Where There's a Will

Not so technical, Inge thought, and yet, the more Dagmar talked, the more convinced she became that this was the best course. People would understand. “The rest of the family, though—they might not like it,” she said. “This affects all of us.”

“Then they’ll have to lump it, won’t they?” Dagmar said cheerfully. Sensing Inge’s incipient agreement and satisfied with the way the conversation was going, she finally took a bite of the roll, smacked her lips, and licked butter from her fingers. “Now, Inge, dear, I imagine you’d like to argue with me about it for a while. Will fifteen minutes do? If it’s going to be longer, I’ll want another cup of coffee.”

“I’m not going to argue,” Inge said, laughing. “You have my complete support. Would you like me to be with you, or do you want to see him alone?”

“Suit yourself, dear,” Dagmar said. Her sharp gray eyes glinted happily from their parchmentlike folds of skin. She no longer looked frail. She was, as always, looking forward to stirring things up.

FIFTEEN

SERGEANT Fukida was in no mood to be trifled with. His annual mock-orange pollen allergy attack, late this year, had finally caught up with him as he’d gotten home from work the previous day, smiting him with itchy, runny eyes, headache, sinus congestion, achy joints, and all-around misery. With Chiyoko staying at their daughter’s on Oahu overnight, he’d had to fend for himself, which meant not only an absence of much-needed wifely care and sympathy, but a pathetic, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs over rice, representing the extreme limit of his culinary virtuosity. He’d taken a couple of allergy tablets at eight and gone to bed, another two at midnight, and two more at three a.m. when a stuffed nose had strangled him out of sleep. He’d awakened to the alarm at seven with a vicious antihistamine hangover and nasal passages that felt as if they’d been cleaned out with a paint-scraper.

Headachy, dull-brained, and generally mad at the world, he’d driven to work on a breakfast of microwave- warmed, leftover scrambled eggs and rice and three cups of tea. His plan was to tell Sarah, “No visitors, no phone calls,” to barricade himself in his cubicle, and to spend the day on paperwork, of which he had plenty to catch up on, sleeping through lunch, if at all possible. This was not a day on which he should be expected to deal with living, speaking human beings. Fortunately, there were no appointments or meetings on his calendar.

His plan did not work.

“Morning, Sarge, couple of ladies waiting in there to see you,” was Sarah’s gratingly cheery greeting. “They were sitting in the lobby when I got here.”

He stifled a groan. “To see me in particular, or anybody?” he asked, but without any real hope.

“Sorry,” Sarah said with a grin. “To see you. I checked with the lieutenant, and he said it’s you, all right.”

“You know what it’s about?”

“The Torkelsson thing.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have come to work,” he said bitterly. “My head is in no condition to deal with the Torkelsson thing.”

“Do you want me to—”

“No,” he said, drawing himself up and looking for the first time into the opening to his cubicle. He could just see a pair of black-pant-clad legs, the feet of which barely touched the floor. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Brave sergeant,” Sarah said. “Good sergeant.”

HE disliked them right off the bat. The old woman sat as if she owned the place, barely turning her head to cast a beady, disapproving eye on him as he entered his own office. The younger one, in jeans and Western shirt, sprawled in his other visitor’s chair like a man, legs akimbo, one booted ankle on the other knee. He didn’t much care for that either.

“We’ve been waiting some time,” the old woman told him.

Tough. He squeezed around the desk, took his seat, and looked at them inquiringly, his expression neutral.

“I am Dagmar Torkelsson,” the old lady said. “This is my niece, Inge Torkelsson Nakoa. Do you know who we are?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“You are familiar with the Torkelsson matter of some years ago?”

Fukida nodded.

“Excellent. We are here to correct certain misapprehensions that the police may have in regard to those events.”

You are here, Fukida thought, because Lau and Oliver had gone about their “discreet” inquiries like a couple of bulls in a china shop, rattling the teeth of the entire Torkelsson establishment. They were now aware that the lies they had told ten years ago had caught up with them, and unless he was mistaken he was about to hear some bogus, newly concocted version of events that would supposedly explain away the old contradictions and ambiguities. A little more fancy dancing by the doyenne of the clan to once again boggle the minds of the credible, gullible, Hawaii County PD. Well, let ’em try. Irritable as he was, he was genuinely curious to see what they’d come up with. His headache, he found, had receded. He rearranged himself more comfortably in his chair and pulled a pad and pen to within easy reach.

“Misapprehensions?” he said.

The niece, Inge, spoke for the first time, doing her best to look helpful and remorseful. “You see, we weren’t entirely truthful before.”

No! Really? he thought but didn’t say. “In what way would that be, Mrs. Nakoa?”

After the briefest of glances between the two women, it was Dagmar who picked up the ball. “The fact is that we— all of us—have been aware from the beginning that the body in the hay barn was not that of my brother Torkel.”

He tried not to show his surprise, but an outright, unforced admission of this central, critical fact was not what