“He and I go back a ways,” Opunui said, giving Vail a dubious side glance. “What he told me—that was off the record. When her husband mentioned the physical, I asked if I could speak with her doctor. Found out it was my Ohana.”
“Ohana?” Vail asked.
“Close friend,” Russell said. “Like family.”
“Doc was upset when I called him,” Opunui said. “First thing he said was, ‘Impossible.’ Mrs. Kelleher just wasn’t the kind of patient he would’ve bet on to have a massive heart attack.”
“Where’s the husband?”
“At their house, a couple blocks away. Kind of in shock.”
“Let’s get a tox screen on Mrs. Kelleher ASAP. What about CSU?”
“Haven’t come yet.”
“You wanna see anything else here?” Russell asked.
Vail stepped outside the tent and surveyed the immediate area. “Where are the witnesses?”
“Sent them home. Got their statements and contact info.”
“And?” Vail asked. “What’d they say happened?”
“She started coughing. Real bad. She stumbled into the street and grabbed for something to hold her up. But she dropped to her knees and then fell onto her side. A woman ran over and took a pulse but there wasn’t any. She wanted to do CPR but she didn’t know how. She called an ambulance but we’ve only got one, and it was out on a call. Sent one from Waimea. Took ’em fifteen minutes to get here. No need to transport at that point.”
“Probably gone the minute she hit the ground.” Russell said.
Vail gestured at Opunui. “Why were you called?”
“Paramedic knew the victim. Friend of his mom’s. He knew how fit she was. He called KPD, asked for me.”
“Why you?” Vail asked.
“He’s my nephew.”
Vail glanced at Russell. “Does everyone know everybody else in this town?”
“We’re close,” Opunui said. “Only about twenty-five hundred of us. Whole place is one square mile.”
“Let’s go take a look at the house, talk to the husband.”
They hoofed it a couple of blocks to a two-story, well-maintained home. Opunui knocked on the door and announced himself. “Got a couple a questions, Ted.”
Ted Kelleher pulled open the screen. It squeaked and creaked. His face was ashen and he looked like he had been hit with a brick across the cranium. His eyes sat at half mast, his cheeks moist from tears.
“I’m Karen Vail with the FBI. This is Detective Russell, Honolulu PD.”
“FBI?” He glanced from one to the other. “I don’t get it. Mary had a heart attack.”
“Yeah,” Vail said. “About that. We’re not entirely sure what happened yet. That may be exactly what took Mary, but we have to cross all our t’s.”
“What else could it be?”
Vail and Russell looked at their shoes, then Vail sighed and said, “We really can’t say. That could be all it was. We’ve got an ongoing investigation, so we can’t say any more.”
“Mind if we look around the house?” Russell asked.
Kelleher shrugged in a slow, lazy manner, as if it took all his effort. “Sure. Fine. Whatever. Ain’t gonna bring me back my Mary.” He waved a hand behind his left ear as he trudged away.
Vail and Russell fanned out inside the home, Vail taking the ground floor and Russell going upstairs. She cut right to the chase, checking the bathroom first.
There was no bar of soap—and no soap dish. In its place was a foaming pump bottle. Not wanting to accept the obvious, she pulled over the garbage pail from beneath the vanity and, after slipping on gloves, sifted through the contents. No wrappers. Nevertheless, it would go back to the lab for further analysis.
Vail pulled aside the shower curtain and looked over the tub. She groaned, then padded out of the bathroom and found the husband. “Mr. Kelleher. There’re no soap bars.”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“Dries us out. We use shower gel and that foamy liquid stuff.”
“Any chance Mary bought a bar of soap recently, in the past few days?”
“Doubt it. She was the one who insisted we not use it anymore.”
“You sure about that?”
“I know my—knew my wife, Agent Vail.” He stopped and bit his bottom lip.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Kelleher. I don’t mean to upset you.”
Russell walked into the living room. “Nothing. No so—”
“Yeah. We were just discussing that. Mary hated soap. Wouldn’t have bought any.”
Russell’s look mirrored Vail’s thoughts: Shit. And, Is this our offender or not?
“Did you or Mary ever shop at a health food store?” Vail asked. “Or a farmer’s market or craft fair—even a roadside stand?”
Kelleher rested both hands on the high-backed wood chair, then glanced at the ceiling for a moment. “Couple years ago we bought some pineapples from a guy by the side of the road. Other than that, no. Why?”
“Something we’re looking into,” Russell said.
“There are four or five gift shops in the area. We walked through a few of ’em over the years. Never bought anything.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, Detective. Money’s tight, sometimes it’s a challenge to make our house payment. If we don’t need something, we pass it up. Mary’s always on my case, makin’ sure I don’t buy stuff we don’t need.”
Vail and Russell moved off and huddled a couple dozen feet away. “I still want crime scene to go through this place. Probably a waste but can’t ask for a do-over a week from now if we realize we missed something.”
“I agree.” Russell glanced over her shoulder at Kelleher. “Let’s go chat with Opunui.”
“Mr. Kelleher,” Vail said, heading back into the kitchen. “We need to have crime scene technicians collect evidence. There someplace you can go and wait till they’re done?”
“Why can’t I stay here? In my house?”
“There could be evidence here. And the more you, or anyone else, walks around, moves things, and so on, the greater the chance evidence could be disturbed—or destroyed.”
“You—you think Mary was killed?”
“Don’t know,” Russell said. It’s possible.”
Kelleher licked his lips, absorbing that. “How long this gonna take?”
“We’ll ask them to be as fast as possible. I don’t think it’ll be that bad. Maybe a couple of hours once they get here.”
Kelleher glanced around, then grabbed his car keys off a hook in the pantry.
They walked out together and Russell waved Opunui over.
“We need this place sealed off till CSU arrives.”
Opunui pulled out his radio and asked an officer to post himself out front while Russell requested that the crime scene unit double-time it to the Kelleher house.
As they watched Kelleher’s 1980s Chevy pickup disappear down the roadway, Opunui turned to Russell. “Was he helpful?”
“Not a whole lot. But he did give us some potentially useful info.”
Vail looked out at the coastline. “If this is our offender, how’d he get here?”
Opunui shrugged. “Most likely, he flew. Short flight from Oahu.” A squawk came over the detective’s radio. “Excuse me.” He turned and walked off.
“But flying means going through security, being scrutinized by law enforcement personnel,” Vail said. “That’s the opposite of what he wants, his whole reason—we think—why he came to Kauai to kill.”
Russell nodded slowly. “Let’s say that because of that article, he knows that we know these weren’t natural deaths. We’re suspecting homicide, a serial killer. If anything, he wants to be more careful. Not less. So he island hops to Kauai, a rustic place with little crime and a sleepy police fo
rce.”
“Even if we find that Mary Kelleher is one of his victims, he’s thrown us a sharp curve.”
“Yeah,” Russell said. “We can no longer just focus on Oahu. That makes our job a lot harder.”
Vail stared off into the distance. “What if he doesn’t fly? How else would he get here? Can you rent a boat?”
“You mean like a fishing boat or a motorboat?”
Um, is there a difference?
“Let’s say either.”
Russell chuckled. “No. Not really. The channels around the islands are very rough. Smaller boats wouldn’t be able to handle it.” He thought a moment. “If you’re not going by plane, it’d have to be cruise ship or ferry.”
“Ferry?”
“Something called the Superferry ran about a dozen years ago. Company spent tens of millions of dollars on heavy-duty ships designed to carry cars as well as people. Great idea—and definitely needed. But story I get is that they had all sorts of legal trouble. I think they skipped an environmental impact report, and as you can imagine, in these parts that caused an uproar. Hawaii Supreme Court ruled against the operators and the ferry shut down in ’09. Kept getting resurrected and shot down until some other company found a financially sustainable model. Hawaiian Island Ferries started up a year or so ago. HIF carries three hundred cars and about nine hundred passengers.”
“How long’s the trip from Oahu to here?”
Russell bobbed his head. “I’d guess about three, three and a half hours.”
“So he could’ve come and gone the same day?”
Russell considered that. “He needed to find his target, right? Who knows how long that’d take. No, I’d say he was here a couple of days at least. Hell, he could still be here.”
“Problem with that,” Vail said, “is that we know approximately when he was last in Oahu. We know when Mary Grant died.”
“Right.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not right. We can’t establish a timeline because we don’t know when he came into contact with his vics. We only know when they died, meaning we—”
“Only know when the Marys opened the bar of soap. I mean, a lot of people may open it right away, but others might not.”
This time Vail found the rock she was pining for earlier and gave it a good solid boot. It went flying and nearly hit Opunui in the back of the head.
“Starting to get frustrated?”
Vail stood there as a gust blew her tightly curled locks across her face. She did not bother to clear them.
Russell used an index finger to gently uncover her face. “You’ve had cases like this before. I know you have.”
“Yeah. So?”
“What’d you do on those?”
“I found a rock and gave it a good kick.”
Russell could not help but laugh. “I mean about the case.”
Vail took a deep breath. “I kept moving. One foot in front of the other.”
“So let’s do that. I’ll put a call through to whoever operates the HIF, ask them to get us a list of all passengers for the past couple of weeks. Have them include method of payment.”
“Since we have no idea who we’re looking for, you want to narrow the list of potential suspects by sorting by cash payment.”
“Right.” Russell pulled out a pad and started jotting notes.
“We could be dealing with thousands of people. So first we eliminate by gender—toss out all the females—and then we get rid of all the males who used a credit card.”
“Male cash customers. Okay.”
“These days, I’m willing to bet that’ll drop the number.”
“Yeah, but two weeks, potentially a thousand or more people per trip, a few islands … a couple ferries per day per island. This could take awhile.”
“Then the sooner you get some people on that, the better.”
Russell rooted out his phone. “I also want to get an undercover detective on every ferry that leaves any of the islands headed for Oahu. If he’s headed back to Oahu. What’s your gut say?”
Another blast of wind buffeted Vail’s body and shoved her off balance. She stumbled back a foot. “Jesus.” She sorted out her hair and saw Russell doing the same. “Obviously I’m winging it a bit because of this time of death thing. Until we find someone who’s actually seen this guy, we have no idea if he’s even in Hawaii.”
“Your gut,” Russell said. “I realize you could be wrong. I promise not to get on your case about it. ’Cause I got nothing better.”
“My gut.” Vail closed her eyes and stood still for a moment, clearing her mind, filling her lungs with clean sea air. “I think I need to go find one of those hiking trails.”
“Seriously, Karen.”
“I was being serious. Okay, here’s my best guess. UNSUB’s familiar with Oahu. He’s been there before, we know that. It’s comfortable for him. He knows his way around. And he’s confident killing there. Could be other reasons, too, that we don’t know about. So yeah, if he’s still in Hawaii, I think he’d go back to Oahu. At least before he leaves for wherever he lives year-round.”
Russell punched a button then brought the handset to his right ear. “So the question is, is he going back to Oahu to kill?”
Vail did not answer—but she did not need to. Judging by Russell’s slumped shoulders, he knew the answer to his own question.
29
Vail’s and Russell’s helicopter landed and they returned to their vehicle. Her hearing was a bit off, the headset muffling the din of the rotors fairly well. But after forty-five minutes the incessant, droning white noise got to her.
In the quiet of the car, after assimilating the information they had absorbed, they received a call from one of Russell’s colleagues.
After hanging up, he summarized what he had been told: “No charges by any of the four victims. The Kellehers’ credit card records haven’t been looked at yet. The others? No gift shops, farmer’s markets, craft fairs, that type of thing.”
“So they either paid cash or they didn’t buy it from any of these types of places,” Vail said.
Russell sighed. “And there’s some more bad news. The ferries don’t keep a passenger manifest. If someone uses a credit card, yeah, they’ll have a name—of whoever’s card was used—but anyone who paid cash, they were just admitted into the queue. No record of their names.”
“Great.”
They were each alone with their thoughts.
Finally, Vail bit her bottom lip and faced Russell.
“What?”
“I was thinking.”
“Always advisable.”
“I can’t decide if Mary Kelleher is the work of our UNSUB.”
“Kind of obvious, isn’t it?”
“You mean because her heart attack is suspicious? Because if it is murder, it’s unlikely we’ve got two killers in Hawaii using the same kill methods? Because her name’s Mary like the other victims? And she fits the victimology?”
Russell pursed his lips. “Yeah. All that.”
“But she doesn’t use soap. And we found no soap bars and no soap bar wrappers.”
“The absence of something can’t prove something isn’t what it appears to be.”
“You’re butchering what I said earlier,” Vail said with a chuckle. “I once had this argument with my ASAC. But the bottom line is we’ll have to wait and see if Bachler finds any aconite on the Kelleher body.”
“Which would be a first. What if he doesn’t?”
“That’s what I’ve spent the last forty-five minutes thinking about.”
“And despite all that effort—and knowledge and experience—you don’t have an opinion?”
“I have an opinion. But I was hoping for a smoking gun.”
“How often have you had one of those?”
“Eve
ry time I fire my Glock.”
Russell gave her a look.
“What?” Vail said. “Do you only shoot rubber bullets on Oahu? Is that an ‘aloha’ thing? No real ammo?”
“That’s funny. Didn’t Bruce Willis once say, ‘Aloha, asshole!’ right before he blew the guy away? In one of the Die Hard flicks?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, he should have. Great line.” A moment later, Russell pulled into the crime lab’s parking lot.
It was dusk and Vail fretted that they were farther away from answers than they were two days ago. “I feel like a salmon.”
Russell got out of his car and removed the sealed bag containing crime scene evidence from the trunk. “I don’t even know what to do with that comment.”
“Not making any headway. Swimming upstream. Against the tide.”
“Yeah, but don’t the salmon always make it and lay their eggs?”
Vail drew her chin back. “I’m FBI, not Fish and Game. How the hell should I know?”
“You’re exhausting, Karen.”
They walked in and caught Bachler before he clocked out for the night. “Guess what we’ve got for you,” Russell said, holding up the bag.
“Not for me,” Bachler said. “I’m going home.”
“As long as it’s processed PDQ,” Vail said, “We don’t care who does it. We need to know if there’s any aconite. Body is en route on another chopper. Should be here already.”
“Yep. It’s in the morgue. ME is slicing and dicing as we speak.”
“Good.” Russell rubbed his eyes. “Can you ask them to text me if they find anything? If it’s our killer, that means he’s left the island. And that means we really need to know.”
“Left the island?” Bachler asked.
“Body’s from Kauai.”
Bachler’s lips parted. “Crap.”
“Yeah,” Vail said. “Crap.”
Bachler reached for the wall-mounted phone and pressed a button. A few seconds later, he said, “It’s Harry. Priority is aconite. You find any, Adam Russell needs to know immediately.” He listened a second, then nodded. “Great. Thanks.”
Russell gestured at the phone. “That was Kuoko?”
“Yep. Said he’s already ahead of us. Should know something in a couple of hours.”
Red Death Page 13
