Rip Tides

by Toby Neal

  Lei walked into the women’s room and splashed water on her face. She took some relaxation breaths: in through her nose, out through her mouth. Tried to imagine finding out she was pregnant and dealing with it alone, with Stevens murdered.

  Her mind shied away from a horror too great to bear.

  She bought a little more time by changing out of her still-damp suit and cover-up into clothing from the backpack she’d made sure was packed from the vacation rental. Back in jeans and a button-down shirt, her badge and gun in place, she felt better able to face Shayla.

  Lei pushed rioting curls back from her face and bundled them into a rubber band. With her hair pulled back and the weight she’d lost since her miscarriage, the face that looked back at her from the mirror seemed all eyes and mouth, the cheekbones high and stark, freckles standing out across her nose.

  She put a little lipstick and mascara on, hoping that would help balance things.

  It didn’t.

  Finally, done stalling, she tightened her shoulder holster, washed her hands, and strode out.

  * * *

  Lei brought a glass of water in to Shayla, who was sitting at the table, playing with her phone. “Sorry for the wait.”

  “Who was that screaming?” Shayla’s golden tan looked jaundiced under the harsh lighting. “It sounded serious.”

  “Nothing to worry about.” Lei sat herself across from Shayla. “Detective Kamuela will be along in a moment with some items we’d like you to identify from Makoa’s things at the Torque team house.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you come over here often? Spend much time at the house?”

  “Not really. I’d come over for big contests, to give support. But no. Usually he visited me at my house, when he came home.” Shayla clearly considered Maui not just her home, but Makoa’s.

  “Would you consider yourself and Makoa close?”

  “Definitely.” Shayla folded her arms across her shapely bosom.

  “What kind of relationship would you say you had?” Lei kept her voice neutral, but Shayla drew her brows together.

  “What’s this about?”

  “We’ve heard rumors that you weren’t Makoa’s only girlfriend.”

  “You’ve heard about Pippa, then,” Shayla stated. “I guess I should have told you when you came to the house with the sketch artist, but we were so upset, I didn’t think of it. Besides, how is it relevant to the investigation?”

  A long beat went by as they eyed each other, and finally Lei asked gently, “Do you want me to spell it out?”

  Shayla dropped her eyes and covered her face with her hands. Lei had the feeling she was seeing a deliberate shift in behavior, and sure enough, the shoulders that had been thrown defiantly back hunched inward, and she trembled as if with a sob.

  “It’s all been too much,” she said, her voice muffled by her hands. “I know the situation we had going was weird to people, but it worked for us.”

  “Shayla, I’d really like to understand it from your perspective. Just tell me how it came about. Help me understand how it worked for you.” Feeding back the witnesses’ own words to them helped create a connection, a sense of being understood, and sure enough, Shayla lowered her hands. Her big brown eyes were glossy with tears, and her full lips trembled.

  “I had Makoa first. He was my boyfriend. But then Pippa, who works on Oahu a lot more than me, began hanging around with him. Just friends, I thought—but it had become something more. I love Pippa and I love Makoa. I didn’t want to lose them both, especially to each other. So I said, why don’t we just share?” She blinked, and fat tears rolled out of her eyes. “So we did. It worked for us.” The phrase had begun to sound like a mantra.

  As if on cue, Kamuela came in with the same cardboard box of Makoa’s things that they’d shown Pippa. He set the box on the table. “Here are some of Makoa’s things that Pete at the Torque house packed up,” Lei said, taking out the stack of T-shirts.

  Shayla scooped up a blue one, pressed it to her face. “Can I keep this?” she asked.

  “Sure. We were taking the rest back to Maui, to his parents. But there was one more thing we found.” Lei reached into the box and took out the small, black velvet box.

  Shayla’s mouth opened, and she reached over and took the ring box, flipping it open. She covered her mouth with her hand, and tears filled her eyes as she looked at the sparkling diamond. “Oh my God. He was going to ask me to marry him.”

  Lei blinked, glanced at Kamuela. The scene with Pippa was so fresh it was hard to process Shayla’s confident statement. “So…he hadn’t talked to you about this?”

  “No. But I’m sure he was just waiting for the right time to ask me. He told me the morning he was killed that he had something important to talk to me about.” Shayla took the ring out, slid it onto her finger as her eyes welled, and Lei couldn’t help contrasting Pippa’s raw grief to Shayla’s pretty tears. Which display of emotion could be hiding a murderer?

  “What about Pippa?” Lei couldn’t help asking.

  Shayla wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, still gazing at the ring. “We’d have worked something out.”

  “Come on.” Lei snorted. “I would sooner gut another woman than share my husband. You’re telling me you’d let him keep Pippa? Because from the reports we heard, you were the one getting edged out and that ring was for her.”

  Shayla’s dark eyes flared wide, and Lei glimpsed the steely will that gave the girl her dominating personality.

  “No way,” she said confidently. “Okay, you’re right. I wouldn’t be willing to share Makoa once we were married. “

  “Did Makoa ask you to marry him? Tell you anything important this weekend, before he was killed?”

  “No, but he told me we had something important to discuss. He was taking me to dinner the night he was killed.” She swiveled her hand back and forth, watching the light play on the diamonds. “Can I keep this?”

  “Take it off. It’s evidence,” Kamuela growled from his side of the table. Lei could tell he didn’t like Shayla’s cavalier attitude.

  Shayla removed the ring and put it back in the box. Lei could tell it was hard for her to part with it, as the young woman slowly shut the lid. Lei leaned forward, her eyes hard on the other woman’s face, feeling like a matador baiting a bull as she said, “Makoa was going to tell you something important before he was killed. Pippa is pregnant.”

  Shayla recoiled as if slapped. “Pippa wouldn’t try to steal him from me with the oldest trick in the book! Where is that bitch?” Shayla shot to her feet, knocking the chair over behind her.

  “Sit down!” Kamuela grabbed her arm and bent it, and Shayla sat, glaring, but now Lei drilled into her.

  “That bitch, huh? For all we know, you’re lying and Makoa told you Pippa was pregnant, that he was breaking up with you. So you called your ex Eli Tadeo to help you out with a problem.”

  “No!” Shayla exclaimed, jumping up again. “Pippa was just a convenience. Someone for him to bang on Oahu. I figured it was better the friend you know than the enemy you don’t, so I went along with it. But he didn’t love her, not like he loved me.” Lei and Kamuela glanced at each other, but there was no stopping Shayla now that she’d gotten started. “Pippa had it bad for him, though. She would do anything to be with him, including this ploy to try to nab a ring, now that he’s gone. I bet she said he was going to ask her to marry him because she was pregnant.”

  “That was one possibility we were exploring, yes,” Lei said. “But it’s easy enough to check out her story. We’ll just ask her to take a pregnancy test.”

  “Even if she is pregnant, it’s because she trapped him,” Shayla said. “That ring is mine. He was mine.”

  “So much for an arrangement that works for everyone,” Lei said dryly. “It
’s amazing you were able to keep this going for as long as you did. And now I don’t believe either of you.” Lei took the ring box, put it back in the box of clothing. “We’ll talk again. Do you and Pippa need a ride back to the party at the team house?”

  “We had one until you brought us out here,” Shayla said sullenly, following Lei to the door and out in the hall. She spotted Pippa sitting in a waiting area near the front door and darted past Lei, launching herself at the other woman.

  “You bitch!” The sound of Shayla slapping Pippa’s face rang through the small station. Lei got ahold of Shayla by the shoulders and hauled her back, twisting an arm up behind the girl in a restraint hold. Pippa jumped up off the bench and went for Shayla.

  “You’re the bitch and always were! I should never have gone along with your sick ideas!”

  Kamuela, who had been stowing the box in the evidence room, reached Pippa just as she slugged Shayla, knocking the other girl back into Lei’s arms.

  They got handcuffs on both women and escorted them to Kamuela’s truck, where he put Shayla in the back of the pickup and Pippa inside. Leaden silence filled the vehicle as they drove back to the Torque team house.

  “Are you two calmed down enough to go to the memorial party?” Lei asked after they arrived at the crowded beach house. “Or do we need to book you both into jail for a cooling-off period?”

  Shayla straightened up in the bed of the truck. Even with wind-whipped hair and handcuffs on, she managed to look like she was ready to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “I’m done. Done speaking to that lying whore.” She narrowed her eyes at Pippa.

  In reply, Pippa, who had been looking green as Lei helped her out of the back of the truck, bent over and vomited in front of Shayla. Some of the warm, acrid-smelling vomit splashed on Shayla’s feet, and the other woman squealed, leaping back in repulsion.

  Kamuela hauled Shayla farther up the driveway before uncuffing her, while Lei helped Pippa sit down on the grass. She took off the handcuffs. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t ever want to see her again,” Pippa said. “I just want to go home. But I live with her.”

  “Well, we have another stop to make, but I’m going back to Maui. You could get a ride with us to the airport, or find another way there,” Lei found herself offering.

  “I’d like that. If I get home before Shayla, I can get my stuff out of the house.”

  “Okay. Let me ask Detective Kamuela.” Lei left Pippa rubbing her wrists by the truck and rejoined Kamuela, walking back from the house. “So much for no catfights or drama,” she said. “Can we give Pippa a ride back to the airport? I don’t want to leave them both here, and she wants to get her stuff out of the apartment they share.”

  “Sure. Thought you had another stop.”

  “Yeah. I want to go by the store where the ring was purchased and find out when Makoa bought it.”

  They walked back to the truck to see Pippa talking to Bryan Oulaki. The young man had a hand against the truck beside the girl and their heads were close together. Lei went on high alert and felt Kamuela stiffen beside her as well. Pippa looked up at their approach, and her eyes were streaming.

  “Bryan said he would take me to the airport.”

  “Okay,” Lei said, keeping her voice soft and sympathetic, though this evidence that Pippa knew Bryan, their strongest suspect, bore close attention. “Have you known each other long?”

  Bryan straightened up defensively. “Since Makoa introduced us. I just want to help out. Pippa’s been through a lot.”

  “Okay. You sure, Pippa? It would be easy for us to take you.” Lei didn’t know why exactly she was reluctant to leave Pippa with the young man. Maybe it didn’t mean anything that they knew each other, that he wanted to take her to the airport.

  But maybe it was important.

  Pippa wiped her eyes. “I don’t want to get in your way. I appreciate Bryan offering.”

  Lei and Kamuela left the couple and got into Kamuela’s truck.

  “Interesting,” said Kamuela.

  “Yeah. Want to hear my favorite theory?”

  “I do.”

  Lei clicked her seat belt into place as they backed out of the crowded driveway. “Here’s what I think happened. Makoa got to Maui and told Shayla right away. She pretended to be okay with it, the way she’s pretended to be okay with it all along. But she called her ex, Tadeo, and he came out to the break where Makoa was surfing and did the deed. Tadeo matches the description of the guy the surfers who rescued Makoa said they saw. I no longer believe anything Shayla says. She denies that it was Tadeo; but she’s the one who provided the description and claims to have seen the guy when the whole story about the van could have been to throw us off, a red herring. That sketch turned out to be so generic it could be half the guys on the North Shore.”

  “Or,” Kamuela said, navigating the turn back onto crowded Kamehameha Highway. “It could have been Oulaki. Pippa finds out Makoa’s going to ask Shayla to marry him no matter that she’s pregnant, if she even is. She calls Oulaki and tells him. Oulaki also matches the description Shayla gave. He goes over, rents the van, does the deed, and comes back to Oahu. Now he gets the girl he’s wanted and his rival out of the way, and with this theory, Pippa may or may not be involved at all.”

  “I like Shayla more for it. She’s cold under those pretty tears. Cold, and sure she’s superior. Those are some of the necessary ingredients for murder.”

  “Let’s not forget that neither of these girls actually killed him.”

  “No, but that ring is motive. Just like I thought it might be, and Shayla has a stronger motive,” Lei argued. “She has money on the line in the form of that life insurance policy. She has both money and revenge to kill Makoa. Pippa might have been first in his heart, but Shayla was first on paper.”

  “So what do you want to do next?”

  “Let’s go to the store and find out what we can about that ring, then go get both girls’ phone records and run down their phone calls on the day Makoa was killed.”

  Chapter 15

  Lei sat on the plane back to Maui, sorting through the cell phone records that Kamuela had been able to get printed up at his station before he dropped her off at the airport. In the end, she was glad she hadn’t had Pippa along for the ride when they went to the jewelry store, where she found out the ring had been purchased two months before Makoa’s murder, pushing the timeline of his intentions toward either of the girls back into the unknown zone. Whatever he’d been planning to do with the ring had preceded Pippa’s announcement, which still needed to be verified—but Lei didn’t think the girl was acting, with all her emotions and symptoms.

  Lei focused on the day Makoa had been killed. His fateful drowning had happened on Saturday morning, so she looked for numbers called by both girls on Friday evening and Saturday morning, and cross-checked them with Eli Tadeo’s and Bryan Oulaki’s phone records. She spotted Bryan Oulaki’s number on Pippa’s records as an incoming call on Friday night.

  So Oulaki called Pippa, not the other way around. Now she had something to follow up on.

  Shayla’s records were less revealing. No calls Friday night or Saturday until after Makoa’s drowning. Lei felt a twinge of disappointment and looked out the round oval window at the rapidly approaching, corrugated green coastline of Maui. She liked Shayla as the force behind this murder: for the way she’d revealed her real attitude toward Pippa, for her confident grab at the ring, for the steely will she’d shown when looking into Lei’s eyes.

  But none of that made the woman a murderer, and with virtually no trace on or around the body, this case was going to be made on a confession or a strong enough circumstantial argument. And whatever had sparked the murder, neither girl had actually held Makoa under.

  That was someone else. Someone with a deep enough rage
, spite, greed, or jealousy to take another man’s life in broad daylight, in front of witnesses.

  The plane bounced around as it often did coming in on Maui in the glow of sunset, the gusty wind generated by the deep valley of the central area of the island lifting the plane with some stomach-dropping bumps that made the passengers around her gasp. Lei leaned her forehead on the window, watching the sugarcane fields rising to meet them, and remembered the hijacking of months before.

  But surprisingly, it didn’t bother her. Not nearly as much as the looseness at the waistline of her jeans, the emptiness under the hand that rested there.

  Pono met her at the curb after she collected her weapon and the boxes of Makoa’s belongings. The ring she’d kept close, in her backpack.

  “Hey, partner.” Pono took a box from her, put it in the extended cab. They piled the rest in the back. “How was Oahu?”

  “Busy. Got some good leads. You?”

  “Finally tracked Eli Tadeo. He has an alibi for the time in question.”

  “Shit,” Lei said, hopping up onto the chrome step that led into the cab of the truck. “I have a new theory and I want it to be him.”

  She told Pono her theory about Shayla as they wound through the busy traffic of downtown toward Kahului Station.

  “Motive she might have, but without any record of her contacting Tadeo, and with Tadeo at community baseball practice with his brother, Eric, our MPD poster boy, that theory’s not going anywhere.” Pono pushed his ever-present Oakleys up with a thick finger, and there was a deep dent between his black brows. “I did my best to smooth over the questioning with Eli, but Eric and his wife are pretty pissed.”

  “Screw them. It’s a murder investigation of a high-profile guy,” Lei said. “If Eric Tadeo can’t get the stick out of his ass enough to understand that, he doesn’t deserve the job he’s got.”