Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  “Can we talk to Tanaka?”

  “Nope. Not till we’re finished.”

  “When do you think that will be?”

  “We’re the government, Kimo. We take the time we need.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “You might want to practice your surveillance techniques,” he said, smiling. “You guys stood out like a sore thumb in Chinatown on Friday night.”

  “Sometimes that’s the point.” We stood up. “Thanks for the cooperation, Francisco. I’ll remember it the next time you need something.”

  He was still smiling when we walked out.

  “We shouldn’t have told him about Tanaka’s connection to our homicides,” Ray said. “I feel like a teenage girl who puts out and then gets slapped for her trouble.”

  “That’s something else you need to take up with your wife.”

  After that productive little meeting, we went back to headquarters, where O’Malley’s autopsy report was waiting for us. It indicated that the cause of death was exsanguination, which means loss of blood. The method of death was a “necklace incision” across his throat, in which both his carotid arteries and his jugular vein had been cut.

  Doc Takayama had noted, in clinical language, that the extra large black dildo in O’Malley’s butt had caused damage to the anal walls, but the fact that no blood was present indicated that the device had been inserted there post-mortem.

  “Kinky,” Ray said.

  “Or a red herring. The killer wanted to make sure we thought it was a sex thing.”

  “He’s doing a good job of it.”

  Sampson called us in as we were packing up to leave for the day, no closer to finding our killer than we had been that morning.

  “Do you like this guy Tanaka for your murders?” Sampson MAhu BLood 259

  asked, when we’d laid out our progress. “The one the FBI has in custody?”

  “We think he’s pulling the strings,” Ray said. “But we have nothing that ties him to the weapons, and only theories that connect him to the victims. Once the FBI makes their case for money laundering, we might get a shot at Tanaka.”

  “I’m putting you back in the rotation tomorrow. There’s no use chasing your tails until the Feds are finished.”

  Sampson was right; we knew Tanaka was involved in the murders and we would have to wait for Francisco Salinas to let us talk to him.

  When I opened the front door, Roby was delighted to see me, and I took him for a long walk around the neighborhood.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Adam O’Malley, though. Was his death a random sex crime? Or was it connected to our case?

  Did Tanaka have an alibi for Thursday night, when O’Malley had been killed? What about for the other killings? He was Japanese, but in the dark he could have passed for haole. Did he have the kind of tattoos we had seen in the video of the man following O’Malley into the Honolulu Sunset? Or had he simply hired Dex to do his dirty work? And what would have made him think a warehouse worker like Dex could function as a hired killer?

  By the time we circled back to the house, my head was so full of questions that I didn’t know what was real and what was speculation. When we walked in the house, Mike was in the living room, unbuttoning his shirt. Roby raced across the floor to jump up and nose his crotch. He pushed the dog away, laughing, and we kissed.

  “I’m really antsy,” I said. “You want to go for a run?”

  “Yeah. I could use a run. Spent most of the day behind a desk, and I’m feeling stiff.”

  “Stiffness we can deal with when we get back,” I said, smiling at him.

  He laughed. “I might hold you to that.”

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  We changed into T-shirts and running shorts and took off up the hill. Mike’s legs are longer than mine, but I kept up with him as we ran. We stopped high up on Aiea Heights Road, looking back down at Pearl Harbor and the Ford Island Bridge. The sky was turning from lavender to black, and street lights were coming on. In the far distance I saw the neon dragon that glowed over a Chinese restaurant at the boom of the street. Dragons again.

  I remembered Dex’s tattoo, and his pai gow name, Lan Long, which meant blue dragon. It was time to do some research on Dex and see if we could connect him to the murders and to Jun Tanaka.

  We turned around and went back down the hill toward our home and our dog, and I pushed thoughts of murder out of my head and focused on enjoying the evening with Mike.

  The next morning, while we waited for a new case, Ray and I plunged into researching Dexter Trale. I called Karen Gold at Social Security and had her run Dex’s work record, and Ray called his Army contact and discovered that Dex had served two tours in Iraq.

  Dex’s employment records started coming through the fax, and I pulled them out to review. Ray and I were looking them over when Harry walked in.

  “Hey, brah, howzit?” I said. “You do something with those faded pages?”

  “Didn’t get a chance to yet. But I couldn’t sleep last night and I was fiddling around online. I remembered that guy you asked about, Dexter Trale, and thought I’d look him up and see what I could find.” He pulled out his iPhone and started typing. “I’m sending you a link now.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Just open your e-mail.”

  I turned to my computer and opened Harry’s message, then clicked on the embedded URL. I got a big warning message that said the material was suitable only for adults.

  “Ray, look away,” I said, as I clicked through.

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  He gave me the finger, and I gave him a shaka back, the Hawaiian hand salute with the thumb extended, and the two middle fingers bent over, the others erect. We both laughed, and the two of them clustered around me as the page opened.

  “That’s Dex,” I said, pointing at the photo of a naked skinny haole guy on the screen. Dex was standing in what looked like the living room of the house he shared with Leelee. He was flexing his arms, which were covered with tattoos, and his stiff dick, which was only average-sized, jutted out from his body. There was another man, naked, on all fours on the floor, presenting his butt to Dex. The other guy’s face wasn’t visible.

  “Hello,” Ray said. “Guess Dex isn’t so straight after all.”

  “I believe the term is ‘gay for pay,’” Harry said.

  “Are there more like this?” I asked.

  “You can’t see them without a membership. You have one?”

  “Hey, I’ve got a boyfriend. I don’t need to go looking for one online.”

  “Go ask Lieutenant Sampson if he’ll authorize the fee,” Ray said, poking me in the side. “I want to see what he says.”

  “I was only kidding,” Harry said. “Other guys might need a membership, but not me.”

  I looked at Ray as Harry’s fingers danced across the keyboard.

  Before we could start to argue about hacking, though, a whole portfolio of pictures of Dexter Trale opened up. In some cases he was alone, touching himself and looking provocatively at the camera. In others he was either fucking or getting sucked.

  Despite knowing what a scumbag Dex was, and the fact that Mike and I were fucking like bunnies every time we could, I still found myself getting hard. I wondered if all guys were wired like that. I guess that’s why porn is such a big business. I was glad I was sitting behind my desk so I didn’t have to make any adjustments.

  “He get paid for this?” Ray asked.

  “Looking to pick up some extra cash?” Harry asked.

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  “Dex is the kind of guy who doesn’t do anything for free,” I said. “But interesting as this is, I don’t see how it relates to our case.”

  “Between this, and what your witness said about meeting Dex at The Garage, Dex could be the guy who picked up O’Malley,”

  Ray said. “I’ll bet he needs cash, too. You saw that place where they live. Leelee sure doesn’t work. With the uncle gone and Edith dead, he could be doing a
nything he can to pick up a few bucks.”

  “Including a little sharpshooting,” I said. “But the person who shot Edith Kapana had damn good aim, and Dex’s hand shook when he was lighting his cigarette.”

  “Think it was a military injury?” Ray asked.

  “Wonder if he’s getting any treatment at Tripler?” I asked.

  That was the Army medical hospital in Honolulu where Mike’s parents worked, but I didn’t think I could ask either of them to pry into Dex’s records.

  “Actually I have something that might relate to that,” Harry said, showing us a printout from a pharmacy a few blocks from the Kope Bean warehouse.

  I groaned. “I don’t even want to look,” I said, but I looked anyway. “You know, you’re making Ray and me crazy with this. It is so illegal to go into someone’s medical records without a court order.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “So forget for the moment how I might or might not have gotten hold of this information. He has prescriptions for propranolol and primidone. I was curious to see what those are for, so I did some research. Propanolol is a beta blocker; doctors prescribe it in conjunction with primidone when a patient has a condition called Essential Tremor, ET.”

  “Phone home,” Ray said, holding an imaginary phone to his ear.

  “This ET condition would explain why his hands shook?” I asked.

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  Harry sat back in his chair. “Yeah. And taking his meds would block adrenaline in his system, calm him down enough so that he could shoot.”

  “Tanaka has the motive for all three killings—to protect Ezekiel’s position as the KOH figurehead, because KOH is essential to the money laundering operation. And now we can see that he had the means—Dex.”

  I got up and started pacing around, just like I’d done back at Fields and Yamato. For some reason that helped me think.

  “Dex was in the military, so we could get a subpoena to determine if he was qualified on the M16A4 rifle with sniper scope,” I continued. “Which would give him the training to kill Aunty Edith and shoot at us outside the Ohana. And as long as he took his medication, his hand wouldn’t shake and he should be able to fire a rifle accurately.”

  “And cut Adam O’Malley’s throat,” Ray said.

  I looked through the paperwork on my desk until I found the images we’d captured from the video at the Honolulu Sunset.

  The face of the guy with O’Malley never showed, but there was one good shot of the guy’s lower left arm, with a tattoo of a grinning skull there. It matched the skull tattoo we could see on Dex’s arm in the porno pictures.

  “Suppose we go out to the Kope Bean warehouse and talk to Dex about his extracurricular activities?” I asked.

  “Fine with me,” Ray said. “But if he starts striking poses I’m leaving the conversation up to you.”

  he weN BAg

  Harry left, and Ray and I went in to see Sampson. Fortunately we still hadn’t gotten a new case handed to us.

  “Everything we’ve found in the three murders we’re investigating ties back to Jun Tanaka,” I said. “He was the biggest backer of Kingdom of Hawai’i, which he used as a conduit for money laundering. The figurehead for KOH is Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, and we believe that Edith Kapana, the first victim, was going to expose Ezekiel’s hospitalization.”

  I showed him the copies of Ezekiel’s records. “She gave these pages to Adam O’Malley. That made them both a threat to Tanaka’s investment in KOH. Stuart McKinney was a witness to the large amounts of cash passing through the Kope Bean warehouse. Tanaka couldn’t afford to have that information get out.”

  “And Trale connects how?”

  “He played in Tanaka’s card games,” Ray said. “He worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean and also did other jobs for him, like driving Ezekiel around.”

  I continued, “He lived with Edith Kapana, the first victim.

  He worked with Stuart McKinney, the second victim. He fits the description of the man who went home with Adam O’Malley, the third victim.”

  “Means?” Sampson asked.

  “Dex served in the military,” I said, handing him a printout of what Ray’s friend had e-mailed. Sampson knocked the miniature cannon on his desk back and forth a couple of times as he thought.

  Ray jumped in. “We have a witness who will testify that Dex picked him up at a gay bar called The Garage, then mugged him.

  We think we can make Dex as the guy who left The Garage with O’Malley the night he was killed.”

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  “Opportunity?” Sampson asked.

  “We’re waiting on fingerprint comparison to see if we can place Dex in O’Malley’s apartment,” I said. “We’re going to find Dex and talk to him, see if he has an alibi for the times of the three killings.”

  “Okay,” Sampson said. “If Trale doesn’t have an alibi, I think you’ve got enough to pull him in.”

  I walked back to our desks with Ray, who held out his hand for a fist bump, and I knocked my hand against his. “You and me, brah,” I said. “You and me against the world.”

  “Okay, quoting Helen Reddy is just a little too gay, even for me,” Ray said, and we both started laughing.

  We drove to the warehouse under cloudless skies the color of the light-blue porcelain floor tiles in my parents’ kitchen.

  My mother used to say that when she was stuck in the kitchen cooking for her husband and three sons, at least she could feel like she was outside, walking on air.

  The white pickup registered to Dex wasn’t in the Kope Bean parking lot, but we still made a circuit of the property, looking for Dex on the loading dock, before we went inside.

  Tuli was at her computer, taking orders, when we walked in, but Dex wasn’t there.

  “He was supposed to be here Labor Day and yesterday,” she said, taking off her headset. “People don’t stop drinking coffee just because it’s a holiday, you know. But he didn’t show up.” She shook her head. “First Stuart McKinney, now Dexter Trale. It’s hard to get good help these days.”

  “You haven’t heard from him?” I asked.

  “Not since he left on Friday afternoon.”

  We thanked her and drove out to the house in Papakolea where he’d been living with Leelee and her family. She answered the door, the baby attached as always to her hip. Her right eye had been blackened a few days before; the skin around it had turned yellow and purple. Her hair hung in greasy strands around her MAhu BLood 267

  face.

  “We need to see Dex,” I said.

  She started to cry. “He wen bag.”

  “Left,” I whispered to Ray.

  “Friday. He fed up wid the keiki crying, hana hou, hana hou.”

  She was wearing a shapeless T-shirt with what looked like baby vomit on it, a pair of shorts and rubber slippers. She looked so young and vulnerable, and I felt bad for her, stuck in such an awful situation without anyone to help her. Her shoulders shook.

  “I don’t know why the keiki cry. Aunty Edith only one who make him pau.”

  I dug a tissue from my pocket and gave it to her. Ray took the baby, who was crying, too. “I’m going to get him fixed up,”

  he said.

  Leelee led me into the kitchen. She hadn’t been cleaning up for a couple of days; dirty dishes and baby bottles were stacked in the sink, and ants crawled over an open package of crackers on the counter.

  I felt out of my depth. Ray babysat as a teenager, so at least he had a handle on how to look after the keiki. I may be in my mid-thirties, but in some circumstances the first thing I think to do is to call my parents.

  Leelee sat on the sofa, looking dejected. I walked into the kitchen and called my mother. “Mom, you remember Leelee,” I said, when she answered.

  “Oh, no. What’s happened to her?”

  I started washing the dishes, holding my cell phone against my shoulder as I gave her the quick rundown.

  “You can’t call Social Services,” my mother said. “Y
ou know the first thing they want to do is take away the baby. Your father and I will come over now and help get things cleaned up.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “We’re all ohana,” she said.

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  By the time I finished washing the dishes, Leelee had calmed down. “Dex come home Friday from work,” she said, when I found her back in the living room. “Maybe six, seven o’clock, in bad mood. I say, ‘Kay den, Dex, no make like dat.’”

  She blew her nose. “He get all stink on me. He start grab his stuff, I was all like, wat doing? No leave me! Dat when he hit me.”

  “You know where he went?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She had gone to look for him on Saturday, walking all over the neighborhood, but no one had seen him. Or at least, no one would tell her if they had. After that, she’d stayed home, hoping he would show up. But she hadn’t been able to do much more than get out of bed and heat up some bottles of formula for the baby.

  Ray came back in with the baby; he’d given him a quick bath and changed his diapers. “Not exactly what they’d call police work back at the academy,” he said, handing the baby to her.

  “Keiki smell so ono!” Leelee said, snuggling her nose into the boy’s chest, and he giggled.

  “Any chance Dex is going to come back here?” I asked Leelee.

  She started to cry again. “He say he no come back, evah.”

  Ray put out a BOLO on Dex’s license plate, warning that he might be armed and dangerous, while I called my brother.

  “Hey, Lui, your buddy Lan Long did a runner. You know if he was friendly with any of the guys in your pai gow game?”

  “Don’t think so. Tung was the only guy he ever really talked to. Though he bragged a lot to us about his time in the army, all his shooting skill and so on.”

  I made a mental note of that. Dex really could shoot, and Tanaka knew it.

  “You hear anything from the FBI after the raid?” Lui asked.

  “Nothing. Listen, brah, you call me ASAP if Dexter Trale contacts you. Lan Long, that is. He’s very dangerous.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” Lui said.

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  Ray sat on the sofa next to Leelee and asked if there was any place she thought Dex might go. “He have any friends? Family?