by Toby Neal
You told me to do all that.
And I’m trying not to miss you… But I know I have a distant look in my eye that can’t help looking for you and a distracted air about me because one ear is always cocked for your voice.
I hate myself for it, and I hate you for making me that way, and nothing about any of it changes the fact that I love you and miss you. Don’t be surprised if I just show up someday and do something about it.
Kelly
Lei sucked in a shuddering breath as her eyes fell on the naked ring finger of the hand holding the letter. Her heart squeezed as she pictured Stevens laughing, blue eyes crinkled, head thrown back. Stevens reaching for her, lifting her so their faces were the same height, kissing her. Stevens asleep with Keiki, curled around the dog on the couch.
On the day he’d asked her to marry him, they’d been on one of their long, rambling drives, exploring the far corners of the Big Island, and they’d come to the farthest point south in the entire United States—the long empty sweep of windswept grass and rugged lava beach called South Point.
Stevens had spread a blanket in the lee of a lava outcrop, and they’d finished deli sandwiches and bottled lemonade she’d packed. Keiki had gnawed a beef bone, and Lei’s head had been pillowed on Stevens’s thigh as she watched the lazy turn of one of the vast white windmills that marked the rusting line of an abandoned wind farm stretching for miles on the wide-open bluff. She’d sighed with contentment.
“Thanks, Michael. This is so nice.”
She’d extended her hand up to touch his face, and he’d dropped the ring into her palm. She’d gasped as diamonds kindled into flame in the rays of the setting sun.
“Marry me.”
She’d slipped the ring on her finger in answer and reached up to draw him down into a long kiss that said all she’d never been good at putting into words.
Abruptly she refolded the letter. What could it possibly tell her about this case, about what had happened to Jay Bennett?
Nothing.
Maybe Jay had taken a long swim to nowhere—but Lei didn’t believe it. Jay Bennett was going to go home to Kelly and bring her to Kaua`i for their honeymoon. There was also a good chance the circular currents in the bay would have washed him in and he’d have been found by now.
Jay Bennett was gone, but he wasn’t a suicide. And what the hell did that shoe with the three stones mean? She should take another look at those stones. There had been something unusual about them.
Lei refolded the letters, stacked them, put them in a ziplock bag, and stowed it and the journal in her backpack to take back to Evidence tomorrow morning. She dug out the slipper and the three stones and set them on the table, turning on a powerful overhead lamp.
Shoes are universal, anonymous, and yet intensely personal. She picked up the worn slipper. It had once been a good brand, with a nylon webbing strap and a built-up area that would have supported Jay’s instep. It was worn now, the brand name no longer discernible—but his footprint was. The slipper carried the deeply impressed outline of his toes and extra heel wear that indicated he didn’t always pick up his feet when he walked.
Lei picked up the closest stone, a reddish opaque round with translucent spots and patches of black. She knew it wasn’t local. The next one was more jagged, pale green with crystalline white striations. The last was a round cabochon of some type of opal with blue fire caught in its matrix. She needed to find out what the stones meant, what type they were. She scooped the stones into a smaller ziplock.
Lei fingered the dog-eared green Frequent Smoothie card with its multiple punch holes—the next place to look for Jay Bennett.
Chapter Five
Thursday, October 21
Lei started her day by driving to the little store in the middle of Kapa`a, a freestanding purple building called the Health Guardian. She’d driven by it a dozen times, always noticing the tables outside filled with earthy-crunchy types drinking green shakes and eating salads.
Inside the weathered building the smells hit her first—powerful scents of rosemary, garlic, and sage. She looked up and, sure enough, skeins of garlic and bundles of herbs hung from the rafters. Low shelves displayed what Lei thought of as “hippie food”—boxes of quinoa, bags of lentils, bins of granola.
Lei went straight to the counter, where a tall, cadaverous man was working an old-fashioned register. She waited behind the last customer, taking in the atmosphere.
“Help you?” Hooded blue eyes looked at her warily from a seamed face. A ponytail drew graying hair back from a forehead bisected by a bandanna.
“Yes.” She opened her jacket and showed her badge. “I’m investigating a missing person—this man.” She pushed the photo of Jay Bennett over to him.
He tapped the photo. “How long has he been missing?”
“Not long. He disappeared a few days ago.”
“I’ve seen him—he picked up food here.”
“Can I talk to you privately for a few minutes?”
He looked at her a long moment, then at Jay’s photo.
“Okay.” He waved over a young man to cover the register. “Come back to my office.”
He led her through a thick curtain of clattering bamboo beads and cotton fabric. The room in back held a lounger, a stereo, storage racks, and a computer workstation.
“Sound carries in here.” He shut an inner door and sat in the lounger, gesturing her to the couch. Lei sat down. She took out Jay Bennett’s photo and reached in her pocket to bring out the three stones and place them on the table. The aging hippie rubbed his knuckles as if they hurt him. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t believe I know your name,” he said with an old-fashioned formality.
“Detective Lei Texeira.” She extended her hand. He shook it.
“Jazz Haddock. People call me the Guardian, not only because I look after their health but because I look out for our alternative community.”
“So how well did you know Jay?”
“Not well. I knew he was camping around. He’d shop here.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Last week. He came in a couple times a week, liked the smoothies.”
“How’d he pay?”
“Cash.”
“He ever say anything about someone stalking him?”
“No.” Haddock cracked his knuckles. “Did he say that?”
“Yeah. Apparently he thought he was being followed. Told his girlfriend about it. You have any ideas about that?”
Haddock’s eyes skittered around the room, coming to rest on the bookshelf. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“Maybe I know something.” He folded his seamed lips together.
“You gonna tell me what it is?”
“Maybe.”
She decided to let it go for the moment. “Did he ever meet anyone here?”
“Not that I saw. This is about more than Jay Bennett, isn’t it? It’s about all the other disappearances too.”
“What disappearances?” Lei rocked back in astonishment, suddenly wishing she’d gone to the station to see what Jenkins had been able to pull up. She’d left a message on his phone that she was going to the Health Guardian first.
“Yes. I’ve been watching it happen for years.” Haddock’s chambray eyes glistened as he looked at her. “I’ve written letters to the editor. I’ve called the police department every spring and fall, but I’ve always been ignored.”
Lei dug in her jacket pocket for her notebook. “I’m going to have to corroborate that, Mr. Haddock.”
“Call me Jazz,” he said. “I warn them too.” He gestured back toward the café area. “I’ve posted pictures of the missing; I tell people they’re in danger if they’re camping alone. But no one listens… He always finds a way to take another.”
“Who’s ‘he’?” Lei made notes as fast as she could write.
“I don’t know, of course. Not that the police would listen to me if I did. I’ve tri
ed everything I could short of hiring my own detective to find out where they disappear to.”
“I’m working on it now—and I’m sorry no one listened to you.”
“It’s been going on for at least five years.” Jazz stood up, paced. “But I’m the wrong color to be heard here; the hippies are ‘undesirables’ in the community, and they came here to escape so it takes a long time for anyone to miss them—sometimes no one ever does.”
He got a binder off the shelf and handed it to her.
She opened it. It was filled with clippings about missing people from the island. She closed it again, overwhelmed. “Can I take this? Look it over?”
“Sure, if it will help. I think he’s doing something careful with the bodies so they’re never found.”
“Where are you getting this? How do you know they didn’t just leave Kaua`i?”
“Too many stories to tell.” Haddock continued to pace. He seemed ambivalent about how much to tell her. Lei’s stomach churned and the odd smells of the store were making her light-headed. She found her hand slipping into her pocket to rub the black worry stone.
“You say ‘he.’ What makes you think it’s not…a group? Or related to drugs or something?”
“I think I might have heard something about that,” he said with a degree of confidence she found chilling. “I’ve been involved with TruthWay since we got here, and we keep an ear out for what all the groups are doing. It’s mostly adult males that are taken—young and fairly fit. They’re heavy and strong. Takes some muscle to deal with them, I would think.”
“What’s TruthWay?”
“We’re a religious group. We’ve been called a cult before, but only by the unenlightened.”
Lei wrote truthway hard in the notebook, underlining it. “What about a possible drug connection?”
“Lots of people smoke a little grass—myself excepted, of course.” His chambray eyes dared a twinkle. “Jay looked like a guy who liked to burn a little now and again, but I didn’t know him well enough to say. That’s not the kind of thing that gets you disappeared around here.”
“Then what is?”
He threw his hands up. “No damn idea. All I know is, it keeps happening.”
“What do you know about burglaries in the area?”
“There’s always some. Break-ins on rich people’s houses or tourist cars mostly. Meth or heroin addicts trying to support a habit. But this is Kaua`i. It’s a small island. Anything goes on, somebody knows something.”
“You’ve put so much thought and care into this.” She tapped the binder.
“Just don’t ever make me have to speak to that prick Fernandez again,” Jazz spat. “Bastard busted me for possession a while back, and he’s never listened to anything I said since. Go ahead and look at the binder, and call me after you do.”
“Thanks so much.”
He held the beaded curtain aside. “Need anything from the store? I’ve got a lot of great fresh tomatoes right now. Organic.”
“Sure. Show me where things are in this place. I’ve never shopped in a health food store before.”
Lei left with a couple of string bags filled with fresh produce, pasta, and a chicken, and the binder filled with missing people. She called Jenkins as she pulled out.
“J-Boy, meet me for lunch at the usual place. Got a lot to bring you up to speed on.”
“Sure you want to do that? We could eat here.”
“We need privacy. And bring the printouts on the missing persons.”
A long pause as Jenkins digested this.
“Okay. See you there.”
Lei parked in front of the little hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that was their favorite lunch place. She brushed through the swinging half doors and strode across the worn plank floor to her favorite table, in the corner facing the door.
“Hey, Ginger.” Anuhea, the petite Filipino waitress, set the slightly greasy laminated menu in front of her with a smile. “Jack coming?”
“Sure is—he’s going by J-Boy now. Ice tea, please, and we don’t need menus.”
“Coming right up.” Anu sashayed off.
Lei took out the thick binder. Suspect number one in this whole thing needed to be the enigmatic Jazz Haddock, a man who called himself the Guardian and seemed to know way more than he should about what was going on. She took out her notebook, flipped to a new page, and began jotting down everything she could remember about Haddock.
The doors creaked open and Jenkins slipped into the plastic chair across from her, a manila folder in his hands.
“Hey. I struck gold at the health food store.” Lei tapped the binder.
Jenkins laughed. Lei saw Anu’s appreciative eye on him from across the room.
“That’s gotta be a first. Lei in a health food store, let alone ‘striking gold.’ What did you do, find a clue in the bag of bean sprouts?”
She filled him in on her meeting with Jazz Haddock.
He gave a low whistle. “Interesting.”
“I want to see those missing persons reports.”
Jenkins slid a stack of photocopied papers out of a manila envelope. “It’s kind of scary actually. There are a lot more than I would have expected on an island this size. I went back as far as 2000 and there are sixteen. Seems more frequent from 2005 to now.”
Jenkins looked through the binder as Lei organized the reports chronologically.
Next she sorted them according to age, race, and gender, looking for trends. There did not appear to be too many commonalities other than the majority were Caucasian and of no fixed address. The easiest people to ‘disappear’ would be those like Jay Bennett—young, transitory, perhaps ending up on Kaua`i as part of a larger picture of leaving home far behind.
There were some notable exceptions: a few women apparently fleeing abusive husbands, some wandering Alzheimer patients, a lost hiker in Kokee whose body was later found. She removed those and set them aside.
Their lunch arrived and she ate automatically, still scanning, as Jenkins flirted with Anuhea.
“Most of the disappearances seem to be in May and October once I took out the ‘outliers.’” She laid the May/October sheets together by year, and the hairs rose all over her body as she looked at the faces lying across the table, stretching in an unbroken line of pairs back to 2005. “Something’s definitely going on with this.”
Jenkins peered over. “Wow. I didn’t put that together last night. I was pretty tired. Plus you have those ones that don’t fit the pattern.” He gestured to the outlier pile.
“Yeah, but once you account for those as more naturally occurring situations, it begins to look like someone might be preying on the transient community.”
The timing sparked something in her memory—something about October and May/June.
“I gotta get my laptop.” Lei jumped up and went to the truck, fetching her laptop and turning it on.
“We should be back at the station for this. Wouldn’t want anyone to pick up on it.” Jenkins gave a worried glance at Anu, who was wiping down a nearby table.
“I know, but I don’t want anyone there to pick up on this either and snake us out of our case before we talk to Captain Fernandez. Just make sure no one sees anything.” Jenkins restacked the sorted printouts, slid them into the envelope, and set the binder on them. Lei’s computer sang a “done waking up” song to her, and she logged onto the wireless hotspot that made the restaurant a favorite haunt, hit Google, and did a general search: “Celebrations in October.”
There were harvests, Halloween, Homecoming Football Games, Octoberfest, and the ancient celebration of Samhain.
She searched under the same phrase for May and came up with May Day, maypoles, Cinco de Mayo, and the spring celebration of Beltane.
She’d known there was something significant about May and October—the ancient rituals in Europe of planting and harvest. But what did that have to do with Hawaii, which had never had to follow that seasonal calendar, let alone those old fertil
ity rituals? Hawaii had its own calendar, its own lore. She dumped the photocopied pages back out, looking at the pairs, analyzing the demographics.
“I want to see if there are any trends. Got a highlighter?” Jenkins procured one from Anu, and Lei made hash marks under headings on her notebook as she had Jenkins sort the sheets: Male, Female, Caucasian, Other Race, Under 30, 30–50, 50–70. Most of the victims in her impromptu Venn diagram ended up in the Male Caucasian Under 30 category.
She sat back, highlighter in hand.
“So who is Male Caucasian Under Thirty? Transient hippie guys like Jay Bennett. Or young surfers camping on the beach.”
“There are only three females, one under thirty, two thirty to fifty. Why not more females?”
“I don’t know, but it could be because women seldom travel and camp alone.”
“So what’s the connection between these missing people and May and October, and why?” Jenkins had the line between his brows that meant he was worried, and Lei was wide-awake now, nerves jangled by the implications.
“Let’s check the binder Jazz gave me, see how many of our missing persons are in here.” She pulled the binder over and flipped it open. “Haddock is the owner of the health food store. Calls himself the ‘Guardian of the alternative lifestyle community.’”
“Let’s do background on him as soon as we get back. Always suspect anyone volunteering information.” Jenkins repeated the lesson drilled into them both by Sergeant Furukawa.
“I know.” Lei slapped the binder shut as Anu came by and refilled their water glasses. She didn’t have to imagine the extra swing Anu put into her hips as she walked by Jenkins. “Whatever else he is, Jazz Haddock has it in for the captain. He said the cap had busted him and that he wouldn’t listen all the times Jazz has tried to get a case open on the missing persons.”
Jenkins whistled again.
“Maybe this isn’t the best place for us to talk, but I don’t want it getting around the station either. And who knows? It could be the captain has been turning a blind eye. I don’t know him well enough to tell.” Lei checked off all the names Jenkins had printed up against the binder; they matched.