by Kay Hadashi
“Don’t tell me. White with a blue stripe? Thick like it was a rental board?”
“That’s right. Just like you said about the Gonzo boards. But when I go back to talk to them this time, they won’t be able to wiggle out so easily as before. When I spoke to them Friday, they denied they were missing any boards, even showed them to me. But they had twenty-eight of them then. I’ll see how many they claim to have today. That’s my next stop after here. Unfortunately, the media has heard about this and I’m dealing with half a dozen newspaper and TV reporters.”
Melanie sat up. “You know what? That’s my job to talk to them about these things. Can you send a patrol car to pick me up? My house is only a few minutes from there.”
“I can manage them, if they all show up at the same time and leave once I’m done. But there are reporters coming in from Honolulu now.”
“Just send someone to get me. It’s time for an official statement from me about this anyway.”
“My precinct commander Hernandez should be here shortly. I’ll hold off on any more statements until the two of you have had a chance to talk.”
Melanie hurried as best she could to change into something more presentable than a T-shirt and threadbare sweatpants for the ad hoc press conference she needed to give. As she changed clothes, she considered what she might say to the reporters, people always hungry for information--the juicier the better.
“What do they usually say? We’ll get to the bottom of whoever is behind these deeds?”
When she went outside, the patrol car was just arriving. After being helped into the back seat, she noticed a strong odor.
“That’s not me that smells like that, right?” she asked the officer as he pulled out into traffic.
“No, Ma’am. I had to take in a couple of drunk drivers early this morning, and one didn’t quite make it out of the car, if you know what I mean.”
“How nice.” She tried opening the windows in back, but being a vehicle that transported suspects and criminals, the switches and door handle didn’t work. She immediately felt claustrophobic. “Can you put the windows down, please? In my condition, I’m not far from doing the same thing most days.”
The breeze that blew in helped, but not much.
“Holding a press conference at the beach, Ma’am?” he asked.
“That’s right. Somehow, I need to reassure the public that our beaches and the ocean are safe, and without sounding like I’m giving a canned speech. Any suggestions?”
“Not much of a speechmaker, Ma’am. But you always sound like you know what you’re talking about on TV. That’s why my wife and I voted for you.”
“Thanks.” She wanted to add something about giving it more consideration next time and voting for the other candidate, but let it go. Getting out her phone, she called Lailanie to cancel her appointment.
“Everything is okay?” the hairstylist asked. “You’re not going to the hospital, are you?”
“No, it’s mayor business. If you have a TV there, turn it on to the local news.”
Just about then, they arrived at the beach, where Nakatani was holding off a throng of a dozen reporters and two TV crews. Arriving right behind her was Commander Hernandez, MPD chief.
“Mayor Kato, Mayor Kato! Do you have a statement for the press?” one of the reporters shouted.
After having half a dozen microphones thrust in her face, Melanie said, “Let me talk with the lead detective and the precinct commander for a few minutes and we’ll come back to you, okay?”
The reporters left the trio alone when officers called them away.
“What’s the deal with this one, Nak?” Hernandez asked.
“About the same as the first one from a few days ago. Surfer with a leash but not much of a board. The coroner is looking him over on the beach where he was found. I have a CSI crew here, getting photos, collecting whatever evidence they can from a public beach at high tide.”
“What were his injuries?” Melanie asked, her medical mind kicking in.
“Basically the same as the Winston kid. Severe chest injuries. But there’s something new with this one, something I didn’t know when we talked a while ago, Melanie.”
“What’s that?”
“A shark took a bite out of this one.”
Melanie got out her phone and sent a text to Josh, asking where they were and to stay out of the water. “Which means he’d been floating outside the reef for a while. Sharks rarely come close to shore on this part of the island. It might even have been the mechanism of injury that caused his death, but I’m not telling that to the press. Every time there’s a shark bite within a thousand miles of Hawaii, hotel room reservations plummet.”
“If there is a shark patrolling these waters, we’re compelled to tell the public, Melanie, for their safety,” Hernandez said.
She sighed, knowing he was right. “I know. But let’s wait until we know for sure. What was bit off the body?”
“Apparently, his head,” Nakatani said.
Melanie swallowed some nausea, the flavor of her morning oatmeal.
The coroner joined them, snapping off his gloves. “That’s a mess.”
“We heard something about a possible shark bite?” Nakatani asked.
“That was no shark. If it had been, it would’ve come back for more. An arm, a leg, whatever. They don’t leave easy meals behind. No, it’s too clean of an injury. Incisive rather than a tearing bite a shark would make. I think it was from a large boat propeller.”
“So, definitely not a shark?” Melanie asked.
Dr. Benson nodded his head toward the beach. “Let’s go have a look and I’ll explain why I think that.”
The CSI techs had the body covered with a tarp. When two of them lifted on end, they were careful to shield the body from reporters and their cameras. Melanie had seen shark bite victims and beheaded victims during her time as a doctor, but this hit her differently. The body was deformed the way Kenny Winston had been, and with the head missing, made it look even worse. She clamped her teeth against more nausea that was rising.
“See the skin edge here?” Benson said, pointing to where the neck had been. “This has been incised, not bitten through. Not carefully by a knife, mind you, but chopped roughly the way a propeller might do. Given enough time, I might even be able to tell you the quality of the propeller, if it was new or old, had any rust on it, or damaged edges. No, this definitely was not a shark bite.”
“There’s no sign of the…”
“Head?”
“Yes,” she muttered.
“Not that we’ve noticed,” Benson said. He pointed to someone in snorkel gear in the water. “We have someone checking the water, but that could’ve drifted in a different direction, or just sank.”
“Shark probably found it before it got too far,” Nakatani said. “Made a meal of it anyway.”
When Melanie stood up straight again, her mind whirled for a second. Steadying herself didn’t help. In fact, it made her nausea worse.
“Pardon me.”
She stepped over to the privacy of shade beneath a tree and let loose of her breakfast. Once that was done, she felt a hand on her back and a handkerchief being given to her. After she wiped her mouth, Nakatani handed her a bottle of water.
“Thanks,” she said, after spitting out the rinse water. “Kind of embarrassing.”
“No worries. You don’t have to do this news conference, Melanie.”
“I want to. It was just the sight of that guy. And seriously, you guys need to clean your patrol cars a little better.”
Chapter Nine
Detective Nakatani took Melanie home after their news briefing, but made a stop for something to drink at a fast food place. Melanie was sure to find a place in the shade, but with plenty of breeze blowing through.
“One iced tea, extra sugar, no lemon,” he said, setting a large cup in front of her.
She took out the straw and took off the lid to drink. “I think the conference went
okay. I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself.”
“It went fine. They got an update about the earlier investigation, and what we know about this one. Not much more we can tell them. I do think it was a good idea not to tell them about the guy’s head.”
Melanie set down her cup after taking several sips. “Let’s not bring that up again, okay?”
“I wanted to talk to you for a while about the investigation into the missing artifacts.”
“You said Winston’s fingerprints were on all the cases of the missing things, right?”
“Full prints on the case at the library, and we found partials at the museum that would be good enough for court evidence.”
“It’s so strange he showed up dead only a day after the thefts.”
Nakatani shifted uneasily. “There are some other peculiarities popping up in that investigation.”
She wondered where he was going with it. “Oh?”
“As of last night, everything has been bought in an online auction, and by the same buyer, a Japanese woman in the LA area that goes by the online name of Aiko Murata. Does that sound familiar to you?”
Melanie ignored her tea, worried she might bring it up again. This time it was nerves instead of nausea. “There are a lot of people with Japanese names in Los Angeles, Detective.”
“When we turned the auction sales into an official investigation, we were able to force the auction house into telling us the address of where the things were shipped. Guess where that was?”
“To this Murata person, I would guess.”
“Not exactly. Since this is now an FBI investigation…”
“Oh, those guys,” Melanie hissed.
“Yes, I heard from Hernandez you and they don’t get along so well. But when the feds checked out the shipping address, the discovered a man named Carl Masters had signed for them. But instead of using his name, he signed Aiko Murata’s name. The really interesting thing about this Masters fellow is that he’s a retired Secret Service agent.”
“That is interesting. Did they arrest him, or the woman, what was her name again?”
“Murata,” Nakatani said slowly. Melanie felt like he was drilling holes into her with his stare. “They didn’t arrest her either. Can you guess the location of the address?”
The jig was up. She knew she’d been caught in her scheme. “1173 Hacienda Lane?”
“Also known as the Jack Melendez Presidential Library, formerly his private home, and that of Doctor June Kato, and a child named Melanie Kato, albeit thirty-some years ago. The only reason the FBI agents backed off was because of the location.”
Melanie tried putting on an innocent expression but knew it looked more like nausea right then. “Seems more than coincidental, doesn’t it?”
“It’s even more coincidental that the mother of the man whose prints were found on the museum cases is staying with you as a houseguest.”
“I’m still not sure how that happened, and I can’t quite seem to find a polite way of getting rid of her. As it is right now, my daughter would be pissed at me if I made Mrs. Winston leave.”
“I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for the next twenty-four hours, if I get some straight answers from you, right now. But I have to tell you, it looks an awful lot like internet trafficking of stolen historical artifacts, which is a serious federal offense and carries severe penalties.”
“Look, I was just trying to get the stuff back to Maui. When I found it at an online auction, I had to bid. There was no way I was going to let that stuff go to some collector who would stick the stuff in a corner of his hobby room, or resell it a year from now for a profit. That’s Hawaiian heritage stuff and belongs here. Or in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. It might be safer there. The only reason it was still here on Maui was because they were used by Mauian villagers.”
“You don’t know anything about the theft of it?”
“All I know is what you’ve told me.”
“Why did you have it sent to your father’s library?”
“You know he was my father?”
“Everybody at the precinct knows, even if most of the public still doesn’t. Why send it there and not have it sent back here?”
“I was hoping not to implicate myself. In a few weeks, I was going to have it quietly returned anonymously, no questions asked. And then beef up the display cases they were kept in.”
“Why get Masters involved?”
Melanie smiled at the memory. “Agent Masters was a young agent on Dad’s protection detail when my mom and I were living there with Dad. He was always so stern, but for some reason took a liking to me. We’d play little games, just simple little things that I’d make up on the spur of the moment. He even went along with my practical jokes that I’d play on Mom and Dad occasionally. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out he would tell them ahead of time so they could play along and act surprised. Well, he remained on Dad’s detail until the very end, and was even one of his pallbearers. That’s when he retired from the Service and took over managing the library. I know it sounds silly, but this was one last way of playing a practical joke on everybody, and kept my name out of it. At least until now.”
“Explanation accepted, for the time being. Who the heck is Aiko Murata?” he asked.
Melanie chuckled. “It was my way of including my mom in the gag.”
“I don’t get it.”
Melanie dug through her pocketbook to find a small snapshot. “This is my mom when she was working as a model. That was taken several years before I was born, when she was modeling in Japan, using that name as a professional alias.”
“She’s very pretty.” He handed the picture back. “You got your looks from her.”
“Thanks, but never in a million years could I look nearly as good as Mom. Or be as classy.”
“Okay, for the record. Before last week, you never met or had any business with Kenneth Winston?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Or Adelaide Winston?”
“None, except that she’s living with us right now. And yes, I do realize how that must look to the police.”
“You don’t have the stolen objects in your home, right?”
“Not at all. Once they’re returned to Maui, I’ll look at them through bulletproof glass cases at the museum, just like everyone else.”
“Do you have any other stolen objects in your home?”
“Seriously?” she asked. “If I had even so much as shoplifted as a kid and my mom had found out, I’d still be grounded.”
“Had to ask. One more thing. Did you have anything to do with the planning of the theft of those items?”
“I could no more plan the break-in of a museum for the theft of artifacts out of locked cases than flying to the moon.”
“Yes or no answer, please.”
“No. I had nothing to do with the planning nor did I assist in the theft of those things. You can consider that my official statement about it. Anything else?”
He flipped his little notebook closed and put it away. “Yes. Are you getting enough rest? You don’t look so good.”
“Detective, I’m two meals behind after losing my breakfast at the beach a little while ago, I haven’t had a full night of sleep in weeks, and have an offensive lineman packed into my uterus. Right now, he’s doing jumping jacks on my bladder. Not to mention the slipped disc in my back which is grating on my last good nerve. If you wouldn’t mind helping me into your car, you could give me a ride home.”
***
Perched on the couch, her legs sprawled, her head back on a pillow, the muted TV showing an old western, beads of sweat running down her face and neck, Melanie tapped a finger on her belly.
“Hey, you in there. Come out.”
Just as she was about to doze off, she heard the back door open, followed by the sound of small footsteps through the kitchen and into the living room.
“Momma!” Thérèse shouted as she leapt onto the couch.
“La Perouse. We found a coconut.”
“Well, that’s a good day, then.” Melanie looked at Josh and Addie as they came into the room. “Island shortage on sunscreen?”
“We put some on when we first got there,” Addie said.
“We might’ve been out for too long,” Josh added.
“You know the rules, Josh. Every two hours, even in the shade and she always has to wear a hat. Can you bring me the aloe, please?”
“It’s not so bad, Momma.”
“I know, but let me put it on you anyway. What else did you do with Aunt Addie?”
“Went to some little shops, got sumpin’ to drink.”
Addie had gone to her room and closed herself in by then.
“Were you nice to her?” Melanie whispered.
“They’ve become best friends,” Josh said, taking the aloe back to apply to his own face. “How was your day? Get some rest?”
“Not really.” Melanie sent her daughter into the kitchen for something to drink, an activity that would take a few minutes. “Another body has washed ashore, but I’m not telling Addie until we know more about it.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“It looks about the same as for her son. Except this kid lost his head to a motor boat propeller.”
“Of all the ways to go. Anything I can do for you?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to get home. I’m very close to being overdue for a trip to the bathroom.”
“You can’t get up?”
“I seem to be stuck here. But before you help me up, go in the sewing basket and get a straight pin.”
“What for?” he asked.
“You’ll see.” While she waited, she listened to what Thérèse was doing in the kitchen, something that was turning into a major project from the sounds of it.
“What am I doing with this?” he asked, once he was back with the pin.
“Jab it into my right big toe.”
“What? I’m not going to jab you with a pin. Do your self-destructive activities on your own time.”