Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  She used all her strength to do so, her body being whiplashed by the power of sea meeting land. But suddenly, she felt free of the hostile force that had so wanted her. She was below the current's sweep, and waiting anxiously for her, his one hand on the lifeline, the other extended and waving her on, was Parry, bubbles fleeing madly around him. He was on his knees in calmer water.

  She realized that the satellite photo was correct. Here was a crevice created over eons of time by the forces of this watery world. They were in the vestibule and hopefully the repository created here by the constant wash of time.

  It was a large area, perhaps the size of a Littie League baseball infield, handily, small enough that they could scan every inch to locate what they'd come for, //... if there was anything to find. The current was still strong here, pushing them about like corks, but it was not so stalwart that they could not maneuver, if they forced the issue. She'd dived in places where the current swept by like space and stars against the porthole of an airplane, seaweed and small fish caught up in it and passing by her mask at thirty, maybe forty miles an hour, and yet she had still slowly managed to make headway against the current to return to the diving boat, using a draw line as last resort. She'd been in such a dive off the coast of Key Largo at the John Pennekamp underwater Coral Reef State Park in the Florida Keys once, when the dive-master, an enormous whale of a man whose only interest, it seemed, was his next can of beer, had foolishly taken the party beyond the barrier reef into rough waters. It was not pleasant to dive under such conditions, and it took every ounce of energy, and most of the divers that day never got off the boat, finding themselves too sick to do anything other than puke over the side.

  Jim motioned for her to follow the contours of the circular field they'd discovered in one direction while he explored the other. The clarity of the water was better here than above, for it was calmer. Still, the sediment at the bottom of the reservoir was in a constant swirl, disturbed by the current, moving back and forth like milky, dirty water in a washbasin. Yet if she worked at it, she could see through this thin cloud, which hung ghostlike over the bottom, to see teeming life darting about, rooted plants, seaweed and coral and volcanic stone. A course could be determined and followed. One thing was quite clear, with visibility so bad, they had to remain above the sandy floor, to keep their fins from swirling up the sediment even more.

  As it was, they could barely see one another after a few feet of separation. Parry in fact looked like a ghost as he swam off in one direction, disappearing before her eyes. Being careful, picking her way along with great caution, fearful of swimming into a vortex, Jessica felt her stomach lurch at the thought that her last sight of Parry might have already occurred.

  They were crazy to be here doing this....

  She adjusted her weight and descended further, getting closer for the survey of the floor, wiping aside floating debris. She followed a zigzag pattern, but not for long. She was stopped instantly by an unusually large, ivory stone with smooth contours below the sea, lichen growing on its base. Mold had so painted it over as to make it one with the surroundings, save for the top, rubbed bare, fanned for all eternity by the current. She sensed something strange about this stone immediately. It appeared bonelike.

  She descended, parting small schools of fish as she did so. Nearby a sea turtle played out its underwater ballet, so at ease was it here in the depths. It came so near she reached out to touch it, but it sped off just ahead of her fingertips, as if in a teasing and familiar dance it'd danced with mankind for generations.

  Below, in the sand at the bottom, she was coming to rest over what appeared the unnatural formation, a mound amid an otherwise smooth surface. Just as her knees were about to touch bottom, a UFO-shaped portion of the sand lifted off and shot away, its eyes on its head, looking angry and ratlike as it sped off.

  If fish could curse, the pancake flounder would have the vilest words to say, she thought.

  Jim Parry, doing his own zigzagging probe, saw her kneeling there, causing a smokescreen of sediment to settle around her. He came gliding over, curious about her find, giving her the universal hand gesture for What? He looked great underwater, she thought while pointing to her discovery, fearful of embarrassment now should her treasure turn into nothing, a false alarm.

  She dug in with her gloved hands at the conical cap of the mound, Jim lending his own powerful hands, each scooping away sediment around the base. In an instant which made them both draw back, Jessica came away with a human skull and the neck bone from which it had so easily detached. The unmistakable skeletal remains of the skull's owner protruded now, shoulder bones and spinal column looking like a macabre mockery of the living coral around it.

  Even here and through her face mask, Jessica could tell from the size, heft, contour and jaw that it was the skull of a woman. It was partially shattered at the cranium, brittle, ready to cave in. The eye sockets stared ceaselessly back at the divers. Christ help me, she thought, it's my nightmare come true, like a damned premonition. Parry went to work uncovering more bones, discarding rocks and silt, until soon, it appeared they had a large cache of human bones.

  Jim had been so right it was scary, she thought.

  Underwater everything was exaggerated, the five senses heightened, underscored. Colors were indescribably bright and blinding, shapes monstrous and large, and it took more effort to stare into death here like this than in her lab. Every effort made when working underwater, too, was more difficult; maneuvering the bone cache, like two spacemen lifting moon rocks in a zero- gravity environment, took its toll. Still, they worked to dig at the find with deliberate patience.

  She had just begun to wonder how they were ever possibly going to get the bones to the surface when, like a magician's trick. Parry extended her a large net—from out of thin water, she mentally quipped—a net used for shelling or lobstering which he'd obviously brought along. Together they began filling the net with an array of bones, from ribs to femurs to skulls, some of which seemed too ponderous to be those of women—but this was no place to make such judgments. In fact, it was far too soon to tell for certain if all the bones were human, she conceded while Parry finished filling the net.

  Now, the net filled to capacity, making it impossible for them to collect any more of the skeletal remains, they saw they had hardly scratched the surface of the underwater tomb. Still, it appeared that the top layer of bones was of more interest to them, since they appeared newer than most they'd found here.

  Unlike the Navy divers at the Blow Hole, who'd not used satellite photo reconnaissance and had not located such a find, she and Parry had been extremely fortunate. Parry had made things happen here. She respected him for that. Forensically speaking, it appeared that they had Lopaka Kowona cornered in every sense of the word now. Just too bloody bad they didn't have the killer himself cornered.

  Still, at least now they had more than the handful of bone fragments found at the Blow Hole, so skimpy as to be not enough for the usual jury, no matter how much Linda Kahala's minuscule remains might tell Jessica Coran.

  Jim gave the signal that they should now find the tow rope and ascend the way they had come. She dreaded the return trip, but realized that the danger was only in one area, and when they reached that current belt, they'd have to move quickly and determinedly on. She worried about Jim and the extra weight the bone net represented, but then she saw that he had thought of everything, for he was attaching the net to the lifeline and tightly securing it there. He meant to bring it up with the anchor once on the surface, hand-over-hand.

  Their little salvage operation looked to be a success when they were both successfully past the dangerous current zone and beyond any threat from the sea. The ocean was both benefactor and punisher here, depending on its whim and the foolishness of mortals like them who dared taunt the enormity of this god. Arising to meet the radiance of the upper world, Jessica was anxious to return to safety there amid the black stone beach, the sun and the silence of their priv
ate world above. She knew she'd been badly battered against the coral and lava rocks, and that her bruises would not soon heal, but they'd also be a friendly reminder of her exhilarating time here in this raw world with Jim Parry.

  Even before he surfaced, Jim was looking at his watch, anticipating the arrival of the chopper and their departure. The bittersweet thought of leaving here was so strong that each of them felt it in the other's mind as they made their way out of the pounding surf to the safety of the protected bay and shore. They had yet to haul the bones from the sea. It was nearing mid- moming.

  23

  To the homicide detective, the earth spins on an axis of denial in an orbit of deceit.

  David Simon, Homicide

  All the bones were fleshless and from the creamy surfaces and the growths and green, easily smudged life that clung to them, it appeared they were old. When Jessica mentioned this, Jim immediately wanted to know, “How old?”

  “I couldn't say. I'm not a forensic anthropologist, but suffice it to say they're a hell of a lot older than Linda Kahala's was.”

  'Two, maybe three years old? What?”

  “If I had to hazard a guess, yes... if not older.”

  “Older?”

  “Yes, older, maybe a great deal older, and Jim, some of them...” She paused.

  “What? Some of them what?” They'd spread out some of the bones along a ledge, staring down at them, while most remained in the net.

  “Some look to be male.”

  “Male?”

  “Either that or quite large women, and Kowona doesn't do large women. He does—”

  “Small women,” he finished for her.

  “Petite women, yes.”

  “Then this has been just another wild-goose chase, all for nothing?” He cursed under his breath and glared at one of the bones he held in his hand, making her believe he was about to hurl it back into the depths from which it had come.

  “Don't jump the gun. We need to study them all. Maybe we've got a real mixed bag here. Maybe some of the pieces'll fit our puzzle, some not. It'll take some lab time.”

  “Yeah, sure...” he finally agreed, dropping the femur he held in his hand back into the net. “Come on, let's pack up and be ready for the chopper. We've got to get back up the trail with the tanks and our cache.”

  “If it helps, two of the skulls are definitely female, and they look relatively new, in comparison to the others, I mean, and I think they came from the top of the mound.”

  'That's something, but how do you explain the others?”

  “Well, there once was a community here, you said.”

  “But they buried their dead in the earth. You saw the graveyard, the stones.”

  She considered this, turning one of the skulls in her hand as she did so. “What if they had some members of the village who weren't exactly fit for what they considered a proper burial? Do you know anything about Hawaiian religious practices and rites? Suppose they did sacrifices at one time...”

  “To the sea? I haven't ever heard of it, no.”

  'To the sea... to the Spout?” she suggested.

  He pondered this possibility. “Of course, makes good sense... more 'n' likely, you're right.”

  “And if Kowona grew up in a primal culture like they say, he'd have seen the ceremony performed, perhaps more than once. Perhaps it's the way the bones of his brother went, if the old great-granduncle of Kaniola can be believed. Maybe it's what led Lopaka to the Blow Hole, and maybe here before that?”

  “Now I feel strange about taking these bones from their eternal resting place,” lamented Parry. “I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's rather ghoulish, seeing as how it was their burial ground.”

  “We can always return the bones that belong here, but we need to know the truth about those that may not.”

  “Can you make good enough distinctions now, so we can return the older bones?”

  “I think so, but there's no time for another dive.”

  “Hell, we can shoot them back through the Spout.”

  “And they'll likely return to within feet of where we found them,” she agreed.

  Just hurry. I don't want anyone seeing us. Some tourists come poking about here and see us, and God knows the consequences.”

  She began to cull the bones, soon finding it easy to discriminate between the newer and older, particularly the skulls. Above ground, under the illumination of the sun, she found no difficulty in distinguishing a male jawbone from a woman's, a male hipbone from a female's, and so it went. She placed all the bone parts they would keep to one side, refilling the net with the others. The amount of new bones was considerably less than the old, and as she worked with the aged bones, finding them so brittle to the touch, worn paper-thin by time and water, they flaked easily in their new, arid environment. She realized just how ancient some of the bones were; certain they must date at least to the early 1900s and perhaps the late 1800s.

  She kept one ancient bone fragment for comparison and carbon-14 dating later.

  While she conducted this process, Jim worked on getting all their gear back to the chopper pad. He was pretty much finished when he found her at the Spout with the net filled with returnable bones. He helped her out over the ledge with her burden and together they lifted the net and allowed the bones to return to the outgoing waters via the Spout. Standing there, Jessica could imagine the ancients worshipping this place as sacred.

  Each roaring plume of the geyser was an angry godlike outburst, a counterpoint to her quiet thoughts.

  Several of the thigh bones and long bones of the arm and hand got caught up in the netting and refused to return to the sea so easily. Jim fished them from the net and one by one tossed these final fragments back into the sea. The entire time they both were drenched by the incoming tide as it flew into the funnel of the Spout and cascaded up and over them. Before it was over, they were soaking wet. They returned to the most likely usable bones from their cache and replaced them in the net. Jim carried these up along the winding trail with Jessica following.

  “I'll give you the background on the missing Maui women... kids really, all the medical papers, see if you can match any of the dental charts with the two skulls we've got.”

  “It should prove interesting,” she said from behind, watching her footing as they went, seeing now just how awfully treacherous both the terrain and the pukas hereabouts were. One hole in particular looked like the mouth of an enormous serpent just asleep below the earth, waiting patiently for a passerby to careen down into its gut. The bottom was mere darkness. She dared stare too long into this natural abyss, feeling a dizzying disorientation wash over her. Maybe she'd gone too long without a bite to eat, she thought, regaining her composure.

  After the chopper's arrival, they flew on to Kahului, where they disembarked with all that belonged to them. A rental car awaited them at the airport, the bones carefully concealed in its trunk as quickly as possible to arouse no one's concern. While still on the helicopter, Jim had radioed authorities in Maui about the find and the likelihood it might prove connected with the Kowona case. He'd made arrangements for a field operative based on Maui to meet them at the airport and see personally to the careful boxing and transporting of the evidence to Lau's labs back on Oahu while Jessica drew up instructions for Lau to go along with the bones. Working with local authorities on Maui, Parry warned that Kowona could be somewhere on their island. Patrols were stepped up, everyone put on alert, and a surveillance team was sent out to monitor the area around the Spout for any sign of a man dumping any sort of strange parcels into the ocean there.

  Lopaka Kowona, Jim was assured by one patrol officer, would not slip through the hands of the authorities on Maui as he had with those “fools” on Oahu.

  “That hurt,” Jim said to her when the transmission ended.

  From the airport they drove to their next destination, a quaint cow town like something out of a movie set in the deserts around L.A., she thought. But even though there w
ere hitching posts along the main street and horses tied to the posts, there were also Ford, Chevy and Dodge pickup trucks sporting gun racks and rifles through cab windows.

  There were hardware stores, feed stores, millinery stores, grills, bars and taverns—she counted four within the two-block length of the little town of Makawao, where a banner proclaimed the date for the upcoming rodeo, to be held on July 4th, long since come and gone though the tattered banner waved on.

  Everyone walking the concrete walks and onto the boarded steps of establishments here had chaps and boots, it seemed, and the cowboys were of every size, shape and ancestry.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  “Kowona's home for a long time. He worked the Omaopio Ranch just outside of town here, same as Ewelo the Paniolo. People here will know Kowona, and maybe they'll talk.”

  “Let's do it, then. You want to canvass together or make a split?”

  “Together. We might be less threatening that way.”

  “Or more.”

  “Just follow my lead.” They got out of the car and instantly the locals pegged them as not the usual touristy couple. In fact, Jessica fit right in with her tomboy appearance, in two-day-old jeans, her hair stringy from the early morning dive, bruises showing on her arm as if her man had given her a good and deserved smacking around. She couldn't help but feel self-conscious, and it didn't help having the locals stare at them as if they were wearing horns. She wasn't wearing a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle or boots, and she didn't know how to square-dance, nor did she know the achy-breaky line dance. Over the saloon door a notice for tonight's dance was posted.