Paradise Crime Thrillers Box Set

by Toby Neal

  “Human bone hooks?” Sophie scrunched her brows.

  Taggart settled back on his heels, broad, work-roughened hands dangling between his knees. He took off his hat and pushed a rumpled handful of dark hair off his forehead. “Hawaiians made fishing hooks out of bone and shell. And as you may know, they believed in a connection with their ancestors. Mana, the spiritual power that inhabits all things, was believed to be concentrated in the bones of a person. So, sometimes, after an ancestor had been buried and the skeleton was exposed, they would retrieve a bone from an ancestor and carve fishing hooks from it. These hooks were sacred, infused with the mana of their ancestors and believed to be good luck, blessed if you will, for the fishing that was so much a part of their survival.”

  “So did you identify a lot of human bone hooks buried in this site?”

  “The GPR isn’t strong enough to find items that small, but we’ve found two so far during our excavations. Each of them is valued at a couple of hundred thousand. Their actual value is priceless, and considered more because Kakela was kapu, for royalty only, so the bone they are made of is that of ali`i, Hawaiian royalty, and thus even more valuable.”

  Sophie, hands on her hips, gazed around at the tattered baseball field. “Kind of incredible that no one, back when they filled this place in, understood the significance of it.”

  Taggart clapped his hat back on his head and stood up. “That’s colonialism for you. But picture how it was: a sheltered brackish lagoon filled with fish for eating. The sacred royal palace hales on the island in the middle, for living—and some partying.” Taggart bounced his brows suggestively. “There were what my mama would have called…goings-on.”

  “Really.” Sophie shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine.”

  “Well, of course all that was gone, broken down, by the time they were building roads and needed somewhere to put the fill dirt. The mosquitoes were bad in the lagoon, which had lost its circulation, so it was a practical solution at the time.”

  Sophie felt a chill finger of wind zip down her spine and she dropped the plywood back over the hole. She still wasn’t sure why the Hui couldn’t make do with a night watchman. Taggart had hinted at internal security concerns when he hired her on behalf of the Hui, but hadn’t told her what those concerns were.

  Life in the private sector was very different from being an FBI agent. As an agent, she had perennially been overwhelmed by a demanding stream of cases, and even when there was a break in the pace, she always had a backlog of long-term projects to work on.

  But as a private sector security specialist, her priority was getting and keeping the jobs that Security Solutions assigned to her—no matter how boring—and making sure the security firm had happy customers.

  Sophie walked back to the trailer as the sensor light finally extinguished on its timer.

  She removed her phone and set it on the desk in front of the monitors. Somehow the text she’d begun to Connor had been erased, and she didn’t feel like resuming the conversation. Keeping an eye on the monitors, Sophie rolled out her padded mat and went through a familiar yoga routine, stretching, bending, strengthening. The practice was a central part of her recovery from her early, abusive marriage.

  Doing her practice kept her going for a while, but two hours later, she was nodding off again when the sensor light lit up once more.

  This time, a figure was clearly visible in the monitor, climbing the exterior of the fence. The sensor light caught him in its blinding illumination, frozen on the fence like a fly caught in a web.

  She needed to capture him outside the fence before the sensor light scared him off. Always dressed for action in yoga pants, a sports bra, and athletic shoes, Sophie was already outside and running. She dodged through the unlocked gate beside the trailer, pouring on speed as she ran along the outside of the fence, scanning for the climbing figure.

  Of course, the intruder was gone by the time she reached the brightly lit area, but the barking of a nearby dog brought her attention around to the burglar’s direction, and she sprinted toward the sound.

  The Kakela site was located in the middle of Lahaina town, surrounded by congested residential streets and the beginning of the shopping area of Front Street. The thief was barreling through residential backyards, if the barking of neighborhood dogs was any indication.

  Sophie ran as fast as she could, given the obstacles in her way: parked cars, trash cans, a child’s plastic wagon. Fences pushed her back into the battered street, and she stepped in a muddy chuckhole, sprawling full length on the worn asphalt.

  “Twin snakes conjoined at birth!” Sophie cursed in Thai, rising to her knees, looking at her scraped hands in the yellow glare of the streetlight. She rose slowly, still looking for the thief, and retrieved the Taser that had flown from her hand.

  The intruder was gone, and the sound of dogs marking his passage faded into the dark.

  Chapter Two

  The king tightened his hand around his cell phone. “Say that again.”

  “They have some heavy security at the site. I almost got caught.” The man still sounded breathless.

  “Well, that wouldn’t do, would it?” The king kept his voice even with an effort.

  “Not that I’d have anything to tell them since you made sure I don’t know who you are and have no way to reach you but this burner phone number.” A long pause. “Do you want me to keep going after the artifacts? Even though there’s surveillance?”

  “Yes. I want you to find me as many as you can, in fact. Figure out a way.”

  “You’re the boss. I’ll need double, and I expect payment in the usual way.”

  The king’s lips tightened. He tapped his fingertips lightly on the burled koa wood desk before him in annoyance, making a sound like far-off drumming. “That will be acceptable. For your extra trouble.”

  He ended the call, slid the phone into a drawer, and locked it.

  Thick, inky darkness coated the windows—being far from neighbors kept the light pollution down. The king liked being way out in the country, away from other people, away from the noise and bustle that reminded him that now wasn’t then.

  He got up and walked over to one of the bookshelf-lined walls, filled with the kind of leather-bound, gold-embossed tomes that told a story of money and time. He felt along the shelf and pushed a hidden button.

  A few moments later, he entered his secret place.

  Automatic lights came up, a dim glow of overhead spotlights that highlighted his treasures. The king bypassed the seating area: a comfortable armchair with a reading lamp beside it, a place where he liked to sit and contemplate all he had spent a lifetime amassing. But today was not a date for contemplation.

  He walked to a metal highboy lined with shallow drawers and pulled out the middle drawer. Inside, nested on black velvet trays, a series of gleaming ivory-colored bone hooks seemed to glow. He flicked on the spotlight overhead so that brilliance lit the tray in his hands.

  The king could feel mana suffusing the hooks. The essence of power that filled all things, especially the sacred, rose around him like a fragrance. He could feel the hooks’ power, their ancient history, and the hands of ancestors who had carved them as they reached out to him from beyond their graves.

  Visiting this chamber never failed to put the king in touch with the past he had not been fortunate enough to experience. He was a man out of time, but he could still experience the ancient power of his Hawaiian forebears.

  The collection was still missing a hook made from the bone of his ancestral queen. He would not rest until it was complete.

  Sophie looked around the conference table at the Hui to Restore Kakela’s central meeting room. To her left, Brett Taggart rubbed out an unsanctioned cigarette in a chipped ceramic ashtray. To her right, Pomai Magnuson, director of the Hui, opened a pink, fragrant box of Komoda Bakery malasadas. Beside her, the Hui’s treasurer, Aki Long, fiddled with a tablet and stylus, making self-important harrumphing noises in his throat.r />
  Across from them, board president Seth Mano steepled his fingers and leveled a stare at Sophie. Mano wore typical Hawaii business casual: a button-down aloha shirt and chinos. He tapped thick fingers together and then smoothed his shirt down over an incipient potbelly.

  “So. Take us through what happened again.”

  Sophie raised her brows. “I already took you through the intruder’s attempted incursion, and it’s all in the police report I filed last night. I’m not sure what more you need to hear.”

  Magnuson handed around paper napkins. “Everyone, take a malasada. Director’s orders. Ms. Ang, you look exhausted. Perhaps you need coffee as well.”

  “I have tea.” Sophie tapped the thermos of cold Thai tea she’d sipped on the night before. “But I love these. Thank you.” Sophie bit into the greasy, tasty, sugary Portuguese pastry. Her tongue encountered a soft haupia coconut pudding filling. “Oh, I love it when they put the filling inside.”

  “Not strictly traditional, but a great addition,” Magnuson agreed. “When everyone is a little more calmed down by sugar and carbs, we can talk about the situation again.”

  Mano frowned. He pushed his malasada around on the napkin without eating it. His heavy face, dark with a shadow of a beard even at eight a.m., had a bullying poutiness to it.

  “Enough with the niceties. I want to know what is being done to catch these thieves.”

  “I presented your nonprofit with Security Solutions’ detailed security plan. Your board approved it,” Sophie said stiffly. “Using that plan, we successfully retarded the efforts of a would-be thief last night. The actual capture of the thief is the province of the Maui Police Department.”

  “Then why aren’t they at this meeting?” Mano demanded.

  “I invited them to come when I made the report. I believe that this may not be considered a high-priority case. After all, there is no danger to life and limb, and the MPD is spread pretty thin. But I have a detective friend in the Department I can contact personally if you would like me to try that,” Sophie said, already feeling guilty to add one more thing to her friend, Sergeant Lei Texeira’s plate—but Lei would want her to.

  “I think we need to discuss possible motivations for the incursions on the site,” Taggart said. He’d munched through a malasada in two bites and now dusted his fingertips off on the napkin. “My contract with the Hui is to identify the perimeter of the buried island. We are halfway through that now, and along the way, have identified a number of possible burials indicated by the ground penetrating radar study.”

  “Anyone with an interest in the site could get the idea that artifacts might be buried there, but the randomness of the holes suggests they don’t even know where the island section is, and digging in the former lagoon isn’t likely to yield anything,” Magnuson said.

  “I would like a look at any more detailed maps you have, including the ground penetrating radar study,” Sophie said. “Having an idea of what the thieves might be after will help me set up some more targeted surveillance. In the meantime, since I’m there at night, I think you should hire someone to monitor during the day, in case last night’s attempt signals an escalation.”

  “Your contract is already almost prohibitively expensive,” the treasurer complained, dabbing his greasy mouth with a napkin. “We make some money renting space in the parking lot in the corner of the site, but that’s got to go a long way.” The Hui shared ownership of the archaeological site with another community organization and owned a small, paved, pay-per-stall parking lot in one corner of the area that provided a source of revenue.

  “We can work something else out,” Magnuson said. “To start, I’ll have our office employees take shifts during the day out in the trailer. They should be able to keep an eye on things from there, and still get some work done.”

  “I need to ask you frankly: are you happy with Security Solutions’ surveillance plan and my services?” Sophie addressed her question to Magnuson, who, despite her unassuming manner, was clearly the real power player in the room.

  “Yes, thank you, Ms. Ang. We’re satisfied. You were able to prevent another attempted incursion on the grounds, and now we should be able to prevent more. We just need to figure out what the thieves are looking for.” Magnuson picked up another malasada and took a bite.

  Mano cleared his throat and tapped the table with his knuckles, drawing all eyes to his face. “I’m not satisfied. And I answer to the Hui’s board. I’m not sure what we should be telling them about what’s going on at the site.”

  “We should be telling them that we have the situation in hand.” Magnuson met Mano’s eyes squarely, and the air seemed to crackle with the confrontation between the two. “In fact, we don’t need to tell them anything, if they don’t ask. And I’d appreciate you keeping these matters and discussions confidential—though I suspect that ship has already sailed.”

  Perhaps these were some of the internal politics that Taggart had referred to when Sophie was hired. She glanced at Taggart, and the archaeologist pushed a hand through his hair and stood up.

  “I think we can leave the two of you to prep a statement for the board members if you choose to do so. Ms. Ang and I will go look at the GPR report and topographical maps, make sure she’s got all the information she needs.”

  Mano shook his head, but Magnuson inclined hers in dismissal. The opposing signals seemed to be about how these two did business—in total opposition.

  Sophie took her cue from Magnuson and stood, gathering her laptop and the folder containing her notes and the police report. “I’ll let you know what my friend at MPD says,” Sophie told Magnuson. “Sergeant Texeira may be able to find us some more support in actually capturing the thief.”

  Chapter Three

  Sophie spent another hour with Taggart and then returned to her condo to rest before the night’s surveillance shift. Security Solutions had rented her a place at Sugar Beach Condos, a complex on the ocean in Ma`alea near Kahului. She was exhausted, but the thought of lying down in the shabby, impersonal room and trying to sleep didn’t appeal. Standing in the unit’s kitchen, decorated in the mint-green decor of the late eighties, she pulled her phone out and called Lei.

  “Hey girl. You on the island yet?” Lei’s familiar voice made Sophie smile. She’d texted that she had a job on the Valley Isle, and to expect a call.

  “At my condo now, too wound up to sleep, though I’ve got a graveyard surveillance shift again tonight. Did you have lunch yet?” Sophie paced in front of the sliders, which gave a view of wind-whipped Ma`alea Bay, Kahoolawe a purple smudge in the light-struck distance. Cutout plastic whales adhered to the windows, interfering with the view.

  “Was just going to eat at my desk at the station, but meet me at Ichiban in the Kahului Shopping Center.”

  Half an hour later, Sophie embraced her friend outside the little hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant in Kahului. Lei’s curly hair tickled her nose, and her friend felt wiry and petite in Sophie’s arms though she was only three inches shorter than Sophie’s five foot nine.

  “So good to see you. How’s Kiet?” Lei and her husband, Michael Stevens, had recently adopted Stevens’s son by his first wife, a sweet-natured baby boy that Sophie adored. “Has he begun asking to see Auntie Sophie yet?”

  “Ha. He’s only six months old! We’re happy he’s begun to say Da-da.” Lei pushed open the glass door with its jingling bell and led the way into the dimly lit restaurant. Dusty rice paper lanterns hung over utilitarian Formica tables decorated with bottles of Aloha Shoyu and metal napkin holders.

  “Shows what I know about babies,” Sophie said. “He seems so smart. I have to see him while I’m here.”

  “We’ll have you over for family dinner. We do that every Friday. You can flirt with Jared.” Lei quirked a brow, showing her dimple. Her husband’s younger brother was a single firefighter who enjoyed a variety of ocean sports that kept him in top shape, which Sophie had already noticed. She ducked her head in embarrass
ment. Jared was very attractive, but she’d already decided a long-distance relationship was too difficult with her crazy schedule—and now, there was Connor.

  The women sat at a table that looked out through a plate glass window covered in a peeling light-proofing film. The view into the parking lot consisted of a battered monkeypod tree, parked cars, and a busy thoroughfare. A window air conditioner wheezed over their table.

  Lei caught Sophie’s look as she broke apart a pair of wooden chopsticks, and laughed. “The food is good—and cheap.” Lei smoothed the light cotton jacket she wore over her shoulder-holstered Glock and pushed errant brown curls behind her ears. Her tilted brown eyes were bright with interest. “Tell me about your case. I’ve been curious about the Kakela site for a while.”

  Sophie picked up the laminated menu. “Let’s order first.” They placed their orders with the waitress and sipped plastic glasses of water. “So. You aren’t even going to ask about my face?” Sophie couldn’t keep a plaintive note out of her voice as she touched her cheek in a gesture that was becoming habitual. The bone of that cheek was a prosthetic, and the skin graft that had been sewn over it, covering the devastation caused by a gunshot wound, still felt numb and tingly.

  “Sophie.” Lei grabbed Sophie’s hand and pulled it down from her face. Neither of them was a ‘toucher,’ so Sophie’s eyes widened in surprise as her friend gazed at her intently. “I’ll be honest. This is one of those situations where I don’t quite know what to do or say. You got shot in the face less than two months ago. I was just sick that I couldn’t come visit you while you were recovering, but between the baby and work I couldn’t get over to Oahu…”

  “I know. I wasn’t trying to get your sympathy or make you feel bad. I just…”

  “No, let me finish. I didn’t want to not mention it, because it was such a big thing in your life. It would be in anyone’s! But honestly, you look the same to me. I mean, technically you don’t—when I look closely, I can see that your eyes are a little off: one’s wider than the other, and the skin graft area is a little lighter in color. There’s a scar around it…but it just doesn’t stand out to me. If anything, your face is more beautiful and interesting now. It hints at stories you have to tell.”