“ Really? Do you have another avenue?”
“ Yeah, our fat friend. Professor Claxton, came up with the same name when Tony questioned him with the new information. Seems the creep is on one of his old class rosters, but had dropped out prior to completion.”
“ So now Claxton's memory is jogged. Convenient. You sure he isn't just reacting to events?”
“ Sure he's reacting to events. Claxton got shit scared out of him when Ewelo and his boys killed Oniiwah; don't let the man's bravado in front of female cops and tough guys like me fool you. He seems also to have remembered someone he slept with once, someone Paniolo fixed him up with.”
“ Really? He slept with Linda Kahala like Oniiwah said, but not for a grade change?”
“ And Kia before Linda. Seems the relationship between Claxton and the cowboy goes a lot deeper.”
“ Patron of the prostitutes and benefactor, I get it.” She leaned back as far as the office chair would take her, interested, listening intently now while her fingers idly played with a paperweight in the shape of the islands, an odd object to say the least. “The guy's full name is Lopaka Kowona,” Parry said.
She repeated the name slowly as if doing so would exorcise all demons. She had a sense, a purely instinctual feel about the name, that it belonged to the Trade Winds Killer, Linda Kahala's murderer. “And you say Ivers picked up on the same name?”
“ Nate heard the abducted girl call her abductor Lopaka. I had Gagliano check with the registrar's office at the university, and he found that there was a Lopaka Kowona registered part-time at the same time that both Kia and Linda Kahala were enrolled. Nate also wrote down half a license plate number and a check with DMV shows it registered to a Lopaka Kowona. Enough to get a warrant? Probable cause? You bet it is, and now we've got a door to kick.”
“ I'll be damned,” she said, a feeling of relief washing over her. It was probably too late for the pretty little girl she'd read about in the Union Jack that morning, but this could mean an end to a seven-year reign of terror about the islands. The series of lucky strokes was almost too much to believe. “I want to be there,” she demanded.
“ If we can nail this guy Kowona, and Ivers and Claxton both I.D. him, we put the lid on his coffin without cutting any deals with Ewelo. That'd be the crowning glory.”
She pushed aside the paperweight and realized how like a dragon the series of humps that made up the islands were.
“ Don't get your hopes up too high, Jim. It sounds like we'll still need Ewelo as corroborating-”
“ To hell with that.”
“ What?”
“ Try this. A maroon sedan's sitting in this guy's driveway as we speak, and it stinks of a gasoline rupture. HPD has had an APB on the description of the car all night, and with one of their own hospitalized, they look that much harder.”
“ Damn, then maybe we do have the bastard dead to rights after all? I want in.”
“ You realize this girl, Hiilani, could well be in that house?”
“ Let's hope she is. Otherwise, she's at the bottom of the ocean, and if that's the case, we'll have a hell of a time proving our case.”
“ Not if we can find enough trace evidence inside the car and the house.”
“ I'm with you.” And she was. Many cases today were being solved even in the absence of a body by virtue of the magic of DNA, blood, and serum typing, fiber and trace evidence.”Meet me at the garage, and bring your bag, and I've got an ambulance on standby,” Parry said. “I got a bad feeling about this one… think we're going to need a lot of plastic bags.”
Everyone was in on the kill. And everyone who wasn't wanted to be. Terri Reno and her burly partner Kalvin Haley were on hand, along with Tony Gagliano, Jim Parry and Jessica and everyone in the Hawaii FBI who had worked the case, plus a couple of HPD squad cars, one carrying Police Commissioner Dave Scanlon. They had all collected out front of the remote little bungalow on this bright Hawaiian day, the sun blinding in its intensity, the heat sending up a searing mix of gasoline and blood that mingled in the few feet between home and auto. Something about the house and the loud music coming from inside the crumbling little structure, its deserted location on a dead-end street, the terminus a crevasse looking two miles back down toward the city, and even something about the dark maroon car spoke clearly to Jessica that this was it.
At the door, there was no answer to Tony Gagliano's insistent pounding. Tony called out, “FBI, open up!”
The waiting seemed a lifetime before Parry abruptly shouted to Gagliano, “Kick the sonofabitch in.”
“ You got it, Boss,” said Gagliano, relishing the moment. “It'll make me feel useful.”
Everyone had a gun drawn. With all his might, Tony made a clean strike at the lock, sending the door in on its hinges, wood splintering going up against the door frame creating spiked lances. From within, the blare of a Hawaiian radio station hammered out an old favorite, Jim Croce's “Leroy Brown.” Swelling up also from within the dark little interior was an odor like nothing Jessica had ever encountered, not even in an exhumation. The odor wafted past the door, which, swinging on its destroyed hinges, made an eerie irk-irk-irking sound.
“ Smells bad,” complained Gagliano, whipping out a large red bandanna to cover his nostrils and mouth before stepping through.
“ Don't touch anything,” Jessica warned from behind Parry, who quickly followed Gagliano inside, using a flashlight to illuminate the place. The incredible sunlit brightness of the Hawaiian street outside was at such great odds with the bleak hole of the doorway, so that every shadow inside was plunged that much further into darkness. Jessica's skin crawled as she stepped past the dangling door, her nostrils now flaring at the thick, pungent odor of death emanating from inside as if the odor were a living creature that had taken up residence permanently and was about to pounce shadowlike from a comer. Her eyes battled to adjust to the lack of light. When her eyes won, she found Gagliano and Parry staring back in her direction, Gagliano playing the flashlight over the wall behind Jessica's head and to her immediate left.
The place was a pigsty, she was thinking when she heard Jim's warning: “Don't turn around, Jess.”
She did exactly as instructed not to do, turned and gasped at the mutilated woman dangling there, her features torn from her, making it impossible to readily identify her as the young store clerk listed as missing. Jessica's immediate reaction was one of horror and fright, but at the same time she saw the telltale signature wounds she'd come to expect from the Trade Winds Killer, each slash a meaningful symbol to the insane man. These body art marks created by Lopaka had until now been mere speculation, since all previous victims had been swallowed up by the sea.
She shuddered at the enormity of the suffering that was apparent. Parry grabbed onto her shoulders and tried to usher her out.
“ No, no, Jim,” she said, pulling free of him. “Have to protect the… integrity of the crime scene… learn everything we can about this sadistic monster.”
“ Just step out and get your bearings, Jess.”
“ Going out at this point'II just make it doubly hard to step back in, and it'll just make breathing tenfold harder. No.” She remained adamant. “Just get me some decent illumination in here and the best equipment you've got.” She was panting, trying to gain control of her autonomous reflexes. “And… and for God's sake, Jim, don't let anybody walk through here until I'm finished.”
He looked deeply into her eyes, biting his lip and biting back his own sense of horror and insult, and recalling for a moment her tenderness of the night before, tried to reconcile that with the woman he stood before now.
“ Do it, damnit. Get me some field lights in here and one of those newly developed ultraviolet reflective imaging systems if you've got one. We'll intensify the light in here seventy thousand times and maybe, just maybe we can find some usable prints in this pigsty, but whatever we do, we're going to find enough evidence to bury this bastard. The death penalty in effect in Hawaii? God, I hope so.”
“ Sorry, no can do… not even the chamber,” replied Tony, shaking his head. “And if we ever needed it…”
“ Too good for this guy,” countered Jim Parry.
On the wall, on an elaborately constructed bamboo and wood “meat” rack, hanging by her wrists, her legs dangling free, Hiilani's corpse was like an agonizing, deafening scream that drowned out anything Jessica or anyone else had to say. The body, somehow like a stone object with soft, human eyes, might be made of papier-mache and paint, ketchup and fake blood, except that the caked-on stuff was real and the flesh was responsive to the touch, the vitality of the cells having returned after rigor had come and gone, releasing the corpse from its stiffness,
