He makes his selection of weapons, the ceremonial sword once belonging to his father, the same one that had struck down his brother that night so far from the sight of others, save for Lopaka's curious young eyes, so many years before when he'd followed his embittered and drunken father into the forbidden forest. Later, the body was “discovered” by his father, the very assassin who had the power to cover his every step, and he did so with royal aplomb, taking the small, disfigured lump of flesh to the burning place. The bones were thrown into the sea. Lopaka pleaded for the body to be taken to the burial site. After all, Lopeko was of royal heritage, but his pleas went unheard. The body was diseased, contagious, or so the lie went.
The entire episode was cloaked in secrecy, and only the years had brought back the memories in flashes of insight long denied him by a child's abhorrence of a dread reality. Still, his memories were shrouded over, confused and disjointed. Sometimes his father used a sword, sometimes a club, sometimes a coiled rope. It mattered little, since the result was the same. Nowadays Lopaka's dead brother came to him while he slept, his bruised and torn body pleading for vengeance, telling him that his plan to gain immortality and to wreak vengeance on their father was not only well conceived, but that it would reunite them in a way they had never been united on this plane, for Ku had found Lopeko and embraced his so-called cursed soul.
His father had told the village that the boy had contracted the disease, had wandered into the forests and had died when the demons of the dark had attacked him.
All Lopaka knew for certain was that his father would one day answer to Ku, and thereby answer to him, Lopaka. That his brother would be avenged.
His mother's ghost also came into his brain and blew words of encouragement and praise for his pact with Ku. She had known the truth about his father, too, and she'd been poisoned by the devil man to protect his dirty secret.
All his life, Lopaka had lived with these truths, and the silence he'd had to maintain for so long erupted in violence even at a young age. He saw his enemies all around him, for many in the village where he grew up distrusted him to keep silent and his father watched him like a bird of prey considering its next meal.
He steps now toward Kelia. Her eyes give away her soul-felt fear; moist and gleaming with fright, the eyes widen even as the sword is raised above her. The sword tip eases down gently, and it snaps away button and blouse and bra, and now the tip of the cutting edge plays over her brown, firm, responsive skin, and she begins to squirm, her mouthings like an animal plea, like all the dogs he'd ever killed, and so like the girl in the village he'd killed, and so like Lina Kahala and the others before her. Each replay in his mind heightens his need to cany through with it again. Hiilani is no longer a person, she is a sacrificial offering; she is Kelia reborn, placed in his care for the sole purpose of his and Ku's delight.
“Only a few more like you,” he hoarsely whispers to her, a giddy, leering smile coming to his pouting lips. “Only a few more like you, and I go to Ku.” He plays out the rhyme, repeating it like a mantra. “Don't be afraid. I will anoint you, Kelia, and give your essence to Him, and you will go before me like my brother, my mother... to prepare my way... and together we will have no enemies greater than ourselves...”
She begins to flail like all those before her, afraid to go over. The drug is wearing down, and her scream escapes in short staccato bursts, further exciting him. His glassy eyes are alight now with a mad pleasure, his Ku taking control of him now, speaking in a voice not his: “There is no need of fear. Accept me... love me... accept your fate, Kelia.”
Just as the god speaks through him, using his tongue and vocal cords, Ku also uses his hands, working quickly now to take Kelia's hair in large, long tufts. She continues to flail and kick out at him as he completes her disrobing and stares at her shivering body.
Now, Ku tells him, we do some serious cutting. Each cut has a purpose, a meaning, signifying the order and power over chaos Ku represents, and each cut fascinates Lopaka as blood rivulets begin to paint the child sacrifice.
Kelia's endless screams are heard only by Ku now as they mingle with the acidic screech of Suicidal Tendencies on the stereo, which Lopaka does not recall having turned on.
Ivers, unable to see and in great pain, was not a good patient. He suddenly pulled out his IV and snatched away at the bandage over his eyes while blindly shouting, “Will some goddamned somebody listen to me!”
The medics couldn't restrain him.
“God damnit, I said call FBI headquarters! Parry! Get Chief Jim Parry down here now. I know who the fucking Cane Cutter is! Lopaka's the name, and I got a piece of his plate number, and he's going to kill her if you don't let me the hell to a phone for Chrissake!”
Another set of orderlies came in and sat on Ivers while the doctor in charge hit him with another and stronger sedative. Not three miles away, in the heart of the Waikiki district, information about the incident outside Fort DeRussy reached James Parry and scattered details were being discussed over the police band. The news had Parry instantly alert. Jessica, seeing his excitement, now listened intently as well.
“This cop, Ivers... I know him,” Parry said. “He's a good man, but lately he's been a pain in the ass, calling every day, wanting to know the dispensation on the Kaniola case as he calls it. I keep telling the guy Kaniola's case is an HPD investigation, but he never bought it. He's shrewd.”
“Sounds like he's badly injured.”
“He's a moose of a man, but yeah... sounds bad. I'm going to get over to the hospital. You want to come?”
“Sure, let's go see how your friend is.”
After informing the others in the stakeout party. Parry pulled away from the curb. Tony was walking the Ala Moana Boulevard route, working the street, and in close proximity to Terri Reno, checking in every hour on the hour, for what it was worth. Tern's partner, Kalvin Haley, was eyeballing them both from a nearby surveillance van, using a remote camera this time, hoping to find Terri's favorite street beau in his viewfinder, to get the creep on film.
Jessica held firmly now to the dash as Parry sped for the hospital, his strobe light flashing. Once they arrived, they found Ivers under sedation and in no condition to talk about his unfortunate experience; so Jessica went for his doctors, flashing her credentials and wanting to know the skinny on the patient in 211, while Parry held back to talk to the detectives assigned the case.
Jessica quickly located the doctor in charge of Ivers's case, a man named Flores who bitched about Ivers's behavior, saying he'd given the big cop enough sedatives to settle a horse.
“So what's the prognosis. Doctor?”
“Vital signs are remarkably stable,” Flores began, taking off his wire-rims to reveal black, Hispanic eyes beneath the hospital glare. “The man's like a bull, believe me. His chances for recovery are good...”
“But?”
“Too early to tell about the eyes.”
“His eyesight is at peril?” Flores replaced his glasses and bit his lower lip. “We're calling in a specialist tomorrow. Can't do any more than we've already done for the moment.”
“Will he be blinded for life?”
“It's my considered opinion that he will come through it in time, but who can say. There's been serious damage to the soft tissue of the comea. If he does regain his sight, it will never be a hundred percent, no.”
“Damn,” she muttered.
“As for the rest of him, second- and third-degree burns up and down the left side of the body, throat, and head, but it hasn't sapped him of his strength. That much is in evidence.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it took me and four orderlies to restrain him.”
Jessica next located Jim Parry and huddled with him, informing him of his friend's condition in as positive a tone as she could muster. Parry swallowed hard at the “good” prognosis, and then he turned back to the waiting pair of detectives on the case who'd taken the brief respite from Parry's probing questions to flip ba
ck and forth through their notes, stopping now and then to sip coffee from paper cups.
“They sedated the hell outta Ivers before we could get a word outta him,” said the taller of the two.
“Hell, when we got here, they were sitting on him. He was trying to bust out, I guess,” said the shorter detective with some mirth.
“He's like an ox.”
Parry nodded knowingly at them, and then he stared after the two detectives as they walked away. “HPD's finest,” he muttered to Jessica.
She placed a hand over his. “You all right, Jim?”
“Hell, no. How about you?”
She forced a smile. “Hell, no.”
“No call for you to hang here all night. Let me take you home,” he suggested. “It's damned near two in the morning.”
“Fine... on one condition, Jim.”
“Conditions... do you always place conditions on people who offer you a lift, Jess?” He didn't mean his tone to be quite so harsh, gesturing with the open palms for peace, flashing apologetic eyes; still, she knew that she was often guilty of placing conditions on people around her, especially those she cared about the most.
She couldn't blame him for the outburst. She momentarily thought about that well of pain she'd thrown pennies down all her life, reaching back to her relationship with her father, who was a great one for placing conditions on the people he loved. It was partially due to his military background and his own upbringing, not to mention his profession as M.E. No, Jim couldn't possibly understand fully the wellspring of fears and doubts she harbored, though he might understand the nature of her work, filled with shifty people and shifting inconstants. She was a meteorologist of murder, faced with the eddies of human “atmospheric” conditions. For in any investigation, circumstances altered constantly and prevailing “winds” were never the same if you blinked; unfortunately, it was little different in her personal life.
Jim reached out, touched her cheek and said, “I'm sorry. I had no right to say—”
“Shhhhh,” she replied, a finger to her full lips. “Let it go.”
She briefly thought of all the men in her life, from her father to Alan Rychman. Conditions, shifting and ephemeral as nature, the sea, the clouds, the balmy trades... that was how she'd dealt with men all her life. Change, alter, shift them before they do it to you....
Sometimes she could feel Donna Lemonte, her shrink, breathing down her neck, looking over her shoulder like a second conscience. Dr. Lemonte was an excellent psychologist and had become the closest thing she had to a girlfriend these days. Donna had made the same connection between Jessica's “conditional” professional life and her relationships with men, the fact Jessica had to be in charge, that she had to make the ground rules by which all relationships with men were to be played out.
She had become, particularly since Otto Boutine's death, afraid to truly commit herself to anything other than her career ever again, for fear of loss. She'd lost her father and her mother, and then she'd tragically lost Otto, for which she still blamed herself.
Boutine and her father... tough act to follow. She had become a cripple in more ways than one since Matt Matisak's bloody attack on her. The butcher had shaken the faith and the belief system instilled by her father, that there was a reasoning power over all and after all, a power that set into motion the human drama, as flawed and cluttered with twisted monsters as it was, a power that held a hand over the abyss and over the chaos. Matisak had made her doubt this, for she could no longer feel the pulse of that great hand as evenly as she once did. Perhaps she never would again.
Nowadays she thought more and more of a shadow self, a Jessica Coran who might have been had she never encountered Matisak, or had she not chosen her father's way of life.
She and Donna talked of shadow selves, the person or persons either of them might have been, had they been born in a different place and time, chosen a different career, met by chance the right man. Under a set of different circumstances, given other givens, other conditions, other choices, who might she have become? And would she not shun someone like herself, even someone like Jim Parry, had she not been her father's daughter?
Parry's eyes were busily studying her, and she wondered how much he knew of her from information he'd gathered on her, how much from Zanek. and how much he'd surmised just being with her for so many hours on the case. Just his fatigue talking, she decided, letting his rancor slide.
“Condition is,” she said firmly, “you go home and get some rest, too.”
“No... think I'll come back here, sit with Ivers. Want to be here when he comes around. The man doesn't have any family.”
“He means a lot to you.”
“A lot I owe him, yeah. He taught me how to work Honolulu.”
“Aha, so that's how you know so much.”
“Ivers is a white native. Came with the place. Actually, worked Maui for years before coming to HPD. He tipped me off to the disappearances there. No one knows the islands like him.”
“Look. The Rainbow's not ten minutes from here. Come with me, sack out on the sofa till dawn and then—”
“I don't know, Jess.” He bit his lower lip, jiggled his keys in his pocket, shuffled his feet and shook his head.
“What possible good can you do if you collapse? Think of it, you want to have your breakdown here?”
Around them, the military-green walls, cabinets and the yellow lights of the waiting room, even the cola and snack machines, seemed out of another time. “Military doctors aren't always the best,” Parry said. “Thought I'd see about transferring Nate to a better facility.”
“I told you, I talked with his doctor. Flores is going to get your friend through this, and the burns weren't as bad as they might've been. He's going to come through this.”
“Sir?” a voice at the doorway timidly called.
Parry turned and stared at a young patrol officer in uniform.
“What is it, officer?”
“My partner and me... we were first on scene at the incident outside the fort, sir, and well... I understand you want to know all the details? We got a call from the suits handling the case.”
“Yeah, right, sure do. Officer ahh...”
“Janklow, sir. Phil Janklow.”
Phil told them all that he knew, including the information regarding the gas leak which he was still brooding about. “We got an APB out on the car, but without a plate number, well...” He didn't offer much hope.
Jessica got a confused picture of the events, but Parry concentrated on the car, getting what he could from Janklow about the make and model of the vehicle. Much of what the police had gotten from eyewitnesses clashed and contradicted, but the car's description remained firm.
After Janklow was gone, Parry said to Jessica, “The description of the car could fit with what we know of the car that Kaniola followed out to Koko Head the night he and Thom Hilani died. Nate was looking for that car.”
“So if it is the same guy...” Her eyes lit up. “We've got a sketch of the suspect and possibly a description of his car. Come tomorrow, he'll be feeling the noose tightening. I just hope you have all the corridors off the island covered.”
“We do.”
Parry, beyond fatigue now, agreed to take her up on her offer of the sofa in her room, and together they left the hospital for the Rainbow Tower. On the way to his car, Parry said, “When Ivers gets his eyesight back, I want him to have a look at our sketch of the suspect. See if it rings any bells.”
“According to the doctors, he rang quite a few bells around here.”
Parry attempted a laugh. “Come on, Doctor. You must be as dog-tired as I am.”
“You'll get no argument there.”
“An unconditional agreement?” She only slightly flinched at the remark.
They both knew that the morning papers would be carrying the police sketch of the suspect on page one, and that things would be thrown into high gear. Anything could happen. Tips could flow in. The killer might
well kill himself, or try to put as much distance between himself and Oahu as possible, which meant some form of passage off the island.”We'll both need as much sleep as we can get if we're going to be any good tomorrow spearheading 'Operation Containment,'“ Parry told her as they walked out to the parking lot and his car.
15
To live is like to love—all reason is against it.
and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler
The Hawaiian night was calm, at peace, the wind a gentle, pulsating, cheek-caressing reminder to Jessica of the fragility of this tropical island world. Built upon volcanic rock, riddled with air pockets and underground rivers of lava, given birth by a cauldron in the boiling depths of the sea. The land mass was little more than a mighty coral reef created for the gods of Hawaiian legend whose sense of sport was often cruel.
She knew the truth, that the islands were a strange illusion created by an unruly, chaotic earth continually evolving, and that what was taken for granted here as terra firma was only as good as the faith people put in it, which might, faith and all, be gone with the next fiery eruption. She even imagined the river of fire come like a dragon to play out a billion-year-old game of hide-and-seek with life and death in the balance.
Hawaii was the ultimate land of illusion. Here even nature in all her lustrous, plush, enticing fantasy conspired in the deception, for while Hawaii purported to be paradise and perfection at every turn, Jessica had seen the seams, the pit viper in the garden, particularly here in Honolulu, where the darker aspects, the underbelly of the city, were as bleak and foul as anything she'd seen in D.C., Chicago or New York.
Here every illusion was forged by nature, save the sprawling city of Honolulu, yet nature conspired with the city to mask its meaner aspect. Honolulu stood a shimmering man-made Babel filled with the voices of every tongue, hugging an ocean that could destroy it at any time. The city acted as a modern jungle for such predators as the Trade Winds Killer. Nature's illusive calm and man's monuments, seemingly pleased to be in close proximity here in Oahu, left an unsettling insecurity in Jessica Coran, even as she looked past James Parry's muscular form to the lazy Pacific below.
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