Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  “I can’t see him being that blind or that bought off. Still, when you look at the pattern, it makes you wonder.”

  Anu dropped the check at Jenkins’s elbow.

  “Thanks.” Jenkins winked at her. “You’re the best.”

  “I sure am,” she purred, and trailed smooth oval fingernails across his shoulder as she walked away. Jenkins’s neck flushed.

  “Let’s get back to the station. You can get your heart rate back down running background on Haddock while I talk to Captain Fernandez.”

  “Think you’re putting me on desk duty that easy?” Jenkins threw a couple of bills on the table and followed Lei through the swinging doors. “Think again, partner.”

  The Timekeeper padded across the cave to check on the Chosen, the headlight-style flashlight barely piercing the smothering dark of the cave. The man was sitting up, the padlocked collar around his neck securely attached to the tie-out cable, his legs drawn up tight against nakedness and chill.

  “Why am I here?” His voice jarred the Timekeeper. He never liked it when they talked to him. “What are you doing with me?”

  The Timekeeper carried two buckets. One was covered with a lid for bathroom use; the other held an assortment of food and a gallon jug of water. He set them within reach and walked away.

  “Why am I here?” the Chosen called after him. “For God’s sake, leave me a light at least!”

  The Timekeeper went back out to the quarter horse he’d ridden to the cave and dug the duct tape out of the saddlebag. Chances were slight the man’s calls for help would attract anyone in this remote area, and the entrance of the cave was all but invisible. Still, it wasn’t good to take chances, and the Timekeeper didn’t like to hear anyone in his special place but the Voices. He carried the tape back into the cave and silenced the Chosen with it.

  He didn’t leave a light, either.

  Chapter Six

  The captain waved Lei and Jenkins in, then shut the door of his office. Fernandez cut an immaculate figure, hawklike features framed in well-tended silver hair. Lei stifled her apprehension. She’d been in his office only once, for her transfer interview a few months before.

  “What’s so urgent?” The captain gestured to the supplicant chairs in front of his desk.

  “Something big.” Lei placed the file on his desk as they sat.

  He pulled the folder over and leafed through it. “What’s all this?’

  “I stumbled onto this missing persons pattern with the disappearance of a guy named Jay Bennett, who was beaching it at Pine Trees. Got a visit yesterday morning from his girlfriend from California that he hadn’t called in when scheduled, and she’d found his wallet and some other stuff it’s unlikely he’d voluntarily leave behind. I went out that afternoon to check the area and canvass and found more of the guy’s possessions in a trash barrel. The girl who reported him missing also turned in these.” She took the stones out, set them on the desk. “They were left on one of his shoes in a triangle pattern. Someone threw away all Jay Bennett’s possessions. Either he was snatched or it was a suicide, but after I examined some of what he left behind, I don’t think it was suicide. So I had Jenkins do an MP search. These are what came up, back to 2005, when a regular pattern of disappearances emerges.”

  She paused. The captain was looking at the pairs, held together with paper clips. All the outliers were clipped together in another pile.

  “Hmm, this is interesting.” The captain stroked the neat goatee on his chin. “I remember a lot of these cases. The ones you’ve set aside in pairs did stand out in that they were transient and traveling alone. Seemed unrelated at the time.”

  “Any bodies ever recovered?” she asked.

  “When we find a John Doe we try to match them to Missing Persons as much as possible. That automatically takes them out of the MP database, so no.”

  “So…don’t you think that’s odd? So many disappearances without a trace, at the same time of year, going back so far?” Lei could feel Jenkins vibrating with excitement beside her.

  A long pause, then Fernandez nodded. “It’s strange when put together this way, but given the demographic of the missing, not a definitive pattern. In other words, there could be a lot of explanations.”

  “Captain, I beg to differ. That’s ten people missing in the last five years, regular as clockwork in May and October. I want to show you this.”

  She lifted the binder off her lap and passed it to him. “Apparently Jenkins and I aren’t the only ones to think this is a pattern.”

  “Where did you get this?” Fernandez put a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses on his nose and leaned in to examine the binder.

  “Health food store owner. Jazz Haddock.”

  Fernandez set the glasses aside with a snort. “Man’s a pothead. Got a screw loose from too much drugs.”

  “Doesn’t mean he isn’t just handing himself to me as a suspect.” Lei held eye contact with the captain. “I think he bears more investigation, sir. He seems to know too much about this.” She wasn’t above playing on the captain’s biases to get the investigation to move ahead.

  Fernandez picked up the binder in one hand, the stack of printouts in the other.

  “All right. You can work in some canvassing at the parks on this latest missing person, see what you can pick up—but until we get something harder, something indicating foul play, your priority’s the mansion burglaries.”

  “About that, sir. That’s what led us to the Island Cleaning meth factory,” Jenkins said. “We think our lead suspect, Lisa Nakamoto, was behind the burglary jobs, and when we went out to her business we found evidence looking like meth production. Sergeant Furukawa wants us to wait until he brings Nakamoto in to do anything more.”

  “Didn’t know it was your investigation that led to the Island Cleaning raid.” A long pause. Apparently Fury had taken credit for their discovery and they’d already raided the building. Lei felt a surge of frustration but bit her tongue.

  Captain Fernandez stroked his beard some more. “Okay, wait on that one until the narco team brings in Nakamoto. You can move ahead with pursuing this, but keep it under wraps for now.”

  “Of course.” She collected the folder. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  Lei hurried back to the workstation, tense and energized. Jenkins followed as she started a new case file online, titling it “May/October Missing Persons,” while Jenkins got a case jacket going, filing duplicates of the missing persons photos with a two-hole punch.

  “We’re on a roll now.” Jenkins rubbed his hands together gleefully and slapped them down on his thighs. “What next?”

  “Let’s get out and do some canvassing, start at the south side of the island and work our way back through the parks to Ke`e Beach, the beginning of the Na Pali cliffs. This time of year more of the park dwellers will be on the dry side of the island.”

  Lei put the file with pictures of the pairs of missing into her backpack, Jay Bennett’s on top.

  “Sounds good.” They got to the parking lot and flipped a coin for which car to take. Jenkins won, so they got into the Subaru.

  “It’s pretty unbelievable that so many people have disappeared without anyone in KPD putting the pieces together.”

  Lei shook her head—conflicted. Jenkins criticizing the way locals did business wasn’t something she wanted to hear; but she couldn’t help agreeing that the law enforcement community had missed what was happening. If it had been local teenagers disappearing, the community would have been up in arms. Still, part of her understood resentment toward these outsiders, whose biggest contribution to the area was increased drug sales and overflowing toilets in the parks.

  “We’re dealing with it now,” she said shortly.

  Her cell rang.

  “Texeira.”

  “It’s Alika Wolcott. This an okay time?”

  She glanced over at Jenkins. “Shoot. What’s up?”

  “I wondered when you were coming by to check out my burglary.”


  “Oh crap. I totally forgot.”

  “Way to make me feel special.” Flirtatious, slightly mocking tone.

  “There’s a big case. It’s taken over everything, and I completely spaced it. I can send a unit to take your statement.”

  “I’d rather you came yourself.”

  Lei paused, chewing her lip. Jenkins glanced at her, cocked an eyebrow.

  “Okay. I guess I can swing by on my way home from work, but it’s going to be later, a lot later.”

  “No problem. You got the address?”

  “Yeah. You gave it to me at the office.”

  “Bring a swimsuit.”

  “What?”

  “Bring a swimsuit. I want to show you my new pool.”

  “This is business,” Lei said frostily. “I’ll come and take a statement and an inventory, see what I can see. That’s all.”

  “I hope you’ll change your mind when you see the pool. Later, then.” He wisely hung up before she could.

  “Who was that?”

  “Dude I met at Paradise Realty. Wants me to check out a break-in at his place.” Her scalp flushed with annoyance and something else.

  “He hitting on you?”

  “Trying. Wants me to come swimming in his pool.”

  Jenkins laughed. “He obviously doesn’t know who he’s up against, Sweets.”

  “Hey. I like guys as much as the next girl. Just not slick developer dudes with pools.”

  “Right. Tell that to the working slobs who’ve tried to ask you out.”

  Lei ducked her head. “I’m getting over a relationship. ’Nuff said.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” Jenkins concentrated on the road and Lei leafed through the folder of missing persons photos they planned to show around. They drove on in silence, out past Lihue and Waimea to the park called Polihale, which marked the southern end of the Na Pali Coast.

  Polihale was in the lee of precipitous mountains that blocked rainfall, so it was as dry as the opposite side of the island was green and lush. A mile-long stretch of windswept beach culminating in rugged red cliffs, Polihale was the wintering ground of the peripatetic homeless community.

  They parked the Subaru and got out. Hot wind tugged at Lei’s curls, and she bundled them back with a rubber band, taking off her jacket and draping it over the seat. She slipped her gun and her badge into her pants pockets; Jenkins did the same. No sense advertising they were cops—the park dwellers would pick up on that soon enough.

  Locking the car, they set off across the dunes. Kiawe trees, brought in by missionaries centuries ago, strewed the path with thorny, brittle twigs.

  “Good thing we’re not barefoot,” Jenkins said.

  “Think that’s the idea.” Lei referred to the rumor that the missionaries had brought the trees in to force Hawaiians to wear shoes. She tipped her head back to look at one of the gnarled trees, slanting sideways from the prevailing wind direction. “Annoying as the thorns are, without the kiawe we wouldn’t have any shade at all out here.”

  Over the rise of the first dune the park appeared—a series of desolate cement pavilions with built-in barbeques and chained-down picnic tables. Graffiti covered everything, and the metal oil-barrel trash cans were overflowing. Jenkins made a little disapproving sound and Lei surveyed the area with her hands on her hips.

  Clustered beneath the rise of another dune were a group of tents. She pointed. “Over there.”

  They struggled a bit though the shifting dunes, the wind-blown sand stinging like needles. The tent village had made the most of the landscape—huddled in a hollow and sheltered by several large kiawes, the area was pleasantly warm and still. On a carpet scrap in front of one of the tents a young mother changed a baby’s diaper. She shaded her face to look at them, and called to someone inside a nearby tent.

  They slithered down the embankment into the cuplike hollow.

  “Hey. We’re looking for some missing people and wondered if you could take a look at some pictures.” Lei indicated the file folder of photos.

  “Sure,” the woman said. She wore a paisley smock, strings of puka shells, and her blondish hair was in waist-length dreads. The nut-brown baby burbled a greeting, waving both hands.

  A lean, muscular man emerged from the nearest tent, standing upright in a patterned brown sarong. Thick sun-streaked hair brushed his shoulders, his skin gleamed with oil, and if Lei wasn’t mistaken, he wasn’t wearing anything but the sarong.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’d like to take a look at those pictures.”

  “Sure.” Something about his narrowed eyes and arrogant physical stance put Lei on alert, but she kept her voice and demeanor relaxed, her eyes down. She handed over the file of printed color pictures.

  As they stood there, the occupants of five tents emerged one by one. They ranged in age from an older couple in their sixties to several young people. They clustered around Sarong, looking at the photos of the missing.

  The older man pointed to one of the pictures with a knobbed forefinger.

  “I knew her. She was a nice girl.” He was missing several teeth, so the words were slurred, but there was no mistaking the snap of intelligence in his eyes.

  Lei took the picture out of the pile. He’d pointed to Tracy Enders, age twenty-six, disappeared in October of 2008.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Ha`ena,” he said. “We switch parks when our permits expire. Tracy didn’t like Polihale as much, but the rain started early that year and so we were packing up to hitchhike out here, get away from the rain. When we went to leave, Tracy’s tent was still up but she was gone. We looked around, called for her, figured she’d hitched into town or something.” He shrugged.

  “Did you find anything unusual at her tent? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No. I knew something was wrong, though, when we went back after the ten days on our permit was up and her tent was still there. It was ticketed though—and then the park guys took it down eventually.”

  The young woman with the baby piped up.

  “I knew this guy.” She pointed to Jay Bennett’s photo. “Camped with him out at Ha`ena; he even came to the papaya farm a few times. Nice guy. What happened to him?”

  “We don’t know.” Lei belatedly remembered she and Jenkins had meant to go by a papaya farm where a noise complaint had been reported. In the excitement of following up on the Island Cleaning lead, it hadn’t seemed important.

  “All these people are missing?” Sarong asked, dark eyes piercing.

  “Yeah. We want to know where they might have ended up.”

  “I can guess.” He smiled, a wolfish display of extra-long canines that hadn’t seen a toothbrush in a while. “Suicides. Lotta people come here to disappear, find it lonelier and harder than they thought paradise should be.”

  “We’re considering all angles,” Jenkins said.

  The older woman spoke up, pushing long white braids behind her shoulders. “What Tiger is saying is that some things go on here, it’s better not to look into too much. Better to camp with friends and watch out for each other.”

  “That’s right. For your own safety, stick together,” Lei said. “Can you look through these again?”

  The file made the rounds. The old man handed them back.

  “I hope you find them.”

  Jenkins collected names. Lei doubted there was a single real one in the list he earnestly wrote down in the spiral notebook he carried, and the address had to be listed as “Local Parks” as the little colony made no bones about their lack of address.

  Done interviewing, Lei and Jenkins trudged the length of the sun-scoured park and found no one else.

  “Real tourist attraction, this.” Jenkins, back at the Subaru, dumped sand out of his shoes.

  “Yeah, the hidden Hawaii no one misses seeing.” Lei took a pull off her water bottle. “Something about the way they live is kinda appealing…No responsibility, just enjoying the outdoors all day.”

 
“Those tents were hotter than hell and the shower didn’t look like it worked,” Jenkins said. “I’d rather go to work and be able to get in a comfy bed at night.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She looked back as they pulled away. The man they called Tiger looked down at them from the top of the dune, his brown sarong somehow blending with the sand, muscled torso gleaming. He did remind her of a big cat, watchful eyes on the car as they pulled away.

  “Let’s run that guy they called Tiger,” she said, pulling the Toughbook computer out of its custom fold-down support arm in the glove box. “I like him for something. Not sure what, but he’s got a smell about him.”

  “Yeah, BO,” Jenkins said. “He said his name was Jim Jones.”

  The name reminded Lei of something, but she wasn’t sure what. She punched in the name. No matches on Kaua`i. Expanded the search. Came up with a few hits on the other islands, but no one matching his description.

  Suddenly, she remembered the name.

  “Jim Jones is the cult leader who made his people drink the Kool-Aid!” she exclaimed. “He’s sending us a message, all right. Turn around. I want to bring him in!”

  Chapter Seven

  Jenkins cranked a turn, and they hauled ass back to the park. This time Jenkins drove the all-wheel drive as far as he could up onto the sucking sand while Lei radioed that they were bringing someone in for questioning.

  Lei hit the dune at a run, her cuffs in her back pocket, baton in hand, gun in sight in the holster, badge clipped to her belt. Jenkins was right beside her as they ran into the little tent village.

  It was deserted.

  The tents were empty, belongings neatly stacked inside, but the campers were gone.

  Lei hurried through, checking, then ran to the top of the nearest dune. She looked in all directions. Nothing but sand and sparkling ocean as far as the eye could see.