Twisted Vine by Toby Neal Read Free Book Online Page B

boy! I’m happy to take him and at least try to find a home for him.” The terrier ran to her, and she scooped him up. “Can I get his leash and food?”
    “Just a moment,” Lei said, trying to physically turn the woman away from the sight of Fukushima and her assistant loading the black body bag and gurney into the ME van, but she was unsuccessful. Sherry watched with her mouth ajar, color draining from her highly colored face. As if sensing her distress, Sam licked her chin until she looked back down at him.
    “I can’t believe he didn’t do something for Sam,” Sherry said. “He loved this dog. Took such good care of him.”
    “You seem like you’re surprised Mr. Shimaoka took his own life, but Detective Ching said you knew he had cancer.”
    “I knew he had cancer, but not what kind. He was in pain, and he didn’t like to take medication. We’d talked about that several times. I guess if I’d known it was pancreatic cancer—which is painful and terminal—I wouldn’t have been so shocked.” She stroked the little dog’s fur. “I better get his things.”
    Lei led Sherry and another helpful neighbor into the kitchen to pick up the dog’s food, leash, bed, and toys. “Thank you, Agent Texeira. You’re very kind,” Sherry Thompson said.
    “Just want to find him a good home.” Lei couldn’t remember anyone calling her kind before—she must be mellowing with age. She kept the women from going any farther into the house and rejoined Ken at the SUV as the ladies walked off with the dog and his accoutrements.
    “Whew. Got that taken care of. Got a little more information on our victim too.”
    “Good.” Ken handed her the handheld vacuum with its special trap for fibers. “Back to work. Let’s get this car done.”
     
     
    Evening bloomed a salmon glow over clouds above Punchbowl when Lei was finally able to drive out from the Bureau headquarters into her grandfather’s neighborhood near where Alfred Shimaoka had lived. She’d told Ken about the likely connection to the name in the note, but it had taken hours to go over Shimaoka’s car inch by inch and then to search his house. They’d then taken samples, fibers, prints, and photos back to headquarters and spent more hours processing the evidence in Workroom One. Finally Ken had dismissed her, saying, “I want you to interview your grandfather. He’s the only person mentioned by name in the note.”
    Lei drove through the quiet neighborhood with its neat lawns and monkeypod shade trees, passing Shimaoka’s house and going on to Soga Matsumoto’s. She’d made a photocopy of the suicide note after they’d analyzed it—no prints but Shimaoka’s were on it.
    Lei continued to wonder how Corby’s prints could be on the duct tape off the tailpipe, indicating an assist with the suicide apparatus. Yet important areas where other fingerprints would have been, like the suicide note and the keys, were marked by none but Shimaoka, indicating the death was by his own hand.
    How could two such different people ever even meet, let alone join in executing Shimaoka’s death? And then someone had assisted in Corby’s too.
    There were still too many missing pieces in both cases.
    Lei pulled her silver Tacoma up to the curb in front of her grandfather’s low, modest ranch home. The grass of the front yard was a beautiful, putting-green quality Bermuda, decorated with a small cement temple and a single, clipped bonsai juniper.
    Lei usually met her grandfather for lunch at his favorite noodle house. She’d been over to his home only one other time, at the holidays, when her grandfather had invited her and her visiting aunt and father over for tea. It had been a tense hour for Lei, full of awkward pauses, but an important gesture on Soga’s part as her parents’ marriage hadn’t been supported by the Matsumotos. They’d never tried to find or contact Lei after their daughter Maylene died, and without her aunty Rosario’s intervention, Lei would