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

by Swigart, Rob

  The doctor shrugged. “Not sure. He had no ID, but the power company employee who brought him in must’ve said his name was Herbert. At least that’s what’s on the chart.”

  “The man who brought him in, what did he say?”

  “He made a statement, went back to work. Said Herbert was with some guy from Waimea named Sanderson, they drove out past Mana, he suddenly went crazy, started running around tearing off his clothes. He jumped in an old irrigation pond.”

  “What could cause this?” Cobb asked.

  The doctor looked at the ceiling, as if answers were written up there. “Any number of plants containing atropine or related substances, if ingested or inhaled.”

  “For instance?” Chazz looked up with interest.

  The doctor continued looking at the ceiling. “Well, Datura stramonium could do it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jimsonweed. Grows all over the place.” The doctor shrugged at Dr. Shih, who smiled at him reassuringly. Dr. Shih had seen it all. Even this.

  “Look at this,” Patria said, bending over the man on the gurney. “Strange.”

  “What?”

  She touched a virulent purple-and-blue octopus writhing around the muscular forearm.

  “So? It’s a tattoo.” Chazz was frowning in thought.

  “Don’t you remember?” Patria asked.

  Takamura said, “Remember what?”

  “The French journalist. What was his name? Hobart, Herbert, something like that. Dark short, spiky hair. Tattoo on the forearm. A strong man, not too tall.”

  “This is him? Hobart?”

  “The tattoo looks the same. It’s hard to tell: I mean, when we saw him he was standing up, talking, alive. This, I don’t know. It sure looks like him.”

  “Okay, so this is Hobart. That ends your worries, doesn’t it? I mean, he was the one you felt was following you around, wasn’t he? The French journalist looking into the Ocean Mother affair?”

  Patria pulled in her lower lip. “Mmm. Yes.”

  “You sound doubtful.” Chazz took her elbow in his palm. “You think this isn’t the one?”

  “Tattoo’s the same,” she said. It was no answer. “It must be him.”

  “Come on,” Chazz said. “I want to see Orli and take a shower and eat a real lunch and… other things.” He leered at her. She smiled.

  Dr. Shih also smiled. The young people were so transparent. Only forty years old or so, still filled with passions.

  Dr. Shih followed the gurney down the hallway and into the ward. This case interested her. She thought there was something familiar about the symptoms. Yes, Jimsonweed, certainly. Eaten, probably, though why anyone would eat the stuff she could not imagine: It tasted terrible. And why a French journalist?

  Dr. Shih had been the county medical examiner for more years than she cared to contemplate. She had seen bodies mutilated by traffic and by human hand. She had done autopsies on human beings destroyed by viruses designed and built by the human mind and hand, conceived in the terrible dark places in the human heart.

  She had grandchildren, seven of them. She had a husband who was a structural engineer, a man she had met when she was in medical school in Los Angeles. He was a gifted amateur violinist, and she loved to listen to him play Bach partitas. She thought of him fondly as she looked down on the ravaged person on the bed. The elegant structures of the partitas filled her mind, imposing a different kind of order on the chaos that lived inside this man’s head. Datura poisoning was ugly. It destroyed memory.

  Dr. Shih’s husband’s music rebuilt memory. Dr. Shih’s husband was Chinese, of course, as was Dr. Shih. His name was Norman Shih, and her maiden name was Shen. She had not had to change her initials when they married, and that had pleased her. It maintained a thread of memory, a continuity with her own ancestral past.

  Dr. Shih was a scientist in the Western tradition. She used tools that were shiny and clean. Her thinking was logical and built on an elaborate structure of memory and experience. But she had, somewhere back there in her cultural past, a different view, and from time to time she could look down on a patient, if he or she was alive, or a body, if it was not, and sense the shapes of energies, the patterns of meridians, the points of ebb and flow and blockage, and she could touch a place and free something. And the patient, if alive, would get better, or the body, if not alive, would give up to her some secret of its demise.

  Hobart was giving up nothing, though. His breathing was rough and irregular. His pulse raced, then inexplicably slowed. Perspiration formed along his hairline, then suddenly evaporated and his skin was dry and hot. His eyes twitched.

  So Dr. Shih sat down beside the bed. Tentatively, slowly, she reached out and touched the man’s temple. Her eyes, nested in fine wrinkles, calm and brown and filled with facts and knowledge, grew dim and inward and soft, as if she were making an effort to forget what she knew, all of it, from this morning’s journal articles to the first anatomy lecture in medical school. She tried to feel, through her fingertip, the errant flow of yin and yang, the rise and fall, the orientation of Qi as it moved around the scalp and through the bone of the skull, along the long nerve fibers, the channels.

  She did not think. Sometimes it was important not to think, not to force logic into a place it did not belong.

  And then it came to her: a sense that what she touched here, this cold temple clad in clammy skin, was evil.

  Not the skin itself, nor the bone beneath it, but what had happened to them. She felt the imbalance, the loss of control, the wild oscillations of yin and yang that had come to this.

  Evil was not a word in a medical doctor’s vocabulary, of course. Life and death, sickness and health, disease and cure, yes, but not good and evil.

  Yet evil was here. Someone, she was certain, had done this thing, had made this creature lying here less than human.

  He would probably not recover. She could feel that through her fingertip. He would never know again who he was. His identity had been taken away from him. His soul. He was alive, yet not alive. Datura had seen to that.

  The others, the dead ones from the ship, and the still-living one, they had been robbed in a similar way. The means were not the same, but the evil was the same. From the same source. She felt it in the faintly racing pulse in the temple under her fingertip, in the gasps for breath, the heat and cold that flashed through this man. This former man.

  The same person who had killed the crew, killed the women, had done this. She was certain of it. She opened her eyes with no memory of when she had closed them. She could see, built into the air of the room, the seamless structures of the Bach partitas, constructing themselves note by note. She loved her husband, who was so logical and so feeling too, though he said little. She thought of Lieutenant Takamura’s beloved Charlie Chan, a Westerner’s stereotyped view of a Chinese detective. Dr. Shih shivered a little, thinking that she was herself acting like a stereotypical Chinese, drenched in silly mysticism, measuring through her extrasensory fingertip the channels of her patient’s meridians and the flow of yin and yang.

  She snorted. Silly, of course. Superstitious nonsense.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling of evil that clung to the end of her forefinger and made her want to scrub and disinfect it.

  Patria thought this man was the killer, and now they were safe.

  But Dr. Shih did not think that.

  She thought this man on the bed here was the victim of an evil; he was not the evil itself.

  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 sha
pe 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.