“Thanks, ladies.” He strolled toward the police station, watching the Birdman and the girl walk up the road, not specifically suspicious, just being a cop. A jeep crossed in front of him, jerked to a stop at the edge of the green, and Ann Mag-lynn swung out. She had been avoiding him, he knew, since his wife’s return. Seeing her now—slender, boyish in her own uniform of loose white trousers and bright print shirt, cropped dark red hair standing up like a woodpecker’s crest—was a punch to the gut that you just see coming: surprise going straight to fury without pausing for pain or fear. But he clamped that down, the way a cop must, at least to stay a good cop. Tending the spaces, Samoans called it, knowing how you fit in the relationships around you, being who you have to be for the situation you’re in.
As he walked up to her, her face was tense. “I found a body,” she said. “At the dump.”
CHAPTER 3
“Never been to the dump,” Han said, glancing at Ann as he drove. “I just toss my trash bags from home in the station bins for someone else to deal with.”
“Well, this isn’t the dump.” Riding shotgun, Ann stared straight ahead, eyes on the road, as if she were driving. Han drove far too fast for Samoan roads, and the hard-topped, top-heavy jeeps favored by the government and its senior employees rolled far too easily. The road here was particularly unnerving, barely two lanes, winding among boulders and ocean on the left and forested cliffs on the right. Every quarter mile or so, a narrow valley opened between the cliffs. If there was a stream, there was a house; otherwise, just coconut plantations, leading up toward the mountain ridge a thousand and more feet above, facing the stone blue sea. Han wanting her to make eye contact as he drove made her crazy. Of course, everything about him made her crazy these days, so worrying about his command of basic physics was at least objective. “So what family owns it?” She gave him points for knowing the issue in Samoa. Not who but what community.
The road plunged suddenly into forest, still hugging the foot of the mountain chain even as the island opened to the left into its only relatively flat land. They passed the road to the airport. Han glanced at her as if looking for directions. She shook her head. “Another couple of miles. If you’re not looking for it, you may miss it in the forest.” She meant he should slow down, but she could have saved her breath. He still almost missed the turnoff but tromped on the brakes and yanked the jeep off to the left down the road into the tall trees.
“There’s a village in here?” The graveled road was a single lane, and the trees arched in a high canopy overhead. They passed one isolated house, the classic thatched roof on pillars set on a waist-high stone parapet, and then a more closed-in, western style, house up on stilts.
In name.
“Nu’ufou. New village. Because of the airport?”
She nodded. “If you think of how the map goes “ She was drawing in the air. “There’s this L-shaped loop. We’re on the north-south leg now. Where the track into the dump takes off, the road angles ninety degrees due…a left turn, anyway. Dumps out on the airport road just beyond the prison.”
One of the officers in back leaned forward. “Lot of people from Nu’ufou work in the prison.” This officer was young and amazingly good looking, even among a people who excelled in gorgeous young men. But he was also observant and insightful by the standards of any culture. In the last year, Ann knew, he had risen fast in Territorial law enforcement. The DPS didn’t distinguish between uniformed branch and criminal investigation. The first year Han had been in Samoa, he had been the C.I.D. and back in uniform, rather to his disgust. But Ann had been seeing this young officer with Han more and more when Han was really out doing his thing, and she knew that Han valued him.
Ann said, “You asked about the land. I’m guessing the family’s some connection of my direct boss. Neil would know.” Neil Hutchinson was Director of Health for the American Samoa Government, head of the hospital and, indeed, the island’s health care system. Like Ann, he spoke Samoan. Unlike Ann, he maintained a phenomenologist’s interest in Samoan family squabbles, possibly because his job depended on knowing when to duck for cover. “It’s really as close to useless as any flat land here could be: lava rubble and brackish slime pools overgrown with scrub forest. On a good day.”
Han grinned at her. Still staring at the road, she ignored him. A brief conversation erupted in Samoan among the three officers crammed into the back of the jeep. The only word Ann caught was confusion. Though another interpretation, she knew, was disturbance.
“This place,” said the officer who had spoken before, “Is where land of families of three villages meet. There is much confusing. When there is confusing, Samoans fight.” His name was Ioane Ioane, John son of John. Just names: no aristocratic title association, no family. In Samoa, that was as close to a non-person as you could get. A distinction, Ann knew, for which Han didn’t give a shit. His own family had been Korean warlord nobility for a thousand years. Which had insured that, when the Communists took over the north, they had been wiped out.
Han grinned again, glancing up at Ioane in the rear view mirror. “Can’t have that to yourself, man. That’s human universal. That’s what we’re here for: keep things simple.”
Ann looked out of the side window. She wondered if Han also knew that, off-duty, Ioane hung out in the more-or-less tolerated Samoan subculture of gay males and transvestitism. If Han didn’t know, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him: she had no idea how Korean culture viewed the problems of people whose heads had gotten born into the wrong bodies. Not her problem. Most men are confused enough about sex that a woman can look like a boy and think like a man and yet be happily heterosexual. And, in general, not get killed for it. She shivered. Was that it? The body in the dump? Something to do with what Samo-ans called do girl? She didn’t know why, but she didn’t think so.
“Interesting, though,” Ann said. Her mouth could run quite well while her mind was elsewhere. “I’m guessing a senior talking chief of one of the families got the bright idea to cash in on a government lease to use the site for an official dump, by-the-way establishing some kind of precedence for his family’s claim. Problem is, those two or three acres are essentially unusable. At the moment, they’re a disaster. There’s no way the Health Department’s going to take this site on as an official one.” She snorted softly. “At least by anyone who’s first loyalty is to sanitation.” So what’s your first loyalty? The inner voice faltered. She stared out the side window. Pride, probably. Stiff upper lip. Tend the spaces.
“But the families wouldn’t know that,” Han said. “Your body’s going to turn out to be someone who got in the middle of some confusion. All sounds pretty normative to me.” Inter-and intra-family politics of one sort or another accounted for essentially all Samoan homicide.
Ann pointed. “Here.” The height of the tallest tress was suddenly less; the land, unable to sustain the forest titans, the banyans and the mangos. “You’re going to want four-wheel.”
Han worked the jeep down the lane, occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror. Ann looked in her side mirror. Behind them, the police van struggled through the ruts. But the weight of the officers inside, she knew, was a fair match for the weight of the vehicle if they had to push it. The track faded into the muddy clearing. Beyond it, the mountain of trash rose, peppered with mynahs. As the cars pulled up, the birds erupted into the sky in a rush of wing-sound and indignant chattering. Caretaker and Bobcat were gone.
As if choreographed, all the doors of both vehicles swung open and they all got out: Han, Ann, the three officers with them and the four others in the van. Ann had never been at a crime scene before. Not like this: not at the beginning.
Assuming it was a crime. Could it be anything else? Everyone looked at Han, waiting for orders. Suddenly, they could hear another engine, and the hospital’s rusty ambulance backed smoothly into the clearing. The driver was the senior hospital security man,
a retired U.S. Army non-com universally known among palagis—Samoans too, for all Ann knew—as Sarge. He slid out from behind the wheel, walked around and flung open the back of the ambulance. He lifted his chin in greeting to Han and Ann but said nothing.
“Okay,” Han said, looking at Ann. “Try to retrace your steps. I’ll be right behind you. You want to limit disturbance to the scene.” She thought about the bottle she had chucked at the birds. His pedantic tone irritated her, but she also recognized the irritation as fear.
She had always thought it would be cool to be part of a real police investigation. And doctors see terrible things all the time. But outside of a battlefield, those terrible things are usually emotional, not, like this, food for worms. She led Han across the water and up the slope, very conscious of his being right behind her. He would never touch her, not here, not where people could see, but he was that close. Maybe I imagined it, she thought again. Some trick to get his attention. What’s worse? It being there or it not being there?
As soon as she crested the slope, the full smell hit her again. She dry heaved, turning away. “Sorry,” she said.
Han grunted. “Smells right, anyway.” He stared at the body for a long time. Like a big cat, she thought. She often thought of him that way, the square-jawed, tiger’s face, black hair cropped to a military flat-top, wide shoulders, narrow hips, sturdy, slightly bowed legs. Finally, he said, “Neil still doing medical examiner? Or has he dumped that on you?” Like a lot of senior technical government employees, like Han himself, the Director of Health covered any number of roles left perpetually open by the Territorial government’s inability to get organized.
“Neither.” She wasn’t exactly sure what a medical examiner did, but if it involved anything more than just saying, yep, from here, I’d say that person’s dead, she didn’t want any part of it. Maggots. God. Yuck. “We’ve actually got a pathologist. Just got here. Neil says he’s done forensic path too.” Her voice was right: matter-of-fact, slightly ironic, tending the spaces. But she could feel the disconnect, like a boat drifting away from a dock, the open water yawning wider and wider.
Han grunted. “The South African with the boat.”
“Oh. Neil said…well, maybe he’s worked in Australia. Accent’s similar. Name’s McGee, I think.” She was babbling, getting lost. She pulled herself together; the feeling was physical, like hauling a door shut against strong wind.
She pictured a tall, lean, bearded man with curly, sun-burnt hair standing outside Neil’s office, of shaking a warm leathery hand and of feeling, just for an instant, the possibility of another life.
Han snorted. “Imagine: having someone who knew what the hell they were doing.” She knew he wasn’t slamming Neil. It was just knowing what had to be done and yet not being able to get it done right. Eventually, you stop caring or you quit. “Okay. Go get him. Take my jeep. He’s got his own vehicle, but I don’t want any more tire tracks than we have already. His boat’s at Nozaki’s.”
CHAPTER 4
Han’s eyes followed Ann as she slid down away from him toward the ditch. Part of him was thinking about her, about the swing of her shoulders and the swell of her buttocks under the thin fabric of her clothes as she moved. He could tell that she was nervy about the body and embarrassed by that. Get her out of the way. Give her something to do. But he was also thinking that this would be about his tenth dump stiff. Was he, in fact, finally losing count? That would be something. The first body he had ever found in a dump had been as a child fleeing south through the Korean mountains with his hardly-older sister, just two little orphan rats picking through an abandoned village’s refuse for the food that wasn’t there and coming on the dead body of someone, maybe a villager, maybe a soldier. He remembered only the profile of the skull beneath the black skin as his sister pulled him away and they hurried on. The next two had been in Nam. And then he had become a cop.
“Ioane, come up here. Follow our path.” He gestured. “Get the markers. Stake as you come. Official right-of-way. Rest of you stay down there for now. Somebody go out and close the road. Walk. Don’t use the van.” The men began to pull equipment out of the van, Ioane pointing and giving quiet orders. Han knew the other men didn’t like that. They mainly saw Ioane as Samoan society did: younger than they were and a nobody. It made Han’s being cock-on-the-rock all the more important. Sarge leaned against the ambulance, watching. Han knew Sarge wanted a cigarette. And knew Sarge was one of the only men in Samoa he could trust not to smoke at a potential crime scene.
Ioane marked the path across the ditch and up onto the trash pile. This was only his second crime scene, at least in the palagi, the European, sense. There were plenty of murders in Samoa, but they rarely required classic forensics. Somebody just walked up to somebody else, usually on the village green, usually a rival claimant to a village title or something to do with land tenure or an old family feud, and blew them away with some antique firearm in front of God and the whole village. Not a lot of mystery there. Nor was the individual perp what Samoans cared about. True justice was bringing to book the community pathology that had fostered the crime, not so much punishing the killer as an individual, though that certainly happened as well. It was a weird system to work in for a Western-trained investigator, but Han had to admit that it was beginning to make sense to him. When he didn’t look too hard at it. Ioane clambered up beside Han, and the smell hit him. He made a face. Then he saw the body. His eyebrows drew together, and he looked at Han.
“You think this is confusion?”
Han snorted. “Likely. But right now, you don’t think. You just wait for the medical examiner. But it’s a damned odd place to commit suicide or go lie down if you’re feeling poorly. Not to mention,” Han went on, almost to himself, “how the fuck you’d get here.” Ioane was looking around, across the clearing, into the forest. The trees trembled, filled with mynahs, and the air pulsed with the birds’ lunatic chatter. The corpse didn’t seem to bother Ioane. Han had noticed that on other cases. No need for profanity or stupid jokes to cover discomfort. Ghosts, on the other hand, Han knew, really worried Samoans. Unlike ghosts in the States and Europe, who seem to gravitate to where people live, Samoan ghosts liked isolated places. Maybe, Han thought, looking for the privacy they never got in life.
“Where is the family?” Ioane said. “How many days here alone, and no one is looking?” He looked at Han, his face creased with distress.
“Yeah, well,” Han said softly, “That’s what we’re for. We’re the family.” Did the kid understand? Most people didn’t. Ioane’s gaze broke away.
“This is a very bad place,” he said.
“Fucking awful,” Han said. “Any way to drain it? Sluice gates, maybe?” Ioane’s face went blank again. His English had improved a lot in the last year (he remembered verbs most of the time now and was beginning to get conjugations) but there were times, Han knew, when he, Han, tipped Ioane over the edge. “I mean, can we get the water to go somewhere else? It’s going to be “ He almost said fucking impossible. “It’s going to be very difficult to get the body out intact, much less do any serious investigation, with all the water.” It’s not, he thought, like you can use frog men. And in a sea of rubbish, how do you tell what’s rubbish and what’s truth? There weren’t even enough rubber waders in all of Samoa to clothe his men adequately to slog around in this shit. And seventy five percent of the
Department of Public Safety’d be in hospital on IV antibiotics within twenty-four hours otherwise, just from the tiny scrapes and punctures inevitable from sliding around on this kind of surface.
Ioane’s face lit up like a lantern. “The caretaker has a Bobcat. Shall he dig?”
“No,” Han said. “But…he live around here?”
Ioane nodded. “A small chief of Nu’ufou. The Bobcat is at his house.”
“See if one of the other guys knows where. If it’s close enough to walk, go s
ee what he’ll tell you about…say, the last week. Looking at that body, even from here, we’re not talking something that happened yesterday “
Too much rain.
“Yeah, well, that too. Today’s Thursday. So go back over all last week, last Monday through this Monday, when the heavy rains started. Anything he saw, anything odd.”
“Shall he dig?” Ioane said again. Han was beginning to hear a grammar drill in there somewhere.
Han didn’t want the dump site disturbed. Among many other things, he would have to find out who was high enough up the local pecking order to get the site closed until the investigation was finished. Nor did he really think the Bobcat could deal with the drainage problem. But there was more. “No. But while you’re there, take a look at the machine.”
“Looking for what, sir?”
Han shrugged. The enormity of trying to do an investigation by regulation means bore down on him as if a big bird had come to sit on his shoulder. In the States, what am I looking for was easy. Everything. And then you sift and sift and sooner later, if you and the victim’s relatives and the perp haven’t all died of old age first, you find something and maybe get an arrest and a conviction. Here, it was just bloody lucky things happened they way they usually did. In community. The thought came to him as something important but then faded.
“Oh, just anything suspicious.”
A Bird in the Hand Page 2