Wired Justice Read online

  Wired Justice

  Paradise Crime, Book 6

  Toby Neal

  Copyright Notice

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  © Toby Neal 2018

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  http://tobyneal.net

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  E-book ISBN: : 978-0-9997022-1-5

  Print ISBN: : 978-0-9997022-4-6

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  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

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  Cover Design: Jun Ares [email protected]

  Format Design: Jamie Davis, Vellum

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  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt Wired Secret

  About the Author

  More Titles from Toby Neal!

  Connect With Toby

  “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”

  Charlotte Brontë

  Chapter One

  The best place to think about life was on a volcano.

  Sophie Ang tried to hold that thought as she held a hand up to shade her eyes, watching Alika Wolcott, ex-MMA coach, friend, and possible lover, pilot the chopper that had dropped her off up and away from the desolate lava field.

  She couldn’t suppress a pang of anxiety as she turned to view the plain. What had she gotten herself into now?

  Kalapana on the Big Island was a landscape of stark contrasts. The deep blue sky arched overhead, depthless and unbroken. Desolate as a moonscape, acres of black lava stretched away in every direction to the ocean, where a restless sea beat against the fresh stone. The only sign of human presence was the remains of what had once been a two-lane highway, engulfed periodically by shiny black rock that gleamed iridescent in the sun of high noon.

  “Come, Ginger.” Sophie’s yellow Lab had been nosing for smells around a rock, and came to Sophie’s side at her call. Sophie attached the Lab’s leash to her belt with a clip and tightened the straps of her backpack once more, settling the weight so that it rested evenly on her hips. She set off toward the area of active lava flow that she had been able to see from the helicopter as they flew over the plain.

  All the tourists visiting the lava flow site had made a road of sorts across the expanse. It was easy to follow their tracks. As the morning wore on, Sophie encountered people riding rented bikes, other hikers, and tourists of every stripe, age, and build. Even a quad rumbled past her, towing a flat trailer loaded with tourists.

  Sophie reached a crude viewing area taped off with yellow caution tape and found a good vantage point, slightly out of the gusty wind that whipped over the wide flank of the volcano, hitting the ocean like a cat batting the surface with its paw.

  The lava ran in a sinuous, slow-moving, hypnotic glowing river to the edge of the cliff of new stone. Molten red chunks of liquid rock dropped into the sea in a relentless stream, causing explosions of steam and a crackling sound like breaking glass as extreme heat met its match in the water.

  Sophie watched the majestic sight from beside her stone bulwark, one hand on Ginger’s ruff. The dog whined, but calmed under her hand as hours passed with no sense of time. They watched the blood of the earth ooze forth inexorably, hit the ocean in sizzling bursts, and slowly build the island.

  Sunset bloomed spectacularly to the west over the sea in reds and yellows that echoed the colors of the lava. The light faded into purple and indigo. Stars appeared, the moon rose, and the tourists mounted their bikes, shouldered their toddlers, and headed back toward the parking area some miles away.

  Sophie ate a couple of energy bars, drank some water, and fed Ginger some kibble, still watching the lava trickle into the sea. The gleaming surface brightened even more as darkness fell.

  She felt no urgency to leave. This was all, and it was enough.

  Eventually, she undid her bedroll and sleeping bag. She lay down with the dog close against her, still enthralled by the lava’s pageantry.

  The soft breath of next morning’s breeze caressed Sophie’s face, waking her. She had come to no conclusions nor had any deep insights about her bizarre and fragmented life, lying there on the cliff and watching the lava drip into the ocean—but she reveled in that elusive sense of freedom she’d been seeking.

  Still meditative, Sophie eventually rolled up her sleeping bag and headed out. She didn’t feel ready to deal with people right now, and was glad of the early morning emptiness on the lava plain. She glimpsed a whale spout in the nearby ocean as she and Ginger, unleashed, walked over the raw lava back toward civilization.

  The dog gave a sudden bark, signaling her interest in something, and lunged off of the rough path worn by hundreds of feet. Sophie grabbed for her collar, but the Lab galloped away across the razor-sharp rock.

  “Ginger, no!” Sophie cried. Ginger’s feet could be cut on the keen-edged lava! “Ginger, come!” She scrambled after the dog, continuing to call as she ran as fast as her forty-pound pack would allow.

  Ginger could be impulsive, but this level of disobedience was rare. Sophie dropped the backpack to the ground to gain speed. “Ginger! Come!”

  The lava rose in frozen, broken waves around her like a sea captured in black stone. Coruscations of lightweight a’a lava created banks and waterfalls, mounds and shelves. Sophie labored over the rugged surface, gleaming with iridescence and sharp as glass.

  Ginger seemed to be heading for a stand of burned trees on a mound of a hill, emerging like an island in the ocean of the rugged black plain. Sophie had heard that these protrusions of unburned land were called kipukas. She scowled with fear and
concern, noticing steam wafting up from cracks nearby. They were running around on an active hot zone! “Ginger! Daughter of a diseased warthog!”

  Ginger wasn’t even listening to Sophie’s Thai cursing this time. The Lab disappeared into a stand of hardy ohia trees marking the edge of the kipuka. Sophie, a few seconds behind, entered the sheltering forest, her heart pounding with anxiety and frustration. “Ginger! Bad dog! You are not getting off the leash anymore!”

  The dog’s answer was a sharp yap, followed by a frantic whine.

  Something was wrong.

  Sophie crashed through a screen of dense, brittle underbrush made up of ferns and bushes, swatting aside branches. Another time she would have enjoyed exploring the old-growth koa and ohia trees towering around her, the air filled with the melody of native birdsong.

  The sweetish rotting smell of decomposition hit Sophie’s nose: Of course! Ginger was so excited about some awful dead animal. Nothing made the dog happier than rolling in a nicely aged piece of roadkill. Sophie had to catch the damn dog before she rolled in whatever had drawn her all this way.

  Sophie parted the branches of a hardy guava tree, and stopped short, covering her mouth and nose with a hand.

  Ginger stood, tail waving, amid a pile of dead bodies.

  Chapter Two

  Security Specialist Jake Dunn prided himself on his focus. Yeah, people said he was impulsive, but they just didn’t understand how he worked. When Jake was interested in something, he zeroed in on it like a heat-seeking missile and followed his instincts, which could look like a series of tangents to others—but he always ended up in the right place at the right time, nailing his objective. He’d seldom been wrong following his gut, and now it was telling him that something was wrong on the Big Island.

  Security Solutions’ newest clients, a couple in their late fifties wearing the golf shirts and chinos of the well-to-do, sat in chairs across from Jake and his boss, President of Operations Kendall Bix.

  Bix was doing the interviewing. “So how long has your daughter been missing?”

  “A week.” Kent Weathersby spoke, petting his wife’s hand over and over. Jake wasn’t much of a toucher and the tenderness in the gesture looked strange to him—but Betty Weathersby seemed to find it comforting. She snuggled into her husband, her immaculately coiffed head nestled on his shoulder.

  “We reported Julie missing after she didn’t check in with us for our scheduled weekly talk. She had been on a backpacking trip through the islands, and we’d agreed she would check in with us every week. She’d been on the Big Island for a week, then we stopped hearing from her, so we contacted the authorities. The Hilo Police Department closest to the area where she was last seen has not been able to find her.” Weathersby spoke mechanically, as if he had rehearsed the speech so it would flow smoothly, even as his wife winced visibly with each mention of their daughter’s disappearance.

  Jake cleared his throat. “I hope we can be of help, but you understand we will need to work closely with local law enforcement, and not step on anyone’s toes or duplicate efforts on the investigation.”

  “Julie usually found a group of other campers to hang out with both for safety and fun. We’d only had two short check-in talks since she arrived on the Big Island. She was camping outside Volcanoes National Park. She hadn’t found anyone to hang out with yet that we knew of.” Betty’s wet blue gaze brought on a twinge of guilt. She reminded Jake of his mom.

  His mom had flown all the way from the mainland to be at his bedside when he had been recovering from a recent gunshot wound. His sisters had come over too. Totally unnecessary, but at least they’d all been able to get a Hawaii vacation out of it.

  Jake looked out the windows of Security Solutions’ conference room to where he could see a sliver of ocean in the distance between the buildings. The ocean was his favorite thing about living in Honolulu; just looking at it soothed his restless soul.

  “I think we should be able to get some more answers for you,” Bix said. “A week isn’t long to be missing for a young woman of your daughter’s age. She probably met a guy and…you know.” Bix smiled. The expression perched uncertainly on the man’s stern mouth.

  “We’ve been getting that same feeling from the police department that you’re giving us now: they don’t take us seriously. They think our daughter is shacked up with some man. That’s the message we’ve been getting over and over. But our Julie is not like that,” Weathersby said starkly. “Something’s happened. Something’s wrong.”

  Jake slapped his thighs and stood up. “I believe you. I’ll go to the Big Island and find her.” He turned to look at Bix. “And I know just the woman to help. Our field agent, Sophie Ang.”

  Chapter Three

  Sophie breathed through her mouth, overwhelmed by the stench and the sight before her. “Ginger! Come!”

  The dog finally obeyed, whining anxiously over the discovery. Sophie clicked the leash onto Ginger’s collar, her eyes scanning the scene. She dragged the dog back behind an ohia tree for cover, assessing the area and its horror.

  The bodies were distorted with bloating, still dressed in their clothing. Gender and age were difficult to determine except by size, clothing, and length of hair. Five people, probably a family, had been piled into a shallow depression, but the killer hadn’t bothered to cover them.

  Sophie identified a Caucasian male and female adult along with two boys and a girl. Their clothing was better quality; the kids wore name brand shoes, and the parents’ outfits were classic middle-class garb for Hawaii: aloha shirt and jeans on the man, capri pants and a tank top on the woman. Cause of death appeared to be gunshot; one of the bodies, the little girl dumped on top, faced Sophie. A bullet hole in what had been her forehead crawled with flies. Her eyes were missing, probably pecked out by mynah birds.

  Sophie backed away, scanning the area. Most likely she wasn’t in danger; this site appeared to be a straightforward body dump. Still, she needed to get back to her pack where her gun and phone awaited, and call it in.

  Jogging back through the lush foliage of the kipuka, alive with birdsong and the green of mature trees, Sophie shook her head to clear it of a sense of unreality. She hadn’t come to the Big Island to investigate yet another crime in a remote place! She was supposed to be having a vacation!

  Who would shoot an entire family and just dump them out here?

  Sophie’d been avoiding the news lately, but something like the disappearance of five well-off white people tended to get into the news. Why hadn’t she heard about this?

  “Not my circus. Not my monkeys,” Sophie murmured one of Marcella’s sayings. But the little girl’s empty eye sockets had stared at her, making this her problem in a horrifying way.

  Sophie reached her pack, secured Ginger to a clip, and dug out her phone. She had one bar of reception and her battery was low from her overnight on the lava without charging it. She called 911. “Hi. This is Sophie Ang. I’m a hiker in Kalapana, and my dog led me to a kipuka off the trail where we discovered the bodies of a Caucasian family.” It felt good to identify herself by her legal name, now that the events of her past had been resolved. Law enforcement would run her name, and discover her background as a former FBI Agent. “I will wait for your team to arrive.”

  The sun was high overhead by then. Sophie took out her solar battery cell phone charger and hooked it up to the phone. She hiked back across the hot lava to the edge of the kipuka, where she and Ginger could wait in the shade under one of the towering ohia trees. She had given the team the best instructions she could, and it wasn’t long before she spotted a couple of ATVs roaring toward her.

  The responding detectives, accompanied by a couple of uniformed officers, introduced themselves. “Detective Kamani Freitan and Detective Fred Wong. Point us to the area of the discovery,” the female detective said.

  “Decomp has set in,” Sophie said. “You’re going to want proper crime scene wear.”

  Freitan, a statuesque woman with t
hick, black hair in a braid and tilted brown eyes, looked at her quizzically. Sophie met the woman’s gaze squarely. “I’m former FBI. I’d say the victims were killed five or six days ago. Family of five. Execution style body dump.”

  The detectives looked at each other. “Wait here while we check it out. Where is the location?” Wong said.

  Sophie pointed. “Through the trees there. Follow your noses—the smell will be your guide.”

  One of the uniformed officers stayed back with a clipboard. “I’d like to get your statement, Ms. Ang.”

  All of this was standard operating procedure, but Sophie still felt the usual suspicion coming from the investigators elicited by anyone discovering a body. She breathed through her frustration and gave her statement of events leading to the discovery to the officer as the detectives left.

  Detective Freitan reappeared, visibly pale under her tan. “I need to find a cell signal out from under these trees.” She walked a distance away and Sophie could hear her, working both the radio and her cell phone, calling for her commanding officer, the medical examiner, and crime scene investigators. Presumably her partner was still with the bodies.