by Toby Neal
“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 found 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.”
“At least, not now that you know he’s not going to be raking in the profits with you at his side,” Lei said dryly. Selzmann looked away with an eye roll as if such things were beneath her. “So who was this other woman? Any other information?”
“Angie. That’s all I know. Her name is Angie. She has dark hair and she’s ethnic-looking. Not that pretty.”
That seemed to have outraged Selzmann as much as anything.
“Ethnic-looking. In what way?” Lei kept her voice neutral.
“You know. Local.” Selzmann shrugged. “I know better than to try to guess what blend. Everyone’s so mixed around here.” The woman’s carelessly expressed racism made Lei’s eyes narrow.
“Well, you seem to think you’re breaking this case wide open for us, but so far you haven’t told us anything that makes him the murderer. We were aware of Danielle’s land, but it seems pretty thin as a motive, considering the challenge of killing her in ninety feet of water,” Lei said. “Has he said anything to you about her death? Is there any evidence you’re aware of?”
Selzmann chewed her lower lip. Lipstick adhered to her bleached teeth. “No. I just know he talked a lot about her land, his plans for it. ‘Even if I give her half the value when we sell it, we’ll both walk away with a couple of million,’ he told me.”
“When you saw him later in the day, was there anything unusual about his behavior?”
“He was tired. And agitated. But he just said he and Danielle had had another argument before she left that morning. We had sex. It wasn’t very good.” Selzmann fiddled with the diamond tennis bracelet. “I remember thinking he was starting to take me for granted, because he barely got done and then fell asleep. I hadn’t got mine, if you know what I mean.”
Lei kept her face expressionless. Scuba diving and murder could have a taxing effect on a body. The fact that he could do it at all was remarkable if he’d been the man with Danielle in the Zodiac. Still, Selzmann’s comments, while incriminating, were far from putting Phillips at the scene. “Well, thanks for coming in and telling us this. We may well need to talk with you further. Please stay available.”
Selzmann stood. “I just want to do my part to get Danielle some justice.”
Lei bit her tongue on the snarky retort she wanted to make and showed Selzmann and her lawyer to the door.
It was time to squeeze Frank Phillips hard and see what came out.
Lei and Bunuelos rolled up on Frank Phillips’s handsome little office in Wailuku with their lights and sirens off. Lei led the way in, and as before, the receptionist looked up, drawing her brows together in annoyance. “Mr. Phillips is in a meeting.”
“Mr. Phillips is under arrest,” Lei said. “His mistress turned him in.”
“His what?” The woman’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m afraid not.” And Lei brushed past the woman’s desk to push open the door. Phillips was talking with a man in business-casual across a pile of folders on his desk. His expression was identical to that of his assistant as Lei came around and pulled him up by the arm, clapping cuffs on him with satisfaction. “Frank Phillips, you’re under arrest for the murder of Danielle Phillips.” She recited the Miranda catechism as she pushed him toward the door.
“Call my attorney, please,” Phillips told his assistant, and the astonished young woman nodded as they walked out to the cruiser they’d driven over for the occasion.
“I didn’t kill her,” Phillips said. “I don’t know who did.”
“Save your breath. We’ll be taking a statement down at the station.” Lei got in the driver’s seat as Bunuelos patted Phillips down and put him in the back of the car.
Phillips’s attorney, Davida Fuller, well-groomed with gleaming, toned arms, didn’t take long to join him in the interview room. Lei, Omura, and Bunuelos watched them confer through the observation window.
“I am still having a little trouble with this.” Omura seemed to put into words the nagging unease Lei felt with the conclusion of the case, in spite of how good it had felt to arrest Frank Phillips. “Phillips has means, motive, and opportunity for this crime, but we still don’t have anything hard. Nothing tying him to the body, the Zodiac, the scene, not even a positive ID from the recording. I’ve called the DA; he’s going to be here to observe the interview and we’ll all confer afterward.”
“I suspect his lawyer won’t let him tell us anything,” Lei said. “She’s a sharp one, from what I saw before.”
Once in the interview room, recording equipment on, Davida Fuller shook her glossy hair at Lei. “I’ve advised my client not to say anything regarding the date in question.”
Phillips complied with Fuller’s directions at first. “No comment,” he said to every question, stone-faced. Finally, Bunuelos slapped the tablet down on the table in rare temper.
“We’ll get you on this, you cold-blooded son of a bitch.”
“I’d like to see you try.” Phillips’s contempt for the smaller man curled his lip. “You’ve got nothing.”
“Nine times out of ten, when a woman dies violently, the murderer is her husband,” Lei said. “The other times, it’s her boyfriend. We have a witness, your mistress, rolling on you and destroying your alibi. We know about Angie. And we have your phone.” She held the phone up. She’d taken it from him at the office but hadn’t had a chance to look through it.
“Steady, Frank.” Fuller patted his hand. “None of that is anything but circumstantial.” She addressed her comments to Lei. “You will have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Frank went out to Molokini with his wife, shot her ninety feet down with a speargun, swam back to the boat, somehow made it to work on time, where he put in a few hours, then met with his mistress, had sex with her, and went on with his day. That’s going to be a tall order.”
“Couple of things we think will tie you to this, Frank.” It sounded
unlikely when put like that, but Lei gave no outward sign. Instead, she opened her folder, ignoring Fuller, her eyes on Phillips’s pale, angry face. “The kayak. You have one in your garage. We caught you, and that kayak, on a video recording leaving the harbor the morning of the murder at around six a.m., which is plenty of time to go out there to Molokini, do the deed, paddle back, and go into work like nothing happened. The kayak even has a small motor on it.”
“No, that’s not how it went!” Phillips exclaimed, ignoring Fuller’s restraining tug on his sleeve. He yanked his arm away. “I was trying to work things out with Danielle!”
“So our witness, who tells us you found out Danielle was pregnant, was lying?”
“Damn it!” Phillips fisted his big hands and tugged at his short hair.
“Don’t worry, Frank. Stay strong. Don’t say anything. They have to prove this, and they’ve got nothing,” Fuller persisted, but Lei knew she had Phillips when he looked up at her, righteous anger bringing his dark brows together as he bunched his muscular arms.
“Okay, I knew she was pregnant! I had divorce papers all ready. The night before she died, I told her I wanted a divorce. She was happy about it, said she was ready, too, and had her own papers ready to sign from Meg Slaughter. She was going out to Molokini the next morning for one of her fish counts, and she invited me to come along. For old times’ sake. She seemed to want to end on a friendly note, and I did, too. I decided to appease her. I thought if I could get her to sign the papers before she remembered about the clause about her land, I could still go ahead with the sale. I’d already put a lot of money into prepping the property for subdivision. So we went out, and it was all good. But when we got there, I made a mistake. I told her I was really excited about the progress the engineers were making on the land. Said we were both going to make a bundle off it, so it was okay we were breaking up. And she was pissed.”
“Frank, stop!” Fuller commanded, but he clearly wanted to unburden himself.
“We argued. She said no way was she selling that land. That it was her child’s inheritance. And I said, ‘Good luck with that. What makes you think you’ll keep this baby when you lost all of ours?’” Phillips was panting with anger, and a deep grief shone in his dark eyes. Lei felt a stab to her own guts, registering that. This man was opportunistic and greedy, with the sexual morals of an alley cat, but some part of him had loved Danielle. Their losses and various problems had eroded the marriage.
Just as losses and problems had eroded her own marriage.
“Please. What happened next?” Lei prompted sympathetically, with a “go on” hand gesture.
“We had words. Ugly words. And I said, ‘This is a waste of time. I’m out of here. I’m going to someone who appreciates me.’ She laughed. ‘Good luck with that, you cheating asshole,’ she said.” Phillips hung his head. “I took my dive stuff on the kayak and left.”
Lei felt her stomach hollow out. This had the ring of truth to it, as did the conviction in Frank Phillips’s squared, tight jaw and direct gaze as he looked at Lei. “I was a jerk. I get that. And a cheater. But I didn’t kill her.”
Davida Fuller leaned forward. “Tell them the good part, Frank, since you’ve been telling them everything anyway.”
“Someone saw me come in at Kamaole Three Beach. One of the lifeguards. He gave me a ticket because I motored in and pulled up on the beach. We’re not allowed to launch off that beach. So I have the citation. It’s in my office drawer. I hadn’t gotten around to paying it, but it has the date and time on it.”
“And you’ll see by that ticket, only an hour after their departure from Ma`alaea, that Frank would not have had time to dive with Danielle, kill her, return to the craft, and paddle all the way to that beach park,” Fuller said.
Lei ignored this. “Who picked you up at the park?”
“Angie. My other girlfriend.” Phillips held Lei’s gaze defiantly. “I called her from the park. She has a truck. Took me and the kayak home.”
“We’ll need her contact information,” Lei said.
“She’s not going to be happy with me. She didn’t know about Barbara,” Phillips said, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “I don’t know if she’s going to be cooperative.”
“Don’t you worry about that.” Lei bared her teeth in the smile she reserved for perpetrators she despised. “You just worry about how you’re going to get through the weekend in jail. Your arraignment is Monday.”
She and Bunuelos left Phillips arguing with his lawyer, unable to believe he wasn’t able to just leave.
“You might as well let him go,” the district attorney, a short, dapper Japanese man named Hiromo, told her in the observation room. “Even if his story doesn’t check out, I’m going to have a hell of a time proving he was the guy.”
“I want to hold him while we check his statement,” Lei said. “I want him behind bars for the weekend. Captain?” She turned to Omura in appeal. “Let’s sweat this scumbag, at least.”
Omura’s sharp brown eyes sparkled. “We’re on the same page, Texeira,” she said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he deserves a few days in jail. Just for being a disgusting human being.”
Hiromo stood, buttoned his jacket. “Okay, then. I’ll brace for all the motions Fuller files.” He left.
Lei scrolled through the photos on Phillips’s phone. The file was empty. So were his texts. Phillips had cleared out evidence of his double infidelity after Barbara caught onto it, but apparently “Angie” was still unaware. Lei couldn’t help remembering how well Fraser filled out her uniform and the sight of her name on a plaque above Stevens’s. Almost reflexively, she checked his phone again. Still nothing.
She refocused her attention on her team. “Damn. Phillips erased everything. I wanted to get eyes on this Angie woman.”
Omura tapped the Formica counter. “Husband down. Boyfriend down. Stalker down. Who does that leave? Who could have physically been at that dive site and shot Danielle?”
“The fishermen in the hard-bottomed boat that Danielle caught on the GoPro footage,” Lei said. “And we don’t know who or where they are.”
“We need T. J. Costa,” Bunuelos said. “He knows the poaching scene. And I think I have a lead on him.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lei and Bunuelos, with backup units, headed down the highway. Bunuelos was behind the wheel of his SUV, sirens off but lights on and radio silenced. Lei checked her weapons in the front seat as he drove, releasing the magazine of her Glock and refilling it from a box of ammunition before ramming it home. She filled a second magazine and slid it into a pocket on her vest. She checked and filled her small backup ankle rig as well as they headed out Waiehu Beach Road, a frontage alongside Kahului Harbor in an industrial, run-down area of the island.
She used the moments of calm to mentally tick through the case. Had she covered everything? As much as possible, yes, and she didn’t regret Phillips’s arrest one bit. Even if ultimately he wasn’t guilty of Danielle’s murder, he deserved a measure of suffering and she was happy to make sure he got it.
Onshore wind blew constantly off the ocean, peeling the paint of decrepit rentals hunched along a rocky beach. They turned into a graveled drive surrounded by patchy, salt-burned grass, blocking in several vehicles parked around the entrance of a battered-looking bungalow.
Lei tightened her Kevlar vest and got out of the vehicle, taking up a defensive position and holding back with Bunuelos behind their vehicle. Lei felt the ocean breeze wicking the nervous sweat from her brow, teasing the curls escaping from under her MPD ball cap, as the SWAT unit approached the house. They surrounded the exits before identifying themselves and knocking in the door with a cannon.
Of course Costa wasn’t going to come easy, she thought, as gunfire erupted inside the battered house. She and Bunuelos glanced at each other, waiting for the signal to go in.
Suddenly, the front window burst outward in a shower of glass and welter of exploding screen. T. J. Costa, tatte
d-up, meth-producing fish poacher, hurtled through the opening to land in a rolling flurry of glass in the threadbare yard.
Lei surged up and dashed around the car, weapon ready. Costa was up, staggering a bit but already moving. He shook his shaved head, tossing shards of glass off, and bolted. He must have been hopped up on meth, giving him imperviousness to pain and extra strength.
Lei barreled into the man from the side with all she had, and far from going down, he stumbled a bit but kept moving as she bounced off his rocklike body. She latched on to his back, grabbing him, yelling, “Stop! Police!”
Costa didn’t go down until Bunuelos tackled him, too. It took their combined weight to bring him to the ground, and then they’d had to sit on his back to subdue the man. It was with distinct pleasure that Lei said, “T. J. Costa, you’re under arrest.” She was only able to get the cuffs on him with Bunuelos’s help.
The SWAT unit was able to secure the premises, and two more suspects were taken into custody. Lei and Bunuelos hauled Costa, spitting curses, out to the SWAT van.
“Bring all the suspects down to the station for us,” Lei directed. “We need to interview them.”
Following the black SWAT SUV containing the surly dealer and his compatriots, Lei glanced at Bunuelos. “How’d you know he was at that house?”
“Had a call to the tip line. Pono’s got fans who don’t want to see his shooter go free.”
“Speaking of, I better call him.” Lei found her partner’s number and dialed it. “Hey, Pono. Gerry and I are bringing in Costa. Scooped him up with a few other lowlifes.”
“I’d love to be there. I should be off medical tomorrow.” Pono’s voice sounded upbeat.
“How’s the arm?”
“Not bad. Gonna have a fun scar. Tiare thinks it’s hot.”
Lei smiled. “Whatever works to keep the flame alive. Anyway, I just thought you’d want to know. And it looks like we might be on the homestretch on this one.” She updated him on the case so far. “Hoping Costa says something that puts him at that scene. We’re having trouble finding anything that sticks to the husband,” Lei concluded.
