Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  “Worth the report I have to write.” He pulled an impressive-looking bowie knife from a holster on his belt. “You guys want some venison?”

  A few minutes later they pulled out. The buck lay in the back, minus the hind leg Pono had whacked off to leave with the rangers.

  “To the doctor with you,” Pono said, glancing at Lei’s pale face.

  Her nose wrinkled. “Phew. I’ve never liked the smell of blood.”

  “At least it’s not human this time.”

  Halfway down the mountain, Lei had to have Pono pull over so she could vomit.

  “You don’t look good,” Pono said, as she got back in the cab. “You pregnant?”

  “God no. That would be terrible,” Lei said. “No. It’s carsickness and the fall making me queasy. They don’t tell you how windy this road is in the travel brochures.”

  “What’s so terrible about you getting pregnant? You guys are finally acting like adults and getting married. And don’t start with that ‘I had a bad mother so I’ll be a bad mother’ crap. I’ve seen how you are with dogs. Best indicator of parenting abilities is how people treat their dogs.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Lei leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the window and watched the road, breathing slow to calm her roiling stomach. As they drove down the volcano and headed toward the hospital, Lei considered what he’d said. She couldn’t remember exactly when she’d last had her period, not that she’d ever paid much attention to it. Could she be pregnant? She was on the pill, but lately she’d been distracted and had missed a couple of doses. They’d stopped using condoms once they were exclusive, and somehow, Lei had never imagined the world’s oldest relationship complication could happen to her.

  The weird way she’d been feeling lately was probably just stress with the case and planning the wedding.

  At the emergency room, she called Stevens. “Sorry, honey. I fell down a cliff. I’m at the ER.”

  “Good God, woman. Can’t you get through the week without ending up in the hospital?”

  “Don’t know. Never tried it,” she said, going for humor. “Nothing serious. I’ll be done by the time you come pick me up, I’m sure. They’re just x-raying my ribs.”

  At the radiology lab, the technician handed her a questionnaire, and Lei paused at the question Are you pregnant?

  Her heart sped up, and the print of the letters danced in front of her eyes, turning to hieroglyphics. A wave of nausea swept over her, and she dropped the clipboard to reach for a nearby trash can. There wasn’t anything left in her belly, but when the technician came back, she said, “I could be pregnant. I better find out before I get the X-ray.”

  “No problem. We have some pregnancy tests if you’d like one. You really shouldn’t have an X-ray unless you know.”

  Oh God. She wasn’t even going to be able to procrastinate.

  Lei wasn’t sure she could even pee on the little stick, but finally she was able to go. She set the plastic wand on a paper towel and wrapped it up so she didn’t have to look at it before she washed her hands.

  She’d be a terrible mother. Lei felt sick at the thought of the responsibility, at the possibility of hurting a child as her mother had abused her.

  Lei also couldn’t ignore the leap of something like joy at the thought of a baby with Stevens’s eyes, with her curls. She splashed water on her face and hands, wondering if she had the courage to unwrap the plastic wand and look at it. She decided she didn’t. She put the wand, still wrapped in the paper towel, back in its original box and stuck it in her purse.

  “I need to wait on an X-ray,” she told the technician. “Can the doctor check me out some other way?”

  Chapter Nine

  Lei was feeling better the next morning. Her ribs, examined by the ER doc by visual and touch exam, were “probably just bruised”—but that didn’t stop them from hurting every time she took a deep breath.

  “No more chasing perps on foot until after the wedding,” Stevens had said when he picked her up, folding her into his arms and kissing the top of her head. “I don’t want you on crutches or something on the big day.”

  The pregnancy test felt like a lead weight in her purse. She still didn’t want to look at it—she’d open it with Stevens on the honeymoon if her period hadn’t started by then. That way, no matter what the test told them, she wasn’t dealing with it alone.

  Lei booted up her work computer. She had extra lieutenant duties to fit in, including reviewing a patrol’s scheduling, making sure trainees’ ongoing logs were looking good, and other departmental minutiae Captain Omura had lobbed her way. She slurped down a couple of Advil with her coffee, paused to wonder if that was okay if she was pregnant and decided it had to be; she wasn’t going to cut into more lifestyle choices until she knew for sure. Besides, she was in survival mode with her bruised ribs.

  Lei called down to the lab that was processing some of the trash she and Pono had picked up yesterday on the ‘Bow Hunter’ case, as they’d nicknamed the Waikamoi murder.

  “Get anything off that cup and those wrappers we submitted yesterday?” Lei asked Roger Ciman, the island’s top trace analysis expert. She’d pulled him off other work to get something off the trash on the camper before she left on the honeymoon.

  “Yeah. Got a fingerprint. It was a little degraded, but enough. Ran it already. No matches in the standard databases.”

  “Damn,” Lei said. The case had just gotten even more challenging. “Thanks for the quick work. Send it to me, will you?”

  “No problem, sir.” Lei opened her mouth to protest the unfamiliar salutation but remembered that she was a lieutenant now, and the MPD called all officers “sir” regardless of gender.

  She checked her e-mail. E-mail lists of names of volunteers and grad students who’d worked with the different environmental agencies had arrived in her in-box. She printed them out just as her e-mail dinged with the arrival of a blown-up, enhanced copy of the camper’s fingerprint.

  Lei printed the reference photo and put it in the case file, staring at the black-and-white whorls on the paper.

  Now what? How to match the unknown print with an unknown name? She was certain that the camper was someone who’d been involved in conservation work. But if he wasn’t in the system, how did they find out who he was? Calling in that many people for fingerprinting, from potentially all over the country, just wasn’t practical or even justifiable—at this point the camper was technically just a person of interest.

  Lei sipped coffee, considering as she leafed through the file. Finally, she made a list of all the agency heads and their contact numbers. Maybe someone from one of the agencies would have a suspicion about one of their students or volunteers that could lead to something.

  Pono arrived, setting a plastic-wrapped musubi next to her elbow. “Tiare forbids you from getting injured before the wedding and sends you something to eat.”

  “Thanks!” Lei unwrapped the compacted rice topped with fried Spam wrapped in thin, pounded nori seaweed, making a tidy snack. She took a bite, chewed. “Delicious, as always.”

  “How’re the ribs?” Pono asked, booting up his computer.

  “Not so good. I’m thinking a day working the phones isn’t a bad idea. What do you think of this?” She told Pono her plan to call the various conservation nonprofits on Maui, including the Park Service, to fish for leads on the camper.

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m going to call Interpol about our vic’s prints. I’m off to get some coffee.” Pono left.

  Pono’s mention of coffee reminded her of how she’d started the pot that morning and then returned to the bedroom. Stevens had spent the night at her place to “keep an eye on her” after her fall into the gulch. Lei smiled at the memory of his long muscled body in her bed, his shadowed, sleeping eyes, the way he looked waking up—and reaching for her.

  “Daydreaming of the honeymoon?” Captain Omura’s dry voice at the doorway of her cubicle made Lei start, spilling coffee on he
rself. Lei felt a blush burn her cheekbones—even now that she knew Omura valued her on the Maui team, the captain’s almost unnatural ability to read her mind made Lei edgy.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve got some things to catch you up on,” Lei said, dabbing her shirt with a napkin. She filled the captain in on the chase yesterday, the camper’s fingerprint, and her plan for today as Pono returned with a chipped mug of black brew.

  “Glad I stopped in, then. You might have updated me sooner,” Omura said, with a glance shared between Lei and Pono.

  Lei shut her mouth on protests that they hadn’t had time as Pono ducked his head. “I’ve got something to check on in the lab,” he said, and disappeared again.

  Omura stepped inside the cubicle and sat on Pono’s chair. “I also wanted to give you something.” The captain crossed her legs, sleek in a tailored blue pencil skirt and black sling-backs. She handed Lei a box. “I bought you a gift. Thought I’d give it to you personally.”

  “Oh.” Lei held the precisely wrapped package, tied with gold cord and trimmed with two origami cranes. “Thanks. It’s too pretty to open!”

  “I like to do a little tsutsumi now and again.” Lei was aware of the Japanese art of present wrapping, where the presentation was as important as the gift. “Go ahead and open it. It’s just a little something.”

  Lei tugged on the cord and carefully unwrapped the gift, preserving the paper and decorative cranes. She opened the box, and took out a gold-painted dowel about three inches long with fishing line tied to it. Pierced through their white parchment bodies, a series of folded origami cranes fluttered from the line. Lei stood up to be able to hold the fragile mobile above the ground, and the ivory paper birds lifted and spun.

  “A little good luck for you both,” Omura said, referring to the Japanese custom of giving origami cranes at weddings. “I couldn’t do a thousand, but there are a hundred to get you started.”

  “Captain, I don’t know what to say.” Lei watched the graceful little birds move in the draft coming down the hall. She set the mobile carefully on her desk and embraced Omura, smelling a hint of the other woman’s delicate perfume, feeling a tightness in her throat as she thought of the captain folding each tiny bird. “We’ll treasure it.”

  “That’s more than enough. So glad you came to join my team.”

  “I’ve decided Maui’s home. Thank you for bringing me home.”

  “Well, then, since you’re home”—Omura gave Lei’s shoulder a pat—“keep me updated on the case more closely next time.”

  It didn’t take long for Lei to work her way through calls to the five agencies that did conservation work on Maui—but she didn’t get anything of interest until talking to Jud Snelling at Hawaiian Bird Conservatory.

  “Our team had already been discussing who the camper could be and whether we had any ideas about volunteers and interns. We had a Canadian grad student, Edward Kingston, about three months ago who was kind of paranoid—was working on his own side research project, which he had trouble letting go of. He had some behaviors that concerned his field supervisor,” Dr. Snelling said.

  “Can I get the supervisor’s name?” Lei hastily jotted down the name “Edward Kingston.”

  “Dr. Lana Biswandi. She’s with University of Hawaii, but we coordinate our location with some of their biology programs. She was concerned about his outlook, but he completed his internship successfully, as far as I know.” He rattled off the professor’s phone number.

  “Did Kingston go back to Canada?”

  “We assumed so, but maybe Dr. Biswandi will know.”

  Lei dialed the professor’s number.

  “Dr. Biswandi here.” The professor had a low alto voice and an Indian accent.

  Lei identified herself and described what they were looking for and why.

  “Yes, Kingston was under my supervision on a field project involving habit patterns of the native birds—do you need to know what we were studying?”

  “No, just the behaviors that concerned you about Kingston.”

  “Well, then. He was secretive. Always making notes in a little journal, hiding samples from the field, et cetera. I confronted him, and he admitted he had his own research project going. I forbade him to work on it at the same time as our formal project, and he seemed to comply—at least, I never caught him working on it again.”

  “What was he like personality wise?” Lei leaned back in her office chair, forgetting about her ribs and almost groaning aloud as pain lanced across her sternum.

  “He was a loner. Quiet.”

  “Okay. And where did he go after his internship ended? Back to Canada?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lei’s pen stopped as she waited. She blew a curl out of her eye. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean, I assumed he went back to Canada. We had a goodbye lunch with all the interns. But it’s possible he stayed on Maui in violation of his visa. He did say he had his own project he was working on. It makes sense that he might be your unknown camper because he was good at survival camping. We learned from him in the field—to make fire, other skills.”

  “That sounds like the man we’re looking for. This person knows how to live out in the wilderness and leave little trace.”

  “What are you investigating him for, exactly?”

  Lei considered her options, decided that Dr. Biswandi might be helpful in this too. “We want to question him regarding the murder of an unidentified Asian man who was capturing native birds.”

  A long pause.

  “Interesting,” was all Dr. Biswandi said. Lei was disappointed. “I’ll call our other interns and ask if anyone knows where he is.”

  “It would be great if they didn’t know why we’re looking for him.”

  “Of course.” Dr. Biswandi cut the connection with crisp decisiveness.

  Lei put the phone handset down slowly. It looked like she’d found a strong candidate for the mysterious camper—but catching him was another thing entirely.

  Chapter Ten

  Dawn crested Haleakala in a blaze of salmon-pink glory, filling the chilly, shadowed eucalyptus grove they’d parked in with powdery golden light reflected off nearby clouds. Lei and Pono got out of the purple truck as the SUV with the K-9 unit pulled up and parked next to them for the manhunt. Takama, his lips a line and hands on his hips, frowned at them in front of the gate into the preserve. Jacobsen, beside him, looked no less worried about what the search would do to the delicate forest.

  “You sure this is necessary?” Takama said, indicating the dog, a flop-eared hound called Blue, with a flick of his fingers. Blue’s handler, a young, fit officer named Freddie Lee, was still unloading and prepping the dog.

  “Yes. We need to capture and interview this man,” Lei said. “Our captain spoke to Dr. Snelling; everyone’s on board. We’ll try not to damage the plants.”

  “The understory,” Takama corrected.

  “Right.”

  Lei had spent the rest of yesterday tracking Kingston. She discovered that he’d never used his passport to leave the island, and his classmates from the research project hadn’t seen or heard from him since the goodbye luncheon. Dr. Snelling had been able to bring an abandoned ball cap Kingston had worn down to the station.

  Lei restrained herself from going over to pet Blue’s sleek head—the dog was in “work mode,” but it was hard for her to resist any dog. Pono handed Lei her Kevlar vest. “Mandatory.”

  “I can’t handle the Velcro with my ribs the way they are.”

  “Guess I have to leave you here, then.” Pono put his hands on his hips and eyed her until she put the vest on, leaving it loose.

  “I’ve always hated these things,” she muttered.

  “I know. You’ve also seen what a compound bow and arrow can do—and the perp might be otherwise armed.”

  They set off at a good clip down the dirt track into the forest. Lei breathed shallowly to ease her ribs. The dog was silent, trottin
g beside his handler. They made good time all the way to the boardwalk. Finally, under the cathedral of arching koa and ohia branches, with birdsong sweet in the air, Lee gave Kingston’s hat to Blue to sniff.

  Almost immediately, the dog began casting about in the ferns. Takama’s lips were tight as the animal nosed the ground, making tiny whining sounds. Suddenly, the hound lifted its head and charged into the understory. Freddie Lee followed at a run, Lei and Pono bringing up the rear. The ferns took a beating as the dog bolted through the brush, the rest of them close behind.

  Lei, slowed by her injury, jogged up just as the dog leaped on a bundled shape in a camouflage sleeping bag. The man gave a cry of surprise. Lee restrained the dog, and Kingston sat up, the sleeping bag still around his waist.

  Lei recognized him from his passport photo, though he was bearded, with the bushy hair of months outdoors.

  “I hope you’ve come to get the poacher,” Kingston said, dark eyes worried as he looked around at the ring of faces gazing down at him. “He has a gun.”

  “Someone got him, all right,” Pono said, hauling the biologist up by the arm. “And we want to talk with you about it.”

  “I know about the man who was shot with a bow. There’s another Asian guy out here,” Kingston said. Kingston asked to call his lawyer on a satellite cell phone the biologist produced from his waterproof backpack.

  “Doesn’t look good, you calling him when we haven’t asked a single question.” Lei gave Kingston her best intimidating stare. The biologist pushed his hair out of his eyes and stared back calmly.

  “I know my rights in the United States,” he said.

  “Getting deported is one of them,” she said, but Kingston just pushed a speed-dial number and held the phone to his ear.

  Back at the station, Lei swallowed an Advil with coffee. She and Pono had left Kingston in the interview room while they waited for his lawyer to arrive, and they’d just come from informing the captain that they had their person of interest in custody. Lei was weary from the early morning, the vigorous hike both ways, and the hour-long drive up and down Haleakala.