by Toby Neal
The DLNR agent for the area, Mark Nunes, was on his way to meet with them, so Lei took the time to call the University of Hawaii. She was connected with Dr. Rebecca Farnsworth.
“How can I help you, Sergeant?” The woman’s voice sounded older, deep and confident.
“I’m calling regarding one of your staff. Dr. Danielle Phillips.” Lei had the case file open. She felt a twinge of sorrow seeing the bright, fresh smile on Danielle’s face in the driver’s license photo.
“Lani? What’s going on?” Dr. Farnsworth’s voice quickened with alarm.
“We’re calling to inform you she’s deceased and that there was foul play involved.”
“Oh no!” A gasp. “What happened?”
“We can’t discuss an open homicide investigation, but anything you could tell us regarding her responsibilities for you would help. And if you could assemble a list of people for us to interview, that would be great. Also, keep this confidential for now. MPD is working on a statement for the press.”
Pono looked up from the notes he was jotting with a nod. Pono was in charge of their PR, never Lei’s strong suit.
“Okay. Wow, I’m in shock. But I guess, on second thought, I’m not that shocked. I knew what Lani was doing was dangerous.” Lei could tell the woman was working hard to regroup. “She answered to me and she was the senior marine biology staffer here on Maui. As you know, we’re a smaller satellite college in the University of Hawaii system. She was our only full-time marine biologist.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“She was working on several research projects, most notably a longitudinal fish-populations study for Maui, which was going to be coordinated with projects on the other islands. Oh, dear, what’s going to happen to her research?” The woman was still trying to assimilate the news.
“Did Danielle have a private office? We’re going to need to search that.”
“Yes, she does.”
“I’ll send an officer over to seal it. Please don’t allow anyone in or out until we’ve had a chance to go through it.”
“All right. It’s kept locked anyway, but I’ll make sure.”
Lei turned aside to tell Pono about the office. “Seal the home, too,” Lei said. “And get us the search warrants.” Pono got on the phone to Dispatch.
Dr. Farnsworth went on. “Anyway, Danielle was such a hard worker. She was never too busy to help a student or another staffer. She loved what she did and she will be greatly missed.”
“I’m sure. What can you tell me about her use of the University’s Zodiac?”
“Was that involved?”
“Yes, it was. It’s still anchored out at Molokini. I might as well tell you, she died scuba diving off Molokini.” Lei made a note on a paper and passed it over to Pono. Call Coast Guard about retrieving the Zodiac and impounding it for our search for trace. He was still on the phone about the warrants, but he nodded.
“Oh no! I bet this was something to do with her illegal-fishing documentation. When she was out doing her fish counts, she kept seeing fishing violations. So she started documenting it for the DLNR, to get it stopped.”
That had to be Danielle’s GoPro footage they’d retrieved. Pono had been right in his guess about the fishing documentation, and it looked like it might have gotten her killed.
“Thanks for this information. After we search the vessel, we’ll return it to the University of Hawaii. In the meantime, if you could work on a list of other useful interviewees for us, that would be great.”
“She had a stalker, you know,” Dr. Farnsworth said.
“She did?” Lei’s pen was poised over the notes she was making. “Tell me more.”
“He was a grad student whose work she was supervising. She complained to me about it. I had the kid in for a lecture. We were actually processing paperwork to get him expelled from the campus and dropped from the PhD program because he hadn’t stopped his activity toward her.”
“What did he do?”
“He would follow her around on campus. Take pictures of her all the time. Texted and called her constantly. She asked him to stop, then told security. After that he would wait by the parking lot for her. I advised her to take out a temporary restraining order on him. Did she do it?”
Lei had already punched up Danielle’s police record, which was clean. “Nothing on file.”
“I think she thought it was getting better.”
“What’s this man’s name?”
“Ben. Ben Miller. He lives somewhere in Kahului. She told me she was going to cut him from the program if he didn’t stop bugging her.”
“Do you think he would be angry about that?”
“Oh, yes. He was several years into his PhD. To continue, he would have to move and start all over, if he could even get a university to accept him. She told me she was documenting his behavior in his student file.”
“Hmm. I will probably want to re-interview you, Dr. Farnsworth, later down the line.” Lei got the contact information for Ben Miller and Dr. Farnsworth’s personal cell and hung up.
She turned to Pono with a tight grin. “Got a hot suspect here.”
“I’d say let’s go get him, but here’s Mark Nunes now, here from the DLNR to answer our inquiries.” Pono gestured to a man standing in the doorway of their cubicle.
Nunes was dark-haired, around five foot ten, deeply tanned, with the tilted eyes and lean but muscular build of a local. He was dressed in the DLNR uniform of navy pants and shirt with identification patches, boots, and a duty belt much like a police officer’s. Lei stood and shook his hand.
“Sergeant Texeira. Did you know the victim, Danielle Phillips?”
“I did.” The man nodded, his eyes on the floor.
“Yeah, I talked with him while you were on the phone,” Pono said. “They were friends.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. Okay, we should do a more formal interview, then.” Lei cut a glance over to Pono. “Why don’t you get him set up in an interview room and I’ll get the photos we want him to look at on a tablet so we can go through them there?”
“Sounds good.” The two men exited. Lei sat down, routing the GoPro pictures to a tablet device for them to review and finishing her notes from the phone call to Dr. Farnsworth. While she was at it, she called in a Be On Lookout for Ben Miller. The last thing they needed was for Danielle’s stalker to slip off the island. Lei hoped they were in time to bring him in, even now.
She picked up the tablet and headed for the interview room.
The two men were already seated, and Pono had the recording equipment on. He added Lei’s name and rank for the record as she took the third chair.
Nunes sat quietly, but there was an air of coiled distress about him. His dark eyes were red-rimmed and he blinked repeatedly. “I was shocked to hear Danielle is dead.”
“Yes, it’s a real shame. So how long have you worked for the Department of Land and Natural Resources?”
“Ten years.”
“Then you’ve been through some lean times.” Pono rubbed his mustache briskly. “I heard the furloughs were really tough a few years ago, when the state cut way back on resources.”
“Yeah. The economic crash of 2009 hit the state really hard. Teachers and all state employees were furloughed. We were cut back to just four days a week and lost all personnel who weren’t permanent state employees. It was really hard to keep up back then. Still is. I’ve come to realize we can only do what we can do.” Nunes held his hands open philosophically, and Lei spotted a carved hook pendant in the neck of his shirt.
“I just gave my husband a bone hook like that.” She pointed to the necklace.
“Symbol of fishermen and providers.” Nunes touched the pendant, a gesture that had a feeling of superstition about it, and Lei smiled.
“So you do some fishing yourself?”
“Of course. I love the ocean and all that’s in it. I fish to feed my family, like so many do here on Maui. I’m proud to be with DLNR s
o we can make sure the reefs are healthy and there’s food for generations to come.”
“So tell me about Danielle Phillips and her relationship with DLNR.”
“Lani. She loved the ocean, too. She helped us with our investigations.” Suddenly Nunes’s clear brown eyes clouded, and he pressed the thumb and forefinger of one hand over his eyes. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” he whispered.
“Tell us about your relationship with her,” Lei said. Nunes seemed to be reacting personally to this. Could there be something more between the two?
“Relationship?” Nunes removed his hand, blinked his eyes, and sat up straight. “We were friends. I was her main contact when she handed over evidence. To issue a citation, we have to have hard evidence that a rule or regulation has been broken, such as ocean biologics taken from a protected area. She was in the ocean so much for her research that she was able to boost a lot of photos to us that helped us win cases.”
“So not only do you have to bust people with the fish in hand, but you have to have evidence the fish were caught illegally?” Lei frowned. “That seems challenging.”
“It is. But it’s kind of like being a detective.” Now Nunes’s eyes gleamed a little. “I do a lot of stealth photography with a long lens or underwater, with a GoPro like Lani used.”
“So did she do assignments for you? Like, follow so-and-so; we suspect them?” Lei asked.
“No. She wasn’t an agent. She would just spot things, document them, and boost them to me when they came across her path.”
“Okay. We need to know that you’ll keep this whole conversation confidential, because this is a homicide investigation.”
Nunes reared back a little in his chair. “Someone killed Lani? I just thought she drowned. Accidentally.”
“No. It was a homicide.”
“Oh God.” He covered his mouth with a hand, eyes wide. “Whatever I can do to help.”
“Yes, that’s why we called you in. We found a GoPro on the bottom of Molokini’s bay with a lot of photos on it. We’re having trouble interpreting them.” Lei woke up the tablet, moved her chair around the table to show Nunes. The agent and Pono both leaned in to look. “We can’t tell where these locations are, but I think the opening shots are to establish location.”
“Yes. This is the way I told her to do it. Put the location in context, then date and time-stamp the photos.” They scanned through. Nunes pointed to the ones with the net. “That’s illegal aquarium capture happening.”
“Can you see anything identifying in the photos?” Pono asked. Several divers in snorkel, not scuba, gear were chasing fish into an underwater net. Nearby was a submerged white plastic drum, a ring of buoy around the top keeping it upright at the water’s surface. Nunes pointed to it.
“They’ll put the fish in that and ship them off-island in the same water they were captured in. Helps keep the fish from dying of shock.” A few photos further on, Danielle had snapped a shot of the three divers rolling the white barrel up out of the water onto black volcanic rocks. “Looks like La Perouse Bay. And those are the Micronesians we’ve been busting.”
“Micronesians?” Lei squinted at the grainy photo. All three men, wearing baggy trunks, had bushy black hair and darker skin than most Hawaiians.
“Yeah. They’ve been immigrating to Maui for years now under our agreement with their government. Because we nuked Bikini Atoll and it caused a lot of unforeseen damage, the native people can come live in the United States and get free health care. Every year there are more and more of them, and some of them fish like they do in their islands—no size or count limits. They don’t respect our conservation laws.”
“Oh, man,” Lei said. “Talk about integration problems.”
“Right. So this is an entirely different kind of fishing.” Nunes tapped the screen, expanding a photo where two black-suited divers appeared to be retrieving an ahi tuna. “It’s legal to fish or dive on the back side of Molokini, the part they call ‘Ono Alley,’ because there are so many pelagic fish over there. But not on the inside. Usually fishermen are using line gear for those fish, but maybe what happened was that these divers were chasing a fish and he came in shallower, to the protected area. They weren’t willing to let him go. A fish like that is worth thousands.”
They scrolled on.
“What can you see from these pictures?” Lei indicated the black hull of the boat overhead from the final photos on Danielle’s GoPro.
“It’s a Zodiac hard bottom, twenty footer or so. Quick and easy way out to Molokini on a calm day. Zoom in.” They did. Nunes went on as he studied the photo. “Can’t see anything. That’s the difficulty. Lani had to find something we could track later that tied people to the photos and establish date, time, and location. She knew that, so she’d have tried to find something.”
“I don’t see any identifying marks on the Zodiac,” Lei said as they all scanned the underside of the black boat.
“The motor in the water looks like about a sixty-horse outboard, but I can’t see anything either. I know she’d have tried to get a shot of the registration number on the hull,” Nunes said.
“This is the last photo on the GoPro. Maybe they killed her before she could get that identifying shot,” Pono said. Lei gave him a sharp look. It wasn’t a good idea to speculate in front of a witness.
“We try not to jump to conclusions,” Lei said, addressing Nunes. “You can’t talk about what you saw here. We’ll turn these photos over to the DLNR after the investigation.”
“Where’s that list of people cited for illegal fishing I asked you for?” Pono said.
Nunes produced a typed list from his pocket. “Here. These are poachers and fishermen cited for various infractions in the last six months.”
“Thanks for pulling that together so quickly.”
Nunes shrugged. “All in the database. Is that all for now?”
“For now.” Pono let him out of the room as Lei switched off the recording equipment. She walked to join her partner as he held the door ajar. “Let’s do a quick comparison of the murder weapon with the spear these divers had in the last photos on the GoPro.”
“Don’t you want to go pick up the stalker?”
“I called in a BOLO to get things started. I want to follow up on a slew of search warrants next, but if we know what kind of speargun we’re looking for, so much the better.”
They were headed down the hall toward the evidence room as they talked, Lei carrying the tablet. “So I’ll get on the horn and get a search warrant for Ben Miller’s place, too,” Pono said. “Already got the ones for home and office.”
He thumbed his phone open as Lei stopped at the half door to the evidence room. “Sergeant Lei Texeira checking an item I dropped off earlier.”
Officer Clarice Dagdag was a short, plump woman whose legs made a whisking sound in her crisp uniform as she bustled off to retrieve the spear for Lei. Lei gave the spear, still in its paper wrapping, to Pono as she signed the logbook. “Thanks.”
Clarice inclined her head, her glittering rhinestone cat’s eye glasses already aimed back toward a tiny television monitor on her desk, where a soap opera played out a muted drama.
They carried the spear to one of the workrooms with a computer and an evidence processing table. Pono unwrapped the spear shaft as Lei pulled up the photos on the tablet and scrolled to the ones of the divers at Molokini.
When Lei had the right photo, one that showed a diver holding a trigger speargun, she looked at the shaft Pono had taken out.
The shaft looked like hardened steel. Pono picked it up and looked at the flat end. “Eight-millimeter diameter by sixteen-point-five length.” There was a hole in the end of the shaft and a double-barbed head. The metal flanges of the barbs slid open or closed easily. “I can make out ‘Mares’ here on the shaft. Almost worn off. But this is definitely a pneumatic gun.”
“A what?”
“A compressed-air speargun that fires the shaft using air pressure and a t
rigger. Someone removed the nylon cord that connects to the speargun body.” He tapped the empty hole in the shaft. “Mares is a popular brand. We just need to look through their catalog to find the types of guns that fire this shaft to know what was used.”
“Okay. I’ll pull that up.” Lei didn’t bother turning on the ancient computer in the corner, instead opening a search window and punching in the Mares brand on the tablet. She keyed in the shaft specs.
“Looks like the smaller model of the Sten Pneumatic Pro.” She pulled up a window with the photo from the catalog, dragged the GoPro shot of the diver holding the gun, and positioned the photos side by side. Pono leaned in close as they eyeballed the photos.
“Just visually comparing, it does look like it could be this size.” Pono pointed to the Mares catalog. “This little Mares gun would have to be pretty close to the victim to drive the spear as deep into the body as the shaft went into Danielle. I can’t see clearly enough to check if there’s a rubber band on the diver’s gun in the photo. Can you zoom in?”
“Why would there be a rubber band on it?” Lei used her fingertips to open the photo further, and though the resolution got fuzzy and grainy, they could see a faint line at the top of the speargun in the diver’s hands.
“Different type of weapon. That’s definitely a rubber band gun. I was going to tell you I didn’t think a pneumatic had the juice for big fish. Deep-sea spear fishermen tend to use longer guns with multiple rubber bands to get more torque.”
“So that’s not the murder weapon in the photo.”
“Correct.”
“But it could be one of the other divers, or someone not pictured.”
“I guess. Still, diving at that depth—they wouldn’t have brought only a small gun like that Mares pneumatic.”
“Okay. But at least we know what we’re looking for when we go out with the search warrants.” Lei rewrapped the spear shaft, trying not to remember how it had looked protruding from Danielle’s body. “Since it was a smaller gun and it had penetrated her deeply, wouldn’t the diver who shot her have to be pretty close?”
“Probably. That sounds like some fun research.” Pono grinned, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “I’ll see if my buddy who owns a dive shop can loan us a Mares gun and we’ll figure out exactly how close we’d have to be and in what position to get the shaft into a body like what was done to our vic. Dr. G will love helping us reconstruct the scene.”