by Toby Neal
The view before her was even better than the picture on the postcard that Connor had left pinned on her side of the “Batcave.” She had him to thank for the inspiration for this trip.
And now it was time for goodbye.
Sophie reached into her pocket again and took out a small baggie containing the torn-up scraps of the note Connor had left her in the safe deposit box, the note pledging his love. Love he meant, in his way. That was why it hurt to dump the scraps into her palm and toss them off the cliff and into the void.
Wind swirled up and caught the tiny white snowflake bits, whirling them into the sky above Sophie’s head for a brief moment, before sweeping them out to sea.
Sophie wished she could dig into the backpack and pick up the brick of the Ghost software and throw it off the cliff, too. Even though he lived, that program had taken him from her.
But she wasn’t quite ready to do that. Maybe there was still some redemptive possibility for the software when she cracked it and mastered it. But that would wait for another day. Today was full of new beginnings and possibility.
A pure-white tropicbird with a forked tail dove like a kite above the black cliffs, making her smile. Far off in the distance over the ocean, a towering cumulus cloud trailed a rainsquall lit with a rainbow. And right in front of her, the red-dirt trail beckoned.
Sophie had paid a high price for a whole new life to step into and explore, and now it was time to begin.
“Come on, Gracie. Let’s go,” Sandy Mason said, and picked up her bamboo walking stick.
Turn the page to keep reading book five of the Paradise Crime Thrillers, Wired Dawn!
Wired Dawn
Paradise Crime, Book 5
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut , Mother Night
Chapter One
The boy ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the farthest black corner of the cave. His breath tore through his lungs. He put his hands out, slowing as the fire got further away, its flickering light dimming. The darkness thickened, and he tripped and almost fell on the loose, jagged stones of the cavern floor.
That voice like warm honey called his name. “Come, Nakai. What you running for? Where you think you can go?”
Nakai reached the back corner of the cave, a dark and drafty spot where he could feel fresh air welling like spring water from somewhere deep in the earth.
The man’s footsteps approached, unhurried and confident. Nakai glanced back and saw his flashlight swinging, illuminating the harsh volcanic walls with every swing. “Stop this foolishness, boy.”
Frantic, Nakai felt down the wall to the vent where the air came through. There was a small opening there, and he dropped to his knees and wriggled through.
Pitch darkness on the other side of the wall was thick as a muffling black blanket. Nakai crawled forward, biting his lips to keep from whimpering at the pain of rocks digging into his hands and knees.
“What, boy? You trying fo’ get away?” That voice was the sound of evil disguised as a friend, the sound of the worst kind of betrayal. Even now, the boy’s skin crawled at the memory of the man’s hands on him—touching him, stroking and petting, pinching and forcing. “You want to leave so bad? You go, then. And sleep well in the dark.”
Nakai stopped, holding his breath, turning back toward the slit illuminated by the flashlight’s beam. He heard the scrape of a rock, and then the light blinked out.
He was in total darkness, and he was trapped.
Nakai turned and felt his way back in the direction from which he’d come.
Panic rose in a strangling wave and sweat burst out over his body as he crawled forward, and forward, and forward—and felt nothing ahead. No cleft, no wall. No light whatsoever.
He was lost in the dark already.
“Let me out! Help me!”
The stone seemed to vibrate around him, as if he sat on the head of a giant drum. “That’s why music sounds so good in the cave,” the man had told the circle of boys on Nakai’s first night with the group of runaways. “This lava tube goes on for miles, and the porousness of the stone helps sound carry.”
Maybe it would carry his calls for help. “Let me out!” Nakai cried again. “Help! I’m stuck in here!”
Nothing but the faintest echo of his terror came back to him.
Nakai crawled rapidly now, heedless of bleeding, determined to at least hit some kind of surface—and suddenly, he was out in space, falling into blackness that swallowed his scream.
Chapter Two
Special Agent Marcella Scott stood on a battered rubber mat outside the door of a shitty apartment on a run-down street in a bad part of Honolulu. The gritty zone of heat-shimmering concrete block buildings was sandwiched between the airport and a military installation, and the discordant sound of traffic going by on a nearby overpass competed with the wail of a police siren. The only evidence that the apartment was even in Hawaii was a battered and dusty plumeria tree on one side of the building. Its fragrant pinwheel blossoms sent up a waft of sweet scent. Marcella closed her eyes and breathed it in—and reached out and knocked.
No one answered.
She knocked again.
No answer.
Marcella dug in her pocket and brought out a thick bunch of keys. Her boyfriend, HPD detective Marcus Kamuela, always told her to thin them out. “You could do yourself an injury with that wad of keys,” he teased. “Throw your back out carrying them, or at least bruise your ass sitting with them in your back pocket.”
Marcella laughed, but didn’t thin out the thick bunch of keys with its plastic New Jersey souvenir tag. A girl had to remember where she was from. Hence the cheesy key ring. Besides, Marcella loved keys. A key meant you were trusted, had access, and could get in.
She was the only person to have a key to this apartment besides its occupant.
Marcella flipped through the bunch: home, FBI office, parents’ apartment, car, post office box, and on and on until she came to a couple of connected brass Schlage keys. Of course, just one wasn’t enough for security conscious Sophie Ang.
Her friend Sophie had dealt Marcella a blow of betrayal that still had Marcella’s temper flaring hot under her tidily buttoned blouse, if she thought about it too long.
And Sophie was likely holed up in there, blackout drapes drawn, deep in one of her depression cycles. Angry as Marcella was, Sophie needed her.
Marcella opened the thumb lock and with the other key, the deadbolt. She pushed the door inward. “Sophie?”
She felt the emptiness of the place instantly. Ginger, Sophie’s energetic golden Lab, was absent. The apartment smelled stale and sour, but she called again, anyway. “Soph!”
No answer.
Marcella shut and locked the door. Sophie wasn’t at her father’s. Frank Smithson had been the one to call Marcella to go check on his daughter. “She has a three-day window to contact me, and it’s been four days. You know how she gets, and where she hides,” he’d told her this morning. “Can you go by her place?”
This bolt-hole of Sophie’s was rented in the name of an alias, Mary Watson, and, as far as she knew, Marcella was literally the only one who knew where it was.
Marcella wrinkled her nose at the smell of garbage that had been left under the sink. She opened the refrigerator. Very little inside. She walked into the back bedroom. The bed Marcella and Frank had bought for Sophie was neatly made up—but the sense of emptiness persisted.
Marcella opened the closet and frowned.
The hangers were empty. She opened the drawers of the dresser. Nothing inside.
Sophie was gone.
Marcella straightened, heart rate spiking. She hurried now, whipping open the drawers of the desk looking for clues. Everything was removed but a notepad and some leftover office detritus: a few Post-its and pens, some tape. The monitor Sophie plugged into her high-end laptop when she was here was still there, but every personal anything that belonged to her friend was gon
e.
Would Sophie have run? Did she not trust the system that much?
The sound of a key at the entrance brought Marcella racing back into the front room, whipping the door open.
“Sophie!” Her friend’s name died on Marcella’s lips.
A short man with a greasy comb-over and a basketball of a belly straining a UH Rainbow Warriors jersey stood before her. Brown eyes blinked at her from behind thick glasses. His pidgin English was thick. “Eh, sistah. Whatchu doing heah?”
Marcella’s hand had fallen automatically to the weapon at her side. “FBI. Who the hell are you?”
The man’s eyes widened and he took a step back. “Building manager. I nevah know notting what dis renter was doing in heah.”
Marcella took out her cred wallet and held it up for the man to see. “I need to know where the woman who rents this place is.”
The manager’s gaze darted up to the left. He was considering what to tell her, how much to lie. Marcella softened her voice and stance, opening her hands in appeal. “Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. The woman who lives here is missing and I’m looking for her. She didn’t do anything wrong.” At least I hope not.
“I nevah know notting,” the manager whined.
Marcella’s quick temper spiked. She shot out a hand and grabbed him by the wrist, yanking him inside the apartment. He stumbled across the threshold with a little yelp and she slammed the door behind him. “Where is she? Tell me now, or I’ll take you in for questioning in her disappearance.”
“She paid me for six months in advance!” the man burst out. “She said no tell anyone she lived here anymore. Said she was going to be in and out. Nevah said notting about no FBI!”
Marcella looked him over. Sweat had popped out in beads on his brow and upper lip. His gaze darted around the room.
He was telling the truth.
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
“No. Only that she liked her privacy.”
So, Sophie had anticipated Marcella would come looking and paid this jerk to keep quiet about it. Anger rose in a hot flash.
“Get out of here,” Marcella snapped. “And you better not rent this place out from under her. But if you see her, tell her the FBI is looking for her.”
The man scrambled to the door and slammed it shut behind him.
Marcella took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself. That bitch! Some friend Sophie was, first holding back intel about the online vigilante she was dating, next pulling a disappearing act when she might be facing a murder charge! The situation Sophie faced and its consequences were dire, and leaving her father and friends hanging wasn’t mature.
But maybe Sophie had never had the chance to grow up. She’d been trying too hard just to survive.
Marcella’s gaze landed on a colorful postcard held onto the rusting, avocado-colored fridge with a magnet.
She walked over and removed a scene of the stunning Na Pali Cliffs on Kaua’i, their corrugated, jutting green expanse marching into a blue horizon like an endless row of Chinese clay soldiers. A caption in yellow at the bottom blared Visit Kalalau!
Marcella slipped the postcard into her pocket. She screwed up her nose at the foul-smelling garbage.
Who knew when Sophie would be back? It would be awful to come home to this reek.
Marcella pulled the white trash can liner out of the plastic can, tying it tight, and looked around one last time. “I’m going to find you, Sophie,” she muttered. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”
She carried the trash out and locked the door behind her.
Chapter Three
Sophie folded her damp tent as tightly as she could, but still, somehow, the damn thing had expanded. She usually had to refold it several times before she could get it back into its tight nylon bag, and the ever-present, bright red Kaua’i mud adhering to the slick plastic bottom made her hands and knees filthy.
“No one told me how dirty you get camping,” she remarked to Ginger. The Lab looked on, tongue lolling in her usual doggy grin. Sophie had taken to talking to Ginger as days went by without other human contact.
There had been other hikers on the trail to Kalalau, of course. She and Ginger had done the rugged eleven-mile hike in two segments as she got used to carrying the heavy pack and working her camp stove, water filtration system, assembling and breaking down her tent and gear. She’d sent her obligatory text on the third day to her father, letting him know she was still alive, but her phone revealed No Signal.
“That Lyft driver said it was ambitious to take on Kalalau as a first-time backpacker,” Sophie said, scrunching the tent down tightly. “I think he might have been right.” Ginger woofed in agreement. The Lab’s coat was rough with mud; it had rained off and on for the five days they’d been out here. “Maybe it will be drier deeper inside the valley if we can find a ridge to shelter behind.”
Finally wrestling the filthy tent into its packet, Sophie finished breaking camp and brushed soil and leaves over her fire ring. She’d camped near the stream since she finally arrived at the remote valley, with its famously stunning, jungle-clothed ridges that opened from a peak at Kokee and spread into a wide, lush valley that ended at a massive beach and the wide blue sea.
But the beach was populated with other campers and frequented daily by boatloads of tourists who came via Zodiac from Port Allen on the south coast. Sunburnt and loud, their juice boxes and sandwiches and snorkel gear celebrated a vacation in paradise…but Sophie wasn’t here for a vacation.
She wasn’t entirely sure why she was here, except that she had needed to get away and start a new chapter in her life. The postcard she’d found in the Ghost’s apartment had drawn her here with the extreme beauty of this setting.
She’d fled Oahu and the remains of her life. Fled a broken heart, a possible murder charge, and even her own pattern of falling into a black hole of depression.
So far, the crazy idea had worked to keep her demons at bay. Hiking and learning to survive outdoors all day had been a total distraction: she was too tired by nightfall to wonder or worry, happy just to burrow into her tiny tent with her dog, and sleep the deep and uncomplicated sleep of the physically exhausted.
The depression medication might be working, too. This was the first time in her life she’d resorted to the stuff, but the circumstances had dictated a radical intervention. She had a three-month supply, and hopefully, she’d be ready to resume a normal life by the time her prescription ran out.
Or maybe not.
Sophie popped the little white pill into her mouth and swished it down with a mouthful of water she’d filtered and boiled from the nearby stream. “Come, girl. Let’s go.”
Ginger fell in behind Sophie as she pushed ahead, thankful for her wet-dry hiking shoes because the narrow trail was slick with iron-rich red mud, winding between tall banks of pili grass, and wild guava trees. The smell of wet grass, mold, and the sweetness of rotting fruit flavored the air. Sophie plucked a yellow guava off one of the trees and bit into it as she pushed forward, already feeling the forty-pound pack’s weight sinking heavily onto her hips. She paused to tighten the belt so that the weight didn’t land on her lower back.
She took another bite of the firm, tangy guava, enjoying the sweet-sour pink flesh as she paused to look around at the soaring, green-robed sides of the valley. This place reminded her of Waipio Valley on the Big Island, her first real exposure to this environment—and a case that had scarred her for life.
Sophie shut down the memory of that place, that case—and of her partner Jake, who’d saved her life.
Jake Dunn.
She wouldn’t think of him, of her conflicted feelings about and toward him. Because thinking of him reminded her of Connor. And Connor didn’t deserve anything from her, at all. She was off men. Forever.
Sophie hurried, bumping into Ginger and urging the dog into a trot. She used the sturdy bamboo stick she’d picked up on the first day she left to push branches out of the way a
nd for leverage as she hiked as rapidly as physically able, straight toward the back of the valley.
She’d heard from some other hikers that there was some kind of settlement back there, a village of renegade local people who refused to honor the five-day permits issued by the state for camping. She was ignoring the five-day limit too, and thus needed to avoid areas patrolled by state park rangers.
The trail meandered along a clear stream, climbing steadily back toward the steep head of the valley where the junction of the walls boasted a waterfall that plummeted hundreds of feet.
Sophie paused eventually to let Ginger drink from the stream and to drink herself, from a canteen of boiled water. At each elevation, she paused to look back at the view down toward the ocean, to savor a slight breeze that dried away sweat brought to the surface of her skin by effort and humidity.
Sophie wanted to see the waterfall, and then she’d pick another campsite. One with enough openness that hopefully she’d get her gear dried out, and be able to connect her satellite-ready laptop with some satellite internet.
She hadn’t been online for five days, an eternity for someone as “wired in” as she was normally. After the first couple of days of free-floating anxiety, she’d come to enjoy the anonymous feeling of being unplugged.
She was well and truly off the grid.
And she’d left everything and everyone behind—including her name and identity. Her father. Her partner Jake. And her friends Lei and Marcella.
It was all the Ghost’s fault. That bastard had let her grieve for him…
Sophie shook her head to rid it of buzzing, painful thoughts as she reached a small knoll surrounded with the bright yellow-green of kukui nut trees in full leaf. The remains of lo’i, the ancient Hawaiian terraces used in the cultivation of taro, provided a stacked rock wall that would block the wind. If she was under the trees, her camp would be out of the sun. She could set up camp now and see the waterfall later…but she didn’t want to be in sight of the path.