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I took my cell phone out to the lanai overlooking the ocean and sat in a white wooden rocking chair with a hunter green cushion that matched the foliage around the house. It was a beautiful place, and I was sorry Alexander Fields had to leave it in such a terrible way.
I reached Shepard Fields at his office in Cupertino, in the heart of Silicon Valley. I introduced myself and said, “I have some bad news, Mr. Fields. Your father was killed Tuesday night in a fire at a warehouse he owned near the airport.”
“And you want my alibi?”
That was an interestingly cold response from a man who’s just learned his father is dead. “That wasn’t the reason for the call, but if you’ve got one I’d be happy to hear it.”
“My partner and I were at a charity event in the Castro that night. We left the party around ten and returned home. I had an eight A.M. meeting yesterday morning. And as I’m sure you know there’s no way I could have left San Francisco after the party, flown to Honolulu, set a fire and then made it back here to my office that early.”
“I take it you and your father weren’t on good terms?”
He laughed. “You could say that. My father was a bastard, detective. My mother was a saint to put up with him for as long as she did.”
So much for Sarah Byrne’s observation that the man had always been gracious. “Do you know anything about a company he owned called Inline Imports?”
“Not at all. I spoke to my father every couple of weeks or so. We had a whole list of forbidden topics, from politics to the economy to my sexual orientation. So mostly we talked about the weather in Honolulu, with the occasional detour into my father’s disappointment that I hadn’t given him a grandchild.”
“How about your sister? Was she on better terms with him?”
“My sister is a money-grubbing slut. I’m sure she kept close dibs on Daddy and her eventual inheritance. Be sure to ask her about her alibi, detective. I’m sure you’ll find out about her history of drug abuse and petty theft, and the way Daddy always bought her out of trouble.”
“Is she in trouble now?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I haven’t spoken to her in at least ten years. Last I heard she was married and living in Oregon, but she’s probably been through at least two husbands since then. They can marry, you know. Straight people. They do it all the time.”
“I’m aware of that. Did your father ever say anything about any threats against him?”
“My father had a strict policy against talking about work with his family. Growing up we had to learn about his cases from the newspaper. So no, he never told me anything.”
“According to paperwork we found in the house, you and your sister are joint executors of your father’s estate. You’ll want to contact Winston Yamato. I’m sure he can help you expedite the release of your father’s remains from the Medical Examiner’s office as well.”
“Good old Winston. Of course he’s got his fingers in this.”
I offered my condolences, though I was pretty sure they weren’t necessary, and said that I might be back in touch if I had further questions. He told me he’d make arrangements to come to Honolulu and deal with his father’s remains in the next few days, and gave me his cell phone number.
After I hung up I looked out at the restless ocean and reminded myself how lucky I was to come from a functional family. I loved my parents, my brothers and sisters-in-law, and my nieces and nephews. Hell, I even loved almost all my cousins. When my father died, and I knew that day was approaching, I would be a lot more upset than Shepard Fields.
I was staring at the sails of a catamaran tacking toward Diamond Head when I heard a baby crying. I looked around, then followed the sound, around the corner of the house to the small cottage alongside it. It was a miniature of the bigger house, with the same hipped roof and front porch, though it was small enough to fit into Fields’ living room. I peered in the window and saw one room, with a single bed, a plain dresser, and a crib with a folding table beside it.
I was about to walk in when Marikit came out of the big house behind me. “No, is all right,” she said. “I take care.”
“Your baby?” I asked, as she opened the door.
The little one was squalling his lungs out, and a quick sniff told me he needed to be changed. She crossed the room, picked him up and put him on the towel on top of the table.
“This what you were hiding, Marikit?” I asked.
She nodded as she began changing the little boy. “Mr. Fields not know about my son. He not hire me if he knew.”
“Why not?”
“He no like little kids. Too noisy, he say.”
And yet he was harassing his son about giving him a grandchild. People can be so contradictory, which is tough when you’re trying to unravel a murder.
“I careful to keep my baby hidden,” Marikit said, disposing of the dirty diaper in a garbage pail.
“He never heard the baby crying?”
She shook her head, then expertly wrapped the baby in a fresh diaper. “Mr. Fields have bad hearing. He no like to wear his hearing aids, either.”
“What’s going to happen to you now?” I asked.
“I work for agency. I call them and they tell me wait here until they talk to family.”
I felt sorry for Marikit; her loss was collateral damage to whoever had killed Alexander Fields.
Ray appeared in the cottage doorway. “Spoke to the sister,” he said. “She’s a piece of work.”
“Just like her brother, I’ll bet.” We left Marikit to finish with the baby and walked down to the water’s edge.
“I feel like I need to take a bath after talking to her,” Ray said. “All she wanted to know was how soon she could get her money.”
I told him about my conversation with Shepard Fields. “Her brother says she’s a money-grubbing slut, which seems to match your impression. She have an alibi?”
“Yeah, she jumped right on that. People watch too many cop shows on TV, you know?”
“Her brother was the same way. I’m starting to think those two have a lot more in common than they’d like to admit.”
Ray pulled out his note pad. “Stephanie Elizabeth Fields Potter Cornell. Currently divorced from husband number two, but living with a boyfriend. Her alibi is that she was working out at the gym Monday afternoon near her house outside Seattle. Then dinner with the boyfriend and a romantic evening of TV and sex.”
“She told you about the sex part?”
“In detail. I’m telling you, the woman has a loose screw.”
“Or she got screwed.”
Ray frowned. “Save me from the bad jokes. She talked to her father every Sunday afternoon, but he never mentioned any threats. She was planning to come out here next month to spend some time with him.”
“She have children?” I asked.
“No, she said she’s got some problem with her period or her eggs. I tuned that part out.” He looked at me. “The brother say anything about Fields being sick?”
“Nope.”
“Well, Stephanie said her father had end-stage pancreatic cancer. Just a few months left to live. That’s why she was coming out to see him.”
“I wonder if Shepard knew. Not that it matters, since both of them have alibis.”
“Which doesn’t rule out a third party acting for either of them.”
I nodded. “True that.” I shook my head. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”
“Thank you William Shakespeare,” he said. “Just my luck to get an English major as a partner.”
My cell rang, a government number I didn’t recognize. It was Wilma Chow, the social worker. “You’re in luck, detective,” she said. “I handle Dakota Gianelli’s case. What do you need from him?”
“It’s complicated. Can I come over and talk to you?”
“I’m in my office for the next hour. Then I have a custody hearing.”
“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
As I hung up, Ray said, “If you drop me at headquarters, I’ll put together the subpoenas for Fields’ bank and phone records. I’m warning you, though, if this kid doesn’t want to be in a foster home there’s not much you can do about it.”
“I know. But I have to try.”
We walked back to the Jeep, talking through the case. “Someone comes to visit Fields last night,” Ray said. “After six-thirty, when Marikit has gone back to her cottage.”
“Could be the old woman was the visitor, or maybe she was an additional hostage.”
Ray nodded. “The two guys, or the two guys and the old woman, take Fields, willingly or unwillingly, to the warehouse on Lagoon Drive.”
“If he didn’t go willingly, there might be a sign,” I said.
We looked carefully around the front porch. “What’s this?” Ray asked, pushing aside a branch from a hibiscus hedge. He put his glove back on and picked up a rectangular white plastic object with a red button in the center. “Looks like his medical call button.”
A few feet away I found a black cord with a broken clasp. “No reason for him to pull off his call button himself,” I said. “So I’m guessing Fields left the house unwillingly.”
“But Marikit didn’t hear anything. No shouting. He didn’t press this button either.”
“If somebody had a gun to his head he couldn’t have raised an alarm.”
We put the broken cord and the alert button in evidence bags and got back into the Jeep. On the way downtown, I said, “There must have been something at the warehouse the killer wanted. Otherwise why not kill Fields at his house?”
“And why burn down the warehouse? To cover the murder?”
“Maybe the killers were worried there was more evidence in the warehouse. They didn’t want to take the chance that we’d find it.”
“Mike can figure out how much paper was in the warehouse, can’t he?”
“Yeah. He has to calculate the fire load, which is based on the amount of combustible material in the square footage of the burn site. Why?”
“I’m wondering if there were a lot of files there, or just a few. A lot of files makes it more likely they burned the building because they didn’t have time to go through everything.”
“They could have been after something other than paper,” I said. “Maybe smuggled artifacts, for example. Once they got what they wanted, they burned the place just to cover their tracks.”
“All good theories,” Ray said.
I dropped him at headquarters and drove a couple of blocks to Wilma Chow’s office. She was a pleasant, heavyset woman, wearing a shapeless white cardigan over a light blue silk blouse with a Chinese collar.
“I called the foster home where Dakota had been placed, and I learned he ran away three weeks ago,” she said, after I was seated across from her.
“You didn’t already know?”
She shook her head. “We’ve been having problems with this foster mother. She has six children in her care and she doesn’t always give us full reports.” She sighed. “We have so many children who need care, especially ones like Dakota whose parents have drug problems, and it’s tough to manage. Ninety-nine percent of foster parents are loving, caring people who devote themselves to the kids in their care. But the one percent cause us the most problems.”
“What can you do to find Dakota and get him placed somewhere else?” I asked.
“I can’t do anything until I know where he is. This office doesn’t have the resources to track down missing kids. That’s a job for HPD.”
“What can you tell me about his mother? Maybe she has some idea where he’d go if he was in trouble.”
She looked through her file. “Angelina Gianelli is at the WCCC. Her last known address was in Wahiawa, so it’s possible Dakota went back there, to a friend or a neighbor.”
I wrote down the Wahiawa address, and thanked Wilma for her help. “If I find him, what should I do? Call you?”
“That’s a good start. I’ll find him someplace temporary, and then we’ll look into longer-term placement. Dakota is almost fifteen, and Angelina’s going to be in jail for at least four years, so that means we need to look after him until he turns eighteen.”
“And after that?”
“After that he’s on his own,” Wilma said. “We hope that by the time a child ages out of the system, he or she has made enough connections, either with the foster family, or with friends and members of the biological family, to be able to manage. Of course, that’s not always the case, but we have limited resources and we have to focus on the children who aren’t old enough to help themselves.”
I had met a couple of foster kids through my work with the gay teen group, and I knew that often they didn’t develop those resources, and fell through the cracks. I hoped Dakota wouldn’t be one of those.