by Toby Neal
“So this leave is for you to hop on a plane to God-knows-where, trying to find your husband ‘somewhere in Central America’?’” Omura made air quotes. “First of all, I don’t like hearing this news any more than you do. But seriously, Lei—I can’t spare you! I’m shorthanded, as you know, and Stevens taking that military leave really put me in a jam, as I wasn’t shy to tell him. So any personal feelings aside, I couldn’t let you go even if I wanted to—which I don’t. You’re a mother. Or have you forgotten you have a son who needs you, more than ever now that his father’s missing?”
Lei’s stepson, Kiet, aged five, wasn’t handling his dad’s absence well. Lei rubbed her hands up and down on her black jeans, wicking away nervous sweat. “I haven’t forgotten. But I have family who’ve been helping with Kiet already…”
“No. Just no. And if this officer told you to wait, you need to do that.” Omura stood, came around her desk, and did an unprecedented thing—held open her arms. “Hug.”
“Captain?” Lei cocked her head in surprise, but she smiled as she leaned carefully into the other woman’s space and shut her eyes for just a moment. The Steel Butterfly was hugging her. It was an awkward and stilted embrace, like two triangles leaning against each other—but the emotion clouding the captain’s eyes was genuine as she pulled away.
“I’ll do all I can to support you during this time. Flex time for your pickups with the kid, short days, swapping shifts, whatever. But I can’t grant any leave, especially if I think it might end up like that other trip.”
That other trip.
Lei’s belly tightened at the memory. She’d taken off for the Big Island to deal with an enemy in her own way, a move that had worked in some ways and cost too much in others.
“Shit.” Lei’s shoulders sagged. “Okay.”
“Good.” Omura tip-tapped on pointy-toed sling backs around her desk and sat down. “I have a new case for you. Something a little different, in addition to your regular cases with Pono. I’d like you to handle it as a side project.”
She held up the Ziploc bag containing the skull. A fracture mark on the bone where the forehead would have been testified to possible cause of death.
“Where’d this come from?” Lei accepted the bag and turned the skull in her hands.
“I logged it into evidence already. It was brought in this morning. Apparently it washed up on the beach near one of the Hana streams. A woman named Iris Yamaguchi found it in some driftwood. She bagged it and brought it in. Didn’t realize she should have left it there and called us.”
“Have you had anyone look at it? To date it, or anything?”
“No. That’s for you to figure out, and if there’s anything more that can be found out about this poor kid—who it was, when it happened, if there was foul play involved.” Omura pinned Lei with her dark gaze. “I plan to keep you so busy you don’t have time to worry about getting that man back. Now go find me a cold-case child killer.”
I woke with that jerk that happens in a falling dream, my whole body a-jangle with alarm and a sense of impending disaster.
But the disaster had already happened, when we were captured.
I blinked my eyes in a darkness as thick as if a velvet bag had been dropped over my head. The plane had crashed in my latest dream, and I’d been on fire at the end. Crawling. Dragging my dog, burning and desperate.
Like the most recent time the house was on fire.
But the plane hadn’t crashed, really. Must have been another dream. Or a memory. Maybe it had crashed. Who the hell knew?
I wasn’t sure about anything right now. Dreams and memories ebbed and swirled through my mind, and I couldn’t tell which was which half the time. I shut my eyes, since I couldn’t see anything anyway, and tried to remember the real plane ride here to Honduras—because that’s the particular ring of hell where we’d landed. I was sure of that much.
The military transport C-130, open and echoing, had roared along on its journey to whatever the godforsaken mission destination was—I hadn’t known at the time. I was strapped into the over-hard upright seat against one wall, alongside a couple of other civilian contractors. Military police troops I’d be training when we arrived occupied the rest of the seats.
At least I’d finally slept on the flight. I rolled my sore neck, using the occasion to gaze around the interior of the aircraft. Several heavy-duty Jeeps were strapped down the length of the plane, along with a huge pile of supplies held down with a webbed net. I unstrapped from the five-point harness and stood, stretching my muscles. I took a walk up and down the length of the plane, getting circulation back into my legs.
I felt shitty. Throbbing headache, dry mouth, a twitchy sense of frayed nerves. Perhaps left over from the dream I’d been having, but more likely that other thing. I dug in my olive-drab backpack, stuffed with all the personal possessions I’d have for the next six months. I took out my shave kit and went to the head.
It was a bare-bones closet with a metal toilet and sink with a steel mirror above it. I did my business and opened the shave kit.
I had a flask inside filled with booze, disguised as a shaving cream can. It had been a simple enough thing to buy online. This ration was all I going to get, and it was strictly for medicinal purposes, so I could stave off the DTs as I dried out.
Because that’s what this stint overseas was all about. Kicking the booze, and the other mental shit, too. I swigged a gulp of the cheap scotch, gazing at my hollow-eyed reflection in the steel mirror with contempt.
The foul stuff seared my throat and made my eyes water, burned my esophagus, and went off like a bomb in my empty belly. It tasted horrible. I wanted to retch. Instead I felt immediately better as flu-like symptoms of withdrawal receded.
Just one more hit.
The scotch still tasted horrible, but it felt good, and that second drink activated a fierce longing to finish the rest. But I was in trouble if I did. This had to last, and then I was done. I screwed the top back on. Feeling steadier, I shaved with a sliver of soap.
Working the razor around that stubborn square edge of my jaw, I caught sight of the hook pendant Lei had given me. The white bone seemed to glow in the dim silver of the mirror, filling the shadow at the base of my throat, almost hidden in the olive of my uniform shirt.
I still remembered her small hands pressed together over the pendant, her curly brown head bent before me as she murmured a prayer of blessing over it. She’d risen up on her knees in the bed before me and fastened the slightly scratchy coconut-husk closure behind my neck.
My face had been close to her breasts: small, round, and perfect. I’d looked my fill at them and breathed in the smell of her. I’d shut my eyes and felt the love in the gift wash over me. I’d soaked it in, reveled in it—as I had in her body.
I didn’t deserve any of it. I’d almost destroyed us. But I’d make up for it now, by dealing with my shit and making some money. The company I was working for, Security Solutions, paid very well. This six-month stint would be a good start for our son Kiet’s college fund, if nothing else.
I finished shaving. Splashed my face. Buttoned up that last button so that the bone hook I told her I’d wear until I returned was hidden. Zipped up my kit. Returned to my seat.
When I shut my eyes, for a moment I could still smell her.
I slept again. I didn’t want to. Bad things came when I slept.
Chapter Two
“Dad! I see a wave coming!” The ocean off of Maui was always warm, but the currents and waves were strong. I was on my longboard with Kiet in front of me, out at the cove at Ho`okipa, our favorite break. Kiet wore a flotation device just in case he got into trouble. Sunlight sparkled on the water. The clouds, piled against the West Maui Mountains off to our left, looked like mounds of shaving cream. Out to sea, I saw the rise in the horizon that meant a wave was coming. I spun the board, Kiet sliding down against me.
“Paddle hard!” I yelled. My boy’s little brown arms churned as hard as they could a
s we headed toward the yellow-gold of shore. I arched my back, lifting my chest above his little body as he thrashed and splashed in front of me. For five, Kiet had good focus and physical effort. I stroked hard, too, and in a moment we both felt the lift and surge beneath the board that meant we’d caught the wave.
Kiet popped up to his feet. He looked good, braced strong, black hair gleaming with water and sun. As soon as I was sure he was up and stable, his arms outstretched, I jumped up behind him, angling the board to catch the wave’s peeling break off to the right.
“Hang five, buddy!” I yelled. Kiet sidled up toward the front, and I whooped as he inched to the nose of the board, extending one foot to hang his toes over the end.
He looked back to smile at me, so like his murdered mother, Anchara, that I lost my balance. We wiped out, the board flipping into the churning curl of the wave and sucking us under.
All was churning dark water, roiling and deep. I fought for the surface, certain that my son was drowning. My eyes were open and burning under the water, filled with nothing but black. I was unable to find him, reach him, help him.
I woke abruptly.
I was shaking with the bone-jarring, full-body shudders of hypothermia. My jaw ached with tension from trying to keep my teeth from clattering together. I shivered so hard the water around me made tiny waves.
Tiny waves that splashed against the mud walls of the deep pit I was in.
Oh, yeah. The pit. I must be remembering this. I wasn’t in the pit anymore. I was lying flat on my back somewhere dry, musty-smelling, and darker than a coal mine. Probably a storage shed. I remembered what happened next, in the pit, but not how I got where I was now.
“Lieutenant. Move back here.” A man hauled me under the armpits out of the puddle I’d fallen over into, propping me against the slimy mud wall. Rain continued to pelt down on us through a bamboo frame covered with palm fronds. I couldn’t stop shivering; my teeth chattered and my body quaked. I couldn’t even form words I was so racked with shudders.
“I think he’s sick,” the man who’d helped me said to someone else. I tried to remember his name. I knew this man, this fellow prisoner, filthy in his mud-crusted clothing. His eyes were dark and shiny as he looked into my face, briefly touching my head. “He’s got a fever.”
He was talking to someone on the other side of me.
“You think they give a shit?” The other guy’s voice was scratchy and hard.
“But we should tell them. He’s no good to them if he dies,” my helper said. He sat down in the mud beside me and threw an arm over me. “Relax, LT. We got you. Carrigan, get over here. Lean against him on that side. Let’s warm him up.”
I felt the reluctance in Carrigan, but he shuffled over and pressed against me. Sandwiched between the two men, I eventually began to thaw a little as our shared warmth loosened my locked muscles. “Thanks,” I whispered through cracked lips.
I rested my forehead on my knees.
A dim memory came to me. Carrigan was another of the civilian contractors. We’d all gotten to camp together—and the plane hadn’t crashed. Definitely hadn’t. I remembered his cold blue eyes. We hadn’t hit it off—I thought he was an entitled asshole. He wouldn’t change out of his polo shirt and Bermudas into the uniforms they’d issued us.
“I’m in charge of tech. I don’t need to wear this hot, shitty uniform,” he’d said. Yeah, Carrigan was a jerk.
“Hey, man, relax.” It was my friend whose name began with a “K.” He was pounding my back, because I was choking. Somehow I’d sucked water, and though I coughed and coughed, my lungs didn’t clear.
“Hey!” K-Man stood, bracing his legs to pull me up. I felt hot but cold, too, and the shivering wouldn’t stop. “Hey! This man is sick!” He yelled up at the entrance of the pit, and this time Carrigan yelled, too, and then two more voices joined in, shouting up into the mouth of the pit. “Help! Ayuda aquí!”
Things looked very close to me: the grains of soil in the walls were big as boulders, the puddle I knelt in, deep as a lake rising to swallow me. But then everything was far away, as if I were seeing through the wrong end of a telescope. The slurry of the mud walls formed distant, fascinating patterns.
Patterns like the path of blood, sliding down a wall. So much blood could come from one body. They said it was only five to eight pints for most people, but when it all emptied out of dying veins, it looked like a lake. I’d wondered sometimes if it only seemed that way because of the color—so intense. So permanent.
And blood had so many textures.
Pooling blood, with a skin of coagulation, like Jell-O beginning to set.
Spattered blood in abstract patterns, bizarrely beautiful at times.
Blood with flies stuck in it and scabbed blood in dried puddles. Blood hardened into black strings, blood speckled like freckles on skin.
Bloody hands reaching for me.
I cried out, adding my hoarse voice to the yelling of the rest of the men.
The palm fronds lifted, and a round brown face looked down.
“Ayuda esta, por favor!” cried K-Man. His hands dug into my armpits as he tried to haul me upright, but I collapsed face down in the water. “This man is sick!”
The black of the wipeout at Ho`okipa rolled over my head, and I was gone.
Lei set the child’s skull down on her desk. Pono Kaihale, her longtime partner, barely back at work from a minor gunshot injury, recoiled at the sight.
“It’s a kid.” No one liked kid cases, but Pono’s aversion was almost at the phobia level.
“Don’t worry. The captain gave me this one to work on my own,” Lei said. “She thinks this is an old skull. Someone found it washed down a stream in Hana.” She leaned over, inspecting him. “Show me your arm.”
He held out that thick, brawny appendage. A triangle tattoo pattern encircled the biceps that had been gouged by a drug dealer’s bullet in their last case. Lei winced inwardly, remembering how terrified she’d been when Pono was shot. She traced the white edge of the bandage with a finger, wishing again that she’d remembered to call out that the suspect was armed.
“Told you, just a flesh wound.” Pono’s cheeks creased in a wide grin. “Did I tell you Tiare thinks it’s hot?”
“You did. And you told me you’d always wanted to get ‘just a flesh wound’ for bragging rights.” Lei sat, booted up her computer. “Captain wouldn’t grant my request for leave.”
Lei had called Pono from Oahu to tell him the news about Stevens. She had no secrets from her partner, who’d become like the brother she’d never had.
“Nothing you can do for Mike with him way over there in some classified hot zone.” Pono squeezed Lei’s shoulder with a meaty hand. “I know that doesn’t make it any easier. But Kiet needs you. He still having sleep problems?”
“Yeah.” Lei sighed, looking down at the pathetic little skull. She picked it up, hefted it. “This skull doesn’t look much bigger than Kiet’s head.”
Pono looked away with an exaggerated shudder. “Get that thing out of here. It’s bad juju.”
“So superstitious, you.” But Lei stowed the skull out of sight in her desk drawer. She deliberately pushed Stevens out of her mind as she opened her departmental e-mail. She’d tried. She really had. And she wasn’t going to risk leaving her job without permission after that last time. Her hand rested in a brief habitual gesture on her belly.
Lei was flipping her notebook to the number for Maui Memorial’s morgue when she heard a delicate throat-clearing at the door of the cubicle.
Both Lei and Pono turned their office chairs. An attractive woman stood in the doorway, and there were spots of color on her high cheekbones. “Hi, Sergeant Texeira. Detective Kaihale. I wonder if I could have a moment of your time.”
“Sergeant Fraser.” Lei took in her husband’s partner’s appearance. As one of the MPD’s training officers, Fraser wore a uniform. She’d opted for a pencil skirt and low heels instead of trousers, and Lei could see why—he
r legs were stunning. The crisp navy fabric of the uniform brought out the woman’s deep blue eyes. Creamy skin, smooth dark hair in a French braid, and shiny winking brass finished a look worthy of any recruiting poster.
Lei suppressed the instinct to smooth her own springing curls and straighten her wrinkled tank top. “How can we help you?” She was proud of how calm she sounded, when every cell in her body wanted to leap up and tear the woman’s hair out by the roots.
Stevens had never told Lei he had a partner. She’d found out by accident, going up to his office after his deployment for a missing set of keys and finding Kathy Fraser sitting at his desk. That was also when she’d found out that Fraser had known his deployment date for months, though he’d told Lei only the day before he left.
What was this woman to him?
“Could I speak to you privately, Sergeant Texeira?” Fraser was obviously uncomfortable, and Lei’s stomach tightened. There was nothing this woman could say that Lei was going to like.
“I need another cup of coffee, anyway,” Pono said. “Nice to see you again, Sergeant Fraser.”
“You too,” Fraser said.
Lei shot her partner a look of shock as the big Hawaiian stood and sidled out past Fraser, not meeting Lei’s eyes. Was she the only person in the whole department who had never met Kathy Fraser or known that she was Stevens’s partner?
Fraser entered and closed the retractable privacy slider. The roof of the cubicle was open, but soundproofing inside helped cut down on ambient noise as the detectives worked their cases. The woman took a seat in Pono’s chair.
“You’ve got a hell of a nerve coming and talking to me.” Lei could feel herself arching and stiffening, like a cat reacting to a threat.
“I came because…” Fraser licked her lips, and a tiny bit of lipstick got on her teeth, a small comfort to Lei. “I wanted you to know there was nothing between Michael and me. I could tell you—jumped to some conclusions when you found me at his desk. But there was nothing you need to worry about.”
