Keiko aimed the beam out into the murky canal. Once again, nothing. It would have to be a brightly colored piece of clothing, like the dead man’s white linen suit, to show up in the cloudy water, even at a few inches deep. For a hundred feet in either direction, from where the brambles started to the edge of the manicured ball field lawns, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the water.
“Hey there, little lady,” said a voice right behind her. She was startled that someone had been able to creep up on her without hearing him. When she turned to face the voice, she got a bigger surprise when she saw two pairs of eyes looking back at her.
She shone the light in their eyes and plastered a giant grin on her face. “Hi fellas! Is this the way to Waikīkī Hotel?”
One of them took another step closer to her. “I don’t think so, Sweetness.”
“Wanna party?” the other asked. She shone the light in his eyes when he took a step closer. He had a peculiar, greedy look to his face, as if he were rather single-minded about something right then. He moved quick to snatch the light from her hand and tossed it off to the side.
Keiko had no patience for what they wanted and took an athletic stance, ready to fight. “Why don’t the two of you wise up and walk away?”
“Why don’t you just get those clothes off?” one said back, taking another step closer.
“Yeah, that ain’t gonna happen.”
Before either of them could react, she gave a sharp kick to one in his crotch, spun and landed a solid punch to the neck of the other. Her hat flew off from the power of her punch. Planting both feet solid on the ground, she took another punch at the man squealing like a pig and holding his crotch. Landing her fist in his eye, he was done for. The man with the bad neck was just winding up to send a haymaker in her direction. Quick and agile, she beat him to the punch, sending him sprawling with a kick to the belly.
In the matter of only a moment, Keiko had broken into a heavy sweat, and tried wiping some of it away. She had a skinned knuckle and a stubbed toe, but was in far better condition than either of the men. She took her own advice and wasted no time in beating a hasty retreat, grabbing the flashlight but leaving the hat and shoes behind.
“Okay, that was fun,” she muttered, hurrying away toward a dimly illuminated parking lot. She scanned the area for anyone else that might be following her. Seeing no one, she forced her mind back to the original reason she came here. “Maybe they took his clothes off.”
Keiko went to the closest trashcan and lifted the lid off. Nothing. She hurried off to another can at the far end of the lot, keeping an eye over her shoulder for the men she’d just fought with. She went to the only other trash can in the area. Shining her light inside, she reached in and hit pay dirt.
“White jacket, white pants, black shirt, red necktie,” she said, pulling each garment out one at a time. “No shoes though.”
There were some voices, several men talking in an elated, or at least inebriated, way. They seemed to be getting closer. Shutting off the light, she got her cell phone out and dialed Davison’s number.
“Hey, found his clothes, but no sign of him. At the canal, just like I thought.”
“Just laying around?” he asked.
“In a garbage can at the parking lot. I bet if you got HPD out here to dredge the canal, they’d find his body.”
“Best you get out of there. Just put the clothes back in the same trash bag you found them in and bring all of it to the office. We’ll take a look at it once you get here.”
Keiko was glad to be leaving. With one last glance around the area, she grabbed the bag and took it with her, rotting food stink and all. Hustling back to the busier area of Waikīkī, she was able to flag down a taxi to take her to the main offices of Homeland Security. Carrying the trash bag with her, she met Davison at the main entrance. He took a quick look inside the bag.
“Just take that whole thing and toss it in the dumpster,” he told her, pointing toward the side of the building.
“But we need to search it. The dead man’s clothes are inside. We might be able to ID him. Or maybe even get someone’s prints off of something?”
“Don’t worry about it. We already know who he was.”
“But…”
“Time is money, and you’re wasting both, Keiko.”
“You sound just like a plastic surgeon I used to work with,” she told him when she got back from the dumpster. “And nobody liked him either. But who was the dead guy?”
He led her to his desk on the third floor. She rarely ever had to go in to the office; rather he came to her when they needed to meet. That was a big plus, since she didn’t like visiting the office. She had been interrogated there once for several hours on end, which eventually led to life-changing events. Taking a quick glance at the soundproof interrogation room, which happened to be in use right then by two men badgering another in shackles, she sat uneasily at his desk.
“That guy had something to do with our dead guy?” she asked, nodding her head in the direction of the interrogation room.
“Him? No,” said Davison. “That idiot’s North Korean and was found travelling on a South Korean passport. As soon as we picked him up, he asked for asylum.”
“Will he get it?” she asked.
“If we let him stay and he turns out to be a spy, it’s trouble for us. If we send him back to Pyongyang, he’ll get an ice pick to the eye socket. Or worse. Not your problem, though.” Davison looked her up and down for a moment, which made Keiko wonder if somehow she’d picked up the stink of the trash. “And by the way, one of them is your friend Marty.”
“Who was the dead guy anyway?” she asked, taking a longer look at the men, trying to guess which was Metro Marty.
He looked her up and down again. “I like the outfit.”
“Yeah, this is my attract-weird-guys-at-the-park outfit. Lost my hat and slippers, though. Who was the dead man?”
“Homeless guy that got clobbered by a truck on the H-1 Freeway this morning.”
“What? He fell off the lānai. I was there, Davison. I saw his head, where he landed on the sidewalk. He was probably dead before that, but he was definitely thrown or fell off my building.”
“You only saw his head and shoulder, how he supposedly landed. What you didn’t see were the rest of his injuries. At the morgue, we got him all cleaned up and straightened out again, and dressed up in new clothes so we could pose him. And as you know, dead men don’t bleed. That’s why there was no blood at the scene.”
“You posed him?” Keiko asked, confused. “I don’t understand.”
Somebody left the interrogation room and walked up to her. When Keiko looked up, she was even more confused.
“Megumi?”
Her roommate pulled up another chair and sat. “I know, I’m supposed to be in Coronado doing some advanced training, right?”
“What’s going on?” Keiko asked once again, looking back and forth between them.
“This has been a test for you,” Davison said. “I needed to see if you could think on your feet while still taking orders from the office.”
“Mostly, it was to see if you could use your counter-intuitive thinking, to solve by thinking outside the box, and not go off on a tangent of your own or get lost in all the dead-end clues.” Megumi smiled. “You did nearly perfectly, every step of the way.”
“Except for going unarmed to that park late at night,” Davison said. “You’ve made better decisions than that.”
“Yeah, stubbed my toe. Almost broke a nail, too.” Keiko looked down at her bare feet and thought of the two men she had beat up. The skinned knuckles on one hand were beginning to throb. Taking a deep breath, she looked at her boss and roommate. “Okay, but what about the dead guy? You guys took a corpse up there and tossed him off? Don’t you think that’s over-doing training a bit?”
“T
hat’s CIA training stuff. Those dudes are a bunch of cowboys. Homeland Security is much more sophisticated than that,” Davison said.
“Yeah, sophisticated,” Keiko mumbled.
Megumi laughed.
“Seriously. The CIA would probably take a live guy up there and pitch him off, just so they could see if he told any secrets on the way down. Here at Homeland, we like to think we have a little decorum. Which means we didn’t toss him off. While I arranged his body on the sidewalk, Megumi was upstairs. Once I gave her the high-sign, she tossed a dummy off the balcony. All I had to do was load that into the trunk of my car and drive off, picking up Megumi around the corner. The ambulance was waiting the next block over to come back for the corpse once a crowd formed. All a part of the show.”
“What show?” Keiko asked. Once again, she was confused, just as she had been all day.
“It was a rather nicely choreographed scene, put on for your benefit. At the spur of the moment, I might add. I had to get Homeland employees from all over this building to pretend to be tourists and bystanders, just to make a small crowd around the man. I almost called the Honolulu Actors Guild for extras. We put on a pretty good show, huh?” Davison asked with a smile.
“Had me fooled.”
“I even stood there and watched as you ran up to the scene,” Megumi said, with a satisfied look to her face. “Look at the pictures you took with your phone.”
Keiko got out her phone and studied the pictures more closely. Sure enough, Megumi was standing right in the middle of the crowd in one of them, the simple disguise of a fedora on her head, her hair in a braid, smiling.
“We need to work on you stretching your field of perception during a crisis,” Davison said. “Megumi will work with you on developing techniques for that.”
Keiko put away her phone. “Who tossed our apartment?”
“I did,” Megumi said. “Nothing got broken though, and everything has already been put back again.”
Keiko felt defeated, and also embarrassed. She took the charm from her pocket and handed it back to Megumi, who immediately began to rub it with her thumb. “Okay, why the frog?”
“As a red herring,” Davison said. “Just like the clothes, the hat, and cigarette butts in his pocket. I wanted to see how much that would distract you. Just like the crowd, the ambulance, and the police.”
“They were all plants put there to distract me?”
“Exactly. We’ll have to work on your ability to sift through clues, to separate red herrings from real evidence,” Davison told her, turning to his desk. “Starting first thing in the morning.”
“What about Dan Hata? He wasn’t involved, was he?” Keiko said.
“He was a problem, along with a few of the responding officers. Not all the cops that showed up had been briefed on our scheme. Once real cops started to show up, we had to pull the plug on it and get that body out of there. Bad luck of the draw that Hata was assigned to investigate. Like you said earlier, I can go lean on him a little, tell him I had an op running out of that unit, and I’m sure he’ll back off. Once local cops find out Homeland Security is involved, they disappear in a hurry. Anything else?” Davison asked.
“Yeah, one last question. Who was that first evidence tech that showed up at my hotel room?” Keiko asked.
Davison and Megumi looked at each other. “That’s what we’ve been wondering,” Megumi said. “All we can figure is that we have a leak, and somebody has been monitoring our activities.”
Keiko laughed. “That would be a surprise.”
“It looks like that’s going to be your next op, to find out who the mole is in my department,” Davison said.
Keiko looked over to where the North Korean was still being interrogated in the soundproof room. “Leaks and spies and moles. Looking forward to it.”
Kay Hadashi
Based in Honolulu, Kay Hadashi is a lifelong avid reader and has had an extensive career as a surgical nurse. Story plots for her novels come from events at the hospital and straight out of the news media. She knows that the best stories are the ones that come to life through the characters. Using elements from her family and herself, the characters she creates have qualities and failings that readers enjoy. Kay is proud to be a part of this anthology project that will long continue to benefit the residents of Hawai‘i.
Find me on the web at kayhadashi.wordpress.com and follow me on Facebook.
‘Ālewa Park: A Louise Golden Mystery
Laurie Hanan
Day One
Charlie’s deep bass voice carried across the park. “HEY hey hey hey, HEY hey hey hey, HEY hey hey hey …” He rocked in time with his chant, sitting on a bench in the shade of a monkey pod tree, tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand, never looking at the ball, never missing.
Teenage boys taunted each other good-naturedly on the basketball court while they shot hoops and postured for the girls watching from the sidelines. The evening breeze was so thick with pakalolo, a person could get high just walking through the park.
Sage and I had come for exercise—hers, not mine. Dogs and their owners passed us on the concrete footpath while we made embarrassingly slow progress. Sage is blind from birth and senses the world through her nose. She stopped every few inches for a thorough investigation of the landscape, not wanting to miss a smell. I couldn’t deny her that simple pleasure. I knew all the regulars by sight, and most of their dogs by name. Funny how much easier it is to ask someone their dog’s name than their own.
Sage went into alert stance. Something in the bushes had caught her attention. She nearly toppled me as she lunged toward a dirt trail that led into a thick tangle of untrimmed vegetation.
True to her breed, she’s an excellent ratter, but I’d had a long day and wasn’t up for a rodent hunt. “No, baby girl.” I gripped the leash and tugged. “Not that way.”
She strained harder, nosing toward the bushes, letting out a desperate whine with each breath.
I spotted one of Sage’s doggie buddies leading his owner in our direction. Maybe I could distract her. “Hey Sage, I see Pono. Let’s go say hi.”
Hearing her friend’s name had no impact. It took all my strength to move her back onto the sidewalk.
Once she caught a whiff of Pono, she forgot everything else. The two dogs danced around each other, tails wagging ecstatically.
“Howzit?” said Pono’s owner, a burly Hawaiian.
I pushed my hair off my sweaty forehead. “Long day.”
“I don’ know how you can walk your dog after deliverin’ mail all day. I nevah walk my dog till I wen’ retire.”
“The vet says Sage needs more exercise. I don’t mind, really. It’s a lot cooler out here than in the house.”
Sage and Pono circled, sniffing, until their leashes were wrapped together.
Pono’s owner helped me untangle the leashes. “Eh, what kine dog Sage, anyways?”
“She’s a Westie. How about Pono?”
“Half Jack Russell, half Satan,” he said seriously, then let out a hearty laugh. “Eh, watch out!”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me off the sidewalk just as the guy in the power wheelchair came barreling down on us silently, oxygen tubes snaking from his nose, his brown and white spaniel in tow.
“Bastard,” Pono’s owner muttered as we watched the wheelchair retreat at high speed.
“I feel sorry for his dog.”
“I know. He nevah let da po’ t’ing stop fo’ nuttin’.”
We said our good-byes and headed in opposite directions.
Minutes later, a child’s piercing shriek came from the direction of the overgrown brush at the edge of the park. It was impossible to tell whether it was a cry of glee, pain, or fear. There was still plenty of daylight and it wasn’t unusual for kids to be in the park at this hour. I scanned the area I thought it had come f
rom. No kids in sight.
Another scream, louder this time. No, this was definitely not the sound of a child having fun.
A young girl tore out of the same dirt trail Sage had been trying to drag me into earlier. Her eyes, wild with terror, locked on mine.
“What happened?” I called to her.
She came to a stop in front of me, sobbing, her breath ragged from running. “A dead lady …” she managed between gasps.
What?
A chilling fear gripped me as a thousand thoughts fought for space in my head. My first instinct was to grab the girl and run, get as far away as possible.
But wait.
While a dead body was the last thing I ever wanted to see, the girl might be mistaken. When I was about her age, I was sure I saw a dead woman in an alley, partially hidden behind a dumpster. I ran home, hysterical, and told my father there’d been a murder. He insisted I show him what I’d seen. It was almost a letdown when the body turned out to be that of a decomposing long-haired dog.
I pushed down my panic. “Show me where.”
Her head moved side to side as she mewled, “No no no no …”
“Is your mom here with you?”
Her trembling fingers raked her tear-stained cheeks.
“Are you here by yourself?” I tried again.
She nodded.
“Come, let’s sit down over here.” I led her to a bench. More important than checking out her find, I needed to calm her so she wouldn’t flee. If there really was a body in the bushes, the police would need to talk to her. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Danielle,” it sounded like, through her sobs.
“I’m Louise. My dog’s name is Sage. Would you like to pet her?”
She nodded.
I lifted Sage to the bench beside Danielle. “Sage is blind. You need to be gentle and not make any fast movements.”
In reality, Sage adores everyone and knows no fear of people. But I hoped the effort at gentleness would serve to distract Danielle. It worked. Still crying silently, she wrapped an arm around the dog. Sage sensed Danielle’s distress and settled against her.
Paradise, Passion, Murder Page 16