Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “You work for Sandstone?”

  “Security. I head security. This is a security matter. The toxin got out. Thank god more people didn’t get exposed. We’d have a real public relations disaster on our hands. It’s bad enough as it is.” He gestured at the wreckage.

  “What’s bad enough?” Chazz asked.

  “This isn’t the satellite,” Linz said. His shoulders slumped. “That leaves a question. Where is the real satellite?”

  CHAPTER 30

  “THE SATELLITE DIDN’T crash,” Elliot Propter said. He was sitting up in his bed. His arms lay along his sides on top of the blanket. They were bruised and thin. An IV needle was taped to his wrist. His voice was very weak.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the clouds which had obscured the peak of Wai’ale’ale had followed them down the trail to town. Outside the windows the air had taken on the same oppressive gloom that promised a rain before dark.

  “What do you mean?” Cobb Takamura asked. He stood beside Propter’s bed, his hat in his hands.

  Propter shook his head, a slow tossing back and forth against the white pillow. “It was a game. You see?”

  “Regrettably, I do not.” He glanced over at Chazz, who shook his head.

  “Wakefield. The Special Intelligence Group. Crisis management team, they do war games, simulations. It was a game, the satellite, the toxin, everything. I stumbled on him here, I knew who he was.”

  “Ah. Then it was all a game.” That was all Cobb Takamura said. His voice was profoundly sorrowful, without question in it. The others waited.

  Finally Chazz spoke. “There is no satellite at all?”

  “No,” Propter whispered. “No, no. You don’t understand. There is a satellite. It is loaded with poison, up there. It didn’t crash, but it’s real. The crashed satellite was a fake, that’s all.”

  Wayne Standish’s large chin led the way into the room; the rest followed briskly. “It’s time for treatment, Lieutenant. Now we have some idea what hit him, we may be able to do something. Frankly, though,” he lowered his voice, “there’s been a lot of systemic damage. This is for you.” He handed Cobb a pink phone message slip.

  Cobb nodded. “I need to question him some more, of course. How long will we need to wait?”

  “A couple of hours, anyway. We’re trying to clean out his system. Takes time. The toxin gets in the lungs, then CNS and so on. Come back around six.”

  Cobb agreed and led the others from the room.

  “What does he mean, it’s a game?” Patria asked.

  “A simulation,” Chazz said, his arm around her shoulder. “Like the one on my computer. It simulates something in the real world, the processes and procedures. A way to test dangerous or expensive things without actually doing them. It’s unbelievable. I read a definition once: a simulation is an explicit model with well-defined components interacting in a predictable way.”

  “But a game? They would fake all this? This was something in the real world. A satellite, or something that faked a satellite…”

  “That’s it!” Handel shouted, then caught himself. “Oh, sorry.” He continued in a quieter voice. “That’s it. I forgot, then I remembered, then I forgot again.”

  “I might quote detective Chan,” Cobb said. “ ‘You are zebra— sports model jackass.’ But that would be unkind.”

  “Not to mention unfair,” Handel said in an aggrieved tone.

  “Yes,” Cobb responded dryly. “Then I will only ask, what do you remember, then forget, then remember again, Sergeant?”

  “Something I heard at The Honeycreeper the other night. There was this guy, a technician up at the NASA radar dish, a friend of that old guy Mateo, I told you about him. He said he overheard people up at the ground station saying there was something wrong with the satellite radar track. Something funny about the radar trace, he said.”

  “A fake?” Chazz asked.

  “Could they do that, fake a radar trace? Put on a show for everyone from Kapa’a to Lihu’e?” Cobb asked.

  Chazz frowned. “It seems probable. They could use a remotely piloted vehicle gimmicked with fireworks to fake the crash. Jam the radar signals at the NASA station to cover the fact that it wasn’t a real satellite. Sure.”

  “If it was a simulation, why would they do all that, go to the expense of faking a satellite crash, issuing statements to the press about a falling satellite, all that?” Patria asked.

  “Not to mention poisoning Propter and his car with the toxin?” Takamura added.

  “To make it more realistic?” Chazz suggested. “The problem with simulations is that they aren’t real. So they don’t do the job very well. The more real you can make them, the more reliable the results will be. From what Fujiwara has told us, we presume the toxin was attenuated, not intended to kill anyone, only provide the necessary ingredients to create fear and panic in the populace, to make the emergency seem more realistic. Besides, Propter was following them. Dosing him would slow him down.”

  “It may have done more than that,” Patria said.

  Cobb put his dark glasses on. “Shall we return to the office? I have to return this phone call, and we might be more comfortable there than here.”

  Outside, however, the clouds were so thick, he removed the glasses. They drove into town in silence.

  “Yo, Boss,” Sammy said as they got out of Cobb’s car. He was standing on the front porch of the County Building, chewing on his toothpick.

  “Kukui Nut,” Cobb said.

  “Lousy weather, eh?”

  “Same as under the mountain, seems to me.”

  Sammy nodded. “One of these days, boss, I am going to buy you a new hat.”

  Cobb smiled. “Kukui Nut. You never change.”

  “Sure. Good thing, too. You would still be floundering around in this case without me.”

  “I am still floundering around. No idea who killed Victor Linz.”

  Sammy grinned around his toothpick. “None?”

  “Well… Not none, no.”

  Sammy nodded, throwing his toothpick away and going inside. “See you later, boss.”

  “Sure. Regards to Darrell.”

  Sammy waved as the door closed behind him.

  “ ‘Life would be dreary waste if there was no such thing called loyalty’,” Cobb quoted.

  “You know who killed Victor Linz,” Patria said decisively. “I know you know, and I know that Kimiko knows, too.”

  “How do you know that Kimiko knows?” Cobb asked as they crossed the street.

  “Woman’s intuition.”

  He stopped. “Come on.”

  “I talked to her on the phone. You’re not the only person working on this case, you know. We decided you know who did it.”

  “Ah. Women in your delicate condition become psychic, perhaps.”

  “My condition is not that delicate. Plenty of women have done this before me. Billions.”

  “Well. And you and Mrs. Takamura have solved this murder, have you?”

  Patria smiled. It was her Mona Lisa cat-ate-the-goldftsh smile. “I’m not saying.” They went into the police station.

  “Gang of people to see you, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Hirogawa said with such tremendous good cheer Cobb paused.

  “Gang?”

  Hirogawa bobbed his head vigorously. “Mrs. Angela Franklin, accompanied by Kaoru Kano. A Ms. Billings, accompanied likewise by small child. A Mr. Ueda. All sitting in the squad room upstairs. And you have a phone message from…”

  “I know, I know. I already got the message. I will return the call as soon as we have met with everyone.”

  They started upstairs. “And your wife called,” Hirogawa called after him. “She says she knows who did it, but she’s going to wait to see if you’re right.”

  Cobb shook his head. “Mrs. Takamura,” he said. “Always full of surprises.”

  The squad room only seemed full. As Cobb and the others greeted the five people milling around in it, Peter Linz appeared at the do
or.

  “Well, well. Many people here, just like the end of a detective novel,” Cobb said. Chazz gave him a hard look, which he ignored.

  “Does this mean he thinks one of them shot Victor Linz?” Chazz asked Sergeant Handel, who looked blank.

  “ ‘Stone walls are crumbling now like dust. Through many loopholes light stream in like rosy streaks of dawn’,” Cobb said softly.

  Angela Franklin looked at Peter Linz. “What the hell did he mean by that?” she asked.

  “Please don’t trouble yourself about it, Ms. Franklin. I’m sure in your grief you have other things to worry about.”

  She detected no irony in his statement and returned slowly to her seat beside one of the wooden desks.

  “Answer the question, would you, Lieutenant?” Peter Linz said.

  Cobb lifted his eyebrows. “What question was that?”

  “Do you think one of us did it, shot my father?”

  “Please, Mr. Linz. All in good time.” He shook Lianne’s hand and squatted down to look into Corinne’s eyes. Corinne hid behind her mother’s leg and looked at him, four fingers in her mouth. He smiled and stood up. “I must ask everyone to remain here a few minutes. I have a phone call to make.” He nodded at Sergeant Handel, who took up a position near the door with a nonchalant air.

  No one spoke while he was gone. Angela looked at her nails. When this failed to consume the time, she removed a small compact from her purse and examined her lips in the tiny mirror inside the lid. Her tan was perfect, her lip gloss muted and subtle. Its subtleties seemed capable of occupying her attention indefinitely.

  Lianne Billings took Corinne on her lap and began telling her a story in a soft voice, nearly inaudible to the rest. There was in her voice a quiet sorrow that made Patria move protectively toward her.

  Peter Linz stared out the window at the gathering gloom as the sun, already behind the clouds, slid behind the mountains as well, abandoning the parking lot below to shadows. Ueda sat calmly, his hand folded in his lap in a meditative mudra. He was smiling slightly. Chazz and Patria went out into the hall to the drinking fountain, unwilling to submit themselves to the mounting tension in the room.

  Cobb returned. He sat on the edge of a desk, swinging one foot gently back and forth. He was still wearing his hiking boots, spotlessly clean once he’d peeled off the protective plastic boots Chazz had provided them. Angela found herself staring at them, her lip gloss and tan forgotten.

  “I will tell you a story,” Cobb Takamura began. “A story about a clergyman who was walking along a road when he encountered a figure, the figure of Plague.”

  Plague was walking to London, Cobb said, to kill a thousand. But some weeks later when they met again, the clergyman asked why two thousand had died. Plague insisted he only killed a thousand. “Fear killed the rest,” Plague said.

  As he finished the story, which was quite short, he was looking out the window, as if lost in the anecdote’s hidden consequences.

  “No one’s died,” Peter Linz said after a time. He was looking impatiently at the detective.

  Cobb tilted his head. “On the contrary. Your father is dead. And Grant Welter is in the hospital with severe neurological damage. He lives now in silence. My guess is that the silence is from fear as well. Four others are in the hospital with the effects of this so-called plague. One of them is in jeopardy. True, the toll is not in the thousands. But the plague was man-made. And I would hold you, and Mr. Ueda here, and your father, responsible for that, and for the panic and fear that resulted from it. We have discovered since that it was all a game, a hoax, silly and cruel.”

  “Now wait a minute. You can’t hold us responsible for this. We do contract research, that’s all. The government decides it needs something done. We do it. It’s business, that’s all. We are not responsible for this ‘hoax’ as you call it.”

  Cobb nodded. “No, I suppose not. You are of course entirely innocent. Tell me about Sharleen Propter.”

  “What?” Peter Linz said numbly. He was visibly dumbfounded.

  “Sharleen Propter, Room eighty-nine, Taylor Care Facility, Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “Please, Mr. Linz. This is a murder investigation. You have as much of an interest in seeing it resolved as any of us. After all, you are a suspect. Sharleen Propter is the sister of Elliot Propter. She is an invalid, Mr. Linz. I spoke with the people at the Taylor Care Facility. I know what happened to her.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Linz said. He turned back to the window and spoke to the darkening glass, where his reflection was gathering density against the external gloom.

  “Nineteen-eighty,” Cobb said softly.

  “Yes. Eighty.”

  Peter sighed. Angela was staring at him with apprehension. “Peter!” she said sharply. “Don’t!”

  “It’s no use, Angela. He already knows. It was in the papers.”

  Cobb nodded. “Chazz and Patria tried to think of things that a pharmaceutical company might want to hide. They made a couple of suggestions. Government work, of course: Sandstone was involved in that. And lawsuits, bad publicity. So first I called a friend of mine who used to work for the Boston Globe. Then I called Taylor Care.”

  Peter made a curious despairing sideways chop with his hand, as if to open the window and throw himself out. “My father,” he began. He moved away from the window and sat on a wooden chair with a tattered vinyl seat, rips patched frequently with silver duct tape. “VPL made a contraceptive pill,” he said quietly. “A good one. It did well in the clinical trials. Pregnancy rate was very low. It was a good product.”

  Angela started to go to him, but a look from Sergeant Handel seemed to push her back into her seat.

  Linz looked at Cobb. “It was. It was a good product.”

  “Go on.”

  Linz looked away. “There were some side effects. There are always some side effects. They weren’t significant. Very low probability. The warning was on the package; physicians were informed. VPL acted well within the law.”

  “Sharleen used this product,” Patria murmured.

  Linz looked at her. “Yes. She knew the risks.”

  “What risks were those?” Cobb asked, though he knew the answer.

  “Blood clots. That was the only side effect. It said so on the package.” He stopped again.

  “Go on,” Cobb urged.

  “Sharleen had a stroke. That was unusual. A tragedy.”

  “A tragedy for Sharleen, or for VPL Pharmaceuticals?”

  “For everyone,” Linz growled. “She took the company to court. Of course the warnings were clear. She really had no case.”

  “Blood clots? Not really as serious as stroke, are they? She’s crippled for life because of the product, and the company claims it warned her of blood clots?” Patria’s outrage was naked.

  Linz looked once more out the window, now completely black. The reflection of his face, in the shadow of its own, was outlined clearly against the glass. When he turned, there seemed to be two of him, side by side, looking the same direction in profile. But his eyes were not on anyone in the room. “She… was unlucky. A rare case. The drug was approved. She filed suit against the company. You know how it was in those days, the late seventies. Everyone was filing suit. Insurance costs were rising faster than inflation. There was tremendous negative publicity for the company, even though VPL won the case. VPL had nothing to hide. The clinical trials were open, very positive.”

  He stopped and looked at Cobb. His reflected face turned its back to the room. “You understand I was working at Sandstone then, not VPL. I had nothing to do with it.”

  Cobb said nothing. Linz continued. “VPL fought the suit. They had to. If negligence had been proved, it would have been devastating.”

  “Did Victor Linz testify in court?” Patria asked.

  Peter nodded. “This was business. There were stockholders, directors. You must understand, it was business. Victor didn’t have a
ny choice. VPL won the case, Sharleen’s lawyer appealed, and lost the appeal. There was a scene in court. Propter was there; he started shouting about language, deceptive language. It said ‘blood clots’ in the literature. VPL was not legally liable. But Propter was raving.”

  A silence as complete as the darkness outside fell over the room.

  Finally Cobb slipped from the edge of the desk and stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Linz. I don’t believe we need detain you any longer.”

  Both Angela and Peter Linz expressed surprise at once.

  “Ms. Franklin,” Cobb said. “I don’t imagine any of this is going to improve your prospects, despite your recent celebrations. You can ask Mr. Kano here what condition Kapuna Shores is in. And Victor Linz’s share in VPL Pharmaceuticals may not turn out to be what you believed. Still, I congratulate you on your inheritance. Mr. Linz, I can’t say I am particularly sympathetic with the goals of your company. Sandstone is in a nasty business. I will forget the incident with my gun up on the hill. I have put it safely away again. I dislike guns altogether. You may go.”

  Linz and Kano left the room without another word. Angela Franklin gathered her purse and stood up. She glared at Cobb for a moment, but said nothing. She, too, left.

  “Ueda-san?” Cobb said. Ueda stood, the curve of a polite smile carved into the set of his lips. “You have come a long way. Hawaii has had a long relationship with Japan. There is in front of the County Building a monument to that relationship. A third of the population of this state is of Japanese descent. We like it here. We enjoy our heritage, but this is our land now. You are welcome to visit. I trust the rest of your stay will be less eventful than the beginning. And I do wish Makeda Pharmaceuticals would stay out of the poison business.”

  Ueda bowed stiffly. “The cat, I believe you would say, is out of the bag. Without secrecy there is no advantage in Makeda’s partnership with Sandstone. Perhaps the project is at an end, in any case. The research was completed. I am puzzled about one thing, though.”