chapter seventeen

At 7:30 the next morning, dog walkers and squawking tourists had barely started their morning perambulations round the canals of Venice when Frank called. I left the deck, where I’d been staring out over the water, and headed back inside. The smart home shut out the noise with the click of the sliding glass door.

“You find Lee already?”

Still shirtless in sweat pants, I leaned back against the kitchen counter, feeling the cool touch of granite on the small of my back as I stared at Frank’s floating face in my Nokia Handy. I could hear gulls in the background. Frank’s glove phone had that shaky-cam effect. He was walking back to his blue Toyota Corolla, parked on a tony Clara Vista side street, somewhere near the beach.

“Spotted his Lexus at the Whole Foods you tagged,” Frank wheezed as he stopped to scrape beach tar off the soles of his shoes. “Chipped it while he was inside. Take a look.”

The lean Asian man in the first pic Frank sent had on Dockers, a worn blue Oxford shirt, and New Balance sneakers along with his unkempt beard and mustache. His once black hair was longer and scruffier than Lee’s had been on his driver’s license. Now dyed a mousy brown, he’d combed it over his ears—like a man on the run keen on hiding a major security bio-identifier. The bones under his hangdog face were more prominent too, and the skin round the jaw had softened. It looked like Lee’s skull was pressing up through thinning skin even as gravity tugged the flesh down towards his chest. The combination of time and stress had not been kind to the scientist. But it was Lee all right, leaving the grocery store and getting in the Lexus. The next couple snaps showed the same man exiting the Lexus and entering a small beach bungalow.

The bungalow was one of those places built for the Hollywood overflow the first decade of the twenty-first century, when even wealthy people looking for ocean front property found themselves out-priced by the tech billionaires in the Malibu market.

“What’s the word on the beach house?” I said.

“Rental leased to a trust. But it looks like Lee’s not moving back anytime soon. The wife may be his next discard.”

“He’s been talking to divorce lawyers,” I said, nodding, “but hasn’t filed.”

“Maybe the ax is just about to fall.” Frank sent me a little streaming video over the phone. “This happened yesterday around four.”

In the video, a woman wearing a beige sweater set and black pearls I instantly pegged as Mrs. Lee got out of her white Mercedes. She stormed Lee in the driveway of the Clara Vista bungalow. I paused the video and checked the time code:5:14 p.m. yesterday.

“That’s the wife, isn’t it?” Frank said.

“Yeah.” I did a rough calculation. “She must have headed up north right after I left her door.”

“She’s hopping mad,” Frank said. “You tell her the husband was bonking a stripper?”

“I may have given her that idea.”

I let the video play through this time. Lee and his wife held themselves stiffly at first, but as their conversation escalated into a heated argument, the gesticulations got wilder. Then, Mrs. Lee slapped her husband hard and started pummeling him like a windmill on overdrive. Dr. Lee covered his face, warding off the blows. Finally, Mrs. Lee whirled around, and ran back to her car.

“I couldn’t make out a single word,” Frank said. “Korean?”

I nodded and replayed the argument with the audio up this time.

I flicked on my phone’s translation app. Divorce popped out. Police and shame repeated several times, but the rest of the translation was more gibberish than English.

“The dialect’s too thick,” I said. “I’ll get Shin to translate.”

Shin’s wife Ahn was Korean, and his time in K-town before his transfer to Homicide Special had made Shin’s already good Korean fluent.

I watched the argument replay once more. Divorce, police, shame. Their conversation seemed more linked to my questions about Britney Devonshire than any beef with protestors, but two things were clear. Dr. Lee was in meltdown mode. And he was hiding all right, but it wasn’t from his wife. She’d known exactly where he was. She’d lied to me.

“Stay on Lee,” I said to Frank. “I’m coming up north.”