Motive

by Dustin Stevens

  “Last night, a body was found atop the mosaic on the floor of the state capitol building. Governor Randle has asked that you specifically investigate it.”

  The words hit Kalani like the head of a sledgehammer, smashing into her stomach and forcing the air from her lungs. Three times her lips moved to protest the directive, though no sounds escaped.

  “Believe me, I have no idea why either,” Tseng said without looking over at her. “I explained to him that you were on leave right now and that you had just been accepted into detective training when the incident occurred, but he was emphatic. You and only you would handle this.”

  Kalani’s head spun as she tried to make sense of the words she was hearing. She released the cup of coffee she was holding and drew her hands back into her lap, twisting her fingers into a ball. She stared down at them for several long moments, trying to keep her breathing even, to slow the heartbeat she could hear surging through her ears.

  “Look, sir, I’m not sure what the governor thinks he knows, but I assure you it isn’t true. There was a time I would have killed for this opportunity, but to be honest, right now I’m not even sure if I’ll return to the force.”

  Tseng gave her a sideways glance at the admission, his face impassive. “I told him that too.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Told me to get my ass up here and convince you to do it.”

  Kalani met his gaze for a moment before shifting hers back out towards the ocean. She pulled her feet free of the sandals and stood, walking a few feet to the side and leaning against a twisted bunch of corded branches hanging down.

  “May I speak freely?” Kalani asked without looking over.

  “Please,” Tseng replied.

  “What the hell is going on here? Since when does the governor get to assign who handles a case? Especially to someone that isn’t even active duty, when there are dozens of able-bodied detectives ready to go?”

  A long, deep snort rolled out of Tseng, lifting his head back several inches. “First of all, he’s the governor, so here in Hawaii he can pretty much do what he wants.

  “Second, you think that’s weird, you haven’t heard anything yet.”

  The comment came as a surprise to Kalani, who folded her arms across her chest and turned to stare at Tseng. For the first time, the slightest hint of curiosity was starting to creep in. “How’s that?”

  Tseng unlaced his fingers and extended his hands out in front of him. He unfurled his right thumb away from his fist and said, “First, I’m the only person he called. If anybody ever asks, he did alert HPD about the murder, but I wasn’t allowed to bring in the crime scene techs, the detectives, not even the area patrol to secure the scene.”

  “What?” Kalani asked, her eyes bulging. “So who’s at the scene now?”

  “There is no scene now,” Tseng said. “I was given four hours to process what I could alone, then everything was packed up and scrubbed clean in time for another busy day at the capitol.”

  “What?” Kalani repeated, her voice a mixture of shocked and appalled.

  “Election season,” Tseng said simply, the only response he had. “Second, he wants you to handle the investigation because he knows you’re not active duty right now. You can move in relative invisibility.”

  “Invisibility?”

  “Yup,” Tseng said, nodding. “He wants this thing as quiet and as far off the books as he can get it. He’s convinced that this was the work of one of his political foes and he will not let this become all anybody’s talking about between now and the primary.”

  Trepidations receding a bit, Kalani furrowed her brow, listening to the explanation being given to her. It was incomplete at best, a train wreck at worst, replete with dozens of gaping holes.

  “But there are a hundred politicians at the capitol, why does it have to be about him?”

  Another derisive snort rolled out of Tseng. “Have you met the governor?”

  Kalani pushed on without acknowledging the question. “Chinatown is only three blocks from the capitol. Why does it have to be about politics at all?”

  “Again I ask, have you met the governor?” Tseng deadpanned.

  This time, his words struck a chord, bringing Kalani to a stop. She raised her hands above her head and rested them atop her scalp, trying to make sense of what she was being told. Around her the morning sun continued its ascent into the sky, bright rays of sun encroaching on their spot in the shade.

  “Any idea who the victim was?” Kalani asked.

  “None,” Tseng said.

  “Much at the scene to go on?”

  Tseng’s head shifted no more than an inch in either direction. “Physical evidence on the body. Otherwise surprisingly little for such a violent crime.”

  Kalani nodded herself, linking up the information in her mind.

  “So let me get this straight,” she said, her words slow and even. “Last night you were called to the capitol and told to process a scene by yourself. The second you were done, the body was removed and the entire thing washed away, which didn’t matter because there wasn’t much there anyway. And then you were told to come here and find me?”

  “Your chronology is a little off, but you hit all the high points,” Tseng said. Still his voice was even and nearly void of emotion, his gaze locked on the horizon.

  “And then what?” Kalani asked.

  Tseng remained perfectly still for a full minute before rotating his head at the neck to stare at her. He ran his gaze the length of her body, Kalani feeling him assessing her attire and the bags under her eyes, before nodding once.

  “And then you go find out who did it.”

  A long moment passed as Kalani stared at him. She waited for another smirk, a half smile, any sign that he was joking with her. When it was clear that sign was never coming, she shook her head, making no attempt to hide her shock at the entire situation.

  “I think Governor Randle has seen a few too many episodes of Hawaii Five-O. He needs Steve McGarrett on this case, not me.”

  That drew out the smirk Kalani had been waiting on. “There’s no such thing as Five-O, but if there was, I’m sure he’d have called them instead of me last night.”

  “Yeah, why did he call you?” Kalani asked, her trepidations, even her inhibitions, falling away bit by bit. “I mean, no disrespect sir, but if a full cover-up is what he was after, why bring you in at all?”

  Tseng parted his hands and raised his palms towards the sky, raising his shoulders in a move that relayed he had no idea. “Best I can figure, he had no other option. By the time I got there last night, the girl was already cordoned off and her body was growing cold. They’d been there a while and clearly discussed every option before making the call.”

  “So they decided...” Kalani began, letting the insinuation fill in the rest of her question.

  “That they would call me and run an underground investigation,” Tseng said. “Keep it out of the papers, but give the impression everything was on the up-and-up should anybody go snooping.”

  Kalani twisted her body away from Tseng, pressing her shoulder against the gnarled trunk of the tree. She nestled her narrow frame between two notches and crossed her left foot over her right, watching the perpetual motion in front of her, an unending cycle of waves fighting for supremacy, their ultimate goal being the first to reach the shore and deposit itself atop the brushed white sand.

  “Politics,” she muttered, disgust dripping from the word.

  “Politics,” Tseng agreed.

  Kalani shifted her gaze over to Tseng, the scowl still splashed across her features. “What do you think?”

  “Truth?” Tseng asked, looking over to match her gaze for a moment. “I think this whole thing is a disaster in the making. I don’t want a part of this any more than I can tell you do, but we don’t have a choice.”

  It was the exact thing Kalani had been thinking for the past five minutes, though she appreciated Tseng’s willingness to say it out loud
. “The governor calls and leans on you, you come out and lean on me.”

  “No,” Tseng said, shaking his head, letting the movement take his focus back out to sea. “The governor is leaning on both of us, he’s just letting me be the messenger on this part of it.”

  A comment about not having a choice came to Kalani’s mind, but she kept it to herself. Tseng had already explained that to her, there was no point in rehashing it.

  She was going back into the field, whether she wanted to or not.

  “How would I even go about this?” she asked, her tone detached, full of resignation.

  Tseng picked up his mug and drained the remainder of his coffee before setting it down and smacking his lips. “You’ve been a cop for ten years now, you know how to run an investigation.”

  “Yeah, as a cop,” Kalani countered. “What you’re describing is something different.”

  “True,” Tseng conceded, raising his eyebrows and nodding a bit. “But I was able to lift the girl’s prints at the scene and while I may be stereotyping here, something tells me she’ll be in our system.”

  “It’s a start,” Kalani said.

  “I also got him to agree to let an ME examine the body. He doesn’t want anybody on the city or even state payroll to see it, so it’s being shipped out to Tripler as we speak.”

  Another comment came to Kalani’s mind, but she let it pass.

  “Beyond that, your point of contact will be me,” Tseng said. “For everything. Whatever you need, I will try to get for you.”

  The word caught Kalani’s attention, pulling her gaze back over towards him. “Try?”

  “What can I say, it’s a shit show,” Tseng said. “We’ll both do what we can with what we’ve got, and get out of this as fast as we can.”

  Kalani fell silent, mulling over the situation. Calling it a shit show might be underselling the situation. An hour ago, she was asleep in her bed. Now she was being forced back to a life she had left months before and still saw every time she closed her eyes.

  “You know, this might be the nudge you need,” Tseng said.

  Kalani shifted her attention back to him, remaining silent.

  “What you went through...” Tseng began before pausing and shifting directions. “I don’t blame you for taking time off, and I’m sorry to be here now interrupting it, but this might not be a bad thing. Might be the kind of jolt to get you going again.”

  Kalani stared at him a long moment, feeling her eyes narrow a bit in frustration. “You think?”

  “At the very least, it should give you some clarity on those questions you’ve been asking yourself,” Tseng said. “If nothing else, by the time this over, you’ll know whether to hang up your badge or not.”

  The narrowed eyes and pursed brow stayed in place as Kalani slid her gaze back out to sea. What he was saying wasn’t wrong, she had already considered that fact herself, but something about him already thinking that far ahead didn’t sit right with her. She thought about commenting on it, but decided to let it slide.

  She had another more pressing matter to get to at the moment.

  “I assume you don’t expect me to do all this alone?”

  Chapter Six

  From the outside, the office looked just like a hundred, a thousand, others throughout Honolulu. A solid brick façade offset by evenly spaced windows, all of them stretching from a foot off the ground to a foot beneath the first floor ceiling. A standard glass and steel double door was placed in the center of the building, opening outward towards the street.

  Unlike most other though, campaign signs covered every square inch of glass along the entire front.

  In most states, primary campaigns were something of a perfunctory exercise. The respective political parties came together months in advance and decided what individual would represent them in the coming election, the general thinking being not to expend precious resources eight months before the real contest.

  Perhaps even more important, the idea was to not put their candidates through so much unnecessary bloodshed and provide their opposition a roadmap on how to defeat them.

  In Hawaii, a state that saw as close to a single-party system as any in the country, this was not the case.

  Throughout the islands, the Democratic Party enjoyed a competitive margin larger than any other state. In the 2008 presidential election, it was the only one to give more than seventy percent of its vote to a single candidate. As it currently stood, there was but a single Republican in the entire state senate.

  The cumulative effect of such one-sided representation meant that unlike other states, the real heavy lifting of campaign season happened in August.

  If a candidate wanted to obtain office, they had to do two things. They must first be a Democrat, and they must second survive the primary.

  The moment the front door of Mary-Ann Harris’s gubernatorial campaign office opened, both of those facts were announced with glaring obviousness. Stacks of campaign materials, ranging from yard signs to ink pens, stood piled on every available surface, all adorned with Harris’s name and the unmistakable Democratic elephant. Underscoring them was the catchphrase, “Say Aloha to change!”, everything done in garish displays of red, white, and blue.

  Weaving their way amongst the stacks of materials were scads of workers. Some sat at desks wearing business attire, working the phones for campaign donations, trying to secure campaign stops for their candidate, rattling off information to concerned voters. Others wore t-shirts displaying the same name and slogan as the signs they carried, ready to head off for another day in the field.

  At three minutes before nine, Mary-Ann Harris walked through the front door, a copy of the morning Star-Advertiser under her arm, a cup of coffee from the local house on the corner in her hand. Dressed in slacks and a red dress jacket, she caught sideways glances as she walked through the room, none of the workers daring to stop her as she went.

  Standing right at five and a half feet tall with blonde hair giving way to white, she was far from an imposing figure. High-cheek bones accentuated a heart-shaped face, with watery blue eyes and thin lips.

  What had everyone acting skittish was the appointment she had waiting in her office. Nobody was quite sure why he was there or what he was after, but there were only a few reasons a man of his repute could be waiting for her, few of them positive.

  Sensing the demeanor of those around her, Harris kept her eyes locked straight ahead and strode to her office, ignoring the blatant looks coming her way. The noise of the headquarters dwindled away to nothing more than a low hum as she walked through, her square heels echoing off of the tile floor beneath her. Keeping her expression impassive, she walked to the rear of the room and entered her office, closing the door behind her. In quick order, she sat the coffee and paper down on her desk, walked to the bank window staring out over everything, and shifted the blinds closed.

  Darkness enveloped the room as Harris felt her way along the wall and flipped on the overhead lights. She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the pale white hue before turning, a smile affixed to her face.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  Across from her, slouched down into the leather chair opposite her desk, sat Kimo Mata. His compact frame was splashed sideways across the chair, his left leg draped over the arm and swinging free. He stared back at Harris with heavily lidded eyes, a shadow of facial hair growth spread across his face. Dark hair was a uniform half inch long clear around and his cargo shorts and aloha shirt were rumpled.

  “I hope it’s worth my time,” Kimo said as way of a greeting.

  Harris kept the smile in place and walked around behind her desk, ignoring the newspaper as she picked up her coffee and settled into her chair. “Looks like you’ve had a rough morning. If I had known, I would have brought you one of these too.”

  Kimo shook his head and said, “I’m on the backend of a long night, coffee would just keep me up.”

  “Oh,” Harris said, taking a drink and
setting the cup down in front of her. “I will try to be brief then.”

  “Appreciate it,” Kimo said, arching an eyebrow. He motioned back over his shoulder with a nod of his head and said, “You always have such a chilling effect on your staff?”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “I knew the minute you walked in here,” Kimo replied. “Could have heard a pin drop, let alone those oversized shoes of yours.”

  The remark drew a smirk from Harris as she measured the man across from her. She, as did most people in Hawaii, knew him quite well by reputation. It was the first time she’d ever met him in person though, a visage that didn’t quite measure up to the legend.

  “Most mornings, no,” Harris said. “But I think their reaction today was more to you being here than my arrival.”

  “Should I be offended or flattered?” Kimo asked, the arched eyebrow rising a little higher.

  Harris extended her hands to either side and smiled. “You saw this place when you walked in. This is ground zero for a race to the governor’s seat that only has a couple of months remaining.”

  A smug half-smile stretched across Kimo’s face. “So worried about things around here that my presence is enough to throw everyone into a panic?”

  “You’re being modest, Mr. Mata,” Harris replied. “You’re well known as the best investigative journalist in the state. Wherever you show up, influential people tend to take a hit.”

  “I’m taking that as a compliment.”

  “You should,” Harris replied. “That’s why I called you.”

  Silence fell between the pair for a moment. Harris watched as Mata ate up the praise, bobbing his head just slightly in agreement with her statements. She knew from a lifetime of working around men that he would milk the moment as long as he could before pushing forward, so she decided to let him have it.

  Her next appointment wasn’t until ten. She could afford to give his ego a few extra seconds.