anything new, though, and I spent too much time staring into space and wondering what kind of photos of me were out there.
I checked the file and saw that Steve Hart hadn’t put Lucas’s fingerprints into the national database. The guy was a victim, after all, so that was a reason, but it was still sloppy police work. I went downstairs to the Special Investigations Section and found Thanh Nguyen, a fingerprint tech I knew who worked in Records and Identification. He was a wiry guy in his early sixties, and word around the building was that he’d been in the South Vietnamese army.
He pulled the records up on the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AIFIS, and ran a search. The results came back a few minutes later; there was a match to a Lucas Tyler, who had a record for solicitation, petty theft, and criminal mischief in Seattle.
AIFIS serves up more than just fingerprints. It includes criminal histories; mug shots; scars and tattoo photos; physical characteristics like height, weight, and hair and eye color; and aliases.
I was surprised that the name matched; I’d always assumed that hookers took on new identities, but maybe Lucas Tyler hadn’t been imaginative enough. And Lucas was a sexy name; it’s not like his real name was Fred or Harvey.
Back upstairs, I called the Seattle PD. The detective who took the call was friendly but couldn’t provide much information. All the charges had been dropped except one for felony theft, for which Tyler had served six months in the county jail. He did get me the information on Lucas’s bond; a woman named Elizabeth Tyler had put up the money for him. He gave me her phone number.
Ray got on the extension when I called her. I introduced myself and explained I was a homicide detective in Honolulu. “Is this about Lucas?” she asked.
“Do you know him?”
“He’s my brother. What kind of trouble is he in now?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead.” I explained what we knew of the circumstances.
“I’m not surprised,” she said, with a chill in her tone. “The last time I talked to him, he was nuts. He said he had all these photos of men having sex with him, that somebody was blackmailing these guys and giving him a cut of the profits. I told him he had to get out of Honolulu. I even offered to pay his plane fare home.”
“Did he give you any details about these men-names, occupations?”
“To be honest, detective, I didn’t want to know. Lucas was always too handsome for his own good. Everything came easy to him. Our parents spoiled him like crazy, teachers passed him along when he didn’t do the homework. He started taking money for sex when he was sixteen.”
Once she got started, she didn’t seem to want to stop. “He seduced the principal of his high school and got the man fired. He had sex with the quarterback of the football team and the boy was so mortified to be exposed that he dropped out of school and joined the Army. He was killed in Iraq.”
When she finally ran out of Lucas stories, I asked, “If you think of anything that might be relevant, will you contact me?” I spelled my name, and gave her my phone number at the station.
“He broke our parents’ hearts,” Elizabeth Tyler said. “Not because he was gay. They were very liberal people. But they believed that everyone was good at heart, and Lucas wasn’t.”
“Seduced the principal, huh?” Ray said, when I hung up. “And the quarterback. Sounds like my cousin Joey’s fantasies come to life.”
“Not mine,” I said. “Our principal was seventy-five if he was a day, and the quarterback was a real jerk.”
Despite all our work, I didn’t think we’d made much progress, and that worried me as I drove out to a different STD clinic, this one in Aiea. Once again, I received a number and submitted to various indignities. The nurse on duty was a young guy, with a scar on his right cheek that looked like it had been caused by a knife. “What brings you in? Just being careful?”
I was beyond being bashful at that point. “I had sex with a guy a couple of months ago. I think everything was safe, but I can’t be sure, because I did experience some bleeding. Later on I learned that he had syphilis. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t pick anything up from him.”
“Do you know if he’s notified his other partners?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “Gunshot, not syphilis.”
His eyebrows rose, but he just nodded. “Have a seat back in the waiting room, and we’ll call you.”
I didn’t bother to pick up a magazine and pretend to read. My brain was whirling with all the little facts I knew about the murder victims. I was glad that we’d put a last name and a history to Lucas; I hate it when someone dies unknown and unmourned. Even somebody with as many issues as Lucas Tyler.
An hour passed. After my encounter with Lucas, and the subsequent intervention by my brothers and Harry, I’d been celibate, relying on cybersex and Internet porn, until I’d fooled around with Gunter, and then Sergei. If I turned out to have anything, I’d have to tell both of them. And then Sergei would tell his sister, who’d tell my brother. The whole drama of it made me tired.
Fortunately, when the duty nurse called my number he handed me a piece of paper which certified that I had a clean bill of health. I felt better-but just a little.
69 IN 609
After another hard surfing session Friday morning, I sat in front of my office computer and stared into space, hoping for an inspiration that would help us solve the case, but came up with nothing.
Around eleven-thirty, I drove up to Manoa and picked up Jimmy in front of the library. His hair was no longer in a Mohawk, and he was letting the black roots grow in. His skinny frame was filling out, the results of gym workouts and Aunt Mei-Mei’s cooking and care packages. We went to a plate lunch place near the campus, and after we’d ordered, he said, “I’m glad you called me, Kimo. But I know you. You just want to talk about Lucas, don’t you?”
I pretended to be offended, and in truth I was, just a little. “What, I can’t call up my friend Jimmy and hang out with him?”
He looked at me with the same built-in shit detector I’d seen in Frankie and Pua. I shrugged and showed him the photo of Lucas, and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Poor guy. I haven’t seen him for a while. I was afraid something like this would happen to him.”
“You knew him?”
He told me about how he and some kids from the GSA at UH had been going down to Ala Moana Beach Park. “I met Lucas for the first time a long time ago,” he said. “Back when-you know.”
I nodded. “He was nice to me. He was making a ton of money, and he liked to hand it around. He bought me this pair of two-hundred-dollar sunglasses. And whenever he’d see me, he’d buy me food.”
“I’m glad he was nice to you.” And I was; I wanted to see Lucas as a victim rather than a villain, and knowing he’d been kind to Jimmy helped.
“I didn’t see him for a long time. And then when I started going down to the park with the GSA, I recognized him, and I felt terrible.”
“Did he tell you anything about his life? Anything that might help me find out who killed him?”
“He was living in this apartment in Kaka’ako, but he got kicked out.” The waitress brought our food, and Jimmy said, “I went there once. I could show you.”
“That’d be great.” We ate for a few minutes. “You mentioned when I talked to you that he’d been getting customers through MenSayHi,” I said. “You know anything more about that?”
“There was this Chinese guy,” he said, spearing some macaroni-potato salad. “He’s the one who got Lucas involved. Lucas wanted to hook me up with him, but I said no.”
“Good for you.”
He ate for a minute. “I’m not sure, but I think he said something about being videotaped. Like it was some kind of insurance policy for him, maybe. That when he got too old to turn tricks he’d be able to get money from these rich guys.”
That tied in with the pictures I’d seen on the MenSayHi site, and with what Elizabeth Tyler had said. I
