by Toby Neal
“Just that I am getting the impression that there is someone behind all these thefts. Someone who thinks they are doing a good thing.”
“Do you have anything harder than that? And why call me?”
“You are a daughter of my heart,” Esther said simply. “You were given to me to pray for. I sense danger to you in this, and to the new little one coming to you.”
“Thank you, Esther.” Lei knew the gift she was being given, to be chosen in this way. “I’ll tell Stevens. We are getting a baby unexpectedly, and he’s in foster care. We’ll alert the people working with his case. His mother was murdered, so you are right to be concerned.”
A long pause. Lei could picture Esther’s wide, smooth brown forehead, her finely modeled lips, and her shining brown eyes as she contemplated this.
“That is not the baby I’m concerned about,” the wise woman said, and hung up the phone.
Lei frowned. She set the phone in its holder and navigated out of the parking lot. She’d never yet had a phone call with Esther in which something confusing wasn’t said. Did she think Lei was pregnant?
She’d never known what the woman meant until after the fact—but so far, all her “knowledge” had checked out, even if only in hindsight. Lei pulled in to the station and met Torufu in Omura’s office, where they updated her on the progress in the art thief’s murder.
“The FBI is now tracking the man’s identity and financials.” Omura tapped her fingernails on the case file. “Now that we’ve brought them in, and the man is wanted by Interpol, our responsibility is the ‘boots on the ground’ aspects, such as this autopsy report.”
“Right,” Torufu said. “Nothing too interesting. His tox screen was clean, and obviously, blunt force trauma to the head was cause of death.”
Omura pushed a paper over to them with contact names and numbers. “This is the FBI team working on the man’s background and Interpol agents looking for his residence in Norway. Please coordinate any new information with them.”
“Sounds good.” Lei took the paper. “I was planning to go back to try to establish which set of footprints dealt the killing blow. I’ll reinterview the landlady and then release the premises for cleaning.”
“You do that while I get ahold of the Feds and Interpol and fax them the autopsy report,” Torufu said. “And please, God, no bomb threats today.”
They stood to leave, but Omura gestured to Lei. “Stay back a moment.”
Lei sat back down as Torufu headed out. Omura told her about Stevens’s phone call that morning and the lead on the Hui related to Magda Kennedy. “I’m putting him back on the job.”
“That’s good,” Lei said. She took a breath, blew it out. “On another subject, I need to ask permission for some compassionate family leave. My aunt is dying.” She told Omura about her father’s phone call.
Omura frowned, a crease between her immaculate brows. “This isn’t a good time.”
“I’m aware of that, sir.”
Omura sat back, twiddling a pen. “You are aware that once you’re officially on bomb squad, you need to be available on call twenty-four seven.”
“That’s why I’ve really been thinking it over. Talking with some people I’m close to, including Dr. Wilson, the psychologist. I’m very sorry to tell you, but I don’t think I’m the right person for that detail.”
Omura sat forward. The line had deepened between her brows. “I won’t lie and tell you I’m happy to hear it. I liked how you stepped up to the challenge and dealt with your demotion to sergeant, and though I heard mixed reports on your training, I was hopeful. I guess I’m glad you’re not wasting more of our time and resources getting trained for a job you don’t really want.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Lei said again. She sat upright in the chair, her hands on her thighs to keep from rubbing the pendant at her neck. “I really like working with Torufu. We make a good team. But especially now, with my aunty dying and this newborn coming into our lives—I don’t think I’m the right person for the job.”
“Can’t say I didn’t see it coming. You gave me some hints, and so did the instructors with Homeland who ran that training—they thought you didn’t have the confidence or mechanical aptitude,” Omura said. Lei felt her pride smarting but tried not to let it show as the captain continued. “All right. How about this? Finish your interviewing today and wrap up what you’re doing, and I’ll release you for a week of leave tomorrow to go be with your aunt. I’ll see if Torufu can carry on with your cases alone or if I need to reassign someone.”
“Thank you so much, sir.” Lei stood. “I really appreciate your understanding. I won’t forget this.”
“See that you don’t.” Omura flicked her nails. “Now get out of here before I change my mind.”
Lei pulled her truck into the municipal parking lot outside the Vineyard Street Inn in Wailuku. Her body felt sticky with stress-induced sweat from her conversations with Omura and Torufu. She’d told her partner she’d resigned from the explosive detail and was making flight arrangements to California. She’d just hung up the phone from calling her father to tell him, and that conversation hadn’t been easy either. He’d confirmed Aunty Rosario really was going downhill. Hospice was in, and she wasn’t leaving her bed except for dialysis.
Getting out of her vehicle, Lei looked up at the deep green cleft of Iao Valley directly behind the taller municipal buildings of Wailuku, the oldest town on Maui. A cool mysteriousness about the valley, usually wreathed in clouds, wild and yet so close to civilization, never failed to calm her nerves. She’d loved the year or so she and Stevens had lived in Iao Valley…
She slammed the door of her truck and walked briskly across the worn two-lane road to the inn. She found the door marked manager and checked the name in her notebook before she knocked on the jamb. “Mrs. Figueroa?”
The petite landlady looked up from behind a battered metal desk. “Yes? Who’s asking?” Today she was wearing a muumuu decorated with papayas and a pair of lime-green Crocs. Lei wondered if she had a different pair to match each muumuu.
“Remember me? Detective Lei Texeira with the Maui Police Department.”
“Of course. Come to release my guest room for cleaning? The place stay stink inside. I like clean ’em already!”
“Yes. But I’d like to look around one more time and ask you a few more questions.” Lei sat down on one of the wicker chairs next to the woman’s desk. “Remember I asked you to keep your ears open on who might have done this?”
“Yes, and I been asking. I no like say, though.” The woman appeared to have loose dentures, which she played with, lined lips working like she was sucking a lozenge.
“Why don’t you want to say? This crime was a terrible thing. It brought danger to your inn and cost you a lot of business.”
“I no like say because I no like more bad things come to my inn.”
Lei frowned. “Is someone threatening you?”
“No.”
“Is this something to do with organized crime?”
“No.” Mrs. Figueroa slapped her hands down on a pile of paperwork. “I no like say. The guy was one stupid Euro. No one cares he wen’ make die dead.”
Lei hadn’t heard that pidgin English phrase in a while, and she was taken aback by the woman’s attitude. “I’m sure his family would disagree. No one deserves what happened to him.”
Mrs. Figueroa sucked her dentures, clearly considering. “I only heard rumors about who done him. But you didn’t hear it from me, right?”
Lei mentally crossed her fingers. If she needed to call this woman as a witness, she would. “Anything you can tell me would be great, and of course, this is a confidential conversation.”
“I heard it was da boys from the Hui went done ’em.”
“What Hui?”
“You know, the Heiau Hui. They found out this guy one of the thieves that took the petroglyphs from Haiku, and they came here and killed him.”
Lei made a note on her spiral not
ebook. “Who told you this?”
“Rumors. I no can say.”
“I need a name, Mrs. Figueroa. Someone I can follow up with. A lead.”
Mrs. Figueroa worked her dentures for a long minute. “I no like them get piss off with me.”
“I understand that, and I won’t say how I got the lead.”
More coaxing, and Lei finally got the name of one of the local organizers of the Hui, a man related to Mrs. Figueroa’s second cousin. He’d told her it was a Hui hit and to shut up about it. “So I no like get more trouble for my inn.”
“Well, we still have to figure out which of the three sets of footprints are the ones of the person who actually killed the man. The others were accessories. Please don’t worry.”
“Be sure you keep me out of it.” Mrs. Figueroa’s anxiety seemed genuine. “I only want to do the right t’ing. The Hui, they’re doing a good thing for our island, protecting the artifacts.”
“Of course. We couldn’t possibly guard the sites as well as I’m sure the Hui is doing,” Lei said. She jotted the cousin’s name, George Figueroa, in her notebook and, after more assurances that Mrs. Figueroa wouldn’t be quoted in a way that would get back to her, Lei walked down the hall to the door marked with crisscrossed crime-scene tape.
She’d brought her camera, because even though Torufu had shot the scene, she wanted to be able to assess the footprints near where the body had been found and see if she could find the pair that had dealt the death blow. They really should have done that at the time, but Lei remembered getting distracted by finding the murder weapon.
Mrs. Figueroa, still grumbling, unlocked the victim’s door. The foul smell of rotting blood hit Lei hard. She stepped back out of the doorway into the hall.
“Phew!” Mrs. Figueroa held her nose. “So stink!”
Lei dug in her backpack purse for the little vial of Vicks she carried for just these occasions. “Please stay outside, Mrs. Figueroa.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” The landlady pulled the door shut behind her, leaving Lei, breathing shallowly and nauseated by the smell, snapping on gloves.
The blood spatters had dried black all over the room, and the smell, sweet and cloying with a metallic aftertaste, was cut by the Vicks but far from gone. Lei gulped repeatedly, feeling the urge to vomit and annoyed with herself because of it. She turned on her blue light and shone it on the floor. Blood trace immediately lit up, and she set the light down at an angle so that it shone across the negative space where the killers had stood and on the blank area where the body had lain. Smeared spots where the perpetrators had walked through the blood led toward the door.
Lei was able to identify one set of prints, approximately a men’s size nine, that had faced the victim and were outlined in negative space and spatter. Trace on either side outlined other shoe prints. She photographed the positions.
“They held him down and the guy wearing size nine beat his head in,” Lei muttered, chilled by the brutality of the slaying. She suddenly needed more air. She turned and slid up the screenless window where the murder weapon had been ditched.
She stuck her head out and breathed fresh air until her stomach settled and dizziness subsided. “Good thing Abe wasn’t here; he’d laugh me right out of the room,” she said aloud.
Finished checking the shoe prints, she stripped the tape off the door and left it unlocked, stopping by Mrs. Figueroa’s. “You can have the room cleaned now,” she said. “Be sure to use the firm Dr. Gregory referred you to. You don’t want to handle blood yourself.”
“No one will want to rent that room,” Mrs. Figueroa grumbled. “I going have to paint the whole thing.”
“Not a bad idea,” Lei agreed. “But I think this will blow over quickly, and as long as you keep renting to tourists, they’ll never know.”
She hurried out to the truck, eager to pass on the lead she’d picked up to Torufu along with the identification of the murderer’s shoe print. At least she wasn’t leaving him with nothing to follow up on as she took off for the mainland.
He’d taken the news she wasn’t sticking with bomb squad stoically. “I guess that means we’ll be reassigned partners,” Torufu said. “Too bad. You’re good in the field, Mrs. Stevens.”
Lei had apologized again. She felt like it was all she did these days.
With any luck at all, Stevens would be home soon, and maybe they could meet in the shower. She couldn’t wait to get the stink of rotten blood off her body.
Stevens drove up to the house in the cool blue of evening after a long day of catching up at the station and working the Heiau case. The interview with Magda Kennedy was set up for the following day, and he’d caught up with all his station business. A light was on inside. Lei’s truck was already parked in the driveway, and he felt his battered spirits lift.
She was home. The last few days had felt like an eternity. He was doing much better after meeting with Dr. Wilson, so much so that he was looking forward to sleeping in his own bed—with his wife.
Keiki greeted him happily, with a woof and a tail wag, but as soon as Stevens stepped inside the house, chaos hit him.
Everything had been moved or was awry and out of place. The cushions were off the couch, bedding on the floor, cupboards hung open, drawers gaped ajar. He recognized the aftermath of a search. McGregor and Chun had been in his house, and they hadn’t even had the courtesy to clean up after themselves.
Rage surged up inside. Stevens stormed forward to slam the doors of the cupboards and shove the drawers back in. He knew he was overreacting, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“Lei!” he bellowed. “Where are you?”
She opened the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel, hair dripping and eyes wide. The freckles stood out on her nose like dots of paint. “What are you yelling for?”
“This! This, dammit! Those assholes, tearing up our house. No respect!” He held up the mattress of the baby’s crib. The backing had been ripped off to check inside the box spring. “What, I was going to hide something in my baby’s bed? Seriously?”
“I know. They did a really rude, crude job. It sucks, and they were in a hurry. They did it quickly because I told them to. I came hurrying home, hoping you’d be here, and instead they were waiting to be let in because of our alarm and Keiki. So I was right outside while they tore through here in fifteen minutes. I told them to hurry.”
Stevens’s fists were clenched, his jaw tight. His chest heaved with anger. “So you told them to trash our house like this.”
“No, of course not. I told them to hurry up and not to bother cleaning because I wanted them out before you came home.”
Stevens strode over to the sideboard and splashed himself a glassful of scotch. He tossed it back in quick gulps, the bomb of warmth that went off in his empty stomach almost dizzying.
“It’s a shitty thing to come home to.” Lei slid up under his arm, her wet hair touching his shoulder, a towel around her slender body. “I just wanted them gone.”
He set the empty glass down with a thump. A wave of desire rose in him—a fierce need to bury himself in her, to be obliterated there, if even for a moment. He craved her in times of pain. She was his haven, the only person who knew every broken place in him and matched it with one of her own. Lei was the only one who could take all he had and give it back to him, pressed down, shaken together, overflowing.
“I want you,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Now.”
Her tilted eyes flared wide, and she let go of the towel. “You got me.”
He could barely wait, both of them tearing at his clothes to get them off. He was consumed by frantic want, and with no finesse whatsoever, he took her among the discarded couch cushions on the living room floor, the coffee table shoved aside.
She met him with an explosion of equal fire, bite, and power. In the tangling clash of their damaged hearts and wild emotions, he found a measure of peace.
For a brief moment they were that one body—the one safe and welcomin
g place in the world.
Chapter 20
Lei lifted herself onto one elbow as she and Stevens lay facing each other on the floor. Stevens’s arms were still locked around her, their legs entwined. Her skin complained from several rug-burned spots, but the knot of tension she’d carried in her chest, queasiness left over from the blood-spattered crime scene, and the anxiety she’d felt at getting home from work to find McGregor and Chun in the driveway—all of it was gone.
He’d buried his face in the juncture between her neck and shoulder, her damp curls covering his face. He’d instantly fallen asleep, but his arms were still clamped tight around her.
Lei pulled back slightly so she could see his face. There was tension in his squared jaw and shadows under those blue, blue eyes, hidden from her by a fan of lashes. She smoothed the crease between his brows with her thumb, stroked her hand down the plane of his cheek, and massaged the muscles between his neck and shoulder. Gradually, the grip he had on her body loosened and his muscles went heavy and slack.
She eased away, picked up the towel and wrapped it around herself. Went into the bathroom, washed. Squelched some Curl Tamer into her hair, slipped into her robe, and moving as quietly as she could, she let Keiki in. She went around the house and tidied up the mess left by the search.
A search that, thankfully, had yielded nothing.
It was Chun who’d given her a subtle thumbs-up as he followed his partner out, with a murmured, “Sorry for the hassle.”
She’d banged the door shut behind them, and after her afternoon in the crime scene, she’d wanted nothing more than to get clean in the shower.
Lei hadn’t counted on Stevens’s explosive response to the mess or she’d have picked it up first. She put some hot water on and made spaghetti, heating up some canned sauce as he slept on in the living room. Finally, when the food was almost ready and she’d poured them each a glass of Chablis, she woke him up, kneeling down in front of him and kissing his closed mouth.