told me he didn’t have insurance. I’m willing to bet you he probably left a false name and address.”
I went back to Ray. By the time we returned to the station, the autopsy results for the three women were in. Norma had been killed first, at least an hour before the two Chinese girls. Doc’s report said that the young women’s physical condition, including their dental work, implied that they had grown up in mainland China.
Ballistics results showed that the same gun had been used on all three women, and Larry had demonstrated that the pry marks on both doors matched. “How do we connect these murders to Jingtao and the arson at the acupuncture clinic?” I asked. “There’s a circumstantial connection, but arson and homicide are two very different crimes. What if we have more than one bad guy?”
“Then we’ve got a hell of a case,” Ray said.
REMEMBERING LUCAS
Billy Kim from the ballistics lab called a little later. “You guys want to come down here? I’ve got a match on the gun used in your shootings.”
Ray and I went down to B1, passing Vice on the way, and I wondered how Brian Izumigawa was holding up. I hadn’t heard from him, which I took as a good sign. Maybe Mr. Hu was too busy with other problems to chase down Brian.
“What have you got?” I asked Billy. He was a skinny Korean guy who knew everything there was to know about ballistics.
“A cold case. A John Doe.” He pulled up the results on his computer monitor and showed us how the bullets matched.
“What do you know about this victim?” I asked.
Billy shook his head. “Not much. Steve Hart caught the case.” Steve was another detective in our squad. I’d had a run-in with him early, when I took away one of his first big cases. It was nothing to do with him; a bomb had gone off at an event I was attending, resulting in a high-profile death, and because of my personal connections I was determined to be the guy to break the case open. It was also what brought me and Mike together, but that’s another story.
Steve Hart still held a grudge against me, though I’d tried my best to be a good guy since then. Sometimes our shifts overlapped, sometimes not. That day, he came in a couple of hours later, and Ray and I waited until he’d settled in at his desk to ask him about the dead John Doe.
“No leads.” He was a tall, rangy haole, a California transplant with a chip on his shoulder. “You think you can do something with it, be my guest.”
He dug around and found the folder, which Ray and I took back to my desk. The first thing we saw was a photo of the dead guy, and I knew that I’d seen him before. But where? His eyes were closed, but otherwise his handsome face was untouched. He had the slimness and pale skin that I’d come to associate with those addicted to ice, the smokable form of crystal meth. Had I arrested him? Seen him hanging around Waikiki?
I closed my eyes and focused-and then I realized he was the hustler Mr. Hu had paid to fuck me, who had tried to use me to bargain with Vice.
My first few encounters with Mr. Hu were pretty vanilla, but quickly the stakes escalated. It seemed that he had made it his personal mission to break me. Each time I went to the mansion, he had constructed a new scenario to debase or degrade me, and each time I couldn’t help but go through with what he asked. I had toyed with the occasional bondage or sadomasochism fantasy in the past, and I think my sense of self-worth had been so knocked down after breaking up with Mike that I relished the chance to indulge in some of those darker sexual passions.
The last time I saw him, we were in the living room of the mansion in Black Point and he asked me if I’d ever been with a prostitute. I’d laughed and said, “I don’t need to pay for sex.”
“But when you pay, you get what you want.” Mr. Hu was handsome in his way-tall, a bit stocky, always beautifully dressed in expensive suits, Egyptian cotton shirts, silk ties, diamond cufflinks. Most of the time he stayed fully clothed; when he did strip down, I saw silk bikini briefs that retailed for a hundred bucks or more.
“I get what I want,” I said.
“Yes, but what about what I want?”
I slipped my right foot out of my deck shoe and raised my leg so I could stroke the inside of Mr. Hu’s thigh through his suit pants. “What is it that you want?”
“I want to see you naked.”
“You do, do you?” I said, beginning to unbutton my aloha shirt. I was proud of my body, though by that point in my relationship with Mr. Hu I’d been skipping most of my athletic pursuits in favor of visiting the mansion in Black Point. I stood up to shuck my shirt and step out of my pants, and I was uncomfortably aware that I’d put on a few pounds around my waist.
Mr. Hu saw it, too. “Not so sexy, are you?”
“I can leave if you want.” I stood there in my boxers, my stiff dick already poking its head through the slit. Of course, I wasn’t going anywhere, but I couldn’t help trying to be assertive.
“No, you will do,” he said. “The boxers, please.”
I pulled them down and stood there before him, as if I were on display for his purchase. “There is something about you, Kimo,” he said, appraising me. “I don’t know quite what it is. You are a handsome man, but I see many, many handsome men. I appreciate your enjoyment of sex-your willingness to transcend your own boundaries.”
“And you like the fact that I’m a cop. That turn you on, Mr. Hu? You have cop fantasies?”
He smiled tightly. “I have had my own experiences with the police. For the most part, not erotic at all. No, it is something inside you, something I am trying to bring out. Appetites you have repressed.”
That was scary. If I’d been repressing appetites, it was with good reason. We don’t need to act on our every desire, after all. “Please step over to the wall, face it, and place your hands against it,” Mr. Hu said.
“Assume the position,” I said, as I placed my hands in the cuffs mounted there, and he locked them shut. “You going to pat me down? Think I might be carrying a concealed weapon?”
“Your weapon is clearly evident.” He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around my eyes as a blindfold. “We will try something new tonight.”
With my eyes covered, I felt my other senses heightened. I thought someone else had entered the room, though whoever it was walked very quietly. He came up behind me, and Mr. Hu said, in a voice underlaid with desire, “Eat his ass.”
I felt the man’s hot breath against my butt, then his tongue, poking and probing me. “Yes, fuck him with your tongue. He likes being fucked.”
He kept up a steady flow of instructions to the unknown man behind me, the soundtrack to his personal porn flick. The guy sure knew how to use his tongue. He licked the tender spot between my ass and my balls, he tongue-fucked me, then when my ass was loose and juicy he finger-fucked me, first with one, then two, then three fingers.
I was moaning with desire by the time Mr. Hu told the guy behind me to fuck my ass. “He has a very large dick, Kimo,” Mr. Hu said. “I hope it is not painful.”
“No, you hope it is painful. You hope he splits my ass in two and fucks me so hard I can’t sit down for a week.”
“You know me so well. And I know you, too. I know that what you think of me is what you want for yourself.”
I heard the telltale tear of a condom package, the squirt of a lube bottle that sounded like a fart. The guy was hung like a donkey, or so it seemed. Even with generous amounts of spit and lube, he could barely wedge the rubber-covered head of his dick in my ass. He stood behind me, grabbing my shoulders and trying to piston in and out of me, and the blindfold magnified the sensations. I began crying and moaning, begging him to give up. “You’re killing me. Mr. Hu, please, please, make him stop.”
“I can’t do that, Kimo,” Mr. Hu said gently. “Once something is begun it must be finished.”
I thought I heard his pants unzip and his breathing quicken. Finally, donkey dick pushed one more time up my ass and whimpered, and I realized it was the first time I’d heard his voice-the soundtrack had been exclusively Mr.
