Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  Whoever did this to him put out the tendrils of a spreading evil. It was fear. It was death. He would not be a soldier in some obscure war. He would be a dark force that sucked the soul from this man, who would never truly live again. Or from the girl, young and innocent, who had beliefs and had lived for those beliefs, and now had them taken away along with her identity. Tracy Ann might recover. There was a chance, since she had not died like the others. But she would never be the same. She would grow around a scar, and it would change the shape of her life forever. She had been touched by the evil, and it might kill her yet.

  Dr. Shih took her finger away and stood up. She would have to tell the others what she knew.

  This man was not the man they thought he was.

  For the first time in years Dr. Shih felt fear.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  LOVE AND ASHES

  Chazz Koenig let the hot water flow over his beard and soak through the gauze and tape on his ribs. His eyes were closed. Steam filled his nose and throat. He had not known how soiled he felt, how violated by the fight in the fog, how defeated.

  He did not hear the shower door open, did not feel cool air strike his skin. Only when she touched him did he turn and open his mouth, streaming, and she reached up to him and held him in the wet, and they were two bodies that felt only the places where they touched.

  It was a desperate act between them. He said nothing, and then it was no longer desperate but calm, and they rode side by side, at anchor together, holding hands, and he found himself on the floor of the bathroom of this anonymous condominium with his wife beside him and he thought to ask about the child.

  “Asleep,” she murmured, turning to the hollow of his neck and laughing because the hair of his beard tickled her, and it seemed as if it was all right again.

  Later when the child was awake, they went out into the bright blue afternoon and walked along the road. The shops of Kapaa were open to the world. Bright cloth flapped in the gentle breeze by the souvenir stands and T-shirt stores. The open market displayed papaya and pineapple, taro and mango. Kapaa was growing, like all of the island’s towns, swelling with money and visitors. The old wooden storefronts were vanishing, replaced by modern mini-malls and fast-food restaurants. Pizza and fried chicken were replacing fish and poi and Chinese food. The highway was clogged with traffic headed north to Princeville and Haena.

  It was bright and sunny and serene, all of it. No cloud troubled the sky. Beyond the shops, the green slopes of Waialeale were streaked with the first shadows as the earth rolled on.

  “I’m glad it’s over,” Patria said, holding her husband’s hand and pushing the stroller Orli sucked her thumb and looked around with what might have been curiosity.

  “Over. Yes.”

  She looked at him. “You doubt it?”

  “I doubt everything.” He was not smiling as they walked.

  “Something’s bothering you still.” She did not look at him again, and the words were flat, without inflection, but certain. “Why did those men attack you?”

  “I thought it was because I countered them in the disco. I thought it was pride, they had lost face or something. But they left me to die, so I think it was something more. I think they were sent to kill me.”

  She did look then. “You catching my paranoia?”

  “It was too professional. Too deliberate. It wasn’t a bar fight, a scrap for the hell of it. There’s something deeper going on here, more than a sick man killing people.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was afraid of that. I hoped it was just Hobart. Now he’s in the hospital and out of action. I was hoping it was all over. So, uh-oh.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it is. Maybe now he’s out of it, it is all over. He ate Jimsonweed and put himself out of it.”

  They walked on, but the shadows down the slope of the mountain were reaching toward them, and there was a chill in the air.

  Kimiko was waiting for them at the tiny Japanese teahouse, and they had tea, and it was almost as if something were healing. The pine grew twisted against the wooden wall, and the fish floated near the surface of the water and let their scales flash in the failing light, and no one spoke very much because there was this thing among them that was a hope that it was over and a fear that it was not. Then Cobb Takamura arrived, and they knew it was not over at all.

  He sat down without a word and spread some faxed photographs on the table.

  A demented black-and-white landscape, filled with steam and smoke and fire. Trees stripped of life, burned.

  And one thing that was not a tree but had once been a man.

  “Who is it?” Patria asked, but the fear was back, and while she might not know who it was that appeared half buried in the cooling lava, one arm and what must have been his head burned black and unrecognizable, she knew in that place inside herself where she kept all the bad knowledge that the man in the hospital was not the killer.

  “We don’t know. It might have been a mysterious man who sometimes calls himself the Phoenix, or Phénix. A yellow Toyota found near the road had been rented to a Jean Prévert. On the other hand, this man here might have been Alain Duvalois, a French officer,” Cobb said. “Or he might have been killed by Duvalois, whose rental car was found in downtown Kona in a No Parking zone. However,” Cobb shuffled up another faxed photograph, “this was found on the body.”

  Kimiko leaned over the fax. “What is it?”

  “A passport. It belongs to Jean Prévert, salesman, forty-two years old, citizen of France, born in Rouen. The passport, what you can see of it, proves he has visited Haiti, Mexico, and French Polynesia. The passport was, of course, badly charred, yet the identity was curiously clear. We won’t know who died for sure until we get dental results back from the Sureté, but at the moment it looks as if it was Prévert.”

  “Someone killed him and threw him into the lava?” Patria asked.

  Cobb took his hat off and held it in his two hands as if it contained an offering, as if he were asking something of the universe. “Someone, yes. Duvalois? If so, he’s disappeared, leaving his rental car parked in a No Parking zone. He got a six-dollar ticket.” Cobb shook his hat a little, checked its contents, and put it to one side. “They also found a notebook. Locey called, he’s with the sheriffs’ department for the South Kona District.”

  “We met him,” Patria said quietly. She had her finger in Orli’s mouth, and the child had fallen asleep. Patria did not look at the photographs on the table. One of those indefinite shapes had been a human being.

  “A notebook?” Chazz said.

  “And a gun.”

  Kimiko Takamura had said nothing. She sat collected inside some kind of calm all her own. “A gun?”

  “Yes. One of those composites, no metal. Brought in from Tahiti, we think. But who brought it?”

  “Duvalois or Prévert.”

  Kimiko followed her thought. “He’s dead, then? The man who killed the crew, that Richards woman, and the other one. He’s dead.”

  “It looks that way. Duvalois dropped his notebook, and one of them dropped the gun.” Cobb shuffled all the faxed photographs together, put them back in their manila envelope, pushed the metal tabs through their hole and folded them flat to seal the package. “But that leaves the man in the hospital. Who is he? We thought he was Hobart, that Hobart was our man, but Dr. Shih just told me the man in the hospital is definitely not Hobart. Don’t ask me why. She just said it, ‘He isn’t the one. He’s a victim,’ she said. And then this fax came, and it looks like she was right.”

  “She would be,” Kimiko said.

  “The notebook?” Chazz urged.

  “‘I now gaze solemnly at stone wall.’ The notebook tells us our man also calls himself Phénix. What is curious is that Duvalois wrote it in English. The notebook was lying on a block of new lava. It must have been like hell in there. Someone saw two cars driving toward the eruption. Thought it was strange and reported it. Time Locey got
there, there was only one car. So he hiked in. A good man, Locey. Thick smoke still, gradually dying off. The eruption is taking a small break. Otherwise he never would have found the book. He thought Duvalois must’ve sat on this block for a while, in the smoke, and written in the book, then lost it or left it. Locey took it and went looking for Duvalois. There was a lot of smoke and mist, he said, bad visibility, so he wasn’t sure what he found when he found it. But he took pictures.” Cobb tapped the envelope.

  “Awful,” Patria said “Half buried like that.”

  “Yes. They’re trying to dig him out. The stuff is still hot, though. I don’t think it’s a pleasant job. The body was badly burnt.”

  “Please.”

  “Locey found the body before he found the gun. One of them had dropped the gun or thrown it away— it couldn’t have been much use in all that smoke anyway. They struggled, we have to assume that, and judging by the passport, it seems Duvalois won.”

  There was a silence. Chazz felt the cocoon of love he had wrapped around himself and Patria turning to ashes. He had noticed what Cobb Takamura had implied. The silly quotes he used from Charlie Chan sometimes revealed what he could not say himself. He was staring at a stone wall.

  “You don’t know where he is,” Chazz said. “Duvalois.”

  “No. He’s disappeared. He’d been following our man, he knew him, knew who he was and what he had done. He wanted to get to him before we did. Prévert visited a Kahuna named Waialani O’Brien. He has drop-in students from time to time. Almost always from the city of Los Angeles. None there now. Waialani says the man told him he was a student of Huna from Los Angeles. He knew the metaphysical jargon. He was fascinating, says Waialani O’Brien, but his aura was dark.”

  “So, Mr. Takamura, who was Prévert or Phénix?’’ Kimiko asked.

  “A man with many names and a mission,” Cobb answered seriously. “He hated women. He killed without remorse. He manipulated things from a distance. He once worked for the French government. He had Queneau killed by remote control. There was some connection between Queneau and Phénix’s mother. That was in the notebook. Just the words: Phénix’s mother, Queneau. An equation. LeBlanc is checking into it, but I don’t hold out much hope. Queneau is dead, and LeBlanc is not being… vigorous in his pursuit of solutions. The French don’t really want this solved. Not the way we do.”

  Cobb put his hat back on and sat back in his chair. His face was deep in shadow, gathered in the sockets of his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks.

  “What else?” Chazz asked finally.

  Takamura looked at him blankly.

  “Come on,” Chazz said irritably. “Relatives and friends of the victims. Motives and methods, access, all that. Why did this guy kill them all?”

  Cobb Takamura sighed. “All right.” He pulled a folded sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and flattened it on the table, on top of the manila envelope. “They all had relatives. Tracy Ann has parents, for example. They were here. I ruled them out as suspects.”

  “We know who did it,” Patria protested.

  “Yes. But we don’t know why. Suppose someone hired this creep to kill the crew. We have to take that into account.”

  A woman in a dark-blue silk kimono appeared with a fresh pot of green tea. She bowed deeply when presenting it, and Kimiko spoke to her in rapid Japanese. Cobb looked pained. His Japanese was not as fluent as his wife’s and it bothered him, though he never said so.

  The woman went back inside, and Cobb continued. “We have a list of twenty-six close relatives of our dead activists and a substantial number of political and social organizations. Russell Tichenor, the captain, had an estranged wife who had moved back to Calgary. Did she hire this man to kill her husband? It seems unlikely. She has taken no alimony and has established herself in a new relationship, but we can’t rule her out entirely. Jeffrey Hudson was originally from North Carolina, where he had a proper conservative-Democratic upbringing and belonged to the country club set. That is where he learned to sail and navigate ships. Did he make powerful enemies? Clarence Locke, the black man, was a merchant seaman for ten years before he got into Gaia. He had a conviction for burglary when he was young, but nothing recent. Tracy Ann dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley in her junior year. Jacqueline Guillaume, a prominent French left-wing activist for environmental causes, had a son. She was a forceful television advocate and had articles written about her, although she was not well known in this country. Certainly she could have been a political target. We tried to contact the son, without success. No one knows where he is, but the authorities in France are looking. Gottwalls, the engineer, was a bachelor with no known family. No hint of anything to make him a specific target, no enemies, that sort of thing. Noel Taviri, the Tahitian, was active in the Polynesian separatist movement, much disliked by the French authorities. He was a likely target, except we live in a civilized world where political assassination is not allowed.”

  “You’re joking. Taviri probably was the target,” Patria said. She had pulled Orli into her lap and was gazing down into her sleeping face. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  Cobb looked at her quickly. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because of his name—Phénix. And because you don’t know where Duvalois is. And because you don’t have dental records back yet.”

  “We have his passport so he must be dead. By the way, Chazz, he thought you were dead.”

  Chazz was startled. “Me?”

  “The notebook,” Cobb said. “Phénix/Prévert sent the four men after you. He didn’t know you survived.”

  Patria put the sleeping child back in the stroller. “Why would he want to kill Chazz?” Her voice shook a little.

  “I’m not sure,” Cobb said slowly. “But I think he was afraid of him, and of you. He was killing people he thought might figure out who he was, might identify him. As Hobart he snooped around the police investigation. The Garden Isle wrote you and Chazz up, said you two were working on the case. The article mentioned your knowledge of cultures, that Chazz was a biochemist. He counted on keeping everyone off balance and spooked by his voodoo booga-booga. He was only afraid of scientists.”

  “Why wasn’t he afraid of you?” Kimiko asked him. There was something prim in the way she spoke, as if she didn’t approve of someone who didn’t fear her husband.

  Cobb shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t understand why he stayed around. His job should have been over, but he stayed in Hawaii. A sane person would have left.”

  “Either he wasn’t sane or he had something else to do.” Kimiko still spoke in her flat inflectionless lilt. The lack of emotion made Patria shudder. She put her hand protectively on the handle of Orli’s stroller.

  Takamura nodded. “Maybe both. Taxeira doesn’t know who killed those two women, but they were strangled by a pro – Phoenix, a man with a sick compulsion? And if he had another job, he may have had help, accomplices. We have people watching the airport and the harbor. Commander Shafton has assured me the Coast Guard is keeping a special watch for small boats.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “Ah. Sarcasm, Patria. Yes, we still do not have great confidence in Commander Shafton, but he’s finally stepped aside. We may have missed something on the ship. Remember that smudge on the wall? I think it was a trace of the powder we found on their feet. I think it came from somewhere, and that somewhere may still be aboard. Meissner’s lawsuits finally got results. Gaia is taking possession tomorrow, so if we’re going to find anything, it’ll have to be tonight. I’d like you two to come along.”

  “Okay. When?” Chazz asked.

  “How about now?”

  Kimiko said, “I’ll take Orli, if you like.”

  “You know what it means?” Patria said, handing Orli to her friend.

  Kimiko said, “What?”

  “Phenix. The Phoenix, the legendary bird that dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes,” Patria shuddered. “It would be a damned good thing if he�
�s really dead this time.”

  The ship floated in a limbo between light and darkness. Black rust streaked her sides.

  The dock was crowded. Tall lights threw shadows into the deepening twilight. Soon they would be harsh white and bottomless black. The police car Sergeant Handel brought was parked on an angle, its headlights casting dim circles on the ship’s sides. Yellow police tape blocked the gangway.

  Handel had a supply of heavy-duty flashlights. “Ship’s generators aren’t working,” he said. He removed the tape and they climbed aboard.

  It was a depressing trip through the cold metal shadows inside. The aquariums were empty, the instruments dead. Shafton, dressed in crisply pressed slacks and a white shirt, followed them without speaking. His irritation showed in his eyes, in the set of his lips pressed into a thin disapproving line across the lower part of his wide bleached face.

  In the companionway by the cabins, he said shortly, “I don’t know what you’re looking for. We both had our people go over this ship.”

  “Yes,” Cobb agreed blandly. All his irritation with the officer was gone. “But we did not look it over ourselves.”

  Shafton said nothing, but his thin lips vanished completely into a line.

  As they walked through the ship, their flashlights swept in wide irregular arcs around the metal walls. Their feet clattered on the metal grid in the engine room. The atmosphere was damp, sweaty, and confined; their voices echoed and rebounded in the small hold. They spoke in clipped, brief bursts.

  The tour was unproductive. No new clues leaped at them, turned up under the cabinetry, appeared suddenly in places already searched. They were making their way out again when Shafton cleared his throat. “You might take a look behind the inspection panels,” he suggested. “There’s a space between the inner and outer hulls. For wiring, pipes, that sort of thing.” He looked a little sheepish. “It’s possible to hide things.”

  “Your men would have done that, Commander,” Cobb said, his voice carefully neutral.

  “They didn’t think of it, I’m afraid.”