Motive

by Dustin Stevens

  She could only hope they would have a similar effect on the doctor, or at the very least ensure her disdain was aimed elsewhere.

  Much like the parking lot outside, the hallways of Building C were almost deserted as Kalani let herself in and walked towards 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 on the edge of the room. Everything appeared in the same position as it had on the previous two trips, most of the space outfitted in stainless steel, all of it polished to a mirrored shine. The faint scents of formaldehyde and disinfectant hung in the air, tickling the 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 fluorescent light straight down, illuminating Dr. Song and her newest charge. Also paralleling the first visit, the newest victim was arranged in the standard autopsy position, an exaggerated Y cut from her shoulders to her navel. The skin flaps on either side of her were peeled back exposing the entirety of her innards, pink flesh washed out to almost white by the light shining down.

  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 a moment before going back to what she was doing, removing a piece of tissue and inserting it into a glass vial. She took up a plastic cap and twisted it down over the end of the sample before dropping it down on the steel stand beside her and reaching up high, flipping the light switch off.

  Again Kalani’s eyes dilated, everything around her seeming dim without the artificial sun shining down from the overhead fixture.

  “Good morning,” Kalani said, trying to offer a smile, but being unable to bring herself to do it. Between the ways she felt and the doctor looked, it would have only been perfunctory, neither one really believing it.

  “Morning,” Song, rotating the plastic shield up from her face, the plate of it extended from her forehead like an oversized ball cap. The look on her face displayed that while she wasn’t suffering from the same extreme exhaustion as Kalani, she too was beginning to feel the strain of what was being presented to her.

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

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

  Out of habit Kalani turned to the side, half expecting Rip to be standing beside her, before a shy smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Not at all. He’s confirming a lead this morning and then headed this way.”

  “Ahh,” Song said, peeling the clear surgical gloves from her hands and tossing them into the oversized garbage chute beside her. Shoving the sleeves on her coat up a little higher she walked to the sink along the back wall and used the kick release to turn on the water, the sound of it splashing against a stainless steel basin reaching Kalani’s ears. “Should we wait for him or go ahead and get started?”

  “We can go ahead,” Kalani said, raising her voice a bit to be heard over the water. “We’re pretty sure the time frame is getting tighter. That’s why we went in opposite directions this morning. We need to be moving on this stuff as fast as we can.”

  “Got it,” Song said, turning with her hands held out in front of her, the porcelain skin glistening with water. Droplets dripped from her fingers as she tugged some paper towels from the dispenser on the wall and wiped herself dry.

  “I haven’t written anything up yet,” she said, nodding towards 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 even close her, 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. If forced to guess she would venture that she was a victim of circumstance, an easy target that met a very particular typeset.

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

  “Very,” Song said, shoving her hands down into the pockets of her lab coat, leaning a hip against an empty exam table. “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 a moment, her body going rigid. Her assessment the night before had been correct. “Passport baby.”

  “That would be my guess, too,” Song said, nodding gravely. “The fillings in her teeth seem to 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 scene workup the night before, but it was hard to know if he’d had a chance to run them through AFIS as 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.”

  Song looked at her a long moment, almost sensing what Kalani was thinking, before pressing her lips tight together and offering a tiny nod of assent. “It’s okay. It was the first thing I checked this morning too.”

  Unsure how to respond Kalani simply nodded, remaining rooted in place, waiting for the report she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.

  “Unlike the previous girls, there was no sign of sexual trauma at all,” Song said. “She was young, and in good health. Looks to be late teens or early twenties at the latest.”

  A handful of responses came to Kalani as she stood listening to the report, but she remained silent. She could tell from Song’s tone she had much the same feelings about the entire situation. There was no need to spend time rehashing the obvious.

  “Other than that, the only things of any real value I can give you are of the chemical variety,” Song said. “First, her blood showed high levels of pentobarbital, an unusual, but not unheard of sedative for this type of action.

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

  Kalani’s brow pushed together as she fed the information into what she knew, thinking back a few hours before, examining the body. “But there was none in the tox screen?”

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

  Once more Kalani nodded, the wrinkle between her brows growing deeper. “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 was trying 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 few things that could potentially 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 to achieve some goal, but the information of knowing the girl had been held as well meant the location must be somewhere with medical capabilities, perhaps even a full lab. The type and amount of sedatives used were just too st
rong otherwise.

  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, now presumably abducting targets from the airport or some other well-traveled location.

  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 truncated timetable, consistent with the sudden weekend disappearance of Mary-Ann Harris.

  It was also her experience that such expediting also tended to result in more bodies being found.

  The thought pulled her stomach into a tight ball as she looked across at Song. “Thank you, Doctor. Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Song said, offering only a tiny shake of the head, her voice no more than a whisper.

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

  Song looked at the box without reaching for it. “It was my understanding that this wasn’t any of our ideas.”

  Placing the box on the closest examination table, Kalani took a step back, shaking her head. “No, it wasn’t. I feel terrible for getting you and Rip both involved.”

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

  The words rang in Kalani’s head as she took one last glance at the girl’s body still spread open in the center of the room. A quiver of sorrow passed through her as she looked at the small figure, just a child herself.

  “Tell me something,” Kalani said, her gaze still aimed on the room’s macabre centerpiece. “What would someone keep using all these fetuses for?”

  A moment of silence passed, both women looking at the exposed insides of a young woman whose name they would probably never even find out.

  “You know, that was the other thing I was considering this morning,” Song replied. “Before now, the condition of the girls was throwing me off. I kept assuming that the obvious sign of sexual trauma was the thread connecting the victims together.”

  “Us too,” Kalani said, shifting her focus over to Song, the doctor’s attention still aimed in the opposite direction. “We’ve spent all our energy thus far looking at the victims, tracking them down, trying to figure out why they were being slaughtered and placed in such public places.”

  “But looking at this girl here,” Song said, motioning towards the table with her chin, “I realized that wasn’t the case at all. Those girls just happened to be easy targets. The pregnancy is what they’re really after.”

  Little by little the pieces Kalani knew in her mind began to link up. It explained how a haole, a Chinatown working girl, and a foreign visitor all ended up in the same room together within days of each other. She had been trying so hard to examine them and 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 brought them to be 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 even born?”

  Song lifted her hands still clutched inside the pockets of her coat, her head once more twisting to either side as she turned her focus to Kalani. “Honestly? The only thing I can even think of would be stem cells.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The first journalism job Kimo Mata ever took was as a freelancer for a small paper in Los Angeles with local distribution. Nowhere near as expansive or powerful as the Times, it operated on a much tighter budget, allotting desk space only to those writers that were considered full-time staff. Still in his junior year of college, Kimo was a long way from that, having only submitted a handful of articles on various low-end 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 scalp, but fast found that the twenty bucks 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, a halo of frizzed out hair and cigarette smoke encasing 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 place at the bar as slowly as his twenty dollars would allow, listening to the guards bemoan their work situation. They were convinced that their boss was skimming from the house operation, taking home a sizable chunk of the profits that would have otherwise been earmarked for them.

  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 that 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, 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.

  Fortunately for him, they arrived before the outfit backing the race track did.

  The story might not have been the one that he built his career on, but it did impart a lesson on him that he had never forgotten. Whenever performing research, always be sure to do so on a public computer, one that couldn’t be traced back to his name, much less his bedroom.

  The Manoa branch of the Hawaii State Library system was just five blocks from his apartment, a single story building tucked away on a mostly residential street not far from the University of Hawaii. Made of brick and painted white, it was small and unassuming, rarely used during the day by more than a few locals, the occasional college student looking for someplace quiet to study.

  All told, it was the perfect place for somebody like him to come in and do some digging without looking over his shoulder.

  A small, plump woman with rosy cheeks and white hair pulled back into a ponytail smiled at Kimo as he entered, his lips curling upward in a matching gesture. A semi-regular at the place, both sides knew each other by sight, if not by name.

  Swinging past the general fiction and A/V sections, Kimo went directly towards the back corner of the building, a bank of four computers sitting empty. Around him an elderly man in a loud polo shirt and a mother carrying an infant against her chest both roamed the aisles, though neither looked his way as he passed. The scent of old newspapers and printing ink found his nostrils as he ambled on, the early morning sun filtering through the windows, illuminating the space.

  Twelve minutes after leaving his house he was seated in front of a computer screen, his back to the w
all. Two years before he had taken out a library card in a false name, having never checked out a single book on it. Instead it was used exclusively for gaining internet access, three hour chunks of time to be spent on the worldwide web, free of charge. Once he was done he could sign out and walk away, the system wiped clean at the end of each business day. As long as he steered clear of pornography, weapons, or anything that might get flagged in the system, he was virtually invisible as he prowled about.

  For the ten hours since leaving the palace his singular focus had been on trying to determine the motive behind whatever was causing the string of killings in Honolulu. Whoever was behind them clearly had political motivations, as Kalani had pointed out. The bodies were all displayed to be used against the governor, placed in high-visibility areas that he would be forced to either make general knowledge or hide completely.

  The fact that he had gone the route of hiding them was curious to say the least, but didn’t do enough to place any blame squarely on him. The fact that he had called on the Chief of Police only bolstered that opinion, as had his actions the previous night as well. From what Kimo could tell, it appeared the governor was guilty of a healthy amount of election paranoia, but nothing more.

  That left the other major candidate, which was an even harder situation to figure out. Mary-Ann Harris was riding a lot of public sentiment in the wake of her husband’s passing, but few in the state really viewed her as a serious contender to go all the way. Early polls showed her even in the primary, but Kimo was convinced that was more on the Anybody-But-Randle ticket than any merits of her own.

  How she had parlayed that into possessing intimate knowledge of what was transpiring around the city was the part he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around. The first such incident could have been chalked up as coincidence, but the second call was too much to brush aside. She had known something was going to happen, this time before it even transpired. That meant she had been in direct contact with the perpetrator of the act and even if she was merely being used as the mouthpiece, against her will or not, that made her an accomplice.