“ This Paniolo guy disgusts me, but I don't think he's the Trade Winds Killer,” he flatly observed.
“ Aren't you being a bit premature?”
“ He doesn't fit the profile.”
“ Sometimes the profile doesn't fit, so? You can't be a slave to it. Let your instincts guide you. Besides, the color of his skin certainly fits.” She hesitated, doing battle with her seat belt. “Serial killers tend to kill within their own race. At least you've got probable cause which, even if it doesn't stick, may get Ewelo on Oniiwah's murder, not to mention the fact it'll give you some breathing room.”
“ Ever the opportunist, aren't you?”
“ Drive,” she replied.
He tore out and flipped the switch to his strobe light, in hot pursuit of the ambulance. Bodies had been known to get lost before, and if Ewelo did have friends in high places…
Jessica, still with her lab coat over her shoulders, and tearing away the surgical gloves she'd used in examining the body, now said, “Ewelo's mean enough and ugly enough to please Pearl, the city, county, state and the boys back home in D.C. Hell, his eyes alone'll convict him. Just see to it the newsies get his photo-graph- preferably a mug shot.”
“ I like the way your mind works, Jess.”
“ And Jim?”
“ What?”
“ It's time to warn the women of this island in complete detail just what turns the Trade Winds Killer on, just in case Ewelo's not the real thing, which given our doubts…”
Jim, thinking aloud, said, “You think Ewelo used a cane cutter on George Oniiwah?”
“ Possibly, but whatever he used, if the evidence supports it, you'll have him on the boy's murder.”
“ But you agree with me; you don't think he's the Trade Winds Killer, do you?”
“ My luck doesn't usually run that well. How 'bout yours?”
“ I've seen overly helpful men volunteer, join in search parties, work day and night on a case-”
“ Sure, and shout the loudest for police to do their job,” she added.
“ And go ballistic and self-righteous and do the vigilante thing as a cover.”
She considered this a moment as the lush island landscape flew past. “It'd make for a hell of a cover. Yeah,” she conceded, “I've been involved in cases where the killer revisited the crime scene, relived the events over again, fantasized about his emotional release at the point of killing, all without the least worry of being caught by a stakeout, because he's part of the damned stakeout.”
Parry, nodding, added, “Not to mention the fact he becomes privy to the investigation.”
“ Sure, Ewelo could be our guy, but we won't know that unless we can make the connections. One is his proximity to the university where the women were going to school; a second is the fact he may've feared what Oniiwah knew, and in a show of civic duty, he offs Oniiwah, as a lesson to those who dared to harm Hawaiian women. A third connection, Oniiwah's blood, will give us an opportunity to revisit Paniolo's, his den, not to mention his home. Hopefully locate other blood samples. We need to know everything there is to know about this man: who his friends are, who does business with him, where he's worked before on the island, and if he likes to cruise the strip where the women disappeared.”
Parry liked what he heard, and he gunned the Stealth until they were a hundred yards behind the ambulance, which was now cutting off 72 for 63 and the Pali Tunnel. Once they were back in Waikiki they'd tighten up to be sure the driver knew he was being watched. Never again would Parry assume anything when it came to the mind of a Hawaiian national. He gave a thought to the political power of the PKO, the Preserve Kahoolawe Ohana, which had come into greater prominence in the nineties.
Parry radioed ahead that they were coming in with George Oniiwah's body, and said that information should be conveyed to Claxton for his own safety and that Claxton was to be picked up.
“ On what charges, sir?” asked Dispatch. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
“ Roger that. Number 1. We have your orders.” Even Dispatch liked the sound of it.
“ You think you can make it stick?”
“ Maybe not, but when we wheel Oniiwah's body past him, maybe he'll change his mind about protective custody and a change of scenery.”
“ What about Claxton as a possible suspect in the Trade Winds killings?”
“ No, won't wash.”
“ Why not?”
“ He's a lover; likes pretty young women, can't keep his hands off them, but he doesn't get his jollies by beating or humiliating them, no… and he's not into carving them up for sexual arousal as obviously our boy is.”
“ So, what're the Cowboy's sexual proclivities?”
“ Closer to our killer's, I'm told.”
Jessica could never quite fathom the sadistic sexual urge that led to a primitive need to destroy a sexual partner completely in order to ejaculate and thereby conquer wholly the being of another. Murder and sex, an ancient story. The Cane Cutter didn't murder to cover a rape, however; in fact, what he did was not classified at all as a rape by FBI standards, but rather he raped in the ultimate sense by raping life from his victim in order to fulfill his peculiar, deviant sexual urges. The Trade Winds Killer punished his victims because they had something he did not: a normal sex drive; he tortured them and cut into them to prove himself a man, to prove that he could overcome his own impotence, showering them no doubt with his sperm when it finally came forth, ending the ritual of foreplay and ejaculation only to open the door to the final ritual of death, the last act played out between victim and killer.
Having enjoyed the victim's pain and blood, which “turned him on,” blinded by a mad desire for more, the final raining blows and cuts-which Jessica postulated from the Kahala arm must number in forties and fifties-filled the killer with a mystical and religious release from this plane of existence.
Not everyone could comfortably contemplate or fully comprehend such a religion; it wasn't everyone who had to examine such diabolical acts to make sense-however twisted-of sexually motivated mutilation murders. But she and Parry had to do exactly that. Tenderness, caresses, kisses, soft touches, all that love meant for normal, God- fearing human beings who found a healthy lust in mutual respect, care and fondling, were turned to their opposite extremes by the sado-masochistic Cane Cutter and others of his kind. The Cane Cutter preferred brutality to tenderness, punches and knife wounds to caresses, a disgorged tongue to a kiss, a clawing, tearing rake of nails to a soft touch, madness to a healthy lust, tearing and rending to fondling, humiliation to respect. He wanted total domination over life, to completely bond with and take another life. Ironically, he preferred pain to pleasure, death to life. Subconsciously wanting death for himself, but too cowardly to destroy himself, he instead becomes the carrier, the reaper.
The more Jessica thought about him, the more she both recognized and despised the Trade Winds Killer, and the more she believed him still out there, despite the Claxtons and Paniolos of the island or other deviants behind bars at the moment. For not only was he a psychopath, the Cane Cutter was quite cunning, planning out his every move, cautious to a fault and invisible even when seen.
It still remained true that Officers Thom Hilani and Alan Kaniola were the only two lawmen who'd come even remotely close to ending the terror of the Trade Winds Killer.
4 P.M., July 16. FBI Crime Lab, Honolulu
Back at Lau's labs, as they'd come to be known since Dr. Shore's extended departure, Jessica prepared Oniiwah's blood to be tested against that found at Paniolo's. Each specimen was carefully processed, but it would take time to know for certain if they had a match or not. In the meantime, she had to know whether she could or could not trust Lau, who would be overseeing the tests.
Lau had not been present when she'd arrived with the samples she had taken from Oniiwah's corpse. It was 6 P.M. and Lau had gone home, but now his sudden return surprised her.
“ You've heard the news?” she asked.
“ The Japanese-Hawaiian boy, George Oniiwah, yes,” he admitted.
'Then you knew of him?”
“ Only what I have read in the papers.”
She knew he was lying and from the speed of his darting black eyes, and the pretense with his hands over a
