Motive ; One Last Day ; Going Viral

by Dustin Stevens

  That just seemed to be how things kept turning out in this investigation.

  Rip reached the door a half step before Kalani, pulling it open and allowing her to pass through. Together they came to a stop just inside the room, surveying the chaos in front of them.

  In a room that measured roughly 100 feet square, at least that many people were moving about with frenzied purpose. Most wore red t-shirts bearing the same slogan as the posters they were getting ready to distribute. Moving among them was another group wearing street clothes and carrying clipboards, barking orders and pointing out things that needed to be done.

  The buzz of frenetic energy rose from the crowd, no single voice standing out above the others, a constant drone of muffled conversation. Despite it, nobody seemed to be without purpose, each one accepting the task they were given, moving with determination to get it accomplished.

  Not a single person appeared to be older than mid-30s. Every one of them went about their business without so much as glancing at the pair of strangers standing among them, giving the impression that unannounced guests were just something that came with the territory.

  “Excuse me,” Kalani said, reaching out a hand toward a young woman in a denim blouse and jeans. Her hand landed on the woman’s forearm only to be brushed off as she huffed past, tossing her hair to announce she was too busy to be bothered.

  A shot of annoyance rose in Kalani as she aimed her attention at a young man with spiked hair and glasses coming toward her. “Can you tell me where to find Mary-Ann Harris?”

  “Nope,” he said as he slid past her, careful to avoid eye contact as he went.

  For a split second the thought of drawing her weapon and firing it into the ceiling crossed Kalani’s mind. She took another step forward and opened her mouth to yell, only to be beaten to it by a shrill whistle beside her. The sound tore through the room, bringing the activity to a halt, many of the faces wincing as they turned to see the tall blonde man assaulting their eardrums.

  “Hey!” Rip bellowed, the bass in his voice a bit louder than usual. “We are police officers, and we’re looking for your boss. One of you will stop and talk to us. Got it?”

  Kalani drew her badge off her hip and waved it at the crowd. “We really need to speak with Mary-Ann Harris. Can someone please tell us where she is?”

  A low murmur swept through the room as young people looked back and forth at each other. Eventually, a girl with dark hair pulled into a thick braid stepped forward. She was dressed in jeans and a tank-top, holding a clipboard, looking like her sleep schedule resembled theirs.

  “Sorry,” she opened, the murmur of conversation started again. “This is just our busiest time of the day, getting all our canvassers ready to head out. Being Saturday and all, we’ve got a bigger crowd than usual to deal with.”

  Kalani nodded and returned the badge to her belt. “That’s okay. We’re looking for Mary-Ann Harris.”

  “I’m sorry, she isn’t here,” the girl said, shaking her head, the braid slapping against her back.

  “Do you know what time she’ll be in?” Kalani asked.

  The right side of the girl’s face bunched up, relaying she was about to deliver bad news. She hugged the clipboard across her chest. “I’m sorry, but she won’t be in until Monday. Said she was feeling ill and needed to get away for the weekend.”

  “Away,” Rip said, “as in, off island?”

  “I’m not sure. She called and left a message on the office voicemail sometime overnight.”

  Kalani turned and shot a look at Rip. His face showed he was having the same thought she was. “Is this unusual? Her to just disappear for the weekend?”

  “First time I’ve ever known it to happen,” the girl replied, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “Said to cancel her events tomorrow and everything.”

  Shooting the messenger would do nothing to relieve their anxiety. “If you see or hear from her, please let her know it’s important we speak to her as soon as possible.”

  “Okay, will do,” the girl said.

  Without another word both sides departed in opposite directions, the girl off to continue doling out tasks, Kalani and Rip back out into the morning sun.

  “You think she’s on the run?” Kalani asked the moment the front door closed behind them.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rip said. “Whether it’s because she’s afraid of us or whoever was feeding her information, I don’t know, but she’s in the wind.”

  Kalani stopped alongside her Jeep, the same thought crossing her mind the minute the girl said Harris was gone. The excuse of needing to take a break was clearly a blow-off reason to lay low for a while, but taking it to the extreme of canceling campaign events showed a much deeper level of fear.

  “She won’t stay gone long though. She has too much going on in there to be away very long.”

  “True,” Rip said, “but does her being gone for the weekend mean she’s just buying time, or something’s about to go down?”

  The thought slammed broadside into Kalani. For the last 12 hours she’d been assuming that what they’d dealt with the night before was the worst that could happen, not until now realizing it could just be the start of more things to come.

  “So what now?” she asked. If he was right and something was imminent, their next moves could be critical. “Go to her house and bang on the front door, or head to Tripler?”

  Rip stretched, his hands high over his head, his shirt riding up, exposing several inches of stomach. He stayed on his toes for a moment before fishing for his car keys.

  “You go see Jannie. I’ll knock on the front door of Harris’s empty house and then meet up with you afterward.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  One of the worst kept local secrets in Honolulu was Liliha Bakery, a mom-and-pop joint that had been open for over five decades, tucked away on a side street in Kalihi. Specializing in all things baked, it brought people in by the droves to take a number from the tape spool by the door and stare in wonder at the cases along the walls. Half of the space was reserved for counter service, a dozen stools stretched in front of it, always full with a line waiting out the door. The other half was exclusively for take-out, standing room only for hungry folks in a hurry.

  For all the things that made Liliha what it was, the item that really put them on the map, the thing that differentiated them from other bakeries on the island, was the coco puff.

  Small puff pastries filled with chocolate custard, the delicate concoctions were then topped with a dollop of sugary macadamia nut spread, harmonizing into a dessert that was known far and wide. At last count it was believed that as many as 10,000 of them went out the door on any given day, a testament to the power the tasty morsel held over the locals.

  A fold-up carton of coco puffs swung in Kalani’s hand as she left her Jeep in the parking lot of Tripler and headed for the door. Looking down at it, she knew it was a pittance for the work Dr. Song had done for them in the past week, but at the very least it would show that the effort was appreciated. She herself felt in the same position as the ME, strong-armed into participating in something she wanted no part of, and knew that even a gesture as simple as pastries would help curb her growing anger.

  She could only hope they would have a similar effect on the doctor.

  Much like the parking lot outside, the hallways of Building C were almost deserted as Kalani let herself in and walked toward the lab in the basement, muscle memory beginning to set in, her feet carrying her forward without much thought. Compared to the bright sunshine outside, the hallway seemed especially dark, her eyes fighting to adjust, the subterranean air feeling cool on her skin. The only sound was the even slap of her shoes against the floor, an echo reverberating off the block walls around her.

  Knocking once on the outside door to the lab, Kalani pushed her way inside, coming to a stop at the edge of the room. Everything appeared the same as the previous two trips. The scents of formaldehyde and disinfectant hung in the air, tickling th
e inside of Kalani’s nose.

  On the far side of the room, in the same position as just a few days before, a single lamp threw harsh light straight down, illuminating Dr. Song and her newest charge.

  At the sound of the door closing Dr. Song looked up from behind her clear plastic mask, a grim expression on her face. She shook her head from side to side before going back to what she was doing, removing a piece of tissue and inserting it into a glass vial. She took a plastic cap and twisted it onto the end of the sample before dropping it down on the steel stand beside her and reaching up high, flipping the light switch off.

  “Good morning,” Kalani said, trying to offer a smile, but being unable to bring herself to do it.

  “Morning,” Song said. The look on her face displayed that while she wasn’t suffering from the same exhaustion as Kalani, she too was beginning to feel the strain of what was being asked of her.

  “That bad?” Kalani asked, remaining rooted in place, the pastry offering still by her side.

  Song’s eyebrow rose in unison with her shoulders, a full body shrug that lifted her up an inch or so. “Yes and no. Did I offend your partner the last trip? He sent you alone this time?”

  “Not at all. He’s confirming a lead and then heading this way.”

  “Ahh,” Song said, peeling the clear surgical gloves from her hands and tossing them into the waste container beside her. “Should we wait for him or go ahead and get started?”

  “We can go ahead. The time frame is getting tighter. That’s why we went in opposite directions this morning.”

  Song accepted the information with a nod.

  “I haven’t written anything up yet,” she said, gesturing toward the corpse still lying open on the table beside them. “As you can see, I still have a few things left to do before I close her up, but I think I’ve found everything I’m going to.”

  Kalani nodded. On the drive over she had steeled herself for how little the report would most likely contain, the girl not seeming like any of the others they had processed before. She was probably a victim of circumstance, an easy target who met a specific need for the killer.

  “Pregnant?” Kalani asked, jumping right to the punch line.

  “Very,” Song said, shoving her hands down into the pockets of her lab coat. “Her hormone levels were consistent with someone well into the third trimester. Given her size and the stretch marks on her skin and the walls of her uterus, I’d say a week or two from delivery at most.”

  Without realizing it, Kalani’s eyes slid shut, her body going rigid. Her assessment the night before had been correct. “Passport baby.”

  “That would be my guess,” Song said, nodding gravely. “The fillings in her teeth indicate Korea, which would fit her appearance, but I can’t be sure.”

  That had been Kalani’s first guess as well. They had sent the fingerprints to Tseng as part of their crime scene workup the night before, but it was hard to know if he’d had run them through AFIS yet.

  Even if he had, Kalani wasn’t expecting there to be a match.

  “Sorry,” Kalani said, “didn’t mean to get ahead of you. Please, go on.”

  “Unlike the previous girls, there was no sign of sexual trauma,” Song said. “She was young, and in good health. Looks to be late teens or early 20s. Other than that, her blood showed high levels of pentobarbital, an unusual - but not unheard of - sedative for this type of surgery.

  “Second, and perhaps even more useful, is the fact that I noticed traces of burns around her nose and mouth consistent with chloroform.”

  “But there was none in the tox screen?”

  “No,” Song said, “which isn’t that surprising. Even a dose of chloroform strong enough to leave skin burns would be metabolized in a few hours.”

  “Meaning she was grabbed and kept alive for at least a while before being killed.”

  She glanced up at Song, who nodded in agreement.

  “As I was working, I tried to put it together in my mind as well. That’s the best I could figure too, especially given the amount of pentobarbital in her system.”

  While the information didn’t provide a ton of opportunity by itself, it told Kalani a couple things that could be of use.

  The first was that the killer must have somewhere to hold the girls. There was no way he would have kept an abducted girl close to giving birth in a vehicle for any length of time, especially while administering sedatives. Since the first victim, it had been assumed that the stolen fetuses were being taken for a purpose, but knowing the girl had been held as well meant the location must be somewhere with medical capabilities, perhaps even a full lab.

  The second, and even more harrowing, was that the killer was growing bolder in his selection of victims. No longer was he stalking street walkers in Chinatown, having presumably abducted a young girl from the airport or some other location for new arrivals.

  This could have been nothing more than an act of convenience, but more likely, it signified a rising level of desperation. It was Kalani’s experience that such escalations often coincided with a shortened timetable, consistent with the sudden weekend disappearance of Mary-Ann Harris.

  “Thank you, Doctor. Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Song said, her voice no more than a whisper.

  The two women stood and stared at each other a moment before Kalani stepped forward and raised the offering from Liliha. “A small thank you from Rip and me. I know you must have had better things to do on a Saturday.”

  Song looked at the box. “It was my understanding that none of us volunteered for this.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” Song said, her voice soft. “People above us got leaned on, they leaned on us. That’s how these things go.”

  Kalani took one last glance at the girl’s body, still spread open. Sorrow passed through her as she looked at the small figure, just a child herself.

  “Tell me something. What would someone be using all these fetuses for?”

  A moment of silence passed, both staring at the exposed young woman whose name they would probably never even know.

  “That was the other thing I was considering this morning,” Song replied. “Up until now, I kept assuming that the obvious sign of sexual trauma was the thread connecting the victims.

  “But looking at this girl here, I realized that wasn’t the case at all. Those girls just happened to be easy targets. The fetus is what someone’s really after.”

  Little by little the pieces began to link up. It explained how a haole, a Chinatown working girl, and a foreign visitor all ended up in the morgue within days of each other. She had been trying so hard to figure out how they connected to each other when the truth was, they themselves didn’t at all.

  It was what they carried that did.

  How or why that related to a gubernatorial election was still something Kalani had no idea about, but at least now she had a clear heading to work from.

  “And?” Kalani asked. “Any thoughts on why someone would go to these lengths to abduct babies before they were born?”

  “Honestly? The only thing I can even think of would be stem cells.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The first journalism job Kimo Mata ever had was as a freelancer for a small paper in Los Angeles. Nowhere near as expansive or powerful as the Times, it operated on a tight budget, allotting desk space only to writers who were full-time staff. Still in his junior year of college, Kimo was a long way from that, having only submitted a handful of insignificant human interest stories.

  Alone at the bar one night, though, he heard a conversation he believed was going to change all of that.

  It was just after sundown on a Tuesday, the place completely empty as Kimo made his way inside. He took up the seat closest to the door and asked for a burger and a beer, waiting in silence as he watched a muted Dodgers game on the TV above the bar.

  He was supposed to have been sitting in a night class about journalistic
integrity, but had decided to blow if off to hear a favorite band play down the street. Without tickets he had shown up hoping to find a scalper, but fast found that the $20 in his pocket wasn’t going to get him close enough to even hear the music, let alone inside the door.

  Alone and dejected, he had found the joint by mistake, ambling in under the withering gaze of a bar wench weighing twice what he did, cigarette smoke encircling her head. He placed an order for a draft and burger more out of fear than thirst or hunger, using it to get her away from him so he could have a few moments to himself.

  It was in those moments that a pair of security guards from the nearby dog track wandered in.

  Over the course of the next half hour, Kimo sat in rapt silence, nursing his beer, listening to the guards bemoan their work situation. They were convinced that their boss was skimming from the house, taking home a sizable chunk of the profits that would have otherwise been earmarked for employees.

  By the time they were done with their dinner, Kimo was aching to sprint out of the place, convinced he had a story that was going to make him a star. Filled with the gumption of youth and the fallacy of big dreams that often came with it, he went straight home to his laptop to begin pecking away, digging up everything he could about the race track. When there was something he couldn’t get access to, he called in a friend who was a budding tech god to assist.

  Three days later, he had everything he needed for a front page expose that would have the big papers calling. Long before it ever made it to press, or even to his editor’s desk, though, the police showed up at his doorstep. They had been monitoring activity at the track for some time, and when his IP address showed up snooping through the company files, they came to have a little chat with him.