The headlines read THREE DEAD IN BIZARRE SUICIDE PACT. It was splashed all over the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sitting at his desk, Lieutenant Dan Watanabe tossed the paper aside. He looked up at his boss, Marty Kalama. “I’m getting calls,” Kalama said. Kalama had wire-framed spectacles and blinked a lot; he looked like a teacher, not a cop. But he was an akamai guy, knew what he was doing. Kalama said, “I hear there’s problems, Dan.”

“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.

I n 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 the fangs through, and watched as yellowish venom slid down the glass.

The yield was a disappointing few milliliters. Jansen really needed a half-dozen cobras in order to collect enough venom to study, but there was no room for more animals in the lab. There was a reptile facility over in Allston, but the animals there tended to get sick; Peter wanted his snakes nearby, where he could supervise their condition.

Venom was easily contaminated by bacteria; that was the reason for the alcohol swab and for the bed of ice the beaker sat on. Peter’s research concerned bioactivity of certain polypeptides in cobra venom; his work was part of a vast research interest that included snakes, frogs, and spiders, all of which made neuroactive toxins. His experience with snakes had made him an “envenomation specialist,” occasionally called by hospitals to advise on exotic bites. This caused a certain amount of envy among other graduate students in the lab; as a group, they were highly competitive and quick to notice if anyone got attention from the outside world. Their solution was to complain that it was too dangerous to keep a cobra in the lab, and that it really shouldn’t be there. They referred to Peter’s research as “working with nasty herps.”

None of this bothered Peter; his disposition was cheerful and even-handed. He came from an academic family, so he didn’t take this backbiting too seriously. His parents were no longer alive, killed in the crash of a light plane in the mountains of Northern California. His father had been a professor of geology at UC Davis, and his mother had taught on the medical faculty in San Francisco; his older brother was a physicist.

Peter had returned the cobra to the cage just as Rick Hutter came over. Hutter was twenty-four, an ethnobotanist. Lately he had been researching analgesics found in the bark of rain-forest trees. As usual, Rick was wearing faded jeans, a denim shirt, and heavy boots. He had a trimmed beard and a perpetual frown. “I notice you’re not wearing your gloves,” he said.

“No,” Peter said, “I’ve gotten pretty confident-”

“When I did my field work, you had to wear gloves,” he said. Rick Hutter never lost an opportunity to remind others in the lab that he had done actual field work. He made it sound as if he had spent years in the remote Amazon backwaters. In fact, he had spent four months doing research in a national park in Costa Rica. “One porter in our team didn’t wear gloves, and reached down to move a rock. Bam! Terciopelo sunk its fangs into him. Fer-de-lance, two meters long. They had to amputate his arm. He was lucky to survive at all.”

“Uh-huh,” Peter said, hoping Rick would get going. He liked Rick, but the guy had a tendency to lecture everybody.

The person in the lab who really disliked Rick Hutter was Karen King. Karen, a tall young woman with dark hair and angular shoulders, was studying spider venom and spiderwebs. She overheard Rick lecturing Peter on snakebite in the jungle, and couldn’t stand it. She had been working at a lab bench, and she snapped over her shoulder, “Rick-you stayed in a tourist lodge in Costa Rica. Remember?”

“Bullshit. We camped in the rain forest-”

“Two whole nights,” Karen interrupted him, “until the mosquitoes drove you back to the lodge.”

Rick glared at Karen. His face turned red, and he opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. Because he couldn’t reply. It was true: the mosquitoes had been hellish. He’d been afraid the mosquitoes might give him malaria or dengue hemorrhagic fever, so he had gone back to the lodge.

Instead of arguing with Karen King, Rick turned to Peter: “Hey, by the way. I heard a rumor that your brother is coming today. Isn’t he the one who struck it rich with a startup company?”