Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  He came around a bend and there was Handel’s Dodge nosed into the shrubs at the edge of the road. The headlamps were buried deep in the foliage, which glowed green with bright flecks between leaves. The horn was very loud.

  There was no apparent reason for the accident. Cobb approached cautiously, one hand on his holstered weapon. He peered in the window, then grunted, removing his hand from the butt of the automatic. He pulled open the door and touched Handel’s forehead, tilted against the wheel. “Jesus Christ,” Handel said, looking around. When he lifted his head, the horn stopped abruptly, leaving behind an eerie silence that seemed to echo with the recent sound. “What happened?”

  Cobb smiled, relieved. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I got your message. Ow.” He had his hand to his forehead, and pulled it away quickly. A lump was visible even in the filtered moonlight. “Somebody pulled in front of me. I hit him, I swear I did. Where is he?” He dabbed tentatively at the lump rising on his forehead. “Boy, have I got a headache!”

  Cobb looked down the road, a sliver of moonlit asphalt that vanished into the trees beyond the next turn. He moved around the car and back up the road toward the highway. Again the silvery asphalt was empty.

  “Hit and run,” he said when he returned. “You hit, he run.”

  Handel climbed out of his car and walked unsteadily to the front. The fender was crumpled and the headlight on the left side was out. “Lieutenant, they didn’t have any lights on. I woulda seen them if they’d had lights on. Suddenly they were just there.”

  “They?”

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I think there was more than one. I saw a face on the passenger side, just before I hit.”

  “What kind of face?”

  Handel put his hand to the swelling on his forehead again and probed at it, wincing. “A man, I think.”

  “You can do better than that, Sergeant.”

  “Male. Caucasian. Between thirty and forty years old. I couldn’t see much. It was dark and I didn’t get a lot of time to observe him.” His pride was hurt.

  Cobb nodded. “OK. How about the vehicle?”

  Handel looked sadly at his shattered headlight, buried in the loose leaves at the roadside. The leaves were long and narrow, with notches. Were they ferns of some kind? No, not ferns. “I’m sorry. The vehicle, you said? A van. A white van.”

  “The kind Dr. Koenig drives?”

  “No… he drives a Volkswagon, doesn’t he? One of the old ones?”

  “That’s right. Very good.”

  Handel shook his head slowly, favoring it. “It was a big one. Ford, Dodge, something like that. More like a panel truck, I think, like a delivery truck.”

  “Can you think of anything else?”

  Handel frowned. “One thing funny, Lieutenant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some kind of antenna on the top. Like a TV news truck, ones you see on television.”

  Cobb shook his head. “Everything from TV, Handel. Do you think this car will move? I could use a ride back down. That was something of a jog up here, and I’m not getting any younger.”

  The engine was still running, and the gears worked. Soon they were winding down the road toward the laboratories at a cautious pace. Once inside, Cobb put some ice from a lab refrigerator in a baggie and gave it to Handel to hold against his forehead.

  “What happened?” Patria asked when they entered. The lights were dimmed, and the small video screen on the SEM was lit up.

  “A small accident,” Cobb said shortly.

  “Oh,” she answered with elaborate indifference. “I see.”

  “Sergeant Handel had an unfortunate encounter with another vehicle on the entrance road.”

  “OK.”

  “This late at night, and with a possible emergency keeping many people in their homes, it could be thought strange to encounter another vehicle on the entrance road.”

  “Could it?”

  “Will you two get on with it,” Chazz complained. He was carefully adjusting the image, his eyes glued to the screen.

  “A white van or panel truck, the sergeant tells me.”

  “Mmm? Does that suggest anything to you, Chazz?” Patria asked sweetly.

  “No. Panel trucks for DRC are blue.”

  “Could the truck have been blue, Sergeant?” Cobb asked.

  Handel, seated on the far side of the room with his forehead lowered onto his ice pack, muttered, “Maybe light blue. Would have to have been real light, though. It sure looked white.”

  “Panel trucks for DRC are dark blue,” Chazz said without looking away from the screen.

  “One other item of perhaps small consequence. The sergeant tells me there was an antenna on top of the van. Now Darrell, down in Civil Defense, tells me he thinks the base station was down here somewhere. He didn’t really know, he just thought it sounded that way from the strength of the signal or something. Food for thought, perhaps.” Cobb picked up the telephone. “How do we call the gate?”

  “Four-five-five.”

  He dialed and waited. After a few minutes he hung up in disgust. “Does he go off duty or something?”

  Chazz did look up then. “Of course. Is it after midnight? They lock the gate then and you can only get in with a card.”

  “Cobb,” Patria pointed. “Are you carrying a gun?”

  He shifted uneasily. “I’m a policeman. I’m supposed to carry a gun.”

  “I’ve never seen you carry one before.”

  He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “To tell you the truth, I’ve got a funny feeling about what’s been happening— just a feeling, but for some reason I thought I ought to have it with me. Murder has a funny effect on me these days.”

  Handel tilted his head back and held the ice against it for another moment. A thin trickle of water found its way to his eye and he tossed the ice on the counter in disgust. “Lieutenant, you wanted me to meet you here.”

  “And you were off duty, enjoying a quiet beer at the end of a hard day, so this request is an inconvenience. Yet it was of some importance, now no longer so great.”

  Handel snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I forgot.”

  “Yes,” Cobb said drily.

  “No, Lieutenant, you don’t understand. Those Japanese men were there. And then this other guy came in. I had a hunch, you know, like with you and the gun. I had this feeling it was important. So I had Cairnes over at the Waimea substation run a check on the car while I called your wife. She said you wanted to meet me here, of course, and I did get the message, but I felt it was important, what with this guy showing up and Cairnes off at the station checking on it. That’s what took me so long: he was checking on the car, and I was in the phone booth calling, and then I didn’t know whether to come straight here or wait for him or go to the station. And before that I saw this guy come in, and I looked at his car and everything and then I went back inside to tell Cairnes to do the check, and well, I just…” He shrugged.

  “Quite,” Cobb said.

  “Well, I had a theory. Look, suppose this guy with the car…” He pulled the paper from his pocket, “His name is Welter— the station wagon has three outstanding parking tickets from downtown Lihu’e— suppose he’s the murderer. He has these Japanese men fly in from Tokyo. Who are they, really? Businessmen, we’re told. But we didn’t find any record of their arrival. They’re staying at a house owned by Kapuna Shores, right? Now it turns out that the name on the deed is Grant M. Welter. He’s listed as general secretary of Kapuna Shores. But Kapuna Shores has opposition, right? Now, suppose this guy Welter— he has contacts in Japan, right— he hires, or gets someone there to hire, some gangsters— you know, Yakuza. These gangsters sneak onto the island, shoot Linz, then go to the offices of Kapuna Shores for the payoff— Welter tells Kano to give them the money. Then they sneak off the island. See?”

  Cobb nodded. “Interesting theory.”

  Handel picked up his ice pack again. “It’s possible,” he said. He pressed the
pack to his forehead again. Again a trickle of water ran into his eye and he threw the ice down in disgust.

  “It is indeed possible. I would say it is too soon to make theories, though. As Sergeant Chan would have said, ‘Watch and wait. Youth, I am thinking, does not like that business.’ The first impression is not always correct, even when based on a hunch. Hunches are subject, unfortunately, to interpretation. For example, how do they leave the island?”

  “I don’t know. Airplane. Boat. Somehow. It can’t be that hard.”

  “No, I suppose not. We should check with the tower at the airport for plane traffic. We should check with the Coast Guard for boat traffic. Frequencies are monitored, are they not? Arrivals and departures are usually noted?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then you have a day’s work ahead of you.”

  Handel looked up. “You think it’s worth following?”

  Cobb sat down on a two-drawer file cabinet and looked into his hat, as if reading a message left by some previous owner. “Yes,” he said. “I do think it’s worth following. They are strangers on this island. They are associated somehow with the dead man, apparently in a simple investment deal, but perhaps there is more to it than that, as you say. We should at least find out when they arrived here for sure, just in case. I would suggest also a discreet conversation with Mr. Welter as well.”

  Handel smiled. “I’ll get on it first thing.”

  Cobb grunted. “Good. And now let us see what Dr. Koenig has found for us in our informal and unofficial investigation of the other mysterious problem.”

  “As you know—” Chazz began, falling into his lecture mode. Patria winced, and Chazz glared at her a moment before repeating, “As you know, this is the only scanning electron microscope on the island. It might make sense to send the samples to Honolulu, but for some reason Dr. Shih seemed to want me to take a look at them. These were taken from the site of a lesion on the patient, listed as ‘Elliot Propter’ in the hospital record. We assume that he had some reason for going up the jeep road the night the satellite crashed.”

  “Yes, Chazz. Get on with it, please.” Patria yawned. “It’s getting late. Do we have a medical emergency or not?”

  Chazz smiled without humor. “I don’t know. The lesions look as if they were invaded by something. According to the Medical Examiner the lungs were also affected. Presumably Mr. Propter inhaled some substance that made him sick.”

  “Great,” Patria said, unconsciously cupping her hands over her stomach. “Something’s in the air?”

  Chazz shrugged. “He could have been allergic to something. I’m not a doctor. Take a look, though.”

  The small screen displayed an alien landscape, painted in sepia. Stretched sheets of some tissue filled the center, sheets with gaps that revealed additional layers beneath. At the top a clot of lumpy boulders spilled across the screen, and around the boulders small, light-colored flecks had been poured onto the supporting sheet. Toward the bottom of the image a tangle of fibers tightly enclosed a group of saucer-shaped cells, which Chazz said were fibrin threads immobilizing red blood cells.

  “These cells at the top are mast cells, a kind of granulocyte, common in the skin. This is a lesion, of course, so we would expect some bleeding, and the production of fibrin to clot the blood.” He adjusted the verniers and the image expanded onto the boulders. The light flecks grew larger, and began to resemble white peanuts on the surface of the spherical cells. “Mast cells release histamine, among other things. That is, I think, what these flecks are. Looks like Styrofoam pellets spilled out of the cell. See, here is one that still contains its histamine capsules.”

  “It does sound like an allergy, doesn’t it?” Patria asked.

  Cobb nodded. “It could.”

  Handel turned away from the darkness outside. “What kind of lesions?” he asked without turning.

  “These were quite small ulcers in the skin. We see very active histamine production here. Now look.”

  The image swept past as if they were traveling over the bizarre landscape. “Magnified four thousand times,” Chazz said. The boulders grew larger as they approached; it seemed they swooped over rounded hummocks, which flattened as the view expanded, then rose above the edge as the view dipped down into a fissure in the cell surface. The peanut-shaped histamine capsules grew larger, showing roughened skins not unlike the nut they resembled. The capsules emerged from caves in the cell surface.

  They came to a round, roughed sphere with a pronounced cleft in it. Chazz bled in a yellowish color, which enhanced the contrast with the sepia background. Sticky threads connected the new object with another large cell, which now appeared to have been in the process of extending pseudopodia toward this apparent stranger.

  “Macrophage,” Chazz said. “It was trying to eat this invader, whatever it is. Note the tight coils of this object and the cleft. It seems to me it’s a protein of some kind. It has apparently provoked the mast cell to release its histamine granules.”

  “That sounds like an allergic response,” Patria suggested.

  Chazz nodded. “It does. But it’s a pretty severe one.”

  “Histamines? That why we take anithistamines? For colds and stuff?” Handel asked.

  “Right. The mast cells have receptors for type IgE antibodies. A foreign substance invades, the antibodies attach to it, mast cells attract the antibodies and get a signal to empty. The histamines then irritate and inflame the area. In this case enough to cause lesions. The other signs— dizziness, vomiting, gastrointestinal bleeding, diarrhea, and so on— could be effects of this reaction as well. I don’t really know. As I say, I’m not a doctor. But it seems possible.”

  “So we’re dealing with an allergy here?” Cobb asked.

  Chazz nodded. “Sure. A simple allergy, that’s all. There’re some questions left, though.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one thing, what the hell is it he was allergic to? It doesn’t look like anything I recognize easily. I’ve tried a computer match on morphology— visible shape and structure— and there’s nothing in the database it recognizes as foreign.”

  “Could it be something from the satellite?” Cobb persisted.

  “Possibly. It strikes me that the lesions were all on exposed skin: his face and hands. He got rained on. Prevailing winds came down from the hills toward the coast. Toward him.”

  “Well.” Patria had relaxed some. “That means since it was an unusual allergic reaction and not anything particularly sinister, we won’t really see more cases.”

  “Mm-hm. Except for the other questions.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “Why do I have a feeling this is not as simple as it seems?”

  Takamura thought for a moment, then decided. “No doubt you wondered why the State Health Department ordered the emergency sirens, twice? And, of course, we’d like to know who the people in the van that the sergeant ran into were, where they went, and how they got out. It means they had to have an entry card. And why was Mr. Propter trying to get up the jeep trail to the satellite? I confess I’ve been holding out on you, but earlier today I was down in the Civil Defense office. We monitored some radio communications of the government team investigating the satellite. I’m afraid that what we heard now makes sense. I was hoping it didn’t, but they said, very clearly, that there was a toxin on the satellite. They said, ‘We have Candide confirmed’.”

  He slid off the file cabinet and lifted the phone receiver. While he was dialing Chazz and Patria looked at one another.

  “Candide? It doesn’t mean anything to me,” Patria said. “I know a little about archaeology. Does the archaeological site at Kapuna Shores have anything to do with all this?”

  “Nothing,” Chazz insisted. “Coincidence, that’s all. I don’t see any connection between the satellite and Linz’s death. What is the toxin, though?”

  Cobb hung up. “Chazz, you spent time in Japan, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, a little. I studied aikido there
for about six months. Why?”

  “I was thinking about Sergeant Handel’s notion. If these men from Japan were here to get rid of Linz, your experience could be useful. But we have another pressing problem, now. The satellite.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just called the hospital. We have three more cases of this allergy of yours. All in a coma. One was a paramedic.”

  CHAPTER 13

  ANGELA WAS STILL IN shock when Peter Linz arrived. She’d been drinking some and had trouble finding the knob of her room door. Her hand fumbled, turning it one way, then the other. He kept knocking while she worked.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw who it was. She tried to close the door, but his foot was in the way.

  “Hello, Angela.” He pushed his way into the drawing room and wrinkled his lip at the clothes scattered on the chairs and floor leaving a trail into the bedroom, the ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes, the half-empty glasses on the dresser. He closed the door behind him. “Please,” he said. “Don’t mind me. Do finish your drink.”

  “Peter, I don’t know what happened. He was just… dead. He went out in the morning and didn’t come back. Your father did that a lot lately, left me alone. He was so busy. I didn’t mind, I suppose, I had things to do— go to the beach, shopping. This was a business trip, anyway. It was all right. He had a meeting but he didn’t come back. They found him…” She slumped into a deep, brightly patterned easy chair, holding her drink in both hands.

  “Sometimes I wonder why he divorced my mother only to take you on. There’s little enough difference as far as I can see. She always complained too.”

  “That’s not true,” she flared. “I’m not complaining. Anne didn’t love him.”

  Peter turned away. “And you did,” he said. His voice was flat, without inflection.

  “Yes!” She shouted it, then calmed herself with an effort. “We had a good thing, Peter. A good thing. Our sex life was…”