Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

“So when did Georgie last see her alive?”

  “Just a few days ago. Friends saw them together.”

  “Then maybe he did her.”

  Tony frowned. “Don't think so, Chief.”

  “Why not?”

  He continued shaking his head. “No stomach for it. He's Mr. Clean, like I said; Hawaii goes preppy.”

  “So that clears him?”

  “That and a lie detector, yeah, in my book.”

  “Lie detectors aren't foolproof. Anybody know we've questioned the kid?”

  “Not a soul. The test was done in an out-of-the-way fashion, strictly hit and run. I did the test myself working out of the case. Convinced Krueger to turn over the machine to me.”

  “Good... good,” replied Parry, popping a mint. “Keep it that way.”

  “I'm telling you, Chief, another go at this kid's a waste of time. And it could expose him to some ugly feelings in the community.”

  “Maybe, but I've got to ask him a few questions. After we're finished with the Kahalas, you can run me over there.”

  “Waste of time.”

  “Maybe, but perhaps I can shake loose something from the kid.”

  “Something I missed?”

  “Something you weren't aware of.”

  “Swears he knew nothing about how she was living in between the time he dumped her and last saw her.”

  'Ted Bundy swore a lot of 'truths' too. Come on, Tony, the kid freakin' lied to you about the timing.”

  Gagliano shrugged. “Whatever you want, Boss.”

  “What I want is some answers. So far, we got shit, Tony.”

  “What about the doctor lady? She come up with anything?”

  Parry brought his agent up on the news from the lab. It was enough to light Tony's eyes up. “Then those kanaka cops were on to something. Too bad they failed to follow proper procedure.”

  “They were good men, Gag.”

  “First thing they ought've done was call in the damned plate. Had they done that, we'd have their killer, the Trade Winds Killer, locked away for life right now.”

  “Maybe there was a good reason they didn't call it in immediately. Plate might've been obscured.”

  “So they inspect the car instead?”

  “Yeah, like that and—”

  “—and they find blood on the interior, maybe the girl's clothes, but before they can make another move, they're under fire.”

  “Like sniper fire from the brush. Never saw it coming.”

  Both the FBI men had served in Viet Nam and both understood how sudden death could strike.

  The time in and out with the Kahalas to inform them of the positive I.D. made on Linda's torn limb, making it a certainty that their daughter was at peace with her Maker, was a mere twelve minutes, but it seemed like an hour. The mother crumpled under the weight of the news, supported only by her husband, who also slid to the floor. In their dark house of mourning, the couple reminded Parry of the twisted, sad figure in Picasso's Blue Guitarist.

  The FBI men left a card and quickly disappeared, leaving the grieving parents to themselves.

  “Get me to this Oniiwah kid,” Parry said in an acerbic voice.

  Gagliano knew the tone and what it meant. He said nothing as he and Parry, boarding Tony's car together, drove for the University of Hawaii. After a few miles, Tony said, “The kid lives in the dorm. We may not catch him. Could be out at a pizza joint, a dance, a party, a rat's-ass gala, anything.”

  'Tonight, Tony.”

  “We'll find him...”

  Just then the usual clatter and clutter of the police ban radio in Tony's unit caught their attention, the dispatcher calling on a city squad car to investigate a disturbance on Paani near Kapiolani

  Boulevard. It was coincidentally the same street on which the Kahalas lived and where Parry had left his car.

  Each of the men looked at one another. “What do you think, Jim?”

  “Dispatch gave it a 10-6. Couldn't be anything too big. Let's push on for the college.”

  As they did so, Parry thought of Linda Kahala's small, tight-knit community, thought of her hanging out on the corner at the drugstore where she and other children bought their crackseeds and Coca-Colas, thought about her walking the few blocks to Iolani School as a child, about her later catching the bus for Kapiolani Community College, which she'd attended for two years before going on to the university. She'd seemed a determined young woman with a plan. Parry had to know what had happened to end that plan.

  They were now entering the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, its peaceful, serene setting at the base of the mountains where the lush, green blanket of the Honolulu Watershed Forest Preserve marked its boundary, making it appear a place where nothing bad in the world could ever happen. For the FBI men such a fantasy world did not exist; they knew that no matter the place, so long as there were people, evil was very much in attendance.

  They located George Oniiwah, pudgy and smug, squatting in a rat's nest called Paniolo's, a cave into which the patron had to climb down and in, sheltered from any street light or noise. From the sign outside it was ostensibly a bar and grill that existed just off campus as a place for students to get a pizza and a beer, to shoot some pool and hang out. To Parry's trained eye it was much more than this.

  Oniiwah sat in the gloom far to the rear and close to the pounding jukebox, which was blaring out the most recent death- metal tune, an ear-shattering mix of high-tech guitar, screams about sex with corpses and a pretty fair drum section. The lyrics would make any maniac proud.

  Everyone in the place had marked the FBI men as exactly what they were the moment they'd entered the dark entrance to this lair: cops. Still, George feigned indifference and simply continued to sip his Hawaiian homeboy brew, a beer called Kona, with a girl at his side and another couple across from him.

  An amorphous spirit floated about the place, going in and out of what little light was afforded by a Schlitz beer sign, cigarette smoke that'd been trapped there forever. Paniolo's, or Cowboy's, was outwardly a typical Hawaiian watering hole, its patrons' faces all dark-skinned and leathery. Tony knew a little bit about the owner, who had been a Hawaiian cowboy for years over on the island of Maui, working with free-range-fed cattle and horses there until he got tired of eating dirt. Before establishing himself here, he had been arrested on drug-trafficking, but he'd not served time due to technicalities brought about by an improperly obtained search-and-seizure warrant with probable-cause violations and violations against his civil rights. Since then, his lawyer, a man looking for places to invest, had set him up with the tavern.

  The disreputable owner, a full-blood Hawaiian, went by the name of Halole, Hal to his friends, better known to police as Harold Ewelo. It looked to Parry that the “Cowboy” was still eating dirt, only of another kind, as the place was an obvious front for drug-dealing, with Hal set up to run the operation from both the front and the back door. Somewhere in the bowels of this underground labyrinth where not even the trade winds could penetrate, Parry had no doubt you could get just about anything on your mind.

  Tony needn't have pointed out George Oniiwah. Something about the kid called out to Parry. He looked out of place, a child among thieves. “Thought you said he was squeaky clean,” Parry shouted, having no need to whisper over the roar of the music.

  “I'm tellin' you he is.”

  “Then what's he doing here?”

  “His crowd comes for pizza, the jukebox, the beer, I tell ya. They're not what you'd call heavily into drugs.”

  What about prostitution? Is Georgie above that? Parry wondered. And what possible reason was there to attract Linda Kahala to this turkey? As Parry approached the young people at the table, he could believe Tony's assessment. They were all clear-eyed and intelligent and quite aware of the two cops bearing down on them, their nervous necks twitching, eyes casting about at one another like ping-pong balls, hands alternately opening and closing, stock defensive gestures. In fact, Oniiwah's thumbs were clos
ed over by his clenched fists, a sure sign of more than just nerves. Even the girls gave off body language that told the cops they were guilty of something. So did the man behind the bar, and another at the grill, each eyeing the other until the first one disappeared into a back room.

  “Hello, young people,” said Gagliano to the group in a mock show of grandfatherly concern.

  At the back door Parry caught a glimpse of a pair of onyx eyes that had followed the bartender back in; the eyes now stared out at the FBI men. The owner whom Tony had described to him? Jim wondered.

  Parry let the jet black eyes know, with his own gaze, that he knew that they knew. As soon as the onyx eyes disappeared, a commotion could be heard in the rear, the music having died.

  George Oniiwah recognized Tony Gagliano from their earlier talk. Now George stood, making a show of it, saying, “Awww, man, haven't you pigs got anything better to do? Damnit, I'm sorry 'bout wha' happen' to Lina, sorry as all hell, but I didn't do it, and I don't fuck-king know who did! You cops're like maggots. I've got you crawling all over my ass. First you, den the Honolulu cops, now you again? Shit, man!”

  “Beat it,” Parry told the other young people.

  “Hey, man, you don't tell my friends what to do.”

  “Get out,” Parry shouted, and the three others vacated without a word.

  “Now, Georgie boy, we're going to talk.”

  From one corner of his eye, Parry saw the bartender return with a heavy carton and begin to refill shelves already stocked to overflowing. He heard Tony belatedly introducing him to Oniiwah. “This here is Chief Parry, George.”

  “I already told this FBI mother—”

  “Watch your mouth!” ordered Parry, his eyes burning into the kid.

  “I... ah, already tol' Agent Gagliano all I know.”

  Parry instinctively disliked Oniiwah, knowing him for a selfish, priggish type of islander who had spent his entire life trying to be cool and to put on a good show, to look, speak and act Western in the MTV sense, and to pretend he had some political leanings that didn't show him for the sapling-blowing-in-the-wind that he was.

  “Search your soul, Georgie,” Parry said, realizing this kid didn't have much of a search ahead of him. “Search it and tell me about this.” Parry handed the book of sonnets across a blackened wood table that'd been carved with the names of hundreds of students who'd sat here before George Oniiwah. “Check out the marked pages,” continued Parry. “I think— no—I know that Linda was trading poetry with someone. She mailed letters almost every day. Was she sending these to you?”

  George Oniiwah was a thickly built young man with a handsome face; he wore the most expensive designer clothing. His father was a merchant, doing extremely well on the strip. “No, she never sent nothing like this to me, man. She never talked like this, ever. She... this isn't the Lina I knew, man, no way.”

  “She had her dark side,” Parry began. “Least she was interested in the darkness, death maybe, maybe had suicidal tendencies, maybe?”

  Oniiwah sat before him like a stone, expressionless.

  “Well, damnit, did she?”

  “No, she didn't ever talk that way round me, man, never.”

  “All right then, who do you know that might've encouraged her in this?”

  He set his teeth, understanding where Parry was going, grateful that Parry's questions didn't center on him self. “I don't know. Kia was like that sometimes, depressed, you know. Maybe it was her.”

  “But she disappeared, too.”

  Kia Wailea, the other university student who'd disappeared and who was the subject of another of Parry's case files, continued to be listed as a missing person.

  “George, you've got to see why we are suspicious of you; the fact you knew two of the victims? That kind of news gets around.”

  “Hey, man! If people think I killed those girls... Geez, I could find myself in a body bag. Why don't you guys leave me alone?”

  “Killed? Who used the word killed? Did you say anything about these girls having been killed. Agent Gagliano?”

  “No, not once,” replied Gagliano.

  “That's bullshit,” cried Oniiwah over the sound of the heavy metal of Poison coming out of the box now. The guy at the bar, trying to appear busy by wiping it down, leaned in to try to hear more of the conversation between the government men and Oniiwah, who continued to protest.

  “Everybody knows them girls gotta be killed. They been missing too long, and nobody was fooled about that business at the Blow Hole, about that leg being a store dummy's.”

  “Leg? Who said anything about a leg? Tony?”

  “No, Boss, not a word. Besides—” Besides, it was an arm, Georgie boy,” continued Parry. “Supposing it was Linda's arm, you want to tell me about it?”

  “What?” he nervously blurted out. “I don't know what you want.”

  “Know anything about something missing from her arm, Georgie? Something you keep in your little fridge in the dorm?”

  “Goddamnit, man, I don't know what you're talking 'bout, man!”

  “Supposing Kia and Linda were tortured to death, their bodies horribly disfigured and mangled. Don't you know that we need somebody to put away, to show that we're doing our job? Suppose you won our little lottery, Georgie?”

  “This is nuts! I didn't do anything like that to Linda or Kia or anyone else!

  “There's got to be someone you know that Linda and Kia also knew, someone who could have kidnapped, tortured and murdered them. Among your friends, Georgie... someone you fucking know. It's in you, this knowledge, buried but it's there. Now, I want you to search for it. Try... try, damn you, you little fuck!”

  The music in the box ended just as Parry swore out his threat. Parry was almost across the table, his eyes flaming with intensity, his fists white and pounding the table for splinters. Tony tried to calm him. The college boy put his hands to his head and gave the appearance of trying to tear from his mind the information Jim sought. “There's nobody like that, not that I know, no one that could make all those women disappear like—”

  “Mutilate, Georgie, try mutilate, disembowel, eviscerate. They teach you all them big words here at the university, Georgie?”

  “No one... nobody I know could do a thing like that, none of my friends.”

  The music came back up, a freakish clatter of horns over steel guitars and a screeching rapper that Parry could not place.

  “Friends? Who the hell said anything about friends? Did I say that the bastard had to be a friend?” Parry asked Gagliano, turning to his partner for help.

  “All right, maybe he's not a friend,” suggested Tony, easing the situation a bit.

  George considered this as if he'd been told for the first time that the world wasn't flat.

  Brain-dead, Gagliano was thinking. We're dealing with a brain-dead. “Just someone you would all have had to come into contact with at some time, maybe somebody employed here at the college?”

  “Well... no,” he reconsidered. “Naaah.”

  “What naaahl Who? Give or the chief going brok' yo' face, kid,” pressed Gagliano.

  Oniiwah looked stricken now. “Claxton.”

  “Who's Claxton?”

  “Dr. Claxton just popped into my head, but no, that's not possible. “Who's this guy?” pushed Tony.

  “Her English professor,” said Parry. “Shakespeare, right?”

  “Shakespeare?” asked Tony.

  “Yeah, Shakespeare. Tell me, George, why'd you mention Dr. Claxton?”

  “Well, he's sometimes kinda scary, you know what I mean?”

  “No, why don't you explain to me what the hell you mean?”

  “He's a huge man, for one, but it's not even that; it's how he talks when he gets the least mad at you; makes bad, awful jokes, sometimes about your family, your nationality, stuff like that; and the guy's morbid, real graveyard-bound, man.”

  “Give us an example of graveyard-bound, George.”

  George squirmed in his sea
t. “I don't want this getting back to me, man.”

  “Don't you worry, George,” said Tony.

  “Well, he's into heavy-duty heavy metal, satanic shit, really.”

  “So's a lot of people,” Parry pressed.

  “And once, I swear, I was an eyewitness to this, once he took a kid and threw him out of class and—”

  Tony laughed. “Real bad dude.”

  “—and smashed his face into the door first; said it was all an accident, but it wasn't an accident. And nothing was done about it, and a time before that he... he made a move on Lina.”

  “What kind of a move?” Parry was instantly interested, as was Tony.

  “I only heard about it from her after.”

  “Go on.”

  “Called her in... something to do with a grade he said. One of those late afternoon conferences, man, and the building's as empty as a crypt. He forced Lina into a corner of his office, tore her clothes before she got outta there. Lina claimed he didn't get far, that she brought her knee up right into his nuts. Nex' day I did notice him staring at her like he was going to kill or rape her if he ever got a chance.”

  “This is beginning to sound like bullshit,” said Gagliano, unconvinced.

  “It was him who gave her the poem book! I saw him give it to her. And those passages that're marked? Lina didn't mark 'em; he did, he did!”

  “George, you lied to us about the last time you saw Linda,” said Parry, immediately waving off Oniiwah's objections. “I think I'm hearing some lying going on now. I can tell when a man lies. I'm a walking detector. Now, do you want to amend anything you've said about this Professor Claxton before I go after his ass?”

  “What I said was the truth... only...”

  “Only what, George?”

  “The part about his having marked the pages. I don't know that for sure. Could've been her that marked the pages. I don't know. She was in his ten o'clock class. I had him at nine, an hour earlier.”

  “Anything else you wish to amend?”

  “I tol' you what Lina tol' me. What reason did she have to lie? She was real upset. I think it was one of the things that led her to the street; I mean, think of it. Someone in a position of trust and power over you, someone like a teacher that you look up to all of a sudden trying to put his hands all over you and shit like that?”