by Swigart, Rob
She took a last look inside, thinking that it might be a good idea to move over here if she could climb to the lanai and unlock the door. Perhaps there would be a way to do it from the back.
She was in the alley between the other set of condos and the wall, beyond which she knew was an extensive papaya orchard, when she heard the scream.
“Orli!” She ran to the front and collided with someone in the dark. “My God,” she gasped as strong hands closed around her throat. She struggled for a moment in the large man’s grip.
Kimiko backed away in horror. The man looked at her out of empty eyes, and it was the void in those eyes that horrified her. Her scream still echoed.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her back was pressed to the door to Orli’s room. The child was still sleeping. Her scream had apparently not awakened her. Kimiko was glad of that. This strange man might not know she was there.
Baka did not answer. His eyes were wide, unblinking. They saw but somehow did not register what they saw. The woman he was told to get was not here. He would have to look in the other rooms. He walked past Kimiko and went into the dining area. He moved on into the master bedroom.
Kimiko thought of getting the child and trying to leave, but something stopped her. There would be others, she thought.
Kimiko had never met Vincent Meissner. She did not know this man without a soul. He reappeared in the dining area and moved toward her. It was as if he didn’t see her, or as if she were a piece of the furniture.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said softly. Vincent did not pause. He reached out with stiff arms and took her shoulders. She kneed him violently in the crotch, putting every ounce of strength in her slight frame into it.
He gasped and backed away a step. A pained expression crossed his face and disappeared as quickly as it had come. He reached for her again.
Chazz Koenig leaned back in his chair and stretched. His joints creaked. “Goddammit, Sy, this scares me.”
Sy Eckerling looked up at his mentor. “Hey, it’s almost the same as the other stuff. Plant and animal remains, human bone, miscellaneous organic compounds, tropane alkaloids, traces of tetrodoto×in, and a hint that perhaps some extract of a cone snail venom wandered in there. This stuff would paralyze an elephant and kill most people.”
“Most people. Except Tracy Ann Thrasher. I’m glad that maniac is dead.”
Patria stared up with sick fear into the man’s face. “You!” she gasped.
He smiled, slowly. “Yes, my little bird. I have waited for you.”
“What do you want?” She choked under his grip on her throat. She was a small, compact woman with a tough core. She raised her knee sharply, trying for his crotch, but he had turned and she hit his thigh instead.
He jerked his head to one side and half dragged her toward the front gate. “You’re a tough one, my little bird. I do like that. The others are not so tough.” He reached with his other hand and opened the gate. “We will begin with you.”
He moved his grip to the nape of her neck, pressing his fingertips into the nerve nexus just under her ear. She gasped again, this time from pain. He began to sing as they walked down the street together. She wanted to scream, to cry out for her child back in the condominium, but she could not. She could only hold on to the hope that this man would make a mistake.
Kimiko Takamura reached up for the fat man’s temples. He was holding her shoulders, staring into her eyes with his own empty ones.
Vincent Meissner had never been a strong man. He was sedentary and overweight and had a thyroid problem that caused his eyes to bulge slightly. The effect of this on his expression was chilling.
Kimiko placed her palms against his temples and pushed her thumbs into his eyeballs as hard as she could. The pressure stopped the blood flow in arteries behind the eyes that fed the brain. Within seconds he made a small sound deep in his throat and fell heavily to the floor, unconscious.
She backed away in horror. Swiftly, but with as much silence as she could maintain in her near-panic state, she went into Orli’s room, lifted the sleeping child from the bed, and carried her to the sliding glass doors onto the lanai.
Orli gurgled in her sleep, and the sucking sounds as she worked on her thumb increased in tempo, but she did not awaken. Kimiko made whispered crooning sounds as she slid the door open with one hand and stepped outside.
Jean-Marie watched Phénix frogmarch the woman down the street and around the corner of the dirt access road through the papaya orchard. He lost them in the shadows and nodded. Then he tipped his beer bottle back and finished it with a sigh.
“The others should have been here by now,” his companion said. He probed the bandage on his forehead with his forefinger.
“Not necessarily. There’s no telling when the cop quits work. Chausseur and Hennet are watching the police station. The Japanese bastard went in, so he’ll come out.” He looked at the remains of his fast food, picked out the cold hamburger, and stuffed it into his mouth. “We wait for the man to come back,” he mumbled through the food. “The zombie will take care of the Nip woman. We will have them all, as Phénix said.”
“Okay.” The Algerian drew a wry face, taking his finger away from his little blossom of pain at his temple to pull his knit cap down lower. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. It’s disgusting.”
“Hien? Oh, very well.” Jean-Marie crushed the package in his fist. “But it is important to be well fed. This time we cannot leave him alive.”
Chazz lifted the printout from its tray and looked at it. “I don’t know what else we can do tonight. I’ll swing by and see if Cobb is finished with the fingerprints.” He put on his jacket.
“You wanted me to remind you,” Sy told him.
“What?”
“Call Patria.”
“I don’t know if I need to. She’s safe. She and Kimiko are in Kapaa, at the county facility. No one knows about it.”
Sy shrugged and turned off the light on his microscope. “Your funeral,” he said.
Cobb Takamura fed the last of the sheets into the fax machine and pressed the send button. LeBlanc would receive it in seconds, but LeBlanc was not in the office at the moment, so nothing would happen with either the partial prints they had lifted from the jar or the dental records of the body in the lava until tomorrow at the earliest.
“Handel,” he said to his partner. “Chazz and I are going to go pick up Kimiko. She’s got the car. Tonight I think we are going to stay at our own homes. Tomorrow should confirm that Prévert or Phenix is dead. Kauai is peaceful again.”
Sergeant Handel said nothing about his own doubts. More than once Lieutenant Takamura had told him what a quiet island Kauai was, and more than once that statement had proven false.
Kimiko stood on the lanai, her back pressed against the rough stucco wall, listening.
The night was full of sounds. Distant surf. Cars. A barking dog. From town, occasional shouts as people went in and out of the cafe. The wind in the leaves of the papaya trees. Insects.
It was a normal night.
But something had happened to Patria. She should have come back. The fat man, unconscious on the living room floor, had gotten in easily even though Kimiko had locked the front door when Patria went out to check the gate. Where had she gone then?
Kimiko stepped down into the garden carrying the child. Everything was quiet.
She slipped into the breezeway between the two duplexes. Was there a faint trace of Patria’s perfume here? Plumeria, that’s all. She crooned softly, under her breath, to the child. Don’t wake up, she said. Sleep.
The other apartments were dark, deserted. Someone had lured the occupants out. A phone call, supposedly from the police, she assumed. Probably sent them to a hotel, told them the county would pay. Isolating Kimiko and Patria.
She moved cautiously to the front. It was deserted. She darted around the corner toward the back, where the stairs up to the lanai off 2B were. She took the stairs si
lently, two at a time.
She didn’t expect the door to be unlocked; that was a bonus. She slipped into the old man’s condo and put Orli on the couch. The child gave a short cry, opened her eyes wide, then fell asleep sucking her thumb again.
Kimiko tried the phone, but it was dead.
She slid the door shut and locked it, moved to the front door and threw the bolt. Then she began checking the windows.
There would be others out there, watching. She began to feel the fear.
In the papaya orchard, Phénix stopped suddenly. Patria felt a surge of hope; he was letting her go.
Instead he applied a sudden pressure to her carotid artery, and she slipped instantly into unconsciousness. “You are clever, my little bird,” he said softly, holding her limp body. “You noticed my lovely tattoo, I saw the look in your eyes. Now we can be lovers, for a while.”
He lifted her easily and slung her over his shoulder. Without a backward glance, he began to jog lightly toward the mountains. He was singing under his breath.
TWENTY-SIX
A GATHERING
A waning gibbous moon was halfway up the sky to the east when Chazz stopped in front of the police station and picked up Cobb Takamura. It was 1:57 A. M., the last day of July.
“What did you find?” Cobb said, and then answered the question himself. “You found the same stuff we found on the victims’ feet, a disgusting collection of chemicals from bodies human, animal, and plant. And I found partial prints that I sent to Papeete.”
“Also inorganic material,” Chazz said. “Salts, mineral powders, that sort of thing. Only unusual thing was a faint trace of the venom from a cone snail. Sy Eckerling narrowed it down to C. Geographus. We have a few of those little devils at the DRC, in the marine biology wing. They sit around waiting for a blenny to come by, nail it with a poison dart. Pssst, the fish is paralyzed almost instantly, and the snail, which is not a swift creature, can take its time with dinner. If the snail is large enough, the venom is fatal to humans.”
“Very impressive. So this venom is in the brew? Interesting. What propelled our man, do you think?”
Chazz shrugged and he shifted into gear and drove the ancient VW van away from the curb. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t doubt he’s very sick – assuming he also killed the two women.”
Cobb nodded. “Taxeira doesn’t agree with us. He has his own theory. He thinks we get a lot of sexual deviants from the mainland. He thinks we got one in this case. Not related, says Taxeira. He’s on it: some actor from Los Angeles, he says. A creep. He says he’s closing in on him.”
Chazz did not notice the tan sedan that turned the corner of Umi Street and followed him through a series of left turns. It stayed well back. The driver, whose name was Hennet, drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel as he drove.
“Taxeira says all that?” Chazz asked. He pulled onto the highway and turned north. The moon cast long silver beams across the glimpses of water to their right.
“He does. This ‘actor’ stays at the Hilton, where the second victim was staying. He preys on lonely women, married or not. He acts out some ritual that includes death.”
“I see. What do you say?”
“I say the Phoenix has an obsession, but he also has a job. I say he killed the crew, probably to get rid of Noel Taviri, a thorn in the side of the French government. Maybe he didn’t mean or want to kill everyone, maybe he did. But even that wasn’t enough. He has a compulsion, a sexual thing, so he killed the women, too. Then he called the four goons from here, sent them after you. He’s been following your wife. I say Duvalois killed him in the lava and went home. That’s what I say. I say he’s a problem for the French now.”
The lights of Lihue fell behind them. Clouds drifted across the sky, shredding away from the top of Waialeale into streaks that floated across the moon; the silver light dipped into luminous gray, flooded back.
Chazz shook his head. “The guy was a creep for sure. So the theory goes that he was working for the French government, intercepted the Ocean Mother, got aboard in Raïatéa either as extra crew or as a stowaway, mixed up his messy concoction, spread it on the deck or got it onto or into the crew. Then somewhere off the coast of Kauai he took the lifeboat, rowed to shore, and slipped into the general population. He picked up the Richards woman on the tour at the DRC and took her back to his suite at the Westin, where he killed her. Right?”
“Right. Then he changed his appearance, and posed as a journalist named Hobart. When he learned we were going to Tahiti, he called his four friends to stop you. He was worried we’d find out things either he or the French government didn’t want us to know. The deaths of the two women would make him a liability to the French government, put him on the short list. Duvalois came after him and cleaned it up.”
“Meanwhile,” Chazz picked up the thread, “he had a rendezvous with the other woman, the one from the Hilton. Did her in and dumped her in the Wailua River.”
“Somewhere above the falls. She washed over. Patria and Kimiko found her.”
Chazz nodded. “And he dosed someone with his clever little Jimsonweed concoction, gave him a tattoo identical to his own to put us off and make us think he was out of the picture. That means…?”
“That means,” Cobb said when Chazz paused, “that he was not going to leave Hawaii, he was planning something else. He was baiting us. What more could his job require or his obsession drive him to do? A very good question. Any ideas?”
They passed the small Japanese teahouse where they had met earlier that day. It was dark and shuttered. Moonlight reflected white off the front, shrouding its humble entrance gate in shadow.
“He’s crazy. Patria might be able to say more. He thinks he’s a voodoo priest, or a kahuna master of ‘ana’ana, of killing people with magic. But he uses venom from marine snails, blowfish toxin, frog skins, and scrapings of human bone. Nothing really magic in that at all.”
“Perhaps not. But this was a man who liked to play with your mind. We’ll ask Patria. I want to know why he came to my island. Most of all I want to know why he stayed, even if the question is more or less academic now.”
The scattered lights of the village of Waipouli came toward them, passed them, fell behind. Darkness flowed by on both sides, broken through the trees by the flicker of moonlight on water. Mars blinked above the moon through the palm crowns, a red sore on the soft black sky.
The car following them slowed as it passed through the small town, but not enough. A traffic patrol officer, bored with late night duty, clocked it at forty-three miles an hour, eight miles over the limit. The old white VW van was doing forty-six, but he knew it belonged to Chazz Koenig, a good friend of Lieutenant Takamura. He was working with the lieutenant on the Death Ship case. He was a Good Guy.
This one, though, was a tourist, and not a Good Guy. Not that tourists were bad, mind you. But they were definitely Not Good. So he turned on the siren and the lights and ran the tan rental car down and waited patiently for the driver to roll down the window.
Hennet watched in frustration as the van’s taillights disappeared around a bend in the road. He looked over with hatred when Chausseur called him a fool. Then he opened the window. It was time to be polite in another language. He found it difficult enough to be polite in his own.
He would not succeed.
Kapaa was a distant blur of streetlights and homes. At this hour, the main street was deserted. Chazz had turned toward the condominium complex when Cobb Takamura, who appeared to be asleep with his porkpie hat over his eyes said quietly, “Keep going. Turn right at the end of the street and head back to the highway.”
“All right.” A flare of alarm rose in Chazz, but he said nothing and kept driving. They passed a parked car. Patria’s vehicle was in front of the condo. Everything was dark.
“You’d think they’d stay up for us. Weren’t you planning to go home tonight?”
Cobb had not moved, but Chazz sensed his tension, his state of alertness. Th
ey turned right and coasted a block before turning right again. Headlights appeared in his rearview mirror as they made the second turn.
“Okay, I get the picture. What do we do?” Chazz’s hands rested lightly on the wheel. “This is not exactly a hot getaway car.”
“Pull over, up there.” Cobb nodded toward the side of the cafe. As they rolled to a stop, a bank of the lights inside went off, leaving half the cafe in darkness. There were still two or three people inside. “Kimura lives upstairs,” Cobb said. “They might think we went in, but the place will be locked up. It’ll delay them for a minute. How fast can you move?”
“My leg and side are all right now. I can move.”
“Shall we?” Cobb clicked his door open and slid to the pavement. Chazz was on the ground and in front of the car when the headlights appeared at the far end. Then they were walking quickly along the sidewalk in front of the café.
There was a small alley between the cafe and the next set of shops, a two-story wooden building with an old-fashioned facade and a row of stores on the bottom floor. Upstairs was a large loft that had once been home to a dance studio, and now was a warehouse for the retail tenants. They slipped behind a Dumpster in the alley and waited.
The car cruised slowly past, the two men inside looking intently at the cafe. It pulled to the curb and idled for a moment, but the men in the car decided Chazz and Cobb weren’t inside, and a minute later the car cruised slowly past the mouth of the alley.
“I guess it didn’t fool them. Familiar?” Takamura hissed.
“Only saw the passenger,” Chazz answered. “But he was one of my friends from the disco. Big man, broad, flat face. Limping.”
“Ah. So they are from Tahiti. What are they doing here on my island?”
“You’re asking me?” They watched the car turn the corner and followed on foot.
“I don’t like this,” Chazz said. The car had returned to its position in view of the condo.
“I don’t like it either.” They were already running lightly along the sidewalk, staying close to the shadows. They moved swiftly from one cluster of shrubbery to the next. Soon they were outside the complex.