by Toby Neal
“Anyone specific at Torque you have in mind?” Lei cocked her head and dimpled a little to show she liked him and was ready to listen to his theory and take it seriously. “We were aware of the life insurance policy on him, but were given to understand it wasn’t unusual for a professional athlete to have something like that as part of his contract. Especially in a dangerous sport like surfing.”
“Well,” Kellogg huffed. “No. But it bears looking into.”
“Thanks for the tip. Now can we speak to Pippa privately?”
He left with a harder-than-necessary slam of the door.
Lei reached into her purse and took out the pregnancy test in a small, brown paper-wrapped bag. “Will you please go to the restroom and take this test?”
Pippa recoiled, looking around wildly. “My parents don’t know!”
“And we don’t need to tell them. But we do need to know if you really are pregnant. It’s important,” Lei said gently. “There are those saying you are faking this. For sympathy. Or some other reason.”
Pippa straightened her spine. “Shayla. That bitch. Well, I took one of these last week and it was positive. So no skin off my nose to do it again. It would be a relief if it wasn’t accurate, but I’ve been having other symptoms, too.”
Pono rubbed his nose, uncomfortable. “I’ll be out in the truck.”
Lei followed Pippa to the bathroom, and the girl frowned at her. “Aren’t you going to wait outside?”
“I’m sorry, but this test may be evidence. We have a care, custody, and control protocol. I have to verify that it’s really your urine that goes on that stick,” Lei said as gently as she could. “And while we’re talking, I’m so sorry about how things went with Shayla. It was necessary that we saw her reaction to the news.”
“Whatever. There was no way she was going to react any way but badly when she heard the news,” Pippa said, stepping inside and leaving the door ajar for Lei to follow. Lei shut the bathroom door, and Pippa unwrapped the pregnancy test. Lei’s stomach clenched as she remembered finding out her own results with Baby, how joyful and excited she and Stevens had been.
She turned her back to give Pippa privacy as the young woman did her business on the stick. Pippa set the pregnancy test wand on the brown paper sacking, wiped, and washed her hands. She flushed the toilet.
“Satisfied?” Pippa’s puffy eyes were narrowed angrily.
“I’m sorry. This makes me as uncomfortable as you are,” Lei said softly. “Ready to find out?”
“I guess.” Pippa pulled apart the two sides of the wand. The little while chemical strip was blue.
“You’re pregnant,” Lei whispered. “Congratulations.” She stood stoically as Pippa turned to embrace her, bursting into tears.
Lei took the test and slid it into an evidence bag. She sealed and labeled it and exited the bathroom, followed by the weeping girl.
Kellogg and his wife came out of their bedroom.
“What’s the matter, Pippa?” her father demanded. Pippa just cried harder.
“Do you want me to stay? Talk to your parents?” Lei asked the distraught young woman.
Pippa shook her head. “No.”
Pippa’s mother embraced her. “Come, sit, honey. Talk to us. Tell us what’s wrong.”
“I’ll let you be alone with your family,” Lei said, and left the sobbing girl with her parents. Out at the truck, she gave a single nod, holding the evidence bag. “Take me back to my truck. I need to get home. I’ve had enough for the day.”
They drove in silence.
“Do you think those two sets of parents are going to be able to work out being grandparents of that baby?” Pono asked.
“Funny you should ask that. I was just thinking of Pippa’s father and Makoa’s father in a shouting match over who gets to babysit,” Lei said. “They’re both such bulldog types. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.”
Lei had fallen into something of an exhausted trance, staring out the window as Pono drove, when the radio crackled into life. “Units respond. Ten fifty-six found in Kanaha Canal.”
Lei lifted her head to look at Pono. “A body in Kanaha Canal? Where’s that?”
“It’s a slimy rain runoff channel out by the Cash and Carry,” Pono said. “We’re only a few blocks away. Up for a floater?”
“No,” Lei said, but Pono turned on his cop light, placed it on the dash, and put his foot down on the gas.
A few minutes later they pulled up in the grocery store’s parking lot, where a waving spectator drew their attention. Lei braced herself mentally as she approached the lip of the canal.
A blonde-haired woman was floating facedown in the shallow canal with its steep cement sides. She was wearing a familiar blue tunic top, beginning to swell with gases trapped in the floating body. Lei gasped as she took in the long body in narrow jeans, all of the clothing swollen tight. The sweetish smell of decomp, not too strong now but bound to become overpowering soon, wafted in Lei’s direction.
“Oh my God. I think this is Stevens’s mother,” she said. “She’s been missing.”
“I’ll radio Stevens. You shouldn’t have to tell him,” Pono said, and hooked his radio off his belt.
A few minutes later Pono came back. “He called in to work today. Not answering his radio.”
Lei thought of his trip to find his mother last night. He’d been unable to find her, and now this. She took out her cell and speed-dialed him.
Chapter 17
Lei was watching for her husband and saw Stevens’s Bronco arrive right behind the medical examiner and his van. Fujimoto, a good detective who’d been hastily assigned now that she and Pono couldn’t investigate the case due to possible conflict of interest, was working with the responding patrol officers and firefighters to hook the body and drag it closer to the cement embankment for retrieval. It was a clumsy business, and she’d hoped it would be completed before he arrived.
She hurried to the Bronco and he opened the door, almost falling into her arms.
“Lei,” he breathed into her hair, holding on too tightly. Fine trembling, as from a fever, shook his tall frame, and she could smell alcohol on his skin and hair. “It’s her?” He hadn’t yet looked toward the figure in the shallow, filthy water with its gasoline sheen.
“I don’t know. But I recognized the shirt and the hair. I had to call you.”
Stevens raised his head, let go of her, and walked deliberately forward to the edge of the cement lip. Lei followed and took hold of one of his cold hands.
The body had reached the nearest side-sloping cement embankment, but it was too far down to drag up with the big boat hook they’d used to bring it to the edge. Fujimoto, leaning down to try to haul the body higher, slid down the cement with a cry and landed in the water with a splash.
The retrieval effort took on a darkly comic aspect as the firefighters that were part of the first response threw Fujimoto a line. Standing waist-deep in the greenish water, he tied the line around the body’s waist and the firefighters hauled it up the side. Lei glanced at her husband. Stevens’s face was white, with pinched marks beside his nose.
“I hope Jared doesn’t hear the fire department call,” he hissed between his teeth as the soggy, bloated body was hauled by main force up the steep cement wall.
Dr. Gregory, the ME, fussed around the sodden corpse as the firefighters threw Fujimoto a second line and the detective walked his way back to the top.
“Turn her over,” Stevens said. “I need to see if it’s my mother.”
“Oh dear,” Dr. Gregory murmured. “I’m so sorry. Let me get her hands covered.” He finished bagging the body’s hands, and then he and his assistant, Tanaka, rolled the body.
The woman landed with a wet thunk on her back. Her mouth was ajar, filled with water that ran out the
sides of peeling lips. The eyes were open and milky. The face was bloated and pale, damaged by something that had left pockmarks of decay, probably nibbling fish or crustaceans. But it was still a distinctive face, and it wasn’t Ellen Rockford Stevens.
Lei felt Stevens stagger beside her. She caught his arm. They leaned against each other in support as Stevens’s breath whooshed out in relief.
“Not her,” he said.
“But she’s wearing Ellen’s clothes,” Lei said slowly. “Dr. Gregory, this is not my mother-in-law. But she’s wearing her clothes. I think we should proceed as if this is a homicide.”
Fujimoto brushed his hands off against each other.
“Tell me everything you know,” he said. “Let me record you for time’s sake.”
“I’ll go over the clothing carefully,” Dr. Gregory told Stevens. “If there’s anything on the body that can help you locate your mother, I’ll find it.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Lei said. Stevens just nodded. Even though a little color had come back into his face, he still looked terrible. Beard roughened his cheeks, and his vivid blue eyes were sunk in caves of shadow. As she leaned in to him, she smelled the sharp reek of alcohol making its way out of his pores in acrid sweat.
He’d been drinking. That was why he’d called in to work. He’d been drinking daily since the house fire, which had begun to worry her, but he hadn’t had a big binge since Kiet had come into their lives, after the murder of Steven’s ex-wife.
Lei stuffed down her worry and anger and focused on Fujimoto.
“Can we talk in your car or something? Just not out here.” Darkness was falling now, the gloom lit by amber pools of streetlight, but the firefighters were still nearby, stowing their equipment, and so were the patrol officers who had found the body.
“Come to my car.”
They followed Fujimoto to the jacked-up SUV he drove and got inside. Fujimoto turned on a small digital recorder and stated the date, time, and those present.
“This is the on-scene statement of Lieutenant Michael Stevens and Sergeant Lei Texeira regarding the recovered body of an unknown woman from the north end of Kanaha Canal. Now, Sergeant Texeira. You asked that your husband be notified. Tell me why you made this request.”
Lei described how she thought she recognized Ellen from the clothing and the blonde hair, and then the questions shifted to Stevens—who was his mother, where she’d gone, why he was looking for her but hadn’t put out a BOLO on her as a missing person.
“She’s an adult making adult decisions,” Stevens said heavily. His voice was as raspy as a lifetime smoker’s as he described driving around looking for Ellen the previous night, the bar fight he’d broken up. “I couldn’t do any more at that point.”
“So you think your mother has joined the homeless community and is somewhere drinking,” Fujimoto stated.
“Yes, I do.”
Lei spotted a yellow Maui Fire Department pickup truck pull up with a screeching of brakes. Her brother-in-law, Jared, got out, his tall, whipcord body all tight lines as he hurried to Dr. Gregory, who was just zipping the black body bag up over the waterlogged discovery in the canal.
Lei hurried to intercept Jared, putting a hand on his arm. “It’s not her,” she said.
Piercing blue eyes, so much like those she loved, blazed down at her. “I need to see anyway.”
Mutely, Dr. Gregory unzipped the bag. The woman’s ruined face stared at the sky with milky eyes.
Jared turned away, retching. Lei could tell, by the abrupt release of tension, that his reaction was not horror, but relief.
“She’s still out there, Jared. We’ll find her.”
Stevens got out of the SUV, walking over to sling an arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Fujimoto’s putting out an island-wide BOLO on her. I’m not gonna lie—I’m worried the shroud killer is still at work. I’m not willing to bet it’s a coincidence that this woman looks like Mom, is wearing her clothes, and is a dead floater now.”
Jared flung off his brother’s arm, turning to Stevens angrily. “Mom’s an alcoholic. She probably traded her clothes for a drink from this woman. Anyone can see how hard it would be to get out of this cement canal once you were in, and if the woman was impaired at all, she would’ve drowned. There doesn’t have to be any foul play—you’re paranoid!”
“Maybe we are,” Lei said, trying to calm Jared’s agitation. “But there is a chance Chang or Ray Solomon is doing something. Solomon is out on bail.”
“I think it’s time we made some calls,” Stevens said.
“It’s just bad luck,” Jared said stubbornly. “You don’t know Mom like I do. You didn’t live through her shit in LA as long as I did. It was nothing for her to trade the clothes on her back, which were nice at one time, by the way, for another bottle.”
Lei and Stevens stared at him as he strode back and forth, pushing his hands through his short brown hair in agitation.
“Maybe you dealt with your mother for longer, but you haven’t been through what we have,” Lei said. “Too many people close to us have died for us to think this is a coincidence.”
Stevens gestured with his head toward Fujimoto, who was directing the surrounding officers to spread out with lights. “They’re searching for anything that looks like a shroud or trace that goes back to Mom. I’m going to join them.”
Forty-five minutes later, the area thoroughly searched, Stevens hugged his brother goodbye briefly and then met Lei’s eyes. “See you at home?”
“Pono left, so you have to take me to the station to pick up my truck,” Lei said.
They got into his old Bronco. In the enclosed space, the smell coming off him was even stronger, a potent combination of alcohol, sweat, and the sweetish tang of vomit.
“You were drinking,” she said.
“That obvious?” His voice was low and harsh. “What a detective you are.”
“Let’s just get home. Get showers. Get something to eat. Then we can talk.”
He kept his eyes on the road until he got to the station. She got out of the truck and into her own vehicle, and followed him for the dark drive home along the winding coast. She used the time to think through what to say, what to do.
Keiki bellowed a greeting as the automatic gate rolled back. Lei remembered Conan, with his wide chest and sparkling, intelligent eyes. Conan would wake her beloved old girl up from her lethargy. Lei had a good feeling about that dog, and the thought of him felt like something to look forward to.
All the lights were on in the new house. The harsh cement block was softened by golden light from the bulbs. Getting out, pulling her backpack behind her, Lei could see most of the interior doors were hung.
“Michael, you were working on the house,” she exclaimed, feeling her anger recede.
“Yeah. We sleep in it tonight,” he said, slamming his door. “It’s time your dad had his space back.”
Wayne was standing behind the screen door of the cottage, Kiet on his hip.
“Mama and Daddy are home,” he told the baby, who reached, squawking with excitement, for Lei. She hurried up the wooden steps to take him in her arms.
Lei buried her face in the baby’s fragrant neck, inhaling his unique perfume of milk, powder, and the sweetness of baby skin. He laughed and grabbed her hair, filling his hands with the curly mass. She sank into the Adirondack chair on the deck and wallowed in the child in her arms, lifting his shirt to blow on his tummy, her whole being lighting up with joy at the feel of him in her arms.
Dimly she heard Stevens and Wayne talking, and Keiki crowded against her legs, thrusting her massive head into Lei’s armpit and snorting happily.
God, it is good to be home. She never wanted to leave her baby again. Ever.
She might not be over losing the little life that had been with her
so briefly, but Kiet was more than enough to fill her arms and her heart for now.
Wayne had dinner, a rich homemade mac and cheese casserole, still warm for them in the oven. They ate, filling her father in on the situation with the dead woman found in the canal.
Wayne’s brows drew together as Stevens concluded the story. His rugged face, deeply seamed, was worried. He pushed his salt-and-pepper curls back, his dark eyes troubled. “Please tell me it’s not the shroud killer again.”
“We don’t know.” Stevens’s voice had a rough, muffled quality to it, and Lei realized that he was avoiding looking at her. He must still be feeling bad for his drinking binge. “I hope it is just a weird random thing, but I don’t think we should proceed as if it is. Mom traded clothes with some blonde woman and then she happened to fall into the canal? It’s hard to imagine that, when we’ve had this many deaths around us.”
“I am going to make some calls after I shower,” Lei said. She ate rapidly, leaving Kiet to be fed by Stevens, and they were still at the table when she got up and went to the shower.
It felt heavenly to rinse away the nervous sweat of the exhausting day, let it flow down her body to swirl around her feet and disappear into the drain.
We are going to sleep in the new house tonight.
A sense of anticipation lifted her. “We need some alone time,” she muttered, soaping briskly. Shortly after, wrapped in a terry cloth robe, she busied herself cleaning up Kiet and taking him out of his high chair, sitting with him for his bedtime bottle and putting him down in his crib while Stevens took his shower.
Underneath all that, she simmered with desire to be with Stevens. Alone. In their new home, joined together. So he’d had a drinking binge—she loved him anyway and wanted to show it, support him in the situation with his mom.
He needed her. And truth be known, she needed him just as much.
Wayne washed up, murmuring in a low voice to one of the addicts he sponsored on the phone, and Lei changed into her familiar old boxers and tank top and wrapped herself in her robe. She picked up her pillow as Stevens came to the door, a towel wrapped around his narrow hips. She took a moment to enjoy the sight of him, a smile tugging up one side of her mouth as her gaze roamed.