by Kay Hadashi
“What about what he said about getting me into nursing school? I didn’t need your help with that. I didn’t need your help in getting a job at West Maui Med. What do you think I am, your pet project?”
“I didn’t do any of that. You did all the work it took to become a nurse, and a lot of it while pregnant. I admire you for that. And the OR at work got a whole lot better once you started working there, that’s for sure.”
“You didn’t do anything to get me that job?” Trinh asked.
“No. The OR manager came to me one day and asked about you. Somehow, she knew we had worked at the same hospital in San Francisco. I explained we were friends and I could give a personal reference for you, but that she would have to check with the San Francisco hospital on your professional qualifications, just like she’d have to check with the Air Force about those qualifications. All I did was tell her you were a hard worker and seemed to know what you were doing on the rare occasion we worked together. But no, I didn’t get you that job. Just like I didn’t let you live with me because I felt sorry for you the way Andrew said. I like having you here. I’d miss you if you moved out. When you move out.”
Trinh sat back. “Well, get out the tissues because I’ve decided to move in with Harmon sooner than what we planned. Scarlet, Wilson, and I are moving in with Harmon this weekend.”
“Oh. Because of me?” Melanie hesitantly asked.
“Not everything that happens on this planet is because of you, Mel.”
“But you’re not getting married?”
“Not yet. We just want to give it another trial run. It was great when we were first married back in San Francisco, but it just doesn’t feel the same now. Maybe because we’re older now, I don’t know. But I get kinda lonely for him, at night, you know?”
“Is somebody moving into your side of the house?”
“Next summer. Kimmie will come home from school in Honolulu in June. I’d like her to have a place of her own for the summer. Why?”
“I was thinking it might be nice to put Pop and Dottie somewhere else besides under my feet, at least until she’s strong enough for the trip back to Wyoming.”
“They can be here until Kimmie’s home. I heard Josh is going with them,” Trinh said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From Josh.”
Melanie clamped her teeth together. “That son…”
There was a knock at Trinh’s front door. She let in Detective Nakatani, who had brought someone with him.
“This is Hana Tsuda, Maui Police department’s unofficial handwriting expert,” Nakatani said of the young Japanese woman with him. “I say unofficial because our mayor hasn’t funded us for a real one yet.”
Melanie shot him a glare. “Thanks for the reminder, Detective.” She bowed to the young woman. “Hajimemashite. Dozo yoroshiku.”
Melanie and the guest started a conversation in Japanese, Detective Nakatani joining periodically by stumbling through a few phrases.
“Hey, no fair the rest of you speaking secret code languages around me,” Trinh said. She went off to get snacks and something for them to drink.
“Not that there is anything wrong with the idea, but why does MPD use a Japanese person for their handwriting analysis expert?”
“I can answer that,” Hana said, with only the slightest of accents. She handed out business cards to each of them. “I trained in the field back home. When I came here, I trained again. It’s quite interesting, seeing many of the same traits across two very dissimilar written languages. I also do written translation work. I’m a lot of fun at parties.”
“Oh?” Melanie asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“No, I mean people ask me to look at their signature and tell me what I think of their personality. It turns into a game after a while. You thought I meant…”
“Never mind what I thought,” Melanie said. She looked the woman over a second time and was jealous of her average height, delicate features, and raven hair. “I guess I haven’t been to a party in a while.”
“Do you have those yearbooks for us to look at, Mayor?”
Melanie got them off the end table. “You’ll find Katie’s handwriting on page one-eighty-seven in this one.”
“Why are there only three books?” Nakatani asked.
“She graduated a year early,” Trinh said. She took one for herself while Nakatani and Hana looked at the other two, and turned to the swim team page. “Wow. Look how skinny we were.”
Melanie and Trinh reminisced about making varsity swim team even as freshmen, and flipped through their freshman yearbook. While Nakatani went from one page to another, Hana examined Katie’s handwriting with a monocle, comparing that with the signature on the photocopy of the pharmacy logbook entry Nakatani had collected.
“Yes, most likely the same person,” she said.
“How likely?” Nakatani asked.
“Ninety percent. I can see where the person has aged twenty years, but I feel very nearly convinced it is the same hand that wrote both signatures, the one in the school yearbook and the one in the pharmacy logbook.”
Melanie leaned back into the cushion of the couch she was on. “So, go arrest her, Detective.”
“Not so easy. She hasn’t committed any specific crime. She’s not even complicit in one, from this evidence.”
“Why not? You were all hot to go get her the other day. All we needed to do was find the link between her and the missing drugs. Well, there it is.”
“All I have is two signatures written twenty years part, and only a ninety percent assurance they’re from the same person. That person may or may not be a part of a drug diversion crime.”
“What do you need to make her more suspicious? I thought being connected to Ozzy as a sibling, and him being a known associate of Cabbie Cabrera was enough?”
“Enough to get her into an interrogation room, but not much else.”
“Who’s getting taken into an interrogation room?” Harmon asked, coming down the hall. He was introduced to the visitors before being told what the meeting was about. He took the last yearbook Melanie and Trinh were in together and turned to the girls’ swim team page. “No wonder the two of you won every time you raced. You’re bigger than everybody else.”
“Look how big Melanie’s shoulders were,” Trinh said.
“You won almost every time we raced against each other.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one that won the Olympic gold medal.”
“You won a gold medal?” Nakatani asked. He, Hana, and Harmon all looked at her inquisitively.
“Old news, Detective. Have you located Cabrera yet?”
“Hold on a second,” Harmon said. “When did you win the Olympic medal? Before you were in the Air Force? I remember you were good in all our water training exercise and rescues.”
“It was when we were still in San Francisco,” Melanie said. “You don’t remember?”
“Remember what? You were living with us then. All I remember was how you were always either at school or at the hospital. We barely ever saw you at home. Whenever you were there, all you did was sleep.”
“It was at the end of med school. I took a long weekend off to go the Games. Lost miserably at my two individual events.”
“They don’t hand out medals to losers, Mayor,” Nakatani said.
Melanie told the story of how she was packing her things to go home after her last race, when a coach came for her. “They needed a fourth on a relay team and I was the only other female US swimmer still there. So, less than an hour after my last race, I was back in the pool again. Somehow, we pulled off a win, and way slower than any record time.”
“Where’s the medal?” Trinh asked. “I never have seen it.”
“Heck if I know.”
Nakatani shook his head, Hana giggled, and Harmon shrugged.
“There is news about the sandwich bags,” Nakatani said. “Several of the partial fingerprints we found on them were decent matches to Andrew C
arson.”
“As much as I’d like to see Andrew in handcuffs doing the perp walk into a courtroom, I can’t believe he has a police record. How did you get his prints?” Melanie asked.
“I spent part of the day at the hospital following him around. When he left his food tray behind in the cafeteria, I collected the silverware for the prints he left behind. And yes, perfectly legal, but no, not admissible in court. I did it for reference.”
“And?” Melanie asked.
“Partials of several of his fingers were on all four bags, and two of those bags were the ones with your prints on the inside. With that knowledge, we went back to the sandwich bags we collected from your home last week and compared them to the ones that had been stuffed inside the teddy bear. Exact match. Then we checked with the manufacturer and they said that particular style of bag hadn’t been produced or sold in more than a decade, and they’ve had two style changes since those have been on the market.”
“It sounds to me like there’s a very strong inference between Andrew and the meth,” Melanie said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t see why you can’t go pick him up for a few hours of interrogation.”
“We did. He had solid alibis for everything.”
“He would,” Trinh hissed.
“He also allowed us to check his condo for sandwich bags or any ingredients used in the making of meth. You know, as clean as that guy’s apartment is, he had no cleaning supplies at all. No broom, no vacuum cleaner, no cleaners, nothing.”
“He has a service that comes in daily to clean everything. They even do his laundry and dishes,” Melanie explained. “But how did his fingerprints get on the same sandwich bags as mine, and the meth?”
“They were only partials.”
“Well, the next time you have him in an interrogation room, sweat him a little. He’ll talk.”
“We tried waiting him out, but he sat there like a stone, giving the same alibi time after time.”
“Next time, make him drink a full bottle of water, and then give him some coffee.”
“What will that do?” Nakatani asked.
“Andrew has the smallest bladder in town. Seriously.”
The rest of the group looked at her for an explanation.
“Whenever I was mad at him, I’d give him tons of stuff to drink all evening. He’d whine and complain all night long about having to get up for the bathroom again.”
“Dang, Mel, that’s mean,” Trinh said.
“It got him out of my life.”
The three women of the group laughed, while Harmon and Nakatani crossed their legs.
“I remember how diabolical the two of you can be when working together,” Harmon said. He made a point of looking at Trinh and Melanie.
“We’ve learned a few tricks since then, so watch your step,” Trinh said. She smiled and patted his knee.
“Another secret in the Mayor’s office?” Nakatani asked.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” Harmon told him. “Just a word to the wise. Don’t let your wife spend time alone with these two.”
Nakatani referred to his notepad. “Well, we’re getting closer to finding a culprit. We have a large amount of missing drugs that are necessary for making meth, actual drugs in a large quantity that were packaged for trafficking, a known association between those drugs and someone who is a known recent associate of Carlos Cabrera, an island drug manufacturer and distributor, and evidence that links Cabrera to the rowboat that the dead couple was found in. I even have partial fingerprints on sandwich bags that held meth, but those don’t match Cabrera’s prints that I found on the boat. The big question mark is why that couple was killed, and how the teddy bear is involved.” Detective Nakatani flipped his notepad closed and put it away.
“But I told you about how the teddy bear was bought at the same time as the bowtie and at the same place, just before the crime was committed. That should mean something, right?” Melanie asked.
“You’re on to something, Mayor.” Detective Nakatani began flipping through his notebook again until he found what he was looking for. He unfolded a photocopy and handed that to Hana, the handwriting expert. “I was able to get a copy of the original receipt from the billing department of the toy store. I can’t read the signature, but maybe you can.”
The handwriting expert looked over the receipt with her monocle. “Different name, same handwriting.”
“How sure are you?”
She looked again. “Eighty-five percent.”
“Statistically, that sounds awfully strong to me,” Melanie said. “Ninety percent assurance the signatures from the yearbook and the logbook are the same, and eighty-five percent assurance the handwriting on the sales receipt for the teddy bear is the same as the handwriting in the pharmacy logbook. That’s a seventy-five and a half percent assurance the two signatures belong to the same person. There’s your link.”
“Seventy-five and a half?” Nakatani asked.
“You didn’t know? Melanie is a human calculator,” Trinh muttered.
Melanie smirked at her lifelong best friend. “That pharmaceutical company vendor is the link between the stolen ephedrine and the teddy bear. The teddy bear was in the rowboat where the dead bodies were found, and the boat has Cabrera’s fingerprints on it. Plus, the teddy bear was stuffed with the exact same type and quality of meth that had been made from the stolen ephedrine, and the sandwich bags had both Ozzy Simpson, Katie Simpson’s twin brother, and Andrew Carson’s fingerprints on them. I say go pick them up.”
“If I arrested them with that as evidence, I’d have to take you in, Mayor. Don’t forget your prints were also on those sandwich bags.”
Melanie sat back and began picking at a hangnail. “I told you how Andrew might’ve got those bags.”
“Might’ve doesn’t last long in court, Mayor.”
“I don’t know what else you need,” Melanie said. “There’s no smoking gun, just two con artists that were killed in slow motion by being electrocuted in a boat full of salt water.”
“Boat full of salt water? What are you talking about?” Harmon asked.
Nakatani explained the theory that the Taylors had been drugged and electrocuted in the rowboat filled with seawater, later found by Melanie and Thérèse on the beach.
“You’re sure they were electrocuted in that rowboat and not somewhere else?” Harmon asked.
“Why do you ask that?” Nakatani asked.
“I was on call at the hospital that weekend and we had a patient brought in with very similar injuries, a very low voltage electrocution. He had been standing in water at the beach working on his boat late at night. His generator cables fell into the water, while the generator continued to run. He said he felt the current running through the water, not enough to really shock him, but enough to cause some pain and make his heart palpitate. It took a few minutes for him to get out of the water and unplug the generator. We checked his EKG and found it was a little off but was corrected with some meds. We wanted to keep him over night and let him go the next day.”
“Did he say if anyone else was involved in getting shocked?” Nakatani asked.
Harmon shook his head. “He denied anything like that, but it seemed like he was hiding something. I live near there and that beach is busy with tourists strolling and wading until very late. It seems improbable to me that no one else was at the beach at the time. The odd thing was that just as we were about to ship him off to the ward, he left without saying anything to us. Just vanished.”
“You remember his name?” the detective asked.
“I only remember because the first name is unusual. Oswald something.”
Chapter Fourteen
Detective Nakatani left Trinh’s house at a gallop after learning what Harmon had to say. That left Hana behind with no way of getting home. Leaving Harmon and Trinh to themselves, Melanie got ready to take Hana home.
“Before I go, I need to talk to you, Trinh.”
“Uh oh,” T
rinh said as she was dragged into the kitchen by Melanie. “What’s wrong?”
“You said something earlier about being glad to see Andrew get tossed behind bars, even if he wasn’t guilty of drug charges. What did you mean by that?”
Trinh turned away, pretending to wipe down the kitchen counter. “I meant he’s a jerk and belongs behind bars.”
“Nobody goes to jail for being a jerk, otherwise half the world would be behind bars. Spill it, Trinh.”
“Just that he was kinda aggressive when he came on to me once or twice.”
“How aggressive? What did he do to you?”
“Just tried forcing himself, you know, on me.”
Melanie demanded to know what happened and got the full story from Trinh. “I finally had to knee him in the crotch a couple of times to get him off me.”
“Stupid jerk,” Melanie said. “I see why the two of you hate each other so much. I guess he felt entitled since he had broken up with me and you weren’t married anymore.”
“It wasn’t after you broke up. You guys were still talking about getting married when he did that to me.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?” Melanie asked.
“Not sure why. It looked like you were going to break up with him eventually. Anyway, he threatened my job at the hospital, that if I said anything, he’d find a way of getting me canned.”
“I’m gonna…”
Trinh grabbed Melanie’s arm. “No, you’re not. You’ll leave him alone and let Nakatani do his job. I’d rather see Andrew in jail than get beat up by you.”
Melanie let her hands relax from the fists they had balled into. After giving her friend a hug, she took the handwriting expert to her side of the house.
“Sorry about you being left behind,” Melanie said to Hana. “Detective Nakatani is quite single-minded about things when he has a hot lead to follow.”
“Never mind. He did say you were curious about your own handwriting the other day.”
“Oh, gosh. It was just simple curiosity.”
“I was looking in your yearbook and saw the place where you wrote your name. I’ve also seen your recent signature. Quite interesting.”