Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3)

by Swigart, Rob

  By the time they reached the highway, the rain was falling heavily and Chazz had to slow down. He could barely see up the road to the east through the oncoming sheets of rain, and when he did finally make the turn west, a car emerged out of the downpour and slid at him with a squeal of brakes just as Chazz was accelerating. When the moment was over without damage, the other driver leaned on his horn.

  “He was going too fast,” Chazz muttered, but he drove carefully the rest of the way.

  When he reached the entrance to the DRC, the rain had slackened and a blue line was visible to the east. The wind still played around the van, which rocked gently as he descended down the driveway after the guard waved him through.

  Patria looked at the shafts of sun slashed across the wooded slopes and open patches. “Maybe it will turn out all right after all,” she said, looking at her husband with a smile.

  “I hope so. I do have to take a look at these samples.”

  “I know.”

  He parked and she picked up Orli out of her car seat. “Come on, Kiddo. Let’s go for a walk. Maybe I’ll find out something about family patterns.” She pulled the stroller from the back and fastened Orli in the seat.

  “Come by in an hour or so,” Chazz called after her.

  She waved cheerily and pushed the baby away. The small wheels rattled on the gravel drive, and Chazz could just hear the child gurgle with delight at the jostling.

  Under the microscope, it was a powder. Grayish. He prepared a sample for the scanning electron microscope and determined it was a complex mixture of organic and inorganic dusts. It was rather pretty but otherwise uninformative.

  In the corridor he ran into Sy, the graduate assistant he had for the semester from UCLA. “Got the samples all stored away, Dr. K.,” Sy told him. “I ran an assay on some of the plants like you asked. The electrophoresis plates are on your desk.”

  “I got them, thanks Sy. They looked very clean. Good job.”

  Sy glowed. “How’s Plato?”

  Chazz shook his head. “I’ll have to find him a real home soon. Listen, Sy, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “These samples. There’s a lot of organic debris of one kind or another. I wonder if you could check it out for me, see what’s in here.”

  Sy raised his eyebrows. The quizzical expression that resulted was comical under his bushy shock of tightly kinked hair. His glasses magnified his eyes, too. He was a tall, skinny redhead with a very keen mind and a talent for lab work, though, and Chazz trusted him.

  “Sure thing. This about the Death Ship?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The box has Wilcox Hospital printed on it. I assumed it might be from the M.E. You working on a case after all?”

  “Just helping out. Want to take care of that now?”

  Sy started. “Oh. Yeah, yeah, sure. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?”

  Chazz shook his head. “I have an idea or two, but I’d rather not say.”

  “Okay. I’ll call if I find anything.” Sy headed down the corridor, carrying the box as if it contained the last fertile egg of an endangered species.

  The phone was ringing when Chazz got back to his office.

  “Hello,” Cobb said. “I thought you might be interested to learn that Taxeira has asked me to lend a brief hand to his investigation. Dr. Richards, the radiologist from Santa Barbara, says his wife left a note saying she took the DRC tour yesterday. She never came back. He was at a panel discussion on bone scans at the time. I’m on my way over to see if we can find the murderer.”

  “He’s here?”

  There was a pause. “We found the mysterious Frenchman’s luggage. There are suggestions he may have been killed as well. Perhaps they met someone at the Center. Someone who works there.”

  EIGHT

  INVESTIGATION

  “Calcified material. Aromatics. Various complex organic compounds. And I do mean various. Dozens of different chemical substances. You’d have to send it to the mainland to get a precise list. We have the facilities, I suppose, but we don’t have the staff. Anyway, it’s a mess of pottage. Where did this stuff come from?” Sy was waving a computer printout in the air.

  “Pottage is a meat stew. Are you suggesting…?”

  “No, no, it was a figure of speech, for Christ’s sakes. But look at all this stuff…”

  “What kind of calcified material?” Chazz interrupted. He turned back from his office window and looked over at Cobb Takamura with raised eyebrows. Sy was an enthusiast, hard to reign in sometimes.

  Sy shrugged this time, though “I’d say bone.”

  There was a silence. Chazz looked out the window again. There were no murderers out there, surely. The lantana was blooming its small designer colors. The sky he could see from his office was dark: Rain was coming back. Patria and Orli would get caught in it if they didn’t get inside soon.

  “What kind of bone?” Takamura asked. His voice was dreamy, as if the answer were not important.

  Sy nodded energetically. “Yes, yes. What kind of bone. Exactly!”

  “Well?”

  He shrugged. “Probably human.”

  Cobb nodded as if he expected that answer.

  “So.” Sy said expectantly. “Where?”

  “Where did the powder come from?” Cobb said. “Feet.”

  Chazz and Sy must have both looked comically mystified, because Cobb gave a short bark that passed as a laugh and grinned. “Feet,” he repeated, as if speaking to children. “Bare feet.”

  “Feet?” Chazz said.

  “Yes. The victims’ feet. Not all the victims, understand. Just the ones with bare feet.”

  “What victims are we speaking of here? I thought the so-called Death Ship was listed as an accident at sea or something. Isn’t that what the Coast Guard…”

  Cobb snorted loudly in uncharacteristic derision. “Shafton! That man… well. They’ve tramped all over the ship, moved everything around, put their fingerprints all over the walls and furniture, and generally mucked up the entire ship. Found chalk dust on several of the walls, including the drawing of a skull. Could have been there for years, some bored sailor on a long cruise maybe. Now, as detective Chan of Honolulu police would say, ‘Our evidence is hazy, like flowers seen in pool.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they were killed. The powder proves it.”

  “It does?” Sy caught his breath and leaned forward. Too many Sherlock Holmes stories in his youth, Chazz decided.

  “Sure,” Cobb said.

  “How?”

  Cobb thought for a moment. “Not sure,” he said shortly.

  Sy was confused. “I don’t get it. Are you pulling my leg?”

  “An interesting pastime, but not one I engage in at the moment. Someone put this strange powder on the decks. Powder containing human bone. People in bare feet would step in it. Bingo, foul play.”

  “Was there powder on the decks?” Chazz asked. The rain began to fall outside, large, fat warm drops rapidly gathering momentum.

  “No,” Cobb admitted “And a good thing, too. Kimiko walked all over that ship in bare feet.”

  “Then why… Oh. I get it.”

  Sy didn’t get it.

  “It rained day before yesterday, quite a squall. No doubt it washed the decks nicely.”

  “Yes,” Takamura agreed. “Shortly after someone left the ship.”

  “The lifeboat!” Chazz exclaimed as the door opened. Patria pushed the stroller in, shaking water from her hair. Orli’s white cloth sun hat was dewed, but she was smiling dreamily. Her arms jerked out when she saw her father.

  “What about the lifeboat?” Patria said. She bent down to remove Orli’s hat.

  “It was missing. Someone got on board, killed the crew, and left in the lifeboat.”

  “How’d they get on board? Why take the lifeboat?” She folded the sun hat and put it in the big cloth diaper bag hanging from the back of the stroll
er.

  “I was afraid you’d ask that.” Cobb was peering into the inside of his porkpie hat. Nothing in there but questions.

  “They were already on board,” Patria suggested. She lifted Orli from the stroller and sat down with the child on her lap facing her. She started to make funny faces. Orli laughed.

  “No mention in the log. The whole crew was present and accounted for. And dead. Except one, and she’s not talking. Doesn’t seem to know who or where she is.”

  “Sounds like black magic to me. Someone put the hex on her. ’Ana’ana, someone prayed them all to death.” She put her nose against Orli’s and made chuffing sounds. “With a little help, maybe?” she added between chuffs. Orli rewarded her by blowing a big saliva bubble that burst against her face.

  “Okay.” Cobb went to the window and stood beside Chazz, looking out. Patria smiled, seeing them there, the large bear of her husband next to the small, neat Japanese detective. “We have many puzzles and few answers. Kimiko found them; they all seemed to be dead. They all seemed to die at around the same time, reason as yet undetermined, though the proximal cause of death was respiratory failure. It now seems likely someone killed them. We don’t know who. We don’t know how. We don’t know why.”

  “All we know is what and when?” Chazz murmured. It was only a half-question.

  Sy stood up. He seemed somewhat bored yet still intrigued by the conversation. “We may know how. Partly, anyway,” he said.

  “Powder?” Chazz turned back and sat in his chair, which creaked alarmingly as he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck. He would play Dr. Watson to Sy’s Sherlock.

  “If there’s something topically active in the powder, then they could have been killed by it on the deck. They walked over it and got it on their feet. Bingo, poisoned.”

  “Except that the captain, for one, was wearing shoes.” Cobb did not take the powder seriously as a cause of death.

  “Oh, yeah.” Sy was depressed. “I forgot about that.”

  Cobb turned back to Patria. “What was that about magic?”

  “Black magic, I said. A bit like ’ana’ana, the old Hawaiian kahuna who would pray an enemy to death. It was part of the cultural belief system, that’s why it would work. No good if you don’t believe. Perhaps the powder was a sign, a warning of some kind, not really a poison.”

  “These were Europeans, mostly. American, Canadian, Tahitian, French. Why would they be subject to some weird primitive magic?” Sy was a scientist, a rational man.

  Chazz shrugged. “This isn’t getting anywhere, is it? And I have a class to teach in an hour. Somebody did something weird, some spooky magic nonsense with ground-up bones and junk. That somebody is gone, probably left the islands by now, especially since everyone on the ship is dead. My guess is the answer is wherever the ship came from, not here.”

  “Tahiti?” Patria asked, looking up from her interplay with Orli. “Don’t know about any dark arts from Tahitian history. Mostly a sunny place, despite the white man. It sounds more like Haiti or someplace. Voudun, zombies, that sort of thing.”

  That stopped him. “What?”

  Patria pursed her lips and looked up at the ceiling. “Mixtures of African animism, Christianity, folk medicine. My specialty, remember? We should go to Tahiti, check out any recent visitors from the Caribbean. Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “it could be Southeast Asian…”

  “No way. We don’t need to go to Tahiti. Cobb, tell her.”

  “Not me, my friend. I don’t know yet. But if these people were killed, and it was because of what went on in Tahiti, it might be a good idea. Sammy won’t like it, of course.”

  “What does Sammy have to do with it?” Patria asked.

  “He has to pay the bill. Already he’s complaining about the airplane ride from the Big Island. A trip to Tahiti is going to blow his budget.”

  “That alone might make it worth going,” Patria suggested with a laugh.

  “Don’t even think it,” Chazz said seriously. “I’d better go to class. Want to come watch or anything?”

  “No,” she said. “Orli and I will stay here. Look, the rain’s stopped.”

  Chazz Koenig, yondan in aikido, nidan in iaido, the art of sword drawing, assistant instructor at the small dojo on Kauai, bowed to his chief instructor, Shinawa Hiroshi-shihan, seventh dan master teacher.

  Shinawa allowed a thin smile to touch the corners of his lips. He had recently promoted his assistant instructor to fourth degree and was pleased. Already Chazz ran the classes while he was away, and he was more and more away recently. Certain arts he had not had time for when younger, the Way of Tea, for example, and Ikebana, now occupied much of his time. He was growing old, and certain things are appropriate for those who are growing old.

  Not that he was losing his skill. He was a small, white-haired man who weighed perhaps 150 pounds, but his thin arms contained amazing strength. His will, he would say, was strong, and the body must follow.

  “What is most important, Chazz,” he said, straightening from the bow, “is to have right intent. It is not enough to be strong. It is not enough to have technique, not enough to have great spirit. Your ki is strong, your body is strong. You have technique. You must have intent.”

  “Right mindfulness,” Chazz said.

  “Yes, yes,” Shinawa said impatiently, though he smiled his thin smile. “Right view, thought, speech, behavior. The Buddha’s teachings are still useful in this world. But what is your intent?”

  The students were lining up along the edge of the training mat behind the two men, who did not seem to notice. Their voices were low, their heads bowed in thought. The students would settle into their own meditation before the class.

  “To protect,” Chazz said after some thought. “That’s why I took up aikido in the first place, to control my temper, to protect others. From myself as much as anyone else.”

  Again Shinawa gave his bleak smile. Chazz knew it was a sign of favor, despite the sense that he was not doing well in this little exchange. “Buddha says there are four kinds of people,” Shinawa said gently. He raised his voice slightly, so the eleven students present could hear. “Buddha says, there are those who, because they were taught the wrong things, cause themselves to suffer. They are too hard on themselves, Chazz. Worse are those who, because they are cruel, cause others to suffer. And of course there are those who cause others to suffer as well as themselves. Perhaps that is most people. Finally, there are those who cause neither themselves nor others to suffer. What is your intent?”

  “To create a world in which no one has to suffer.”

  “No!” Shinawa slammed his hand on the mat with a sharp crack. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if contemplating the insides of his eyelids. “There are three kinds of men in the world,” he said softly. “Three kinds of people, women as well as men. The first are those who are like letters carved in rock. They give way to their anger and hold on to their angry thoughts.” He shook his head. His sparse white hair fringed around the large, wrinkled bald area on his crown seemed to whisper with the movement. “Once you were like those people. Then there are those who are like letters carved in sand. They give in to their anger, but let their angry thoughts pass quickly away. Now, perhaps, you are like those.”

  Chazz said nothing.

  After a time Shinawa concluded. “Then there are those who are like letters written in running water. Anger and provocation pass by unnoticed. You are not there.”

  He rose to his feet in one swift, fluid motion and struck Chazz hard on the breastbone. Chazz felt the breath rush from him as he instinctively went backwards into a roll, rising so quickly the students, seated spellbound on the other side of the mat, leaned back as one in alarm. Chazz roared and struck out.

  His technique was good, even flawless. But he missed Shinawa altogether. The old man seemed to melt to one side without moving, and Chazz Koenig found himself flying. He took a high back fall, slapped the mat and was up and charging again.
His face flushed with anger. This was too much! He raised his left hand and struck in a swift yokomen strike with the blade of his hand to the side of Shinawa’s head. Again the old man was not where the blow landed. Instead he stepped softly inside the curve of Chazz’s attack, smoothly picked up its motion, pivoted on the balls of his feet, and again Chazz was flying, forward this time. He somersaulted in the air, landed with only the sound of a slap on the mat, sprang to his feet, and stepped forward for another attack.

  Suddenly, he stopped. The old man had not moved. He was standing quietly, watching Chazz with his slight smile, his eyes narrow but twinkling. His hands were extended slightly before the knot in the strings of his black-skirted hakama, and Chazz saw no opening anywhere for an attack. The old man was relaxed but totally aware.

  The two men stood facing one another for a long moment. No one moved. There was no sound in the dojo. Chazz let his own awareness settle. His eyes went soft, taking in everything through a peripheral sensitivity. He could feel the energy flow through his body, out through his fingertips. His breathing became the breath of the room itself, the breath of everyone in it.

  There was no rush, suddenly, no hurry to do anything. All he had to do was wait. Shinawa’s attention would waver first. He was certain of that. The suki, that momentary lapse in concentration that created the opening, would appear.

  Chazz saw, as if he were inside the legendary moment when two swordsmen met on a narrow bridge in Japan, that neither one would back down. They stood facing one another, hands near the hilts of their swords, ready to draw as soon as the opening appeared. After five minutes of motionless waiting, the two men bowed to one another, turned, and walked away. Neither one had left the opening.

  But there it was! Chazz moved forward, ready with his strike, and found Shinawa’s hand in his face, a fraction from his nose, which, if the old man’s timing had not been so precise and his movement so meticulous, would now be broken. He stopped himself too, and leaned back slightly, to allow the right amount of room to prevent injury.