Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series)

by Toby Neal

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Watch for These Titles

  Sample

  Fire Beach

  Copyright © 2014 by Toby Neal. All rights reserved.

  http://tobyneal.net/

  Kindle Edition: October 2014

  Electronic ISBN: 978-0-9896883-1-4

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9896883-2-1

  Cover photo © Mike Neal at NealStudios.net

  Cover design by Julie Metz Ltd.

  Formatting by Blue Valley Author Services

  This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Proverbs 14:11

  A wise woman builds her house;

  a foolish woman tears hers down with her own hands.

  Chapter 1

  “Fire is poetry. Flame is destiny.” The Fireman smiled to himself as he said the words out loud, tasting the way they sounded.

  Heading for an ignition site brought that poetic side out in him. Next to him, on the floor of the battered old truck, a rusty gas can rattled as he drove down the deserted sugarcane-hauling road. Harsh red dust rose from the potholed dirt as Maui’s strong trade winds kicked up.

  He’d chosen a cane field they’d be burning in a week or two, yellowing since the company’d stopped watering it, fifteen-foot flowering tassels of mature sugarcane waving like mares’ tails. But if he burned it first, the cane company would lose their harvest, two years of work, and thousands of dollars.

  The Fireman pulled the dust-covered truck over at one of the points of origin he’d chosen. He splashed the area with a mix of diesel to cling to the sugarcane, plus gas for ignitability, and tossed a match. He jumped back into the truck, feeling that kick of adrenaline, and floored it to the next ignition site, where he repeated the process. And a third time.

  The Fireman looked back down the road into the wall of rising flames. It was catching faster than he’d planned. Maybe this one would jump the highway, really put a thrill into the Road to Hana for the tourists.

  He stood there and savored a feeling of power as crackling energy released all around him. The sweet-smelling, burnt-sugar smoke soared into the higher elevations and hit colder air, coalescing into mushroom-cloud shapes. White cattle egrets flew in, landing in the road to feast on fleeing insects. A familiar roaring filled his ears as the heat fanned his cheeks.

  The fire was a creature of beauty. He extended a hand to the fire, enjoying the multisensory experience he’d unleashed—and a back swirl of wind blew a tongue of flame to sear that hand like the lash of a whip. He howled in pain and hurled the gas can he was still holding into the oncoming inferno before it could blow up in his hand.

  He leaped into the truck, threw it into gear, and peeled away. He couldn’t help ducking as the gas can exploded behind him with a boom! He floored it and pulled away, bouncing crazily down the potholed dirt road toward the highway. He lifted his hand, seared across the back in a stripe that looked like raw steak.

  He licked the burn, tasting ash and blood. “Bitch. How I love you.”

  Behind his racing truck, the wall of flame swept forward into the field with a crackling scream like a thousand demons in chorus. Insects, birds, mongooses, and more fled in futile terror before it.

  Lieutenant Michael Stevens picked up a call at his office in Haiku. “Bro, it’s Jared.” His little brother’s voice sounded amped up and hoarse. “I thought I’d better call you. You know that cane fire this morning?”

  Jared was a firefighter at Kahului Station, recently transferred to Maui to get away from the holocaust of summer fires in LA—but from what Stevens could tell, Maui hadn’t been the mellow posting Jared was hoping for.

  “Yeah, I saw the smoke. Smelled it, too. Thought they were just doing a scheduled burn.” Maui was one of the last places in the United States still growing and harvesting sugar. The plantation operated at an annual loss, in part because of the vast amount of water and resources it took to produce even a single pound of “white gold.” The harvesting process was also pollution-heavy. It began with burning fields to get rid of excess leaves, leaving the stalks behind, heavy with syrup, to be processed.

  “No. We think it’s another arson case.” Jared coughed. “We’ve almost got it contained. Remember, I told you there have been at least three of these arson cane fires in the last month. Anyway, there’s a fatality. Tourists found a guy on the side of the road, crispy as a chicken wing.”

  Stevens winced inwardly, trying not to imagine what “crispy as a chicken wing” looked like in human form. Likely he’d get to see firsthand. He stood, reaching for the shoulder holster hung on the wall to strap into. “So if it was arson, it’s a homicide.”

  “Right. I thought I’d give you a heads-up since it’s in your district.”

  As if on cue, his radio crackled with the call to respond. “Thanks, Jared. If I don’t see you at the scene, I’ll see you at dinner tonight. Still coming, right?”

  “Right. I’ll bring dessert.” Jared had begun making weekly visits to have dinner with Stevens, his pregnant wife, Lei Texeira, their son, Kiet, and Lei’s dad, Wayne, who lived with them and provided child care.

  Stevens hung up and stuck his head outside his office to holler to his veteran detective. “Ferreira! Ten-fifty on Hana Highway!”

  They got on the road in Stevens’s brown Bronco, cop light strobing on the dash. Ferreira, a middle-aged man of portly build and grizzled visage, worked the radio, getting as much information as he could. “Ambulance is there. Too late, but at least they can keep the lookie-loos away.”

  “How far is the vic from the fire?”

  “On the edge of the highway. Fire burned up to the road, like they usually do. Fire department is working on keeping it from spreading.”

  “This will add more tension to the whole no-burn movement,” Stevens said thoughtfully, rubbing the tiny purple heart tattoo in the crook of his elbow with a thumb as he drove. A vocal faction on the island had begun protesting the traditional method of harvest, citing asthma and a host of environmental concerns.

  “I don’t see how this has anything to do with
that,” Ferreira said, frowning. “These burns are just some misguided kids making trouble. Don’t see how arson that’s just killed a man has anything to do with the burns the cane company does for harvest—something they’ve been doing for a hundred years.”

  “Okay. I hope you’re right.” Stevens knew Ferreira was from a big family that had come over to Hawaii in one of the original immigration waves, working their way up from the “cane camp” shantytowns to powerful positions in local government and solid occupation of the middle class. He’d heard Ferreira lament the demise of sugarcane agriculture in Maui often enough not to argue with the man. He also knew proponents of the change to machine harvesters would make the argument that drying the fields in preparation for controlled burning provided tempting targets for arson.

  They sped down the winding two-lane highway that followed the windswept coastline. Even responding to a call and driving at top speed, Stevens sneaked a few looks out his window at the ocean, a tapestry of blues from cobalt to the palest turquoise at the foam-flecked shore. Surfers, windsurfers, and kiteboarders all played along this coastline, and the colorful sails leaping over the waves reminded him of darting butterflies.

  The fire was still smoldering in the charred field as they came around a corner to where barricades had been set up, diverting traffic along an old road that connected above the beach town of Paia. Stevens pulled up and parked the Bronco, snapping on gloves and picking up his crime kit. Ferreira did the same.

  “Booties would be good,” Ferreira said, slipping on a pair of blue elastic-edged, fabric shoe covers.

  “Good idea. Though I’m not sure how well these are going to hold up on this ground,” Stevens said, looking at the still-smoking rubble that lined the road.

  Just as Jared had told him, the fire had burned up to the highway, eating everything in its path down to the black ribbon of road. The fire zone was very close to the oceanfront community of Kuau, a cluster of residences along the coast. Stevens had spent the last year before his marriage to Lei at a little apartment in Kuau and had an affection for the ragtag collection of older plantation-style homes interspersed with oceanfront mansions.

  They walked down the road and approached the body, draped in a white cloth that was staining in patches from body fluids.

  The medical examiner, Dr. Gregory, had beaten them to the scene. Squatted beside the body, he was wearing an aloha shirt decorated with cartoon menehunes, attention fixed on the grisly sight before him.

  There was an unpleasant, oily quality to the smoked-barbecue odor of the body as Stevens inadvertently sniffed the air. He was glad Lei hadn’t had to go out on this call. At four months pregnant, his wife’s worst symptom seemed to be an oversensitivity to smells. This stench would definitely have had her running for the nearest toilet.

  “Ah, Lieutenant,” Dr. Gregory said, looking up. Magnifying glasses made him look like a bug until he pushed the optics up onto his reddened forehead. “Got a few interesting things about this body.”

  Stevens gave a nod to Ferreira to go find the fire investigator. They’d be relying heavily on the fire department’s assessment of the evidence found at the burn site. He squatted beside Dr. Gregory as the man uncovered the body further. Bits of clothing and skin clung to the sheet. “I wish they wouldn’t have covered the body with this,” the ME fussed. “Contaminating the trace here.”

  “So this is what human barbecue looks like,” Stevens said. “Not pretty.” He’d seen burn victims before, but not since he’d moved to Hawaii five years ago.

  “Not pretty at all. Check out the feet.”

  Stevens looked. The toes were burned, the feet curled as tendons retracted. “No shoes?”

  “Exactly. I wonder if that’s significant.”

  Stevens looked around the corpse. He didn’t see anything beside the body, nor marks on the ground. “Guess he collapsed here from the smoke and then the fire got him.”

  “I think he was running and was on fire,” Gregory said. “His feet are more burned than his hands, and the back of his clothing is completely gone.”

  Stevens tried not to imagine the man’s terrible death, instead focusing on his next steps. “Did you check for ID in his pockets?”

  “I need to go over the whole body at the lab,” Gregory said. “The cloth that’s left is burned right onto his skin. Anything still on him will be degrees of melted. I need to keep it all clean and preserved. Anything else you need here? Because I’d like to bag him.”

  “Are the fire investigators done?”

  “We should check.” Gregory radioed, and a young man moving with athletic grace in spite of heavy fire-retardant gear broke away from a knot of firefighters and came their way.

  “Tim Owen. Fire investigator for the County of Maui.” He introduced himself, and Stevens shook his gauntleted hand.

  “Lieutenant Stevens. You already know Dr. Gregory.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to bag the body, Tim,” Gregory said. “Need anything more?”

  “No. I’m still determining the point of origin, though directionality of the char pattern makes me think it started somewhere on the cane-haul road. This guy was somewhere in this field when it went up. Maybe a homeless guy, sleeping in the cane. No shoes makes me think so.”

  “So what did the body tell you?” Dr. Gregory asked. Stevens thought he might be testing the fire investigator’s assessment.

  “Wasn’t trapped in the flames for an extended period—see, the arms are in fairly good shape.” Owen pointed out the folded, crabbed arms. “His face is even recognizable. The feet are worked over, but they were exposed. Maybe he ran across some burning area with bare feet. Beneath the body, he’s got fabric intact. So my take is the fire woke him up, but he was probably dazed from smoke. These cane fires burn fast, and he wasn’t moving quickly enough. He collapsed here, and the fire flashed over him. Burned a while in this spot, enough to cook his feet pretty good.”

  Gregory nodded. “That was my initial take, too.”

  “We don’t get many vagrants or homeless sleeping in the cane,” Stevens said. “Lots of spiders in there.” The cane spiders were famous in Hawaii. Hairy and brown, with long, slender legs, they grew to be six to eight inches in diameter and dominated their home in the sugarcane. “The cane is sharp and dense. Not much squatting happens in there between the spiders and the leaves being sharp enough to cut you.”

  “Seems like that’s a good thing. I’m new here. I’m just getting the ‘lay of the land,’ so to speak, but I’m already concerned about all these arson fires. Makes me think someone’s targeting the sugarcane company.”

  “Could be,” Stevens said. “Do you have any interviews set up with them?”

  “Matter of fact, I do. Tomorrow morning, talking with upper management at the Puunene Mill, to see if they have any idea about who might have it in for them.” Owen wiped his sweaty face with a bandanna, and Stevens could see how young he was. New to the island, he might not get that far talking to the locals without support.

  “Well, now that this is a homicide case, how about Ferreira and I tag along?”

  “That would be great.” Stevens didn’t think he was imagining the note of relief in the young man’s voice. “Can’t understand the pidgin when people get going.”

  Ferreira stepped up and stuck out his hand. “Know a lot of people at the company. I can help.”

  “Excellent.”

  They exchanged details for the next morning’s meeting while Dr. Gregory and Tanaka, his assistant, got the body bagged with the help of the EMTs who had come out on the call. Stevens was relieved when the body, still reeking even in the bag, was on the way to the morgue.

  Human barbecue wasn’t something he ever wanted to see again. A bad feeling clung to him, along with the smell.

  Chapter 2

  L
ei Texeira drove up the winding two-lane road through rural Haiku on Maui’s north shore. Tall eucalyptus trees, giant tree ferns, wandering vines, and bright sprays of ginger and heliconia bordered the road. It was a mellow thirty-minute drive from her workplace, Maui Police Station in downtown Kahului, to the home she and Stevens had bought in the countryside. Her flagging afternoon energy, another pregnancy symptom, lifted as she turned up the gravel driveway. Coming home always did that for her, especially now that her father, Wayne, had moved to Maui and was taking care of baby Kiet during the day.

  Their new house was set back from the road behind an automatic gate. She hit the buttons and retracted it. The fence around the property was ten feet high, made of cedar, and it provided both protection and privacy. Keiki, her battle-scarred Rottweiler, greeted the truck with happy barks and ran alongside as she drew up to the house.

  “New” wasn’t actually the right word for the house. It was fifty years old, surrounded by fruit-bearing trees and built in the sprawling plantation-style she and Stevens loved. It had been added on to so that the original footage had multiplied. Still, the size and acreage would have made it an impossible investment for a young couple just starting out if Lei’s Aunty Rosario hadn’t left them her bungalow in California as an inheritance. Wayne had helped them sell it after Aunty’s recent death in order to buy the house, and now they carried a small, manageable mortgage. The property even had a small ohana cottage, where Wayne lived.

  Lei pulled into the open garage, beeped the truck locked, and went up the steps to the security door. “Hey, Dad,” she called, unlocking the steel-grilled door. Even out here in the country, they weren’t safe. An unknown enemy they’d taken to calling the ‘shroud killer’ was still at large, continuing to threaten them through the mail after leaving lengths of linen at the deaths of Lei’s aunt and Stevens’s ex-wife, Anchara. Until he was found, they needed to take every precaution.