“ Sure, certain fire, who doesn't?”
“ Controlled fire, you mean. Well, perhaps you'd better be cautious, because even the most controlled fires tend to get out of hand in a wind like this.”
They continued onward until they stood outside an unusual shop that carried items from New Guinea, the walls and windows filled with headdresses and masks with stoney, bulging eyes, fanglike teeth and enormous ears. She stepped inside to browse the unique store, and he followed. There was something completely raw and uninhibited about the items on display for sale here, items that appeared better suited to a museum showing than a capitalistic enterprise. Spears and ancient tools adorned one wall, rustic artwork the other, and as they moved from one display to another, the eyes of the ancient, one-of-a-kind, handmade masks seemed to follow their steps. “An archaeologist would be right at home here,” she commented.
“ Another kind of fanaticism?” he asked. “The desire to stare into the past, to understand the dead?”
“ Not so different from what we M.E.'s do, only our dead are usually of a more recent vintage.”
“ So a good medicine man, or woman in your case, is still worth her weight in papayas, at least in these islands,” he said with a wide and infectious smile.
“ Have all the victims disappeared from this area?” she asked.
“ No, not all. Several have been abducted from our Chinatown area.”
“ Chinatown?”
“ One of our oldest districts where the oldest profession is still the oldest profession.”
“ I see. Were all the women prostitutes?”
“ You haven't had time to go over the files, I take it.”
She shook her head to indicate she hadn't.
He ushered her back out onto the street before saying, “Several were university students, possibly plying the trade to continue at the university, but others seem to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of last year's disappearances were working night-shift jobs, supposedly on their way home, when they vanished. “And all of them fall within a certain age range?”
“ Sixteen's the youngest and nineteen's the oldest.”
“ Pretty tight range.”
He agreed, adding, “He appears to like them with long, free-flowing black hair, and he obviously prefers island girls, never a haole-a white.”
He walked her back to her hotel lobby where a short, stocky man in a raucous, multicolored Hawaiian shirt, dashed up to Jim Parry, pulling him away, speaking in hushed and rapid fashion. The other man was dark-skinned, a heavy sweater. His hair had once been jet black, but now it was streaked and peppered with gray; tossed by the wind, it scuffled about his creased forehead and worried eyes. She heard Jim call him Tony. He'd brought some urgent message to Parry, who was doing his best to rid himself of the heavier fellow.
It then appeared that Parry wasn't going to get away, so Jessica made a move for the hotel entrance, to go to her room, but this spurred Parry back to her; he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, the older man beside him, frowning, a natural scowl distorting his features.
“ This is Special Agent Anthony Gagliano, Dr. Coran.” Gagliano was so darkly tanned that his Italian features had turned to that of a dark Latino. Swarthy, she thought.
“ Gagliano,” she said, “I might've guessed,” trying to muster a smile, feeling wrung out.
“ We've got a line on the missing girl,” Parry said. “Honolulu Missing Persons notified Tony right after their two Hawaiian cops fell, but its only been a few hours ago that Tony's been able to get her family to agree to see me. It's been twenty-four hours, and the girl's description fits our victim profile.”
“ Then you have worked up a victim profile?”
“ In the files I gave you, remember?”
“ A victim profile without bodies. That may be a first, Inspector. I'm impressed.”
“ Don't be. It wasn't too tough. They all might've been sisters, they look-looked-that much alike.”
She sighed heavily, nodding, realizing that this was one more point of evidence that made Parry believe that a demented mind stood behind the disappearances.
“ I've got to go. Tony and I'll question the relatives, find out what we can.”
“ Be sure to get any and all medical information you can,” she urgently told him. “Sure, sure,” said Gagliano, sounding a bit offended.
“ Don't stop at dental. Anything medical,” she persisted to Gagliano's best we-know-how-to-do-our-job glare. “All we've got is that awful arm in Lau's freezer, and that's not much to work with. We'll need every shred of information from the girl's doctor, from measles shots on. Be nice if we had medical records and long-bone X-rays on all of them.”
Gagliano, a hefty man, had the eyes of an impish boy. He stared at Jessica for a moment before replying. “Not much to attach to that ham hock we found, huh, Doc? Sure, we'll grill her family for any medical records.”
“ Get a good night's sleep. You'll need it for the morning,” Parry said to her as Gagliano faded toward his car. “I enjoyed dinner and the walk,” he confided.
“ So did I. See you sometime tomorrow then, Chief Parry.”
“ Might just as well call me Jim. We're going to be working very closely together.”
“ I'm not sure we're going to be working that close, Jim, and I don't know how long Zanek'll let me remain. Maybe Chief is best for now.”
He frowned, but it quickly disappeared and was replaced by an elegant smile. “All right, Doctor. Have it your way.”
“ I usually do.”
“ I can believe that.”
He allowed himself to linger over her disappearing form, not caring what Gagliano made of his behavior. Even with the cane, or perhaps because of it, she was a unique and intriguing combination of beauty and brains, femininity and strength. He decided he very much liked her and that he wanted to get to know her better.
Gagliano rejoined him, saying, “Helluva looker for an M.E., Jim. Couldn't figure it when they told me you were at the Rainbow having dinner with a coroner, but Christ, nobody told me she was such a doll. I figured her more the 'Iron Matron' in the lockup type, if you know what I mean? Still, I never figured you to go for a chest cutter.”
'Tony, tonight was strictly business.”
“ Hey, if you got to do business, it's a hell of a lot easier if the dame across from you looks like something between Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Lo-and-Bacall!”
Parry laughed. “Shut up and get in your squad. I'm under the bus terminal and I'll follow you out. Let's get whatever the doctor wants.”
“ Strictly business, huh?”
“ Go!”
Parry had worked on and off with Tony Gagliano for most of the eight years he had been in Hawaii. Tony was a good man, a tough cop and a straight friend who had several times tried to fix Jim up with one of his many relatives who visited from the mainland from time to time. Most of Tony's family remained in the San Francisco Bay area. Tony, the black sheep of the family for most of his life, had stumbled into police work only after running off to Hawaii to be a beach bum. That had been almost twenty years before. He had come up through the ranks of street cop in Honolulu, had done every conceivable job through detective-shield status and had finally applied for the FBI at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Now thirty-eight, prematurely aged and balding, he had covered a lot of ground with Parry, and they instinctively trusted one another as they could no one else either in the HPD or the FBI. Aside from the work, they had spent many a backyard barbecue and ball game together. Tony had also watched James Parry fail at every relationship he had ever had with a woman over the years. Sometimes, Jim Parry thought as he slid in behind the wheel of his unmarked car, Tony knew too damned much about him.
Parry's car cut sharply from beneath the bus terminal at the Rainbow Tower and out into the traffic of Ala Moana Boulevard. He tried now to concentrate on the work at hand. He'd seen a photograph of the last supposed victim of the Trade Winds phantom, a lovely petite young woman with shining black hair that cascaded down to near waist-length, and while the others hadn't hair quite so long, they all wore tapering hair in similar fashion. Linda, or Lina as her closest family called her, this nineteen-year- old, hadn't much of a file yet, just a photo and the particulars of her home situation and place of work. Her employer had been questioned without result, having been the last to see Linda before she was believed to have gotten into a car with a dark figure on Ala Wai Boulevard,
