Mahu Vice m-4

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Know any words other than nope?”

  “Yup.”

  The perils of having a partner who thinks he’s a comedian. There wasn’t anyone to canvass, though perhaps the next morning our 911 caller might resurface, or a passing driver might call in a clue. Mike came over and said, “They’re working on the overhaul now.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Once we think the fire’s been extinguished, we send some guys in to search for any bit of fire we might have missed. They pull out the furniture, open the walls and ceilings. We want to prevent any possibility of rekindle-when the fire starts up again, after it’s been extinguished.”

  In the glow of the arc lights next to the remaining fire truck, I followed Mike’s gaze back to the smoldering ruin. “I’ve got to stick around for the overhaul,” he said. “If they don’t do it right, they could remove evidence I need to determine the cause and origin of the fire.”

  He stretched his shoulders back and flexed his arms. “Going to be a long night. After that, I’m going down to company 22 to talk to the guys there. How about we meet back here at six? Should be first light then, not too hot.”

  “Ray and I are just finishing a night shift. We’re supposed to have two days off, then go back to days, but I’ll talk to my lieutenant and see if I can go straight to days tomorrow morning,” I said. “How about you, Ray?”

  “Julie’s in school. Won’t matter to her if I’m off or at work.” He smiled. “Will get me out of a bunch of chores, though.”

  The crime scene techs went off to look for anything related to cause of death-spent cartridges, rope that might indicate the victim was bound. Then the medical examiner’s office took away the body, and Ray and I waited around until they had cleared the site.

  Then we went back to the District 1 station, inside the police headquarters downtown, and spent the next few hours clearing our desks so that we could focus on the dead body at the back of Tico’s salon. I believed it was Jingtao, who had so carefully touched my hair on Saturday, and felt that I owed it to him, to Tico, and to my family to figure out what had happened to him and bring his killer to justice.

  Sampson came in at seven, and I explained the circumstances to him. He told us both to go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, then clock back in. Ray left for home, but I drove directly up to Waialae Avenue. I was tired, but at the same time my adrenaline was high, and I was determined to work through my fatigue.

  I wasn’t sure I could work with Mike again without all the baggage of our personal relationship. On the way up to the center, I wondered if I could shift coordination with Mike to Ray. That would be the coward’s way out, though. I would have to suck it up and work with him, and avoid being distracted by memory or sexual attraction.

  By the time I got to the burned center, Mike had set up a temporary command post in an Army tent in the parking lot and it was already hot and humid. The night’s strong winds were gone; no breeze came down from the Ko’olau Mountains, and not a single cloud blocked the sun’s rays. I parked on a side street, out of the way, and walked across to the center, waving at an officer I knew named Lidia Portuondo, who was keeping foot and vehicle traffic out of the center while consoling the pharmacist and his wife, who had seen the morning news in disbelief.

  The trees my brother Haoa had carefully planted and tended over the years had burned, leaving no shade anywhere except under the tent, and when I met Mike there it was swelteringly hot.

  Mike had two firefighters delegated to him, who were already out in the ruins looking for clues. “The ME hasn’t given us a cause of death for the body we found,” he said. “And it was burned so much that he might not be able to tell. Looks like the work of a pro. I want to isolate the ignition point and see if I can identify any accelerants. Every pro has his own signature; if we find the clues we find the guy.”

  Mike had a pint bottle of water in his hand, and he unscrewed it, then took a deep gulp. His radio buzzed and he stepped away to take the call, leaving his water bottle on the table. I used the sleeve of my aloha shirt to wipe my sweaty forehead, and grabbed the bottle for a drink.

  As soon as the liquid hit my tongue, though, I knew it wasn’t water. Way too much kick for that. I jerked the bottle back, spilling a few drops on the counter, and then sniffed. The liquid was odorless and colorless, but I thought it was vodka.

  I capped the bottle, wiped the spilled drops with a tissue, then put the bottle back on the table and went out to the ruins of the shopping center my father had built, in part with his own hands.

  As I walked, I yawned, and wondered if I’d have passed the call to another detective if I’d known Mike would be involved. Maybe. But how could I have justified that to my family? They had met Mike a few times before we broke up, and liked him. No one had ever questioned why we’d stopped seeing each other, and until I told Harry when we were surfing, I’d never volunteered an explanation.

  And what was up with the vodka bottle, at eight in the morning? When we’d dated, Mike had been a wine drinker, preferably red and Italian. He’d gotten a little loopy sometimes, but I had too. I’d never considered that he had a drinking problem.

  In the daylight, the center looked worse than it had at night. Traffic slowed on Waialae Avenue as onlookers gaped, but Lidia kept the cars moving, and prevented foot traffic from getting in our way. The devastation the fire had caused was clear, and the harsh smell of burnt wood and plastic was still everywhere. I stifled another yawn as Mike and I started at the far end of the center, by the acupuncture clinic, looking for anything we could find.

  “A fire needs three things,” he said, as we began investigating. “Oxygen, heat, and a fuel source. Last night, I talked to a bunch of the guys about what they found when they started fighting the fire. The flames were light yellow, almost white, and the smoke was black. That means gasoline was part of the fuel source.”

  He pointed at a charred piece of wood framing. “This building had a lot of wood. If the wood was the only material burning, the flames would have been more red, and the smoke brown.”

  I nodded, writing notes for myself.

  “You can see various points throughout the center where the fire seems to have burned hotter and stronger. Those were the places where the gasoline was spread. The rapid progress of the fire indicated that those places were linked with some kind of accelerant.”

  He pointed to the ground behind the clinic. “The fire was started on the exterior of the building. So our arsonist either didn’t have access to the clinic, or didn’t want to waste time breaking in. There was an alarm system, yeah?”

  “An old one-just a keypad outside each back door, and sensors on the front and rear exits. If you broke down the door, you’d trip the sensor, but that’s about it.”

  It was weird working with Mike again. I couldn’t help looking at him when his attention was elsewhere, remembering the wiry feel of his hair against my chest, noticing the curve of his ass in his dark jeans. The ghost of our failed relationship hung between everything we said to each other. He felt the tension, too; I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the awkward way he tried to avoid touching me.

  “You said the third thing the fire needs is oxygen,” I said, pushing my attention back to the case. “But isn’t there oxygen everywhere?”

  “There is. A fire needs oxygen to keep burning. If the arsonist had set a fire in one store that was airtight, it would have burned itself out. But by setting the fires outside the building, he guaranteed a supply of oxygen. And the narrow alley is perfect; the wind channeled the flames down alongside the building.”

  I saw something on the ground behind the hair salon and leaned over to look closely. “Think our arsonist was a potato chip fan?” I said to Mike, pointing at a scrap of a chip bag.

  “Not necessarily.” He leaned over next to me, and his head was so close to mine that I could have turned just a bit and kissed him. I could tell he felt something, too, from the quick way he pulled back. />
  “Potato chips are greasy, yeah?” he said, standing up and stepping a little away from me. “So they’re a good accelerant. You lay a trail of chips away from the ignition, and the fire runs down the trail. Soon you’ve got a wall of flames going up.”

  He pulled out an evidence bag, and scooped the fragment of chip bag into it. “Good eye,” he said.

  He looked at me, and for a moment I saw a flicker of the old Mike in his eyes, as if he wanted to make a joke but then thought better of it. That connection between us was like an electrical spark in the air, only there wasn’t anything to fuel the combustion.

  We walked all the way down the alley to the beauty salon at the far end. “We’re not only looking for things that shouldn’t be here,” Mike said, “but things that should be, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there isn’t much reason for a gasoline can to be in a travel agency, for example,” he said. “But people decorate their workplaces with personal items.” He motioned through the damaged wall to the travel agent’s desk, where we could see the remains of photographs in twisted metal frames. “If she’d cleared her desk, that might mean she knew the fire was going to happen.”

  “So I guess we can wipe her out as a suspect.”

  “We can’t eliminate anyone as a suspect yet,” he said. “We’re just looking for clues, remember?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Gee, I remember when you used to say that and mean it.”

  My eyebrows shot up and I was about to say something when I saw Ray pull in the parking lot. “There’s my partner,” I said. “Let me go fill him in.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mike said.

  “I’ve got to pick Julie up at two,” Ray said, when I got over to his car. “If we’re still working, can you follow me down to UH and bring me back up here?”

  “Sure. Listen, I need to talk to you before we get started in there.”

  There was a hole-in-the-wall malasada shop across the street, and I steered Ray over there. A malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut popular in Hawai’i, and I figured I would tell Ray about my background with Mike over a big dose of sugar. We’d started working together just as I was breaking up with Mike, and I hadn’t felt comfortable enough with Ray then to say anything.

  Since then, we’d gotten closer. I remembered one of the first conversations we’d had together on personal subjects. We were in my truck on our way back from a case-an old man whose pills had been tampered with by his son. The daughter was a lesbian, and she’d been our primary suspect until her brother had done something dumb that gave him away.

  I said I worried that I’d bent over backward to think of the sister as innocent, because I empathized with her. I took a deep breath. “Because I’m gay, too.”

  “No shit?” he asked. “That’s cool. My cousin Joey was my best friend growing up-we used to have a hell of a time together. He turned out to be gay.”

  “You still in touch with him?”

  Ray shrugged, and turned to look out the window. “Joey got it into his head when we were about twenty that he wanted to own an X-rated porno store. He used to say he wanted to sit behind the counter with his pants open, jerking himself off while the customers shopped.”

  “Not a pretty picture.” I realized I had been gripping the steering wheel tight, and relaxed a little.

  “He did some stupid stuff to raise the money. Started selling drugs, got killed. That was that for Joey.”

  “Wow. Must have been tough for you.”

  “That’s when I decided to be a cop,” he said, turning back to me. “I mean, I always knew cops growing up, had a few in the family, but I hadn’t been thinking about it for myself till then.”

  I still didn’t talk much about my personal life to Ray, but he’d known I’d been burned by a guy in the past, and when I told him about my date with Dr. Phil he’d cheered me on.

  We sat down at a rickety table in the malasada shop with a plate of hot, puffy donuts dusted with grainy white sugar and a pair of coffees, some funky Japanese pop music playing in the background. “So you remember I told you about that fire investigator I broke up with a couple of months after you started working at HPD?”

  Ray had a mouthful of malasada, so he just nodded.

  “And I never would tell you much about him, because he was so closeted? Well, that’s the guy. Mike.”

  “You okay to work with him?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t really okay to work with Mike; just the short time we’d spent together had already shown me that there was still a lot of unfinished business between us-half machismo and half sexual tension. But I was going to have to get over it. “Don’t have much choice. He’s the fire department side of this, and I want to figure out who torched the center. My dad built a lot of that place with his own hands. That makes this personal. Plus there’s the boy.”

  I told him about getting my hair cut on Saturday, and Jingtao. “You think that’s our victim?” Ray asked.

  “Most likely. Hard to ID him, though.”

  We finished the malasadas and coffee and walked back across the street, where Mike was making notes on a yellow legal pad, sitting on a folding chair under the tent. Though the wind had picked up, it was still brutally hot, the sunlight glaring off the windshield of a Menehune Water delivery truck parked across the street.

  “I’ve still got to walk through the last two businesses,” Mike said, putting down his pad and capping his pen. “Want to walk it with me?”

  “Sure.” I noticed that the vodka bottle was gone and wondered if that meant Mike had finished it. But as we walked toward the acupuncture clinic, I couldn’t see any evidence of intoxication. I’d been on road patrol early in my career, and seen a number of roadside sobriety tests given, and I’d seen guys I knew were completely drunk pass with flying colors. So just because Mike didn’t stumble or slur his words didn’t mean he wasn’t plastered.

  As we walked, we went over the report from the crime scene techs, who hadn’t been able to find much. There was no evidence that Jingtao had been restrained in any way, no bullet holes in the remaining walls, no spent cartridges. The fire had done a very efficient job of burning what was flammable; what was left held few clues, if any.

  We walked through the cell phone store, a scrap heap of mangled metal and plastic. The acupuncture clinic was the last step before we went back to the station, and I was eager to get it over with.

  When I walked into the front room where there was a reception desk and a couple of chairs, I felt something was wrong. The place was too empty. Though the fire had begun behind the clinic, the wind had whipped it down the center before it could cause much damage. There had been no decoration on the walls beyond a couple of cheap posters of Chinese sights, and no personal items at all.

  “See the stains on the floor tiles?” Mike asked, pointing to the strange outlines on the floor. “We call them ghost marks. They’re produced by dissolution and combustion of tile adhesive.”

  While Mike and Ray surveyed the back of the building, analyzing the point of origin, I nosed around the reception area, looking for the stuff I expected to find-insurance forms, appointment books, and so on. Nothing. I found only couple of ballpoint pens, a deck of worn playing cards, and a box of rubber gloves in one of the drawers. Each of the three small treatment rooms was similarly barren-the remains of some built-in cabinetry, a tiny restroom with a single toilet.

  “Looks like they pulled out,” Ray said, coming inside to join me. “You said your dad used to own the center, didn’t you? He know the current owners?”

  “I’ll ask him. See what he can give us on all the tenants.”

  Mike was behind him. “You know whether the center was profitable?”

  “Last year, when my dad was sick, we all sat down and talked about money. Back then, the center was owned by a trust-with my parents as the trustees. No mortgage. My dad called it a cash cow, mostly income and little expense. But he’s getting older
, and he wanted to sell off the real estate to make things easier for my mom in case anything happened.”

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t like thinking about the possibility that my dad would pass away. I relied on his quiet strength too much.

  “He went to a shopping center convention in Arizona and hooked up with some big mainland company that was looking to expand here in the islands. I think he sold them seven properties in all. He walked away with cash, though I’m not sure what kind of financing they have.”

  Ray was snooping around the inside of the acupuncture clinic while Mike was taking notes. “My sense is that the new owners are landlords rather than builders,” I continued, “so the place was worth more to them intact, even after the insurance.”

  “Good information. Let me know if your dad knows anything else.” He hesitated for a moment. It felt like there was something charged in the air, and it wasn’t just the smoke. “Tell your folks I said hello.”

  There it was. That sense that he had once been part of my life. “I will.”

  “I’m going to stick around here for a while,” Mike said. “I’ve got a couple of the guys from the fire last night coming over to walk around some more with me, see what they remember. I need to do some calculations, figure out the fire load.”

  “What’s that?” Ray asked, coming back to join us.

  “The total amount of fuel that might be involved in a fire. I count up what was here in the building that might have been fuel. I figure out the origin of the fire, then I examine that spot for sources of ignition. Then I evaluate those ignition scenarios to see if they’re capable of creating sufficient heat energy to cause the fuel that was present here to burn.”

  “We’ll leave all that stuff to you,” I said. “Science was never my strong point. You’ll call us with whatever you find?”

  “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” Mike said.

  “We’ve already done that,” I said. “And see where it got us.”

  BETRAYAL

  Once I dropped Ray at UH to meet Julie, I couldn’t stop yawning. But because my father had sold the center only a few months before, I knew his records would be relevant and I wanted to pick up whatever he had. Since his heart surgery, he had closed the office he’d kept in Salt Lake, moving all his paperwork into Haoa’s old bedroom.