by Rob Swigart
“Dr. Silver was at this meeting?”
Chazz nodded, a gesture nearly invisible in the growing darkness. “He’s old-fashioned; a conservative. He was in favor of freedom.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I’m in favor of freedom, too; with responsibility, though. There is enormous good to be gained from recombinant DNA. Research should not be curtailed, but it should be done responsibly. The guidelines help define what is responsible.”
“I see.”
The emergency crew appeared up the trail carrying the two litters. The bodies were covered. Light was nearly gone by the time they loaded them into the helicopter. The rotors started to whine up the scale before everyone was on board. The pilot was in a hurry to get out of the swamp before dark.
As they lifted off, one of the paramedics said, “I’ve picked up injured hikers this way, but never anything like this. Jesus.” The last word was drowned in the roar of the engine. The helicopter tilted forward, turned on its axis and lifted abruptly over the trees.
Chazz looked down. It seemed as if there were no life at all in the darkness below.
Then they crossed a low ridge and he could see the lights of traffic on the coast road, and to the west the lights of Hanapepe, which disappeared behind them as they swung east toward Lihue.
Above them the stars were shining fiercely.
“You haven’t said much,” Chazz offered later, as Takamura was driving him home.
Takamura nodded, but remained silent for some time. He turned off the highway onto the Koloa Road, through a tunnel of huge eucalyptus trees. The stars flickered behind the branches. Chazz could see Sirius flare to the south, the dog always chasing at Orion’s heels.
“Your van must be at the lab. You want to go there?” Takamura said at last.
“No. I’d just as soon go home.”
After a silence, Takamura said, “I think of Charlie Chan: ‘Impossible to prepare defense until direction of attack is known.’ I don’t know what we are dealing with here. Outbreak of a new disease or random deaths occurring with uncharacteristic frequency? Neither of these is particularly pleasing to a police officer. If this is a new disease, at least it isn’t a crime, but there may be panic. The papers will be out tomorrow, and there will be stories on all these deaths, including these two today. And these two certainly are criminal. Mutilation like that requires a special kind of human. From outside the island, I would hope. If there was a cult like that here, surely we would have heard about it.”
“Akua.”
“Oh, the little boy. Yes, akua. Come down and eat brains of dead people. Perhaps we have a brain-eating cult here. The police academy in Honolulu had no suggestions about brain-eating cults. There is some racial violence in these islands, Chazz. Too many tourists, too much unemployment, overdevelopment. We have tried to minimize all that here in Kauai. But racial violence is simple— anger, resentment, envy. This is more complicated. I don’t believe in akua.”
“Ghosts? Zombies? Maybe kahuna magic. Silver says they can pray people to death.”
“Yes,” Takamura said. “I have heard that.”
“Suggestion, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
“By the way,” Chazz said. “Does the word ‘lolo’ mean anything to you?”
Takamura thought. “A Hawaiian word, most likely. Doesn’t mean much to me, though, why?”
Chazz shrugged in the darkness. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Something Dewilliter said the other day. He said something about ‘lolo.’ At least, that’s what it sounded like.”
“Hm. He’s the impressionable young man? Rimless glasses. Rather wild talker, I think. I’ll check with Sammy later. Then there is your traffic accident. I’d like to know who he was. Surely not Ronald Smith from Indianapolis. Did you find anything in Dr. Shih’s samples?”
“I’m not sure. There was something that didn’t feel right in the electron microscope study this morning. There was plant material there, of course, but I don’t believe that it was connected with the man’s death. I think the pollen was a mistake. It was something else that I saw. It looked like an empty bacteriophage.”
“You lost me again.”
“Looks like a lunar lander with a stinger. It sticks a tail through the cell wall and injects its own DNA through it. Then it’s empty. Sometimes the bacterium is fooled, thinks the foreign DNA is its own. Like I say, that’s what it looked like, but such things are not really uncommon. I’ll have to do a lot more research on this, study the samples a lot more. That’s why I think you need people from Atlanta. It might be a disease. It might be nothing.”
They drove in silence for a while. Then Chazz said, “Tell me something. Why do you quote Charlie Chan all the time? Shinawa says you see too many racist movies. He says Charlie Chan is a stereotype.”
Takamura considered this question. “It began, I believe, as a kind of irony. The fact is, I loved all detective movies when I was a kid, even Charlie Chan. I saw so many of them so many times that I could quote him all the time. Then it amused me to be a Japanese detective who quoted a Chinese detective who was played in the movies by a series of actors, not one of them oriental. Now, you see, I find some quotations very apt. For instance, Charlie Chan says, ‘Mind like parachute, only function when open.’”
“I see,” Chazz said.
“I hope all these events are not related to one another,” Takamura said. Then, “Sammy will be picking the doctor up later tonight.”
“I hope I’m wrong, but I think you’re going to need him.”
18
It was early morning; Chazz jogged along the roadside to the Douglass Research Center. He worked his lips and spat. His mouth was gritty.
The murdered kids had been young. The bodies were young. The faces were gone. They were anonymous without faces. The skulls had been broken open with a rock. The rock had been set carefully beside the boy. Hair and blood were still stuck to it. It was a smooth oval rock with a bluntly pointed end, the kind often used to crack open coconuts.
The ancient volcano of Wai’ale’ale was crowned with clouds, but the sky overhead was faultless, as clear as it had been late last night when he watched Sirius fticker through the eucalyptus. Already it was growing warm, with that sense of indrawn breath damp earth often had in the tropics. He trotted on the shoulder, listening to the whisper of sugar cane. Many of the fields had been harvested, the red dirt turned now in furrows. Other fields had new shoots. The green was brilliant in this early sun.
From time to time the dew-soaked webs of wolf spiders sparkled between sugar canes. The wolf spiders were small-bodied, long-legged arachnids which sat in the middle of their webs with legs held together in pairs so they seemed to be four-legged and a good three or four inches across. The webs had caught more sun than prey.
His blood moved sluggishly as he ran. Gradually, though, his head cleared. Fear fell back as he ran. There were more than thirty thousand people on this island. Six deaths out of thirty thousand was not many. New viruses were rare, homicide even rarer, and cults, in the end, did little damage to people outside their own membership. The two bodies yesterday must have belonged to a cult. Some kind of ritual sacrifice to Pele or Lono.
He began to believe it.
The kid in the guard shack was asleep when Chazz stopped, panting, beside it. Once he caught his breath, he rapped on the glass.
“What?” The kid’s head jerked up. “Oh, Dr. Koenig. I musta fallen asleep.”
“Yeah. Dull night?”
The kid grinned. “Yeah, but the surf’s gonna be up today, Dr. K. That’ll make up for the dull night. Another shitty day in paradise, eh?”
“Looks to be, all right. So how do you take them, these shitty days?”
“When you live in paradise, you take it one day at a time. That’s what we say.”
“Okay,” Chazz said. “Just don’t get eaten by sharks.”
“Oh, no.” The kid laughed. He gestured at his surfboard, leaning a
gainst the back of the shack.
“Terrific.” Chazz waved, and jogged on down the road toward the sprawling laboratory complex that had been remodeled from old worker barracks. Behind him the kid settled back into his chair. Slowly his chin dropped once more onto his chest. Surfing took a lot out of you.
As Chazz let himself into the building, he thought about the positive relationship between benign climate and general friendliness.
No one was around. He snapped on the hall lights and walked toward his office, pausing every now and then to look at the old photographs hanging on the wall. There were pictures of sugar mills with rail cars and open touring automobiles of 1910 vintage. Men in wing collars and handlebar mustaches leaned on the hoods or against the sides of old steam locomotives. Horse-drawn cane carts were caught by the camera, their drivers staring stiffly into the lens; volcanic rock gardens; an ancient wooden hotel with a broad porch. Rows of Japanese peasants from the 1880s hand-tilling the thick soil. Some of the photos went back 120 years.
Chazz paused, his key out, at his office door, then changed his mind and went to the library to check his E-Mail.
He rocked in the carrel’s chair while the modem autodialed the Honolulu Telenet number. It rang, chunked as it answered; he heard the high-pitched carrier tone, and the computer logged on. There was a message from Patria. He sagged in his chair.
Patria was arriving that evening. Aloha.
Chazz stared at the screen for several minutes watching the square cursor blink on and off. Patria had left Yucatan. Was it her scientific curiosity alone that drew her to Hawaii?
He pushed back his chair and paced. Suddenly he shouted, a kiai that shook the walls, and sat down to compose his reply. He would meet her, yes. He looked forward to seeing her. He hesitated just a moment, then signed it, “Love, C.” He decided in that moment that she was coming not out of curiosity but to see him. This would be another chance for the two of them.
He’d have to get back to the condo sometime today to clean up. Meantime he should take another look at those samples. There might be more empty phages.
He was preoccupied when he opened his office door, and it took some moments before it sank in.
The room was a shambles. Papers were strewn everywhere, his desk was tilted against the wall, drawers hanging out. Books and journals were torn out of the bookcases and scattered.
The window was open. He stepped cautiously through the room, trying to comprehend what had happened. He had nothing of value in here, no secrets.
He leaned out the window and looked at the ground. A bed of lantana bushes grew along the side of the building here. The plants were trampled under the window. Maybe the police could make something of the footprints. Looking along the building, he could see the entire bed was trampled. It appeared the other offices on this side of the building had been burgled as well.
They were not specifically after him, then.
His elation of a few minutes ago was gone, replaced by a feeling of outrage. It was rape, violation; even though this was not his home he felt a smoldering anger in the pit of his stomach.
He took a scrap of paper from the floor, folded it around the receiver and punched in Takamura’s number with the tip of a pencil. Later he would find out that this precaution was pointless, but his reaction indicated a change that had just taken place in his life.
19
The newspaper headlines seemed uncertain which death to feature, but the girl by the Slide had been a tourist, and hers was a spectacular murder. That pushed her into a banner headline.
The overall effect of the front page was disastrous. TOURIST DEAD IN FREAK TRAFFIC ACCIDENT; VISITOR DIES fell into three column inches on the lower left; UNKNOWN MAN FOUND DEAD got a full column down the right side; DIVER’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH and WELFARE WOMAN DIES got short bits at the bottom. A file photo of the Slide with a white circle around where the bodies had been found filled front center under the six-column head. The photograph had been taken when the Slide was something of a tourist attraction, and had been cropped in order to remove the unwanted happy picnickers Takamura could remember from the Visitor’s Bureau brochure. The words death, dies, or dead appeared on the front page five times in 18-point type or larger.
Takamura dropped the paper onto his desk, turned so Strachey, the man from the Centers for Disease Control, could see it.
“There,” he said. “‘Events explode suddenly, like firecrackers in the face of innocent passerby.’”
“What?” The young epidemiologist was on his first field investigation. He was busy reading the stories, but the policeman’s tone had put his last sentence in quotes, and he thought he should ask.
“Charlie Chan,” Takamura said wearily.
“Oh. I meant what events exploded suddenly. Surely this is a weekly newspaper. All this didn’t happen at once.”
“No,” Takamura agreed. “Over three days. Do your newspapers usually look like this? All this carnage?”
“More or less.” The doctor shrugged. “I come from a large city. This looks like an ordinary day to me.”
“I see.”
“Still,” the man continued, “so many deaths at once is unusual. The first step would be a talk with the medical examiner.”
Takamura nodded. “She’s a bit busy this morning, Dr. Strachey,” he said drily.
Irony was lost on the doctor, who glanced at his watch.
Even after only five hours sleep following his long flight via Honolulu, he seemed fresh and bouncy. “Right. But it’s after seven. If we’re dealing with an epidemic, we’d better get busy, eh?”
Takamura put both hands palm down on his desk. “Right,” he said. The phone rang. He picked it up in a continuation of the same gesture.
Chazz told him about the burglary.
Takamura glanced at the headlines upside down on his desk. He couldn’t see any connection to all those deaths. “I’ll send someone over. It’s most likely a routine break-in. They happen too often, even here. I’ll send Sammy, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And Chazz, once you’re done with Sammy, would you come into town, to the morgue. The CDC man is here, and we’ll be talking to Dr. Shih. Bring the slides and anything else you can; I expect he’d like to take a look.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Jesus, what a mess.”
“Yeah.” Takamura disconnected, then called Sammy Akeakamai at home. Sammy agreed to get up despite the hour. For the lieutenant bwana sahib.
“Let’s go,” Takamura said to Dr. Strachey.
It was a glorious day. Dr. Strachey was clearly pleased with his first assignment. They stood on the steps of the county hospital. Dr. Shih had demanded ten minutes to finish up. “It’s gorgeous here,” Strachey said, making a faintly repugnant sound as he inhaled deeply through his nose. “God, the flowers. I hope this is a long assignment. I’d like to stay here awhile.”
“Quite all right,” Takamura assured him. “We like it here, too.”
“Do the victims have anything in common?”
“The first man, still a John Doe, was a drifter, lived in a homemade tin shack at the end of a dirt road. Heroin addict. The diver lived in Wailanai, a little village near Hanalolo. That’s on the south side, about ten miles from John Doe. There was a small stash of cocaine in his boat, traces in his body. Different drug, but both users. We had the freak traffic accident the same day. And a woman near Hanalei, on the north side, on welfare, no known drugs, harmless. She had a small garden. It rains a lot on the north side, a different— what do you call it? –microclimate. An unreliable witness spoke of akua, monsters, who ate brains of dead people, and an old car. It doesn’t mean much yet.
“All these people, except the traffic accident, died in a similar way. Dr. Shih can fill you in on that. They didn’t appear to know one another. We had two apparently ritual murders yesterday. Their brains were stolen. Akua? Haha. There have been rumors of a cannibal cult in the hills; we do have some former hippies up there
, people from the mainland, haoles. They came to form squatters’ communes in paradise, you understand. I suppose there were a lot of drugs in that group once, but they haven’t made any trouble in a long time. The park police used to go into Na Pali to run them out. They’d homestead up there on park land. This is a small island, but there are a lot of very inaccessible places here. It’s easy to hide. Maybe they’ve developed a taste for brains. Could they have caught this disease? Could it have driven them mad? Problem is, the rumors all appeared since yesterday, which makes it a pretty thin theory, but I don’t have any fat ones. Does that answer the question? I thought not.”
The first tentative sense that this was not going to be a routine assignment nudged at Dr. Strachey’s awareness. He frowned.
The expression was not lost on Lieutenant Takamura. “Come on,” he said. “Maybe we can go in there now.”
Dr. Shih was working on the boy, speaking into the microphone hanging nearby. Her gloves were slick with gore as she poked around in the chest. Takamura and Strachey watched for a while until she finished, turned off the mike and turned to them.
“I’m getting tired, Takamura. I want a vacation. You are sending me too many of these.” She gestured birdlike at the bodies.
“Dr. Strachey, Centers for Disease Control. He’s an epidemiologist, right?” Takamura looked at him for confirmation. Strachey nodded. “Nice to meet you,” he said. It sounded odd since he was standing on the other side of the room. Dr. Shih was gowned and gloved and clearly not pleased to see him.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “The girl’s throat was cut, carotid artery, larynx, everything, quite swiftly. A very sharp knife. The male, however, died of the same thing as the others before he was mutilated. His was not a ritual death, unless there are some bizarre cannibals living up there in the hills; and if there are, they are very likely eating infected brains. Dr. Koenig’s hunch was right. There is considerable neurological damage in the cortices of the first three victims.”
