good care of me.”
“ Zanek's orders,” he said casually.
“ Is that it? And what did Paul tell you about me?”
“ Only that you're the best, and now I understand why he says so.”
She stripped away her lab coat, put her jacket over her shoulders, and tapped with her cane ahead of him, privately pleased at his attentions. In D.C. she had a reputation as something of a cold “cutter,” a typical M.E. rubric. Some there still called her the Scavenger-always on the hunt for clues. People, and men in particular, were usually standoffish, unsure around her, often threatened by her. The irony of it was that, despite her education, her medical training and her time at the FBI academy, and despite the fact she was an excellent markswoman, she thought herself the least intimidating person she knew. At least, she didn't intentionally intimidate men; still, like an aura one is bom with, she was seldom viewed as anything other than Dr. Jessica Coran, M.E., FBI. There had only been a handful of men in her life who had gotten beyond their initial hangups about her qualifications and degrees, and even this usually required close working conditions and long hours to reach what ought to be an easily accessible plateau.
Interestingly, this hadn't been the case with Inspector James Parry. Here, with him, she'd been treated like a lady from the moment they'd met.
“ You seem to do pretty well without the cane,” he commented when they'd gotten into the elevator. “I looked in on you earlier. You were busy in the lab, so…”
“ Sometimes I need it more… depends on how long I've been on my feet,” she managed.
It was a lovely, silver-handled thing, given her as a coming- home present from J.T. and others at her Quantico labs when she had “come home” after her long ordeal with rehab. The trial that had placed a maniac into a psycho ward in a federal pen for the criminally insane had also been a treacherous ordeal. To this day, Mad Matthew Matisak held sway over certain of her emotions. As Donna, her well-paid psychologist whom she knew on a first- name basis now, had told her, “When you stare into the abyss, it sometimes stares back.”
The healing process, for the brand of distress which Matisak had put her through, had taken years, and even now she was far from any cure or freedom from the scars, particularly the invisible ones. Matisak had cut into her for reasons not unlike those of the Trade Winds Killer, and here she was, staring again into the pit, looking for answers to questions most people pretended never to hear… searching through the rubble of the ugliest side of the human condition which netted rape, bloodletting, torture, mutilation and lust murder.
She wondered if Jim Parry's solicitousness was due to his measured concern for what had happened to her in the past, due to what he knew of her encounter with “Teach” Matisak. He knew that she had looked even deeper into the abyss than he, and that for her it was Matisak's insane eyes that stared back. Parry was intelligent and keen and sensitive. Was he interested in her, she wondered, or what she knew firsthand about serial killers?
Like all of the FBI family, Jim had to be well informed about her ordeal, aware of her near-death experience at Matisak's hand. How she'd lost Otto to Matisak…
At his car, he took her cane and offered a hand as she eased into the seat, and for a moment he lingered over the beauty of the cane itself, commenting on the ornamental craftsmanship. It wasn't a Rolex, but it had to have cost some bucks… and he must have known that it was the same cane which had thwarted the demonic efforts of Simon Archer, a.k.a. the Claw. She could read it in his lingering gaze.”You want to know about Simon Archer and about Matthew Matisak, don't you?” she asked.
“ No, no,” he said.
She didn't believe him. By the same token, she knew that Parry thrived on knowing facts, and that feeding on case-file information was not enough for a thorough investigator such as he. This was his strength and what made him appealing, and she also knew that he was dying to know all the inside dirt.
“ If it'll endear me to you,” she said with a crooked smile, “I suppose I can tell you about Matisak and Archer.” It might even be theraputic, she heard Donna Lemonte say.
He came around to the driver's side, the cane still in his hand. Placing the cane onto the rear seat and sliding in, he said, “Jessica, you don't have to talk about it.”
His sincerity was tinged with a healthy dose of cop curiosity which she both understood and respected. “No, no,” she began, “it's pretty obvious what's on your mind.”
“ Really,” he insisted, “we can talk about other things.”
“ Yeah, maybe,” she replied, “after this is out of the way.”
“ Jess!” he said, feigning annoyance.
She launched into the subject of Mad Matisak by way of an autopsy and a double exhumation which led her along a twisted trail to Matisak's lair.
7
We heed no instincts but our own.
Jessica's whiskey sour with a twist of lime had arrived alongside Parry's gin and tonic, and she was taking in the incredible expanse of the turquoise Pacific, about to taste her drink there in the lounge atop the Aloha Tower, when Jim Parry lifted his glass in a salute, pointed to Diamond Head in the distance and said, “Okole maluna.”
She accepted the toast, touching her glass to his, asking, “And what does that mean?”
“ Bottoms up, in this instance.”
“ What do you mean in this instance? It has a double meaning?”
“ A vulgar one.”
She was intrigued. “Really? I love vulgar-what?”
“ I'd just as soon-”
“ No, please, what else does it mean?”
“ Well, the literal translation means 'stick your bottom up toward the moon,' kind of moon the moon, a practice which most Honolulu cops let pass unless the drunk gets completely out of hand.”
She shook her head and frowned, “Luna, like the Italian moon.”
“ Suck 'em up.” He made it sound like sock 'urn op, as he downed the rest of his drink. “That's another island expression, generally to do with alcoholic beverages, but this could also be taken as a cry of need, an invitation… depends upon the speaker and… circumstances.”
“ As circumstances warrant? It sounds as if the Hawaiian people are a flexible lot, if you go by their language.” She felt a bit uneasy with the innuendo, looked around and asked aloud about the time.
He laughed lightly and said, “It's Hawaiian Time.”
“ Meaning?”
“ A bit late. Anywhere from several hours to several days late, that is.”
She smiled again, relaxing. “You know the island people well, don't you?”
“ No haole ever completely knows them, and when you speak of the island people, well, that includes a lot of varied nationalities. What with all the imported labor for the sugarcane and pineapple fields over the years-Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese. Did you know there were one hundred sixty thousand Japanese on the islands at the time Pearl Harbor was attacked?”
She realized of course that he was right; she'd heard nine languages being spoken in the space of time it took for her to gather her bags at the airport in Maui and get to her hotel- Chinese, English, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Samoan, and a smattering of Spanish.
“ The diversity,” she told him, “simply adds to the romance of the islands.”
“ For the visitor, sure. For the working law-enforcement official, it can cause a lot of problems. For instance, the big Samoans, many of them huge monsters, keep an annual holiday which when translated is 'Kill a Haole Day.'“
“ Kill a White Day,” she repeated. “I see.”
