Isle Be Seeing You (Islands of Aloha Mystery Book 9)

by JoAnn Bassett

  I went to bed promising myself I’d get into the PoP one way or another the next morning. It would be Saturday, which meant more people in town, more people around to witness me flagrantly breaking the law. But I didn’t care. I had to get back in that stash drawer.

  I awoke at four and was about to roll over and punch my pillow into a cozier shape when I bolted upright. This would be the perfect time to go to the PoP. I had a key, so if a cop rolled down the alley I could always flash the key and say I didn’t see the crime scene sticker in the dark. I slipped into dark cropped pants and a black t-shirt, mentally patting myself on the back for my brilliant idea.

  I tiptoed through the kitchen and was about to quietly slip out the back door when the room was abruptly flooded with light.

  “I was hoping that was you,” said Steve.

  I squinted as my eyes adjusted. He was dressed in board shorts and a long-sleeved Lycra shirt.

  “What are you doing up this early?” I said.

  “I always get up around now to surf. What’s your excuse?”

  In all the time Steve had lived with me I never recalled asking him when he got up. I knew he went to Ho’okipa Bay most mornings to windsurf and hang around with what he called, “my regular guys” but I never dreamed he routinely left the house hours before sunrise.

  “I’m going down to the PoP.”

  “Did they take the crime scene sticker off the door?”

  “No.”

  His eyes widened.

  “That’s right. I’ve been reduced to a common criminal. But I’ve got to find whatever it is Sifu Doug sent me to get.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Steve said. “Being a criminal accomplice is on my bucket list.”

  I tried to talk him out of it but he was adamant. He even insisted we take his car rather than mine, since his wouldn’t be immediately recognizable by Wong or Ho or anyone who trained at the Palace of Pain.

  “You don’t have to get involved in this, you know. You could just drop me off.”

  “What? And let you have all the fun? No way. Besides, I’m in the mood for some good old-fashioned burglary.”

  “I won’t be stealing anything. Doug asked me to retrieve something for him, so I’m just the messenger.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Not sure. But I’m hoping I’ll know when I see it.”

  “Fine, but I’m not letting you do the perp walk alone. If you get caught, we’re both going down.”

  Steve parked on the street, which was a good idea since anyone patrolling the alley would be immediately alerted if they saw a strange car. We carefully made our way around to the back, using the flashlight app on Steve’s cell phone.

  “It’s never this dark at the beach,” Steve muttered. “It’s like all the light in this alley has been sucked out and replaced by a creepy vibe.”

  He was right about the vibe. It may have been my reluctance to break the law—or more honestly my fear of getting caught—or the enormity of the horror of the past week, but as we moved through the inky black to the Palace of Pain I felt like I was in a familiar nightmare. In the dream I step off a steep cliff and fall and fall until I jerk awake just before hitting bottom.

  “You okay?” Steve stage-whispered. “You’re huffing and puffing like you’ve run a marathon.”

  He shined the light on the door. The warning on the sticker not only indicated this was a crime scene, but also gave chapter and verse of the law we’d be breaking if we tampered with it. It ended with “Minimum fine $852, and/or 30 days in jail.”

  Steve flicked off the light. “They really don’t want you messing around here. I mean, it’s not eight hundred bucks, or even eight-hundred fifty. It’s a precise eight fifty-two. They mean business.”

  “Yeah.”

  After a few seconds he said, “But hey, if you’re willing to do the month in jail, I’ll spot you the eight-hundred fifty-two bucks. Under the circumstances, I’m betting they won’t go for more than the minimum. Whaddaya say?”

  A thirty-day stint in the Kahului jail was nothing compared to the life sentence Doug was facing, but it was no day at the beach, either.

  I blew out a breath. “I’m ready. Do you think we should just rip it off?”

  “Where’s the fun in that? Hold the light for me and I’ll demonstrate how I got beer money in college.”

  While I held the light, he began to painstakingly pick at the edge of the sticker until, millimeter by millimeter, it began to peel away from the door jamb. After a few minutes my arm grew weary and the phone started to shake.

  “Hold still,” he said. “I’m getting to the tricky part.”

  He grasped the six-inch long sticker by the top edges and pulled it off in one seamless piece.

  “How did mastering adhesives get you beer money?” I asked.

  “Not proud of this, you understand. But I’d go to a high-end store and switch price tags. I’d go back later and claim I’d gotten whatever it was as a gift and they’d give me money back. They’d give me the original price, not the one I paid, and I pocketed the difference. I generally made between twenty and fifty bucks on each switch.”

  “And they never figured out what you were doing?”

  “Well, I never went to the same store more than once a year. But in LA there are a zillion luxury stores. I’m not proud of taking advantage of their faith in humanity, but I was desperate for cash.”

  “I need to get inside.”

  “Right. Well, here’s the sticker. You can put it back on when you’re done.”

  “Do you think it’ll still stick?”

  “My dear, you’re working with a pro. Just make sure you put it back in the same spot.”

  I handed him back his phone. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Give me a little credit, girl.”

  “I’m sorry, but you talk story with your friends. Everyone knows you’re the go-to guy for Pa’ia gossip.”

  In the thick predawn gloom I couldn’t make out his face well enough to determine how he’d taken my blunt, but accurate, assessment.

  After a few beats he cleared his throat. “You should know I’ve deep-sixed a lot of stuff that wasn’t appropriate for public consumption. And, just so we’re clear, in most cases you were the primary focus.”

  If I hadn’t been so anxious to get inside the guan I would’ve asked for details, but duty won out.

  “Mahalo, for helping with this, Steve. I’ll let you know how it goes.” I gave him quick hug and he turned and disappeared into the darkness.

  Once inside, I tacked one small edge of the sticker to the door jamb. I’d try to reattach it when I was finished, but that wasn’t uppermost in my mind.

  I was mere minutes away from getting my hands on what my sifu had sent me to find.

  CHAPTER 21

  I locked the door to Doug’s office before turning on the light. I wished he had something other than the blazing fluorescent ceiling light, but my sifu wasn’t into office décor which meant no desk lamp. I’d need to work quickly to avoid someone seeing ambient light seeping from the high clerestory windows in the practice room. I pulled the pink-capped key from my pocket and unlocked the drawer.

  The key turned without resistance. The drawer had been unlocked.

  I allowed myself only a second or two of alarm. Had Detective Ho found what I’d been interrupted from finding? If so, Wong’s promise to assist me had probably just been a stalling tactic. Perhaps the police already had irrefutable evidence of Doug’s innocence but they’d buried it.

  The contents of the drawer looked just as jumbled as last time. Plastic containers, mouth guards, and equipment catalogs. Along with the two manila envelopes.

  The first envelope held two white belts, made of cotton fabric, folded into sixths. Doug kept those on hand to exchange a belt for the first month’s fees when new people signed up. The second contained a half-sheaf of blank promotion certificates. Doug’s wife, Lani, had taken a calligraphy cla
ss and when students were promoted to a new level she’d painstakingly letter their name on their certificate. I bit my lip as I recalled how when I made black belt she’d fashioned the “P” in my name with lots of curlicues and using two colors of ink.

  I dug through the debris, dumping the contents on top of the desk. The only thing I was sure was missing was Doug’s plastic bag of pakalolo. Maybe Ho had had second thoughts about slapping on the illegal drug charge after all.

  But how had he unlocked the drawer? As far as I knew, the pink-capped key was the only way in and I’d had that in my possession the entire time. I inspected the lock and it didn’t appear tampered with. How had Ho managed to remove the bag of pot?

  I slumped in Doug’s chair, staring into the drawer as if glaring at it would make it give up its secrets. The drawer was empty, with only a tattered piece of corrugated cardboard fitted to the bottom. In a last act of desperation I jiggled the cardboard free and pulled it out. Underneath was a white business-size envelope folded in half.

  I unfolded the envelope. The front of it was covered with a spatter of dark brown blotches. The stains weren’t transparent like coffee or tea stains, but a thicker consistency. More along the lines of poster paint.

  I sniffed the envelope and an earthy metallic tang caught in my throat. Some odors are immediately recognizable, and blood is definitely on the short list. Even through the dense blood-spatter I was able to make out a single word, “Darling,” followed by a heart-shaped symbol, like a love letter.

  My pulse raced as I turned the envelope over. The glue on the flap had pulled away, indicating it had once been sealed but later opened. I took a breath and sat back in the chair, even though my brain screamed at me to rip out the contents and get on with it.

  A déjà vu feeling came over me and I recalled a time when I’d gazed down at a murder victim, knowing I’d never get that image out of my head for as long as I lived. Did I really want to know my beloved sifu wasn’t the man I’d held him up to be? That he was, in fact, a cold-blooded murderer who caught his wife in flagrante delicto and killed her out of anger and spite? And what about her trip to the clinic next to the hospital? Could Lani have sought the advice of a doctor willing to help her erase her shame, like a sexually-transmitted disease specialist or even a gynecologist willing to perform a discreet abortion?

  My hands shook. Whether it was from anger over a woman trying to rid herself of an unwanted child when I wanted one so badly, or fear of learning Sifu Doug was as weak and undisciplined as the rest of us, I’m not sure. But I had to take a moment.

  I got up and walked out of the office. Through the high windows in the practice room the sky had turned a dusky mauve. A new day was coming on.

  ***

  I hadn’t heard from Finn since his message on Monday, five days earlier. In all the uproar over Lani’s murder I’d put my own looming disaster in my back pocket. But it wouldn’t stay quiet. Maybe it was my questioning whether Lani had sought help to deal with the consequences of her infidelity or something else, but as I stood in the practice room pondering whether to examine the contents of the bloody envelope or hand it over sight-unseen to James Kanekoa, I mentally drifted back to the day Finn and I got married.

  He’d been the new kid on the block, fresh from a long stint in Australia and given a plum assignment on O’ahu as a reward. I was aware he worked for the U.S. military in some form of cyber warfare, but even after seven months of marriage I still wasn’t sure what his day-to-day work life entailed. Was he manipulating bomb-dropping drones, or was he merely a desk jockey commanding nothing more lethal than a mouse to harass and annoy the enemy?

  I was a deep in thought when my cell began to chime. I checked the clock. A few minutes after five a.m. I didn’t recognize the number but it was local, eight-oh-eight.

  “Aloha, this is Pali.” My pulse raced as I waited for someone at the police department to confirm they knew right where I was and what I’d been doing.

  “Hello, ku’uipo. Hope I didn’t wake you. I finally got cleared for a call.”

  Finn.

  “Hi.” I mentally scrambled for more but was shut down by the coincidence of him calling at exactly the same moment I’d been thinking of him. Especially since I’d hardly given him five minutes’ thought throughout the past week.

  “I’ve been wanting to call but couldn’t.”

  Probably because you haven’t had time to find a divorce attorney, I thought.

  “How is it going?” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster.

  “Long days. Tough assignment. Look, I’m due back on Monday. Can you take the day off? I’ve got something important to talk to you about.”

  The nerve. Like I’m supposed to “pencil him in” so he can dump me.

  “Steve’s staying at the house for a while.”

  “What?”

  “He and Allen broke up. He’s looking for a permanent place but until he finds something I told him he could stay at my place.” Okay, calling it “my place” rather than “our place” was pissy, but maybe I wanted him to know I was prepared for what he was planning to drop on me.

  “Okay. But could you ask him to give us some space? I need—” At that I heard a loud urgent voice in the background, like someone barking orders through a loudspeaker. “Uh-oh, gotta run. See you Monday.” He clicked off without so much as a ta-tah.

  The silent phone brought me back to the here and now, staring at the bloody envelope. I set my phone to airplane mode. I didn’t want to risk getting another call until I’d decided what I’d do about it.

  ***

  When I first gathered the courage to check out the Palace of Pain I’d just turned twenty-three. Fresh from college on O’ahu with a degree in Criminology and Abnormal Psychology. Looking back, I don’t think I ever seriously considered working in typical law enforcement. In fact, I’d been heavily recruited to take a juvenile probation officer position in Honolulu and I’d turned it down. They desperately needed women to join the ranks. I assume my being a flinty-eyed criminologist rather than a smiley-faced social worker really got their juices up. Certain neighborhoods in Honolulu are rife with drugs, gangs and underage sex workers and no amount of “Tell me how that made you feel” will ever adequately address the problem.

  But Maui was home so I came back. Right away I applied to U.S. Homeland Security to serve as an air marshal on any of a host of international flights that leave Kahului Airport every week.

  I went to my initial interview and found out working for the feds was strictly a one-sided affair. I was questioned and tested and back-ground checked even before they’d admit whether they had any jobs available. I figure they do this for security reasons—it seems everything they don’t want to talk about is chalked up to “national security”—but still it rankled.

  They appear to do a fair amount of “profiling” at these early meet and greets. The irony of government work is that they’re required to maintain a delicate balance when it comes to employing people of different genders, ages, and races, but they’re the last people who will come clean about it. In Hawaii, we don’t tend to have much of a problem with prejudice. That’s perhaps because we use family as the marker to bestow favors or articulate bias. And since we even have our own word for family, ‘ohana, it comes across as appropriate, even charming, in our culture to turn a blind eye to nepotism and cronyism. “Ah, yeah, the mayor’s new technology director doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer, but she’s his niece, so what you gonna do?”

  Not that I’m bitter. But with my haole looks and my orphan status, I really needed to do well at the initial interview or my chances would be slim to none.

  “We’re looking for recruits in top condition,” the interviewer told me.

  At five-six and a hundred and twenty-five pounds, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the worst physical specimen he’d ever laid eyes on, but I was still carrying a bit of the freshman fifteen I’d been unable to shake. I’d dabbled in martial arts in colle
ge, getting to brown belt in kung fu before literally throwing in the towel in favor of hitting the books.

  “I understand. In fact I’ve recently begun training at a guan here on Maui,” I’d said.

  “A what?”

  “A guan. A martial arts gym.”

  “You do karate?”

  “No, I’m serious about it. I practice kung fu.” I’d meant it as a nod to the rivalry between the various martial arts, but apparently his knowledge of kung fu was limited to taking his kids to “Kung Fu Panda” movies. He shot me a skeptical look.

  I went on. “It’s a centuries old hand-to-hand combat technique perfected by the Chinese. It’s considered the basis of all martial arts. In fact, the word kung, or gong as the Chinese say it, means ‘work’ or ‘achievement.’ For early Chinese warriors it was the bedrock of their training, in other words, their ‘work.’”

  He smiled indulgently as if I was a cute kid who’d rattled off the Periodic Table of Elements in a single breath.

  “Interesting. So, tell me about this guan you’ve joined.”

  “Well, to begin with, the name is Palace of Pain.”

  ***

  I lifted the flap on the bloody envelope. The envelope held a single sheet of paper folded in thirds. A single bloody fingerprint was visible at the top edge of the page. I shuddered as I considered how many times I’d shook the hand of the person who’d undoubtedly be linked to that print.

  I put the paper down and gave myself one more chance to walk away. My phone was within reach. All it would take would be a quick call to James. I wouldn’t even have to look up the number; he was in my contacts.

  I recalled Doug’s request: “Tea stash, pink key. Empty it.” This had to be what he’d sent me for. This was his way of explaining what’d happened. He must’ve known I’d share it with his attorney, and then ultimately the police, but it still wasn’t clear why he’d chosen me instead of James. Maybe he didn’t want to put his brother in the no-win position of uncovering evidence that would lead to a surefire guilty verdict. Or, worse yet, risk his brother’s disbarment for withholding it.