Broken Ferns (Lei Crime ) Read Online Free PDF

her hours to avoid providing her health insurance.
    Lei’s eyes grew heavy, and she read a few more files before she decided on an early night.
    In her bed, a twin-sized blow-up mattress she hadn’t bothered to upgrade in two months, she found her eyes wandering around the barren, undecorated room. Lying on that mattress, looking at her clothes in a couple of hampers that passed for the room’s furniture, Lei realized she’d never really thought this apartment would be home.
    Somewhere in the back of her mind, she’d been getting into a king-sized bed with Michael Stevens, with room at her feet for a big Rottweiler to sleep, in a little plantation cottage on the outskirts of Honolulu. Her lack of furniture, her lack of commitment—they’d been because she didn’t know she’d end up alone and dogless.
    Lei felt tears well to sting her eyes. Her chest spasmed painfully, and she muffled a soul-deep sob in her pillow. She cried for Keiki, her beloved dog. She cried for Stevens’s marriage. She wept out fear, disappointment, loneliness, and sorrow, and finally she slept.

Chapter 4
    Morning came too soon, beginning with a bleeding of gray-purple light that welled through the bare window. Lei’s sore eyes took in the insultingly cheerful brightening that reflected off the bone-white stucco of the ceiling, filling the room. Her feet felt heavy as lead as she dragged them to the side of the mattress and stood up, straightening the boxers and tank top she’d worn to bed. In the bathroom, her curly hair, still wet when she’d gone to bed, reared up in disarray.
    Lei slapped on a squirt of Curl Tamer to deal with it. She changed into another pair of black polyester slacks and another button-down white blouse. She strapped on her shoulder holster, loaded in the Glock, and clipped her shiny new FBI badge onto her waistband.
    For the first time, that sense of pride she’d felt touching it wasn’t there. She’d traded her Maui Police Department badge for this one—and it was just another cold, hard piece of metal. She’d already been having a hard time adjusting to the FBI, and discovering exactly how much she’d given up for the Bureau wasn’t adding to the appeal.
    Lei went into the kitchen, opened the fridge. The situation there hadn’t changed, and to top it off, she remembered she was out of coffee.
    The day was not off to a good start.
    At 6:28 a.m., her arms loaded with files, Lei got into her truck. Coffee on the way to McKinley High would have to do. In need of caffeine, she pulled into the nearest Starbucks and did her time in line to get an extra large coffee of the day—Marcella’s coffee-drinking ways were wearing off on her. Or maybe that’s just what happened in a job like this.
    The barista pushed the coffee over to her. “Nice badge.”
    Lei looked up—he was a surfer dude, sun-streaked blond hair a mass of salty-looking spikes, sea-blue eyes appreciative. Cop fetish, probably—she was alert for those, and immune, at the moment, to male attention.
    “Thanks.” She took the beverage, walking out without a backward glance.
    She called Ken on her Bluetooth as she headed to McKinley High on South King Street, right in the heart of downtown Honolulu. Ken’s phone went to voice mail, so she left a message.
    “Hey, partner. Following up a lead on a couple of Paradise Air employees at McKinley High School. Call me if anything new breaks.”
    Lei tapped the Bluetooth at her ear, missing the familiar click of her flip phone as she closed it, the smooth round feel of it as she slid it into her pocket. It had taken her longer than any law enforcement person she knew to switch to a smart phone, and she still missed the sheer physical presence of her old flip phone—like the disc she carried in her pocket, it was something she handled to dispel nerves.
    McKinley High was a historic school in the outskirts of Honolulu. Its hundred-year-old administration building had gracefully arched windows and red tile