by Toby Neal
“Good. I will.”
Silence prevailed until they pulled up at the cottage. They got out, and Lei rolled the gate shut behind the truck.
“I love you,” she said. He didn’t answer, just turned around and swept her up, throwing her over his shoulder. Lei shrieked and laughed, pounding on his back, and Keiki jumped and barked at this new game, cavorting beside Stevens as he climbed the steps, punched the alarm, and opened the door. The door banged shut behind them, and the lights went out.
Lei yawned repeatedly at the staff meeting the next morning. She had a brace on her knee and a pair of crutches she’d borrowed from the supply closet.
“You should get that looked at, Lone Ranger,” Pono said. “Thanks for busting Takama. No thanks for doing it without me.”
“Did you find anything at Takama’s house?” Lei had called Pono and had him search Takama’s place with a warrant last night.
“Yeah. Got some promising trace on his boots, and he had pictures of the poachers in his phone—pictures of them before and after they were shot. Not definitive, but close. With your testimony, we ought to be able to make that case.”
“Texeira and Kaihale! My office,” Omura snapped, sweeping by them on a waft of sophisticated scent. Lei hobbled into the captain’s office behind Pono, and Omura closed the door herself and went back behind her desk.
The captain steepled her fingers. “What the hell is going on? First I get a call that Takama’s been captured and charged with murder when I didn’t even know he was out of jail; then I get a call that Rinker’s in Canada, resisting extradition, and has published Kingston’s bird research in Avian Journal of Science.”
Lei and Pono looked at each other. “It’s better than where we were yesterday,” Lei said. “After my deposition, I felt like we were back at square one, and I for one am happy if that research can help the native birds, even a little bit.”
“Texeira.” Captain Omura steepled her fingers and leveled hard, dark eyes on Lei. “I’m busting you down a rank. You’re a sergeant as soon as this trial is over—I don’t want to give the defense any more ammo by putting it in your file before that. I’m taking too much heat about you, and I’m afraid a workshop isn’t going to be enough to satisfy Mayor Costales. I’m sorry, but you’re clearly not ready for the responsible behavior called for by the rank of lieutenant. Also, your reports are consistently behind. I need someone in the lieutenant position who wants to train and develop others.”
Lei’s mouth opened and shut. She thought of Consuelo, whom she was mentoring, and Officer Cantorna whom she’d wanted to train. She did like to train and develop others, but as usual, her difficulty with protocol was getting in the way.
“Yes, sir.” Lei’s whole face felt numb and tingly. She wished she could disappear.
“In addition, you’re both also being reassigned to new partners and different duties. I feel this particular pairing isn’t helping either of you grow professionally.”
Lei was already frozen in her seat, but Pono spoke up. “Sir, I disagree. Lei and I have the highest closure rate of any team.”
“Yes, but at what cost? I want both of you alive to pull down a pension in twenty years,” Omura said. “I’ll let you know when I have your new partners figured out. Dismissed.”
Lei crutched her way back to the cubicle in stunned silence. She didn’t respond to any of the cheerful razzing about Takama’s capture and her knee from colleagues through the office.
“I think I’ll go get my knee checked out,” she said to Pono, her eyes on the ground, when they arrived at their cubicle.
“It’s going to be okay,” Pono said. “You didn’t like all the lieutenant paperwork anyway. It’s not the end of the world.”
“I don’t care about that, really. Demotion’s embarrassing, but I’ll survive, and we’ll be okay for money. I really don’t want a new partner, though.” She looked up at her oldest friend, pulled a sad face. “I might have to…you know. Be nice and get to know someone new.”
“Heaven forbid,” Pono said, and picked up the phone. He punched a few intercom buttons. “Stevens, come take your wife to the hospital. Her knee is really acting up.”
He hung up the phone. “You should be able to do workman’s comp even though you were off the clock. I’m guessing your kneecap’s busted.”
“Just what I need,” Lei muttered. Pono fetched some boxes and they both began packing their possessions, since they didn’t know whose cubicle they’d be sharing. Pono carefully detached the last of his daughter’s drawings from the corkboard and set them on top of his boxful of personal items as Lei did what she could to pack, sitting down with her leg straight out on a chair in front of her.
Stevens walked up, jingling his keys, with Torufu following. The giant Tongan carried a big box with one hand and dragged his special jumbo-sized office chair with the other.
“Texeira!” Torufu grinned, and Lei couldn’t help smiling back. “You’re my new partner, and we’re the bomb squad of two on Maui. Captain told me to tell you. We leave for special partner training on the Mainland next week.”
Pono shook his head. Stevens’s brows drew together in a thunderous scowl. And Lei put her head back and laughed.
Turn the page to keep reading book seven of the Paradise Crime Mysteries, Dark Lava!
Dark Lava
Paradise Crime Mysteries Book 7
Chapter One
The worst things always seem to happen at night, even in Hawaii. Lieutenant Michael Stevens stood in front of the defaced rock wall, hands on hips as he surveyed the damage. A chipped hole gaped raw as a torn-out tooth where the petroglyph, a rare rock art carving, should have been.
“I keep watch on the heiau.” The witness, sturdy as a fireplug, glared up at Stevens from under the ledge of an overhanging brow. “I live across da street. I come check ’em every day, pick up trash, li’dat. Last night I hear something, like—one motor. I was sleeping, but I wake up ’cause it goes on. Then I see a light ovah here.” He spoke in agitated pidgin, hands waving.
“What’s your name, sir?” Stevens dug a spiral notebook out of his back jeans pocket, along with a stub of pencil tied to it with twine. He knew it was old-school. Many officers were using PDAs and tablets these days—but he liked the ease and confidentiality of his chicken-scratch code.
“Manuel Okapa. Our family, we keep watch on the heiau. This—so shame this!” Okapa spat beside their feet in disgust. “I like kill whoever did this!”
Stevens waited a beat. He caught Okapa’s eye, shiny and hard as a polished kukui nut. “Sure you want to say that to a cop?” Stevens asked.
Okapa spat again in answer, unfazed. “I wish I brought my hunting rifle over here and blew ’em away. But the light go out, and the noise stop. I thought someone was maybe dropping off something. Sometimes the poor families that no can afford the dumps, they drop their broken-kine rubbish here. They know I take ’em away.”
Stevens noted Okapa’s threats and disclosure of a gun in his notebook for future reference. He turned a bit to take in the scene. The heiau, a site sacred to Hawaiian culture, was situated on a promontory overlooking the ocean, separated from Okapa’s dilapidated cottage by the busy two-lane Hana Highway. Even this early, a steady stream of rental cars swished by them, on their way to experience the lush, waterfall-marked Road to Hana.
“What kind of trash do they leave? Appliances?”
“Yeah, li’dat.” Okapa squatted down in front of the wound in the rock. His stubby brown fingers traced the hole, tender and reverent. “I heard this kine thing was happening on Oahu but nevah thought we get ’em over here.”
“Looks like it was taken out with some sort of hand-held jackhammer,” Stevens said, squatting beside the man. Okapa’s touching of the rock’s surface would have disrupted any fingerprints, but it was too late now. He took out his smartphone and shot several pictures of the defaced stone, inadvertently catching one of Okapa’s hands, gentle on the rock’s wound. “Did you see
anything else missing? Disturbed?”
“Come. We go look.” Okapa stood up, and Stevens glanced back at the blue-and-white Maui Police Department cruiser parked close to them, his Bronco just behind it off the busy highway. One of his new trainees, Brandon Mahoe, had responded to the defacement call and had immediately contacted Stevens as his superior to come investigate. Mahoe was Maui born and raised, and he’d immediately appreciated that the stealing of a petroglyph was more than ordinary property damage. The young man, hands on his duty belt, looked questioningly at Stevens.
“Stay here and don’t let anyone pull over,” Stevens said. “Find something to cover the damage for now—some branches or something. We don’t want to attract attention to this yet.”
Stevens’s mind was already racing ahead to the press coverage this would draw, potentially connecting this crime with a string of looted heiaus on Oahu. The pressure would be on MPD as soon as the community caught wind of this outrage.
He followed Okapa’s squat form, feeling overly tall as he towered beside the shorter man. He’d found his height sometimes provoked defensive reactions in smaller local people, and his wife’s partner and friend, Pono Kaihale, had given him a frank talk on how to interact with the locals more effectively. “Don’t stand too close and look down at them—better to stand side by side. Not a lot of eye contact, because that’s seen as challenging. Be prepared to disclose some personal information about who you are, where you’re from, and try to find some common connecting place, family or history. Tell ’em you’re married to a Hawaii girl if they give you a hard time.”
As if reading these thoughts, Okapa tossed over his shoulder, “How long you been here?”
“Two years, Maui. Big Island and Kauai before that,” Stevens replied. “Maui no ka oi. Maui is the best.”
Okapa’s gapped teeth showed in a brief smile. “As how.”
Apparently he’d hit the right note, because Okapa’s shoulders relaxed a bit. Every island had its pride, Stevens had discovered.
They followed a tiny path through waist-high vegetation. Thick bunchy grass, ti leaf, and several hala trees, their umbrella-like structures providing pools of shade. “I used to cut da plants back, keep it nice here. But then I see the tourists always pulling over to the side, trampling in here with their cameras. So I let ’em grow, and less come here. Only the hula halaus come out for dance. This is one dance heiau.”
“Oh. I didn’t know there were different kinds. Anything you can tell me would be helpful.”
“Yeah. Get some for worship da gods, like the big one in Wailuku. This one for dance. Halau is one small-kine school with a kumu, teacher. That kumu leads and trains dancers in the group. This place was used to teach and worship with hula by the halaus.”
They reached a wide area, ringed by red, green, and striped varieties of ti leaf growing taller than Stevens had ever seen. The layout was an open area of flat stones ringed by a wall of stacked ones. He’d noticed Hawaii’s monuments were simple, made of materials naturally occurring, and without the oral traditions of the people and the movement to reclaim the culture, much history would have been lost and the heiaus themselves swallowed back into the land.
Beyond the large, rough circle of stones, the cobalt ocean glittered in the distance, hala trees surrounding the edge of the cliff and bracketing the view with their Dr. Seuss–like silhouettes. Stevens thought the hala and ti plants must have been placed there deliberately because he knew Hawaiians wove the long, fibrous hala leaves into basketry and matting and made dance costumes with ti.
“Auwe!” Okapa cried, pointing. On the far side of the heiau were three large stone slabs, and the one in the middle had a raw, chipped-out crater. “They took the other one!”
Stevens followed the distraught guardian, thumbing the camera icon on his phone. He held up a hand to stop Okapa as the man bent to touch the stone.
“Let me dust this one for prints.” Stevens unhooked his radio from his belt. “Mahoe, bring my kit from the Bronco. Over.”
“Ten-four,” Mahoe said.
“Tell me who knows about this place,” Stevens said, hanging the radio back on his belt and taking pictures of the stones and the surrounding area.
Okapa’s rage was evident. He muttered under his breath as he stomped across the stones, ripping out weeds in the dance area. He looked up with a fierce frown.
“Everyone. Because of that damn book.”
“What book?”
“Maui’s Secrets. One stupid haole wen’ collect all our sacred places and put ’em in that book. Now everybody can buy it and find whatever. I like beef that guy myself.”
Stevens narrowed his eyes. “Where can I find a copy?”
Okapa spat. “ABC Store. Anywhere get ’em. I like burn all those books.”
Stevens wrote down the title just as Mahoe burst into view at a trot, carrying Stevens’s crime kit. The young man’s square, earnest face blanched at the sight of the second desecration. “Auwe!” he cried.
Stevens looked down from Mahoe’s dismay, mentally filing that expression away. Maybe his wife, Lei, could help him learn how to say it right. The exclamation seemed to capture a wealth of grief and outrage.
“I need to dust for prints and photograph this area,” he told Mahoe. “You can watch me work the first rock, and then I’ll have you do the other two. We need to pay special attention to the tool marks. Who knows? Maybe whoever it was didn’t wear gloves. Mr. Okapa, why don’t you stand in one place and look carefully all around. You can’t tramp around, disturbing the site, but if you could just look for anything out of place, that would be a help.”
Okapa folded his arms, still muttering under his breath, but began looking carefully around the heiau.
Stevens flipped the clasps of his metal crime kit and opened it, exposing tools and supplies. He snapped on gloves and handed a pair to Mahoe, gesturing the young man over. He leaned in close to whisper to him.
“Remember. At a scene, you try to maintain the three Cs: care, custody, and control. Okapa could touch, move, or destroy something by walking around, but giving him something to do that doesn’t contaminate the scene is also important. It keeps him engaged with us positively.” Mahoe nodded. Stevens went on, pointing to the canisters of powder nested in foam. “This is probably just review from training, but when choosing powder, you want to pick a color that will contrast with whatever you’re dusting. These stones are a dark gray. Which one do you think I should use?” he asked Mahoe, testing.
“White.”
“Good.” Stevens lifted the soft-bristled brush, dipped it in the powder, and twisted it to load the brush. Then he spun the powder in gentle twirling motions over the rock face.
This was not the porous black lava stone that much of the heiau was made of; these three stones were the much harder bluestone often quarried for decorative rock walls. The surface held the powder well, the face of the rock gently sloping and weathered by the elements.
“Mr. Okapa, what did the petroglyph here depict?” Stevens called as the heiau’s guardian stared around, still glowering.
“Was a dancer with one rainbow on top.” Okapa gestured, demonstrating the way the stick figure stone carving would have been drawn. “That one at the front marked the heiau. It had three dancers.”
“Why do you think someone would steal these?” Stevens asked, still spreading the powder until it covered the entire rock face.
“I’ve been watching the news about the other defacements on Oahu.” Mahoe was the one to answer. “They think some underground collector is hiring people to take them.”
“How much would something like this be worth?” Stevens took out his bulb blower, squeezing gently to blow the powder off the rough surface.
“There are not that many early Hawaiian artifacts, period,” Mahoe said. “Every petroglyph is priceless and can’t be replaced.”
“As why it so bad this wen’ happen,” Okapa said. “’Cause this heiau only had two. And these were good
ones. We were so proud of them.”
Stevens blew more air on the rock, and white powder drifted down onto the red dirt soil beneath like misplaced snow.
“I think I see something. A partial,” Stevens pointed out to Mahoe. “It’s over on the side. Maybe there were two people digging out the carving, or one of them rested his hand on the side of the rock for leverage.”
Already they could see there was nothing on the face of the rock. Stevens handed the brush and powder to Mahoe and let the young man dust the sides and top of the stone and the ones on either side of it.
Several prints picked up, all around the edges of the defaced rock. Stevens squinted at the prints, held his hand up. “I think whoever was using the drill or tool grabbed on to the rock for support. These prints look smeared because of the pressure, but I’ll try the gel tape and see if we can lift some and get a good impression.”
He unrolled gel tape and pressed it lightly over the print, pulling away carefully. He did several and then set the tape in a plastic case to photograph with a scanner back at the station.
“Let’s see you do one.” He handed the roll of tape to Mahoe. “I’m going to take photos of the tool marks.” They worked quietly side by side as Stevens set the ruler against the rock face and shot photos of the tool marks, then mixed up a batch of rubber dental putty, spreading it into the scars on the rock. It hardened in moments, and Stevens peeled it up, sliding it into an evidence bag as Mahoe finished taking his impressions.
“Eh, Lieutenant!”
Stevens looked up at Okapa’s shout, toward the gesturing man. Okapa was pointing at a hole in the ground on the other side of a lantana bush.
“They took a stone from here. Was one oval stone brought up from the ocean.”
Stevens joined him. “How do you know what stone it was?”