by Toby Neal
Dr. Gregory’s assistant had arrived, dressed in scrubs as if she’d just come from the morgue. Glossy black hair in a ponytail emphasized an angular Japanese face. She squatted beside Gregory, who was semi-inserted into the broken window beside the body.
Pono came back, photographing the tide pool with the digital Canon and then turning to take a few shots of the soaring cliff. Pono, with his sociable personality, usually had the inside scoop on departmental business. They’d been partners when they were both patrol officers on the Big Island, and when Pono made detective he’d moved his family to Maui. He’d contacted Lei and her boyfriend, Stevens, on Kaua`i about job openings, and the two had moved to the Valley Isle six months ago.
Lei and Pono continued their sweep and found a few other items: some coins and bottle caps, a rusty beer opener that was probably detritus from the tent village on the bluff. The lighthouse area was a well-known party and drug zone in addition to being a homeless encampment.
The sun felt like a hot lance in Lei’s eyes, and she wished she’d remembered sunglasses, sunscreen, or a hat—preferably all three. Even with her Hawaiian and Japanese blood, her greater Portuguese heritage caused her face to freckle and burn. By then they’d worked their way back to the wreck, and Lei watched the firemen cut the body out of the car.
Ron Vierra handled the bulky hydraulic cutters with the ease of experience. They clipped through steel, foam, and plastic with a guttural roar, like a T. rex dining.
The girl in scrubs approached Lei, hand out. “Hi, I’m Angie Tanaka, ME intern.”
More introductions. Dr. Gregory joined them, glancing nervously up the cliff as he packed his kit.
“So what do you think, Doctor?” Lei asked.
“Seems apparent she died on impact.” Gregory swiped sweat off his brow again. “And she’s a teenager. But I have to do a full workup back at the morgue to make sure. Liver temp appears consistent with death last night sometime. The ocean activity inhibited onset of rigor, but she’s begun now.”
The two firemen, grunting with effort, lifted a section of the steel car frame away from the upside-down corpse. They’d cut the steering wheel loose from the dash, and Vierra pulled it out of the girl’s jacketed midsection.
Lei found herself massaging the stone in her pocket, seeing lost faces as she gazed at the girl’s mutilated body. She’d learned to use a worry stone in therapy some years ago, but this black one was special—she’d picked it up at the funeral of a friend. The stone worked to help her manage her feelings—but it had a price, and that price was remembering.
The body remained upside down and folded into a C shape with the onset of rigor. Gregory and Tanaka moved in, tipping the corpse onto its side into an opened body bag. With some effort, they stuffed and straightened the body enough to fit, and the sound of the zipper closing, one long screech, set Lei’s teeth on edge.
She and Pono helped the MEs lift the bag onto the wire mesh body-retrieval basket that had trundled down the cliff on the winch. They clipped the mesh shut; then Vierra checked the cable attachment and gave the go on his walkie.
Lei took a second to look out to sea, away from the wrecked car, black cliffs and yellow fire truck perched atop them. The ocean was a wind-whipped cobalt, lightening to foamy cerulean near the rocks, and her eyes scanned the horizon automatically for humpback whales.
The winch began with a grinding rumble, and the wire casket lifted. The body bounced and banged its way up the cliff. It caught on the same clump of guava that had impeded Lei’s descent, tipping vertically. They’d closed the cagelike mesh door, but they all gasped as the body tilted upright and slammed against it, swaying and stuck like a bundled black fly dangling out of a spider’s web.
Vierra screamed to stop the winch. After much raising, lowering, and debating, the body remained stuck. Finally, one of the other firefighters on the bluff rappelled down off the truck and untangled it, and the metal cage resumed its undignified ascent.
Lei was the last to go up. By the time she did, she could feel how matted her curly hair had become, how sunburned her normally olive complexion was. She imagined the hated handful of cinnamon freckles on her nose multiplying as the winch hauled her up the precipitous cliff—this time avoiding the guava bushes. She glanced down at the wreck below her as she rose. The Volare was going to be hauled up with a crane eventually, and it was a good thing, because an oily rainbow already polluted the pristine tide pool around the vehicle.
Unhitched from the winch at last, Lei got into her silver Tacoma truck and cranked on the AC. She chugged a tepid bottle of water. Pono hopped in beside her, sweat rings marking his arms. He flopped the seat back.
“Get me to something cold and wet, please, stat.” Tiare, his wife, was attending nursing school at University of Hawaii Maui and his speech was peppered with medical terms.
“Ha.” She handed him another warm bottle of water and broke open a packet of pretzels. “Let’s take ten and then go canvass those campers in the tent village.”
“So—you thinking suicide?” This was the second time Pono had mentioned it. Something was bugging him, too. She glanced over and, sure enough, he was rubbing his lip with a meaty forefinger, an old habit from when he’d given up smoking.
“Too soon to tell. Usually the obvious is the obvious, but there’s something about this that’s just…weird.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “It was a stolen car, so that bugs me. If she committed suicide, why here, in the armpit of nowhere? Why in some anonymous car we can’t trace, without any ID or note? It’s just seeming like too much work, like she was trying to disappear.”
“What I was thinking.” They continued to hash over the possibilities, finishing the pretzels and a browning banana Lei found in the cup holder.
Lei didn’t want to lose any time; she’d spotted the camp dwellers watching the retrieval of the body and wanted to get to the canvassing while the scene was fresh. Slightly restored, they got out of the truck, which Lei had parked near the huge lighted steel pole that constituted Pauwela Lighthouse.
It was a poor excuse for a lighthouse, dreary on a good day and downright creepy in the dark. The spectacular setting of cliffs and restless sea somehow failed to counteract a sense of misery left by a collection of abandoned, rusting cars and the graffiti-scarred broken cement structures that had been bunkers in WWII. The bluff was bare and empty without the emergency vehicles, breeze humming in the twisted brush that hid the tent village, the site of several unsolved murders.
Lei patted the Glock 40 holstered against her side. She made sure her baton and pepper spray were handily stowed in their holsters on her belt and her badge was clipped in plain view. As a detective, she’d come up with her own “uniform”—black jeans with dark running shoes, plain tank tops, and a light blazer to hide her gun, if needed. Today the blazer wasn’t needed. And better late than never, she put on a ball cap her friend Marcella had given her.
“Ready?” Pono slammed the door of the truck.
“As I’ll ever be.” She followed him into the hollowed cave of underbrush, the wind keening in the interlaced branches overhead.
Chapter Two
The first tent was camouflage patterned, a still, hunkered shape in the green gloom.
“Maui Police Department. Anybody home? Come out and talk to us, please,” Lei said.
A zipper opened in a slow parabola, and a thin young woman wearing stained jeans, her hair in dreadlocks, crawled out, accompanied by a draft of garlic and urine. She sat in a camp chair beside the tent opening, eyes flashing defiance.
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear the crash last night?” Pono asked.
“No.”
“You sure about that? It must have been pretty loud. Shoots, you’re lucky the car didn’t run through your tent here on the way off the cliff.” Lei played bad cop, her favorite role.
“I’m a heavy sleeper.”
“Could be you had some help with that.” Lei nudged an empty Jim Be
am bottle near her foot.
“I said no. I never heard nothing.” The woman folded scrawny arms across her chest.
“C’mon. We’re not saying you had anything to do with it. Someone died, though, and we’re trying to at least establish when it might have happened,” Pono said, conciliatory, warm as honey in summer.
“I told you, I was sleeping.”
Lei’d had it. She pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of her back pocket, snapped them on, and reached for the zipper of the tent. “Did you hear my partner tell you someone died? I’m guessing there were some illegal substances in here, helping you sleep that heavy.”
“Hey, stay out of my tent!” The woman scrambled up. “Yeah. I heard it, around two a.m. I know because the kid woke up, was crying.”
Kid? They both leaned forward, and in the gloom of the tent they could see the faint gleam of a toddler’s face through the screen insert of the door, wide dewdrop eyes tracking them like a tiny wild thing in its den. The urine smell must have been diapers.
“Tell us more, or I’ll take that kid straight to Child Welfare,” Lei said. A familiar rage swept over her with white-hot power. There was nothing she hated more than child abuse and neglect. She wanted to grab the baby and run away with it—to somewhere light and clean, where there was no drinking, drugs, or danger.
“You’re right, Lei. We could do that.” Pono redirected his gaze to the homeless woman. “Or we could get you into the shelter.”
Lei shrugged. “Guess it’s up to her, what we do with the kid.”
“Fuck you, cop. It’s not against the law to be homeless, and I never did nothing wrong. I take good care of my baby.” The young mother snarled. On second glance, she probably wasn’t out of her teens, and her eyes welled with furious, terrified tears.
“Watch your mouth. I’m taking that baby.” Lei reached for her handcuffs.
Pono stepped in.
“I’m sure you take good care of your baby. Just tell us what you heard.” His big, warm hand landed on Lei’s arm, both restraining and anchoring her.
“Just heard the crash. And you’re right; it was loud.”
Lei sucked in some relaxation breaths, realizing she’d been too aggressive. But she was still going to call Child Welfare. This tent in the bushes was no place for a baby. Maybe the call would help get the girl some services, a real place to live.
The young mom didn’t have anything else for them. No, she hadn’t come out of the tent. She didn’t go out late at night with the baby. She hadn’t seen anything until that morning when she’d gone out to look at fire trucks and the commotion on the bluff. What did she think? Someone drove their car off the edge—it wasn’t the first time there was a suicide out here. Which was true, Lei remembered. There had also been some suspicious overdoses, and prior to this, a missing woman and a teenager beaten to death, both cases unsolved.
Pauwela Lighthouse was not a homeless camp for the faint of heart or those with any other options.
They worked their way from tent to tent, hearing much the same story, a big crash at around two a.m. Lei wondered aloud where the campers got their water, and one obliging toothless denizen showed them the former pineapple field irrigation system that had been breached. Water was brought into the central camp area under the biggest ironwood tree via a series of screwed-together garden hoses.
They went to one last tent, a little bigger and set apart from the others, where an imposing Hawaiian woman sat at a table made from an upright cable spool. She was sorting long, sword-shaped hala leaves, which hung, drying, from a line under the tarp outside her tent. Lei wondered what a dignified woman like this was doing at the seedy camp. Usually Hawaiians took one another in; it was shame to the family for a relative to be in need.
The woman looked up at their approach. Long iron-gray hair was wound into a bun and pierced by a bamboo chopstick, and she wore a drab muumuu and had rubber slippers on her swollen feet. Her eyes were dark, inscrutable wells.
“What you cops stay looking for?”
Lei held up her badge. “Eh, Aunty. Know anything about the crash last night?” She called the woman by the title of respect used in Hawaii by younger people to elders.
The woman picked up a long piece of hala, pandanus used to make basketry, hats, and floor coverings. She worked the long leaf with her fingers, expertly shredding off a row of spines that edged the length of the leaf with a thickened thumbnail.
“I saw someone leaving after the car went off.”
“What? I mean, you sure, Aunty?” Lei’s attention sharpened.
Dark eyes glanced up, a tightening of contempt at the corners. “I know what I saw.”
“What’s your name, Aunty?” Pono had his notepad out.
“Ramona Haulani.”
“Well, Ms. Haulani, tell us more.”
“I don’t sleep so good.” The woman shredded the stripped hala leaf into half-inch sections, each about eighteen inches long. The thumbnail appeared to work as well as any paring knife. “I was awake, and I heard the car drive up to the edge. I came out of my tent.” Ramona gestured. From the door of her tent, she had a clear view of the bluff where the car had gone over.
“I wanted to see what was going on. I knew it was late, the hour of no-good.”
Lei considered asking about that but decided it was more important to keep the woman talking.
“Then, after the engine was off and it had been sitting awhile, it rolled forward and went off the edge.” Lei and Pono darted a glance at each other. This scenario didn’t sound like a teenager driving off the cliff in a suicide.
“It was loud.” It must have been; everyone had mentioned that. “Then I saw a little light, just a flash, like one of those mainland lightning bugs. It would go on and off, moving away from where the car went over.”
“Did you see anything else? Who was holding the light?” Lei tried not to rush her.
“No. It was dark, hardly a moon even. I saw the light—flash, flash—moving down the road.” She gestured back toward the main road. “I thought it must be someone walking, using a small-kine flashlight.”
They pumped her for more information, but that was basically all she had. She hadn’t talked about what she has seen to anyone, and Pono encouraged her to keep quiet.
“I can keep a secret.”
Ramona picked up another hala leaf, slit the edge. The older woman’s nail must have been sharpened, the way it cut through the plant material with a zipping sound that reminded Lei of the body bag closing. Lei found her hand in her pocket again, rubbing the black stone.
“Why you stay out here, Aunty?” Pono asked.
“I nevah like the family tell me my business. I do what I like,” Ramona Haulani said, and the darkness behind her brown eyes hinted at secrets. They thanked her and hiked back to the truck.
Lei drove them to the station while Pono wrote up notes on his laptop. She was still entertained by the sight of his big sausage fingers flying nimbly over the keys. Sunset slanted across the dash, and her stomach rumbled again. Those pretzels hadn’t lasted long.
“We’ll have to meet with the lieutenant in the morning,” Pono said, still typing. “She’s going to want to get up to speed, stat.”
“I know—but I don’t have to like it.” Lei and the lieutenant weren’t fans of each other. “I’m not thinking suicide anymore.”
“It’ll be interesting to meet with the ME and go over the autopsy report. Somebody walking away from the wreck looks bad. More paperwork.” Pono liked to grumble about that, but they both knew he was better at it.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she flipped it open. “Hey, Stevens.”
“When you getting home? Dinner’s almost ready.”
“Half hour.”
“’K, then. Love you.”
“Likewise.” Lei closed the phone.
Pono looked up. “How’s loverboy?”
“Hungry. He’s almost got dinner ready.”
“When you guys going to get
married?” Pono never tired of trying to get others into his own debatable domestic bliss. He and Tiare had stopped at two kids, something Lei considered a good thing, but the struggle to make ends meet with a family wasn’t something she was in a hurry to duplicate.
“Mind your business.” Lei dropped Pono at the station lot, where his lifted purple truck was parked.
“See you tomorrow, Sweets.” The ironic nickname her Kaua`i partner, Jenkins, had dubbed her with had been bequeathed to Pono. She’d finally given up fighting it.
“Too soon, bruddah.”
I stretch out on my four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and flick on the flat-screen TV to the news, looking for something about the crash. I sip my evening cosmopolitan, waiting through school budget crises and a whale watch gone awry. It’s been another long, productive day managing the company, doing what I love. I’m lucky—or no, that isn’t right. I’ve made my own luck, starting a long time ago when I stole that name that felt so much more a fit than the one I’d been born with.
Finally, a grainy video, obviously someone’s cell phone—a fire truck hoisting up a yellow metal mesh body stabilizer on a windblown bluff. A cluster of uniforms wrestle the basket to the ground beside the fire truck as a voice-over begins.
“Tragedy struck on Maui when an unidentified young girl in a car went off the cliff at Pauwela Lighthouse. Authorities are still determining if the crash was an accident. Neither of the seasoned detectives assigned to the case were available for comment.”
Just a quick blip. The “seasoned detectives” will have the devil of a time finding out who the mysterious dead girl is. I’ve made sure of that. I close my eyes to savor the high from the night before. I felt like I could fly, soaring like an owl over the moonless nightscape. That high. God, it was something. Maybe that was it—I felt like God, granting life, taking it away.
I need to do a little research. I take out one of the prepackaged burner phones that I keep around for such moments and dial a number I’ve memorized—my contact at MPD. He doesn’t know who I am, but he likes the deposits I make every time I need him. That, and I have a few choice photos that ensure cooperation.
