Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  When we got back to headquarters we put together a subpoena for Alamea’s cell phone records, and went through a dozen more calls and emails from people who thought they had information on the dead girl. None of them panned out, though.

  One man insisted that Alamea had been killed by the Night Marchers. “I saw them take her,” he wrote, in an email. “They’re going to come for me next.”

  Ray looked up at me. “Who are the Night Marchers? Sound like a punk rock band.”

  “The ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors. They come out on certain nights to walk around battlefields. And some people think they come to escort the dead to the next world.”

  Another woman who left a voice mail said she was a psychic. “I didn’t see any mention on the newscast of her baby. Make sure someone takes care of the baby.”

  Ray shook his head. “These people come up with the craziest things.”

  The subpoena for Alamea’s phone records was signed and faxed over to the phone company, and the woman I spoke to promised to have them together by the next morning.

  By the end of our shift we were no closer to finding out who killed Alamea. Ray looked at his watch. “I’ve gotta go. We’re meeting the priest at the church to go over the details of the baptism.”

  Ray and Julie were practicing Roman Catholics, and Vinnie was to be baptized on Saturday, at a Catholic church near their home in Salt Lake, near the Aloha Stadium.

  Ray and I had been working together for three years, and we’d become close friends off the job as well. My partner Mike and I often went to dinner with him and Julie on the weekends, and just before Vinnie was born they had asked Mike if he would be one of the baby’s godfathers.

  “My youngest brother is flying in from Seattle to be one,” Ray said. “But we’d like to have someone local, too. Has to be a Catholic, as you know.”

  Mike was flattered. His father was Italian and his mother Korean, and both of them were practicing Catholics. Mike had grown up in the church, though he didn’t attend except for the occasional holiday mass. By coincidence, the church closest to Ray and Julie’s house, St. Filomena’s, was the one Mike’s parents attended, because they offered Mass in Korean. So it all worked out very nicely.

  “Have fun,” I told him. I drove home, fed and walked our golden retriever, Roby, then joined Mike next door for dinner with his parents. He had grown up in that half of the duplex, and then when he was a working fireman he had bought the other side. I’d moved in with him when we finally decided to settle down together.

  I had developed a real taste for Korean barbecue since I met Mike, and no one made a better marinade for the beef than Soon-O. Her special mix of soy sauce, garlic, sugar, sliced onions and some other spices was better than any restaurant’s.

  Dominic and Soon-O were so proud that Mike had been asked to be Vinnie’s godfather, and they were looking forward to the ceremony on Saturday morning. “Almost like having a grandchild,” Soon-O said. “But not quite.”

  Mike and I had been approached by a lesbian couple we knew to be their sperm donors, and he and I had been going back and forth on the question. I thought I was happy being Uncle Kimo to my nieces and nephews, while Mike was leaning toward becoming a father. Mike was an only child, and his parents, now that they were comfortable with his being gay, were eager to get themselves a grandchild however they could.

  I was determined to resist the pressure. “Poor Ray looked like walking death this morning,” I mentioned, between bites of the succulent beef. “Vinnie’s keeping them both up all night.”

  “Mike slept through the night as soon as we brought him home from the hospital,” Soon-O said. “What a good baby!”

  “He does have a knack for sleeping,” I said. Mike’s favorite hobby was dozing on the sofa, with the TV going in the background. I was the more active one, always ready for surfing, jogging, or a more horizontal form of recreation.

  “Your parents are probably too busy with all their grandchildren,” Soon-O said. “But Dom and I would always be available to help you out.”

  I smiled, nodded, and kept eating. That night, Mike and I walked Roby together just before eleven, giving him a last chance to empty his bladder before sleep. The dark sky was clear and spangled with stars, and I wondered what kind of wish Mike was making on them. Was it really that important to him to have a child of his own? Why didn’t I feel the same way?

  We walked back inside and Mike surveyed the living room. “You’re a pig, you know that?” he said. I’d left my aloha shirt on the sofa when I switched to a T-shirt, and the morning paper was still strewn around the kitchen table in sections.

  “Oink, oink.” I grabbed for his hand. “Leave it. Let’s go to bed.”

  He disengaged from me. “I can’t go to sleep when the house is a mess.”

  I almost said that we couldn’t make a baby together if we didn’t have sex—but then I remembered the plumbing problem. I left him in the living room to clean up. I stripped down and slid between the covers, and I was asleep before he came in to join me.

  The next morning I called the Medical Examiner’s office soon after I got to work. “Hey, Alice,” I said to the ever-cheerful receptionist. “Doc have the report together on the jigsaw puzzle girl?”

  “He didn’t like that one,” she said. “You should have seen him. Grumbling and complaining all day. I’ll transfer you.”

  I sat through some gloomy elevator music until Doc finally picked up. “Cause of death was massive blood loss due to internal hemorrhaging,” he dictated. “Time of death was sometime between ten o’clock and midnight Saturday night. I don’t have the full toxicology results back yet but she had consumed a massive amount of sedatives shortly before death.”

  “So the killer knocked her out first?”

  “That’s not the best part. Your victim gave birth shortly before her death.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. All the results are correct. Where’s the baby?”

  “Great question, doc. I have no idea.”

  I did have an idea, though. I went back through the phone records from the day before. The psychic had left her phone number, and I called her back. I introduced myself and asked if Ray and I could come over and talk to her. She agreed, and gave me her address.

  It was my turn to drive, so we hopped in the Jeep and opened up the flaps. It was a sunny, cool morning and it felt great to be outdoors. We trailed behind an elderly man with a long gray ponytail, riding a slow-moving scooter, and I didn’t mind because I knew we’d get where we were going too quickly anyway.

  The old guy pulled in at a low-rise office building, and I continued at the same sedate pace until we reached a run-down house in the shadow of the H1 expressway, beside a sign that read “MADAME OKELANI. TAROT CARDS, PSYCHIC READINGS, ‘AUMAKUA.” The ‘aumakua were also known as spirit animals in the Hawaiian tradition; they were the spirits of our ancestors, who had chosen to take physical form in the body of a particular creature.

  Ray made a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat, like the one my father used to make when my brothers and I were kids and we were trying to put one past him.

  An elderly Hawaiian woman opened the door. Her gray hair flowed down to her shoulders, and she wore an oversized muumuu in a rainbow of bright colors.

  “I’m so glad you came, detectives,” she said. “Sometimes law enforcement is distrustful of psychic abilities.”

  Madame Okelani sat down at a square table, and motioned us to the chairs opposite her. “How did you know the young woman who was killed?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know her. I just had a vision.” She looked at us. “Do either of you have any experience with psychics?”

  “I had my tarot cards read in college,” I said. “That’s about it.”

  “I think everyone has some level of psychic talent.” She smiled. “I teach workshops on how to get in touch with your own ability, and one of the exercises I give people is to consider a news report,
often one about a crime.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why crimes?”

  “Because there will usually be follow up reports, and those reports can verify information you might sense. For example, last week I saw a report about a burglary just down the street. I was upset by that, because it was so close. I meditated, and I saw something very unusual—a mop and a pair of rubber gloves. I didn’t know what to make of that. Then the next day I learned that the maid had been involved in the robbery.”

  “Did you report that information to the police?” Ray asked.

  She shook her head. “Detective. If I called you about that you would have just laughed and said I was crazy.”

  “But you did call us about this vision.”

  “Here’s what I did. I saw the piece on the TV news about the girl you needed to identify. As soon as I did, I turned the TV off and went into a meditative state. I closed my eyes, lowered my heart rate, and tried to focus on the girl’s energy.”

  “And you did this why?” Ray asked.

  “I make my living this way, Detective. It’s important that I be able to do as much as I can for my clients. And that requires discipline and practice.”

  “What did you see when you focused?” I asked.

  She shuddered. “A lot of blood. But also a very tiny baby, like a newborn, red-faced and crying.”

  “Where was this?”

  She motioned to a laptop on the table between us. “I use Google Maps. I open the program and then continue my meditation, hoping to be directed to a particular place on the map.” She looked up at me. “The violence was too strong for me to focus. All I could tell was that the place I was seeing was near the water, with fishing boats. Perhaps a marina.”

  We hadn’t released the location of the body to the press or the public, so it was interesting that Madame Okelani was able to get so close. Was she really a psychic? Or was she the one who had killed Alamea?

  I could tell Ray was thinking the same thing. “Where were you Saturday night?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  Neither of us said anything, just looked at her.

  “I attended a psychic fair at the Blaisdell Center on Saturday.” She turned and retrieved a flyer from a counter near her, and passed it to us. “The fair went until eight o’clock at night, as you can see. An event like that can be very draining for a psychic, with so many people and so much to interpret. Several of my colleagues and I went out for dinner afterward, to regroup.”

  “What time would that have been?” I asked.

  “Let me check my purse.” She got up and left the room, and returned a moment later with a leather wallet. She pulled a receipt out from a restaurant at the Ward Center, time stamped 11:30 PM. “I guess we were there later than I thought,” she said, showing it to us. “I can give you the names and numbers of the people I was with. And the server will remember me, too. She’s a client.”

  I opened my netbook and took down the information. She had an unsecured wi-fi connection, and while I had the computer open I checked my email and downloaded Alamea’s cell phone record.

  “How is the child?” Madame Okelani asked when I was finished.

  I shook my head. “We don’t know. We didn’t even know there was a child until we got the autopsy report this morning. Which was why we were surprised that you knew yesterday.” I hesitated for a moment, unsure of how to proceed.

  Like Mike, Ray had been raised a Catholic, and he had an innate distrust of anything that didn’t fit within his set of beliefs. But I was more open in what I was willing to consider.

  My parents were a polyglot mix of religion and ethnicity. My mother was half-Hawaiian and half Japanese, and had little training in either culture. My father’s father was a full-bloodied Hawaiian who married a haole, or white, missionary from Montana and converted to her Presbyterian religion. My father had grown up believing in what he learned from both parents. He and my mother married in the Kawaia’aho Church in downtown Honolulu, and we’d been taken to services there occasionally as kids, usually for the big holidays like Christmas and Easter.

  But like my father, I’d taken it all in and remained independent in my beliefs. I had a strong set of spiritual beliefs, about treating your fellow man the way you’d like to be treated, and I respected the ancient gods and goddess of Hawai’i—Pele, who ruled the volcanoes; Kanaloa, the god of the seas; and Lono, who brings rains, fertility and harvest, among them.

  “Can you try to focus on the baby again?” I asked. “With the computer?”

  “Kimo,” Ray said. “Can I speak to you outside?”

  “I’ll boot up the computer,” Madame Okelani said. I stood up and followed Ray outside to her front lawn.

  “Why are we wasting time here?” he asked. “The woman’s a crackpot who had a couple of lucky guesses.”

  “You have any other ideas?” I held up my hand. “We have a dead woman who had no friends, and a little baby out there somewhere. Madame Okelani may be able to help.”

  “What about the records from Alamea’s cell phone. We can work on those.”

  “Just humor me, all right? Let’s see if she can come up with anything.”

  We went back inside. Madame Okelani’s eyes were closed, and her fingers rested lightly on the laptop’s keyboard. We watched her for a moment. Then she opened her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t get anything. There’s some kind of interference.” She looked at my netbook. “Is your computer on, detective?”

  “Hibernating. Is that the interference?”

  “May I?” she asked, holding out her hand.

  I gave her the netbook, and immediately she put it down on the table, as if it had burned her fingers. “Makiki,” she said. “The baby is in Makiki.” Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I need to lie down.”

  “Thank you for your help,” I said, taking the computer back. Ray and I turned toward the door.

  “Oh, and detective? You’re not a pig, you’re a dolphin.”

  It took me a minute to process that. “Yes, you’re right. Thank you.”

  “What the hell was that about?” Ray asked, as we got into the Jeep.

  “Which part? Makiki? Or the dolphin?”

  “Whichever part makes sense.”

  I opened the netbook and turned it back on. “I had an argument with Mike last night. The living room was messy, and he called me a pig.”

  “And?”

  I pointed to Madame Okelani’s sign, as the netbook came back to life. “You know what an ‘aumakua, a spirit animal, is?”

  Ray shook his head.

  “The ancient Hawaiians believed that their ancestors remained around them, often taking shape in a particular animal. A family would be protected by that particular animal. A family that lived in up in the mountains might have an owl for an ‘aumakua. One that lived by the water, like my family did, might have a shark or a dolphin.

  “My father always told us this story about how he was surfing when he was a teenager, and the wind came up very strong, suddenly, and he got knocked off his board. He was floundering in the water, couldn’t keep his head up out of the waves. Then he felt something nudge him from below, pushing him toward land. It was a dolphin.”

  I opened the PDF file of phone numbers Alamea had called.

  “He told us that dolphin was our family’s ‘aumakua, and it would always protect us when we were out in the water.”

  “And did it?”

  “We’re all here, aren’t we? My brothers and I have all been caught by waves, tossed around and banged up. But we all survived.”

  “Uh-huh. What do the phone records say?”

  I looked down. “On Saturday afternoon, Alamea called a cell phone several times.” I flipped to another page. “That number is registered to a woman named Charlotte Montes, with an address in Makiki. I think that’s our next stop, don’t you?”

  “We could have figured that out withou
t the crazy lady.”

  “Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean she’s crazy.”

  We drove down to Makiki, to a small stucco house on a tiny piece of land, with a chain link fence all around. The gate into the small front yard was locked.

  I called the number from the printout, and through the open front window I heard a tinny rendition of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “N Dis Life.” As the phone rang, a baby began to cry.

  No one answered the phone, and the baby inside continued to cry. “I think we have reason to believe that Alamea’s baby is inside this house and may be in danger,” I said. “We need to take whatever measures necessary to check it out.”

  “I agree.” Ray grasped the top rail of the fence, testing it. Then he climbed up and over, dropping lightly into the front yard. I followed him, a little less gracefully.

  I unholstered my gun. “If we’re right, the woman inside killed Alamea.”

  Ray nodded, and pulled his gun out as well. I stepped up and rapped on the front door. “HPD. Open the door, please.”

  There was no answer. All we heard was the baby continuing to cry.

  I tried the handle. The door was locked. I nodded to Ray to go around the left side of the house, and I went right, toward the open window. I approached it carefully, peeking in from the side.

  Through the screen I saw a baby in a crib in the middle of the room. And on the floor, a young dark-haired woman sat with her legs out in front of her. She was crying, too, though more quietly than the baby. “Charlotte Montes?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Can you open the door, please?”

  “He won’t stop crying,” she said. “No matter what I do.”

  “We’ll help you,” I said gently. “If you can just get up and open the door.”

  She took a deep breath and stood up. Without a backward look to the baby she walked out of the room, and a moment later she was opening the front door.

  We both holstered our guns and followed her inside. The baby was still crying, and Ray walked over and picked him up from his crib. He began rocking the baby and cooing to him, and soon had him calmed down.

  In the meantime, I sat down at the kitchen table across from Charlotte. Up close I could see she was a bit older than I had thought, probably late twenties or early thirties. “How did you know Alamea Kekuahona?” I asked.