Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  “Okay, yeah. This is not trash from that site.” She threw the handful of carnations into the discard can.

  “You got that right. If you want trash to sort, we’ve got plenty! What the hell are you up to?”

  “I’m following a hunch.” She stood up, but it didn’t make her feel any taller. She glared back at him and refused to look away.

  “What hunch?” he said, and she exhaled.

  “Kelly Andrade’s stepdad. This is his publicly discarded trash, right there for anyone to take.”

  “We interviewed him. Alibi seems solid.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I just decided to grab the trash while it was available and see what’s there. I’ll turn anything I find over to you.”

  “No way,” he said. “You got company.”

  He hooked the other chair over with his foot and pulled a pair of latex gloves on from the box on the table. His cell phone bleeped, and he tersely told his partner to “keep at it” and that he was following a new lead.

  Lei kept her head down, her hands carefully digging, as that bubble of excitement tightened her chest. A new lead! Maybe there was something off about the stepdad after all.

  A few minutes went by. Still nothing of interest.

  “Kinda sad. All her schoolwork,” Stevens said, dropping a handful of crumpled, stained papers into the discard can.

  “I know.”

  “So I know you want to move up. What are you doing to make detective?”

  “Putting in the time, getting experience. I’ve been taking criminology classes at UH, working on my bachelor’s in Criminal Justice.”

  “Well, you gotta be a team player,” he said, shaking out a soggy coffee filter. “Tell people everything you’re thinking.”

  “Like you’d listen to me.”

  “You found the bodies, the crime scene. Not bad. Not afraid to take initiative. Also not bad.”

  She blushed and hated it. She reached down into the last few bits at the bottom, and her hand wrapped around the hard steel circumference of an empty propane can.

  “What do you think?” She held it up.

  “There were a couple of those at the campsite, so I think you better try not to smear any fingerprints,” he said, snapping open an evidence bag. She dropped the canister into the bag and he sealed it, filling out a label.

  She was galvanized now, carefully sifting every bit at the bottom. He helped her open the next bag of trash. This one yielded some bondage porn magazines, which he wordlessly bagged. The last sack was mostly full of the dead girl’s clothes.

  “Doesn’t this seem odd to you?” asked Lei, holding up a little spaghetti-string top. “I mean, dead less than a week and they throw her clothes out in the trash?”

  “Not really. Most people give them to Goodwill or something, but I’ve seen people burn everything just to have it gone forever ...grief takes people different ways.” Stevens had gone out and gotten a camera, and he bent over, photographing the items they had spread on the floor.

  “What’s missing from this picture?” he frowned. They had laid the clothes out in neat rows.

  “Her underwear,” Lei said. Goosebumps erupted all over and she rubbed her arms, her gut clenching. “Wow, that AC unit really got going.” She squinched her eyes shut against a memory of Kelly’s naked body sunk into the mud.

  “You look like you’ve had enough,” he said, cocking his head to look at her. “Jeremy’s coming anyway.”

  “I’m fine.” She gazed blindly at the ruffled yellow skirt at her feet.

  “Well, thanks for following your hunch. Call me on my cell with any more you have and I promise I’ll listen.”

  “Okay.” She picked up one of the discarded bags of trash and fumbled open the door handle.

  “Hey,” he said. She stopped, looking back. “Good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lei pushed through the steel door.

  “I don’t see enough bags of trash going out.” Sherlyn looked up from her keyboard.

  “Detective Stevens is finishing up some things in there and will dispose of them,” she replied, swinging the bag up to her shoulder. Lei chucked the bag of trash including the gloves, and after a brief wash turned on her computer.

  While it booted up, she fished Stevens’ card out of her pocket. She slid the card into her desk drawer, shut it, then opened it again and put the card back into her pocket. She called Pono at home and briefed him on the case, then went on her assigned patrol route, still mulling over the encounter with Stevens.

  Not her type. Still, those blue eyes were hard to forget. She wondered at the swings of emotion she felt around him, what they meant. She fingered the card in her pocket, trying not to remember Haunani’s face, trying to make her boring patrol matter. It just didn’t seem that important to catch speeders and call in loose dogs with the bodies of two dead teenagers lying in the morgue.

  The dark truck he drove blended in with so many others, the ride of choice in that rural area. After finding her address it hadn’t been hard to follow her to this regular destination, an evening class. His camera sat on the seat beside him, along with a pair of night vision binoculars.

  He waited, and scrolled through the pictures on his phone—women he’d spotted and secretly photographed. Each of them had something special that had caught his artist’s eye—a special curve to the ass, shiny long hair, a sweetly drawn mouth. He loved to capture that uniqueness at the moment it was surrendered to him. Beautiful women wanted to be discovered, captured, conquered. He did them a favor, fulfilling their secret fantasies as he acted out his own.

  This next target was a police officer, holding back the crowd at an accident scene. Her navy-blue uniform hugged her body. This one would be a risk, but he was ready for a challenge. He’d titled each photo, and he brushed his thumb across the name on the slightly glowing surface of the cell phone.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday morning dawned grey and wet. Lei slept in, tired from being up late at Criminology class at University of Hawaii the night before, but got up when Keiki woke her to go out. They did their morning run, but Lei still felt restless and unsettled when they got back and decided to clean. She hung the rag rug from her living room on the chain link fence and was taking her frustration out on it with a broom when she heard a shout.

  “Hey Lei!”

  She turned, the broom raised, and her heart rate jumped.

  “Stevens! What’re you doing here?”

  “I’d feel better if you put the broom down.” He chuckled, his hands raised.

  “Sorry.” She laughed a little too, lowering it. “Spring cleaning.”

  “I was in your area and I thought I’d stop by to talk about the investigation. Turns out you were right. We aren’t getting any other detectives from Hilo District, and I still need help, a lot more manpower than Jeremy and I.”

  “Okay. I won’t say I told you so.” She whacked the rug a few more times and thought of the stalker note. “How’d you get my address?”

  “Irene gave it to me. She told me I needed to come talk to you.” Irene Matsumoto was in charge of Dispatch, personnel records, and general morale. She also knew how much Lei wanted to make detective.

  “Nobody crosses Irene. So does this mean you’re putting me on the investigation?”

  “I asked the Lieutenant if I could borrow you, yeah. He said okay. I’m still hoping for some more detectives since the community is making so much noise, but until then—” He shrugged. “We’re it. I’m going to use Pono too.”

  “Let’s go inside.” Keiki began barking from inside the house, a deep snarling Cerberus boom. “Don’t worry. She only eats assholes.”

  He laughed, but it was a little hollow. She opened the front door and signaled Keiki to sit.

  “This is Stevens,” she said in her ‘friend’ voice, making the hand signal.

  “Michael,” he said. “Call me Michael.” Keiki sniffed him, a little leftover growl rumbling in her ches
t, but she moved aside and followed them in. Lei took him to the little Formica table with its delicate orchid plant.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Yeah, please. Nice place.”

  “It’s perfect for the two of us,” she said, getting him a mug and filling it up with the strong morning brew.

  “Oh. Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “No, I meant the two of us.” She pointed to the dog. “Keiki and I.”

  “Right. Okay.” He covered the awkwardness by taking a sip of his steaming coffee. She sat down after refilling her own mug. Keiki put her head on Lei’s leg and eyed Stevens, her triangle ears pricked.

  “We got some more details back from the autopsies,” he said. “Looks like most of the girls’ injuries appear to be postmortem. The lab matched blood on the rag to Haunani Pohakoa. It doesn’t seem like there was much of a struggle, so hopefully they didn’t suffer.”

  “I guess that’s something.” Her stomach churned at the images that flashed through her brain. She took a relaxation breath.

  “I’ve seen a lot more of this kind of thing in LA. I told the DA my opinion on the case, which is that I don’t think the murder part of it was premeditated. I think he had his fun, and then decided they could ID him and he put them in the stream so he wouldn’t have to deal with it.”

  “What were they doing out at that campsite anyway?”

  “Got a theory. The one girl, Haunani Pohakoa, had a pretty regular pot habit.”

  “I know. That’s how I met her, picking her up for possession.”

  “Well we’ve started interviewing the kids she hung out with. Some of them said Haunani was getting Kelly into drugs. I think both girls were troubled, experimenting. But something fishy was going on with Kelly and her stepdad.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He wouldn’t say squat when we brought him in for another interview after you picked up the trash. He stonewalled with his lawyer, acted hinky. When we canvassed the neighbors they reported late-night fighting between Kelly and the parents, and Kelly ran away overnight more than once this last year. Before the mom married the new guy, Kelly used to be a happy, normal kid.”

  Lei struggled to focus on the present moment, taking a couple relaxation breaths, tightening her fist in her lap so the nails dug in, the pain anchoring her.

  I need to pay attention, she told herself. I need to stay with this.

  His words vibrated through her. She closed her eyes and it got worse: she saw the looming black of expanding pupils, felt herself slipping away to the place she went when things got bad.

  Stevens was patting her shoulder and Keiki was growling, a distant thunder, as she blinked, the room regathering itself around her.

  “What happened?” He frowned. “You okay?”

  “Sorry, I got distracted,” she said. She squeezed her fist. The pain answered, and her body was hers again.

  “It was more than that. Did you hear what I said? You were totally out of it there for a minute.”

  “Sure,” she said, racking her brain for what they’d been discussing. “Which part?”

  “The part about the girls meeting some older guy to go out,” Stevens prompted.

  “Right,” Lei said. She knew she was missing information. I can’t remember what he said that made me black out. What if it was important to the case? Her brain skittered around, but it remained a blank from when he had said Haunani had a pot habit. She would just have to look for clues, managing and hiding the “lost” moment as she had for years

  “Anyway, it looks like there’s some substance to that idea,” Stevens went on. “Haunani stopped buying from her regular dealer and started flashing some bling, a new cell phone, stuff like that. She told her friends she had a ‘secret admirer’ and he was taking care of everything she needed.”

  “Why would he need to drug her then? Was it for a threesome with Kelly?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s that witness in her neighborhood who talked about her being dropped off from a Toyota truck, and a student who saw her get picked up after school one day in a black Toyota truck. That’s the lead I want you to run down: possible sugar daddies with black Toyotas.”

  “Great,” Lei groaned. “You know how many black Toyota trucks we have in Hilo?”

  “Yeah, I know. Why do you think I’m here on a Saturday, eating crow and roping you in on this thing?”

  “Okay,” Lei said, not about to argue with this chance to help. “What else should I be looking for?”

  “We’ve consulted Dr. Wilson, the police psychologist, for a profile on the type of guy Haunani would be with. She’s thinking someone twenties-to mid-thirties, probably single, with a newer black Toyota, Tundra or Tacoma model. He lives in this area since he was able to carry on a relationship with the girl for a while.”

  “Sounds like most of the younger guys in Hilo. Okay, I’ll get on it Monday.”

  “I got overtime authorized for you,” he said sheepishly. “I was hoping you’d want to get started tomorrow.”

  She stared at him, laughed.

  “Wow. What a turnaround. Okay, fine. Want to meet up?”

  They set a time, and he keyed it into his Blackberry. She walked him to the door.

  “See you tomorrow, Stevens.”

  “Call me Michael. Really.”

  “Doubtful,” she said, smiling.

  In the bath that evening, Lei leaned her head back against the cool porcelain, taking one of those deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth her therapist had recommended, hoping this time it would be different. This time she’d be able to reclaim one more thing he’d taken from her.

  It was getting to be more and more important that she manage the weird memory loss and blackout moments she’d struggled with since she was nine. She thought back over the conversation with Stevens, and decided the moment that had triggered her was when he said “she’d been a happy, normal kid.”

  She saw Kelly’s bloated, empty face again in her mind’s eye and felt her heart squeeze.

  At one time Lei had been a happy, normal kid too—but she’d already been messed up by her dad’s arrest and her mother’s lifestyle by the time Charlie Kwon got his hands on her.

  These thoughts weren’t helping her relax. She closed her eyes, but as soon as she did, she smelled the Stetson cologne Charlie always wore. She took another relaxation breath, blowing out the remembered scent. The next second Charlie was there, leaning over her, the soap in his hand.

  “Let me wash you,” he said. The pupils of his eyes were wide and black, swallowing her with their need.

  Lei reared up, the water sloshing. Keiki, who’d been napping on the bath mat, lunged to her feet. Dripping suds, Lei reached out a trembling arm to pet the dog’s wide chest.

  “My guardian. It’s okay, girl, I’m safe now.”

  Keiki subsided with a whuff, her ears still swiveling for possible danger. Lei’s heart was still thudding, and she dried a shaking hand on a towel and thumbed open her phone, speed dialing Aunty Rosario at her restaurant in California.

  “Baby girl!”

  “Hey Aunty. How’s the rat race treating you?”

  “Not bad. Been getting some new customers from the ads my busboy put in the mailboxes.”

  “Still serving the lilikoi pie?”

  “Of course. My regulars would mob me if I didn’t. ’Sides, how else can I say I serve Hawaiian food?”

  “What about those poi rolls you were doing?”

  “Turns off the truck drivers. They won’t eat anything purple. So what’s new in Hilo?”

  They chatted and when they hung up Lei was waterlogged and ready to get out, the flashback gone but not forgotten.

  She wondered if she’d ever be able to take a bath without his appearance. Charlie’d had a way of getting to her, twisting everything he did to her into something she’d wanted. Most of her childhood memories remained mercifully elusive but she knew the bath had been bad.

  The
only thing she remembered for sure were his eyes.

  That night she hung her holster from the bedstead and fell asleep with the matte black, boxy shape of the Glock only inches away.

  Chapter Nine

  Lei took extra time in the mirror the next morning, whisking on a little mascara. She mashed in one last handful of CurlTamer, trying to get her hair to lie flat. It refused, as it usually did. When she realized what she was doing, she gave up and went to the station. She didn’t care what she looked like, she told herself, and felt the lie stick like a chicken bone in her throat.

  “Hey.” Stevens met her at the coffeepot in the break room, dark hair damp and spiky and cheeks red with razor burn. He smelled like soap. “Ready to get started?”

  “Of course.” The station was quieter than normal—Sunday mornings being more about church and hangovers in Hilo, and staffing allocated accordingly. Lei plunked down her coffee and booted up a workstation in the computer lab. Stevens sat next to her on another machine.

  “So what’re you looking for?” she asked.

  “I’m rolling through Haunani’s cell phone calls. I want to see if I can find any connection with Kelly’s stepdad or anyone else interesting. I think we’re going to have to track down and interview everyone she has in her contacts.”

  “Oh.” Lei keyed in her password and logged on to the server. She began searching under “black Toyota truck.” The page loaded with entries. She opened each one and began screening the DMV information against the early-to-mid thirties male profile.

  Stevens printed something, and then hopped up from the workstation.

  “Gotta check something out.” He snagged his black leather jacket off the back of the chair. She envied that as a detective he didn’t have to wear a uniform. “Call me on my cell if you see anything likely.”

  “Like what?” She swiveled the chair around. “‘Sugadady’ on a license plate? How the hell are we going to investigate all these dudes anyway?”

  “I have a witness from the high school who says she saw the guy in the black Toyota. If we can show her the license pictures, she might be able to pick him out.”