by Toby Neal
“I’d like to be your first trainee,” Brandon said. “You’ve been a great mentor.”
“Well, I hope you pass the exam the first time, then. How’s your mother doing?” Stevens and the Mahoes had intersected on a case in which Brandon was injured in the line of duty. They caught up for a few minutes, and then Stevens’s cell phone rang. He checked it and frowned. “I need to take this, Brandon.”
“No worries. Just wanted to say hello and let you know my plans. See you around the station.”
The young man exited, and Stevens answered the phone, alone at last. “Hey, Jared.”
His brother’s voice was clipped. “Do you want the good news on Mom first, or the bad news?”
“Gimme the good news first,” Stevens said.
“Good news is we’re at the doctor’s here in downtown Kahului, and she’s had a full physical. Blood work’s already back, and liver enzymes are up, indicating liver damage. Her pancreas is inflamed, and she’s anemic and malnourished.”
“That’s the good news?” Stevens shut his eyes, running a hand through his hair.
“Diagnosis: chronic alcoholism. She doesn’t have cancer or even heart disease, amazingly. Ready for the bad news?”
“If you must.”
“Mom’s skipped out. She told me she was going to the bathroom, and she disappeared.”
Chapter 7
Lei and Pono went in Pono’s lifted truck this time. Lei glanced at her phone, checking the time. She had four hours until she had to get to the airport, and the day seemed to be slipping through her fingers. There were too many leads to follow. She frowned as the GPS directed them up into the mauka subdivision of Kuau, a section of upscale new development homes off Hana Highway on the mountain side of the road.
They turned in to a smooth poured concrete driveway trimmed with palms in front of a large, two-story home. Off to the side, Lei spotted an ohana cottage. The cottage made sense as the young man’s possible abode. She and Pono didn’t have anything but the main address, however, so Pono rang the main doorbell.
A young woman, dark-haired and pretty, wearing exercise clothes, answered the door with a toddler on her hip and a big-eyed little girl hiding behind her legs.
“Hi. How can I help you?” she asked. Her demeanor was calm and confident. Lei held her ID badge up.
“We’re looking for Eli Tadeo,” Pono said, with a smile at the kids, who smiled back. “You look familiar. Have I met you somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’m Rachel Tadeo. Sergeant Eric Tadeo’s wife.”
Lei glanced from one face to another as Pono and Rachel reacquainted themselves. They had to tread carefully now. Their person of interest was the brother of MPD’s recruiter, the “poster boy” of law enforcement in their county.
“My partner, Lei Texeira,” Pono finally said, gesturing to Lei.
“Hey. Why don’t you two step inside? Girls, go clear off the table!” Rachel exclaimed. She set the toddler down, and the girls scampered into the next room. “Come in. Have a drink of something. Eli lives in the back cottage.”
“I think I’ll go straight there, thank you,” Lei said politely, turning to retrace her steps. Rachel held up a hand.
“I need to know what this is about.”
“I’m sorry. We can’t say right now,” Lei said, smiling to take the sting out of her words. “We just have a few questions for him, is all.”
“I have a right to know what’s going on right on my own property,” Rachel flared. “This is about Makoa Simmons, isn’t it? I can’t believe you could even imagine Eli would have anything to do with that!”
Lei kept her face still and gave Pono a meaningful glance, spinning on her heel and walking down the steps, hearing Pono’s mellow bass rumble trying to soothe the recruiter’s wife.
She walked across a series of paving stones to the cottage’s door. It was a cute place with plumeria-print curtains in the windows and a rack of surfboards on the wall beside the door. Several pairs of rubber slippers on the aloha-emblazoned welcome mat indicated Eli Tadeo might be home.
There was no bell, so Lei knocked.
And knocked again.
She turned, looked around. There were cars and trucks parked across the street and along the road, so Tadeo could be home and not answering the door. Perhaps he’d seen who it was, or maybe his car was parked in the big closed garage off the main house.
She took out one of her cards, jotted call us ASAP on it, and stuck it in the doorjamb, turning and tripping back down the steps.
Pono was just saying his goodbyes. Rachel Tadeo frowned at the sight of Lei.
“Your brother-in-law wasn’t home,” Lei said. “Please tell him to call us as soon as he can.”
“I will,” she said, and shut the door unnecessarily hard. Pono walked down the steps to join Lei.
“That was awkward.”
“Yeah. Too bad he wasn’t home. I would have liked to rule him out quickly,” Lei said as they headed back to the truck. “Jealous boyfriend he might be, but getting someone else to do the deed for him? Doesn’t fit the MO for the usual domestic violence offender.”
“We’re not even speculating that way yet. Right now we’re just interviewing anyone and everyone who might have had an interest in Makoa Simmons’s death. Shaking the trees and seeing what drops. Mrs. Tadeo’s protective, but I found out her husband, Eric, and Eli are twins, so I think I understand her attitude a little better.”
“Twins. That is close to home,” Lei said thoughtfully, as they got on the road to Makoa’s parents’ house.
On the way back to the Simmonses’ house, Pono’s phone rang. Lei answered it for him since he was driving. It was Makoa Simmons’s agent, Harvey Nebel.
“I have a little time now,” the sports agent said. “Why don’t you come to my office in Wailuku?”
Lei glanced at Pono. “Financials,” she mouthed, raising her brows in inquiry. “Makoa’s agent can fit us in.”
“Let’s do it,” Pono said.
Fifteen minutes later, they pulled into the underground garage of one of the few high-rise office buildings on Maui. Located on Main Street in Wailuku, the Iao Office Complex was across from the city and county buildings and commanded a view of the deep waist of the figure-eight-shaped island on one side, with waving sugarcane fields and Haleakala in the distance. Stunning green, waterfall-carved Iao Valley bracketed the other side. Lei got an eyeful of both views as they got off the elevator, stepping into an elegant glass-windowed lobby with a reception desk at one end.
Emblazoned in gold script above the reception desk were the words Sports Unlimited.
“I’m surprised Nebel bothers with such a fancy office here,” Lei said in an aside to Pono. “Maui’s not exactly a sports hotbed.”
“Bet he has a house here and works virtually most of the time,” Pono said. “Most of the work’s probably by phone anyway.”
Harvey Nebel was much as Lei had expected from his name: short, balding, with a paunch like a soccer ball and bright blue eyes, crinkled with good humor.
“Pleased to meetcha.” Nebel came around from behind his desk to shake their hands. “Never had occasion to meet any Maui Police Department personnel before.” His aloha shirt was lurid enough to give Dr. Gregory competition.
“Nice to meet you as well.” Pono grinned at the little man. “It was great how you got Winston Pepper traded to the Chargers.”
They went off into football-speak for a few minutes, and Lei used the time to look around the chic space, furnished in shades of slate and silver, with pops of red in a vase and in pillows on cushy-looking chairs set in a conversational grouping. Harvey gestured to these, and they sat.
“I understand from your message that you need some financial information regarding Makoa Simmons’s career. I’m so sorry,
but I can’t provide you with that information without a warrant. I’m sure you understand.” He crinkled his eyes ruefully, turning up his hands.
“I do.” Pono continued to lead the conversation. “I anticipated you’d have strict confidentiality rules, and I brought one.” He took a folded paper out of a folder he’d carried in. “We need to examine every possible motive for this young man’s death, including financial. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, I do.” Harvey adjusted his glasses as he examined the document. “Appears to be in order. Well, I had my girl prepare a folder just in case. We’re both Boy Scouts, I see—always prepared.” Harvey included Lei in his smile. He got up, fetched the folder off the desk, and rejoined them.
“Let me explain it a bit to you.” He sat on the low, Danish-styled backless couch between them, and Lei and Pono leaned in from either side to look on. “Makoa has sponsorships of various kinds. Some of them are contingent on completing tasks or events, some of them are monthly stipends, and some of them are what amount to gifts of swag or product.”
He went through the contracts, explaining Makoa’s income stream. The young man was making what amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year. Lei blinked. “That’s a lot of money. What happens now that he’s dead?”
“Well, Makoa was smart for a young man of his age. He had most of his money going into a central account, which was being managed by a financial planner and invested. He lived on a monthly allowance. He was saving to buy a house.”
Harvey removed his red plastic reading glasses and, to Lei’s surprise, mopped his eyes with a bandanna. “I’m sorry. He was such an amazing young man. He was just getting started with his future. Anyway, most of his sponsorships will end with his death, of course, but there is still some residual income that will be coming in from licensing of his name, image, et cetera.”
“What about life insurance policies and things like that?” Lei asked.
“Funny you should ask. I was just talking to Makoa about this last week. As part of his contracts, he had to carry a couple million dollars of insurance against being handicapped or killed. He’d just found out that his father had taken out a big policy on him, and he wasn’t happy about it. They didn’t see eye to eye, and Makoa thought it showed how much his father didn’t believe in him and expected him to fail.”
“So how much is a big policy?” Lei frowned. She was now glad they’d come to this interview before visiting the parents.
“Three million.”
“That is a lot. Didn’t Makoa have to agree to the policy?”
“Actually, no. Parents can take out a policy on children without their knowledge or consent, and children on their parents. Siblings on each other. Spouses. Et cetera.”
Lei and Pono glanced at each other. “So who was Makoa’s beneficiary?” Pono asked.
“His parents—but Makoa was so upset when he found out about his dad’s extra policy, he changed the beneficiary of his insurance to his girlfriend, Shayla Cummings. Some of the companies he had contracts with will also get payouts.”
Lei resisted looking at Pono again for fear of communicating anything.
Now, not only did the dad have motive, but so did Shayla Cummings—not to mention Eli Tadeo. He might have had a powerful motive to kill Makoa and make his ex-girlfriend rich. And what if Shayla knew? And they’d colluded together?
They shook hands with the energetic little agent and left with the folder of contracts.
In the elevator, Lei shook her head. “The plot thickens,” she murmured, flipping through the papers. “I think we need a look at the dad’s financials, too. I have to get on a plane in an hour. I think you should get the dad’s financial information before you interview him. And if I can find the guy who actually killed Makoa on Oahu, we might have a much better idea of why.”
“I’ll take you to the airport and find out who does the bookkeeping for Simmons Construction. I’ll visit there first before I go interview the parents again,” Pono said.
“You might want to take Gerry or one of the other detectives,” Lei said. “That dad seems like the kind to lawyer up, or deny things were said without another witness.”
Pono nodded. They both worked their phones on the way to the airport: Lei called Omura to update her on their progress, and Pono got the name of the bookkeeping firm that handled Simmons Construction’s books from Rory Simmons’s administrative staff.
After Pono had the name, he hung up. “Now to get my next subpoena going,” he said.
“You were pretty slick with that,” Lei said. “You got a stack of them pre-signed?”
“I do. Won ’em from Judge Natides in a poker game,” Pono said. “He made me raise my hand and swear they’d be justified, but he trusted me enough to presign five of them. Can’t tell you how handy they’ve been.”
“That’s why I like having you for a partner,” Lei said. “I never know what you’re going to come up with, and you pretty much know everybody.”
“And you keep things interesting on our cases. Never a dull moment when Lei Texeira’s around.” Pono grinned.
He dropped her at the airport, and Lei went through the check-in process with her weapon and small backpack. She didn’t call Stevens until she was sitting in the waiting area, her eyes on the great purplish bulk of cloud-wreathed Haleakala in the distance through the giant glass viewing window, planes and ground crews in the foreground.
The phone rang and rang.
Chapter 8
Stevens met Jared in the cafeteria in the basement of the police department building. He clapped his brother’s tense shoulder in a half hug. “Didn’t take Mom long to disappear,” Stevens said. “Let me buy you a burger for spending your morning with her.”
“Okay.” Jared pushed a hand through short, chocolate-brown hair. His eyes had gone gray-blue with frustration. “I thought she was going to go for the rehab thing.” They got into the straggling line at the cafeteria counter. Stevens made a brief throat-cutting gesture not to talk about it. The station loved nothing better than gossip, and he hoped to get his brother alone in a corner for a bit more of a war council rather than advertising their personal business in line.
They got their burgers and a plastic basket of fries, and Stevens led his brother to a table in the far corner. He sat with his back to the room to signal he didn’t want company. The station was a friendly place generally, the cafeteria ebbing and flowing with on- and-off duty officers and support staff coming and going from one another’s tables.
Jared picked up on this and hunched in beside Stevens, squirting mustard onto his burger from a plastic bottle on the table. “So anyway. The doctor met with both of us and went over her results. Mom seemed pretty shaken. Kept saying she was just a little run-down, needed some rest and vitamins. The doc said, “Yes, Mrs. Stevens, that and you need to stop drinking. And to stop drinking, you need professional help and medical support.”
“I bet she didn’t like hearing that.” Stevens took a bite of his burger, narrowing his eyes.
“Not one little bit. She acted all insulted, said she’d always had a weak constitution but she’d come here for the fresh air. Trying her whole delicate-flower act. The doc didn’t buy it a bit. Anyway, we went back to the reception area, waiting on some urine analysis results, when she said she had to go to the bathroom. The office told me the results were in, and it had been twenty minutes by then. I got a little concerned she was feeling emotional about it all, went to the bathroom and knocked. Needless to say, she wasn’t there. Or anywhere else in the building that I could find.”
“What was she carrying when she left the house?” Stevens asked.
“She had that little backpack she’d arrived with. I guess that should have made me suspicious.” Jared took a savage bite of his burger, scowling. Done chewing, he looked at Stevens. “Can we pu
t out an APB on her? Have her picked up?”
Stevens shook his head. “For what? She’s an adult with rights, and she’s exercising them. I’m not happy she’s going to be wandering around here on her own, but we can’t misuse county resources having officers look for her.”
“She’s a danger to herself?”
“We’d have to have her declared incompetent, and I don’t think that’s going to fly. At least not yet.”
They both ate some more, and finally Stevens sighed, picked up his drink, and took a long draft. “I don’t think we’re going to have to wait long to hear from her, though. She’ll call when she needs something or runs out of money.”
They collected their rubbish and left the cafeteria. Jared raised a hand as he headed for the front entrance. “Call me if she gets in touch.”
“Will do.”
On his way back up to his office, Stevens decided to stop off at the second floor, where his men had been redistributed. He found his former detective Joshua Ferreira in a cubicle with a couple of other men. “Ferreira.”
Ferreira stood up, hoisting his belt higher up his paunch. “Boss! I mean, Lieutenant.”
Stevens flapped a hand with a grin. “Not your boss any longer. How’s it going down here?”
“Captain’s got me working Vice.” Ferreira introduced Stevens around. “Lieutenant Stevens is training new detectives.”
“So now we know who to blame when the pups screw up,” one of the men joked. Stevens spent a few minutes talking with them and then headed back to the elevator. As the doors closed on the warren of cubicles and the busy hum of police work, he again felt a jab of something way too much like loneliness.