Motive

by Dustin Stevens

  The other, more pragmatic side, said she should at least explore the option. If not for herself, then for people like the little girl in Chinatown, or the husband of the woman they had just sent to Tripler.

  “Right now, as best I can see it,” Kalani said, “we’ve got a few different leads to follow up on. The first is Harris, which I think for obvious reasons is my and Rip’s first stop in the morning.”

  “For obvious reasons,” Kimo agreed.

  “The second is the girl we just bagged,” Kalani said.

  “From what I could tell she was a foreign national here to give birth,” Rip said, “but we’ll make a run to Tripler after visiting Harris and see if there’s anything we can use.”

  “Okay,” Kimo said, nodding. “And I get that both of those are places you two should go, having at least the specter of law enforcement about you, but where does that leave me?”

  Kalani’s eyebrows raised a quarter inch as she glanced from Kimo to Rip and back again. “Motive.”

  “Motive?” Kimo asked, Kalani feeling Rip staring at her from the side, a look of surprise on his face.

  Since being asked to the gala that morning, Kalani had been wrestling with a loose idea in her mind. She had not verbalized it to anybody, wasn’t even sure how it would sound spoken aloud. Either way, she set herself to push it out, allowing Rip and their new partner to cut it down if it made no sense at all.

  “The way I see it,” Kalani said, “the driving force behind this has to be political. Why else would the killer be making the two leading gubernatorial candidates a part of this when it appears neither one is directly responsible?”

  The look of confusion was still splayed across Kimo’s face as he looked at each of them. “What? So you think a third candidate is doing this? Or the Republican or Independent they’ll face in the general, trying to manipulate things, take them both out?”

  “No,” Kalani said, shaking her head, before scrunching her eyes up tight. “Hell, maybe, I don’t know. I just know, there has to be a connection there.

  “We’ll go to Tripler tomorrow and talk to the ME because we have to, but I don’t think we’ll learn a damn thing from her. The common thread isn’t the girls, those are just convenient targets. The thread is whatever agenda this guy has behind wanting the girls dead.”

  The words, the thoughts, had spilled out of Kalani before she even realized she was saying them. It was a culmination of multiple sleepless nights, of growing angry at standing over innocent victims, of trying to find what pulled them all together.

  Untold hours of thought had led her to the belief that there wasn’t anything obvious doing that because there wasn’t anything at all. The girls were nothing more than props. The only way they would ever solve this case was to get on the other side of, ferret out whatever slight the killer was so angry about.

  The idea out in the open, Kalani held her breath for a long moment, waiting for some visible response from either man.

  After a full thirty seconds Kimo was the first to move, nodding his head up and down. With a single push of his hips he lifted himself away from the front of the car, headed for the driver’s side door. “Give me until the close of business tomorrow. I’ll be in touch.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  For most of the night, the total exhaustion that Kalani had been laboring under for the past week was strong enough to hold sway. It kept her subconscious at bay, letting her body slip into a state of total darkness, bypassing all REM sleep. There she stayed in a low-power mode for several long hours, her deprived body grabbing at any form of replenishment it could. Not until well after the first creases of light had ripped across the morning sky, finding the tiny cracks surrounding her bedroom windows and forcing their way in, did her mind become active again.

  The images she found there were much the same as they usually were, the scene on the corner of Kapiolani and Kapahulu, a gunshot wound on her chest, her partner frightened, firing at something moving in the dark. They played by on a familiar scroll, one after another, the scene depicted in vivid detail for her to relive.

  This time though, her mind decided to be cruel.

  As the bullet struck Jacobsen, lifting him from the ground, silhouetting his body against the streetlamp behind him, the momentum of it twisted him in the air. Only this time, gone was the blood and brain spatter that usually jolted her awake. In their place was the face of the girl she had processed just hours before, her creamy skin flawless, her eyes open and staring at Kalani as she floated by. There she hung in mid-air for a long moment, her body weightless, before the image became too much, snapping Kalani into consciousness.

  An hour later, the picture remained at the front of Kalani’s mind as she drove the Pali Highway, crossing over the Ko’olau Mountains and beginning her descent towards Honolulu. The calendar now well into March, she had opted to leave the windows out of her Jeep, the worst of the wet season now over for the year. Overhead the morning sun peeked through palm fronds towering above the roadway, an incongruent shadow pattern splayed across the road ahead.

  Sunglasses on, Kalani propped her elbow on the windowsill and ran her fingers back through her hair, resting her head in her palm, thinking about the day stretched out before her.

  The morning was set to begin at the headquarters of Mary-Ann Harris, where she and Rip would lean on her to give up wherever she was getting the information that was being fed to Kimo. As Kalani was not considered active duty with HPD, the list of things she could legally do to extract information was minimal, though the odds of Harris knowing that were low.

  She and Rip had discussed the matter after Kimo left the previous night and decided they would throw everything they could think of at her, ranging from making her an accessory to murder to simply calling the media and telling them exactly what they knew. As with most politicians, they foresaw she would then hem and haw and make veiled threats about who she was and what she was capable of, but in the end she would cave and answer their questions.

  She had too much to lose not to.

  How she answered those questions would determine how the rest of their day transpired. If she gave them anything solid to run with, that would become priority number one. If for some reason she opted to play hardball, they would call in Tseng to extract what was needed. In the event nothing she said was of any consequence, they would leave her behind and make a third journey to Tripler, back again to visit Dr. Song.

  For the first time all week, the Saturday morning traffic was mercifully light as Kalani hopped on the H-1 headed east before jumping off at the second exit. She sat through two red lights as the sun rose higher in the sky, burning away the morning mist, promising another gorgeous day in Hawaii.

  Kalani spotted Rip seated on the opposite curb as she pulled up, looking to be the personification of how she felt. His hair was twisted into a jumble atop his head and two days of growth covered his jaw, dark circles under his eyes visible despite his deep tan. His mouth set, he stared at her without making any movement.

  “Morning, Sunshine,” Kalani said, sliding out of her Jeep. She took her weapon and badge with her, attaching both to her belt as she went, as much to keep from leaving them exposed in the car as for extra validation on the task they were about to undergo. Knowing she was already in a less-than-ideal position for enforcing her will upon a candidate that might not be prone to speaking, having them along certainly couldn’t hurt.

  “Morning,” Rip said, his voice just above a grumble as they waited for a faded Chevy Impala to roll past before jaywalking towards the front door of Harris’s campaign headquarters. Kalani could sense from just the single word that he too was beginning to feel the strain of the last several days, the combined lack of sleep and trying to determine what was going on starting to wear him thin.

  The amount she was going to owe him when it was all over was something she would just as soon not try to calculate at the moment.

  The front of the building looked like most of the others
found between the capitol district and Waikiki, a basic brick shell with glass lining the street level. The key difference between this one and most others was that every square inch of the outward facing windows was covered with paraphernalia supporting Harris, a half-dozen different posters and placards all stating the same thing.

  “Say Aloha to Change,” Rip said, reading one of the banners in the same disgruntled voice. “That’s original.”

  A low chuckle was Kalani’s only response as they headed for the door, her thoughts already on how the next few minutes would play out. In an ideal world, they would ask to speak to Harris, who would take them back into her office, and the two sides would have a discussion about the information she’d obtained. More likely, it would go to hell long before any of that happened, derailed by any one of a thousand unforeseen problems.

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

  Rip reached the door a half step before Kalani, pulling it open and allowing her to pass through before stepping in right behind her. Together they came to a stop just a foot inside the room, standing side by side on a tiny tile foyer, surveying the sea of chaos stretched out in front of them.

  In a room that measured roughly a hundred foot on all sides, at least that many people were jammed in tight, all moving with frenzied purpose. Eighty percent of them were dressed in matching red t-shirts bearing the same slogan as the posters on the exterior glass, piling posters and signs into stacks, ready to be distributed. Moving amongst them were a handful of people in their late twenties wearing street clothes and carrying clipboards, barking orders and pointing things out that needed to be done.

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

  Standing at the front of the room and examining the crowd, not a single person appeared to be older than mid-thirties. Every one of them went about their business without so much as glancing at the pair of strangers standing amongst them, giving the impression that unannounced guests were just something that came with the territory.

  “Excuse me,” Kalani said, reaching out a hand towards 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, a bunch of stenciled pencils in her hand, rubber-banded into a tight clump. Not once did she even acknowledge Kalani as she went, tossing her hair in an effort to announce she was too busy to be bothered.

  A spike of annoyance rose in Kalani as she took a step forward. She aimed her attention at a young man with spiked hair and non-prescription glasses coming towards her and extended a hand out, her palm aimed at his sternum. “Can you tell me where to find Mary-Ann Harris?”

  An expression of disgust crossed his features as he sidestepped the outstretched hand, twisting his upper body to the side to avoid contact. “Nope,” he said as he slid past her, careful to avoid eye contact as he went.

  Feeling the disdain rise even higher within her, 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 rising out beside her. The sound tore through the room at an alarming decibel, bringing the activity to a halt, many of the faces wincing or moving to cover their ears as they turned to view the tall blonde man assaulting their eardrums from the front of the room.

  “Hey!” Rip bellowed, the bass in his voice a bit louder than usual, his face relaying the same sense of purpose. “We are police officers and we’re looking for your boss. One of you will stop and talk to us or we will draw our weapons and begin firing at you. Got it?”

  “He doesn’t mean that,” Kalani interjected, heat flushing her cheeks, her eyes wide from his words. She drew her badge off her hip and waved it at the crowd, taking another step into the room. “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 amongst each other. After a long moment a girl with dark hair pulled into a thick braid and large brown eyes stepped forward. She was dressed in jeans and a tank-top and held a clipboard in both hands, looking like her sleep schedule resembled the same one they’d been on all week.

  “Sorry,” she opened, the rest of the room beginning to move again as she approached. Slowly the murmur of conversation started anew, rising with each passing second. “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 heavier crowd than usual.”

  Kalani nodded and returned the badge to her belt, meeting the girl halfway, the flooring underfoot changing from tile to thin industrial carpet. “That’s okay. We’re looking for Mary-Ann Harris.”

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

  “Do you know what time she’s expected in?” Kalani asked.

  The right side of the girl’s face bunched up tight, the look one relaying she was about to deliver bad news. She hugged the clipboard across her chest, her purple fingernails flashing into view. “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,” the girl replied, again shaking her head. “She called and left a message on the office voicemail sometime overnight.”

  Rotating at the waist, Kalani turned and shot a look at Rip. The look on his face showed he was already having the same thoughts she was. “Is this unusual?” she asked. “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.”

  There were dozens of things Kalani wanted to say to the girl, messages she wanted relayed, but she held her tongue. Shooting the messenger would do nothing to relieve the angst inside her. It would most likely only heighten it, making a host of people aware that something was going on. “If you see or hear from her, please let her know it is important we speak to her as soon as possible.”

  “Okay, will do,” the girl said, nodding so deep it dipped the top half of her body forward. She stayed in place until Kalani and Rip began to move towards the door before wheeling and disappearing back into the crowd.

  “You think she’s on the run?” Kalani asked the moment the front door closed behind them, the bright morning sun overtaking them as they stepped onto the street, headed for their cars.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rip said, his face drawn tight. “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 and nodded, the same thought crossing her mind even as the girl first 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 leaving the island and canceling campaign events showed a much deeper level of fear.

  “She won’t stay gone long though,” Kalani offered. “She has too much going on in there to be away for too much time.”

  “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, bringing a feeling of nausea with it. For the last twelve 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 eminent, their next moves could be vital in determining what they might be. “Go to her house and bang on the front door, or head to Tripler?”<
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  Rip drew in a deep breath and stretched his hands high over his head, his shirt riding up, exposing several inches of stomach. He stayed elevated on his toes for a long moment before returning to his flat feet and shoving a hand into his pocket, 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 afterwards.”

  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 ticker tape spool by the door and stare in apt wonder at the cases spread along the walls. Half of the space was reserved for counter service, a dozen stools stretched in front of it, all of them always full with a matching line waiting out the door. The other half was exclusively a walk-up bakery, standing room only for hungry folks with just a few minutes to spare.

  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 scads of other bakeries on the island, was the coco puff.

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

  A paper fold-up carton of coco puffs swung from Kalani’s hand as she left her Jeep in the parking lot of Tripler and headed towards the door. Looking down at it hanging from her fingers she knew it was a pittance of repayment 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 noticed and 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 go a long way in curbing the growing acrimony within her.