opened each with great care and began reading. Each was a great outpouring of pain, regret and pleas for her to return to him. Maybe if she had… maybe she'd been dead, thought Jessica. Then she thought of the innocent string of young women who'd acted as stand-ins for his rage against her. In letter after letter, his handwriting coming more unglued as he wrote, he spoke of how for seven years he'd hunted down and killed for Kelia and the gods that directed him. He claimed it was all for her. For seven years, he had been trying to kill Kelia stand-ins, and now time was coming near for her to step into the breach, to sacrifice her self, if she wished to live forever.
The madness was apparent, but so too was the timing. The dates on the wedding pictures were well after the deaths of Lopaka's early victims. He'd somehow managed to marry one of his intended victims, it appeared, and she, suspecting his insanity perhaps, had left him. The fiend had rationalized killings that had taken place years before he'd ever met or married Kelia Laliiani, who had so feared him that she had escaped to the mainland, somewhere in southern California, it appeared. As evidenced by his photo collection, all the victims looked remarkably like Kelia. Little wonder he found Terri Reno not to his liking.
“ Damn,” she muttered aloud. She knew the letters and the fact he kept the gory death photos in albums were the perfect arguments for an insanity plea, that the letters documented his bizarre and singular behavior. He spoke of voices that were real to him, voices that would lead Kelia and him into the afterlife, a life filled with power and strength and dominance over all living things and the elements, such as the trade winds. He wrote that since she would not return, he could not be whole and would not be acceptable to his gods, and that if she did not come home, he'd be forced to find another to take her place.
He didn't speak of the details of his murders or of torture; he didn't speak of a depraved, perverted sexual drive that required blood for a hard-on and an ejaculation, except to say to Kelia that he would never again make her perform any sex act with which she felt uncomfortable.
“ How sweet of him,” Jessica said aloud to the notes.
A handwriting expert would be called in to testify to his madness. It was evident, the expert would say, in the absence of loops and ribbons, in the missing dots over the I's, in his failing to cross his T's, and in the pinched, pained flow of every word. An expert on sociopaths and psychos would be called in to testify how the poor devil had no feelings or emotional moorings, that he could not possibly empathize with the suffering of his victims, nor presumably help himself in his own compulsion for gratification gained only by hearing the screams and seeing the blood so that he could feel something-even if it was just an ejaculation.
“ Bastard.” She moaned inwardly, shoving the letters back into the stained manila envelope in which they'd been found. She questioned how they could possibly get a conviction if Kowona was judged mentally incapable of understanding his actions.
She wished momentarily that Tony hadn't been so thorough at Kowona's place, but the place had been so small nothing was overlooked. If only the madman's letters could disappear… But she knew there was no way.
A lot of cops and FBI agents were thinking exactly as she was, that in a way it was good that Lopaka Kowona was still on the loose out there, because now, armed with his identity, police might find it a simple matter to do the work of the courts for them. Were such thoughts blasphemous for someone in her position? Perhaps, but they were also undeniable.
She knew Jim Parry's thoughts were goose-stepping along the same tension wire when he'd asked her to review the letters in the first place, to see if she thought they were as damaging to a righteous conviction of Kowona as Jim did on his reading.
Alongside the love letters of the lust murderer, a pathetic little photo album found in a bookcase in the dark slaughterhouse, although less than half filled with images of Kowona and his wife, revealed a lot about Kowona besides his features. Kelia-as the hastily written captions below each shot called Mrs. Kowona- even in her jeans, looked like all of Lopaka's victims. A second and newer album had photos of Kelia on the right, Lopaka's victims in various stages of undress, distress, and mutilation on the left. It was self-evident from his ghoulish gallery that Lopaka was killing and dismantling his victims out of a cataclysmic hatred for the former Kelia Kowona.
Jessica found an office and a phone to use and worked most of the rest of the day trying to run Kelia Laliiani, a.k.a. Mrs. Lopaka Kowona, down. It took some extensive help from agents in California, but finally she was patched through to a woman answering to the name Kelia Laliiani in San Francisco.
Jessica found her most cooperative, her voice quivering from time to time as they spoke. Jessica opened with a warning, believing the woman had a right to know that her former husband was at large and wanted for mass murder.
“ I knew… I knew it… I just knew one day he… Lopaka would do something like this. I told them he would…”
'Told who?” she asked, surprised. 'Told family, friends?”
“ Yes, but not jus' them. I told the police.”
'Told the police? When?”
“ Four years ago, before I left the islands. I wrote a detailed letter to the Honolulu police.”
“ I'll be damned,” replied Jessica. “Did you address it to anyone in particular?”
“ A guy, yeah, a cop working on some disappearances then.”
“ Do you remember the officer's name?”
“ Yes.”
“ You remember from that far back?”
“ No, now I see his name all the time, in the papers, in the Ala Ohana.”
“ You get the Ala Ohana in San Fran-”
“ It comes late, but I never miss an issue.”
“ Wasn't that dangerous? He could've traced you from your subscription.”
“ No subscription. An aunt, unknown to him, sends hers. I am still Hawaiian, and I care about the movement.”
“ The movement?”
“ The nationalist movement, to return Hawaii to its rightful owners.”
“ Hmmmm, then you've also been reading about the Trade Winds Killer case all this time and failed to come forward?”
“ What do you mean, failed? I wrote to the police and told them everything I suspected.”
“ Who, who did you write to?”
“ Scanlon, the commissioner, but he was not commissioner when I first told him years and years ago about Lopaka, just before I left my homeland for here. I told him again when I read about the missing girls and the two police officers who were killed, and I reminded him that I told him so before.”
“ Scanlon,” she repeated, incredulously. “What kind of response did you get for your trouble?”
“ Nothing.”
“ Nothing?”
“ Nothing.”
It explained a lot. How the HPD happened by a dead-end street to find Lopaka's maroon sedan, leaking gas… how they had come to zero in on him some seven years too late.
“ Christ, tell me all you can remember about Lopaka, please.”
“ All I remember?”
“ What kind of man is he? Where is he likely to hide?”
“ He is an insane half-breed, mixed up in his head about his ancestry, and he talks to himself.”
“ Half-breed?”
“ Adopted by his father, or he was a stepfather, I'm not so sure, but he always talked about one day returning to his village and killing his father. He was cruel with me. Tied me up, played… toyed with me… with his knives. Once… once, and I ran first chance I got.”
Once again, it seemed the predictions of Lomelea, the old prophet, were coming true.
After she had gotten off the line with Kelia Laliiani, Jessica wondered what Jim Parry might make of this information; certainly it would put him in a much stronger position should the P.C. ever have the balls to go after him.
Finding her way out of the evidence lockup area, she gave a thought to the grotesque collection of hands Lopaka had foolishly kept; these could prove valuable, though long bones were always easier to identity via long- bone X-ray of arms and legs, if the victims' X-ray histories involved any of these. However, the rings still found on
