Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

In his office he put the specimens I)n the shelf above his desk, paused at the door for a moment and then carefully locked it. It was time he logged on to SCINOTE again.

  There was an email message from Patria. He ran it through the printer.

  “Practicing kahuna?” she asked. “Yucatan has similarities. Could there have been contact, cultural dissemination, between the Hawaiian group and the N.A. mainland? Some correlations in plant use, healing and magic. Kahunas fall into a number of different categories, though. I need to be there. Shall I come?”

  Hell, yes, he thought, reaching for the keyboard. He paused halfway. No, he thought. He hadn’t actually met a kahuna. Rumors from Dr. Silver, a contact, through Dewilliter perhaps. Mention of cults. Praying to death. Better be honest. This would disturb her field work, more important to her than family.

  He told Patria that there were rumors only. He told Patria that it was warm here, even in February, and the air was clean.

  He told her he could use an anthropologist here.

  He didn’t mention that he thought he wanted children. She did not want children, and she knew he knew she didn’t.

  So he flipped through the pages of Poisonous Plants of Hawaii. It was on Page 25, the plant Silver had mentioned. Abrus precatorius. Otherwise known as the Rosary pea, the Crab’s eye or the Jequerity bean. The seeds, ground down to a paste with cold water, could be formed into needle-shaped cylinders. If inserted beneath the skin, death resulted in a matter of hours.

  The fatal dose was 0.01 milligrams per kilo of weight. The seeds were red and quite small. The effects were neurological, similar to snake venom.

  Unfortunately, the plant was a shrub native to India and Burma, and the seeds were certainly larger than the two micron structures Chazz had examined under the electron microscope. A contemporary kahuna could have learned to use it, since the recipe was right here in this book. Anyone could have learned to use it, to make needles out of these ground seeds, inserted it into John Doe’s skin. But clearly that had not happened. He had not been poisoned by Abrus precatorius.

  It was a dead end.

  15

  Renfrew was bored.

  The couple played, sliding one after the other down the three brief cascades, out of sight below the bank of the final twist. They reappeared, trudging up the trail, legs black to the knees with mud, and slid down again.

  Rain drifted overhead, fell on the three of them, the couple and their watcher, drifted on again. The sun emerged, washed the Slide in brilliant yellow, leaving Renfrew in shadow.

  At last the girl unwrapped the food she brought from her trunk, and the two of them ate, feet dangling in the stream. Their backs, splattered with dark mud, were turned toward Renfrew. The boy had constellations of acne scars across his back and shoulders.

  Renfrew was growing restless. The mosquitoes were boring in now that the sun had come out and the wind had died. The swamp upriver exhaled a penetrating damp heat.

  The girl lay back against the bank and stared into the sky while the boy wandered off upstream toward the swamp, pushed his way into an ohia lehua thicket and vanished from sight. Silence fell.

  Renfrew watched the girl for a while; he could see only the top of her head and shoulders. She had one arm thrown across her chest, and appeared to be asleep. He swung the glasses back toward the forest where the boy had disappeared, but there was no sign of him.

  He put the glasses down and waited. There was nothing else for him to do. A mosquito settled on his forearm and he spent some time watching it. The mosquito was not large, but he knew the bite would itch like hell later on. He was tempted to smash it, but he refrained. Instead he watched. The tiny proboscis poked tentatively at his skin a few times, then slid in effortlessly. He watched as the abdomen turned pink, then red as it filled.

  A gecko was perched on a stone nearby, throat swelling and deflating slowly. Very carefully Renfrew moved his arm toward the lizard. He brought the mosquito close, and the lizard responded by opening its mouth slightly. Renfrew waited some more, wondering if this little drama would have any outcome.

  It did. The mosquito withdrew its proboscis and lifted sluggishly from his arm. The gecko moved swiftly and the mosquito was gone. Renfrew watched as the lizard snapped its mouth soundlessly a couple of times and swallowed. Not much of a meal, he thought.

  It occurred to him that the gecko had now eaten a little bit of Renfrew, who briefly considered eating the gecko to complete the circle. The gecko threw him a quick look and vanished over the far side of the rock.

  Nothing was happening. The girl was still asleep. He checked the time, then spoke into the recorder. “One-fifteen P.M. Male subject still gone. Female asleep.”

  He picked up the binoculars and watched her sleep. He was about to put the glasses down again when she stirred, changing position. Her arm moved, uncovering her breasts. He grew bored again. He envied her being near the stream. The mosquitoes were probably not so bad there.

  That thought reminded him of the mosquito that had probed his forearm. Sure enough, the spot was red and swollen. As soon as he looked at it, it began to itch furiously. Renfrew decided not to scratch. He stared at the bite, feeling the itch flow up his arm. It was easier to take than the pig wound. Then the pig wound began to itch. He thought between the two of them he would go crazy. He was about to scratch when the boy friend reappeared, carrying some mountain apples. He stood over her until she stirred and opened her eyes.

  Now, Renfrew thought.

  The boy sat beside her and they ate fruit, tossing the pits into the Slide. They were talking. Finally the boy stood again, and once again Renfrew thought, Now.

  But the boy went sliding. After two or three trips, she joined him. They took two more trips together; the second time they failed to reappear.

  “Come on, come on,” Renfrew breathed, watching through the glasses, but there was no sign of them.

  “Damn.” He clicked on the recorder. “Two-forty P.M. Subjects have gone to ground at the bottom of the Slide. This may be it. I’ll give them ten minutes, then move in for confirmation.”

  He slipped the recorder into his pack. Ten minutes later he started down the trail toward the Slide. It began to rain slightly as another shower moved in. He thought if he could move into position above the last switchback where the trail descended to the stream, he would be able to see them at the foot of the Slide.

  It took five minutes of hard scrambling before he came around the last bend. They probably feared some other hikers might show up, and wanted their privacy.

  The thought was small comfort to Renfrew, but he caught sight of the boy friend’s head and shoulders, then saw them both clearly, so clearly he had to drop back and move more cautiously.

  They were below the first small set of rapids.

  Renfrew pulled back and waited. It was only a matter of time. He watched the cloud formations moving in the sky. They formed transitory curtains of rain which hung over the swamp for a few moments before they dissolved, to re-form in another place. He could hear the water move down the Slide, the white water of the rapids downstream, the faint hiss of moisture moving on the stems and leaves of the grasses beside him. He was listening for something else.

  Finally he heard it. The girl was screaming.

  Her screams were thin and far away; Renfrew could barely hear her. It was happening so far away, in a dreamland. Even when Renfrew was lying in the rain shot full of holes, or gored by the boar, death was far away. When he emptied the clip of his M16 and saw the VC heads fall apart in the distance, it had nothing to do with him.

  Very leisurely Renfrew moved down the trail until he could see the couple.

  The male subject was sprawled in the rapids. His feet and arms were twitching randomly on the rocks; blood began to stain the water as the rock cut his ankles and feet. The girl was still screaming, her hands over her mouth. Renfrew could barely make out her words above the white water whipping over the boy’s body.

  “What is it?” s
he was screaming. “What is it? What is it?”

  The boy’s eyes had rolled back into his head, his mouth had fallen open, and he appeared to be trying to swallow. It was just like the old woman. Renfrew made a note of that in his pocket recorder. The girl had carried the poison or whatever it was. The pair had made love. The boy had died.

  Mission accomplished.

  Renfrew watched the body go limp. It rocked obscenely, white water pouring over his knees and belly. The head fell back into the water upstream, was pushed up until it faced the sky, mouth and eyes agape as another rain shower began to fall. Water had pooled in the open mouth.

  The girl turned and climbed in panic up the rocks beside the Slide. She would be going for help. “What is it?” she kept asking, over and over.

  Renfrew waited a few moments to make certain the boy was dead. Then he unsheathed his bayonet and started after the girl.

  16

  “I don’t know why I didn’t expect mosquitoes,” Chazz said, slapping. “Travel brochures, I guess.”

  The group trudged single file along a narrow trail. Swamp plants grew low to the ground on either side. Through a mist he could dimly make out the edges of forest. It was not raining, but moisture beaded on Ben Silver’s eyebrows and Andrea Silver’s short gray hair. There were seven of them on this field trip, including Cutter, the entomologist; Thomas, the sundew man; and Bradlow, whose specialty was arborescence. Dewilliter had declined.

  Despite the cooling mist, they were plagued by mosquitoes.

  They had stopped at the edge of the bog and looked up. The clouds that moved over and around them were thinning, breaking into lumps, and the pale oval of sun hung nearly overhead.

  “This is paradise, anyway,” Dr. Silver grunted. “Look around. An isolated ecosystem like this is paradise for botanists and entomologists, of course. Tourists, too. Actually, the mosquitoes are not native.”

  “Someone imported them, I suppose.” Chazz scraped thick mud from his shoes with the edge of his hand and flung the clods into the ohia lehua thicket.

  Andrea laughed. “Yes,” she said, “someone imported them. A sailor who was annoyed that the missionaries wouldn’t let the girls swim out to the sailing ships any longer took a cask of brackish water from the hold and cracked it open onshore. It was full of mosquito larvae. His revenge on the missionaries.”

  The sun brightened as the clouds thinned and shredded away. A still heat settled over the swamp. All the plants glistened with the mist.

  “This is as good a spot as any, I think,” Silver said. “We’ll stay here awhile, then go on down to the Slide.”

  Chazz unpacked a magnifying glass and sample envelopes and strolled around the bog, moving carefully from tussock to tussock, avoiding the boggy ground. Andrea exclaimed from time to time over some particularly symmetrical mound of sedge, calling for Ben.

  “Koenig!” Dr. Thomas was gesturing him over to a tiny clearing which cradled the delicate paddle shape of a sundew flower, its sticky spines seeming to grope in the air. Chazz dropped to one knee beside Thomas to observe the plant, and watched as a small crab spider shaped like the crown on the Statue of Liberty began weaving. It was about to attach one end to the tallest sundew. Cutter appeared behind them to watch. Chazz peered through his glass as the spider made its fatal mistake.

  There was a leisurely violence in the way the flower closed itself around the spider, which had been struggling for some seconds with a kind of puzzled resolution to free itself from the sticky gum on the inside of the flower. Once the flower was closed, though, the spider was gone, invisible.

  “They don’t usually like spiders,” Cutter murmured. “Usually they work together. The spider made a mistake.”

  “Sundew eating?” Silver said behind him. Chazz twisted around and shaded his eyes as he looked up. Silver was holding some blades of grass in his hands. “I think I may have found a new species,” he said, proffering the blades.

  “It’s a variant of Panicum.”

  “That’s nice,” Chazz said.

  “Yes,” Silver said vaguely. “Nice. They used to build with these grasses. Houses, you know. The kahunas were very good with plants on these islands. Knew all kinds of poisons and medicines. Shall we go on to the Slide? It’s a different ecosystem there.”

  “Yes, all right,” Chazz said. Cutter and Bradlow joined them; the other two said they might just as well stay here in the bog. The Slide was only a half-hour walk to the east.

  “All right,” Silver said. “Well be back in a couple of hours, everybody.”

  The five of them set off along the trail. Forest sprang up around them, the trees twisted and stunted with the excess moisture. The path seemed to meander aimlessly, as if it were more interested in staying to the driest ground than in actually getting anywhere. Chazz saw unlikely stands of Sugo pine through openings in the forest. When he asked about them, Silver told him they had been planted in a reforestation project. There were so many introduced species in these islands it was difficult to discern which plants and animals were native.

  Chazz could hear running water in the distance, which grew louder as they slogged on. Finally they came around a bend in the trail and emerged from the trees. The top of the Slide was at their feet.

  “Pretty,” Chazz said.

  “Used to be something of an attraction for tourists, I understand,” Silver announced. “It’s been closed to the public for a few years, though.”

  “Why?”

  Silver shrugged. “Who knows? Too many hikers, or the Park Service can’t patrol this area, or there’s been some violence around here, or something. There’s a car park about a mile down that way, but the trail is fenced off.”

  He started to climb across the stream, and the others followed. Chazz let his eye travel along the Slide to the final bend. The top cascade was quite high, and he imagined one would hit the first pool at the bottom with considerable velocity. It looked like fun, and there were fewer mosquitoes here by the stream. It smelled quite fresh.

  The group scattered, moving along the trail down the stream, pausing from time to time to examine some interesting plant. Bradlow pointed out to Chazz some of the trees that once were mere shrubs. The climate and soil were so favorable that shrubs became trees.

  It was Cutter who found the bodies. He appeared, clambering up the slippery rock and mud of the trail, his face ashen. At first Chazz thought he was having an attack of some kind, because he was gasping and pointing downstream. Then he began to retch weakly, as the others climbed down the trail.

  The bodies were arranged side by side on the bank.

  The faces had been neatly sliced from chin to crown. The skulls were cracked open and the contents removed.

  17

  “The man from the Centers for Disease Control gets in tonight.” Takamura chewed nervously on a toothpick. The rotors of the big Sikorsky flexed gently overhead. There was no large clearing close to the Slide, and the emergency crew had to put down at the edge of the swamp. Takamura, Chazz and the other biologists were waiting for the pickup team to return with the bodies. The scientists were huddled under the trees a few yards away. Ben and Andrea Silver were both very pale.

  Chazz nodded. “It looked like a ritual, Cobb. They were laid out like offerings.”

  “Yeah. At least this one wasn’t a disease. This island is going crazy.”

  Chazz wasn’t listening. “Sure?” he asked.

  “Mmm? Am I sure it’s going crazy?”

  “Are you sure this wasn’t the disease?”

  “Disease? Doesn’t look like it, does it? Throats cut, faces sliced open, skulls emptied. Looks like some kind of cult to me. Or a madman.”

  “Maybe,” Chazz said.

  The sun was low. It had taken Chazz, running all the way, forty-five minutes to get from the Slide to the lab vehicle. He had used the CB to call the police. Everyone else had remained in the swamp; no one had volunteered to remain at the Slide.

  Four men with stretchers were
toiling back up the muddy trail with the bodies. Chazz did not envy them the job. It was hot and humid here in paradise, and now that it was evening the mosquitoes were swarming.

  He glanced over at the Silvers. Andrea was standing beside Ben, one arm around his slumped shoulders. Neither of them looked good. He seemed to be in shock. But then, he had seen the bodies; she had not.

  Takamura went over and suggested that since it would soon be dark, the biology team might as well hike on out and get something to eat. The helicopter could take the rest. Silver climbed slowly to his feet and walked off after his wife. The others followed. It would be dark by the time they got back to the lab.

  Chazz doubted they would want to eat. Takamura came back as the last of them vanished up the trail.

  “Who is he, anyway?” he asked. “The skinny one. He seemed very upset.”

  “Benjamin Silver. He directed my dissertation research. That was twelve years ago. I haven’t seen him since Asilomar.”

  “Asilomar?”

  “A conference center in Pacific Grove, California. Biochemists from all over the world met to hammer out some guidelines for research into what was called ‘experimental manipulation of the genetic material of microorganisms.’ It seemed quite dangerous then. We were making chimeras, organisms that combined genetic material from entirely different species; in some cases material from plants and animals were combined. People were imagining human beings crossed with bumblebees, lions with snake tails, that sort of thing. Nonsense, of course. The real concern was with disease organisms— cancer viruses, influenzas, bacterial infections created to be resistant to all antibiotics. New and hideous creations escaping from the laboratory.”

  “Is that a danger?”

  “Of course. But between the treaties against biological warfare and the National Institute of Health Guidelines, the danger is minimal. Without the guidelines, the danger is unknown. And that by itself is the danger.”