“It’s all digital. Every day, the system overwrites the data from a week before.”
“So you’ve got a week’s worth of data from this camera?”
“Come on down to the office. I’ll show you.”
We started working backward, and didn’t have far to go. At ten o’clock that morning, a tall, attractive Chinese woman left apartment 609 and walked to the elevator. She got in and disappeared from the frame.
“That her?” Ray asked.
I compared the photo we had of Treasure to the digital image, and the match was close enough for me. “How about cameras in the garage?” I asked.
Hackbarth punched in some buttons on the keyboard, but the cameras in the garage were no help. We saw Treasure exit the elevator, then walk out of the frame.
By then it was the end of our shift. “You want to call Sampson, get him to authorize the overtime for a stakeout?” Ray asked.
“Suppose we have to.” I was to meet Sergei Baranov that night at eleven at the Rod and Reel Club, but if we were running late I could always call him. He was a big boy; he could occupy himself at the club on his own.
I walked outside and called Sampson, reaching him on his cell phone. “You aren’t sure that this is the girl?” he asked.
“We’re looking for a beautiful Chinese girl who works for the company that owns the apartment and ran the acupuncture clinic that employed Norma Ching and the two dead girls. Logic says the girl we saw is Treasure Chen.”
He authorized us, and then I called the detectives’ area and asked the receptionist to put me through to whoever was on duty.
“Hart.”
Great. Steve Hart was already unhappy that we’d made some progress on his cold case-the death of Lucas Tyler. But I needed his cooperation. “Can you pull up a motor vehicle registration for me?” I asked. “I’m out in Kaka’ako for a stakeout and I need to know what I’m looking for.”
“Got a name or address?”
I gave him Treasure’s name and the address in Hawai’i Kai. He was gone for a while. “I’ve got a license in that name and address, but no vehicle.”
“Can you check a corporate?” I gave him Golden Needles and Wah Shing.
He sighed loudly. “Hold on.”
“Yeah, you’re a prince,” I muttered. He came back a couple of minutes later. “Three vehicles under the Wah Shing name. A Mercedes, a BMW, and a Lexus.”
“Can you read me the data?”
Another big sigh. But he did, and I copied it all down. “Thanks, Steve. I owe you one.” He hung up without saying anything else. Ray came outside and I showed him what I had.
“What kind of car did that guy see?” he asked. “The guy from UH who saw the arsonist?”
I struggled to remember. “BMW or Mercedes, I think. Dark color.”
“So could have been any of these three cars,” Ray said.
“Could have been. Maybe Treasure’s our ninja, and our shooter too. We could wrap this case up tonight.”
“Chance would be a fine thing,” he said.
There was a coffee shop across from the entrance to the condo’s garage, and we agreed that I’d sit there scanning license plates of suspect cars, and Ray would stay in the control room with Sean Hackbarth, whose shift didn’t end until eleven. If I got a hit, I’d call Ray, and he’d pull up the camera in the garage and see if a woman who matched Treasure’s description rode up to the sixth floor. Once she did, we’d go up and pay her a visit.
It got dark after seven, and when a parking space opened up in front of the coffee shop I moved the Wrangler and took up position there, where it would be easier to see license plates as the cars paused and waited for the garage grille to rise. Around seven o’clock, a black BMW pulled up with a plate that matched one we were waiting for, and I called Ray.
By the time I got to the control room, the woman had parked and gotten into the elevator, and Ray and Hackbarth were watching the sixth floor camera. The woman got out of the elevator and walked to the door of apartment 609. We watched her go inside. “You’ll call if she goes out before we get up there?” I asked Hackbarth.
“You got it.”
The concierge programmed the elevator to stop on six. At the door to 609, I knocked, and said, “Miss Chen? Honolulu PD. We’d like to talk to you.”
I was just about to knock again when the door opened.
Treasure Chen didn’t look as beautiful as she did in the photo with her sister, but seeing everyone around you get murdered can have a bad effect on your looks. I showed her my badge, and she said, “I remember you, detective.”
“May we come in?”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
I realized as we sat down in the living room that until that evening I’d never considered Treasure as a suspect in the murders. I wasn’t sure why; was it because she was beautiful? And yet, Lucas Tyler had been handsome, and cruel as well.
“Where were you on Tuesday morning?” I asked.
She looked wary. “I didn’t kill them. I called 911. Why would I do that if I’d killed them?”
“So you know what we’re talking about,” I said. “Why don’t we start from the beginning. Last I saw you were working at the Lobster Garden. What happened?”
“After Tommy died, I got fired. That bitch Mae never liked me. Her husband liked to flirt with the hostesses, so they never lasted long. A while later, Norma offered me my job back at the lingerie shop.”
“As a prostitute?”
“If that’s what you want to call it. I modeled lingerie, and sometimes the men wanted more.” She made a sour face. “I didn’t like giving massages. But at least I made money. No one wanted Norma, so she hated it. The only money she made was from managing us. But what else could an old woman like her do?”
“There were more of you?”
“Always three or four girls,” she said. “And usually a boy, too.”
“Did you ever meet the man who owned the shop?”
“Eventually. One day he came to Waikele.” She pursed her lips together. “I offered to give him a massage, but he didn’t want me. Only the boy.”
“Was that Jingtao?”
She shook her head. “No, he only came a few months ago. This was another boy, one who left.”
Ray, who’d been taking all the notes, continued the questioning. “Did you know about the fires?”
“What do you mean?”
“The lingerie store burned shortly after you moved to Waikele. And then after you left that place, it burned, too.”
She looked surprised, and I saw the wheels in motion in her head. “And then the acupuncture clinic burned, too.”
He sat back on the sofa and crossed his legs. “You know anything about it?”
“No. I didn’t realize that the first two locations had burned down.”
“Why did you move from Waikele to St. Louis Heights?” he asked.
“One day Mr. Hu showed up, said we had to move. So we moved.”
I looked around the living room. It looked as if someone had walked into a showroom and bought the whole room, from the cream-colored sofa to the glass coffee table, even the mass-produced artwork on the walls.
Ray was still asking questions and taking notes. “Did he pick the new location, or did you or Norma?”
“He did. But when we moved, he made me co-manager, with Norma. He wanted to get rid of her, but he had to train me first. He promised me that one day she’d be gone, and I’d be in charge.”
“How did you contact Mr. Hu?” I asked, hoping she had better information than I did.
“We didn’t. He always called us. When the boy ran away, we didn’t know what to do. We had to wait a couple of days until he called. He came to the clinic a few hours later and told us that we had to move out.”
I leaned forward. “Where were you supposed to go?”
“He didn’t have a new location yet. He was very angry that we’d let Jingtao get away. He said that if Jingtao went to the police, he could compromise our whole operation.”
“So what happened after that?” Ray asked.
“We packed up everything. We were short on staff, so Meiying and Meizhen and I did most of the work, with Norma supervising.” The way she said the word it was clear what she thought of Norma. “She sent the three of us home and said she’d be in touch. I was supposed to keep tabs on Meiying and Meizhen, and I called them every day to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.”