by Rob Swigart
Cobb tilted his head, causing the shadow of his porkpie hat to fall across his face in a dramatic slant. “What look is that?”
“He was rubbing his hands together and grinning.”
“Ah, so? The Kukui Nut has found something.”
“He said he wasn’t in police work anymore, so he really didn’t have any reason to share it with you. He said he was just a county employee now, shuffling papers and signing checks. He said when you shuffle papers, sometimes things written on the papers strike your eye. That’s what he said.”
“He didn’t suggest you pass this along to me, did he? No, he wouldn’t do that. He would wait for me to ask.” He sighed and looked at Chazz. “Shall we?”
“Mr. Linz isn’t going to get any better, and Mr. Propter isn’t better enough.”
Cobb locked up the car and they went over to the County Building. Sammy was on the telephone. He was speaking very slowly, as usual. But his words were very loud. It sounded as if he thought the person on the other end were either deaf or very stupid. “I… don’t… care… what… she… says,” he enunciated with false patience. “Tell… her… there… is… no… official… emergency… and… there… will…be… no… check!” He hung up and frowned at the instrument as if it were responsible for what had offended him. Then he deigned to notice the three men standing inside the door to his office. “Ah,” he said pleasantly. “If it isn’t my old partner. Good morning, Lieutenant. How are you this morning?”
Cobb shook his head. “Kukui Nut, you look as if you have just eaten the last honeycreeper in Kaua’i, I think. Like the cat.”
Darrell suppressed a laugh at Sammy’s wide and innocent expression. “I, Lieutenant?” Sammy replied.
Cobb turned to Chazz. “Shall we go? I don’t believe there’s anything of interest here. Since the Kukui Nut got slightly injured a couple of years back, you may recall, his brain has been affected. He has trouble sorting out the trivial from the significant. Finance is just the right place for a man of his peculiar turn of mind.”
Sammy rocked with his own suppressed laughter. This activity made his wooden swivel chair creak alarmingly. The desk began to vibrate. The flesh under his chin quivered, and his eyes nearly disappeared in the generous deposits of flesh that surrounded them. He wiped a tear away with the back of his thick hand. “Oh, very good. Very good. I always enjoyed your humor, Lieutenant. But be careful. I am the man in charge of paychecks now. Here.”
He held up a sheet of paper.
Cobb took it. It was a poor copy of a document typed on a machine that itself was in poor condition. Various rubber stamps indicating date received, date read, date acknowledged, date action was taken, and date filed obscured much of it. It appeared to be a page from an application for articles of incorporation. A block of spotty text about two-thirds of the way down the page was highlighted in fluorescent orange.
“And this?” Cobb tapped the text.
Sammy grinned broadly, showing large teeth with large gaps. “Read on,” he said.
Cobb rolled his eyes at the ceiling briefly, a gesture nearly lost behind his dark glasses. Then he read.
“Ha! Very interesting.” He showed the page to Chazz. Darrell craned his head over Chazz’s large shoulder to see. “Linz’s business connections.” Cobb took the page back and skimmed rapidly. “Mmm… Kapuna Development, of course, we know that… Chairman of the board… Palm Springs Properties… mmm… VPL Pharmaceuticals… pharmaceuticals? A drug company?”
Sammy nodded, his hands folded now across his ample stomach as he leaned back in his chair. Again it creaked dangerously.
“What kind of drugs do they make?”
Sammy shrugged. “The usual— antibiotics, one or two important antiviral drugs, birth control. That’s what it says in the brochure for the company I saw. Quote a major manufacturer unquote.”
“OK, what else? …Chicago Board of Trade… Linz Public Relations, Washington, D.C., a registered lobbying firm… hm, interesting. Most interesting. A busy man, our Mr. Linz.” He folded the paper into four squares and shoved it into his hip pocket.
“I thought you’d be amused, boss.” Sammy leaned forward and pulled a manila folder toward him across his desk. He opened it and began pretending to read.
“Well,” Cobb smiled broadly. “We’ll let you get back to work.”
Sammy grunted as they left the office.
The sky was still cloudless and blue. A gentle breeze fluttered off the mountains. Danger of contagion or poisoning seemed more and more remote. As they drove north, the warmth blew in the windows. Plumeria and frangipani, moist earth and thick sugar cane, even, perhaps, a hint of pineapple or papaya, sweetened the air.
Almost all was right with the world.
“Nothing left now but to clear Linz and we can go back to our quiet, comfortable lives,” Cobb murmured.
“Nothing to it, huh? Then why do I have the feeling it isn’t going to work out that way?” Chazz found himself doing wrist exercises, stretching the tendons. It reminded him of the nikkyo he had applied to an unknown person. Was it only last night?
Cobb nodded. “Me too.”
The hospital was first, geographically. They parked in the red zone. Dr. Shih was sitting at a hideous plastic table in the cafeteria, drinking something that looked like it might be soup of some kind. “Instant ramen,” she said. “It’s awful. Want some?”
“At ten-thirty in the morning? No, thank you,” Cobb said politely. He and Chazz got Styrofoam cups of tea and sat down. “So?” He stirred his tea moodily.
Dr. Shih grunted. She tilted her head and looked at him, her small face unreadable. Perhaps there was a question there of her own. As always, her white medical coat held a variety of shiny metal implements. “So,” she said.
“So, is there anything new to report? We understand our first patient is making some progress.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know why you care.”
Cobb did not pretend to be surprised. “It may not be a police matter. Then again, it may. Poisoning, you see. It sounds a little like attempted murder or something. Maybe. Or it could be an accident. Or he could have been allergic to happiness. You can never tell with haoles, especially haole journalists investigating crashing satellites that may be Russian and have toxins on them, or may only be American and have toxins on them. You just never can tell.”
“I suppose not,” she said drily. “Then you might be interested in knowing about the other patients.”
Cobb nodded, taking a sip of his tea. He did not exactly spit it out, but he did push the cup to one side after swallowing.
“One of the paramedics who picked up Propter was careless. Gary Delmore worked at a car-rental place. He drove Propter’s car back to the agency. He filled it with gas. He got sick. Lisa Omi took the keys from Gary and drove the car to the Shell station on Maalo Road, where they get the cars washed. She leaned against it, talking to Rafael Andrade, who works there. She got sick.”
Cobb fiddled with his dark glasses, carefully wiping the lenses with a paper napkin. “They all handled the car. They all got sick. Where is the car now?”
She shrugged. “I am not a detective, Lieutenant. I am a somewhat baffled pathologist. Certainly there is a connection. The car won’t help much, of course. It’s been washed.”
“Perhaps. But in police work we pass up no opportunity to spend taxpayers’ money. There may be fingerprints inside, say, belonging to someone other than the renter, Mr. Propter, or employees of the agency. There may be something concealed in the glove compartment or the trunk, something Rafael or Lisa missed. We will check it out. Not to mention that if there was something on the car it is now in the sewage system. Is this likely to be a public health problem?”
“Probably not,” she said, looking up as an orderly approached. “What is it?”
The orderly, a scrawny middle-aged man with a thin fuzz of hair on his winkled scalp, said, “You asked me to get you if Propter woke up. He woke up.”
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CHAPTER 22
ELLIOT PROPTER LAY against pillows inside a plastic oxygen tent, his face a desperate gray, his breathing as shallow and ragged as if death were pulling him down. The lesions on the skin of his forehead and cheeks, about the size of a quarter, were a virulent, almost fluorescent purple color in the center, surrounded by a ring of angry scarlet. Chazz, pressing against the glass window into the isolation unit, counted five.
“We can go in,” Dr. Shih said. “He does look better.” She opened the door and shooed out the ICU nurse, a large sullen woman with heavy makeup. The rack of life support monitors winked and beeped. Propter was still intubated, but Shih pointed out they had removed the pediatric feeding tube and given him some nourishment by mouth since he’d regained consciousness.
She leaned over him. “Aren’t we looking better?” she said, her head tilted as usual. Her eyes twinkled. Her bedside manner, Chazz thought, was atrocious.
Propter did not answer. His eyes remained closed and it was not clear he had heard. She took Cobb and Chazz aside. “You know, dealing with live patients is a trial, really. They don’t communicate well. Fortunately I am only a consulting pathologist for Dr. Standish here.”
“You prefer autopsies.” Chazz leaned against a bed table, which promptly slid away on extremely efficient wheels. He had to jump to grab a breakfast tray before it fell off. The tray held the three plastic-capped paper cups of Propter’s liquid diet. Chazz’s hand caught one as it slid. It was still warm.
She glowered at him in mock severity as she blocked the sliding table with her foot. “Yes, Dr. Koenig, I do. The dead are very cooperative— usually. That’s why I’m a pathologist.” She plucked the clipboard holding the patient’s chart from the end of his bed and glowered at it: temperature, pulse, respiration. “He’s improving,” she said. “The question that remains is how far he will improve. They’ve paged Dr. Standish. He’ll be here soon.”
Propter groaned.
Takamura leaned over him. “He’s not contagious?”
Dr. Shih laughed. It was a pleasant sound, considering. “If he were, half the staff of this floor would be in intensive care by now. That’s why we took all the precautions at first, but it appears safe. He’s been poisoned, but the poison is already in him. I don’t think it can get out.”
Cobb nodded. “Mr. Propter. Can you hear me?”
Propter’s eyes opened. “I’m sick,” he said. His voice was very faint.
“What the hell is going on?” a loud, profoundly deep voice said from the door. A large, youthful doctor with a tan even more profound than his voice marched in and glared at everyone. Then he noticed Dr. Shih standing by the window. “Oh. Hello, doctor.” His tone softened with respect.
Chazz, who was closer, read from the small plastic name tag on the doctor’s coat. “Wayne Standish, M.D.?”
“That’s what it says, that’s what it says, so it must be true. And you’re…?”
“Chazz Koenig. And this is Lieutenant Takamura.”
Standish held out his hand. “I’ve heard of you both. A pleasure, really.” He leaned over Propter. “How are we feeling?” He enunciated each word carefully.
He had to lean closer to hear the answer: “I don’t know.”
“Good,” Standish boomed. “Very good. Glad to hear that. You’ve been sick.” He turned back to the others. “He’s been unconscious for days. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for him, myself. Even Dr. Shih couldn’t figure out what it was, and I tell you, if she can’t figure it out, it’s something weird. Toxicity is tricky stuff. Not like disease. Disease you understand, even if you can’t do anything about it. We were looking for an organism, of course. But there warn’t none. No little critters. No parasites. Then we got the other three, bang bang bang, one right after the other. Same signs. Gotta be a toxin, I said. But what? Looking around for chemicals, toxic waste, something in the air. Got any ideas? Lots of folks talking about the satellite. Never heard of anything coming from a satellite before that wasn’t just radioactive or something. So I checked for that, too. Not that I have a lot of experience with radiation poisoning. Not the sort of thing I ran into in medical school or after, and especially not here, of course. Now a doctor from the State Health Department came in again earlier this morning, took a final look at the patients, pronounced them victims of a toxin of unknown origin, stated that the emergency appeared to have been highly exaggerated and that it was effectively over, and that this would be just one little unsolved environmental pollution episode among many. When it all subsides, we will return to normal. This is a quiet island, after all. Even boring.”
Cobb looked at Chazz. “That’s right,” he said. “And we’d like to keep it that way, wouldn’t we, Dr. Standish?”
Standish did not answer, as he was busy lifting the sheet to look at Propter’s chest. There were no visible lesions.
Chazz cleared his throat. “I’m not an M.D., of course. But I am a molecular biologist. It looked to me at first like an allergic response of some sort— with the SEM we could see mast cells ruptured at the site of the lesions, histamines in the tissue and all that. Now I have another notion. I found good evidence of DNA repair in the tissue samples. This is consistent with toxicity, I think, if combined with a reasonably powerful mutagen.”
“Yes, right. Good. But what kind of mutagen? What kind of toxin? I don’t know what to do for this man here. Antidote? Antitoxin? Just been giving him supportive therapy. Treatment is symptomatic, as we say. Fluids, bed rest, the usual boring ball of wax.”
Chazz did not ask how a ball of wax could be considered boring under these circumstances. He said, “I see.”
“I’d like to ask a question or two,” Cobb said.
“Sure, sure.” Standish waved his large athletic hand. He had large everything: large chin, large forearms, large nose, forehead, and ears. Even his hair, swept back, medium length, sun-streaked blond, gave off an impression of largeness. “Ask away. He’ll just get tired and fall asleep, I think. At least he’s awake now. That’s a significant change, right, doctor?”
Dr. Shih couldn’t help smiling. She nodded.
Cobb asked Propter if he knew where he was.
“Hospital,” he said. “They told me I was in the hospital.”
“Can you say what happened?”
A cloud seemed to pass over the patient’s eyes, though that could have been the effect of his breath on the inside of the plastic oxygen tent. “I… No, I don’t…”
Standish sat in the straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed and stretched his long legs out, stretching his ankles back and forth. “He told us he couldn’t remember anything since he got to the island. That’s consistent with trauma, not poisoning, unless the poison itself was traumatic.”
Cobb nodded. “You were driving up a Jeep trail. Do you remember?”
“A Jeep trail?”
“What is your profession, Mr. Propter?”
“I… journalist. I write for R and L Publications Group.”
“You were here on a story?”
“Yes, I…” Again his eyes clouded over.
“Is there anyone you want us to contact for you? A relative, a friend?”
Propter tried to nod. “Sister. In Cambridge.”
“Massachusetts?”
He nodded again.
“What’s her name?”
Cobb wrote it down, along with her address. “We’ll make sure she knows where you are.”
Propter nodded and relaxed some. Then he put out a hand and touched Cobb’s sleeve. Cobb leaned down. “My sister. She’s… not too well. I’d rather she didn’t know.” He paused. “The satellite…” He stopped.
“What about it?”
“It’s… I was following Wakefield. Get him, he’s the one, he knows all about it. Jordan Wakefield. I think it’s Defense. I got the number. Three-four-seven. From Vandenberg. Wakefield’s a SIG, a colonel. But the tape…” He swallowed with difficulty, then suddenly convulsed. Standish grabbed h
is arms and held him down on the bed.
The intensive care unit exploded into action. Dr. Shih summoned the sour nurse. Chazz and Cobb moved first to the back wall, then, when activity increased, out into the hall. A light flashed over the door. Someone raced in pushing a crash cart, switching it on as he wheeled it through the door.
Dr. Shih came out shaking her head. “I told you live patients were unreliable,” she said.
“Will he recover?” Chazz asked.
“Oh, yes. He’s had a series of these convulsive attacks; they’re gradually lessening in severity. I’m afraid, though, all this trauma to his system is going to leave him with some kind of permanent damage. Some of his neurological tests indicate a depressed central nervous system.”
“Do we know where he was staying?” Cobb asked, nodded toward the clipboard Dr. Shih still held in her hands.
She read off the address, a motel in the middle of Lihu’e. “Hardly a tourist,” she said.
Standish appeared, tsk-tsking. “It’ll be awhile,” he said. “The poor bastard’s gone into shock again.”
Cobb and Chazz went outside. Still fine weather. “What do you think?” Cobb asked. He inhaled the sweet warm air and let it out noisily. “Damn shame to waste a day like this.”
“Patria was going to look around Kapuna.”
“Sounds good to me. Let’s go. We want to take a look at Mr. Linz’s work anyway.”
Kapuna Shores Development bore little resemblance to the scale model in the office. A few of the gently rolling hills were there in outline, but earth-moving equipment had not finished the process of bringing them into line. One unit of the condos was finished, and a tennis court sat in the middle of a desert of raw furrowed earth of a dramatic blood red. The fence was up, but the tiny plantings around it were wilting.