Paradise Crime Thrillers Box Set

by Toby Neal

  She assessed herself for injuries. The ankle was bad, at least sprained. Her forehead was already swelling into a knot, and tingly numbness spread down her cheeks, along with pulses of pain. Possible brain trauma, indicated by the fact that her body did not want to obey when she told it to move.

  More bruises screamed at her. Her knee was wrenched, her hip bruised, her hands throbbed.

  But that was not her biggest problem. The biggest problem was pacing back and forth in front of that light source, causing moving black shadows across her closed eyes.

  Far away, she heard pounding.

  Lei was trying to get in, trying to get to her, trying to rescue her.

  What was going on with Blackthorne? There must be evidence down here that would link him to the murder…nothing else made sense to explain his irrational action.

  Sophie’s thoughts were sluggish, bubbling up from somewhere inside her injured brain, trying to form into substance but flickering past her consciousness before she could capture them.

  The longer he thought she was knocked out, the better able she would be to respond to whatever came next.

  She clung to that idea, capturing it, keeping it in a spot between her eyebrows.

  Nearby, a cell phone rang with an incongruously cheerful electronic melody.

  “You can’t get me out of here until I am ready to leave,” Blackthorne said. “Ang is alive, but she won’t be if you continue trying to get in here. This is an internal safe room, with bomb shelter walls. It cannot be breached without serious effort, and I will hear you coming and kill her.”

  A chill rippled across Sophie, raising the hairs on her arms at the certainty in Blackthorne’s voice. Sophie was in trouble. Deep trouble.

  This man was unbalanced. And she was his hostage, locked in with him in a steel basement.

  Tendrils of panic curled through Sophie, brushing along her nerves and tightening her belly, speeding her heartbeat. Assan Ang had locked her in a room not much different from this one.

  But this was not that situation.

  And, even if it had a few similarities, she had escaped Assan, a deadly sadist. She could escape Blackthorne, too.

  An unwelcome memory bubbled up: Assan was free again.

  Sophie kept her breathing calm with an effort. Blackthorne ended the call, and began the muttering and pacing again.

  How could they have been so wrong about him? He had seemed every inch the successful businessman, but clearly something deeper was going on. Something involving Mano.

  Maybe she could get him talking. Build a bond with him. That’s what they had told her in her FBI training on hostage negotiation, seemingly a hundred years ago.

  Sophie needed to seem cowed, helpless. She needed to appeal to Blackthorne’s vanity and exploit any bond she could make with him. He had not asked Lei for any demands, which told her they would be here for a while as the negotiation process unfolded.

  Sophie just needed to stay calm and alert, and appeal to his masculinity.

  If only that weren’t one of the things she was terrible at, and her head was not so sore. But Assan had taught her well, and now she needed to remember those lessons.

  She gave a low moan, not much of a performance considering the pain.

  Immediately, Blackthorne leaned over her. He blocked the red source of light, and she could feel his stale breath on her face. “Don’t move. I have you covered.

  Sophie moaned again. “I have no intention of going anywhere. I think my ankle is sprained, and I have a concussion at least.”

  “Still. Precautions are in order.” Blackthorne wrenched her arms up behind her back, whipping some sort of rope around her wrists.

  Sophie turned her head to the side and emitted a loud, theatrical groan, lacing her fingers together and bracing her palms apart to get some distance as he bound her. “Please. Not so tight.”

  The old law enforcement trick worked, and she had some wiggle room in the bonds as he finished the lashing. He moved her legs, and Sophie didn’t have to fake the sharp cry of anguish as he touched her injured ankle. “Please! Please, I’m not going anywhere with my ankle like this.”

  Blackthorne’s hands hesitated on her throbbing ankle.

  This was not a man who was used to hurting others.

  Blackthorne was trapped in an escalating situation.

  The thoughts, as if being read aloud by her hostage negotiation instructor, unspooled across her consciousness. “Always assess the psychology of the hostage taker,” her instructor would have said. “Once you understand his or her emotional motivation, you hold the key to what will de-escalate the situation.”

  Blackthorne was what he appeared, for the most part. Now he was driven by desperation—there was something incriminating in the room that she’d been about to find, and he was going to get busted for the Mano murder. She had to give him hope, and a sense of control.

  Blackthorne walked away without binding her feet, and she could feel regret and disgust in his heavy footsteps as he began his pacing again.

  He did not want to hurt her, and that was to her advantage.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I won’t do anything. I want to live.”

  Blackthorne snorted. “Of course you do. You’ll say anything to live. We all want to live. Some of us want to live forever.”

  Was this his pathology? Did he have some obsession with death, immortality, making history…anything that she could exploit?

  Sophie wished she was feeling more acute, that she understood human psychology better, and as she often did, she wished she had Marcella’s grasp of human nature and gift for flattery—or even Lei’s quick, dogged way of manipulating witnesses in an interview.

  But Sophie was herself, brilliant in some ways, and limited in others. At least she knew what those ways were. “Can you help me sit up? I want to know about living forever.”

  A long beat went by. Sophie practically held her breath, and then he was behind her, lifting her under her arms, dragging her to a surprisingly soft armchair, the last thing she would have expected in a safe room like this.

  Sophie opened her eyes at last as Blackthorne tucked a pillow behind her upper back so that she wasn’t leaning against her bound wrists.

  More evidence that he wanted her to be comfortable, that he didn’t want to hurt or kill her.

  She looked up at his square, flushed face. She fluttered her eyelashes, as if overcome by fear and some other emotion. “Thank you.”

  Blackthorne moved away and resumed his pacing. Upright, her head really swam, and she leaned it against the chair’s padded, high back. Sudden nausea at the change of position swamped her, and Sophie heaved forward and vomited, her stomach knotting, her body contorting.

  “Son of a bitch!” Blackthorne lifted her out of the chair and laid her on her side on the floor in front of it. He put the pillow under her head. She had brought up nothing but bile, but now the room smelled sharply foul.

  “Glad you didn’t have much in there, but it still reeks.”

  “I’m sorry. So sorry.” Sophie let tears creep into her voice—again, it wasn’t hard. She was in agony, and the symptoms of head injury were not something she was faking. She shut her eyes and rested a moment as Blackthorne began his muttering again, walking over to a large metal cabinet in one corner of the room, and retrieving a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of disinfectant. He scrubbed up Sophie’s vomit, grimacing as he did so, muttering under his breath.

  He was muttering in Hawaiian. Sophie spoke four languages, but Hawaiian was not one of them.

  “Tell me what you want,” Sophie said. “I used to be an FBI agent. I am trained in situations like this. I know what they will do. And I can help us get out.”

  Blackthorne had hazel eyes that hinted at the mixed Hawaiian heritage he must have had to have qualified for attendance at Kamehameha School. The expression in those eyes was hard as river stone as he looked at her now. “I don’t think you can help. And I don’t want to h
ear your voice anymore.”

  So much for building a bond.

  Sophie nodded and shut her eyes, marshaling her resources. She was able to wriggle her wrists within the restraints, and the circulation cut off was not too bad, considering. She tried to work them apart, but the skin of her wrists quickly chafed.

  What could she do to help herself now?

  Keep him talking. Appeal to his vanity.

  She looked around the room, and saw rows of shelving, lined with small black collector’s boxes. Artifacts were mounted in square, lit display cases: and the subject of his collecting was readily apparent.

  Blackthorne collected Hawaiiana.

  Sophie’s mind started clicking at last. There must be a connection, more than just blackmail, between Blackthorne and Mano. She’d put money on the probability of Mano selling the GPR report to Blackthorne before he was killed.

  She just needed to find out what that connection was, what Blackthorne had been after at the site—and whether or not he had found it.

  At the very least, it would fill the time.

  As if in response to her thoughts, Blackthorne’s phone begin to buzz and jump with an incoming call. Blackthorne stared at it malevolently, hands on his hips.

  “You should give them a demand to work on,” Sophie said. “If you don’t, they’ll just keep calling. They may assume I’m already dead, and mount an assault to break in. Consider giving them proof of life by letting me speak to them. That will buy you more time to figure out what you want to do.”

  Blackthorne spun to face her, his face darkly congested with rage, and she wondered how she had so misread this businessman with his golf belly and muscle arms.

  “People underestimate you all the time, don’t they?” Sophie said.

  “Yes, they do. And I will show them all who I really am.” For the first time, Blackthorne’s expression softened slightly as he gazed at her. “I’m sorry for this. You’re just collateral damage.”

  This was not good. Blackthorne had made up his mind about the outcome of the standoff.

  But maybe she could still make it out alive, even if he chose not to.

  Blackthorne advanced to the same cabinet where he had procured the cleaning supplies, and this time he took out a magnificent red and yellow feather shoulder cape, in a classic pattern she recognized from her trip to the Bishop Museum. The cape was covered in a transparent, breathable fabric cover with a zipper. He extracted the garment reverently and laid it over the back of the club chair she had recently vacated. He stroked the bright feathers, thousands of bits of plumage from tiny native birds, with his fingertips.

  “Tell me about your collection,” she said softly. Keep him talking. Flatter him. Learn what you can. Get him to like you.

  He returned to the cabinet and removed a tapa cloth malo, a loincloth made of finely pounded mulberry bark stamped with tribal patterns in natural inks. Sophie could tell that this piece of fabric was a reproduction by its newness.

  His back turned to her, Blackthorne took off his clothing down to a pair of white cotton Hanes underwear, the kind of odd juxtaposition that, like the silly song of his ringtone, was the only reminder that they were not in a place out of time.

  This was not going well. Either SWAT would break in and they would die then, or he would simply kill her whenever he was finished with the ritual he was creating.

  “You are right about people underestimating me. I am sick of being taken for nothing but a haole.” Blackthorne’s voice vibrated with suppressed passion. “I can trace my lineage all the way through the line of Kamehameha III, the greatest king of Hawaii.”

  “That must be why you wanted to purchase the Kakela site, his former royal palace,” Sophie said.

  Blackthorne did not respond. He draped and knotted the malo around his waist and between his legs. Finally getting it the way he wanted it, he turned to face her. She was surprised by the elaborate pattern of Polynesian tattoo designs crisscrossing his chest and abdomen.

  “Tell me everything about your collection. Tell me what you wanted with Kakela.”

  “I told you to stop talking.” Blackthorne removed a folding knife from the cabinet, and cut off one of the sleeves of his business shirt. Walking over to Sophie, he twisted her head to the side and gagged her with the sleeve, tightening a knot in the cloth at the back of her head.

  The material instantly dried her tongue and stretched her cheeks, and Sophie swallowed with difficulty, her jaw ajar. A sense of hopelessness and futility swamped her. Familiar darkness rose behind her eyes, and she closed them.

  There was no sense struggling anymore. What would be, would be. But if she got any opportunity to escape, she would take it. She was a fighter. A survivor.

  Right now, she didn’t feel like one.

  Blackthorne finished his preparations by scooping a handful of hardened coconut oil from a small calabash into his palms, rubbing them together, and anointing his body.

  “I am the reincarnation of Kamehameha III,” he said.

  Whatever Sophie had expected him to say, this was not it. Her eyes popped open wide.

  “I became aware of this through channeling the mana of my ancestors through my collection of bone hooks. They recognized me and told me who I was.”

  Keep him talking. Be his witness. Sophie nodded her head, trying to convey with her eyes an encouraging feeling for him to go on, but even that slight movement made nausea roil through her belly, and she worried, that, with the gag in her mouth, she could choke.

  “Would you like to see my collection? They will all go to the Bishop Museum. I only borrowed them, anyway. They belong to all of our people.”

  He sounded so sane. She blinked hard to convey a yes.

  Blackthorne walked over to a tall, black steel cabinet and opened it. Inside, shallow shelves of trays lined the cabinet from top to bottom. He removed the top tray and carried it over, kneeling beside Sophie so that she could see the collection.

  Each bone hook was nested in a niche of black velvet. The sacred objects seemed to glow with a patina of age and power. Their color ranged from a soft ivory white to a deep, tea-colored stain. Sophie recognized various styles from her brief overview at the Bishop. Blackthorne removed a large, beautifully carved decorative hook from the center of the collection. He held it on his palm and extended it for her to see. “This hook is made from the bones of my queen,” he said. “It’s new.”

  Sophie just stared. New? What did that mean?

  “I tried to buy the Kakela site so that she could be restored and returned to her rest, protected and memorialized properly. But they refused my offer, so she will have to remain here with us.”

  Sophie blinked her eyes to show that she understood. He had found what he was seeking. He had to have had the GPR report to find the queen’s burial site in the buried canoe.

  Blackthorne nodded as if she had agreed, and went on. “I worry that when they breach this place, they will not understand the importance of these hooks. They will not know who they belong to, where they were obtained. I will spend some of the time remaining to us providing documentation.”

  So he was planning for the breach.

  Dread curdled Sophie’s stomach—so much could go wrong with a breach, and Blackthorne was armed and only semi-rational. But he was showing her his collection—he must mean for her to be a witness?

  Sophie blinked and he nodded, as if they were having a conversation. Blackthorne straightened up, and left the hooks beside Sophie. “You just rest. Feel the mana of my ancestors.”

  Blackthorne walked over to the armchair and donned the feather cape with a flourish. As he looked at her, in his tattoos and ancient garb, Sophie could almost see why he thought he was the greatest Hawaiian king, returned in the flesh. There was something timeless in his bearing and this moment.

  But he was going to kill her, and himself. She wished he would let her speak so she could ask him what was the point of being a reincarnation if he was killed? But he would probably
just say that he would come back again.

  She closed her eyes, and just rested, hearing nothing but the faint rustle of a pen and paper.

  What was Lei doing? It was likely that her team was planning an assault. They might begin by trying to make the space uncomfortable, trying to manipulate the temperature, or even cutting off the air supply. Anything to move Blackthorne toward some conclusion of the standoff. And without proof of life, the team might well assume that Sophie was already dead.

  But she certainly hoped not. Perhaps by being passive, she could get Blackthorne to lose interest in her.

  Blackthorne finally straightened up. He returned, and crouched down beside her with a series of plain white labels that had been marked with a location and date. “I have a database set up on my computer, but you have my computer.” He looked up with a faint smile, and she blinked again, opening her eyes wide to show her interest. He smiled again, both sad and a little ironic, a closed-mouth tug of the lips that somehow conveyed those nuances to Sophie.

  It was as if Sophie’s helplessness and silence freed him.

  Maybe he was a little more like Assan Ang than she had originally thought.

  He arranged the bone hooks in a circle on the floor, carefully setting the correct label beneath each one.

  “My Hawaiian ancestors were warlike, contrary to popular belief. They practiced human sacrifice, and they believed in the transfer of mana from one person to another. If I’m going to come back again after this, I will need help.”

  Sophie shut her eyes and swallowed around the gag, the hope that had begun to bloom dying. He meant to kill her, after all. Collateral damage. A human sacrifice.

  If only her head didn’t hurt so badly. If only her ankle wasn’t sprained. But it was, and if she was going to survive this, she had to defeat him. There was no other choice. There was no rescue coming through that locked door.

  Blackthorne went on. “I’ve turned on a recorder so that posterity can know what went on here. What I tried to do. Who I was.” With dim light gleaming on his oiled tattoos, he looked every inch the returned king—except for his white skin and bald spot.