Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Opaka-paka?”

  “Best fish dish in the islands, the way they do it here.”

  “Downstairs, you say,” she considered aloud.

  “At the restaurant.”

  She sighed, gave him time to worry and then said, “All right. Give me a moment to dress.”

  “C-casual,” he intoned.

  “Island casual?”

  “And I promise, no shoptalk.”

  When she hung up, she wondered if she'd made the right decision, and if he'd stick to his word about no shoptalk, or if he was chomping at the bit to glean as much information as possible from her about the earlier autopsies. Still, she wasted no time in dressing in a light, rainbow-colored, muumuu-style dress she had picked up at a hotel shop in Maui. As she quickly blow-dried her hair, using a little gel to style it comfortably and nicely, allowing the gentle, auburn curls to flow freely to either side, she wondered about his intentions. She also questioned her own. Then again, why shouldn't she enjoy herself here in the world's most lovely resort city; why shouldn't she have a place to wear her new dress; why shouldn't she taste this opaka-paka delicacy? And Alan Rychman and Paul Zanek be damned—for different reasons. And by God, why shouldn't she enjoy the company of another man? She found her cane and took a moment to appraise herself in the full-length mirror before stepping out, glad she'd bought the pullover island wear with the tie about the waist as opposed to the one without. She quickly cautioned herself about Parry, reminding herself that all men were the same the world over, and that despite his good looks, she didn't intend to get romantically involved with any goddamned, workaholic bureau chief, Hawaii or not.

  Dinner was delightful, served in an open-air atmosphere on the rim of the Pacific, tracings of lavender and purple aproning the horizon as the sun abandoned sky for sea. Remarkably, Parry remained a man of his word, not once broaching the subject of the double autopsy earlier or the case he was building against a phantom killer stalking Honolulu's Waikiki resort area.

  After a delicious dinner of thick, fresh opaka-paka served up with wine, he took her for a walk along Waikiki's busiest strip. Life teemed here on the streets and in the hotels as it did below in the ocean, the schools of people in their weaving groups swimming in relaxed but controlled fashion, going in, out and among the doorways and concrete pillars, the shopping on Kalakaua Avenue going on all night.

  Parry needn't have pointed out the dazzling one-of-a-kind shops lining the way. Here shops known worldwide competed with local oddities. To her uninitiated eye, it seemed as though the people were mad; having come halfway around the globe, most of them were fixating on an activity they could do at their local malls in Upper Sandusky or Idaho, or Tokyo. People seemed both astonished and pleased to find familiar shop names alongside the unfamiliar, the gaudy neon alongside the tasteful designs that announced such places as Endangered Species, The Wyland Art Gallery, and exotic Korean, Japanese and Hawaiian restaurants; there was also Woolworth's, Burger King, Hilo Hattie's, ABC Liquor and Pharmacy, Thom McAn Shoes. There were three- tiered shopping malls in the International Market Place in the heart of Waikiki. It was all dizzying, exciting and a good deal disheartening, she thought. Maui, too, had high-rise hotels dotting its coasts, but there was nothing to compare to this for the atmosphere that only a major world city might provide.

  “You could spend a hefty fortune here before you got halfway down the block,” he said in her ear as they walked casually along the brightly illuminated street.

  Her thoughtful “Hmmmm” was a purr. She'd drunk a bit more wine than she ought to have. “I can see that,” she managed. “But it's not what I came to Hawaii for.”

  “It's certainly an allure for a good many others, though, Doctor. Big bucks, big time... Honolulu attracts millions each season.”

  She looked across at him as they continued to stroll along amid the bustle, adroitly maneuvering about the human quagmire they now found themselves in when they came to a standstill in front of a small grocery that specialized in Vietnamese goods. “Some unusual delicacies in there,” he assured her.

  “You were in Viet Nam? Acquired a taste for the food?”

  “Didn't everybody?”

  “What sort of a unit did you serve with?”

  “I was just your ordinary grunt.”

  “A grunt, and you came out alive. I'm impressed.”

  They continued along the avenue, the gentle trades whooshing along the man-made valley of asphalt, concrete and steel all around them, the millions of windows winking down over their progress as a street vendor offered them paper leis so he could take their “honeymoon snapshot.”

  Parry waved the vendor off and she shook her head a bit self-consciously, each of them laughing, both amused and a bit uncomfortable. She instantly recuperated, however, asking, “Must have a hell of a lot of pressure on to keep this city's reputation sparkling?”

  “FBI's supposed to be above all that kind of bullshit, but yes... your little understatement is quite correct. You're quite observant, Dr. Coran, but if you remember, I did promise no talk shop, remember?”

  She ignored this. “Some of the young women disappeared from this very area, didn't they?”

  “Yes, but that's not why we're here.” He may's well have taken them in daylight as here. He'd be surrounded by people and the street's as lit up as Times Square on

  New Year's.”

  “People haven't been known to disappear on Times Square at New Year's?” He laughed lightly and then breathed deeply, shaking his head, the carefully combed hair now tossed by the wind. “I promise not to talk shop for your benefit, to show you around town a little, and here you are talking about precisely—”

  “A shrink would call it obsessive-compulsive, a fixation I have on my work, a fatal flaw for any relationship.”

  “Well, I admit to symptoms myself. I don't mind telling you, from what I've seen so far, I think we're lucky to have you... compulsions and all. Nothing wrong with devotion to duty, all that...”

  “Jesus, you're not going to break out in a patriotic Lee Greenwood song, are you?” she said while thinking, What the hell does he know about my compulsions?

  He laughed from the gut at her joke, singing, “God bless America and the U.S.A.” He drew stares and laughter. A seriousness crept into her voice. “You haven't any idea what I'm all about, Chief Parry.”

  He smiled at her thinly veiled remark, their eyes momentarily meeting before he responded. “All cops are fanatical—if they're doing their jobs. Call it what you will.”

  “Most people are obsessive about something, or someone,” she countered. “Crazy is one of the key words in most country-western songs, isn't it?”

  “Everybody's crazy about something,” he agreed, “sure. For some it's a movie star's lips—”

  “—or hips—-”

  “—comic books, baseball trading cards, stamps—”

  She kept pace. “—trashy novels, green lawns—”

  “—antiques, money, cars...”

  With a salutation toward the crowd, she added, “Shopping.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We haven't even touched on porcelain junkies, sports nuts, dog enthusiasts, cat lovers, collectors of the weird and the arcane.”

  He began a bantering laugh.

  “From book matches to little stone dolls with large reproductive organs,” she added with her own laugh. “And some people just can't get enough of fire. You like to play with fire, Mr. Parry?”

  “Sure, certain fire, who doesn't?”

  “Controlled fire, you mean. Well, perhaps you'd better be cautious, because even the most controlled fires tend to get out of hand in a wind like this.”

  They continued onward until they stood outside an unusual shop that carried items from New Guinea, the walls and windows filled with headdresses and masks with stoney, bulging eyes, fanglike teeth and enormous ears. She stepped inside to browse the unique store, and he followed. There was something completely raw and uninhibit
ed about the items on display for sale here, items that appeared better suited to a museum showing than a capitalistic enterprise. Spears and ancient tools adorned one wall, rustic artwork the other, and as they moved from one display to another, the eyes of the ancient, one-of-a-kind, handmade masks seemed to follow their steps. “An archaeologist would be right at home here,” she commented.

  “Another kind of fanaticism?” he asked. “The desire to stare into the past, to understand the dead?”

  “Not so different from what we M.E.'s do, only our dead are usually of a more recent vintage.”

  “So a good medicine man, or woman in your case, is still worth her weight in papayas, at least in these islands,” he said with a wide and infectious smile.

  “Have all the victims disappeared from this area?” she asked.

  “No, not all. Several have been abducted from our Chinatown area.”

  “Chinatown?”

  “One of our oldest districts where the oldest profession is still the oldest profession.”

  “I see. Were all the women prostitutes?”

  “You haven't had time to go over the files, I take it.”

  She shook her head to indicate she hadn't.

  He ushered her back out onto the street before saying, “Several were university students, possibly plying the trade to continue at the university, but others seem to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of last year's disappearances were working night-shift jobs, supposedly on their way home, when they vanished. “And all of them fall within a certain age range?”

  “Sixteen's the youngest and nineteen's the oldest.”

  “Pretty tight range.”

  He agreed, adding, “He appears to like them with long, free-flowing black hair, and he obviously prefers island girls, never a haole—a white.”

  He walked her back to her hotel lobby where a short, stocky man in a raucous, multicolored Hawaiian shirt, dashed up to Jim Parry, pulling him away, speaking in hushed and rapid fashion. The other man was dark-skinned, a heavy sweater. His hair had once been jet black, but now it was streaked and peppered with gray; tossed by the wind, it scuffled about his creased forehead and worried eyes. She heard Jim call him Tony. He'd brought some urgent message to Parry, who was doing his best to rid himself of the heavier fellow.

  It then appeared that Parry wasn't going to get away, so Jessica made a move for the hotel entrance, to go to her room, but this spurred Parry back to her; he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, the older man beside him, frowning, a natural scowl distorting his features.

  “This is Special Agent Anthony Gagliano, Dr. Coran.” Gagliano was so darkly tanned that his Italian features had turned to that of a dark Latino. Swarthy, she thought.

  “Gagliano,” she said, “I might've guessed,” trying to muster a smile, feeling wrung out.

  “We've got a line on the missing girl,” Parry said. “Honolulu Missing Persons notified Tony right after their two Hawaiian cops fell, but its only been a few hours ago that Tony's been able to get her family to agree to see me. It's been twenty-four hours, and the girl's description fits our victim profile.”

  “Then you have worked up a victim profile?”

  “In the files I gave you, remember?”

  “A victim profile without bodies. That may be a first, Inspector. I'm impressed.”

  “Don't be. It wasn't too tough. They all might've been sisters, they look—looked—that much alike.”

  She sighed heavily, nodding, realizing that this was one more point of evidence that made Parry believe that a demented mind stood behind the disappearances.

  “I've got to go. Tony and I'll question the relatives, find out what we can.”

  “Be sure to get any and all medical information you can,” she urgently told him. “Sure, sure,” said Gagliano, sounding a bit offended.

  “Don't stop at dental. Anything medical,” she persisted to Gagliano's best we-know-how-to-do-our-job glare. “All we've got is that awful arm in Lau's freezer, and that's not much to work with. We'll need every shred of information from the girl's doctor, from measles shots on. Be nice if we had medical records and long-bone X-rays on all of them.”

  Gagliano, a hefty man, had the eyes of an impish boy. He stared at Jessica for a moment before replying. “Not much to attach to that ham hock we found, huh, Doc? Sure, we'll grill her family for any medical records.”

  “Get a good night's sleep. You'll need it for the morning,” Parry said to her as Gagliano faded toward his car. “I enjoyed dinner and the walk,” he confided.

  “So did I. See you sometime tomorrow then, Chief Parry.”

  “Might just as well call me Jim. We're going to be working very closely together.”

  “I'm not sure we're going to be working that close, Jim, and I don't know how long Zanek'll let me remain. Maybe Chief is best for now.”

  He frowned, but it quickly disappeared and was replaced by an elegant smile. “All right, Doctor. Have it your way.”

  “I usually do.”

  “I can believe that.”

  He allowed himself to linger over her disappearing form, not caring what Gagliano made of his behavior. Even with the cane, or perhaps because of it, she was a unique and intriguing combination of beauty and brains, femininity and strength. He decided he very much liked her and that he wanted to get to know her better.

  Gagliano rejoined him, saying, “Helluva looker for an M.E., Jim. Couldn't figure it when they told me you were at the Rainbow having dinner with a coroner, but Christ, nobody told me she was such a doll. I figured her more the 'Iron Matron' in the lockup type, if you know what I mean? Still, I never figured you to go for a chest cutter.”

  'Tony, tonight was strictly business.”

  “Hey, if you got to do business, it's a hell of a lot easier if the dame across from you looks like something between Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Lo-and-Bacall!”

  Parry laughed. “Shut up and get in your squad. I'm under the bus terminal and I'll follow you out. Let's get whatever the doctor wants.”

  “Strictly business, huh?”

  “Go!”

  Parry had worked on and off with Tony Gagliano for most of the eight years he had been in Hawaii. Tony was a good man, a tough cop and a straight friend who had several times tried to fix Jim up with one of his many relatives who visited from the mainland from time to time. Most of Tony's family remained in the San Francisco Bay area. Tony, the black sheep of the family for most of his life, had stumbled into police work only after running off to Hawaii to be a beach bum. That had been almost twenty years before. He had come up through the ranks of street cop in Honolulu, had done every conceivable job through detective-shield status and had finally applied for the FBI at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Now thirty-eight, prematurely aged and balding, he had covered a lot of ground with Parry, and they instinctively trusted one another as they could no one else either in the HPD or the FBI. Aside from the work, they had spent many a backyard barbecue and ball game together. Tony had also watched James Parry fail at every relationship he had ever had with a woman over the years. Sometimes, Jim Parry thought as he slid in behind the wheel of his unmarked car, Tony knew too damned much about him.

  Parry's car cut sharply from beneath the bus terminal at the Rainbow Tower and out into the traffic of Ala Moana Boulevard. He tried now to concentrate on the work at hand. He'd seen a photograph of the last supposed victim of the Trade Winds phantom, a lovely petite young woman with shining black hair that cascaded down to near waist-length, and while the others hadn't hair quite so long, they all wore tapering hair in similar fashion. Linda, or Lina as her closest family called her, this nineteen-year- old, hadn't much of a file yet, just a photo and the particulars of her home situation and place of work. Her employer had been questioned without result, having been the last to see Linda before she was believed to have gotten into a car with a dark figure on Ala Wai Boulevard, where she'd walked from the job to home, just opposite the canal.
She'd been working nights in order to pay her tuition at the university. “Bloody shame,” he muttered to himself, turning now into a cramped little driveway as Tony pulled ahead and parked on a steep incline. The two cops were met by Linda's father, a short, crusty full-blood Hawaiian with the characteristic large features and thick folds of skin that marked his age and race. His small Portuguese wife was on the porch, sitting in a stupefied daze on a swing, humming a tune which harkened back to another time and place. The house both outside and in seemed draped in an impenetrable darkness.

  Parry introduced himself, shaking the man's hand, but his eyes roamed the porch and the black interior of the house.

  “It's da way she no want it for now, no lights, nobody inside. She no want you goin' in and goin' through our daughter's stuff, you unnerstand?” He sounded almost apologetic, trained to accept authority.

  Parry nodded, and immediately asked the father if there were any medical records on Linda. “It could help,” he assured Mr. Kahala.

  “When you guys ask for medical and dental records dat mean bad t'ings,” replied the sad-eyed father. “I know dat. But my wife, Miya, she knows mo 'bout where da kine paper bettah, so let me talk to her 'bout dat.” He fell silent a moment and stared at Gagliano and Parry. “You got any mo questions?”

  “Yes, quite a few.”

  “And it would really help, sir, if we could get into your daughter's bedroom,” added Gagliano. “You never know what little item might prove useful in an investigation.”

  “We told the cops everything we know.”

  “But you didn't let the cops inside either. Now we have a warrant, but we'd prefer your cooperation instead.”

  Parry apologized for his partner, taking on the role of the good guy in all this while Gagliano got right into the man's face and continued. “We need to hear it straight from you, sir, for ourselves. We get it second-hand from HPD, who knows... we might miss something.” The old man nodded and began a soliloquy tinged with monotony, until he mentioned that his girl was going to the university. A light turned on inside him for a moment and his voice rose. But the wife shouted from her shadow on the porch, “That's what got her killed! Trying to be Miss High-Mighty and pay for that school! If my Lina had stayed home—”