by Rob Swigart
“I would be grateful,” Cobb said. “As the great detective, Charles Chan, was known to say, ‘The guest who lingers too long deteriorates like unused fish’.”
“Eh?” Fredik tilted his head and allowed a look of deep concentration to pass across his brow. “Well, of course. I suppose, or suppose not. No, indeed. Well, I had it out for you, anyways. Here it is, Chloris.” He handed a five-by-seven manila folder across the narrow counter to Cobb, looking all the while at his wife with a dubious expression. Cobb could feel the outline of another audio tape without its case.
“You mentioned some other people asking about the man in two-twelve?”
Fredik nodded vigorously, sending his hair flying again. “Yup.”
“Could you describe them?”
Fredik turned slightly and shouted. “Chloris!”
“I’m right here, Fredik. No need to shout.”
“Them other men for two-twelve,” he shouted with no lessening of volume.
She nodded, her fingers writhing. “Men,” she said. “Three men. No, there was two others waiting out by the truck. That’d be, let’s see, three and two, that’s five of ‘em. Wouldn’t tell ‘em nothing, though. None of their business. Looked like police, though. Didn’t say they were, just looked like it. From the mainland, I thought.”
“The truck, you said?”
“Panel truck, white. Had a funny aerial on top.”
He nodded his thanks, gave a slight bow, and went out into the street.
The day was well advanced, but he could not say as much for his case. All clues seemed to point to the satellite, none to the murderer of Victor Linz. And the satellite, it seemed, was no longer front page news, but fit material for a radio contest instead.
He was only two blocks from police headquarters, so he walked over, leaving his car parked on Rice. If he noticed the Ford Bronco pulling away from the curb and driving toward the Kuhio Highway, he gave no sign.
Hirogawa was leaving. “Don’t you ever take that hat off, Lieutenant?” he asked, returning to his desk for a moment.
“Sometimes, Sergeant. Sometimes. When it’s especially hot.”
“Well, you’ll take it off now, I think. There’s some folks upstairs waiting for you. Here.” He handed a piece of paper to Cobb. “Ballistics report.”
Cobb lifted his eyebrow and took the paper. “So?” he said, but he took the stairs two at a time.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Handel said when he opened the door.
“Hello, Miss Billings, Corinne.” Before they could answer the phone rang. He picked it up with an apologetic smile. “Takamura.” He removed his porkpie hat and set it in the OUT tray.
“This is Shirley, downstairs. We got an answer to that license you wanted checked, L-M-L-four-three-two. Honestly, I don’t know what Betty was thinking. The computers are perfectly easy to use.”
“What about the license?”
“Well, it’s kinda funny.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t exist. No such number. The plate must be forged.”
Cobb hung up thoughtfully. “ ‘I now gaze solemnly at stone wall’,” he said.
“Trouble finding clues?” Sergeant Handel asked.
“On the contrary,” Takamura said, shaking off his momentary depression. “We have far too many clues. I’m glad you found Ms. Billings.”
“She was more or less kidnapped,” Handel said.
Cobb lifted his brows. “More or less? That’s a serious matter, especially if it’s more.”
“That man, Peter Linz, he said they needed to talk to me.” Lianne said. “Then there was a little confusion. We got locked in.”
Cobb looked at Handel, who said, “They spent the night in the cooler.”
“The cooler?”
“At the house. You know, a room where you store vegetables and stuff.”
Cobb nodded. “You have not been able to follow recent events?”
“No. Has something happened? The hospital said Elliot was still in a coma.”
Cobb looked at his IN and OUT baskets. Except for his hat, they were both empty. He could not recall a time when both baskets had been empty at the same time. He lifted the hat a moment, as if a message may have arrived when he was not looking and was hiding under there. Then he folded his hands on top of the report he had placed on the ragged green blotter on his desk and spoke to them. “What did Peter Linz want of you?” he asked, almost as if speaking to himself.
Her eyebrows knitted together, an expression that gave a peculiar charm to her otherwise unreadable face. “I’m not really sure. He had an intense interest in Elliot, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because of what happened to him or because he was on to something Linz was involved in.”
Cobb nodded. “What, exactly, did he ask you?”
She looked down at her hands, clasped around Corinne’s shoulders. “He wanted to know when Elliot came to Kaua’i. I told him I thought it was around Thursday of last week, but he didn’t call me until Friday afternoon. He said he was here on a story, you know. He’s a journalist for R and L, does investigative stuff.”
Cobb nodded again. “Go on.”
Corinne pulled away from her mother and wandered off to a file cabinet, where she gazed thoughtfully at the chrome handle. “Look,” she said, touching it. The drawer, which was partly open, slid smoothly in and clicked shut. Corinne laughed with delight.
Lianne’s brow cleared when she smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Corinne, come back here.”
“No, it’s fine,” Cobb assured her. “Let her explore.”
“OK, duckling.” Corinne laughed again at her mother and wandered around the room, touching the furniture and murmuring to herself.
“She doesn’t seem to have suffered any serious effects from her night in the cooler,” Cobb observed.
Lianne smiled. “She thought it was an adventure. I told her lots of stories.”
“Could you tell me what happened at the house?”
She shrugged. “Peter Linz. He knocked on my door, said he wanted to talk to me, could he take me and Corinne to dinner? There didn’t seem to be any harm in that, so we went. He said he wanted to talk about Elliot. He took us to that old house. There was a Japanese man there, Ueda. He’s a strong man, very… calm. He scared me. They weren’t directly threatening or anything, not at first. But they both seemed to get more upset as we talked. Then they got into an argument. There was another man there at the beginning…”
“A tall man, thin hair going to gray, very thin?” Cobb asked.
She was surprised. “Yes, that was him. He was on the floor when we came in, looked like he was in shock or something. Later, while we were talking, he left. We were in the living room by then, over near the windows. I was sitting on a couch there. I could see him slide back into the foyer, and I was pretty sure the front door opened and closed. I thought he’d go get help. The Japanese man was against the wall and couldn’t see, and Peter Linz was facing me.”
“You didn’t notice whether he had a gun when he left, did you?”
“No. But there was a gun rack in the entry.”
“I see. What happened then?”
“When Linz and Ueda saw that the other man was gone they seemed to blame me. It was like they went crazy, as if I knew what was going on. I thought… Well, Peter came after me, and I’m afraid I ran. I grabbed Corinne and ran into the kitchen, and there was this door, so I ran through and pulled it shut. There was no handle on the inside. I could hear them looking for us, very faintly, through the door. We waited. I thought someone would open the door soon, but so much time went by.… At least there was plenty to eat.”
“Thank you. This is very helpful.” Cobb turned to Sergeant Handel and asked about his investigation.
Lianne sat quietly as he described his search of the house. When he finished he tapped his own heap of clues— the sheet of paper, the Post-it note, the cigarette, and his transcription of Kano’s phone message.
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“Ah, I too come across the word ‘sandstone’,” Cobb said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s a kind of rock,” Handel suggested.
“I might be able to help.” Lianne spoke quietly. “Ueda said that name a couple of times. It has something to do with the poison.”
“Poison?”
“Whatever got Elliot. I think they had something to do with it, or the company they work for did.”
“I see. And Welter, knowing what it was, panicked and tried to hijack the plane. Well, at least we know he didn’t kill Victor Linz.”
“How?” Handel asked.
“He was not using hollow points.” He tapped the ballistics report on his desk. “And the ballistics don’t match. A different weapon killed Linz. I just wish I knew whose, and why.”
CHAPTER 25
NAMES, ORGANIZATIONS, publishers, address codes, and search tree algorithms flowed, too rapidly to follow. A chart depicting his own search progress formed inside an on-screen window in the upper left. It looked circular and pointess. Chazz typed and sent a query to the online System Operator for subscriber lists to various computer literature search services. He had little hope such a request would be honored, but it was another avenue to try.
Soon it would be time for his class and he would have to call off this fruitless search.
He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “Why am I doing this?” he asked.
Patria, reading by the window, looked up. “Doing what?”
“Why am I trying to find out about this fast-fading news story? A satellite crashed; maybe it dumped a small load of poison into the atmosphere and a few people got sick. Panic hit the island, all the tourists left, a public relations disaster, visitors are staying away in multitudes, the news has almost disappeared from the airwaves, the weather is fine, I have a class to teach in half an hour, and here I am looking up literature on poisons and trying to find out who else might be interested too. Why am I doing it? The story is over, nobody cares what the poison was since the victims are recovering and I’m not a doctor anyway.”
She smiled at him. “You’re quite lovely when you’re frustrated,” she said.
He made a disgusted sound.
“You’re doing it because it could have been deliberate.”
“Yes, it could have been. Is the satellite still up there near the crater? It must have dumped trash all over the forest. A team went up there to investigate it, Jeeps and helicopter. They, whoever ‘they’ are, confirmed ‘Candide.’ What’s Candide? Candide is the hero of a novel by Voltaire, an ‘ingenuous youth,’ it says here, a man who witnessed all kinds of random disasters, while his master Pangloss continued to believe this was the best of all possible worlds. I looked it up.” On screen were three sentences from a database of quotations: “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds.” “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?” “Optimism, said Candide, is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly.”
“What is that supposed to mean, do you suppose?” Chazz asked. “What did the people on the radio mean when they said they had Candide confirmed?”
“Maybe they meant something besides a book.” She had her finger laid down the spine of the book holding her place.
“Of course they didn’t mean the book. People don’t drive eight miles up an impassable mud road just to tell their buddies over the radio they read Voltaire.”
She drew a wry face at him. “No need to be sarcastic. What I meant was they might be using Candide as a code word for some other reason having nothing to do with the book.”
“OK, OK, I am frustrated.” He ticked items off on his fingers. “They have a white panel truck with a fancy antenna. They are well funded, and they are secret, right? They kept me away from the truck, attacked me, in fact. So who the hell could they be besides feds? I called Cobb. The license plate was a phony, so the mind leaps to all manner of fantastical conclusions. They are KGB agents, come to sneak away the remains of a Soviet satellite. Silly, right? They are criminals out to steal an American satellite to sell to the highest bidder, probably the Soviet Union. Equally silly. Meanwhile all hell has broken loose. Sergeant Handel finds the girl and her daughter locked in a cooler. And a bunch of other stuff, like the word ‘Sandstone’.”
“Sedimentary rock,” Patria said. She was making it obvious she wanted to return to her reading. “The oceans press down and under pressure the sands turn to stone. Very pretty in the side of a cliff, all layered in lovely colors of red and yellow.”
“What are you reading, anyway?” he asked, somewhat peevishly. Behind his head a window on the computer screen danced, figures and letters.
“David Malo. Hawaiian Antiquities. Written originally in Hawaiian late in the last century. We found a curious object at the site— not the bowl, but a wheel. I think it was used in a game, called ulu-maika. A betting game, according to Malo.”
The computer chimed.
“Well, well,” Chazz murmured, striking the keys.
“Well, well, what?”
“Just, ‘Well, well.’ There is a toxicology database, very expensive, very special. I asked for subscribers, people interested in toxicology, and bingo, here’s a special toxicology DB with a few public blue ribbon subscribers, mostly large pharmaceutical companies, FDA, a couple of Fortune Fifty chemical conglomerates. Sysop gave me a list. I didn’t think he would, but I guess DRC means something in the world.”
“So?”
“So, VPL Pharmaceuticals is a subscriber. Linz’s company.”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? Pharmaceutical companies would be interested in toxicology. They wouldn’t want to issue any drugs that were poisonous or anything, would they? And they would probably be interested in developing antidotes to common toxins as well. So of course they would want to be aware of the literature, whatever experimental evidence there is of toxic chemical structures, that kind of thing. Doesn’t seem so strange to me. Besides, didn’t you say several pharmaceutical companies were subscribers?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.” Chazz was nodding and smiling. “Several. Big ones. Certainly.”
“Chazz,” she chided. “You look like you swallowed a cage full of canaries.”
He made a face. “All those feathers? No. It is that VPL has three accounts. One in New York, where the headquarters is. One in Pennsylvania, where their research center is. And another one that is unlisted.”
“And?”
“And Linz also owned a lobbying firm in Washington.”
“Are you suggesting he was pushing dangerous drugs through the FDA?”
Chazz shrugged. “Maybe.”
“No you’re not. You think he was doing something else, don’t you?”
“Look,” Chazz said, spreading his hands. “His company has an unlisted account. This in a list of subscribers already confidential. That sounds suspiciously like somebody has something to hide.”
“Go on.”
Chazz leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “What would a pharmaceutical company have to hide?”
“OK, I’ll play your silly game. How about law suits? Drug companies are always getting sued.”
Chazz nodded. “That’s a good one. I hadn’t thought of it, either. What kind of law suits?”
“Oh, some birth control device gone bad, say. That’s a common one.”
He shook his head in admiration. “That is good. They had research results, clinical trials, something like that, that showed negative results they hid. Good. Worth looking into, I suppose. But it wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“All right,” she said. “How about something, say, governmental? Something involving pharmaceutical research on a satellite? Something they don’t want anyone to know about?” she asked slyly.
“Exactly what I was thinking. But something Elliot Propter knew about, and got dosed for his pains?” Chazz finished. “I sure would like to know where and who and what the unlisted subscription repres
ents, but I don’t dare ask sysop about it. Well, never mind. I still don’t know why I bother. But it might be worth taking a little trip up to the crater anyway.”
“What about that other thing? The rock?”
“Rock?”
“You know. Sandstone.”
He shrugged. “I better go teach my class. I don’t know about sandstone. But Cobb found two tapes; Propter mentioned a tape, and Cobb found two of them. They may shed some light on the subject. You going to stay here?”
“If you don’t mind. The library here is better than we have at home as yet, and there are one or two reference books I want to check. The site is more extensive than I thought even this morning, you know. Linz and Kano were going to plow under a major settlement. I think the authorities ought to be rethinking their permits or whatever. And Kimiko is coming here with the kids later on. They went over to her sister’s in Kekaha this afternoon. We need to do some shopping and so on. And they are supposed to turn on the telephone today.”
“Technology,” Chazz said. He grabbed a small duffel bag with his gi in it and left. At the gate to the DRC he turned left toward Hanapepe. He did not notice the Ford Bronco three cars behind him.
The dojo where he taught his aikido classes three times a week was in a quonset hut on the edge of a park in town. The beach was a block away, and the ground around the hut was sandy. His sandals made a pleasant swishing sound as he walked, and the light from the late afternoon sun was a mellow gold across the green zoysia grass of the park. A scattering of local people were out, mothers and kids, a fisherman sorting through a bucket containing his catch of the day. The recent medical emergency seemed very far away at this moment. Perhaps there were fewer people than normally, that was all. He could hear children’s voices calling from the swings across the open space.
He unlocked the door. The hut was in gray dimness which sprang away when he turned on the lights. The small table holding a telephone and an ancient record player, used for aerobics classes two mornings a week, sat near the door. The answering machine blinked the news that there were three messages. He listened: two requests for schedules and a message from Mr. Shinawa, the dojo’s senior teacher, who was away on one of his frequent trips. He was calling to say that he had heard there had been some excitement on the island, and that he hoped everything was all right and that the students were still around and had not fled for their lives. His heavy Japanese accent almost concealed the good humor of his remarks.