by Toby Neal
“That sucks.” Lei looked out at the float. “I didn’t know that was legal out here at all. So how do they do it, exactly?”
“See how the float is circular? It’s attached to a container. They’re circling the area with nets and putting the small reef fish they catch in the container. It doesn’t look like any other kind of diving, so I can always spot them doing it.”
Lei frowned. “There’s no regulation of that?”
“They have to have permits, and there are some size and frequency counts for some fish. I’ll check everything when they get in. But, yeah, they can mostly keep all they get.”
Bunuelos slid his arms into a light backpack. “I’ve got water and some snacks. We should go.” They donned MPD ball caps, waved to Nunes, and set off down a well-worn trail through the lava field.
Lei hit a rapid stride along the trail, the sun hot on her hat but a warm breeze wicking the moisture off her body. A parallel path of rounded, inset stones ran closer to the ocean.
“I bet that’s the old Hawaiian trail,” Lei said. “They have those on the Big Island, too. The kanaka really took time to make their paths well.” Fishing, and their own system of aquaculture, had provided a big part of early Hawaiians’ staple diet, and the traces they’d left behind in this area were the carefully constructed paths they’d walked to their fish ponds and fishing grounds.
Bunuelos just nodded. Sweat was already trickling out from under his ball cap as they reached the shade of a stand of kiawe trees lining the old road along the coast, a four-wheel drive mogul field of twists and turns. Lei looked back at her new partner, teasing, as he wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve and replaced the ball cap. “You need to get out and run with me some time, Gerry.”
“When hell freezes over,” Bunuelos panted. “I have five kids. You think I have time or energy left over at the end of the day for anything but collapsing with a cold one? I go to work as a homicide detective to get some peace and quiet.”
They walked past the small bay containing the well-known La Perouse surf break, today flat and calm, and continued on across the reserve. Lei felt sweat soaking her shirt under the tight casing of the bulletproof vest. She checked their map at the third small inlet, waves splashing up on a beach of tumbled white coral mixed with black volcanic rocks worn smooth by wave action. “We’re almost there.”
In the next tiny bay, they found a cluster of tents deep in the shade of a stand of kiawe trees up against a bluff of steep, jagged lava, but no one was there. Lei glanced inside the tents and saw a jumble of sleeping bags, water containers, and backpacks. “Looks like Miller has company out here.”
“Where is everybody?” Bunuelos wondered aloud. They followed a well-worn path to the ocean and found the campers lying around naked and in various states of getting high, the smell of weed thick in the air. Someone was drumming on a djembe, and someone else, who would have looked better covered up, was dancing trancelike in the sand above the pebbly beach.
Lei frowned, hands on her hips as she looked around. “We should probably cite all these people.”
“You want to go to all those court dates?”
“Hell no.” She sighed. “Let’s see if they know where Miller is.”
It didn’t take long before the alternative nature lovers had directed them over another crest of stone to a small, bright turquoise bay, almost entirely enclosed by steep walls of lava. A red diving buoy in the water marked Miller’s location.
“We might as well take a break while we wait for him.” Lei found a spot of shade under one of the slender, gnarled kiawe trees. She and Bunuelos loosened their Kevlar vests, taking time to drink water and eat some granola bars.
Lei loosened the Kevlar all the way, tugging it off over her head, and took out some field glasses, training them on the bubbles that marked Miller’s location more truly than the red dive float. “I guess pursuing a suspect could be worse than this,” she told Bunuelos. “We could be in LA on the streets or something. Instead, here we are, catching an ocean breeze, waiting for a guy to come up from scuba diving.”
“Maybe you would be in LA.” Bunuelos had a dimple high in his cheek and looked much younger than his fortysomething years as he grinned. “I’ll never live anywhere but this island. Maui no ka oi.”
“Yeah, it’s the best.” She leaned back against the tree trunk and held the cool bottle against her forehead. “Except when it’s this hot. I think I’ve got a little heatstroke.”
Miller eventually rose to the surface, still unaware of them. Lei watched the young man stow some recording gear in his bag and head for the rocks. They met him as he was coming out of the water, peeling the rubber suit down to his chiseled waist.
“Hey.” Miller’s blue eyes were wide with surprise as he shook water droplets out of his blond hair. “What are you guys doing out here?”
“We’ve been looking for you, Ben.” Lei gave her friendliest smile. “We need you to come down to the station and answer some questions.”
For a moment Miller looked terrified. She saw his eyes dart back to the great sweep of open ocean outside the mouth of the secluded bay. She waited, almost sympathetically, as his escape fantasies ran their course and he turned back to face them, firming his jaw. He gave a stiff smile. “Sure. Whatever I can do.”
Miller sat at the interview table at the station. He finger-combed his hair, which had dried in salty tufts.
“We want to revisit the day Danielle died.” Lei opened her file on the case. She glanced up at the mirrored observation room, where she knew Omura was watching, but she’d Mirandized Miller and turned on the recording equipment after he refused the reminder about a lawyer. Beside her, Bunuelos smiled at the young man, working his good-cop angle.
“I told you. I was at the tutoring center.”
“Yes, you were. But you were not seen by anyone there before ten a.m., and we have a video that puts you in the Zodiac with Lani at six a.m. out of Ma’alaea Harbor.” Lei watched him closely.
He paled and reached down to rub his hands up and down his jeans-clad legs. They’d let him change when he got back to the parking lot at La Perouse, but he hadn’t showered, and the salt was clearly irritating on his skin. None of them had had time to shower, though there was an employee locker room down by the gym. Lei’s own body tingled and itched with dried sweat from the hot hike across the lava on top of the adrenaline bursts from the raid this morning.
“It wasn’t me in whatever video you have. I wasn’t with her that day. I told you. I went in to the tutoring center at nine, when they open.”
“So where were you at six a.m.?” Lei asked.
“In bed. I got up, showered, shaved, like that. I get up at seven, so at six I was sleeping.” He frowned. “I’m telling you, it wasn’t me in the boat with her. It was probably her boyfriend, that DLNR agent Nunes.”
Lei felt the back of her neck prickle as she went on full alert. Nunes and the county truck had been gone when they’d returned to the La Perouse parking lot. She wondered at the nip of intuition that had told her both to turn in his sample and not to have him guide them across the lava.
“What makes you say he was her boyfriend?” Lei asked. “I thought you were her boyfriend.”
His jaw bunched. “She wouldn’t have me.”
“So why do you say that now about Nunes? You never told us anything about him in your other interview.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since she died. Wondering who killed her. Knowing you think it might have been me. And I saw them together.” He bunched his fist, looked down. Lei almost felt sorry for him.
“Saw them together? What does that mean?”
“I saw them. Kissing.” Saying the words obviously pained him.
“But I thought you just had to prove your love.” Lei couldn’t resist poking him a bit, to see what came out.
“And I would have. I mean I was. She just needed time to see that I was sincere, that I was right for her.”
“But maybe you got tired
of trying to do that. Especially once you found out she was pregnant.”
The young man’s eyes flew wide, staring at her in disbelief as he paled further under his tan. It wasn’t acting. He hadn’t known.
“I would never hurt her, no matter what,” Miller whispered. “If she was pregnant, I’d just want to take care of her. If she’d ever leave that bastard she was married to.”
“But what if the baby wasn’t her husband’s?”
“Doesn’t matter. I loved her.”
“I find that hard to believe. I think you ran out of patience and killed her.”
“No. Never. And maybe I do need a lawyer.”
Lei probed more, but Miller just stubbornly repeated everything he’d already said and asked for an attorney.
Lei gestured to Bunuelos. “Let’s cut him loose. Thanks for your help, Ben.”
“Check on Nunes. That guy was making a move,” Miller said as he got up. They ushered him to the door. Lei turned off the recording equipment.
“I don’t like Miller for it after this,” Lei said thoughtfully. “I’d bet money he didn’t know she was pregnant. And even though he’d seen her with Nunes, it didn’t seem to penetrate his deluded bubble about Danielle. Most of all, it would be a stretch to get out to Molokini, go down ninety feet, kill her, find some way back to the harbor, and be at the UH tutoring lab by nine o’clock, which we can verify by his time card even if no students saw him.”
“So that leaves us with two unidentified poachers with a hard-bottom Zodiac, Costa, Phillips, and whoever fathered her baby,” Bunuelos said.
“And I’m really starting to wonder if that might be Nunes.” Lei told Bunuelos about the sample Dr. Gregory was supposed to run as she shut the door of the interview room and she and Bunuelos headed down the hall toward their cubicle. “I have to make a call down there and see if he’s done the paternity test. Can you bring the captain up to speed?”
“You got it, partner.”
She hurried to the cubicle alone and picked up the phone to Dr. Gregory, hoping like hell he’d had time to run that DNA sample.
“Twice in one day!” Dr. Gregory’s ever-cheerful voice grated on Lei’s nerves as the ME picked up the phone. “You’re in luck. I ran the paternity DNA, and it’s a match for the sample you dropped off.”
Lei felt a surge of adrenaline.
“Can you e-mail me the results? I need them right away.” Lei sprang up from the squeaky old office chair. “I’ve got to pick up the suspect.” She banged down the phone.
Chapter Twenty
Lei and Bunuelos took his vehicle this time. They kept the siren off but put up the cop light on the dash of the SUV as they headed for Mark Nunes’s last known address. Lei shook her head as they sped down the road.
“I don’t want it to be him, Gerry. I like the guy.” Lei pushed a plush baby toy out from under her butt into the back seat, where two booster seats competed for space with a bag of soccer equipment.
“It might not be him. We just have to see. You always tell me not to jump to conclusions.”
They turned into a tidy subdivision in Wailuku Heights. It wasn’t far from the Phillips’s house, and Lei felt her heart sink a little as they turned into a driveway with a plastic kid’s wagon parked next to Nunes’s county truck and a Subaru SUV.
“Looks like he has a family,” Lei said. Bunuelos’s mouth tightened, but he refrained from comment. They approached the house and Lei rang the bell.
A slender young woman in shorts and a spaghetti-strap tee answered the door with a friendly smile. Her long black hair brushed her hips, where she held a toddler wearing nothing but a diaper and a pacifier. She looked as fresh-faced and young as a high school student, and Lei felt her already-upset stomach curdle further. “Is Mark Nunes home?”
“Sure.” She turned and hollered into the interior of the house. “Uncle! Some cops stay heah fo’ talk to you!”
The wave of relief Lei felt made her almost giddy. She knew she was getting way too emotionally involved with this case, but she couldn’t seem to help it.
Nunes came to the door. He’d changed out of his DLNR outfit into a plain black tee and nylon athletic shorts. His dark brows knit with concern. “Sergeant Texeira! What’s going on?”
“We need to talk with you. Down at the station.” Lei kept her face expressionless, even as her heart broke a little bit. She really, really didn’t want this man to have been Danielle’s killer.
He stared at them through the screen door, a long cool look, and then he turned back to the girl hovering in the background. “Don’t worry, Kalei. I’ll be back soon.”
Nunes sat stone-faced through being Mirandized, and Lei tapped a pad of paper before her with a pen. “So we’d like to know the exact nature of your relationship with Danielle Phillips.”
“I told you. We were colleagues. Friendly colleagues.” Nunes gazed back at Lei levelly.
“Is that all you’ve got to say on the subject? Did things ever get personal?” Bunuelos asked. “I mean, I’d get it if it did. She was a beautiful woman in a shitty marriage. You’re single. One thing led to another…”
“It wasn’t like that.” Nunes looked down, moved restlessly in his chair. “Okay, I liked Lani. More than liked her. She was brave. Dedicated. She…” His throat seemed to close, and he cleared it. “She cared about the ocean like no one I’ve known before or since. It was something we had in common.”
“Did you ever sleep with her?” Lei asked bluntly.
He looked up at her, his eyes widening, then narrowing in anger as his mouth tightened. “None of your business.”
She opened the file, flipping to a picture of Danielle’s discolored, naked body on the autopsy table. “This woman was murdered. No one gets to have any privacy as it relates to her. So I ask you again, did you ever sleep with her?”
A long moment passed. Nunes’s shoulders sagged. His hands came up to cover his face. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Say that louder. For the record,” Lei rapped out, feeling the heat of righteous anger on her neck. If this prick killed Danielle, Lei was going to nail him and enjoy doing it.
“Yes, I slept with her. Yes, I loved her!” Nunes exclaimed, smacking his hand down on the steel table, startling Lei and Bunuelos. “Yes, I wanted her to leave that bastard she was married to and be with me! Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“In fact it is,” Lei said. “How long have you known she was pregnant with your baby?”
Nunes blinked. “What?”
“She was pregnant. With your baby.”
“Oh God.” Nunes collapsed against the table. Lei felt the hair on the back of her neck rise as he groaned, a terrible and haunting sound of mortal pain. He slammed his head down on the table.
This reaction was so extreme and unexpected that Lei froze. Bunuelos jumped up and ran around the table as Nunes slammed his head down again. Bunuelos grabbed him, pulling him backward, and cuffed his hands behind his bolted-down chair. Nunes continued to moan in an extremity of grief as blood and tears trickled down his face.
“So I guess you didn’t know,” Lei said weakly.
“Frank! That greedy asshole found a way to kill her,” Nunes snarled now. “Let me go. I’ll take care of him like I should have a long time ago.”
“Why do you say that?” Lei leaned forward, composing herself. “Did you know about Miller? Ben Miller? He was in love with her, too.”
“That puppy was nothing to her.” Nunes looked up. The congested blood was leaving his face, rendering his dark skin sallow but patched with red. A bruise was forming, distending his forehead, and the skin had split with the blows. Blood trickled down from the contusion, running beside his nose and catching on his lips. “She was going to leave Phillips. But she hadn’t told him yet. She said she had to get some things lined up with her lawyer. Meg Slaughter. You should talk to her.”
“We will.” Lei jotted that down, remembering it as a to-do she hadn’t gotten to yet. “Why did you thin
k Frank killed her?”
“He didn’t want to let her go. She had something he wanted.”
“Maybe she had something you wanted. And you killed her when she wouldn’t leave him,” Lei said.
Nunes shook his head so hard that blood flew from the wound on his face, spattering the table. Bunuelos patted his shoulder. “Hey, man, take it easy.”
“I only wanted her,” Nunes said. “She was who I’d been waiting my whole life for. I could have gotten married a dozen times, but Lani—she was the woman for me.”
“So who’s that young woman at your house?”
“My niece. In case you didn’t hear her call me ‘Uncle.’” Nunes aimed a bloodshot glare at Lei. “Her parents kicked her out when she got pregnant, so I gave her and the kid a place to stay. Let me go, damn it.”
“Maybe. When you tell us what you were doing the morning Lani died. I don’t believe we ever got an alibi from you.”
Nunes tried to straighten in the chair, clearly uncomfortable as the strain of his arms cuffed behind him and his other injuries began to be felt.
“I had work. Began my shift at seven a.m. I monitor that area you found me in, Kihei to La Perouse Bay. I start the day in the harbors, looking to see who’s going out. That morning I was at the boat launch near Kamaole Three Beach. I stay back, get a bead on who’s going out early in the morning, check boat registrations, things like that.” Nunes looked miserable, physical pain setting in along with the reality of the news Lei had given him. She watched his emotion play out, a movie of heartbreak, as he sagged against his bonds. “I cited a couple of guys for expired registrations. That’s on record. You can check.”
“We will. And in the meantime, we can hold you for twenty-four hours. I think you need to cool off. I don’t want you to go off half-crazy and hurt yourself or—someone else.” Lei stood up, gathered her papers and file. “Bunuelos, book him into holding. Give him his own cell and follow suicide watch protocols.”
“Let me go. I wouldn’t do anything, I swear,” Nunes said, but the ooze of blood on the man’s face told a different story.