by Toby Neal
Her O2 meter beeped on her chest, and she frowned, gesturing to Thomas and then to herself, tapping the meter. Its reading was in the yellow zone.
He flashed five fingers three times, telling her they had fifteen minutes of air left. Rice reached into his BCD for a plastic bag, slipping it over the woman’s bloodless white hand and tightening strings that ran through the plastic rim of the bag, protecting any trace that might remain under her nails.
Lei moved off to swim a search grid around the body as Thomas helped pull the victim out from between the coral heads. Rice detached the air tank from the victim’s BCD, and freed from the clamp, the metal tank arrowed for the surface.
Watching its trajectory, Lei saw a shark pass above, a graceful black shape. Her heart rate spiked, but she tried not to breathe any faster and use up precious air. She waved to get Thomas’s attention, pointing to the shark and its several compatriots.
He gave a slight negative headshake, indicating not to be concerned. He fumbled his tablet out and wrote on it. Just curious. Blacktips. No prob.
She nodded and continued back and forth over the reef, her camera at the ready, looking for anything unusual. She let out a burst of excited bubbles at the sight of a small, plastic-encased GoPro camera on an extension rod, wedged between some rocks. She photographed it in situ, then swam down and picked it up, retracting the rod to shorten it and tucking it inside her BCD. She turned her gaze back to Rice, who was having some trouble getting the woman’s stiff, unwieldy appendages into the bag.
Lei kicked over to help. She pushed the floating arm into the yellow mesh bag. It was stiff with rigor, so the woman had died in the last day. Working together, they removed the woman’s fins and maneuvered the body into the mesh bag, pulling the zipper up.
Rice attached the bag to his dive belt and they inflated their BCDs, rising from the bottom at the speed of their bubbles until Thomas signaled for a stop to allow the buildup of gases to expend from their bodies so that they didn’t get the bends.
Lei still had her eyes on the sharks, alarmed to see that the school of blacktips and gray reef sharks had been joined by a tiger. The tiger shark was at least twelve feet long and much wider, a greenish-gray with barred markings on its back that served as camouflage. It circled their little group in wide, lazy arcs, its powerful tail barely moving, but still faster than the others. The other sharks withdrew, disappearing back into the deep. Clearly this fish was the king of its kind.
Lei pointed, looking at Thomas. She knew her eyes were wide behind her mask. She was breathing too quickly as she fought the urge to bolt for the surface, a move that she knew would be deadlier than a shark attack. Thomas nodded and indicated the metallic rod he held at the ready—a bang stick, a one-time underwater single-shot firearm with an explosive round in the head.
Rice gestured that he had one, too, and Lei felt a little better as the Coast Guardsmen drew closer to her, their backs to each other, facing outward. They were armed and ready, even though they were holding a tasty-smelling shark meal between them.
Rice and Thomas seemed to be communicating somehow. Rice drew a flattened yellow buoy out of his vest just as Lei’s monitor began beeping a red alarm, showing five minutes of air. She concentrated on slowing her breathing and watched as Rice attached the buoy to the body bag and filled it with the valve from his BCD, inflating it almost instantly. Thomas touched Lei’s arm and they swam away from the body bag, which began rising. It gathered speed as the buoy dragged it rapidly to the surface.
This made good sense. The Coast Guard Zodiac would see the buoy and retrieve the body, and they wouldn’t be endangered by being near it.
Continuing their slow ascension, Lei watched the tiger shark follow the body, circling it in a gradually tightening pattern. The mesh container must be emitting smells that flavored the water like a tea bag.
Lei heard the thrum of the Zodiac’s engine, saw the movement of the propellers. She couldn’t wait to break the surface and get out, but Thomas had stopped them for one last decompression pause twenty feet below the surface. Hovering there, she tried to calm herself. She watched as the crew hauled the yellow bag aboard.
The shark, deprived of its treat, moved away and headed in their direction. Lei felt her whole body flush with primal terror.
Chapter Two
Once again the two Coast Guardsmen drew close against her, feet toward the bottom, heads pointed to the surface. The three of them kept watch on the big fish as it began its circling again.
Lei was drawing her last, thin breath of air as Thomas gave the signal to surface. She kicked up, ignoring his hand on her arm, unable to slow down in her panic. She reached the surface, spat out her regulator, and yelled for the boat, her voice raspy.
“Over here! Hurry. There’s a shark!”
Beside her, Rice and Thomas broke the surface, keeping their faces below the water, watching the shark calmly.
The Zodiac fired up and drove the fifty yards to their location. The tiger shark’s fin had broken the surface of the water as it passed closer and closer by the time Lei was stroking for the boat’s hastily lowered ladder, with Rice and Thomas right behind.
Lei ripped off her fins, handing them up to waiting hands, and grabbed the chain-and-metal ladder. She hauled herself up clumsily, body suddenly heavy with the extra weight of the gear, her muscle resources exhausted. She was grateful as Pono and another guardsman grabbed her under the arms and hauled her up, then helped Rice and, finally, Thomas.
The shark swam by one more time, then sank out of view.
Lei sprawled on the deck for a moment, all her gear still on. Finally she mustered the energy to roll to the side and unzip the BCD. To her surprise, Thomas was already up and out of his gear. He lifted the tank and BCD off of her. She loosened the weight belt, finally rolling to her knees as she shed her mask.
“Thought you were going to lose it there at the last minute, Sergeant.” Thomas steadied her with a hand on her arm, his touch kind and reassuring. “Take your time before you stand. Scuba has a way of using up your energy that you don’t realize.”
“That shark spooked me.” Lei stood up the minute she was sure her knees weren’t going to fold. “I thought I was going to lose it, too. But you and Rice didn’t freak out. Thank God you were there.”
“That shark wasn’t really hungry. He might have taken a sample bite to see if anything was tasty, but he wasn’t that interested.” Thomas’s bright brown eyes were bracketed by creases from squinting into the sun; he looked a little older than her, probably mid-thirties. She liked his calm confidence and obvious competency, but he didn’t rub it in like some men would.
“I saw that mother!” Pono exclaimed, joining Lei from where he’d been occupied with moving the body, still in the mesh bag, to a more traditional black zip-up body bag. “He was huge. I’m glad you’re safe aboard. I’d have been shitting myself.”
“I just about did.” Lei tapped her O2 gauge. “Sucked all my air like a rookie. Sorry about the panic mode,” she told Thomas.
“You did well. It was a deep dive, and if you don’t go out all the time, you won’t be used to how it’s affecting your body,” Thomas said. “You should go out more. In fact, you could come out with me this weekend. Just going for a pleasure dive around a wreck off Lahaina.”
“That sounds nice. I’ll check if my husband wants to. We both got certified a couple years ago, but it’s the kind of thing that takes a big time commitment, and we’re both detectives, so we’re always working.” She smiled and shrugged, watching to see how he reacted to her mention of Stevens.
“Great.” Lei couldn’t see any difference in Thomas’s friendly demeanor at her frank mention of her husband. “Give me your number and I’ll check back with you.”
Lei rattled it off and he nodded, memorizing it. “Now what?” She indicated the bagged body.
“We get under way.” They were already doing that. Lei felt the engines thrum into life and the bow of the boat lift. Thi
s time they were heading downwind. The Zodiac seemed to ride the rolling surge.
“Dr. Gregory is meeting us with the transport vehicle at Ma’alaea Harbor,” Pono said. “They’re ready to take the body back to the morgue. Any clues about the victim’s ID?”
Lei suddenly remembered the GoPro camera, stuck in the pocket of the BCD. She hurried over and retrieved it, handing it to Pono. “Got this on the bottom. Can’t wait to see what’s on it. And I thought of something. The victim had to have got to Molokini on a boat. Can we do a lap around the back wall, see if there are any more craft there?” Lei asked Thomas.
“Good idea. I’ll ask the captain.” Thomas went into the bridge to speak to the commanding officer.
“I’d like to change. Do you have a shower?” Lei asked Rice, who was rinsing the gear with a hose attached to a freshwater tank.
“Sure.” Rice handed her the makeshift shower. She peeled her wetsuit down and rinsed off as best she could. Lei left Pono sitting beside the black-bagged body, on the phone with someone—probably updating Captain Omura, their commanding officer—and went to the tiny bathroom to change.
In the cramped space, drying her body with a thin hank of towel, she thought of Stevens again, memory sparked by how showers had always been one of their favorite places to play—and get dirty, it turned out.
Those times were nothing but hazy memories.
She could continue to handle their situation if it weren’t for the drinking. She knew why Stevens drank—to numb the flashbacks, to sleep—but that didn’t make it easier to tolerate his alcohol-reeking body falling into bed beside her at night, the repellent smell clinging to his hair, his skin. The irritability of daily hangovers was followed by withdrawal to his workshop in the evenings, where he kept the bottle.
She’d begged him to get help, to talk to Dr. Wilson, their friend the police psychologist, but after one or two visits, he’d refused. “It only makes it worse to dredge it up,” he’d told her.
A year ago Stevens had mentioned that he’d been approached to be a civilian contracted trainer for military police stationed somewhere overseas. She’d blown it off, but two months ago he’d told her he’d accepted a job offer and signed a contract with them. Lei had been so upset that she’d moved out of their bedroom into the guest room/office. “How can you leave me to carry the load? Take care of our child?” she’d ranted. “I’m not the only one you’re being selfish to!”
“I need something else to do, while I still physically can.” Stevens’s crystal-blue eyes were remote, as if seeing something in the distance, even when they were fixed on her face. “I need to do something active, and I can beat this thing.”
“This thing.” That was always what he called his problem, undiagnosed, unspoken, and all-consuming.
She hadn’t realized he was that unhappy in his work as a Maui Police Department lieutenant. Five years ago he’d been reassigned as the main trainer and coordinator for Maui’s detectives, a position he’d excelled at. She suspected job dissatisfaction wasn’t really it. He wanted to go back to a hot zone, as if somehow he could heal himself by returning to a combat situation. He’d done a tour as a marine in the Middle East right out of high school, but she hadn’t thought it affected him.
At least, early in their relationship, it hadn’t.
Lei thought it was the attacks they’d lived through here on Maui that had damaged him. Two house fires, a stabbing, and the brutal murder of his pregnant ex-wife along with a steady stream of murder cases had combined to take a toll. Still, it didn’t matter what she thought. Her husband had made that abundantly clear, and he was waiting for deployment orders any day now. Their captain had been forced to grant his request for military duty leave when he’d obtained consent from the Hawaii police superintendent, going over Omura’s head.
And still she just didn’t really believe he’d leave her and his son for some dangerous mission overseas. She was hunkered down in her corner of the house, waiting for the fit of insanity to pass. It was bound to. It had to.
Lei didn’t think she had what it took to be a parent alone and do her demanding job, too.
She dressed in the clothes she’d worn before. She wished she had some gel to tame her hair, which was going to dry into a wild tangle, but there was no help for it. She shoved the MPD ball cap on and went back onto the deck.
The Zodiac was moving at a decent clip out of the sheltered harbor. The wind hit Lei, almost ripping the cap off her head. She moved into the shelter of the wheelhouse and stood beside Pono as they hit water so deep off the back side of the atoll that it looked black in the shadows.
“A whale!” Pono exclaimed.
A humpback blew nearby, its sleek gray bulk rising to exhale a blast of fishy-smelling vapor. It was remarkably close to the steep black lava cliff of the atoll, topped with the bright green of a few hardy native plants. The Zodiac shut down its engines, abiding by the law that watercraft keep a hundred yards of distance from the gentle giants.
“All these years and I still can’t get enough of these guys,” Lei said. The whale lifted its T-shaped tail in a leisurely fashion and submerged. “Whew, did you smell its breath?”
“I know. What’s amazing is that they eat enough fish and krill in six months in Alaska, then fast for six months over here,” Pono said. “But their breath is still intense. It’s good luck to see my `aumakua today. I’ll tell Tiare our trip to Vegas is bound to be good.”
“You guys going again?” Lei frowned a little. She didn’t want to be without her friend and partner with things so difficult at home.
“Every six months, baby.” Pono and Tiare had relatives in the seemingly alternate universe of the big Hawaiian community that had sprung up in Vegas, giving it the nickname “the ninth island.” Lei sometimes worried that her partner enjoyed his blackjack a little too much when the Kaihales went on their biannual trips, but she restrained herself from anything other than a teasing comment now and then.
The Zodiac rounded a protrusion of the steep cliff, near the curve that marked the beginning of the sheltered interior bay. A sturdy inflatable bobbed, attached to a rock protruding from the atoll’s cliff-like wall. The captain cut the engine and the big craft drew abreast.
“We’ll have to keep our position by using the engines,” Thomas told Lei. “We can’t anchor here. It’s four hundred feet straight down.”
The thought of that depth beneath them gave Lei a shiver. “How can we tell if that Zodiac belongs to the victim? If we take it in, there could be divers stranded.”
“We’re running the registration. We can make some calls, too. In the meantime we’ll board it and search for ID,” Thomas said.
“Okay.”
Lei and Pono gloved up and followed Thomas down the ladder to the little craft. There wasn’t much aboard: a gallon jug of water, spare gas can for the motor, some extra scuba gear.
Lei picked up the only item that looked personal, a backpack. She took out a change of athletic-style women’s clothing and a wallet. With Pono looking on, she flipped it open. A Hawaii driver’s license with its distinctive rainbow looked up at them from the clear plastic insert.
“Danielle Phillips. Age thirty-five. Five foot six, one hundred thirty-eight pounds, brown hair and eyes.” Lei gazed at the woman’s photo, feeling a pang as she looked at the pretty, smiling face. “That physical description matches our vic. Couldn’t tell much about her looks without taking the gear off the body.”
“Registration comes back to the University of Hawaii,” a guardsman called down from the bigger craft. “That’s a staff research vessel.”
Thomas finished speaking into a small handheld radio. “Captain says we tag the vessel to contact us. Until we have confirmation that this is the victim’s watercraft, we’re going to leave it here. Wouldn’t want to strand someone who was just out for a dive.”
He took out a pad, wrote a brightly colored citation, and attached it to the motor with a loop of twine.
Lei copied
the license information and called it in to Dispatch to run, but returned the wallet to the backpack, feeling sure this was their victim.
“We’ll get these personal effects after we’ve verified that this is hers,” she told Pono. She climbed back on board the Coast Guard boat, Pono and Thomas close behind, surprised at the exhaustion pulling at her muscles. “Mind if I take a little nap on the way back?” she asked Thomas.
“Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured to a padded storage seat against the wheelhouse. “Surprised you made it this long.”
Lei felt herself soften and relax at the warm kindness in Thomas’s words. He found a padded life jacket and set it on the bench for her as a pillow.
I’m so empty inside, anyone being nice to me feels like more than it should.
“Thanks,” Lei said, and Thomas moved off to speak to Rice. She lay down on her side, her folded hands pillowed under her cheek. Her eyes fell shut on the sun lowering toward the horizon, gilding the small nearby island of Kahoolawe with gold, as the Zodiac sped back across the ocean toward Ma’alaea Harbor.
It was dark by the time Lei pulled up to the automatic gate of her home in Haiku. They’d turned the body over to the medical examiner, Dr. Gregory, at the dock. She’d dropped off the retrieved GoPro with Jessup Murioka, their tech support staff member. They’d checked in with Captain Omura, their commanding officer, and started the case’s files. Now she and Pono had taken a break to go home, eat, and change before going back into the station to work on confirming the victim’s identity.
The first twenty-four hours on a murder case were crucial. She and Pono had to keep the momentum going as long as they could.
Lei hit the gate’s remote. A ten-foot cedar section of wall retracted with a rumble. She pulled her silver Tacoma into the open garage attached to the side of their house, a single-level cement-block ranch finished tastefully with stucco and roofed in terra-cotta for a slightly Mediterranean look.
Aesthetics had been the last thing on their minds, though, when choosing the materials for the house. Their priority had been a building that was both fireproof and secure, and as it always did, arriving at the house brought a sense of safety and peace to Lei as she opened the door of her truck to the dogs’ ecstatic greetings.
