Micro - Michael Crichton [4]
“With suicide?” Watanabe nodded. “You bet, big problems. Makes no sense at all, if you ask me.”
“So where’d the papers get it?”
“Where they get everything,” Watanabe said. “They made it up.”
“Fill me in,” Kalama said.
Watanabe didn’t have to consult his notes. Days later, the scene remained vivid in his mind. “Willy Fong has an office on the second floor of one of those small buildings on Pu‘uhui Lane, off of Lillihi Street north of the freeway. Wooden building, kind of ratty, got four offices in it. Willy’s sixty, probably you knew him, defends DUIs for locals, small stuff, always been clean. Other people in the building complain of a smell coming from Willy’s offices, so we go up there and find three deceased males. ME says dead two to three days, can’t estimate closer than that. Air-conditioning was off, so the room got ripe. All three died of knife wounds. Willy got a cut carotid, bled out in his chair. Across the room is a young Chinese guy, no ID yet, he might be a national, throat cut both jugulars, bled out quick. Third vic is that Portugee with the camera, Rodriguez.”
“The one who photographs guys out cheating with their secretaries?”
“That’s him. Kept getting beat up. Anyway, he’s there too, and he’s got cuts all over his body—face, forehead, hand, legs, back of the neck. Never seen anything like it.”
“Test cuts?”
Watanabe shook his head. “No. Examiner says no, too. The injuries were done to him, and done over some period of time, maybe an hour. We got his blood on the back stairs, and his bloody footprints walking up. Blood in his car parked beside the building. So he was already bleeding when he walked in the door.”
“Then what do you think happened?”
“I got no idea,” Watanabe said. “If this is suicide, it’s three guys without notes, and nobody ever heard of that. Plus no knife, and we turned the place upside down looking, I can tell you. Plus it was locked from the inside, so nobody could have left. Windows were closed and locked, too. We dusted around the windows for prints anyway, just in case somebody entered by a window. No fresh prints around the windows, just a bunch of dirt.”
“Somebody flush a blade down the toilet?” Kalama asked.
“No,” Dan Watanabe answered. “There wasn’t any blood in the bathroom. Means nobody went in there after the cutting started. So we got three dead guys slashed to death in a locked room. No motive, no weapon, no nothing.”
“Now what?”
“That Portugee PI came from somewhere. He already got cut up somewhere else. I figure try to find out where that happened. Where it started.” Watanabe shrugged. “He had a gas receipt from Kelo’s Mobil in Kalepa. Filled the tank at ten p.m. We know how much gas he used, so we can get a radius of where he could drive from Kelo’s to his destination and then back to Willy’s.”
“Big radius. Must cover most of the island.”
“We’re chipping away. There’s fresh gravel in the tire treads. It’s crushed limestone. Good chance he went to a new construction site, something like that. Anyway, we’ll run it down. It may take us a while, but we’ll get that location.” Watanabe pushed the paper across the desk. “And in the meantime…I’d say the papers got it right. Triple suicide pact, and that’s the end of it. At least for now.”
Chapter 1
Divinity Avenue, Cambridge
18 October, 1:00 p.m.
In the second-floor biology lab, Peter Jansen, twenty-three, slowly lowered the metal tongs into the glass cage. Then, with a quick jab, he pinned the cobra just behind its hood. The snake hissed angrily as Jansen reached in, gripped it firmly behind the head, raised it to the milking beaker. He swabbed the beaker membrane with alcohol, pushed