by Aaron Elkins
“No. The kid says he didn’t hear anything, but they looked like they weren’t having any fun. He thought they were fighting about something and shut up when he came in. He said Dagmar looked really upset.”
“What do you think it was about?”
“What do you think it was about?”
“I think they were having a strategy session,” John said bluntly. “Figuring out where they go from here, coming up with whatever new cockamamie story they were going to befuddle you guys with.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“And so those are your suspects?” Gideon asked. “The nieces and nephews?”
“Who else? Last people to see her alive . . . fighting about something . . . all kinds of nasty, threatening things popping on the old case . . . sure, they’re my prime suspects, you bet. Well, and the two spouses, too—Malani and what’s his name, Keoni. They’ve got a stake in this, too. My guess at this point is that one of them—who knows, maybe more than one of them—wanted to make absolutely sure she never told anyone what really happened.”
“Yes,” Julie said nodding, “I remember, the other day when we were all talking on Axel’s porch, she looked really depressed, really tired. She talked about being ready for it all to come out.”
“Well, there you go.” Fukida was impatiently twirling the cup lid on the table, leaving little rings of foam. He was ready to leave. “Well . . .”
“And at this point, we think the real story is that Magnus was murdered by Torkel?” Gideon suggested.
“That . . . or by one of the nephews—or nieces.”
John looked hard at him. “Are you serious about that, Teddy?”
“I’m serious about it as a possibility, yeah, you bet.” Fukida tipped the cup all the way up to finish his coffee, sucking up the last of the foam, and stood. “Everybody’s being interrogated today, this morning. I’m on my way to talk to Inge now, and I’ve got two of my detectives going to see Axel and Hedwig.”
“What about Felix?”
“Honolulu PD is helping out there. We gave them a list of questions. I want everybody talked to at about the same time so they can’t compare notes ahead of time.”
“That’s good,” John said.
“I’m glad you approve.” Fukida paused before leaving, leaning on the back of his chair. “I’m not asking you along, Johnny. You’ve done great, but I think maybe it’s time for you to step out of this.”
“You’re not gonna get any argument from me on that. If I never see any of that lousy bunch again, it’ll be too soon.”
When Fukida had gone, the three of them sat looking out over the gardens toward the sea. “What awful news,” Julie said, following which there was a long silence.
“I have to get away from here,” John said, still staring out to sea. “I just don’t want to hang around here anymore.”
“You’re ready to go home?” Julie asked sympathetically.
“Not if I can help it, not while Meathead is still loose. But my sister Brenda wants us all to come down to Hilo. You guys interested?”
“That’s your sister who’s a park ranger?” Julie asked. “I’d love to meet her.”
“Right, at Volcanoes. You two would have a lot in common. So I’ve been thinking—”
“Uh-oh,” Gideon said.
John responded with a fleeting smile. “—that we could head down south today, maybe get rooms at Volcano House for a couple of nights—it’ll be a whole lot cheaper than the Outrigger, I can tell you that. We could go up into Hilo for dinner with Brenda and her family tonight, and then maybe tomorrow Brenda could show us around the park. What do you say?”
“Sounds good,” said Gideon.
“I’d love it,” Julie said.
NINETEEN
IT was a view that the pony-tailed old man in the gold-braided captain’s hat never got tired of—that, as far as he knew, no one had ever gotten tired of: the island of Tahiti, rearing up before him in the morning, the upper slopes of its green mountains and hanging valleys glowing like fire, the heavy mists that had clung to the bottoms of the deep ravines all night slowly separating into feathery tendrils as the sun hit them, the sky itself still a pellucid aquamarine, not the pale blue it would turn later on. Behind him, nine miles away across the Sea of the Moon, was the even more lushly exotic island of Moorea, where he lived and from which he’d just motored.
God, what a place.
With a sigh of self-satisfaction, he slowly steered Cap’n Jack’s Reward, a converted fifty-foot Danish fishing trawler, through the ships anchored in Papeete Harbor and then, edging it forward and back as deftly as if it were a twelve-foot dinghy, slipped it into its space along the concrete bulkhead that edged the long waterfront quay. Good. Done.
Nine-thirty, according to the clock on the cabin wall. That left him over an hour before the day’s clients, six Hemingway wannabe’s referred to him by Tahiti Nights Travel Agency (for the usual fifteen percent), showed up to spend a manly day on the high seas in pursuit of marlin and mahi-mahi. He just hoped nobody threw up on his beautiful, newly stained but not yet polyurethaned teak deck.
“Mornin’, Cap’n Jack, toss me a rope, I’ll tie you up.”
Teoni, waiting for him on the quay, was his one-man crew; reliable, competent, and unfailingly good-humored, even with problem customers—of whom there were many. Cap’n Jack had often wondered what it was about deep-sea fishing that brought out the worst in so many men. In Teoni’s opinion it was the result of the temporary absence of the civilizing influence of women, and Cap’n Jack thought it was as good a theory as any.
A final check of the ice chest (ham and cheese sandwiches, taro chips, beer, bottled water, fruit juice, apples and oranges, Twinkies, chocolate chip cookies), a quick look in at the head to make sure the toilet paper and paper towels were out and that it was generally ship-shape (by the end of the day, it sure wouldn’t be), a few unnecessary instructions to Teoni, and after flipping down his eye patch so as not to disturb squeamish passersby, he was off on his two-block walk to the Tiki Soft Internet Café for his morning coffee and a little surfing of the twenty-first-century variety.
Half an hour later, with a chocolate croissant and a heavily creamed and sugared coffee under his belt and a fresh cup on the table in front of him, he had checked and responded to the meager collection of e-mail in his inbox, had ordered two new rod-holders from Pomare Marine, and had opened his Favorites folder to relax for a final few minutes with “Upcountry Doings, Your E-News Update for North Hawaii.”
As usual, there was little in it of concern to him, but reading it was an ingrained habit by now and he scrolled dutifully through it, looking for names and places that rang a bell. He had already hit the PAGE DOWN key to scroll past “Sad News from the North Kohala Coast”—there wasn’t anything on the coast that interested him—when his mind registered a glimpse of the name “Torkelsson” in the body of the article.
Now that interested him.
He scrolled back up the page and read intently, his hand rhythmically stroking his beard, his coffee forgotten.
Sad News from the North Kohala Coast
The body of Dagmar Birget Torkelsson, one of our true pioneers, was discovered yesterday afternoon on the beach near her home at Hulopo’e Beach Estates. Ms. Torkelsson is believed to have died of injuries suffered in a fall. Kona police are investigating the matter.
Dagmar Torkelsson was eighty-two years old. She had lived on the Big Island since arriving from Sweden with her three brothers in the 1950s. Over the next forty years, this remarkable family created and slowly developed the Hoaloha Ranch above Waimea. Now broken up, the Hoaloha at one time represented a cattle empire second only to that of the Parker Ranch.
Ms. Torkelsson is survived by her nieces Hedwig Torkelsson and Inge Nakoa, and by her nephews Axel and Felix Torkelsson.
A private memorial service will be held Friday at the Waimea United Church of Christ, followed by an RSVP reception at the Waimea Communit
y Center for family and close friends. Others wishing to pay their respects to the deceased are cordially invited to a public memorial and reception at the Center on Saturday at two P.M.
The old man finished his coffee, paid ten cents to print the article, put the gold-braided captain’s hat back on his head, and went thoughtfully back to his boat.
TWENTY
UNLIKE the West Hawaii police station in Kona, the headquarters of HPD—the Honolulu Police Department—are on a busy street in the heart of downtown. There is not a garbage dump or compost heap in sight. The building itself is large, handsome, and imposing: a white, four-story structure with banks of concrete steps leading up to the pillared entrance, thirty-foot palm trees at the corners, and a gleaming red-tiled roof. The lobby buzzes with activity and purpose, as in any big-city police department.
But two floors below the lobby, on Level B-2, where the Scientific Investigation Section—the only police crime lab in the Hawaiian Islands—is quartered, you wouldn’t be aware of any of this. There, white-coated criminalists, in their brightly lit but windowless quarters, go quietly about their work, bent over microscopes, spectrographs, and computer screens.
One such, Benjamin Kaaua, stared fixedly at the screen of his fingerprint-comparator, on which two magnified images were projected side by side. On the left was a print—not a fingerprint, but a greatly enlarged print from the base of the thumb of a left-handed leather glove—lifted from the face of a watch on the wrist of the old woman that had been killed. On the right was an equally enlarged image of a small portion of the same area from one of the four left-handed leather gloves that Fukida had obtained from two of the suspects in the case. The image on the left was steady. The one on the right changed as Kaaua periodically moved the card on the focusing platform below the screen. On the card were twelve tiny photographs of different parts of the glove’s surface. This was the second of three such cards for this glove, and he was now on the last of its twelve images. A similar process on the three cards for the other three gloves had produced nothing. Altogether, he had been on the machine for two hours without a break. The final image on the card didn’t match either, and the card was pulled from under its clip and set to the side.
Before inserting the last one, Kaaua stood up to get the blood flowing to his legs again, stretched, and walked around the table, working his head from side to side and squeezing his eyes shut. Time for a break, really, but with one card to go he was eager to finish up.
What he was doing—what criminalists spent most of their time doing—was applying the First Law of Criminalistics: No two objects in the universe are exactly alike. Even mass-produced objects or things made in a mold, while they might be extremely similar when new, would quickly become different. No two things ever wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever tear, or break, or get used, or rust, or get nicked in exactly the same way.
The leather of any cowhide glove, coming as it did from the skin of an animal, was different from every other cowhide glove that had ever been made or would ever be made. And once it had been used, there would be flexure creases, tension lines, wear-furrows, and scuffs that would make it even more observably unique.
So if this glove was indeed the same one that had left the print at the crime scene, there would be a visible match somewhere on the final card.
In theory.
The original print, the one from the watch face, was unusually clear, barely smudged, not at all the usual fuzzy smear. And Fukida, thanks to the course he’d taken at the FBI Academy, had known enough to look for it, and to realize it might be important when he saw it. He’d done a good job of lifting it, too, using superglue and dye stain. He’d lifted another print from the back of the bench Dagmar Torkelsson had been sitting on, but it was too indistinct for comparison.
Kaaua took his stool again, wrapped his feet around the base, rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, refocused on the final card’s first photo, and caught his breath. To be sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, he increased the magnification all the way up to twenty-seven times, then way down to three so he could look at a wider area. He flicked off the light and hummed happily to himself.
We have a match.
FOR once, Sergeant Fukida was motionless. His hands lay quietly on his desk, his feet flat on the floor. His Colorado Rockies cap was on his head in thinking position (backward). He was cogitating.
Dagmar wasn’t the only Torkelsson who had been a piece of work. In all his career he’d never encountered a bunch quite like this one. It was as if they had an unlimited number of versions available to answer anything they were asked. Catch them in a lie, and out popped another one, like sausages out of a sausage machine, to explain the first one away. When he and his detectives had compared notes at the end of the day yesterday, it was as if they’d all been working on completely different cases.
But today things had turned around. Obviously, the family members had compared notes, too, because early this morning Felix had called from Honolulu; they had concluded it was past time to set the record straight.
“Mm,” a skeptical Fukida had replied. He’d heard this before.
Yesterday, Felix explained, they had been in a state of shock on learning of Dagmar’s death—of Dagmar’s murder —and had been frightened and off-balance, hardly knowing what they were saying. Now they wanted to clear the air and do whatever they could to demonstrate their innocence in her murder and to help in finding her killer. They had designated him as their spokesman, and if it was all right with Fukida he would like to meet with him as soon as possible.
Would he be acting as their lawyer, Fukida wanted to know. Felix said he would not, but merely as their representative. Indeed, he hoped that, when all was known, there would be no need for a lawyer. There had been an implied question mark at the end of the sentence, to which Fukida had not responded.
“Come on over,” was all he’d said. “When can you be here?”
Two hours later, they were sitting in the most spartan of the interrogation rooms, a running tape recorder on the scarred table between them. No coffee, no soft drinks. Despite the austere surroundings and the chill in Fukida’s greeting, Felix was annoyingly self-assured and at ease, as if he were there to do a favor for a friend. Fukida had a strong sense of another load of bullshit on the way to being shoveled up.
He pressed the start button on the recorder. “All right,” he said with no preamble other than stating their names and the date for the record, “first I want to know why you all got together with her at her house yesterday morning. What it was really about,” he added as Felix opened his mouth. “I don’t want to hear the same crap about ‘moral support’ and ‘shoring her up’ that I heard yesterday. They didn’t need to fly you in from Oahu for moral support.”
Felix threw back his head and laughed, as if Fukida had told a joke. “Actually, I think it would be better if I started at the beginning.”
Fukida was stone-faced. “I think it would be better if you answered my questions.”
Felix responded with an accommodating shrug and carried on, unflustered. This, Fukida thought, was a very cool guy, probably a hell of a lawyer. “The fact is, the meeting was supposed to be about moral support, in a way—you know, let’s all stick together and keep things close to the vest—but when we got there we found out she’d already been to see you and told you some things, and then when Inge’s husband called to tell us your men had just showed up at their place with a search warrant for the old gun—”
Fukida’s interest quickened. At yesterday’s interviews, no one—including Felix—had mentioned such a call. Was he actually about to get some reliable information here?
“—everything changed. We knew that tired old story about the hitmen couldn’t stand up any more, but we couldn’t afford to let the real story come out—”
“Because of your inheritances?”
Felix showed his first sign of unease. “Yes.”
“But now you feel you can
let the real story come out?”
“That’s right. Somebody murdered our aunt—I mean, this is Auntie Dagmar, for God’s sake. That changes things. It took a while to sink in, but it finally did. So did the idea that it pretty much had to be one of us.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Come on, Sergeant, I’m leveling with you. You can level with me.”
“Go ahead,” Fukida said. “You couldn’t afford to let the real story come out . . .”
“No. We wanted her to . . . well, to lie—to tell a new lie—all of us did. Including me. And we would back her up.”
“And that lie was . . . ?”
“That Torkel murdered his brother Magnus.”
“That—” The puzzle pieces that Fukida had all poised and ready to press into place fell apart. “You mean that he didn’t?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then . . . who did?”
“Nobody murdered him, Sergeant. The whole thing was an accident.”
“Dammit, Torkelsson, don’t jerk me around. I’ve had it with you people. If it was an accident, what was the problem with letting it come out? Why couldn’t you . . . why would you . . .” He shook his head. “I think maybe you better start at the beginning, Counselor.”
THE story Felix told took an hour and a half, and, bizarre as it was, it had a ring of authenticity to it that none of the other umpteen constantly evolving versions had ever had. And it fit the known facts.
The two elderly bachelor brothers, Felix said, had increasingly gotten on each others’ nerves over the years. Seemingly once a month they decided they’d be better off living apart, but Dagmar had always smoothed things over. The three of them had lived together for forty years, after all, and the prospect of breaking up—“divorcing,” she called it—in their seventies was just plain ridiculous. Unseemly. So they stayed.
But it wasn’t only the annoyance of constantly being in each others’ way. The two men had different philosophies of running the ranch. Magnus’s attention was focused on the bottom line, on expenses and debits and cash flow. Torkel was more the dreamer, and the older he got the more cockeyed and expensive his schemes became. On the night in question they had been quarreling throughout dinner over his grandiose plan to collect run-off water from the higher elevations of the Kohalas into a concrete-lined catch-basin, from which it would be piped by gravity-feed to a dozen reservoirs and then sent on to five hundred giant troughs placed at strategic locations on the ranch. It would have cost millions. They had consumed a few glasses of wine, as they usually did at dinner, and Torkel, pushing things, pulled out a checkbook and said he’d write a check for the digging of the catch-basin right then and there.
