A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  They passed the jumble of Whale Rock. She looked at McGee, anticipating the command to prepare for the jibe round to head into Faga’alu. The wind wasn’t strong enough to make the move either difficult or particularly dangerous, but you did have to pay attention. McGee was fiddling with something on his far side, one long arm stretched to the helm. Then he turned back, met her gaze and smiled. Then he lifted his other hand from the helm.

  “Ta da,” he said. “Skipper’s liberation.”

  She had forgotten about the self-steering mechanism. Any long-distance solo sailor had to have one. The boat was headed southeast into sweet blue yonder.

  “An hour,” he said, his grin growing wider, “Or whatever you need. Of the purest privacy. Even in Samoa.”

  “What time is it?” When in doubt, play dumb. Not that she had much doubt, but, worth a try. “Neil said the dinner for the inspectors was 6:30. Even if they don’t like us, we do have to feed them.”

  “No worries,” he said, glancing at his watch. She was not sitting close to him, but she had miscalculated his reach. He laid one hand on her bare arm, coquett-ishly, index and middle fingers and thumb wrapping around her forearm, the ring and little fingers caressing as the hand moved up her arm. She was grateful for her bathing suit and life vest. They felt like armor.

  She looked at him. “I really don’t want this, Wills,” she said in her best one-doctor-to-another voice. “Forgive me if I gave the wrong impression by coming with you. I just can’t resist being on boats.”

  But he could play that game too. He might have been counseling someone about an upcoming biopsy. “You worried about your copper? You need to move on, love.” She was so startled that he should know, even guess, anything about her and Han, and, for a split instant, so aware of his being right, that she couldn’t move. He eased out his long legs in front of him down into the cockpit as if showing off his wares. She could see the incipient erection well enough. His smile grew and then looped down at one end. “Welly Tuiasosopo tells me little wifey’s back and you’re history.”

  The nastiness was like ice down her front. She was suddenly furious, with him, with Welly Tuiasosopo, that brainless drunken gossip, and with herself for getting into this mess. She hopped up away from him onto the narrow windward deck beside the cabin. “I’m serious. I don’t care what you think you know about my life, but we’re going back to Faga’alu, right now.”

  “No, love. Not yet.” He had refolded himself like a big hawk getting ready to drop, intent, turned on. “We are going to have a wonderful screw and you are going to love every minute of it.”

  He shot forward at her. She couldn’t believe a man that big could move so fast in a narrow space. He caught the arm hole of her life vest, but she snaked around, arms over her head, bent forward, and as they wrestled and stumbled across the hatch covers and lines among the forestays, slid out of the vest and jumped leeward, putting the main mast and the tight bulge of the forward edge of the mainsail between them. He was laughing and cursing, scrambling after her.

  “Too far to swim, little bird! And you can’t fly.”

  One hand braced on the lee side of the mast, he lunged at her. The boat was heavy enough to put up with the wildly shifting weights, but it still bucked and shuddered around them like horses in a barn where people are fighting. She popped under the boom and jerked loose the main sheet. The big sail bounced to leeward across McGee’s chest and would have batted him into the water if he hadn’t grabbed the boom through the loosened sail. The boat rocked and staggered as it slowed. Ann crouched, cornered, on the far side of the cockpit with no tricks left. McGee was screaming at her now, scared and furious, but gaining his balance and his footing.

  Weapon. Anything. She flipped open the nearest storage hatch, looking for anything, a gaff, a net, anything with a handle she could use to fend him off.

  Flare pistol.

  McGee swung under the flopping boom into the cockpit. Ann backed up on to the narrow deck on the far side of the cabin again, keeping the bulk of the cabin hatchway between her and McGee, bracing her elbows on the top and pointing the flare pistol at McGee. McGee saw the pistol and stopped. His erection had grown huge in their pas-des-deux across the foredeck and hung out, draped ludicrously in straining nylon. To be so much the center of men’s world and to look so stupid. She almost giggled.

  “Don’t be a fucking idiot!” he said. “You’ll set us on fire with that thing.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But you’ll be dead first. Or wish you were. Magnesium burns in the gut are a horrible way to die.”

  “What would you know about that?” He was fighting to get his voice under control, trying to turn it back into an instrument to calm, to cajole. The erection was now at half mast. The little toggle beside the trigger guard finally gave under her thumb.

  “Okay. Safety off.” McGee’s face went limp as his penis. “Very good,” she said. “Okay. Now: disengage the self-steer and head us back to Faga’alu.”

  He stared at her. “I don’t think you’d kill me.” He had the doctor voice back now. We are reasonable, educated, people.

  “You’re probably right. But I’ll certainly destroy the boat if I have to. And I’m not afraid of the water. I’ve survived boat wrecks before.”

  Finally, he turned and un-clipped the pin from the wind vane gear. He took another few minutes to sort out the sails and get the boat backed into a position where the main could fill and they could pick up a little way. Ann shifted as needed to keep the cabin between them and the flare gun aimed at McGee’s mid-section.

  Once she could spare a little peripheral vision to check their position, she saw that they were only just at the mouth of the bay. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and it was suddenly early evening. The wind would drop now.

  “There are two openings through the reef into Faga’alu cove,” she said. “You can see the markers of one from the shore road.” McGee was handling the boat, calm and focused. He didn’t look at her. He might as well have been alone. Probably wishes he were. “But straight ahead of our present course, you should see a dark stretch, no foam. It’s only about twenty feet wide, but you can slip through there as well, particularly now when the tide’s high.”

  He said nothing but moved the wheel slightly and let the main out a notch, headed to the unmarked entrance. She guessed he wanted to get this over as much as she did. It would be an awkward landfall, dead before the wind, but the cove was big enough and the evening breeze now calm enough, that she had no doubt he could handle it, even with the clutter of other boats anchored there. They slipped through the break in the reef. McGee eased across the flat silver disc of the cove then came up into the wind. The sails began to flap, and the graceful, living creature transmogrified into a noisy, clumsy, oversized bathtub with encumbrances.

  McGee grinned up at her, his voice wry. “Friends now?”

  For just a moment, she actually bought it. Everything’s okay; there’s no fuss; nothing happened; you didn’t threaten to rape me; I didn’t threaten to kill you; we’re still comfortable colleagues. Everything twitched back into place; nobody needs to know anything. He’s a flaming asshole, but he’s not crazy. She could almost smell the chocolate.

  “Right.” She stood up, one knee braced against the cabin, held the flare gun straight up into the air over her head with both arms and fired it.

  McGee ducked. “Christ!” High overhead, the flare popped and blossomed into a smoky umbrella of cherry-colored light.

  “Just to let everyone know we’re here. After all, it’s evening prayers time. Mustn’t skulk about.”

  She dropped the empty pistol through the open hatch into the cabin below, stepped over the rail cable, and jumped into the water.

  CHAPTER 19

  Han got Eric Poulsen—the skipper’s name really was Eric—through the ID of his half-brother’s scanty rem
ains. If Poulsen was the murderer, he hadn’t known what sharks did to a body or that he would ever see the result. The skin under Poulsen’s blond beard went green and the blue eyes drifted. Han shoved a stool behind Poulsen’s legs, and he sat down heavily, head between his knees. Han motioned to the tech to zip up the body bag. Then they rolled out the body from the dump. “I do not know,” Poulsen said dully. “Maybe.” He put his head down again. Han showed him the girl’s clothes, but he shook his head. He looked surprised when Han pointed out that the girl’s shirt was like the one in Ped’s cabin.

  Driving Poulsen back to Nozaki’s, Han questioned him again about the T-shirts but got nothing beyond more vague statements about shopping in Apia. Maybe Poulsen was still stunned by what he had seen in the morgue. Or maybe he was hiding something. More likely, he had been too drunk in Apia to remember much of anything.

  Before taking Poulsen to the hospital, Han had sent his one female officer to find the boat girls and Ioane and a team to search the shore of the cove where Pedersen’s body had been found. From there, they could also keep an eye on Paki’s Bar and Grill in case anyone came back early from the funeral. Welly Tuia-sosopo’s take on Paki was that he wouldn’t miss opening for the Friday evening crowd. For himself, Han was just grateful that there would be about three fewer fights to break up tonight than last Friday.

  Not Friday, he thought, as he drove away from Nozaki’s: Thursday. The big yacht’s first day in Pago had been Thursday. Which meant that they had left Apia sometime Wednesday, probably, the kind of sailor’s detail that he used to ask

  Ann. McGee was a sailor; he could ask McGee. Then he remembered that Ann and McGee weren’t two thoughts he wanted together at the same time. He jammed on his breaks in front of the police station and stalked inside.

  The next hour was taken up trying to sort things into what would go to hell in a hurry if he didn’t deal with it right now, what would keep a day or two, and what was so tangled up in traditional Samoa that not only could he not do anything about it, he really didn’t have a clue what it was about anyway. After about an hour and a half of this, Han decided that since most of what a police chief deals with is politics and, here, all of that meant traditional Samoa, he might as well just go back to being a detective.

  The telephone rang.

  The voice at the other end was feminine, gentle, lilting and probably speaking English. Eventually, Han understood that she was the secretary to the Lieutenant Governor. Who, along with the Attorney General, wanted to see him. Like, now.

  Han hung up with exaggerated care as an alternative to throwing the telephone across the room, which is what he wanted to do. Outside, however, he didn’t drive off right away. A scraggly mimosa gave a little shade. The afternoon breeze was picking up, dabbling across the smooth surface of the bay like the landing of invisible ducks. He watched the play of light and color, seeing and not seeing. It was logical to search the cove. And logical to find the damned girls off the boat and nail down who was where when. And logical to assume that the two deaths were linked.

  And the riddle in the middle was the dump.

  He started the jeep and drove to Utulei, thinking about the dump. In the States, bodies get left in dumps all the time. It’s in the nature ofdumps and in the nature of Americans. But Sa’ili was right: Han could not in million years imagine a Samoan—hell, even a whole Samoan village—leaving a body in a dump. Particularly not that private dump in Nu’ufou. No matter who was pissed off at who’s talking chief.

  In Utulei, Han parked in a Department of Justice space beside the administration building and went up the stairs to the executive suites. Light blazing in off of the bay spotlighted and blinded anyone entering the Lieutenant Governor’s office, but Han knew the shapes of the two men in the mold-spotted leather armchairs well enough. The Attorney General was a palagi named Leon Fischer, an old law-school chum of the governor’s, very comfortable with his fist in every pie and bum on the island. The Lieutenant Governor was a senior talking chief from the Leone district and had a reputation for enjoying being the governor’s hit man. Normally, with his own chief around, Han could avoid these two clowns completely. Even the palagi, Fischer, knew not to fuck around with a high chief of Manu’a. But Han was on his own for now.

  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” Fischer said. Lieutenant, Han thought. Not Assistant Chief. Bad sign. Ceremonial demotion. “Thank you for taking the time to come to see the Lieutenant Governor. He knows you’re terribly busy.” Okay. So today Fischer’s doing talking chief to the LG’s high chief. Cop goes one step down; every one else goes one step up. “The Governor wishes a briefing on the death of a foreign national that was reported to him this morning. He has had communications from Washington that anticipate an inquiry. So he is very concerned that this matter be clarified as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir,” Han said blandly.

  “So, the report is true?”

  “Forgive me, sir. I don’t know what was reported to the governor.”

  “Don’t be dense, man. That a foreign national was found dead here this morning.”

  “Yes, sir. That is true.”

  “Male? Female? Cause?”

  “Male, sir. Identified by his half-brother, Eric Poulsen, skipper of the Baltic schooner moored at Nozaki’s, as Thorvald Pedersen, one of his crew. Cause of death unknown at this time, sir. The sharks didn’t leave us much to work on.”

  The Lieutenant Governor giggled.

  There wasn’t a lot they could add after that. Han walked down the central stairway wondering if the interview was, in fact, just a simple need for information. So why the drama? An office door opened, and a serene Samoan face with a surprisingly sardonic smile appeared around it. Sa’ili waved him in and offered him a cold soda and a chair.

  “I won’t hold you up. I hear just as much gossip as those two do, and I know you are very busy. But I am curious. Did they pump you about both of your bodies or just one?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Oh, because the Lieutenant Governor views himself as in line for the senior high chief title in one of the other two families with interests in that land where your first body was found.”

  “And I’m being told to concentrate on the body that wasn’t found at the dump.”

  “Have a great day.”

  Han headed straight for the dump. Peculiar, he thought, in all of this, that no one had mentioned that the area was also possibly the most ghost-ridden hundred acres in Samoa. In 1974, a Pan Am 707 had botched a landing and gone down. Most on board survived until fire and panic got them. Yet another reason no Samoan would be out there after dark.

  He missed the turn-off to Nu’ufou and had to back-track. The dirt road to the dump itself was the obstacle course of pot-holes that he remembered from yesterday. Why here? If you’re family, you don’t want to draw attention to the place. If you’re palagi, you don’t know it’s here. If you’re Samoan, you’re scared of ghosts. And whoever you are, where’s your transport?

  The cordon tapes were undisturbed. Between the police and the ghosts, Han could see why the caretaker had taken the day off. Han thought about the caretaker. The body couldn’t have been put in the dump the day it was found, Bobcat or no Bobcat. Nor had there been post-mortem damage like you’d expect from someone pushing the body or the stuff around it with heavy equipment, just the obvious work of birds and rats. And now Han had be warned off investigating here by someone who should be pointing fingers at the Nu’ufou crew. The caretaker was a lucky man.

  Han hunted the edges of the clearing for a while, looking for anything like a trail but finally just pushed into the forest.

  Forty-five minutes later, soaked to the chest and covered with scrapes, he anchored himself against a tree and tried to get his bearings. The dump clearing was a few yards to his left through heavy undergrowth, and he was maybe halfway around. He
pushed on again, hung one ankle in a vine, and sprawled forward into a little clearing.

  He rolled slowly to his feet, looking around. He was in a kind of green tunnel, an overgrown path toward the dump clearing. He followed it to the edge of the dump and understood what had drawn him back here. From the working side of the dump, to leave the body, you would have to scramble all the way around that mini-mountain of refuse to unload and get away. Somehow, yesterday, maybe he had thought the killer had been hiding the body. But that was too clever. Murderers aren’t usually that energetic. It’s hard enough to tote a dead body over level ground, much less over a shifting bog of wet refuse. Four strong men with a stretcher had been barely able to do that yesterday.

  But from where Han stood now, the place where the body had lain was an easy vector. From here, you could see a guy with a corpse across his back—or a couple of guys with the body between them—staggering across there, dumping the body, and getting away again as quickly as possible. That didn’t solve the problem of being able to believe that a Samoan would be there at all, but it was at least physically possible for someone who did not have a car. Han went back down the trail.

  The Geodetic Survey map of the island pinned to his office wall was at least twenty years old, and it didn’t show this path. It did show an old trail running east-west from the villages in the western end of the island to Tafuna, now the airport. Here, Han guessed, he was maybe a quarter of a mile north of that old trail. Wrestling through the undergrowth, part of him knew this was a colossal waste of time. But another part of him was on a scent, clear as a hound. I don’t know why, baby; but when I know how, I’ll have you.

  The trail faded in a dense thicket. He kept on and, like before, was suddenly out onto another trail. This was no interstate. But past generations had maintained it as a thoroughfare between villages, and the big trees stood back a little. He explored a few yards to the right. Muddier stretches should pick up weight-bearing prints like plaster. Nothing. He turned back, heading toward the airport.