by Toby Neal
Chapter Six
Stevens’ cell rang as they walked back through untrimmed grass along a cracking asphalt road that had never seen a sidewalk. Various barking dogs marked their progress.
“Yeah, come down,” Lei heard him say. “We’re heading back for another run at the mother. She didn’t take the news well, got a little belligerent.”
That was one word for it, Lei thought, looking at the band-aid on the back of her hand. She could still felt the shocking wet of spittle on her face. She put her hand back in her pocket. No cowry. She bent and picked up a kukui nut out of the grass, slipped it into her pocket with an immediate feeling of relief.
He slid the Blackberry back into a holder on his belt. “Jeremy’s on his way with your partner; he’s swinging by to pick you up after we talk to Nani.”
Lei didn’t answer. He gave her a sidelong glance, a quick blaze of blue that seemed to see more than she wanted him to.
“Stay back from her.”
“I have more experience with her type than you think.” She couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into her voice. Her mother’s face flashed into her mind’s eye, dreamy as she pushed down the plunger of a syringe.
“She got you good with that cigarette. You may not be able to make this any better for her, but I appreciate that you tried.”
They reached the stoop and Stevens banged on the plywood door. He had to bang twice before Ohia’s face appeared, eyes like raisins pushed into rich brown dough.
“She lying down. She high.”
“Let us in.” Stevens pulled the door further open, and brushed by Ohia into a dim interior that smelled of mildew and rotting food. A living area furnished with futons on the floor and a TV with rabbit ears opened into a bedroom. Lei followed Stevens in and stood over a mattress on the floor.
Nani lay in the center of the bed on a quilt that had once been beautiful, hand sewn in a traditional Hawaiian pattern. Her legs were together, her arms crossed on her chest. She laid perfectly straight, eyes closed. The glass pipe and red Bic were set on an upturned coffee can beside the mattress, along with an empty twist of foil.
“Nani. Can you answer some questions? We need to know anything we can about who Haunani was seeing, who might have done this to her.”
No reply.
“Nani.” He reached down, nudged her shoulder. Her body went loose then, wobbling with the force of his shaking, and her head dropped to the side, mouth falling open.
He put two fingers on her neck. “Still got a pulse, but she’s too far gone right now. We’ll have to come back.”
Lei turned to Ohia, who stood behind them, a bulky shadow.
“Can you keep an eye on her? Maybe get some friends in to clean up a bit?”
“She nevah get any friends.” Still the woman backed up, headed toward the sink piled with pots and pans.
“Thanks,” Lei said. “We’ll be back to talk to her again.”
They pushed out into sunlight that felt blinding, air that tasted sweet. Lei rubbed the kukui nut. Its ridges were soothing under her fingers. The Crown Victoria, with Pono behind the wheel and Jeremy in the passenger seat, pulled up on the lawn in front of them. Stevens reached into his pocket, handed her his card.
“Call me if you think of anything else. Thanks for helping.”
“You know I’d like to work on the case full time.”
“I’m holding out for more detectives. I may still be able to use you though.”
“Okay. I guess.”
She headed for the Crown Vic and passed Jeremy, who deliberately avoided eye contact. He must resent her replacing him, however briefly, she thought as she got into the cruiser beside Pono. She glanced back at Stevens and Jeremy as they pulled away. They were looking at his notebook and discussing something. Stevens gestured to the houses they had already canvassed.
She turned her eyes away.
“How’d it go?” Pono had his Oakleys down but she could see concern in the deep line between his brows.
“Not well.” She held up her hand with its band-aid and gave a brief summary. Pono rubbed his mustache, shook his head.
“Asshole tweekers.”
“She’s still a mother whose child was killed.” Lei wished she could forget the way Nani had arranged herself like an effigy on the bed.
They drove in morose silence on a beat of downtown Hilo, which Pono called his “hood.” The cruiser rolled past the corner of a warehouse in the industrial section, and Lei spotted several teenage boys with paint cans tagging the side of a building.
Pono hit the siren and lights, and the Crown Vic roared forward. Lei snorted a laugh at the way the kids jumped about two feet in the air, dropped the cans, and ran. The squad car chased them down the alley until they scattered in different directions.
“Feel like running?” Pono asked.
“Oh yeah!” Adrenaline surged through her, the perfect antidote to angst, and she jumped out of the rolling vehicle to chase one of the miscreants. Pono continued after the others in the cruiser.
She charged after the teen until he ran into a chain-link fence, and grabbed the back of his shirt as he began to climb. She peeled him off the fence and slammed him down, her knee in the middle of his back as she cuffed him. He spat curses at her but shut up when she gave his arms an extra upward wrench. She walked him back toward the main road with a hand on the back of his neck, the buzz of adrenaline singing along her veins.
Pono had caught another of the kids and they took them down to the station and walked them in.
“You Chang boys getting in trouble again?” Sam at the watch desk frowned when he saw the teens. “I going call your grandma. She going give you lickins.”
The kids hung their heads as he berated them, following them into the station. Lei spotted Stevens filling up a plastic water bottle from the water dispenser. She hurried across the bull pen toward him.
“Stevens—how’d it go after I left?”
“You look hot.”
“Yeah.” She brushed sweaty curls back from her forehead. “Chasing some taggers downtown.”
“Get your man?”
“Of course.” She gestured toward Pono and Sam at the booking desk with the boys. “So how did the canvassing go?”
“Didn’t get much more than when you were there.” He screwed the top back onto his water bottle. “We have some leads with Haunani’s cell phone, which that neighbor Ohia found at the house. We also have a shitload of stuff to process from the campsite.”
“What about talking to Kelly’s parents today? Need any help?”
“No, Jeremy and I are handling that. You can get back to…whatever you do.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed her sweaty hair, crumpled uniform and the hangdog teenagers at the booking desk.
“You know what? Forget it. Good luck with the investigation.” Lei spun away, a hot prickle of rage sweeping up to her hairline, knowing she was overreacting and no longer giving a damn. She stomped back over to Pono. “Let’s go, Pono. I think we missed a few.”
Pono ripped the boys’ incident write-up off his pad, slapping it down on the desk.
“Yeah, okay. Sam, can you finish this up? My partner’s out for justice.”
Lei blew through the double doors and was in the Crown Vic revving the engine when Pono got in. She pulled out and laid down some rubber turning onto the busy avenue, roaring back toward town.
“What’s up?”
“That jerk, Stevens.”
“Turned you down for a date?”
“Turned me down for the investigation.”
“Asshole,” said Pono, rubbing his lips hard to suppress a grin. “So I guess you asked to be on the case.”
“I have an interest,” she said. “And a lot to offer. But whatever. He’s a prick.”
“For the record, did you for once think about how this would affect me if you got reassigned?”
“Hey, you get along with everybody. It’d only be temporary.”
“Well…
if you feel that strongly you should go to the Lieutenant and ask.”
“Maybe I will.”
After a long pause, Pono turned the radio to the Hawaiian station. Slack key guitar filled the Crown Vic with soft rhythms.
“Let it go a’ready. Otherwise you come stress out,” he said, leaning back with his trademark mellow. “Seems like those Chang boys we picked up are following in their grandpa’s footsteps.”
“What do you mean?”
“Terry Chang. He was a real crime godfather around here. Got put away finally and some good citizen offed him in prison. Word is his wife is running things now. She’s not going to be happy with those boys drawing attention by getting picked up.”
“Looks like they wanted to get to work building their rap sheets,” Lei said. She hit the steering wheel in frustration. “Those girls deserve more.”
“Like what? You’re not even a detective yet.”
“Something about this case—it’s like it found me. But whatever, it seems like you and Stevens are on the same page.”
“I never said I agree with him, but I understand why he’s trying to get the best. This is the biggest murder to happen in Hilo in forever.”
Lei had no answer, no way to explain her need to help—because what he said was the truth. They drove back through the industrial area, but the taggers were long gone. They continued on their normal route as late afternoon turned into evening.
“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” Pono said eventually. “It could have gone down like people’re saying, with the girls going to party with some nasty icehead or something. But I like Kelly’s stepdad for this.”
“Really?”
“He’s squirrelly. Lawyered up for his interview today, and so far there’s no reason to.”
“How’d you hear this?”
“I have my sources.” Pono knew everyone, and the station was full of his ‘talk story’ moles.
“Maybe he felt discriminated against,” she said, elbowing him. “It’s not easy being the white minority.”
“He one stupid haole,” Pono stated. ‘Haole’ meant Caucasian or newcomer, and the word wasn’t always complimentary in a state where only a third of the population was white.
“Huh,” Lei said. “Hey, it’s trash day, early evening ...maybe he put their trash out on the road already.” She typed the stepfather’s last name into the Toughbook computer screwed into the dash with her right hand while steering with her left. He lived in central Hilo, only a few miles away.
“No need we go look. They always saying, do your own job. You so nosy, you going get us fired,” Pono lapsed into pidgin, cracking his big brown knuckles.
“Not nosy. Pro-active. If that trash is out there, it’s in the open and fine for us to take it, and tomorrow morning it will be gone as an option. We’ll turn anything we find over to the detectives. What are you so scared of? Extra work?”
“Shut up. I just know Stevens and Ito won’t like it.”
“So what? We’re helping them. If we find anything, we’ll give it to them, let them take the credit.”
“It’s a miracle we found the crime scene. Now, we’re investigating. It’s not our kuleana, our responsibility.”
“I don’t know about you, but I care about catching a killer. I care about what happened to those girls, and if you like the stepdad for it, that’s a valid hunch. We’re just looking for another miracle.”
Pono subsided, moodily adjusting his side mirror.
“What’s the baby up to these days?” she asked, to distract him.
“You don’t really care.”
She didn’t, so she shut up and drove.
It didn’t take long to get to the middle-class neighborhood where Kelly had lived. They rolled quietly along the street, lit tastefully by carriage-lamp streetlights. Lei passed the house, a modest ranch. The black plastic trash cans sat on the curb.
“They’re out there. What do you think?” Lei tried to suppress the excitement in her voice.
“Since when did you listen to what I think? Let’s just get this over with. Cruise back by, we’ll dump the trash into the crime-scene bags,” Pono said, his mouth tight.
The backseat held a box of heavy-duty transparent garbage bags from emptying the junked cars. Pono pulled on latex gloves as she turned the corner again and drove slowly toward the house. She pulled up and put the car in park, as Pono leapt out and headed for the first can. She was still pulling on latex gloves when he dumped the contents of the can into one of the plastic bags.
A dog began barking from inside the house as she helped him with the second can, holding the thick transparent plastic open so the garbage, fortunately already bagged, tumbled in.
“Shut up, goddamnit!” someone yelled at the dog, as they emptied the third one, threw the bags into the backseat, and jumped back in the cruiser. Lei put it in gear and they quietly picked up speed.
Pono sighed, leaning back and closing his eyes, rubbing his lips hard with his right hand.
“That imaginary cigarette taste pretty good?”
“You have no idea,” he said, his eyes still closed.
“Let’s pull over, have a quick look,” Lei said. Her hands were actually itching to rip into the bags.
“No way. Pollute the chain of evidence? What if there is something there, you want to be able to give it to Stevens, don’t you?”
That shut her up.
It only took a few more minutes to pull into the station, haul the bags in past the startled night watch officer and back to the evidence room. They logged the three bags in and locked the room.
“That’s not going to smell so good tomorrow morning,” Pono said.
“We could go through them now.”
He just narrowed his eyes at her, gave her back a whack that made her stagger forward toward the door.
“Okay, okay. Tomorrow then.”
He’d opened the Orchids file again. He couldn’t resist looking at his handiwork, savoring the sequence, the tragic beauty of the girls in the water. He played with the key ring, smoothing the girls’ hair through his fingers.
The newspaper article was such a wonderful contrast. He picked up the paper with its grainy, obligatory shot of twin white-shrouded gurneys, and in the background the tense-looking female officer who’d found the bodies. He read the snippet aloud.
“Officer Leilani Texeira and her partner Pono Kaihale were first on the scene of a possible double homicide at Mohuli`i Park.” He tapped her face with its aureole of curly brown hair. “Officer Texeira. You look like you’d photograph well.”
Chapter Seven
Sam was at the watch desk again when she got to the station the next morning.
“Hey, do you know a seven-letter word for ‘outrageous female pop star’?” he asked, pencil in hand.
“Try Madonna,” she said, pushing through the glass interior door.
“It works!” He looked up. “We’ve been getting a lot of calls on those girls you found. Community’s pretty upset. Even had to send a unit down to the high school to deal with the students.”
“Bummer. Don’t know why we aren’t putting more people on the case; I’m trying to get on the investigation but Stevens is holding out for more detectives.”
“Good luck with that.” He went back to the crossword as the door swung shut behind her with a muffled clunk.
Lei picked up some coffee and headed for the back room with a box of various-sized evidence bags and a pair of latex gloves. Pono had sent her a text message that the baby kept him up all night and now they were all sick. He didn’t like it when she took chances, so she wasn’t surprised he’d left her holding the proverbial trash bag.
“You the one brung the rubbish in there last night?” Sherlyn, the veteran evidence clerk, was at her station outside the door. “It can’t stay here. It’s stinkin’ up the place.”
“I know, that’s why I’m here early,” Lei fumbled on the gloves. “I’ll try to work fast.”
“Uhm…the Roosevelt case.” Lei named the owner of the lot with the abandoned cars on it and filled it in on the check-in sheet.
“Never heard of it. You get that rubbish out of my evidence room today.”
“I’m on it.” Lei took the key from her and opened the door. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “You’re right, Sherlyn, it’s nasty in here. I’m going to turn on the AC unit, air it out.”
“Just turn it off when you finish.” Sherlyn went back to her computer.
Lei closed the door behind her, facing the three bags of trash arranged in a row. Her heart picked up speed and she felt a bubble of excitement clogging her throat. Truth was, she was thrilled not to be slowed down by Pono’s nit-picking or Stevens’ patronizing.
She plunked her coffee mug down on the small steel table inside the door and turned on the outside-vented AC unit.
She dragged the first bag toward her, sat on the metal chair, ripped open the transparent evidence bag and tore into the black liner underneath, filling her gloved hands with garbage. She dumped it in carefully explored handfuls into the steel trash container by the table. Most of it was the usual: coffee grounds, ripped up bill envelopes, a pile of crumpled, stained schoolwork, orange peels, and globs of what looked like a tuna casserole.
She was just sorting through a browning bunch of carnations when the door swung open so hard it banged into the steel trash can. Lei started, dropping some of the carnations. She kept her eyes down, but could see that the man who’d come in was long legged, wore jeans, and his shoes were muddy. Michael Stevens. Damn.
“What are you doing?”
She looked up into blue eyes slanted into hard triangles.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re investigating my crime.”
“Stevens, this is just a little research.”
“The Roosevelt case? I don’t think so.” He folded his arms. “Primary crime scene? Ring a bell? It should, you were there most of yesterday.”
