of work ahead of me. I got a grande raspberry mocha and laid my laptop out on a wooden table. By the time two hours had passed, I’d assembled all there was to know about Tommy Singer’s surfing career, and there wasn’t much there.
I’d also done some checking on Brad Jacobson. No one had shut off my access to the police computer system, or perhaps it had been shut off and Sampson had reinstated me. I was able to get into the network remotely and surf a couple of databases. Brad had been arrested once, a misdemeanor charge involving offering a blow job to an undercover agent in Honolulu two years before. He was as fastidious in his financial life as he’d been in his dress; he had a number of credit cards, all up to date, and he was almost finished paying the loan on his Camry. He had a small nest egg in mutual funds.
Frank, the bartender at the Drainpipe, came over. “You hear about those two guys they found out at Pipeline?”
“I was there,” I said. “Heard this girl screaming. I was the one who got somebody to call 911.” I paused. “You know either of them?”
“I think I might have known the one dude,” he said. “Brad. I think I met him once or twice with Lucie.”
That made sense. “How about the other one, the surfer?”
Frank shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
It was the same with everyone I talked to at The Next Wave. I hung around for a couple of hours, striking up conversations with people I recognized from the waves. It was an easy thing to do, and Brad and Tommy were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Though several people claimed at least a passing acquaintance with Brad, no one seemed to know anything about Tommy.
That made it certain to me that he wasn’t a serious surfer. The world of the North Shore is a close one, as I’d already discovered, and everybody knew everybody else-or least knew someone who did. Tommy Singer was an outsider, a college kid who made it up on weekends, and hadn’t penetrated the inner circle of rhino chasers-the slang term for those who follow big water wherever they can.
It was frustrating, though. I knew there had to be a connection, but just couldn’t figure out what it was. Just as I was finishing, KVOL’s five o’clock news began playing from the TV by the cappuccino bar. I stood up as a bunch of other people gathered around to watch.
My brother’s station, always first with any scandalous news, led with coverage of the murders, as I expected. They began with a pan around the beach, showing surfers out at Pipeline, then focusing in on the hollow in the sand where the bodies had been found. Ruiz and Kawamoto had set up plastic traffic cones around the area, where the bodies had been found, and roped it off with yellow police tape.
Ralph Kim, the guy who’d interviewed me, had been dispatched up to the North Shore for a stand up. He was all smarmy professionalism, his crisply pressed aloha shirt a poor attempt to seem like a North Shore kind of guy. He repeated what I’d heard on the radio, describing Brad and Tommy and how they’d met.
“In a bizarre twist to the case,” Kim continued, “police have identified a lover of one of the dead men as former Honolulu police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, who left the department in disgrace over the revelation of his homosexuality, and who has recently been seen at numerous locations on the North Shore.”
“Holy Shiite Muslim,” I heard a voice next to me say. “They got you, brah.”
I turned and saw Dario. He looked tired and drawn, and even the bright red aloha shirt he was wearing didn’t bring up his natural color. Everyone in the area had swiveled around to look at me. So much for keeping a low profile.
Dario took my arm and hustled me back to his office. “What exactly are you doing up here?” he asked me. “Because you know, you’re not a cop any more, and you can’t go around playing at being one.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been asking around about Lucie Zamora, haven’t you?”
“What if I have?”
“But why? You didn’t know her. What’s it to you if she’s dead?”
“I was a cop for six years, Dario. Even if they say I can’t be a cop here anymore, it’s still part of who I am. I guess I just can’t let go of that yet.”
“Well, you’re going to have to. It’s going to look pretty suspicious if you keep nosing around dead people. Especially if they’re dead people you fucked.”
He looked at me, an evil sort of grin twitching the edges of his lips. “You are a top, aren’t you? Don’t tell me under that macho man exterior there’s a bottom just eager to spread his juicy hole for any guy who asks.”
I crossed my arms in front of me and started at him hard. “Are you asking, Dario? Because you could have fucked me that night, at your place. I was drunk enough.”
Dario stalked around the room to the other side of his desk. “I knew I could get in your pants from the moment I saw you,” he said. “It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me? You didn’t have to get me so drunk I was passed out, and then basically rape me.”
“If I’d asked you, would you have said yes? Answer me honestly.” He pointed his index finger at me and shook it.
For what seemed like the twentieth time that day, my heart rate zoomed and I felt flooded with adrenaline. My body was shaking, but not with fear. “Nope. I was scared shitless about being gay. And what you did only made it worse. I went running home, gave up all my dreams of surfing, and signed up for the police academy because I thought there was no way a cop could be gay.”
I didn’t realize I had so much anger in me towards Dario. I didn’t think much about that night, because the consequences, the way I’d lied to myself and others for so many years, were too painful.
He pulled something out of one of the drawers, then came around to my side of the desk. “You were a lousy lay.”
“I was drunk! Passed out!”
He moved closer to me. I could smell the beer on his breath, and the perspiration mingling with a sharp lemon scent from his cologne. His whole body seemed to be twanging like a plucked guitar string. “Have you gotten any better?” he asked in a low voice, one tinged with sex.
“You’ll never know.” I moved a little away from him.
“Oh, yeah?” He came right up next to me again. “You want to show me, don’t you?”
He was so close I could feel the heat radiating from him. But I was determined not to back down. He grabbed the back of my head and mashed his face against mine. It was so disorienting I closed my eyes, and then all I felt was his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, his crotch grinding against mine. I got hard immediately. So much for swearing off sex.
I kissed him back. I don’t know why I have so little control over my hormones; maybe it’s all those years of denying them. Or maybe I did want to show Dario something, take back something I felt he’d stolen from me all those years before.
“You wanted this,” Dario said, through clenched teeth. I heard a ripping noise, and then felt a condom being thrust into my hand. “You want me.” In a quick motion, he’d wriggled around so his back was to me, and he was facing the desk. He unzipped his pants and pulled them down, presenting his bare ass to me.
Then he reached back for my dick, groping it through my board shorts. “Come on,” he said harshly. “Fuck me. I raped you all those years ago, you said it. Now do the same thing to me.”
Confronting Dario
My God. My dick was straining to get out of my shorts, but I knew if I took Dario there, like that, I’d hate myself for it. It was time for me to be a homicide detective again, and a professional one at that. I had promised Sampson, and myself, that I would learn to control these impulses, at least while I was investigating a case.
I put my hands down around his chest, leveraged him back up against me. I leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. “I won’t do it like this,” I said into his skin. “Not out of anger. I don’t want to rape you.”
He squirmed around again, and he was facing me. We kissed again, this time both of us pressing against each other, and I felt his dick, hard as a rock, up against mine. He caught his breath and spasmed for a second, and
