by Gregg Olsen
Kendall looked at the necklace around her friend’s sister’s neck. It seemed so fitting.
Shark’s teeth, she thought.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Haleiwa
Ten years ago
Maryanne Milton was mad at her husband, an airman stationed in Hawaii. Mad was hardly the word. She was bitter, angry, and hell-bent on revenge. He’d cheated on her with another woman, a secretary who worked at the base. To add insult to injury, it was a woman Maryanne had known and admired. Maryanne filled a cooler with beer and drove out to the beach near Dillingham. She figured that she’d drink the beer, then walk out into the creamy surf and let the waves carry her to something that approximated peace. Tranquility. A place away from the embarrassment and torment of marrying the wrong man and having a father who’d been right on the money about the louse. Other unhinged women might have sought revenge by killing their husbands, but not Maryanne. She figured that the burden of her suicide would haunt him for the rest of his life. She parked her yellow VW and dragged her cooler to a deserted spot where the waves struck the shoreline with a fury that suited her mood.
She turned the dial on her radio to find the last song she’d hear before she died. A suicide soundtrack is harder to come by than the happy can imagine. Alanis Morissette was too angsty. A tears-in-her-beer country song she couldn’t place was too maudlin. Maryanne wanted something melancholy, but settled on an angry woman’s anthem, Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good.”
Old school, but oh-so-right.
As she settled into her misery, she noticed a man and a woman down the beach. The woman in a pink bathing suit was on top of the man while another man kneeled behind her. Maryanne averted her eyes when she figured out what they were doing.
They were making love.
Great, she thought. Rub my face in it. I can’t get one man. And she has two. I wonder if they are cheating on their spouses as they act out their little From Here to Eternity scene.
The next time Maryanne looked, the woman had moved her blanket closer to shore and was sitting alone.
Maryanne was planning her next move, her last act of desperation and revenge. She was wondering how her family would react, how the woman who’d stolen her husband would feel.
She looked up to the sound of sirens as police and aid cars converged on the road up the beach. The woman in the pink bathing suit was waving her arms and screaming. In less than an hour, paradise had turned into a nightmare.
Half drunk but sobering up quickly, Maryanne ditched her remaining beer in a trash can, and returned to her car. The hot sands of the beach crunched like tin cans under her feet. A dose of reality had saved her life.
But not the man who’d been making love with the woman on the beach.
She saw on the news that night that one of the men had died during a boogie board accident. As far as she knew, the trio hadn’t been boogying on anything, much less a board. She didn’t say anything to anyone about what she’d seen.
She didn’t want to explain why she’d driven up to the North Shore.
A fifty-five-year-old woman named Selena Jonas sat at her kitchen table in Haleiwa. Her toes tapped a Morse code of agitation on a well-worn linoleum floor. She shook her head at the late-night circumstances as she eyed the wall-mounted kitchen phone. It stayed mute as it had all day. What did you do now, Ronnie? It was a rhetorical question, one she had asked over and over from the time he was small. Shoplifting at seven. Drugs at eleven. Juvenile detention at fourteen. Ronnie had been nothing but trouble. Over and over. He’d promised to get his act together. He said that he’d sober up, go back to school. He agreed to a curfew. All of that had been a big, sad lie.
She only moved from her chair to unhook the receiver to make sure that the line was not dead. Cigarettes piled up like Pickup sticks in a Scotch plaid beanbag-based ashtray. Her husband, a Haleiwa boat mechanic, entered the kitchen and patted her gently on the shoulder. He told her that whatever had happened, Ronnie would be all right.
It was a hope. Nothing more. Deep down, Selena knew it.
The police arrived three days after Ronnie went missing. The teenager’s body had washed up on the northern shore of Kauai, the island neighbor to the west of Oahu. A female tourist walking the beach near Kilauea found him. The sight was horrific beyond imagination.
Parts of his face and the soft tissue of his abdomen were missing.
“Juvenile sea turtles,” the officer told her, “made a mess of your boy. You don’t want to see him.”
Serena had braced herself for the news, and yet her resolve to hold it together was crumbling. “How did he die?”
“Looks like he hit his head on a rock or something.”
“You aren’t going to cut him up, are you?” Her eyes were raining tears.
“Yes, ma’am. If you mean are we going to do an autopsy? The answer is yes.”
Selena cried until she could cry no more. After that she could never look at the image of a green sea turtle without thinking of what had happened to her boy.
In Haleiwa that was very hard to do. Turtles were everywhere.
The next day the Honolulu Advertiser carried a story in the back of the news section. It was only five lines, the kind of article that means nothing to anyone but those who loved Ronnie Jonas.
Haleiwa Boy Dies
In Surfing Accident
Without mentioning Zach Campbell by name, the piece noted that the Jonas boy’s death been the second of two deaths in the area in three days.
It was the only time the deaths were linked in any manner.
The boy was loading his beat-up Chevy Cavalier with a stereo when Tori Campbell first saw him. She’d been walking in the neighborhood at first light; an obnoxious cacophony of tropical birds fed the irritation and anger she’d felt toward Zach. With each step, the anger bubbled over.
“Shut up,” she said to the birds. “Shut it up!”
She thought of all the things she could do to make her life better. She could leave him, of course. He’d only married her as arm candy and there was no genuine love between them. And yet, the idea of just walking away seemed like a futile waste of resources.
His resources.
He had the house before they married. He had the bank account. He had everything she ever wanted. The only problem was him.
Then she saw the boy. A beat later, he saw her.
“My stereo,” he said.
“Your stereo, my ass,” she said moving closer to his car. The backseat was filled with valuables that she knew never could have belonged to him. She reached for her cell phone.
“Please,” he said. “Do not call the police. It will mean big trouble for me.”
She moved closer, unafraid. “You should have thought about that before you stole from that house, you stupid little thug,” Tori said, indicating the beachfront two-story that had been the source of his booty.
“I can put it back,” he said, his eyes widening.
She had been young like that boy and she knew how hard it was to climb back toward respectability after the world decides who and what you are. His fear was useful to her.
“No, keep it.”
“I can go?”
She held a camera to her eye and clicked twice, first an image of Ronnie. The second time, she took a photo of the car, its Hawaiian license plate clearly visible.
Like the proverbial frog in the cool water on boil, Ronnie Jonas had no idea that the kettle was over a flame.
“I want you to come back here tonight. I will have something for you to do.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said.
“Baby, you don’t have anything to worry about.” She turned and walked away. If the boy came as she thought he might, everything would be perfect. Taking another party into her plan had really no risk. The other party would never live long enough to say a word.
Tori knew that she’d made a mistake on Banner Road. She would think twice about letting a witness live again.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Haleiwa
The present
In her room at the Haleiwa Beach Inn Kendall fiddled with the AC, which someone had set on chill-blaster mode. She’d gone from 90 degrees to 55 and was shaking from the unpleasantly cold air. She’d packed light, too light. She found a beach towel and wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl. All she’d learned that day was that no one liked Lainie’s sister, and her husband had died in a tragic accident.
Things she already knew.
She changed into an ice blue sundress and sandals and touched up her makeup. A few hours on the beach and she’d already lost the pallid skin that characterizes those from Seattle or the undead. Not a burn, but almost. Even so, she looked pretty good. Rikki Tyler, the retired Honolulu detective who had investigated the Zach Campbell beach accident, had agreed to meet her for dinner in the bar at Haleiwa Joe’s. She took the towel-shawl off her shoulders, stepped into the warmth of a beautiful Hawaiian evening, and made her way to the restaurant.
Tyler, half English and half Hawaiian, had all the good attributes of both. His hair was jet black and thick, and his brown eyes sparkled with intelligence.
Kendall introduced herself at the hostess station. She explained the situation with Jason Reed and her role in the investigation in Kitsap County. By way of full disclosure, she also confirmed that she had gone to high school with the O’Neal sisters.
“I used to be a friend of Tori’s,” she said.
“Well, I used to be a cop,” Rikki said, his white teeth gleaming in the dim light of the restaurant. “Until my wife told me she’d had enough. She wanted to return to Idaho. We moved. But Idaho is no place for a Hawaiian boy.”
Kendall understood completely. “There’s no ocean beach, for sure.”
“That’s why I’m back here, working at the Walmart in Aiea as a security guard. You caught me on my day off and, frankly, you reminded me of a case that I always wondered about.”
“What did you wonder about, Rikki?” she asked as they took their seats next to a boisterous group from the mainland.
He shook his head. “Want a drink?”
Kendall ordered a Blue Hawaiian.
“When in Haleiwa,” she said.
Rikki might have been retired, but he was still very interested in Tori Campbell. “What happened after your friend returned to the mainland?”
Kendall studied her unnaturally blue drink, fiddled with the pink paper umbrella that came with it, and took her time answering. “Good question. She put the house she and Zach shared up on the market within the first day or two. She sold it in a week. She bought an expensive house on Oyster Bay about three months later. It was way more money than I thought she had, but of course I hadn’t considered the life insurance.”
“Do you know how much she got?”
“Not really. Lainie was working at the P-I then. She told me she asked a friend on the business desk to look into the real estate deal. This was prior to the whole world being at your fingertips on the Internet. When a cell phone was only good for calling someone. She paid cash.”
“Must have made some major dough selling the first place,” Rikki said.
“Not really. They owed a lot on it. She maybe came away with a few thousand.”
“How much was the new house?”
“Four hundred grand. That’s chump change for a place here, but in Bremerton, we’re talking a Bill Gates–type property.” She paused a second, rethinking her statement. “Maybe not quite Gates.”
“She paid for it with insurance proceeds,” he said.
She nodded. “I guess so.”
Rikki gulped the last of his drink, and motioned to the bartender for another. “What’s the victim in Tacoma worth to her?”
“Two million.”
“She’s trading up, isn’t she?”
“Tori was always was that kind of a girl.”
They talked a bit more after a waitress left a plate of coconut shrimp and mango chutney—just delicious enough to halt the conversation a moment.
“You brought something for me,” Kendall said, indicating his briefcase.
“Like all retired detectives working at Walmart,” Rikki said with a self-deprecating smile, “I have photocopies of some of my old cases stashed at home. The criteria, not surprising to you, I’m sure, were the cases that I felt would be the subject of interest someday.
“How many of those? Just four. Your friend’s sister’s case made the cut.”
He opened his beat-up alligator briefcase and produced a small stack of papers. Lainie could see a few more than what she’d found in the North Junett house.
“What did you make of the crime scene?”
“Other than what I wrote?”
“Right. I mean you mention the terrain, the wide grooves in the sand, but you don’t really say what they were. Or if it was related.”
Rikki nodded. “Yeah, the grooves in the sand, as you call them, were strange indeed. They led from the parking lot to where they were sitting on the beach. We thought there might have been a cooler or a board dragged, but we couldn’t track ’em.”
“How come there were no photos showing them?”
Rikki fanned out the remaining pages. “I guess I blame myself for that. We didn’t do a good job securing the scene. We focused on the body and recovering it, not the entire stretch of beach. It is, after all, a pretty big beach.”
Kendall, adept at reading upside down as any reporter, noticed the toxicology report.
“What did tox say?” she asked.
Rikki flipped through the three pages that were the sum of the finding from the lab in Honolulu.
“Alcohol in his system, some trace of a sleeping pill, and—this was the only interesting part—there was some chlorine in the seawater in his lungs.”
“Chlorine?”
“Trace, really. But interesting.”
“Yeah, I mean, you keep Hawaii’s beaches spotless, but not that clean.”
Rikki laughed nervously, then became completely serious. “I think it was an error at the lab, Kendall. We were going through a bad time back then. Had a flake in the lab who thought that processing evidence was ignoring it.”
Kendall understood. While Kitsap County had never had such a scandal, other jurisdictions had a rash of them.
“Tell me about her. Tell me about your interview with her.”
“Memorable,” he said, grateful for the change in topic.
“Do you mean to make me cry? Do you get off on seeing a girl tormented for no reason?”
Rikki Tyler rolled his eyes and sipped his iced tea. The air-conditioning in the police station was working overtime, sending a cool stream throughout the space. After her husband’s body was recovered, the young woman with the stunning tan, blond hair, and slender body had exhibited enough evasive and combative behavior that an interview off scene was in order.
“You are something else, aren’t you?”
Tori Campbell looked at the mirrored surface of the window behind him. She knew there were prying eyes looking at her, studying her like she was an exhibit in a greenhouse or maybe even a zoo.
Yes, that’s how they’d been treating her. Like a caged animal.
“Do you mean to offend me, officer? I’m a visitor here in your so-called island paradise and my husband has died.”
“Detective,” Tyler said, now drilling his stare into her blue swimming-pool eyes. “The officers around here are the man and woman waiting outside to escort you to the bathroom. Should you need to go.”
Tori shifted in her chair. It was metal, wobbly, and not at all comfortable. It made a grating noise when she moved. She sat still.
“I don’t need to go anywhere but back to the mainland. Home.”
“You’re not going home.”
“Oh, but I am. I watch Law and Order. I know my rights and I know you can’t hold me.”
She stopped herself for a second, thinking about the possibility of using th
e Flirt she knew so well. The Flirt was definitely a skill not to be wasted. “My lawyer will be here in five minutes.”
“All right,” he said. “Maybe you’ll want to pass the time telling me about your husband and his little swimming accident. I talked with the rental house owner. Says you two weren’t getting along.”
“She’s a bitch,” she said, pressing her palms into the table. “I won’t say anything more about it.”
“What happened out there at the beach, Ms. Campbell?”
She stared at him. Her eyes were now glacial. She wasn’t saying another word.
“Don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
“I don’t—I won’t—talk about any of it. None of it whatsoever. But nice try, officer.”
“Detective.”
“So you keep reminding me. Or maybe you’re just reminding yourself.”
Tori had meant to get a rise out of him and she could see by the redness of his cheeks she’d been somewhat successful.
Rikki Tyler’s lips tightened. His tenseness and anger made Tori relax. It was as if she was sucking the power from him and she wound him tighter and tighter around her finger. He wanted her, she was sure. All men did. He wanted to rip her clothes off right then and there, and make love to her on that crummy metal table. Banging around. Dragging its legs over the cement floor where all the people on the other side of the two-way mirror could just watch.
Sure, he wanted her. They all did.
Tori didn’t say another word. She let the detective stew in his own juices. He’d be better at that than what he was trying to do with her. That’s how she saw it.
The pair sat there silently, fluorescents buzzing overhead, the rat-tat-tat of a woman’s heels against the tiled floor outside. People were moving on the other side of the glass, and then the door swung open.
Lyndon Knox, a fiftyish man with a slight belly but the posture of a man who knew how to wear a really good suit, entered the room. He was sweaty and in a hurry. He was well known among Honolulu law enforcement as a gun for hire who delivered the goods.