by Toby Neal
“This case could become a lightning rod for resentment,” Stevens said.
“Lightning rod?” Lei turned, reaching into his lap with a grin. “I think that’s a good name for my friend here.” She was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but it wasn’t working. He removed her hand.
“Funny. And this isn’t. I gotta call Omura.”
Meanwhile, Wendy Watanabe had moved on to other disasters as Stevens speed-dialed Omura’s cell.
“I wonder if you’re calling me because you just watched the news,” Omura said in lieu of a greeting.
“Exactly. Okapa was complaining about this Maui’s Secrets book when I interviewed him, but this is the first I’ve heard about some sort of backlash against it.”
“I think we need to get some more detectives on this case, but I already don’t have enough manpower. Let’s call Oahu again tomorrow and see if we can pool our resources, maybe get that book pulled from the shelves temporarily as a sign of goodwill.”
“Goodwill toward who? The Heiau Hui? My guess is, whoever’s targeting the heiaus already has the artifacts they want mapped out. Taking down the book is closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”
“Still. It might placate people like Okapa, who blame the book for exposure.”
“Okay, you’re the boss. Did you want me to try to contact the publisher?”
“Wasn’t that what I said?”
Stevens blew out a breath. “Yes, sir.”
Stevens hung up. He felt wired with worry and annoyed by Omura’s directive. It could give this vigilante group a message that they had more power than they should, and he worried about where that could go, not to mention dealing with the book publisher’s response. He doubted they’d want to pull the profitable book for revision.
MPD needed eyes and ears in the Hui, to monitor it. His old war horse detective Joshua Ferreira was way too well-known. So was Pono, and any of the other detectives he could think of. Even though Okapa knew Mahoe was a police officer, perhaps Brandon could pretend sympathy for the cause enough to believably join.
Stevens got up to wash the dishes for something to do. Lei came up behind him this time, reaching around his waist to put her hands into the dishwater with his. She played with his fingers until they twined together in the warm, soapy water, distracting him. He closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of her pressed against his back, the solidity of her presence.
After so long, she was finally his.
“I’m sorry you’re stressed,” she said, muffled against his back. She kissed his shoulder blade, nibbled his spine.
“I’m really worried about this case. Nobody’s died yet, but I have a bad feeling. Okapa’s threats are the tip of the iceberg. Why don’t you talk to Pono about what the Hawaiian community is saying? He’s always got his finger on the pulse of things.”
“All right.” She pulled her hands out of the suds, shook them, and wiped them playfully all over his front. “But let’s go back to bed soon.”
He finished the dishes, listening to her one-sided conversation with her ex-partner, a burly Hawaiian with the truest “spirit of aloha” Stevens had ever met—a man he was now proud to call a friend.
Thinking of Pono reminded him of his brother, Jared. Jared had come to their wedding last month and had been looking to transfer to the Maui Fire Department.
“Thanks for leaving me to deal with Mom, bro,” Jared had said the day before the wedding. Their mother hadn’t shown—she’d gone on a bender the day before—and Stevens figured it was just as well. She probably would have made a scene at the wedding. But Jared, he felt bad about. His younger brother’s face was chiseled lean and his blue eyes had a hollow clarity that spoke of long days and sleepless nights.
“I just had to get out,” Stevens said, referring to his move to Hawaii four years before. “I didn’t want to watch Mom drink herself to death.”
“Well, I don’t either. This job is killing me, and summer’s coming.” Summer in LA. Fire season. Stevens felt for his brother and had said he’d ask around about openings on Maui, and that meant Pono.
“Ask Pono about jobs in the fire department for Jared,” Stevens said, drying his hands on the dish towel. “Bro wants out from LA as soon as possible.”
Lei passed this on, covered the receiver with her hand. “He says he’ll email you a link tomorrow. Kahului Station is down a position.”
“I knew he’d know something. Good.”
Stevens went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. His eyes fell on the white terry robe he’d appropriated from their cruise-ship honeymoon. That reminded him of the shrouds. Someone had paid for two linen shrouds, given them to him and Lei’s family in a double threat, accompanied by a cryptic note that read, There are plenty of these to go around. He’d had them, and the box they came in, tested for trace and fingerprints.
Nothing useful had been found. Two twenty-foot lengths of bleached linen haunted him.
As they’d been meant to. Someone was still out there who wanted them dead.
He went back to bed, and it wasn’t long before Lei and Keiki joined him. He didn’t fall asleep until Lei was pressed against him, her curly hair tickling his cheek.
Chapter Four
Lei wound her hair into a bun and stabbed it with bobby pins at the stoplight as she drove into Kahului for work the next morning. Enough bobby pins would hold it a few hours, at least. She put in her Bluetooth and called Aunty Rosario, chatting until she pulled up in front of the barracks-like MPD building in the heart of Kahului, Maui’s biggest town.
Torufu was already at their cubicle when she hurried in, slopping hot coffee from the dispenser in the break room on her hand.
“Mrs. Stevens,” he said, wiggling a toothpick up and down between Chiclet-sized teeth. “Mrs. Stevens” was his nickname for her, though she’d kept her maiden name legally. “We have training review at oh nine hundred.”
“Yippee. Can’t wait to revisit the fun of how we blew ourselves up,” Lei said, realizing she’d never finished talking with Michael about her bomb tech training. Just as well. He wouldn’t have liked the story, and it probably would have led to one of those variations-on-a-theme fights they had about safety.
She took off the backpack she carried in lieu of a purse and draped it over her chair. They still had regular cases, and as usual, she was backed up on her email.
At the review meeting, she and Torufu sat with the other participants in the training and listened to the statistics on how many IEDs had been located (eighty-nine percent), successfully deactivated (sixty-two percent), and how many “fatalities” (eight).
“What this tells us, people, is that we need more of these trainings,” the coordinator, a burly bomb expert from Homeland Security, said. “We have another one scheduled in six months.” A suppressed groan circulated the room.
Lei squeezed the web of flesh between her thumb and forefinger, deflecting the feeling of failure she’d struggled with on and off throughout her career. And now she was on one of the most pressure-intense teams on the force, where failure could mean death—not just for herself, but for anyone in the area of an explosive.
Once again doubt assaulted her. Was she right for the bomb squad? Did she have the calm under pressure necessary? She still didn’t know, and the further she got in the training, the harder it would be to pull out if she realized she couldn’t cut it.
Lei set her hands in her lap, and they brushed her abdomen. Maybe last night was the night she got pregnant. She shut her eyes for a second, transported by memory to those incredibly tender and passionate moments in Stevens’s arms. She hadn’t realized how getting married and the decision to start a family would change something between them that couldn’t be put into words.
It wasn’t like it hadn’t already been good. But now there was something almost sacred between them.
She still felt edgy, like something would happen to snatch their happiness away. Getting the shroud receipt on their honeymoon and the news about Aunty’s canc
er hadn’t helped that feeling. But when she and Stevens reconnected in Honolulu during her brief stint in the FBI, she’d decided to live as if she was going to have more. More happiness and everything else that came with the risk of fully living—including heartbreak, if that was what came, too.
More. For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.
“Lei. We’re up.” Torufu squeezed her arm, his hand massive as a baseball mitt.
Lei rose and followed Torufu to the side conference room, where instructors were debriefing each of the teams. They sat in molded-plastic seats in front of a kidney-shaped Formica table with their two instructors, each equipped with clipboards and blank expressions.
“So, your team placed eighth out of eleven teams,” Master-Sergeant Kent said, flipping pages. He had the buzz-cut, grizzled look of a career soldier. “Not very reassuring for Maui Police Department.”
Lei pressed the web of her hand but didn’t respond. Neither did Torufu.
“You located four IEDs in your section. Six were in the section, so that wasn’t the worst. The two of you earned points for your search technique and for good communication and teamwork doing the search. But you weren’t able to deactivate one of your IEDs, which is an automatic fail.” He flipped the papers he’d been consulting shut. “So. Tell us where that deactivation went wrong. We have video to help.” One of the staff people wheeled a TV set over so they could watch their humiliation all over again—apparently, they’d put small video cams over each of the places where the IEDs were hidden.
Lei was glad she hadn’t known that at the time.
The video was a little jerky and grainy, but it showed them clearly: Torufu, head down as he scanned the ground, looming over Lei as she swung the hand-held metal detector with GPS they’d been allowed for tracking the IEDs.
“Here,” Lei said, in the video, pointing to something just off the trail. There was no audio, but she knew what she’d said. They approached the site, and Kent froze the action with a remote.
“See how you’re going straight in? We gave you an ultraviolet detection light. Some of these IEDs are wired with motion sensors, and it would have been good to use it.”
Lei had her spiral notepad out, and she made a note for form’s sake. Truth was, they’d counted on the IEDs being fairly crude, as this exercise was supposed to help with identifying the type of homemade explosives they had a greater chance of encountering. The competition had been timed. They’d cut a corner, and it had cost them.
She watched, feeling herself stiffen in remembered shock as the IED “exploded.” She was grateful the camera, not wired for audio, missed the expletives both she and Torufu had let fly.
“So.” Lieutenant Guttierez from the Oahu Police Department, lean and dark as a whippet, picked up the thread of critique. “Why do you think the device detonated?”
Neither of them answered until finally Lei said, “It was on a motion sensor. We set it off when we approached it. There was no time to deactivate it.”
“Bingo.” There was a long moment of silence. Lei shut her eyes, remembering the moment the device had gone off. Thank God there had been only one device with a motion-sensor trigger mechanism; they’d neglected to use the laser detector at all.
“Did you identify what type of device it was? Why don’t you answer this one, Lieutenant Texeira,” Gutierrez said.
“It appeared to be a pipe bomb. Had a clock timer trigger mechanism. Sergeant Torufu engaged with the device. I was handing him tools...” Lei’s voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure how to proceed. Torufu had been working, and she’d just been providing backup, listening to Torufu’s muttered commentary under his breath. That had been their version of teamwork on projects up until now, and it suited them.
“That’s what we’re most concerned with in reviewing your tape,” Guttierez said. “Texeira, you seem to have an eye for identifying and finding devices, but it’s Torufu here who has the skills—sometimes—for deactivating them. Torufu, were you aware of the guidelines of the training, that Texeira was supposed to work on fifty percent of discovered devices?”
“Yes,” Torufu said. He shrugged massive shoulders. “She has an eye. I’ve been doing it longer. I thought we did pretty well, considering she’s hardly had any training.”
“Be that as it may,” Master-Sergeant Kent said. “You were given some guidelines and didn’t follow them. That was actually impacting your low score more than failing on this particular IED. But remember—even though there was a timer on this training, in real life haste is never worth it. Take all the time you need, and use all the risk-reducing technology you can when locating a device.”
“Having a device ‘explode’ is an important part of training. It keeps you alert to the very real possibility of being blown to kingdom come,” Guttierez concluded. Lei and Torufu exchanged a rueful glance.
“Texeira, we’re sending over a selection of trigger mechanisms to your station. Take some time every day to work on them. You need more hands-on practice recognizing and deactivating the many kinds of devices,” Kent continued. “Have you read your electronics manual?”
“Yes, sir,” Lei said.
“Well, read it again. And, Torufu, if you’re going to work with a partner, you need to treat her like one. Give her a job to do, then get out of the way and let her do it. Many times, being small is going to be an advantage,” Lieutenant Guttierez said. “Often devices are hidden in small spaces, making them both harder to find and harder to neutralize. If you two get in that situation and Texeira isn’t ready, you’ll both be singing with the angels before you know it.”
Torufu clapped her on the shoulder as they left, making her stagger. “It’s all you from here on out with the wire snips and screwdriver, Mrs. Stevens,” he said. “I got no great love of angel choirs.”
“Oh, great,” Lei said, her throat tight, and she touched the pendant at her throat.
Stevens had gone straight in to Kahului Station in the morning to speak to Omura. She’d gathered four detectives for the response team. Stevens looked around at the circle of concerned faces: Veterans all, they would not be able to infiltrate the Heiau Hui without being identified.
“I think we should have a man inside the vigilante group,” Stevens said, when they’d been through preliminary briefing. “I’m looking at my new recruit, Brandon Mahoe. He’s formed a nice connection with our witness Manuel Okapa, the heiau guardian. If Okapa won’t buy bringing him into the Hui, maybe he can at least use Okapa or someone close to the group as a confidential informant.”
“I agree we need someone on the inside,” Gerry Bunuelos, a little rat terrier of a man with a quick smile, spoke up. “I’m just worried if Mahoe’s unseasoned, he won’t handle the pressure well.”
“Does anyone have a better idea? We need someone not widely known as a police officer, but with Hawaiian community connections,” Omura said. “Is that an oxymoron?”
“Yes,” Pono Kaihale said, and Stevens snorted a laugh. It was true—to be Hawaiian was to be connected with your community, your family, your ohana.
Omura inclined her head. “Ask your officer. Inform him of the risks. We don’t know enough about this group to assess how dangerous they are, though I hope to have a better idea after this afternoon. I’ve got a meeting set up on Skype with the Heiau Hui leader on Oahu and a man here in Maui who’s supposedly in charge. I asked for the conversation so I could offer to supplement their efforts with foot patrols and quick police response to alarm calls. Stevens, I’d like you there as lead on this case.”
Stevens inclined his head in agreement and held up his battered notepad. “Wanted to tell you the response of the publisher of Maui’s Secrets to my request to pull the book down: It was a four-letter word, followed by, ‘This is a free country with free speech.’”
“Too bad,” Gerry said, frowning. “I don’t know what that book has to do with the case, though.”
“Nothing, that I can tell,” Stevens said. “
But Okapa said the Hui blames the book for exposing the sacred sites and making them vulnerable to looting, so the group has, according to Okapa on the news last night, decided to focus on pulling down the book as a way to protect the heiaus long-term.”
“This could get ugly, fast,” Gerry said, echoing Lei’s comment last night. Simmering below the paradise surface, a current of resentment against outsiders occasionally erupted into race- or class-oriented violence or property damage, as had happened last year with the Smiley Bandit case and the brief but deadly anarchy movement that it had sparked.
“It’s on us to keep it from going that way,” Omura said briskly. “Stevens, meet me back here in three hours for the conference call with the Hui, and let me know what your young man says about going undercover.”
Chapter Five
Back at Haiku Station, Stevens fired up a second pot of coffee to give himself time to think of how to approach Brandon Mahoe. What he was doing was essentially asking a young, green recruit to spy on his people. It was for a good reason—to keep everyone in the movement safe and to keep the community safe. But still, it was a lot to ask and he knew it.
On the other hand, it could turn out to be a group of retirees walking around with walkie-talkies, not the militant or vengeful dynamic he was worried about.
He sat, sipped a fresh cup of coffee, and let his mind wander for a moment to Lei, to the incredible night they’d had. He was tired this morning, but in a good way. Maybe last night was the night she got pregnant. He didn’t want to keep wondering that but couldn’t seem to help it.
Mahoe was knocking on the doorframe, interrupting his thoughts. “You sent for me, sir?”
Stevens pulled himself together and set the coffee mug aside. “Come in and shut the door, please. I have a special assignment I need to discuss with you.”
Mahoe sat on the chair in front of Stevens’s desk, the door shut behind him. Stevens spotted a tiny patch of toilet paper adhered to a shaving nick on the handsome young man’s square jaw. His dark navy uniform was neat and pressed, and he sat attentively, his head up with unconscious pride. Stevens steeled himself for what he was about to ask.