Death in hilo, p.9
Death in Hilo, page 9
“Why? It’s your case over there.”
“Kawika, Terry’s right. You want to do it yourself. She’s a possible link to D. K. Parkes, through Keoni. Terry can’t think of anyone else who might be, and he’s guessing the cases of D. K. Parkes and his son Keoni Parkes might be linked. Otherwise, it’s a coincidence, and you know what Terry thinks about coincidences. Terry’s worried that if Keoni is dead and if his death relates to his dad’s, then Carvalho will decide the D. K. Parkes murder is part of something that’s still going on.”
“Right,” Kawika answered. That was his worry too. Objectively, he saw no reason to link Keoni’s disappearance to his father’s death. Even if Keoni was dead, there’d be a hundred more likely explanations. But against that Kawika had to weigh Tanaka’s intuition, which Kawika respected.
“So, who is this Dr. Phillips exactly?” he asked.
“An astronomer in charge of public and government affairs for the TMT,” Ku‘ulei replied. “Apparently, she was famous once, among astronomers anyway—some sort of prodigy, I guess. Terry wanted me to ask around, and I did. She discovered something about twin stars, but I couldn’t understand it; too technical. Anyway, that’s why they picked her for TMT, I guess. She’s just about your age. Good-looking, by the way. And she’s a widow. A good-looking blonde widow, Kawika.”
He laughed, knowing she was teasing him now. “Stop it, Ku‘ulei. I’m a happily married man.”
“Married to a good-looking blonde,” she responded, laughing too. “I know you like ’em, that’s all.”
“Elle is ash blond, Cuz, not blonde-blonde.”
“Well, I think Dr. Phillips would be too tall for you anyway.”
“Ouch,” said Kawika. “You’re really mean, Cuz.”
“Okay then,” Ku‘ulei concluded brightly. “I’ll tell Terry you’re coming. I’ll tell your dad too—he’ll be so pleased, Kawika. Especially if you bring Elle. And I’ll set you up to interview Dr. Phillips.”
“Stop it. I’m not going to interview your Dr. Phillips,” Kawika insisted. “Keoni Parkes is your case over there on the Big Island. It’s not my concern, unless Terry’s right and this relates to his father’s murder. That seems pretty unlikely at this stage. So I’ll make sure the Honolulu stuff gets done. Otherwise, I’ll just follow the investigation through you and Terry.”
Kawika meant it. But he was forced to change his mind a day later, right before the weekend, when a city sanitation worker found a human head inside a plastic trash bag at Honolulu’s main garbage transfer station. A man’s head with a .22-caliber entry wound in the left temple, just as Dr. Noriko Yoshida had predicted.
It didn’t take long to establish who the severed head belonged to. No DNA match was needed. A sobbing Dr. Emma Phillips identified it to Tanaka over the phone, once she’d seen the faxed photo Kawika had provided.
It was the head of Keoni Parkes.
* * *
“Well,” Yvonne remarked, after Kawika had briefed the Honolulu detectives on this development in the Robespierre case—the last time they’d refer to the decapitated body that way; it was the Keoni Parkes case now. “At least we can focus our search.”
“True,” Kawika agreed. “We can be more selective, anyway.”
“Right,” she responded, seeming to think aloud. “We know our victim’s name is Keoni Parkes, and we know he was gay. So unless the killing’s random, the killer could be one of his gay acquaintances, don’t you think? Might narrow the field, or at least give us a place to start. Maybe some weekend lover in Honolulu learns about Angel Delos Santos over on the Big Island, feels betrayed. Could happen to any cheater—gay or straight.”
Occam’s razor, Kawika thought. She’s feeling her way toward it, going for the simplest explanation first. They hadn’t discussed the concept, but she seemed about to discover it herself—if she didn’t know it already. Way too early to apply it here, though. “Good thinking,” he responded tactfully. “See if you can develop that idea some more. Still, Yvonne, don’t fall in love with it. We just don’t know enough yet.”
Back at his desk, Kawika was surprised—only at first, because he realized he should have anticipated it—to find another envelope with another pencil-written note in block capitals: CHANGED TO ALA MOANA BEACH PARK BECAUSE OF THAT COPYCAT AT KAPIOLANI. KPS (NOW D/B/A AMBPS). He knew the last part meant Now doing business as the Ala Moana Beach Park Slasher.
Kawika found the sick humor revolting. We really need to catch this guy, Kawika said to himself. But the dead Keoni Parkes, apparently the victim of a different killer—copycat or not—was the victim most on his mind.
Kawika didn’t rush the note to the lab. Instead, he called Yvonne to his desk. “Tell you what,” he told her. “I want you to keep pursuing the betrayed-lover angle and spending a bit of time on Keoni Parkes. But otherwise, I’m going to assign you to the Slasher investigation. I’ll get you started with the team right now. Our best detectives and forensics folks. You’ll learn a lot. And I bet they’ll learn some things from you.”
Kawika called a meeting of the Slasher team in the homicide division’s main conference room. Most were able to attend, and Kawika introduced Yvonne to the few who didn’t already know her. When all were seated, Kawika explained that he still needed some of Yvonne’s time for the Keoni Parkes case, but otherwise he wanted her immersed in the Slasher investigation, beginning at once. “She’s new and she’s young, but she’s awfully sharp,” he told the team. “You train her well, she’ll become a star around HPD, not just on the Slasher case. And don’t be surprised if she catches things you don’t—like the killer. She’s that good.”
As the team dispersed, Jerry Rhodes looked at Yvonne the neophyte, as if thinking How does she rate? But he might have been thinking something different; Kawika let it pass. If anything, Rhodes’s look seemed more surprised than inappropriate this time.
Despite Kawika’s praise, Yvonne seemed perplexed by her new assignment, evidently not sure whether this was a promotion or the opposite. Kawika understood. “It’s a promotion, Yvonne,” he assured her. “Our most important case. We need it solved. I’d like to see you on it, and you deserve this.”
But in truth, Kawika had a different notion in mind. He was thinking of where the Keoni Parkes investigation might lead, how it might affect Ana Carvalho’s inquiry into the Fortunato and D. K. Parkes cases, and the peril it might pose for him and Tanaka, given that D. K. and Keoni were father and son and that the second death might relate to the first, as Tanaka suspected, thereby practically requiring that the first case—one he and Tanaka had covered up twelve years earlier—be reopened.
Kawika decided that for Tanaka’s safety and his own, he needed to take charge of the Keoni Parkes case personally. That would mean ceding most of the direct responsibility for the Slasher investigation to the Two Jerrys, at least temporarily. He’d have to explain that unusual and professionally risky development to his team by emphasizing the Big Island locus of the two Parkes victims and his own past role in the earlier case.
Kawika didn’t want anyone—especially not anyone as smart and inquisitive as Yvonne Ivanovna was proving to be—too close to his thinking on the Keoni Parkes matter right now. Not even Tanaka, to whom Kawika had never disclosed, in 2002 or since, everything he believed he understood about the death of D. K. Parkes. Kawika needed to learn a lot more about Keoni Parkes first.
15
Waikoloa Village
Kawika and Elle flew to the Big Island on Friday and spent the night in the Puakō cottage. They’d kept Jarvis’s old car and fixed it up. So on Saturday morning, after dropping Kawika at the coffee shop where he would meet Tanaka, Elle drove the car—a big one, which Jarvis in his prime had required—to the nearby care center to visit her stroke-ravaged father-in-law. She opened the door to his private room to find another woman, blonde and petite, seated at his bedside and holding his hand. Elle stopped abruptly, her smile fading and her brows knitting in puzzlement. Then two things happened at once. Jarvis began making a plosive puh-puh-puh sound, and the other woman rose and extended her hand.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Patience Quinn. And you must be Elianna.”
Jarvis uttered luh-luh-luh; he couldn’t produce the sound of Elle’s name itself, just the sound of the key consonant, which for Elle’s name was just as good.
Elle stood, a bit stunned, then remembered to smile at Jarvis and nodded toward the other woman. “Patience Quinn, my goodness,” Elle said, almost not believing it, taking Patience’s proffered hand lightly. “Kawika has told me so much about you—all good, of course. Yes, I’m Elianna, but people just call me Elle. Excuse me a second.”
Elle went to Jarvis’s side, looked at him with a renewed warm smile, and bent down to kiss his cheek. Then she straightened up and looked at Patience. She tried her best to seem expressionless, not to show any feelings. She didn’t actually know what she felt, other than surprise. And she’d already shown that.
“I’ve read three of your books,” Patience offered, filling the brief silence, sounding respectful. “I even recognized a bit of myself in Murder at the Mauna Lani—although it seems you made me a man.” Patience smiled, and Elle could see she was trying to defuse an awkward moment for them both.
Elle nodded and smiled back. “Well, my detective is a woman,” she replied, adding a small laugh. “In that book, I felt her lover had to be a man—so you had to be a man. It wouldn’t have worked any other way. Sorry about that!”
Patience responded with a small laugh too, along with a dismissive wave of her hand.
For a moment the two women stood in silence and regarded each other. Then Elle, always quick to make decisions, took action. “Jarvis,” she said brightly to her father-in-law. “Patience and I are going to sit in the courtyard for a bit. I’ll come back and see you after that, I promise. Maybe Patience will too. I’m sorry I interrupted her visit.”
Jarvis produced a yuh-yuh-yuh. Yes.
Giving Jarvis another kiss and squeezing his hand one more time, she inclined her head toward the door and followed Patience out.
Walking behind the other woman, Elle couldn’t help admiring her looks, her clothing, her sense of style—the impression she gave of money. It’s ridiculous to feel jealous, Elle told herself. I’m the one he married. So Elle put jealousy aside. But she couldn’t help thinking about, well, what she couldn’t help thinking about. She guessed Patience might well wonder the same things about Kawika and Elle, having long ago shared intimacies with Kawika herself.
Once they’d seated themselves in the courtyard, surrounded by lush plantings of oleander and hibiscus and shaded by a sprawling Hong Kong orchid tree in full flower, Elle resumed their conversation. “I’ve always hoped we’d meet someday,” she said. “Although I have to admit I didn’t know you’d be so good-looking. It’s a bit disconcerting, you know, for a wife to meet the gorgeous former girlfriend.”
“Oh, please,” Patience protested. “You’re beautiful. It’s disconcerting to me that Kawika found someone so lovely.”
Elle recognized the flattery for what it was: mere politeness. In this instance, politeness as diplomacy. Elle knew she wasn’t beautiful in the same sense as Patience. Elle was a good-looking woman, but mainly in a way no still photograph could fully capture. Her beauty lay in her liveliness, her vivacity, the natural delight and pleasure she so easily felt and cheerfully expressed. She could see the effect in Kawika’s gaze and that of others, not the mirror. And her pregnancy, although not showing yet, had added an attractive depth of color to her olive-skinned face.
“I’ve got nothing on you except a few extra years—which I try my best to conceal,” Patience added graciously. “And you’ve still got your husband, whereas I lost mine. Both of them.”
“Both of them?” Elle asked. “Kawika told me you were going through a divorce when he met you. Did you remarry?”
“Yes, I did—eventually. And that marriage ended in divorce too. Four years ago.”
“Sorry to hear that. You still come to the Big Island, though? I mean, it must provide some comfort and continuity for you. It’s so perfect here.”
“Yes, it is perfect, and yes, I still do. Originally, I had a condo at the Mauna Lani, but I sold it after my divorce, and then—”
“That infamous condo,” Elle interrupted teasingly, with a smile. “You probably recognized your condo, too, in Murder at the Mauna Lani. I took a look at it as part of my research for the book.”
“Oh dear,” Patience said in embarrassment, covering her face with both hands and looking down at her lap. “I was determined not to get all red-faced with you, yet here I am, blushing like the proverbial schoolgirl.”
“I’m so sorry,” Elle quickly reassured her, leaning forward and touching the other woman’s arm. “Please don’t worry. I knew everything about the two of you before I married him. It all happened years ago, before Kawika and I even met. Everything is fine now, Patience. Believe me. And I interrupted what you were about to say. Forgive me.”
“No need to apologize,” Patience responded, raising her head again. “I’m sure I’ll interrupt you sometimes too. I do that a lot, I’m afraid.”
“So do I, apparently,” Elle said with a laugh. “But please go on. You sold the Mauna Lani condo, you were saying, and then …?”
“Then I married husband two-point-oh,” resumed Patience, “and talked him into buying a house at the Mauna Kea. We spent some happy times here, playing tennis and golfing, enjoying the beach, and so on. He was a good sport. About that, at least. Not so much about my work. Now I come here by myself.”
“No children?”
Patience shook her head. “But at least until a few years ago, I got to see Jarvis,” she said, “when he was still doing groundskeeping at the Mauna Kea. That’s always been a pleasure, and at times in my life, a great comfort. He’d come up to my lanai or I’d visit him in Puakō. We’d share a drink and talk story, as he liked to say. Once in a while I’d meet him after work and we’d hike the Ala Kahakai—you know, the ancient shoreline trail—from the Mauna Kea up to Kawaihae. We’d have a beer or two at the Dolphin, then one of Jarvis’s buddies would drive us back to the resort. Everyone was Jarvis’s buddy. It was all so different for him back then.”
Patience paused, choking up a bit. But she soldiered on. “Anyway, I’ve known Jarvis since I was little. He nicknamed me Flea when I was about six—or fuh-fuh-fuh as he calls me now. I was surprised he was more formal today, trying to introduce me as Patience. You know, puh-puh-puh.”
“I noticed that,” Elle agreed with a nod. “When he sees Kawika nowadays, he says kuh-kuh-kuh. Same for Kawika’s cousin Ku‘ulei. With Terry Tanaka, he’s tuh-tuh-tuh. Not stuttering, just trying to get that sound out.”
“Poor guy,” Patience said, with a shake of her head. “He’s such a sweetie. Anyway, my family is longtime friends with Jarvis—you probably know that. My relationship with Jarvis isn’t about Kawika, Elle. Didn’t begin that way, hasn’t ever been that way. I haven’t seen Kawika for, what, a decade or more? So my visiting Jarvis has nothing to do with Kawika.”
Elle waved a hand to dismiss the very thought. “I believe you,” she quickly replied. “And I’m not worried, honestly, even though I was caught off guard today. And even though now I see you—plus having heard so much about you—well, naturally, I’m impressed. But mostly I’m just glad we’ve finally met. And really intrigued.”
“That’s kind of you,” said Patience. “I’m intrigued too, of course. You’re the lucky one. Congratulations, by the way. Sincerely. You got yourself a wonderful man.”
Elle leaned forward and placed her hand on the other woman’s arm again. “Let me tell you something,” she confided. “Something I’m sure you already know. Kawika loved you, Patience. Really loved you. He’s told me that more than once, and I’ve never doubted it. I think you’re the one who taught him he could love someone, in fact. So what happened with you two had nothing to do with—”
“I never knew what happened,” Patience quietly interrupted, as she’d said she might. To Elle’s ear she sounded wistful, not bitter. “He just cut things off. Without a word.”
“What happened,” said Elle, resuming her explanation, “was something completely unexpected. Something he discovered in the Fortunato case, something he couldn’t tell anyone—not you, not Terry Tanaka. Something that forced Kawika to deal with the case in a very unsatisfactory way. It left him isolated and, frankly, pretty tormented. He felt totally alone. He told me the whole story before we got married; I made him. But he and I still can’t tell anyone. Not even you, who really deserves a better explanation. I’m sorry. I can only say that if none of that had happened, if he could have told you at the time, you’d probably be the one married to him—at least if he’d persuaded you, that is—and I’d probably be a spinster, writing fluffy beach fiction for tourists.”
“Hardly a spinster!” Patience exclaimed. “And hardly fluffy beach fiction.” But she averted her gaze, turning toward the bright flowers bordering the courtyard. Elle could see only one of Patience’s eyes; it glistened and seemed ready to overflow.
“So, the official explanation of Fortunato’s murder wasn’t true?” Patience asked after a pause, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s basically what you just said, right? That’s why you can never talk about it, because Kawika still has to protect Terry Tanaka? Maybe himself too? I always wondered about that official explanation. Kawika and I discovered so much, but then …” Her voice trailed off.
“Actually, you could help me understand something,” Elle responded, glad to lead the conversation in a slightly new direction. “What you and Kawika discovered—did it include anything about a man named D. K. Parkes?”
Patience reacted with a grimace. “Why does everyone keep asking me about D. K. Parkes?” she asked.
* * *
