Alexis.
“What do you mean? Like, someone else killed my son?”
Ken pulled her gaze back in his direction. “This is an investigation, Mrs. Hale. We are trying to figure out what happened to Corby, whether accident, suicide, or something else. Please tell us again what you told Agent Texeira before about his behavior and how it had changed.”
“Yes. Okay.” Mrs. Hale took another sip of water, smoothing her hair with a gesture that also wiped the pain from her face. Lei was again impressed with the woman’s ability to master her emotions. “He’d been withdrawn. Quiet. Pulled away from us. Didn’t want to come to dinner, didn’t want to tell us where he was or who he was with. Like I said before, I thought it was a phase. He was growing up.” She covered her mouth with her hand, closed her eyes. Went on. “I didn’t like all his friends. I didn’t like the online thing.”
“Online thing?” Lei had cursorily looked around the computer in his room, but they hadn’t taken it since it hadn’t seemed a large part of this outdoorsy young man’s life.
“Yes. He had some sort of game or something. When he was home, he was always on there, with that awful hard metal music playing. I complained about it, said it was bad for his social life, and he said he was making friends online. People who understood him.”
Lei barely restrained herself from jumping up to go grab the computer. Instead she stood, out of view of the video recorder, and paced a bit. This was what she and Ken had worked out—she had to move when she was agitated, but he didn’t want her running off in the middle of an interview. They’d also discovered that Lei’s background restlessness seemed to motivate interviewees to talk faster, infusing them with urgency to unburden themselves. Mrs. Hale was no exception.
“I think maybe this is connected with that online thing. I don’t know, but he was so secretive about it.”
Lei could well imagine that if it was some kind of gay chat room or porn-sharing site, Corby certainly wouldn’t have wanted his mother to know about it. “We’ll need to take his computer.”
“Of course. Just find out what happened. And I’d like a copy of that note, if you can get us one as soon as possible. I want my husband to see what his work did to us.”
“Yes. I’ll fax a copy to you as soon as we are done processing the paper,” Ken said. “But what do you mean about your husband’s work?”
“It took over our lives. I think we made too many sacrifices for my husband’s ambition. I, for one, am done.”
Lei felt conflicted hearing this, hoping Mrs. Hale was just venting her grief in anger. The senator was a popular lawmaker, known for his environmental policies and trying to bring Hawaii into the forefront of ecotourism, even make the little island state a power player in national policy. This loss could derail his bright career and have repercussions on a national scale.
“I hope you will just take some time to grieve,” Lei said. “I hope you will turn to each other and not against each other. You’ve both lost your son.”
Alexis Hale looked at Lei a long moment, blue eyes narrowed. “You have no idea what I’ve lost. I’ll go get you those handwriting samples.” She got up and walked out.
Just then Jessie the maid, a pretty Filipina girl in a bright fitted muumuu, opened the living room door, admitting a weeping blond woman. “Mrs. Hale’s sister,” she said.
Lei pointed down the hall. “She went to the bedroom.”
It hadn’t escaped Lei or Ken that the Hales had separate bedrooms. The woman ran down the hall, and they heard the noisy greeting of the sisters. Ken stood, pressed Off on the video camera.
“Let’s get back to the office, brief SAC Waxman. I’ll get the handwriting samples from Mrs. Hale.”
“I’ll get the computer.”
Back in the boy’s room, Lei unplugged his laptop, detaching it from a monitor, printer and Internet ports. Taped to the side of the printer was a Post-it with a series of passwords.
“How handy,” she whispered. “Thanks, Corby.”
Lei took a last look around the room, the life already gone from it, the stripped bed a stark reminder. She felt her chest go tight with sorrow, and she walked out with the computer in her arms. The only thing she could do for the young man was investigate—but she had a feeling Corby’s parents weren’t going to like the answers they found.
Chapter Two
Ken carried the computer and Lei, the rest of the packaged evidence, as they rose in the elevator of the Prince Kuhio Federal Building to the tenth-floor FBI offices. The door opened on the gracious lobby with its marble floors, leather couch, and fan of Guns & Ammo magazines on the coffee table, a fresh-faced New Agent Trainee behind the bulletproof glass booth. The NAT, Amit Gupta, a clean-cut young Indian man, gave a big grin at the sight of them. “Let me help!” he exclaimed, coming out of the cubicle.
“We got it,” Lei said, smiling back. It wasn’t that long since she’d been sitting where Amit was, and she still remembered the boredom of answering phones and running background checks, which went with the training period—a period that had been extended especially for her due to some procedural mishaps on a case.
Ken waited, his arms full as she juggled her armload of packages, fumbling for her ID badge. Amit took it from her, swiping it through the lock that opened the steel-cored automatic door leading to Bureau headquarters.
Lei took back her badge. “Thanks, Amit.” The NAT nodded and went back into the booth as Ken and Lei’s black athletic shoes squeaked down the hall.
Marcella poked her elegant head out of her office. “Lei, stop a minute. I want you to meet someone.”
“Let me drop these off first.”
“Sure.” Marcella pulled back into her office. Lei noticed the blind was down over the door as she passed, and she frowned. Who could be in there? Marcella sometimes liked to “surprise” her, like the time she’d tried to set Lei up again with Alika Wolcott, whom she’d disastrously dated, at the gym. Lei was still in limbo relationship-wise.
Lei had chosen her career in the FBI and left her boyfriend Michael Stevens behind on Maui. Ever the gentleman rescuer, heartbroken and rebuffed, Stevens had married Anchara Mookjai to help the Thai woman get citizenship. While Stevens and Anchara had tried to make their marriage work, Lei’s career choice of the FBI had been rocky.
After they’d worked through the drama of his doomed marriage last year, Stevens had gone back to Maui and she’d buckled down and focused on regaining her credibility at the Bureau while they waited for his wife Anchara’s citizenship to come through. They were in touch, but only minimally, as phone calls and Skyping just reminded them both how hard it was to wait to be together. Both of them had plenty to do at work without stirring up emotions.
“Let’s use Workroom One,” Ken said. “I want to get the case file going, and we can inventory these items before we brief Waxman.”
“Okay.” They turned into the workroom, a functional space with a locked temporary evidence locker, worktables with bright halogen lights over them, computer stations, and various analysis equipment. Lei was eager to fingerprint the heroin kit and the suicide note, but she’d told Marcella she’d be back. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, stowing her armload of evidence in the locker.
“You can leave it unlocked. I still have to inventory it,” Ke
n said, setting down the computer on a table. “I’ll take this down to Information Technology in a minute, see how soon Sophie can take a look at it.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll be right back,” Lei said. She grabbed a water bottle out of the little fridge and hurried back to Marcella’s office. She knocked on the door and gave it a push. It swung inward and bumped into Marcus Kamuela. Wrapped in his arms, looking disheveled and thoroughly kissed, was Marcella.
They sprang apart. “Uh—this is Marcus Kamuela, Lei. My boyfriend.”
Lei felt a hollowing under her sternum. “The night marchers walking over her tummy” as her aunty Rosario used to say. Of all the people in the world to be dating her best friend, why did it have to be the detective investigating that nemesis from her past, the Kwon murder? “We’ve met. Saw each other this morning, in fact. Hi again.”
“I didn’t realize you were the friend Marcella’s always talking about,” Kamuela said, looking a little sheepish as he straightened his shirt. “Sorry I was irritated this morning. I hate to miss a case.”
“I know how you feel about your cases,” Lei said, remembering Kamuela’s hard cop face in front of the television cameras on the day Charlie Kwon was murdered. She and Kamuela had had a conversation outside Kwon’s apartment a year later about the unsolved case. The murder of her childhood molester still held the potential to ruin her life. Lei pasted a smile on her face. “So this is the mystery detective you’ve been dating, Marcella. Turns out Marcus and I met when I first got to the Bureau.”
“Well.” Marcella smoothed escaped bits of hair from what she called the “FBI Twist” back into their pins. “I wanted to be sure Marcus and I were going to . . . you know. Be a thing. Before I introduced you.”
“She’s commitment phobic,” Kamuela said, with that crooked, attractive white grin Lei had noticed more than once.
