Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  He turned on his heel and walked from the room. The sound of the starch in his uniform was loud compared to the empty silence he left behind. Finally, Chazz broke the silence. “You took that very well.”

  Sergeant Handel cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling. “You didn’t mention Dr. Shih’s report, Lieutenant.”

  “No,” Cobb said “Well.” He stood up and stretched “Let’s go downstairs, shall we? We have a little time before you have to go to the airport to pick up Patria and the little one.”

  The records room was in the basement, unattended at the moment. A new file envelope lay on a green table. The envelope was thick and an unattractive orange. The white paper tag labeled it Homicide #234. Cobb hefted it in his hand for a moment before lifting the flap and peering inside. “Very nice,” he murmured, reaching in. He pulled out a handful of passports of various nationalities and fanned them out on the table.

  “What have we here?” He held one up. “Jeffrey Laurel Hudson, American, thirty-two years old.” He held the photo toward Handel “Recognize him?” he asked.

  Handel nodded “The pilot.”

  “Weren’t you there?” Chazz asked Cobb.

  “I was busy driving Mrs. Takamura to the hospital and left the preliminary investigation to Sergeant Handel, who has done a fine job by bringing the log and these passports.” He pawed through the others. “Three Americans. Two French. One Dutch, a Canadian. Very interesting. Who’s the best sailor on the island?” He directed this question at Handel, who shook his head.

  “I’m not sure. I think maybe Sammy Akeakamai’s brother Willard. He works a lot of the yacht charters out of Hanalei.”

  “Okay.” Cobb checked his watch. “Chazz, Aloha 3245 gets in in a few minutes… Are you interested in pursuing this investigation?”

  Chazz showed the edges of his teeth. “You drag me away from an interesting if terrifying dive on the big island, hustle me here in a state plane, tell me we have a mystery with seven deaths, and now you ask me that?”

  “Meet us at Nawiliwili around eight. Scott, why don’t you and I go have a chat with Sammy?”

  Chazz was wondering how he was going to get to the airport when a patrol car pulled up. The officer inside leaned across and rolled down the passenger window. “Dr. Koenig?”

  “Yes?”

  “The lieutenant asked me to take you back to the airport. To pick up your wife?”

  “Oh? Thoughtful of the lieutenant.” Chazz climbed in. The other two crossed the street to the County Building where Takamura’s former partner Sammy Akeakamai was some kind of keeper of public records.

  The County Building was never a busy place even at peak hours, but it was nearly deserted this late in the day. The high foyer echoed the sound of the front door closing behind Cobb and Handel. An administrative gloom closed around them. They walked as softly as possible to an office on the right and entered.

  Sammy Akeakamai sat behind a desk facing the wall, a telephone receiver almost lost in the folds of flesh between his ear and shoulder. His thick graying hair stuck up in tufts. He scratched on a yellow legal pad with a ballpoint pen. Cobb craned over the counter to see: a repetitive pattern of chevrons and sharks. The page was nearly full, which meant that Sammy had been listening for some time without speaking. He turned in his chair when the two policemen entered. It creaked alarmingly, and he said into the telephone, “No, no, everything’s fine. I’m still here.” He winked at Cobb.

  Mumbling noises emerged from the vicinity of his ear. His broad face remained impassive as he removed from his desk drawer a paper-wrapped toothpick, carefully peeled the paper in a thin straight line down one side, gently eased the pick from its wrapping, and inserted it carefully between his left lower bicuspid and canine He chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

  “I’ll get right on it, your honor,” he said at last. He carefully replaced the receiver and smiled at Cobb.

  “Hi, Boss. What can we do for you?”

  “What are you going to do for his honor?”

  “I forget. Something about the annual report. Made any arrests lately? I sure miss the old days. The thrill of the chase, the excitement of the arrest, all that.”

  Cobb laughed. “Jaywalking. Petit larceny, maybe.”

  Sammy looked aggrieved. “Come on,” he said. “We had some drugs here, once. I remember that. And then there was the excitement out at PACMAN, and the thing with the satellite…”

  “Well…”

  “And a murder or two. Come on. Things are dull now, admit it.”

  “We’ve got seven stiffs in the morgue, off a boat Kimiko found last night.”

  Sammy’s eyes grew round and large. He stood up and leaned over the counter. “Tell me about it.”

  “I need a sailor, Sammy. Someone who knows currents, tides, winds. Someone who can read the weather.”

  Sammy thumped his own chest. “Hey, Boss. It’s in our bones. I’m your man.”

  Cobb nodded. “Okay. But I was thinking of your brother Willard. He runs charters.”

  Sammy nodded, deflated. “Sure, he’d be pretty good. He’s on one now, though. You might find him somewhere around Lanai, reefing his sails, getting ready for dinner, which reminds me…”

  Cobb gave up. “All right, dinner. Let’s go.”

  Sammy closed up the office, and minutes later they were at the Paradise Cafe around a loaded table with cold beers in front of them.

  No one spoke as the hot and sour soup, barbecued chicken wings and dim sum, the twice-cooked pork, and rolling lettuce appeared. They ate in dedicated silence. The restaurant was a favorite with the locals, but this early it was nearly deserted. Sounds of occasional stir-fry shot from the kitchen like heat lightning. A squeaky bearing in the ancient air-conditioning gnawed at them like a toothache.

  Finally, Sammy scooped the last of his rice from its bowl and licked his chopsticks clean. He pushed plate and bowl away and waited politely until Cobb and Scott had done the same, unwrapping another toothpick, which he chewed solemnly for a moment before speaking. “All right, Boss. Give it to me.”

  Cobb chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “It’s like this. A ship drifted into Kalalono Bay yesterday. Seven bodies aboard. Time of death is unclear as yet, but rigor mortis had passed. Cause of death is also hazy, but they suffocated.”

  “So they had been dead somewhere between, say, six and thirty hours. I see what you mean.” Sammy gazed at his now-frayed toothpick. “Any signs of decomposition?”

  “On the edge, I’d guess. Dr. Shih didn’t say specifically.”

  “So rigor had just passed,” Sammy finished thoughtfully. “Cause of suffocation?”

  Cobb shrugged. Dr. Shih had refrained from doing an autopsy pending notification of next of kin, but external evidence suggested they stopped breathing and died of oxygen deprivation. Causes could range from something they ate, which could be determined by autopsy of stomach contents, to disease, poison gas, or, Dr. Shih had jokingly suggested, voodoo or black magic. “Perhaps they were prayed to death.”

  “Pathogens or toxins should leave traces. Dr. Shih will find them as soon as the decision is made to go ahead with autopsy.”

  Sammy asked why she waited.

  Cobb frowned at his hat, which he now held before him like a knight’s shield, its ludicrous device of golden plumeria blossoms on a blue, cloud-speckled sky aimed at Sergeant Handel. “Good question. There are two reasons, so far. One, we’re having a little jurisdictional dispute with the Coast Guard…”

  “Aha! Commander Shafton.”

  “Mmm. And two, there is, as yet, no evidence of crime. Which means various state and federal agencies have to approve in order to do autopsy without next-of-kin permission.”

  “I get it. So you want to know where the ship was when everyone bought it.”

  Cobb nodded.

  “Were they under power? I assume this was not a sailing ship.”

  “No sails. I’m no maritime aficionado, but it looks like some kind
of converted navy vessel to me, a minesweeper or something. Eighty-five, ninety feet. The engines were shut down. Two of the crew were working on them when they died, an older man, Dutch, and a young American girl.”

  “Right. So we assume they all died at about the same time, or they would be in different stages of postmortem. The ship drifted into the bay?”

  Again Cobb nodded. “From the west.”

  “That figures. Now this time of year the trades blow generally from the east or northeast, against the direction of the ship’s drift. The island would shelter that section of coast, though, so we can assume that it was current that brought it. Time of day?”

  “A little after five. Kimiko had dropped the kids off in Kekaha around four.”

  “Close to high tide, then. The flood current moves slowly near the shore there, but the way it comes around that little cape, it swings down the west side and back to the east along the coast, speeding up near high tide. Ebb tide reverses it back to the west with the prevailing winds, which could have been more or less northerly through the Kaulakahi Channel to southeasterly off Poipu. Things get complicated because of the terrain, but assume there wasn’t much in the way of wind.”

  “Get on with it, Sammy.” Cobb turned to Scott Handel, who had been listening intently to all this lore. “The Kukui Nut sometimes gets pedantic.”

  “Now, Boss. You need the picture filled in. You’re a landlubber.”

  Cobb held up a hand. “Okay.”

  “So the ship had drifted for around thirty hours.”

  “Or less.”

  “Or less. But not more. The current there runs at less than a knot this time of year. So she traveled a maximum of thirty nautical miles. Tides change every six hours, near shore the currents reverse with the tide change. So she was probably near the coast when she stopped.” Sammy sat back and beamed around his toothpick. His teeth were widely gapped, giving his smile a deceptive air of sardonic humor.

  “Yes, Sammy. But did she approach from the south or the north. There’s no record of her landing anywhere in the islands before this.”

  “Oh, she steamed up from the south. No doubt about that.”

  “And nobody spotted her for a day and a half, drifting back and forth off the coast?”

  Sammy shrugged. “It could happen. You could see her from the Kuhio Highway, but who pays attention? You drive along, see a ship out to sea, say, ‘Oh, how nice, a ship.’ Later, driving the other way, you see a ship. Same ship? Who knows? So you say, ‘Oh, how nice.’”

  Cobb laughed. “Okay, Okay. She was out there for up to thirty hours, drifting back and forth with the tides. And before that, she was returning from Tahiti. But why would she come to Kauai instead of Honolulu? In fact, why wasn’t she headed toward Vancouver?”

  “Ship’s log?” Sammy suggested.

  “No help— no entries for the past three days. There may be other pages missing, we can’t tell. There are gaps in the sequence.”

  “Curious.”

  “Very curious. Pages missing, perhaps. The log was written on lined paper in a three-ring binder. Anyone could have taken them out. It’s just that some days there are no entries. So we don’t know why she was headed this way. And the implications, if someone got rid of pages from the log, are ominous.”

  The silence that followed was broken abruptly by the startlingly loud and insistent beeping of Cobb’s pager. He smiled and went reluctantly to the telephone in the hallway behind the dining room. Sammy smiled broadly at Sergeant Handel. “Now tell me the truth, Sergeant,” he said softly, as soon as Takamura was out of earshot. “Is there a poison, toxin, disease or other biological threat here or not?”

  Handel was surprised. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Tut tut, young man. I am in finance, now. Expenditures are my business. An airplane, even a small one, dispatched to the Big Island to bring one Dr. Charles Koenig back to Kauai on very short notice has implications of a toxic sort, don’t it?”

  “The paramedics were worried about Mrs. Takamura. She’d gone on board to investigate— didn’t know the ship wasn’t a derelict when it drifted into the bay, so she looked it over before calling in. She touched two of the bodies and lowered the anchors. She didn’t touch anything else, but I think the lieutenant felt that Dr. Koenig might be able to help.”

  “And?”

  “And Mrs. Takamura is fine. Badly shaken for a while, but fine. She was reading someone named Hegel.”

  “Mmm. Bad sign. Dr. Koenig any help?”

  Scott smiled. “Worried about the expense?”

  Sammy shrugged “Almost three hundred dollars, county money. I write the checks.” He looked up as Cobb sank back into his seat. “What’s up, Boss? You look funny.”

  “Very strange,” Cobb said, so softly they had to lean forward to hear his next words. “That was Dr. Shih. One of our bodies has come back to life.”

  FIVE

  THE BEAST

  The air in the bowl of Nawiliwili harbor was hot and close and dead. Vacationers lay around the enormous Roman pool and panted, from time to time rousing themselves from their lethargy to order iced tea or rum drinks from the outdoor bar. On the small, narrow beach the few bathers draped towels over their faces and fell into a sun-drugged sleep. The tennis courts were deserted, heat waves rising from their green and red surfaces. The golf course was green but still.

  Narni stared down at the pool until her eyes hurt from the sun’s glare. The pool was impossibly blue, with geometric patterns laid into it in black tile. In the middle an irregular island scattered with beach chairs displayed ample racks of skin to the sun. A bestiary of monumental sculptures— smooth-flanked rabbits and hippos and the like— spat water in looping arcs over the swimmers. The brochure assured her this was the largest swimming pool in the entire state of Hawaii. Narni believed it, though this startling fact held less interest for her than the hotel’s promoters might have wished.

  She pushed her hands against the balcony railing and went back inside, pulling her beach robe around her. Enough. Enough sun. Enough sitting around her room waiting for something to happen. Enough drinking in the bar with other doctors’ wives. Enough throwing time away.

  She picked up a brochure and leafed idly through it. Mark was downstairs at some meeting or other. Radiology and AIDS or Tomography for the Timid or something. He was at the bar, laughing over the latest brain-dead jokes. He was putting his sly moves on that pediatrician from Long Beach. Or something.

  The brochure was colorful, the text crowded in a hodgepodge of typographic styles. Restaurants. Hotel floor shows. Surf contests. Flowers. Exotic plants. Tropical flora in a research setting, she saw. There were daily tours of the Douglass Research Center, a not-for-profit plant and marine research institution with an international reputation. Call for reservations. She picked up the phone. Better than waiting around here for Mark to remember he was still married.

  She looked at herself in the hotel mirror, a slightly stocky blond with the early stages of a very good tan. In her late thirties. Well, mid-thirties. What the hell.

  Her rental car was waiting.

  At the hotel entrance she examined the tourist map. After a moment’s hesitation, she headed up the hill toward Lihue, passed discount stores, a number of small and decaying shopping blocks, a furniture store advertising a perpetual going-out-of-business sale, and the County Building, then turned left onto the Kuhio Highway. Sugar cane laid out its unrealistic green against the red volcanic dirt; the mountainsides that thrust up out of the center of the island were draped in grayish-green vegetation, peaks shrouded in scattered rags of cloud.

  She leaned back as she drove and watched the scenery flow by, a tourist in paradise. Every mile took her further into her escape, a flight into a green freedom unlike any at home. The highway curved along the shoulder of the hills, displaying a continuous panorama of cane and sea, palm and lawn, eucalyptus and volcanic cone. Within the narrow confines of primary colors the variety seemed limitless:
bumps and thrusts, smooth contours and sudden surprising geographical leaps, endless variations on the color green, and beyond that the color blue. She was feeling buoyant and a little excited when she turned down the road to the Center.

  A blond guard in a surfing T-shirt leaned out holding a clipboard and asked the purpose of her visit. She told him she had read of the Center’s reputation, its contributions to the world’s understanding of tropical plants and marine biology. She said she was looking forward to this tour.

  “There are ten people on today’s tour,” the guard told her. “Usually we get professionals, botanists and biologists, sometimes amateur horticulturists. Enjoy yourself.”

  He checked her name off the list, handed her a paper badge, and showed her where to park. She wrote “Narni” on the paper and stuck it to her shirt. At the main office she joined a motley collection of middle-aged Americans with sunburns.

  “Are we all here?” asked a very serious if somewhat nearsighted young woman in a short denim skirt, looking down at a clipboard. A mingle of amused voices answered her. She counted myopically, nodded, and smiled briefly. “Right. Then let’s go, shall we?” They trailed off behind her in a ragged line.

  The DRC sprawled over a vast wedge of ground with its base at the sea and its point in the mountains; it included all the island’s types of terrain, microclimate and vegetation. Gardens displayed many kinds of tropical plants and trees, flowers and birds, as well as exhibits of tide pools and smaller marine life.

  “One of the missions of the Douglass Research Center,” the guide announced, “is to investigate potentially useful drugs we might be able to extract from marine plants and animals. We examine everything from sea slugs and puffer fish to sponges and corals. This building is relatively new. The DRC started as a botanical garden then became, because of Mr. Douglass’s bequest, a center for biological research, including molecular and cellular biology. Now we have added the investigation into Nature’s Bounty to our mandate.”