Elysium tide, p.24
Elysium Tide, page 24
“You what, Peter?”
He wasn’t ready to talk about it, not even with her. “Have you ever taken a human life?”
She swallowed, then nodded.
“I see. I’m sorry. I hadn’t killed anyone, not until today, not even in Afghanistan.”
“You weren’t expected to. You were there as a doctor, right?”
“True. But the old ideal of medical personnel as noncombatants vanished when our adversaries stopped playing by the same rules. And the difference between now and then becomes quite real the moment you drive outside the wire. When I traveled with our specialized team, I carried a weapon, and I was willing to use it.”
“But you never did.”
He shook his head. “When the bullets started to fly, my job was to keep my team alive, not to return fire. There were severe days, but never so bad I had to step outside my role. The same rounds that occupied my magazine on our first patrol remained there until the conclusion of my tour. My team took some pride in that—the idea that they’d carried me through without letting me compromise a commitment to do no harm. And now look what I’ve done.”
“You stopped a killer, Peter—Kelly’s killer. Trejo will never hurt anyone again.”
At this, Peter scrunched his brow. Suspension or not, he hadn’t expected Lisa to call it quits on the case so soon, not with such a big thread still hanging loose. “Are you certain of that?”
“Of what? That Trejo won’t kill again?” Lisa let out a dry chuckle. “Yeah. Pretty certain. He’s not coming back.”
“No. I mean, are you certain Trejo murdered Kelly?”
“Him or one of the gang members who died today. Why? Did you have another suspect in mind?”
Peter turned his chair so he could face her more directly. “I should think the man upon whose property I was snooping when they captured me might at least be a person of interest.”
The blank look Lisa gave him told him she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Carlisle,” he said. “Jack Carlisle. I was at the door of his new facility when Trejo’s men grabbed me. It seems a far stretch to call that a coincidence.” He squinted at her. “Didn’t you read my statement?”
“Of course I did. The transcript said nothing about Carlisle, only that Trejo’s men had caught you following them and grabbed you.” She looked down at the lanai’s slate floor for a time, then back up at Peter. “That’s a big discrepancy. We have some leeway in paraphrasing witness transcripts, but not that much. Who took your statement?”
The two had been separated immediately after the shooting, since they’d both been participants. Peter didn’t know where they’d taken Lisa, but he’d been put into the back of an ambulance with the doors closed. Aside from the refreshingly noncriminal paramedic who’d ministered to the lacerations on his arms and face, there’d only been one other person in the bay—a Maui PD detective.
“It was your colleague,” Peter said. “Detective Jenny Fan.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN
THE GRAND
“JENNY’S THE LEAK.” Lisa couldn’t believe the words coming out of her own mouth. Was this jealousy? Anger? No. Okay, maybe a little, but she had some firm ground underneath her suspicions.
Jenny had downplayed Lisa’s hunch about a leak at Haycraft Park. And she had worked against Lisa at every step of the case. Lisa had assumed the sabotage was aimed at undermining her position as the head of the task force. But what if it was something more sinister?
Omitting a detail in a witness transcript could still be explained away. Jenny could claim she misunderstood or was protecting Carlisle from wild accusations—that she simply didn’t trust Peter. Lisa needed more. “What exactly did you tell Detective Fan?”
“What didn’t I tell her?” Peter stood and walked back into the suite, heading for the refrigerator. “Want something? I have bottled water. POG—passion fruit orange guava juice. During my stay here, I’ve grown particularly fond of the POG.”
“Peter.” Lisa followed him inside. “What did you say to Detective Fan?”
“Sorry. I was stalling, trying to remember. Keep in mind that I had just killed a man, which occupied most of my thoughts.” He opened the fridge. “I do remember telling her I was trying to get a peek inside Carlisle’s facility when Trejo’s men picked me up and that the men wore the same brown coveralls as those who’d driven Carlisle’s tiny herd into the pasture.” He paused to pop the tab on a can of POG, then snapped his fingers. “Oh. And I told her I suspected your department had a leak.”
“You told her that?”
“I didn’t know it might be her. Trejo’s man had practically admitted it. ‘Our guy,’ he said, then told Trejo this mystery contact had told them I had been ousted from the investigation.”
None of that had been in the transcript Lisa read. Matching coveralls linking the gang to Ono Beef—brown, the same color seen on the clothes underneath the saboteur’s hoodie when the bleachers collapsed. A witness overhearing talk that implied a CID mole. No investigator would leave details like that out of a transcript, especially the last one. Unless she was the mole.
She. Problem.
“Trejo’s man said ‘guy,’ right? He used that specific word?”
Peter nodded.
Lisa waved the discrepancy off. “Maybe she’s working through an intermediary. But Jenny is the leak. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sorry.” Peter poured her a glass of POG that she hadn’t asked for. “Betrayal ranks among the worst of ills. Like Ephialtes at Thermopylae. The Greeks were slaughtered.” He took a sip of his own drink, then added, “I myself feel quite Greek at the moment.”
Lisa accepted the juice and sank down onto Peter’s couch. She’d been avoiding POG since returning to Maui, the way a recovering alcoholic avoids whiskey. POG went down smooth, but it had the sugar content of a glassful of jelly beans. “Jenny Fan has been working against us this whole time. That’s why the Baseyard was empty when we got there. And that’s how Trejo’s people found us when we hunted Koa down.”
“Be careful with your conclusions. Some of that can be explained by surveillance. I did see a car following us that night.”
“All the way to the marina?”
“No. It peeled off before the last street.”
“They were checking her information or maybe racing us to the coordinates. Jenny and I found their boat less than a mile from there.”
Peter sat on the edge of a chair and took a long swallow of his juice. “You and her. If Jenny was working against you, why would she help you find the boat, and subsequently the shack?”
“She had no choice. Thanks to you, the Coast Guard sent the coordinates directly to me. Jenny had to push in because she knew I might investigate that lead without her. I should have known she was stalling when I had to walk her through finding Mark Ryland in the criminal database.”
A lot of Jenny’s behavior over the last few days began to make sense. She had taken over the crime scene at the Grand in an effort to suppress evidence. She had used Lisa’s lack of local precinct knowledge to get a lift in the fire department’s helicopter without her. By cutting Lisa and everyone else out of the aerial search, she’d given Trejo a head start in hiding the stolen vehicles. And then she’d magically shown up with the remains of the Benz, a feather in her cap that proved almost useless to the investigation.
Anytime Jenny had been around, Lisa had been working with one arm tied behind her back.
Peter still wasn’t convinced. “What about the showdown at Trejo’s shack? If she warned him before your department invaded the Baseyard, why not then?”
“Good question. Jenny did step away from me to make a call while I interviewed the witness near Twin Falls. And Ryland’s statement mentioned the gang had some kind of warning—that they armed up before our arrival.”
“Yes. That.” Peter coughed, looking away. “That was me.”
“You warned them we were coming?”
“I didn’t know you actually were coming. It was a ruse to get them to leave.”
She frowned at him. “So, no phone calls from a mole?”
“None. Trejo was downstairs with me the whole time, and his people argued against, not for, my prediction of a police assault.”
Lisa stared at the gold threads in the beige fabric wallpaper. “She had ample opportunity to give Trejo a heads-up that I was coming and bringing the whole department and part of the Coast Guard with me. So why would she suddenly hang him out to dry?”
“Perhaps for the same reason she omitted key details from my statement. Detective Fan isn’t working for Trejo.”
Lisa met his eye, and they both spoke at the same time.
“She’s working for Carlisle.”
“Carlisle is the intermediary,” Lisa said. “He was the one working Trejo’s strings.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT
CAPTAIN GRIFFITH’S RESIDENCE
KAHULUI
THE CAPTAIN’S HOME hadn’t been the first stop in Lisa and Peter’s effort to revive the Kelly Alana case. Lisa hoped it wouldn’t be their last. She had to take the risk—do this right. “Let me do the talking, okay?”
Peter gave her a thumbs-up.
Mike leaned out from behind him and gave her two. “You got it, boss.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Don’t say that in front of the captain. I’m not your boss right now—not as long as I’m on suspension.”
“You will be.” Mike had that smile that always seemed to be there, no matter what. “We’re gonna set this right. You’ll see.”
Captain Griffith answered the door in board shorts and a Rainbow Warriors jersey. “Kealoha. You have something to say that couldn’t wait until after your review?”
“You have a leak in your division.”
“That’s quite a claim. You have proof?”
“Dr. Chesterfield.”
The captain tried to close the door.
Lisa stopped it with a flat hand. “Wait. What he has is circumstantial, but I believe him, and it’s enough to warrant a hard look.”
“Then take it to internal affairs.”
“Sir, this is a small division, and you know it. If word of an inquiry gets out, we might spook the mole.”
“Translation—your name is mud with IA right now, and you want me to give you permission to do an end run around them. Correct?”
Lisa had to give the man credit. He’d seen right through her line and picked out the far more accurate subtext. “Correct.”
He pressed his lips together for a long time, then swung the door wide. “Come in. Let’s hear what you’ve got.” When only Lisa crossed the threshold, the captain rolled his eyes and thrust his chin at the other two. “All of you. Get in here before someone sees you hanging out on my stoop. Like she said, it’s a small division.”
The captain sat them down at his dining room table and asked his daughter to bring them coffee. Lisa took that to be a good sign that he was willing to listen. Drinking caffeine after sundown was a commitment. She laid out her case and let Peter chime in with an occasional detail.
Captain Griffith scowled at his steepled fingers. “This is more than a leak. You’re accusing Jack Carlisle, who has ingratiated himself no small amount with the mayor and the chamber of commerce, of being an evil mastermind and a murderer who had both Trejo and Detective Fan on his payroll.”
“Has,” Peter said. “He still has your Detective Fan on his payroll. And her actions in his service have caused multiple deaths and severe injury to your officers, including one that I saw go down at Trejo’s shack.”
Lisa touched his knee under the table to quiet him. “I have . . . a friend in the FBI looking into Carlisle. A good friend. If he’s as dirty as we think, he’ll have slipped up in the past. We may have more on him soon.”
The captain glanced at Peter. “Officer Kapas, whom you saw take a hit today, is fine. His vest absorbed the round, and he has nothing worse than a bruised rib. And you,” he said to Lisa, “haven’t given me enough to justify involving the FBI. If your contact trips the wrong digital wire while snooping around Carlisle’s life, we might all be in trouble.”
Mike had raised his hand early in the captain’s statement, and he kept it up, squirming like a first grader with the answer to a math problem.
“Yes, Mike?”
He looked to Lisa, as if he also needed her permission to speak. She tilted her head toward the captain. “Go ahead. Tell him what you found out.”
“Sir, I can tip the scales in Detective Kealoha’s favor. It all goes back to buckyballs. I first noticed it when—”
Lisa thumped the table beside him.
Mike’s pupils darted to hers, and he nodded. “How about I skip the buckyballs and get to the important part. We found an object in the silt at the drowning site, and I sent it to the state lab on Oahu for testing. But I never got a result.”
“No result?” the captain said. “That’s your proof of Detective Fan’s malfeasance?”
“In a way, yes. I hadn’t heard from them in a couple of days. Nothing too unusual for a busy state lab. But when Detective Kealoha came to me this evening, I grew suspicious. I called a colleague there, and he told me they had canceled the tests at Detective Kealoha’s request.”
“A request I never made,” Lisa added. “Someone called the lab from the CID and impersonated me to keep them from testing the object. Those phone lines are recorded. We’d need a warrant to get the audio file, but if we do, Jenny’s voice will be on it. I’m certain.”
The captain stared down into his coffee, brow furrowed. “If we ask for a warrant, we’ll need justification. And I know for a fact Detective Fan has made a life’s goal of making friends with judges. I don’t think we could keep that quiet. The evidence will still be there if it comes to that, but before I try to get it, I’ll need more to back it up in court.”
Mike continued to squirm, and the captain let out an exasperated sigh over his cup. “You have something else, Mike?”
“Yes, sir. It’s my colleague at the state lab. The object, a black stone faceted like a tiny soccer ball, intrigued him too much. He ran the battery of tests anyway. He was planning on sending me the results tomorrow.”
When Mike didn’t continue, the captain set his cup down. “And?”
“And we need more testing for verification, but it looks like the object is a formerly theoretical form of carbon called Elysium, mined illegally here on the island.” Mike spread his hands, eyes lighting up. “Imagine, right under our feet, giant blocks of ultra-hard diamond, so dense light can’t pass through them, with ferromagnetic and superconducting properties heretofore unseen in nature.”
“Which no one can touch,” the captain said. “Because mining on Maui is illegal.”
Lisa shrugged a shoulder. “We think Carlisle is doing it on the sly, using Ono Beef as a cover.”
“But what does mining Elysium have to do with Trejo and the auto thefts?”
“Most likely, Trejo had already set up his network of smuggler’s tracks before Carlisle bought the dead cane fields, driving the uptick in auto thefts you brought me here to stop. I’d guess he would have moved into drugs next, but then Carlisle showed up.”
Peter wrapped his fingers around his coffee cup. “And what’s one criminal to do when he finds another camped out on his territory?”
The captain snorted. “Only two options. Start a war or join forces.”
“Agreed.” Peter sat back with his cup. “And we think what happened is a little of both. The two brokered a deal. Trejo used his smuggler’s tracks to support Carlisle’s illicit mining operations and provide security. Carlisle used his influence to keep Trejo off the police radar.”
“But after Kelly died,” Lisa said, jumping in, “things got too hot for Carlisle’s comfort. He had to get rid of Trejo, but he couldn’t just get him arrested. Trejo knew too much. Carlisle used Jenny to touch off a war to get Trejo and his men killed, and we played right into his hands.”
The captain left the table and crossed the hallway between the dining room and a small open office. “It all fits, but like you said, most of it is circumstantial.”
Lisa stood and laid her hands on the table. “Will you take action?”
“No.” The captain opened a safe behind his desk and brought out a gun and badge, both resting on a clipboard. “You will. I thought about what you said at the station—not your most diplomatic moment, but you made good points. That’s why I brought these home with me. And now you’ve backed those points up.” He set his burdens down in front of Lisa and offered her a pen. “Welcome back, Detective. Sign for your badge and gun. Then go get me enough hard evidence to put Carlisle and Fan away for good.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
LISA AND PETER DROPPED MIKE OFF at his place in Wailuku, only a few blocks from Lisa’s. “Get in touch with your buddy on Oahu,” she told him as he climbed out of the Jeep’s back seat. “Tell him the division wants those lab reports after all. We want them first thing in the morning. Make sure Jenny doesn’t get wind of it.”
She waited until he was inside the house before driving off. Maybe it was an overabundance of caution. Maybe not. An opponent like Carlisle, willing to work with a notorious gang, put a dirty cop on his payroll, and play the two sides against each other in a deadly confrontation, would do anything to stay ahead in the game.
Peter seemed to sense her mind. “He’s been watching us, hasn’t he? Carlisle, that is.”
“Probably. But he might have been using Trejo’s men.”
“Trejo’s gone. Does that mean we’re in the clear now?”
Lisa put the Jeep into drive and pulled away. “I don’t know.”
As she turned north onto Route 30, away from Happy Valley, Peter glanced over his shoulder. “I thought your house was the other direction. Shouldn’t we get Pika?”
“The captain was clear. No one outside that room is to know about this investigation. That includes Pika. For now, it’s just you and me.”
