Game Face

by Mark Troy

  Roland's assessment pleased me. The image of Fryer as a dedicated teacher fit my impression of him better than that of a pervert.

  "Is Kimo always wasted?" I asked.

  "I don't know if I should be talking to you about this. How do I know you're not DEA or something?"

  "Good point. I'm working for Alana's mom. She asked me to find Alana's tablet computer to recover Alana's journal. Purely sentimental. When we get to the search area, you can ask her. She'll vouch for me."

  He thought about that. "Okay. What's Kimo got to do with it?"

  "She thinks Alana and Kimo might have run off together."

  "Kimo maybe, but Alana, no. She had priorities. Kimo understood that."

  I tried another tack. "What's the bad blood between the brothers? Is it the dope?"

  Roland eyed me suspiciously. "I'm not saying if Kimo does ganj."

  "Look, I know nearly every kid on the North Shore has smoked weed, okay? I'm not looking to bust anyone, even if I had authority to do so."

  He settled back in the seat as I slowed to negotiate the curve approaching the Waimea River Bridge. Even this early in the morning on a weekday, tourist traffic clogged the road.

  Roland pointed to the mountains on our right. "Dr. Suit has a place up there on Pupukea. We call it Surf City. He has parties up there for the kids and teachers after the collecting field trips."

  "It's on the mountain and you call it Surf City?"

  "Surf City because it's like the song, two girls for every boy."

  "This is another part of the Dr. Suit mystique?"

  "It's like I told you, some guys are more interested in pakalolo but you can't get any at Mr. Fryer's parties. He makes every kid bring a letter promising they will not do drugs or alcohol. The letters are signed by the parents. Always a couple teachers there. The parties are squeaky clean. All the parents feel safe letting their kids go there."

  "Something happened between Phil and Kimo at one of these parties?'

  "Yeah. Kimo showed up at this party last year. Alana was already there. All I saw was the two of them talking. I don't know if Kimo had been smoking or drinking, but all of a sudden Mr. Fryer goes off on him, yelling at him about bringing dope and booze, and telling him to get out."

  "Did you see him with pot or alcohol?"

  "Nope, he was there about an hour. It wasn't until he and Alana got together that Mr. Fryer started beefing on Kimo."

  * * * * *

  We reached the search area and I parked the 'Vette. The number of searchers had dwindled to about a third of the number they were yesterday. Most of them stood in small groups quietly voicing their despair. A few walked desultorily along the vegetation line, looking for clues that might be caught there, but most of the activity centered on the dive teams who were searching the bottom. Several fishermen drew a mixed response to their effort to mount a campaign to exterminate tiger sharks. Nobody had seen Kimo.

  Roland picked up some quotes from the searchers and then we went looking for Terri. We found her at a table under a blue dining canopy that served as the search headquarters. The canopy's cross braces were hung with copies of another poster that showed Alana cutting across the face of a wave as the curl hung above her. She embodied all the qualities of beauty, grace, strength and daring. The same photo had graced the cover of Surflife magazine and could be found in every restaurant and quick store on the North Shore. Alana was the local hero.

  "How are you doing, Terri?"

  "Not well," she said. "Everyone is putting on an optimistic front around me. I don't know how much more I can take. Look." She moved a box of Junior Mints toward me. There were three stacks of them, ten or more boxes, on the table. Some of the boxes were dusted with sand. One box was soggy from being in water.

  "What are these?"

  "We found them near the rock out there. People came during the night and left them."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Junior Mints were Alana's favorite candy," Roland said. "All the surfers know that. Everybody on the North Shore knows it, I bet. She took Junior Mints to every competition."

  Terri seemed to be fighting for control. She said, "That rock where we found her board, people are turning it into a shrine to her. A shrine to Alana. To her memory." She looked at me beseechingly. Then she threw the box of Junior Mints as far away from her as she could. She swept the rest of them off the table. "I don't want a shrine to Alana," she cried. "I want my daughter."

  "I know, Terri. I know."

  Terri squeezed my hand. "She admires you, Val. She always said she wants to be an investigator like Auntie Val. But she's so good at writing, I steered her to investigative journalism."

  I reclaimed my and brushed away some tears that leaked from my eyes. "We'll find her," I said.

  "Wow, that was tough," Roland said, when we were back in my car.

  "She's lost her only child."

  "I meant it was tough for us."

  "Not nearly as tough as it is on her. No more dicking around. Do you know where Kimo is?"

  "Maybe. You know Kipa Rock?"

  I shook my head. "I don't get up this way much."

  "Kipa Rock is a couple miles down the highway, right before Haleiwa. There's a road that goes back to a gulch. This guy Pipeline Eddie lives back there in an old school bus. Kimo hangs out with him a lot."

  I wheeled onto Kam Highway and headed back the way we had come. "What does Eddie do out there in the school bus?"

  "He grows weed and plays guitar."

  "Many people know Eddie?"

  "Everybody. Why do you think they call him Pipeline? 'Cause he surfs? Nah, brah. 'Cause he's the ganja pipeline to the North Shore."

  "The police haven't put him out of business?"

  "Where you think the cops get their grass? Eddie never touches hard stuff like ice, only weed, so everybody's cool with it."

  It was now mid-morning. The sun was well above the mountains and any morning clouds had been burned off. Kam Highway hugged the coast and the crash of heavy surf filled the open cockpit of the car. The huge winter surf that only a month before had crashed over the highway had already subsided, but the waves were still impressive and, to me, who'd only ventured onto a board half a dozen times in her life, scary.

  A question had been niggling at the back of my mind all morning and now I formulated it. "As editor of the paper, you must have covered the Science Fair, right?"

  "Yeah, don't remind me." He slipped into an interview voice. "So tell me, how did you come up with the hypothesis that peanut butter would be an effective cockroach bait? Gaah!" He made a gun with his fingers and put it in his mouth.

  "Does that mean this year's Science Fair is over?"

  "January. Hallelujah, free at last."

  "When will it start up again?"

  "Not till the fall. Kids won't even think about it till September."

  "Do you remember a project on shark bite strength?"

  "No. To tell you the truth, science bores me. I interviewed a few participants and got out of there. Could have been one on sharks; could have been fifty. Here's the road. Go mauka."

  I cut the wheel left and headed back toward the mountains, as Roland directed. The road was narrow, a lane and a half at most, with no shoulders, only a drainage ditch on each side. It was mostly paved except in a few places where the asphalt had broken into chunks near the edges. We passed a few small homes set amidst banana plants and other fruit trees. A half mile from the highway, the pavement ended and the road became a dirt track that cut through scrubby trees. Just above the brush, I could see the top of a yellow school bus, maybe two hundred yards away.

  The bus sat in a clearing that backed up to the edge of a gulch as Roland had said. On the other side of the gulch, an undulating field of tall sugar cane flowed up the mountain slopes. As we pulled into the clearing at the end of the track, we could see that Eddie had a visitor.

  A small but powerful-looking motorcycle, a trail bike, stood a few yards from the faded-yell
ow hulk of the bus. Between the motorcycle and bus, a man with a mass of dreadlocks, his back to us, was leaning over another man who was prostrate on the ground.

  "Kimo, I presume," I said as I brought the 'Vette to a stop and cut the engine.

  "That looks like Eddie on the ground" Roland said. "Kimo, what'd you do?" he shouted.

  "I didn't do nothing," Kimo said when we reached him. "He was like this, brah."

  Eddie lay face down in the dirt. Blood matted the salt-and-pepper hair on the back of his head. I knelt beside him, put my fingers alongside his neck and felt a pulse.

  "Get me a towel," I said. "And a bottle of water. In the car." Roland took a towel from a clothesline that ran from the back of the bus to a small tree. He retrieved the water from the 'Vette. I poured some of the water on Eddie's wound and the rest on the towel and gently wiped away some of the blood. Parting his hair, I could see a small gash and a big goose egg. It was ugly but not fatal.

  Roland found a short piece of two-by-four board lying near the front door of the bus. "This looks like the weapon," he said. Indeed the board had blood on one end of it.

  "Try to find some ice inside," I said. To Kimo, who'd been standing and watching, I said, "Help me sit him up and get him more comfortable."

  "Who are you?" he said.

  "I'm the one who will kick your ass if you don't help."

  "This ain't my fault," he said.

  "I didn't say it was. Just help."

  Together we turned Eddie over and sat him up against the rear wheel. Eddie was thin and deeply tanned, of indeterminate age, with an unruly beard that was full of small twigs, grass and dirt. I wiped his beard and face with the towel. He sputtered and opened his eyes.

  Just then Roland returned with a handful of ice chips. "You gotta check it out," he said. "Somebody tore up the inside of the bus."

  I wrapped the chips in the towel and put it against the back of Eddie's head. "What happened, Eddie."

  "Don't know," he said.

  "Somebody attacked you. Was it Kimo, here?"

  "Don't know," he said. "Heard something and came out to see. Then lights out."

  "It wasn't me," Kimo said.

  "Right, it was some other guy," I said. "What were you looking for, weed?"

  "Nothing. I told you."

  Roland had gone back into the bus. He came out again and said, "I think he was looking for this." He held out a rectangular, neoprene sleeve the size of a tablet computer. It had, "Ripper," stitched across the top.

  "That's Alana's iPad," Kimo said.

  "It's gone," Roland said. He opened the end and showed it to be empty.

  I grabbed Kimo's arm. "Did you take it, Kimo?"

  He shook himself out of my grasp. "No, I didn't know it was here. What's it doing here?"

  Kimo's response seemed genuine. I believed him.

  Eddie said, "The girl, the surfer you brought out here before, she came and told me hide 'em."

  "When was this?" I said.

  Eddie thought about it. It looked like it hurt to think. "Not last night. Night before. Evening. She said nobody would look for it here. I told her be careful on the road out there 'cause it was getting dark."

  I said, "What was so important about the tablet, Kimo?"

  "I don't know. She was doing a lot of interviews, but that was before we split."

  "Why did you split?"

  "These interviews, she was spending a lot of time on them and they were making her angry and depressed. I told her to quit what she was doing, but she said no, this was important. Every time I tried to talk to her she got more pissed. Then one day she said she couldn't see me again because the shit was going to hit the fan and she didn't want me to get hurt."

  "Alana dumped you?"

  "Yeah."

  "How did it make you feel?"

  "How do you think I felt? My turn for pissed."

  "Pissed enough to steal her computer?" Roland asked.

  "No, I didn't know it was here."

  Eddie said, "I just remembered. The noise I heard was a car."

  "A car, not a motorcycle?"

  "A car," he said.

  "See, it wasn't me," Kimo said.

  "Who was she interviewing?" I asked.

  "The girls in the honors class."

  I threw a glance at Roland. He looked puzzled and then, slowly, understanding filled his face.

  "Oh, shit," he said.

  "She found the fire," I said.

  Roland turned to Kimo. "Hey where you been, anyway?"

  "I been riding, man. Two days up Kaena Point. Just me and this other guy."

  "How come you never answer my messages? How come you're not helping search?"

  "No phone. Left it behind. Afraid I'd lose it that's why. What search?"

  "Alana's missing," I said. "We think she was surfing the evening before last . . ." I stopped as I got the words out. Alana couldn't have been surfing at dusk if she was here at Eddie's that evening.

  "I've been texting you, man."

  "This morning?" I asked. "Did you tell him we were heading to Eddies?"

  "Yeah, but he never answered."

  "I didn't have a phone. Alana's missing?"

  "They found her board," Roland said. "Suit found it. Shark bit it."

  "She saw the shark," I said. "She sent you a message."

  Even as I said it, I recalled the 911 message. Alana had not said shark. She'd said, 'suit.' Dr. Suit.

  "He has your phone," I said. "He knew we were coming here."

  "Who has my phone?"

  "Dr. Suit. Your brother."

  I was remembering Phil Fryer with the board, and then I was remembering him describing how the teeth fit. Only it seemed too neat. And Fryer had lied about the Science Fair, because nobody was doing a Science Fair project.

  I don't know what Kimo was thinking, but he seemed to reach the same conclusion.

  "That son of a bitch," he yelled. He raced to his bike and started it up. I yelled for him to wait, but he gunned down the road.

  I had to get directions to Phil Fryer's place from Roland. Then I told him to look after Eddie and I ran to my car. I started it up and headed to Pupukea.

  * * * * *

  Phil Fryer's house was high up Pupukea, just below the forest reserve. It was a frame house, built into the hillside, with a large lanai jutting out the front, giving an unimpeded ocean view. Tall stilts supported the front of the house and the deck, which formed a carport below. A car sat beneath the deck. Kimo's motorcycle stood next to the car.

  I parked on the side of the road below the house and walked up, stopping first to check the car in the carport. An iPad computer lay on the back seat, but, unable to get in without breaking a window, I couldn't tell if it was Alana's.

  Kimo's angry voice carried from inside the house as I approached the side door, but a garbage bag caught my eye. A piece of bone protruded from a tear in the black plastic membrane. I opened the bag and pulled out a curved section of a shark's upper jaw.

  Entering the house, I found the two brothers facing each other across a kitchen counter at one end of a great room that flowed out to the lanai through large sliding doors. Phil had been making lunch. A pot of soup or stew on the stove gave off a tantalizing aroma.

  Kimo was waving a cell phone and shouting, "What did you do to Alana? And what are you doing with my phone?"

  Phil, his voice even, said, "I didn't do anything to her. A shark got her. If you hadn't been on a dope trip you'd know." He looked at me, showing no surprise at my arrival. "Tell him, Val. Tell this pot head what everybody on the island, maybe the world, knows. Alana was killed by a shark."

  "Like this one?" I showed them the jaw I'd taken from the garbage. "Could this be the missing jaw that your Science Fair student borrowed?"

  Kimo looked confused. Phil glared evenly at me.

  "I'll bet it matches the bite on her board."

  "Probably," Phil said, "It's about average for a mature tiger like the one that got A
lana. The ocean's full of them."

  "Is this what you used to take the chunk out of her board?"

  "You have a hell of an imagination."

  "What will you do if the police find traces of her blood on these teeth?"

  Phil relaxed visibly. "Let them test it. It's an old relic. Any traces of blood could be fifty years old."

  I had the sense he was telling the truth.

  Kimo said, "You killed her!"

  "I did not kill her. Can't you get that through your head? A shark got her. Her body hasn't been found. It may never be found."

  "Why?" Kimo demanded.

  "Yeah, Phil. Why?" I asked. "Was it because she figured out your involvement with the students in your class? Young girls, infatuated with their teacher. Did you exploit that? Show them attention and affection? Did you have sex with them, Dr. Suit? Did you bribe them with A's or threaten them with failing grades if they told anyone?"

  "You had sex with Alana?" Kimo shouted.

  "No," I said. "Alana wouldn't have been susceptible would she? She was bright and she was a celebrity in her own right. You couldn't coerce her because if she told, people would believe her. Did that make her more desirable to you, Dr. Suit? Dr. Shark?"

  "You don't know what you're talking about," he said.

  "Did it make her a threat, Dr. Suit? Not only couldn't you have her, the other girls now had someone to talk to, someone who could tell their story to the world with credibility. You had to get rid of her so you killed her and made up this elaborate shark tale. If they never find her body, well, it's because the body was eaten. In fact, they're probably looking in the wrong place. Where did you hide Alana's body, Phil? Up in the forest?"

  "You don't know shit," he said. "You've got wild fantasies and no proof."

  "The proof is on Alana's computer. You panicked this morning when I told you she had a journal, but you knew she'd hide it with someone she trusted like Eddie, Kimo's friend. You didn't see students this morning. You went back for the phone, which allowed you to intercept Roland's texts."

  Kimo had been inching around the counter. Now he lunged at Fryer. But Fryer was quicker. He slashed at Kimo with a kitchen knife. Kimo jumped back and grabbed his upper arm. Fryer turned and fled out the door.

  Kimo's wound appeared minor. He said, "I'm going after him."

  It was then that I noticed the lunch Fryer was preparing. A tray near the stove held two soup bowls waiting to be filled and a box of Junior Mints.

  "Let him go, Kimo. Alana's here. She's alive."

  But Kimo was already out the door. I heard the sound of a car engine starting and a car peeling away. Then I heard the sound of Kimo's motorcycle.