Rip Tides

by Toby Neal

  They drove on past the end of the famous stretch of coast, through a wide area of squared-off, grassy ponds that were freshwater shrimp farms. Food trucks featuring the island delicacy dotted the side of the highway.

  “Never seen so many food trucks as out here,” Lei commented. “You got all kinds, too.” She pointed to Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, and, of course, Hawaiian.

  “Yeah. Food trucks are a thing out here with real estate so high for restaurants,” Kamuela agreed.

  Kahuku was a depressed-looking bend in the road. Cinder block buildings dingy with permanent mildew held down weedy yards cluttered with rusting vehicles and decrepit boats. The school was a barracks-like cluster of buildings. “Economy seems down out here.”

  “Kahuku’s too far out here to commute into Honolulu for work,” Kamuela said. “And the beaches here get the full prevailing winds, so there’s no demand for the beachfront houses you see along the Seven Mile Miracle.”

  “So much contrast in just a few miles.”

  “Isn’t that always the way in Hawaii?” Kamuela slanted her a glance from sharp dark eyes. “Rich people from somewhere else and the people who take care of their vacation happiness.”

  “I know.” Lei sometimes hated the steep division between rich and poor, the struggle of the middle class in Hawaii, a pricey place to live in so many ways. Her experience with the Smiley Bandit a few years ago had brought that situation into sharp focus, and she’d never forget how close to the surface resentments simmered. “The real price of living in paradise.”

  Freddie Arenas’s address was a squat cube of a house made of cement block with a flat roof and the requisite dead boat and broken-down trucks in the yard. It was newly fenced in six-foot chain-link, though, with a rolling gate over the driveway, and as Lei and Kamuela got out, she saw why.

  A pair of pit bulls, battle-scarred and crop-eared, barreled up to the fence, letting them know Freddie was well guarded.

  They called a few times, but no one answered. Kamuela got back in the truck and leaned on the horn. Finally, a bent-over older woman opened the screen door into the garage. She called the dogs and then creaked her way to the fence. “What you want?”

  “We need to speak to Freddie Arenas. He live here?” Lei held up her ID.

  “He not home. He working.” The woman sucked her dentures, dark eyes suspicious.

  “We can go to his workplace, speak to him there. It’s an urgent police matter.”

  “My boy a good boy. I nevah have to tell you notting.”

  “Aunty.” Kamuela came over to the fence with that charming dimpled grin. “So sorry. No pilikia. He’s not in trouble. Just need to ask Freddie a couple questions. “

  Lei was never in favor of making false promises to potential witnesses, but Kamuela’s dimpled schmoozing was definitely working better than her direct approach, as “Aunty” told him Freddie could be found cooking at one of the shrimp trucks back toward the North Shore.

  “You have a way with the ladies,” Lei said as they got back into the truck.

  “So they tell me.” Kamuela winked.

  They got on the road back toward Haleiwa, and as they did, Lei flipped through her little spiral notebook. “Did you catch the name of that friend of Bryan Oulaki’s? Tadeo?”

  “He just said Tadeo.”

  “Well, the Tadeo we’re looking at on Maui is the jealous ex-boyfriend of Makoa’s current flame, Shayla Cummings.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of her. Bikini model, right?” Kamuela waggled his brows.

  “Yeah. She’s a beauty. Seems to really love Makoa. We found out he recently made her his accidental death insurance beneficiary, to the tune of a couple million. Her ex, Eli Tadeo, is kind of tricky. His twin brother is our Maui Police Department poster boy, and I mean that literally. He’s our main recruiter.” Lei filled Kamuela in on what she knew so far.

  “So how could those two be connected? Oulaki and Tadeo?”

  “No idea,” Lei said as they pulled in beside a battered-looking silver Airstream sporting a big hand-painted sign reading Fresh Island Shrimp. No one was currently in the graveled parking area between two open ponds trimmed in long grass.

  Lei and Kamuela got out, and Lei heard her stomach rumble. She gave Kamuela an eyeball. “Gonna get some shrimp.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “How can I help you?” The young man who leaned down into the window cut in the side of the Airstream also could match the sketch: multiethnic face, medium height, black hair, clean-shaven, and well-built. Half a dozen men they’d seen met that description. The sketch wasn’t turning out to be all that helpful.

  “I’d like the lunch special,” she said.

  “Make that two,” Kamuela rumbled beside her.

  “Coming right up.”

  “So, been working here long?” Lei asked, going for casual as Freddie Arenas turned away to a bubbling kettle on the propane stove.

  “Just a year.”

  “So these shrimp farms. Really seem to be a good thing for the North Shore,” Kamuela said, picking up her thread of making conversation.

  “Sure.” Arenas turned to nod. “Not much going on out here besides the surf community. It’s good they figured out shrimp did well here.”

  “Looks like it,” Lei said, surveying the shallow, square ponds. She couldn’t see anything beneath the wind-ruffled brown surface of the water. “So, you surf? Everybody seems to, out here.”

  “Not much else to do.” Arenas smiled, a good-humored grin. “But I like kiteboarding better.”

  “I’m from Maui. That’s the thing to do over there,” Lei said. “You ever get over there to sail?”

  “Matter of fact, I do. Like to take my gear, go for a few days. Meet buddies over there.” Arenas finished putting together Styrofoam clamshell boxes piled high with breaded shrimp and accompanied by a scoop of white rice and a pile of anemic-looking coleslaw. “Anything else I can get you?”

  Lei took the boxes, handed them to Kamuela, paid, and turned back holding up her ID. “Yes. The date of your last visit to Maui.”

  “Oh.” Arenas drew back. “What’s this about?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Well, I was over there a week or so ago.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Kiteboarding. Like I told you.”

  “Did you do anything else?”

  “I need to know what this is about.”

  “What kind of vehicle did you drive?”

  “I rented one of those windsurf vans. I slept in it, parked at Kanaha Beach Park. People do that all the time. That’s why I rent a van.” Arenas was talking fast now. “I never did nothing.”

  Lei also got that Arenas had an alibi from a Maui kiteboarding buddy he’d partied with while over there. “He crashed with me one night out at Kanaha.”

  Lei finally went back to join Kamuela, who’d finished most of his lunch already. She opened her Styrofoam container. “Not our guy.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Don’t tell me. Your gut.”

  “A little bit. And a little bit the grandma he lives with. Guy like that isn’t going out on weekends to drown surf superstars.”

  Lei sighed, poking at her coleslaw. “Wish we’d get a break on this case.”

  “Maybe that break will be in the threat letters. Or the boxes. While you were talking to Arenas, I called Kahuku PD and asked for a room to sort and process Makoa’s things. We go there next.”

  “Thanks, Marcus.” Lei’s appetite returned as the smell of fried shrimp hit her nose. “I’ll get a second wind after this.”

  Chapter 10

  The afternoon passed in relative peace in an empty conference room at the small cement block Kahuku Police Department building as L
ei and Kamuela opened the boxes of Makoa’s things and sorted through them.

  Lei didn’t know what she was looking for as she shook out stacks of neatly folded T-shirts and board shorts. It was obvious from Makoa’s lack of possessions, other than his surfboards, which Cantor had said belonged to Torque, that Makoa had lived light, with an emphasis on function.

  She was surprised to find a small black velvet box in the pocket of a pair of dress slacks still on their hanger. Lei opened it to find an engagement ring with sparkling, one-carat diamond lighting up a band of tiny, channel-set diamonds.

  “Check this out. Looks like he was getting ready to pop the question to Shayla.”

  “Whoa.” Marcus frowned, taking the box from her. “That’s a rock. The girlfriend’s going to want to have that, I’m betting.”

  “Yeah.” Lei’s mind was whirling. “What if this is motive?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—maybe someone knew he was getting ready to ask Shayla to marry him. What if that person didn’t want him to?”

  “Male or female?” Kamuela said, with one of his wolfish smiles.

  “Could be either.” Lei was thinking back to Shayla’s pretty friend Pippa, equally distraught over Makoa’s death. And the Tadeo connection. “I feel like there’s something here about his love life. Something we don’t know.” She took the ring box back from Kamuela and turned it over, and made a note of the jewelry store on the bottom.

  “Well, this needs to go into a safe.” Kamuela put the velvet box into an evidence bag.

  “I want to interview the salesman at the store where that was bought. And dig a little deeper into Makoa’s love life.”

  “After we process the threat letters.” Kamuela pulled over a high-powered lamp and the manila envelope with the letters in it. Kamuela had asked the station chief for processing materials for paper. Lei handed him a small pile of handwritten letters and kept a pile for herself. The e-mails she set aside for later computer IP address tracking.

  She and Kamuela used gloved hands to alternate spraying the postcards, letters, and folded cards with ninhydrin and then set them under the lamp where prints fluoresced. It was slow and quiet work as they photographed the prints that bloomed on the paper.

  Only when all the prints had been collected and processed to the case file did Lei look through the letters for content.

  “Does this strike you as a lot of hate mail? For a guy who, according to everyone we’ve talked to, was a likable kid?”

  “I was just thinking the same.” Kamuela held up one of the letters he’d finished processing, crude letters cut from a magazine and glued onto paper spelling out, Haole, go home. “Nice.”

  “I like this one.” Lei held up a block-printed card with genitalia on the front and the North Shore belongs to real men. “Real men don’t need to indulge in this kind of localism. Cream rises to the top, and Makoa had what it took to win the Triple Crown this year.”

  “A damn shame. I had no idea he was facing this kind of harassment,” Kamuela said. “They sure kept it quiet in the media.”

  “Well, Oulaki expressed a common sentiment, that the North Shore should belong to those born and raised. But it’s always been a magnet for the world, and that’s part of what makes it special.”

  They forged on, and Lei made a pile of any that looked like they might have been authored by the same person. Most were the ones with the cut-out squares of magazine letters. “I think these were by the same harasser.”

  “Agree.”

  Lei liked how non-talkative Marcus was. “Did you get any prints off these?”

  “No.” Kamuela rubbed the top of his ear, an expression of frustration wrinkling his broad brow. “Of course, the ones that look like something don’t go anywhere.”

  “Let’s take a look at the e-mails. I might be able to get Sophie over at the FBI to track the computers for me.” Lei handed a stack of e-mails to Kamuela, and moments later looked up at him. “I think these are all from the same source.”

  “Yeah.” Though origin e-mail addresses had been obscured by some program, the language of the e-mails was similar, and the threats escalated from “Go home to Maui” to “Get off the contest circuit or we’ll kill you and your woman.”

  “Why didn’t he go to the police with these?” Lei wondered aloud. “Why didn’t Cantor insist that he do that?”

  “Bad for his image, I’m guessing,” Kamuela said, sliding the e-mails back into the envelope. “I’m betting Torque didn’t want anything getting out to the media. Reporting it would make it potentially public and could have damaged Makoa’s reputation.”

  “So stupid,” Lei said, feeling frustration tighten her stomach. She glanced at the window and saw the sun was slanting long across the plumeria tree outside the dusty louvers. Something was telling her to stay with the case, immerse in the North Shore scene. “You know what, Marcus? I think I’d like to spend the night out here. Do a little undercover, see what I can see.”

  “Marcella will be bummed to miss you, but I get it. I can come out here as early as you want me tomorrow.” They gathered Makoa’s belongings back into the boxes. “We can log these into Kahuku’s evidence room overnight.”

  “I think I can take everything back to Maui when I go. Just check it onto the plane.” They carried the boxes down to the locked evidence room, more of a temporary storage closet at this tiny station than anything else. After filling out the requisite forms, Lei stuck the bagged engagement ring deep into one of the boxes. “I hate just sticking this in here, but I can’t keep it safe with me.”

  “Where are you going to spend the night?”

  “I don’t know. There are so many vacation rental rooms out here. Let’s ask around, see if I find something. If I do, you can drop me off on the way back out.”

  She and Kamuela engaged the Kahuku Station staff with Lei’s dilemma, and it wasn’t long before she had a bedroom booked for the night in a beach house owned by the cousin of one of the officers.

  On the drive back to that vacation rental’s address near Pipeline, Lei called Pono to check in on the day.

  “Hey, partner. How’d the interview with the parents go?”

  “Not well.” Pono sounded irritated. “I’ve been having a shitty day with this. How’d I pull the stay-back detail?”

  “Sorry.” Lei looked out her window as they cruised by Sunset Beach again. The sight was no less awe-inspiring the second time around, with sunset turning the spume flying off the waves to liquid gold. “Just give me the scoops, or I’ll tell you mine first.”

  “You go. I’m eating.” She heard him crunching something.

  “Okay. We had an interesting time at the Torque team house. Lots of politics.” She filled him in on the interviews. “And the really interesting thing, besides all the threat letters we picked up, was an engagement ring I found in Makoa’s pants pocket.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Right. But other than that, nothing hard. We have a lot of fingerprints and hair samples to go through that I’m hoping we can match to something you vacuumed out of the van.”

  “What we need is trace on or near the body.”

  “And we’re not going to get that. But I have a couple of interesting coincidences.” She told him about Oulaki’s friend named Tadeo and the attitude the team rider had. “His attitude was consistent with the hate mail Makoa was getting.”

  “All good but circumstantial. Well, Makoa’s father, he didn’t want to answer why he had taken out that big life insurance policy on his son. Threatened to call his lawyer, got all pissed off.”

  Lei nodded, then remembered her partner couldn’t see that gesture. “Yes. He’d be insulted we’d even imagine such a thing, yada, yada. You didn’t tell him that Makoa’s policy benefits Shayla Cummings, did you?”

>   “You’re kidding, right?”

  Lei snorted a laugh. “I was. It wouldn’t be good for him to find that out. Did you find Eli Tadeo? Because if you do, I want you to ask him if he knows a guy named Bryan Oulaki.” Lei told him how unhelpful the suspect sketch Shayla and the artist had worked up was turning out to be. “It looks like half the guys on the North Shore.”

  “Well, I haven’t found Tadeo yet, and he hasn’t called me. I called the number listed for him; it’s out of service. I thought I’d try one more drop-by today. I don’t want to issue a BOLO or something with his brother’s position in the MPD.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. The reporters have descended. They’re hassling anyone and everyone at the beach, agitating Makoa’s parents, calling the station. Makoa’s paddle out and memorial being planned here are getting a lot of press. We need to bring something in, and soon. Omura’s getting restless.”

  “Working it as hard as I can.” Lei frowned. “More pressure isn’t going to speed this up, because it’s not an easy one. Tell Omura I’m going to be staying out here by the beach, doing a little undercover work tomorrow and seeing what kind of gossip and impressions I can pick up. I have a feeling there’s something we’re missing. Something that provides a clear motive. So far all we have are murky possibilities.”

  Marcus had turned the truck off the Kamehameha Highway and back onto the frontage road. They bumped through rain-filled potholes and over a couple of steep speed bumps before pulling up to an imposing wooden gate topped by coconut finials. “Gotta go. We’re at my crib for the night.”

  “I’ll call you if I talk to Tadeo.” Pono hung up.

  Marcus put the truck in Park. “The cousin said to ring the bell and they’d open the gate.”

  “Got it.” Lei hopped out of the truck and rang a bell concealed under a little plastic flap. A few minutes later, the gate retracted and they pulled inside a lushly planted compound. A large, two-story older home took up the bulk of the lot, but palms and fern trees coiled with orchids created an oasis-like feeling.