Every caress had sent delicious shivers through her. Between the waves and his hands, her skin was hypersensitive and she was enjoying every minute of it. He was a strong swimmer, too, able to hold position despite the waves pushing them back and forth, easily avoiding being pushed into any of the shallows where they might end up touching and damaging the coral.
She was comfortable with him. Talking with him came easy and while she’d been unsettled sharing so much with him at first, she was feeling better about it. Partially because he didn’t seem to be judging her or jumping to any kind of over-familiarity. He hadn’t assumed he knew everything about her after the first heart to heart. He’d simply been interested to learn more. She was opening up to him, and she had a lot of reservations about it, but this feeling of…potential was something she didn’t want to miss out on. It was like swimming out past the inner reef. She was more exposed, but the experience was breathtakingly rewarding.
Jason took the lead for a bit and she indulged in a few caresses of her own as he did. She enjoyed his body and he caught her hand, giving it a squeeze before he placed her hand firmly on his behind. She almost laughed into her mouthpiece.
A sea turtle joined them for a few moments, maybe curious. Arin had followed its dive to get a closer look at the coral when strange movement to one side caught her attention. She turned her head to get a good look and froze in the water, then she kicked back up to the surface.
Jason came up with her and spit out his mouthpiece to talk. “What’s the matter?”
She took the time to clear her snorkel and then pulled her mouthpiece to the side. “Body.”
He stilled, treading water to hold position. “Want me to signal the lifeguards?”
She considered. “I want you to get a look with me first. We won’t go close. Just get a good look, then we call the lifeguards in.”
“Okay.”
They dove back down together and approached the body. It was a woman, stuck in the coral, arms waving in the rougher current. The corpse was mostly intact and couldn’t have been there for long. But there were cuts on the extremities and they weren’t bleeding anymore. It was amazing one or more sharks hadn’t swum into the bay to investigate the body if it’d been in the water long enough to bleed out. Hanauma Bay had reef sharks and even the occasional hammerhead had been spotted in the past.
Maybe it was a drowning victim? They were very close to the Witches’ Brew, one of two places where rip tides were a serious danger. But this woman wasn’t wearing a swimsuit. She was fully clothed and wearing a familiar red yukata-style robe.
Arin hung in the water, committing as many details as she could to memory. She wished she had an underwater camera with her.
Jason tapped her shoulder. When she rotated in the water to look at him, he pointed up. She nodded and followed him back up to the surface. They both took long breaths. They’d been down a full two minutes, give or take a few seconds.
Giving her a grim look, Jason turned to face the shore and lifted an arm out of the water to wave down the lifeguards.
“You can’t just take a day off, can you?”
Jason turned and scowled at Kenny as the tall man sidled up to them on the beach. The swarm of lifeguards and police had finished asking them questions. Now they were busy with body recovery or crowd control as a swarm of morbidly curious tourists tried to take pictures.
The man gave Jason an easy smile. “Hey now, I’m just sayin’ our lovely lady of doom does have a thing for finding trouble.”
“You’re not wrong,” Arin said calmly.
She stood next to Jason, one hand rubbing King’s ears as the big German Shepherd Dog sat panting next to her. The sun was rising higher in the sky and it was getting to the hottest part of the day.
“No chance of getting a sniff of the woman to find out how she ended up in the water over there?” Jason figured the chances were minuscule.
Arin shook her head. “Not after she’s been in the water like that.”
“She wasn’t a swimmer.” His suspicion was mirrored in the faces of the police on the scene as a forensic team arrived to begin processing the body.
“She also might not be a random stranger.” Arin made that statement in a very quiet voice. “Kenny, I’d appreciate it if you could get a hold of the report from the medical examiner as soon as it becomes available.”
Jason turned and stared at her. No way was that going to become accessible to the public.
But Kenny simply looked out over the bay with a serene expression. “Right on.”
Handy guy to know. Just how much intel could Kenny access?, Jason wondered. Neither of them was likely to answer him if he asked so he put a different question out there instead. “Who is she?”
“Not sure.” Arin said the words slowly. “But the yukata she’s wearing is from a massage therapy business in Chinatown. It’s the place my little sister helped convert from a front for the human trafficking ring into a legit business.”
Oh no. Jason studied Arin. She’d witnessed death up close and personal, but some hit harder than others. No matter how many times a person saw it, it didn’t get easier.
“Is it the woman you know? The one who asked you to find her brother?” He kept his voice so quiet, it might’ve been sub-vocal, so he’d leaned in to be sure she heard him.
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. The victim looks too tall. But there was another woman there with that kind of long hair all coiled up in intricate ways. The water pulled a lot of her hair free but I still saw the hair ornaments. If it is the woman I’m thinking of, she was at the massage parlor before with Kim. Zu and Raul interviewed her. But I don’t know if she was still involved in anything shady.”
“Seems likely, considering her current disposition,” Jason pointed out.
“True, true.” Kenny leaned over and patted his pig on the shoulder, then straightened. “I’ll find out what I can for you.”
“Thanks.” Arin raked her fingers through her drying hair. “Aside from this surprise, do you have any news for us?”
Jason was definitely interested, too, but he kept his gaze on the beach, scanning the paths and even the water for anyone who might be too interested in their conversation.
“Your new guy, we’ve got a name.” Kenny wasn’t speaking loudly but his voice was cheerful and rang with satisfaction. He really did seem to like finding information. “Mr. Jones.”
After a second, Arin cursed. “Seriously?”
Kenny shrugged. “Hey. It’s a good name, especially if you want to be hard to find.”
Jason nodded. “You have a point. There’s got to be countless people with the same last name out there.”
“Right on.” Kenny bent and picked up a decent-sized stick, then started drawing in the sand at his feet. “Your Mr. Jones hasn’t had time to fully establish himself in the islands yet. He started by shutting down the most vulnerable, exposed points of the operation, just like you said. That was only step one.”
“He needs fresh stock to replace the people he eliminated over on the Big Island, the old and the ones too sick to be able to work hard anymore.” Arin followed the logic. “There might be more we don’t know about.”
Kenny made a sound of agreement. “He’s also reaching out, trying to strengthen current connections and establish new clients. He’s more ambitious than your old friend. He looks to be building up political support as protection.”
“Ugh.” Arin kicked up a small puff of sand. “I hate politics.”
Jason grimaced. “Political connections could make things much more complicated and bury everyone in red tape.”
She started gathering up her tote and towel. “We need to eliminate him fast, before he tries to make an example of Mali.”
“Before he establishes political connections on the island,” added Jason. There wasn’t anyone paying attention to them, not on the beach and not in the water. He turned to Arin. “And before he gains new buyers.”
; She scowled. “We need to figure out where to find this guy.”
“True.” Jason added, “We need to take him down.”
Kenny joined in with his cheerful attitude. “Ah, but it’s not just about getting him behind bars. You need to cut him off from his support and whatever person put him here on Hawaii. Too many powerful men succeed in continuing to do business as usual from jail.”
“We can discredit him if we catch him this early, before he establishes anything.” Jason resisted suggesting they just locate the man and erase him from existence. It wasn’t easy to go the route of the ethical and morally upright.
“We need to discredit him with his backers and cut off his supply of workers to sell.” Arin folded her arms across her chest as she stared at the dead body. “We don’t know for sure she’s a casualty, but if that’s who I think it is, she wouldn’t be on this island if it wasn’t for that bastard. I am very willing to lay her death at his feet.”
Jason was more than inclined to agree. In fact, he admired Arin’s calm determination. Whether she had a contract or not, she was on a mission.
“I can keep looking for more info, but I don’t have those answers now.” Kenny sounded sad to admit he didn’t have all the intel they needed.
“You’ll find it.” Arin leaned toward Kenny, briefly bumping him with her shoulder. “I know you will.”
Kenny chuckled. “Right on. I’ll contact you when I’ve got something.”
Chapter Fourteen
Mali checked with the massage therapy place.” Arin dropped her phone into her lap and rubbed her hands over her face. “The woman I remembered, her name was Gigi. She hadn’t been in to work in at least a couple of days.”
Jason kept a close watch on the road and all approaches via the side and rearview mirrors. He was happy to be in the driver’s seat and surprised Arin had taken him up on the offer to drive back from Hanauma Bay. “So the victim might be her.”
“It’s sounding more and more likely, but we won’t know for sure until Kenny gets us the medical examiner’s report.” She sighed. “There’s no reason the police would actually give it to us. We’re not engaged in an official search and rescue operation right now and it’d be overstepping for us to officially request insight into an active murder investigation.”
But wouldn’t it be convenient if they did? He was kind of wishing a few things would come easy, just once in a while.
“Then we wait.”
She huffed out a laugh. “Not my forte, but yeah. We fill in Zu and Raul, then we wait.”
They fell into silence for a few minutes, heading down the highway back to Honolulu and Arin’s apartment. A thought poked at him until he finally nailed it down. The first person she’d called hadn’t been Zu or Raul. It’d been her sister. Thinking of family before anything else might make sense for a lot of people, but finding a dead body wasn’t at the top of his likely list for reasons to call home to Mom and Dad. Unless Arin had been worried and used it as an excuse to check on her sister.
“You told me why you left home, but you didn’t tell me why you left Mali.” Jason probably should’ve stopped pressing Arin to give up information about herself, but he couldn’t help it. She seemed amazingly complex, but really, she was deceptively simple at her core. Family, friends, the people she cared about came before anything else. She was a better person than he’d ever met in his life, if only because she didn’t pretend to be good.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Arin turned her head and stared at him from the passenger seat, suddenly wary.
Yeah, mention her little sister and the protective shift came up. He didn’t have any siblings to look out for and he didn’t experience a particular need to see to his parents. They’d eked out their own lives for themselves and had been more than happy to be relieved of the burden of caring for him when he’d decided to leave. But Arin had a family and her sister, in particular, meant more to her than anything.
“You said you left, but why? And why are you still walking on eggshells with her now?” That’s what was bugging him. They were both adults and Arin was still so careful in her interactions with her sister.
She hesitated for a long moment, then answered him. “She was afraid of me. Part of her still is.”
Ah. That’d be enough to stab him in the gut. It must be torture for Arin. The one thing that could hurt a person more than anything else in the world was what they cared about most.
“What happened?” There had to have been a trigger, something that had pushed Arin into the decision to sever ties with her sister. He couldn’t believe she would have left otherwise.
“I did.” Arin let her head fall back against the headrest. “She’s never been a sturdy person. As a kid, she was tiny and easily bruised, even breakable. She was bullied a lot, especially at friendly gatherings where all the adults hung out in the kitchen or living room and the kids ran around in the yard or basement. Bigger kids would do things like lock her in a shed and tell her it was full of spiders or shut her down in a basement with no lights on and tell her monsters were coming up the stairs. I’d come along and let her out, but I had to get the big kids out of the way first. She’d burst out of wherever they’d shut her and see me on top of some kid, punching the hell out of him or her.”
“Sounds heroic.”
Arin shook her head. “Mali didn’t respond well to witnessing those things. She cringed and ran away, brought back adults. I’d get in trouble for embarrassing my parents. They’d wonder why I couldn’t be a good little Thai girl like she was.”
“Why would she get you in trouble?” Jason was honestly confused. The two sisters didn’t seem the type, though he hadn’t had siblings so who was he to say what siblings might try to do to each other?
“I don’t think she was trying to. I think she was trying to save the person I was pounding into a pulp.” Arin’s voice was melancholy. “I never got upset with her for telling on me. She was right about me being too angry to stop when it was enough. I’d always go too far if you left me to it. I think she worried my outbursts would be directed at her someday. Seeing me angry or violent upset her. Even if I lightly tapped her on the shoulder or bumped her, she acted like I’d truly hit her.”
Jason swallowed growing frustration. He’d met Mali and he’d liked her. She was a brilliant woman and truly affectionate. Raul was obviously in love with her. But if Jason had learned this about the relationship between the two sisters before meeting Mali, he’d have thought some really uncharitable things about her.
“We’re fundamentally different.” Arin stretched her arms forward, then let them fall into her lap. “Her reaction to brute force wasn’t bad in any way. It’s just really hard to love your sibling when you’re afraid of what she can do. It’s different when Mali looks at Raul because she met him as an adult, came to accept him as an adult. How she feels about me developed when we were kids and it was more of an amorphous fear when she looked at me.”
“So you left.”
She nodded slowly. “I left her to face bullies on her own. My parents loved us, but they also went with the belief that she had to learn to persist through the tough times. They believed bullies would eventually lose interest and move on. And even though I promised her I’d always be there, I didn’t come back home for good.”
Because her sibling had been afraid of her. What would he do if he went home to his parents and saw fear in their eyes? He might turn on his heel and never come back.
Yeah, he could understand where Arin was coming from with her choices.
“If I couldn’t work it out of my system, I figured I could learn better control. I was obnoxious with my bursts of temper and destructive behavior. I didn’t like who I was, either.” Arin gave him a real smile, one of peace, but there was still no happiness there. “I went away. That was the most important part. The military was the right place for me for years while I figured out how to be constructive instead of just stupid angry all the time. And my sister
did get through the hard time in her life, too. She’s never mentioned me breaking the promise, hasn’t held it against me. But she doesn’t have to. I remember and I want to make it up to her.”
“I think you’re amazing.” He waited for her to scoff at him. He glanced at her before returning his attention to the road. She was blushing and he vowed to tell her more of what she deserved to hear. If she was embarrassed, she didn’t hear it enough. “Seems like you achieved what you were intending. Why not be more proud of what you do in front of your family?”
“Because what we do is still the stuff of nightmares.”
She had a point. Their line of work was risky at the least; more usually, it was dangerous and life threatening. Both of them had been doing private contract work for some time and tenure in their careers meant they had blood on their hands. A successful mission might mean they’d gotten in and out of a place clean, without being discovered. Or it meant they’d left a trail of bodies in their wake. The latter happened more often than the former, and he couldn’t think of any civilian he’d ever met who could handle those details without being at least partly horrified. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet someone who wasn’t.
He understood her being hard on herself. He didn’t think about it often, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought he liked himself either.
“Hey.” He waited until she turned her head to look at him, then dropped one hand down to rest on the center console between them. “You are fierce and confident, and you create safe spaces so those gentler souls you keep talking about have a place to be. You are amazing. Don’t think anything less than that of yourself.”
And he’d strive to be even a fraction as good a person as she was.
She sputtered for a minute. After a moment she placed her hand in his. “Hi.”
He grinned. There she was. This was the woman inside all the prickly defenses. “Hi.”
Fierce Justice Page 14