The tribe ate, but instead of throwing the bones to the dogs, they tossed them into a large kettle, where the remaining flesh would simmer into a rich broth.
The scene changed again, and now darkness had fallen over the village.
A form moved in the darkness, and Katharine had to strain to make out the details.
It was the woman. As Katharine watched, the woman used a net to lift the bones from the kettle, and piled them on a cloth she had spread on the ground. She kept fishing until she was certain there was nothing left to find. The woman began folding the cloth around the bones, and for a moment the camera lingered on the grotesque pile.
The woman seemed to have found all the bones but one.
The skull was missing.
The window in which the video had been playing abruptly closed. Once more, Katharine and Rob found themselves staring in silence at the image of the skull.
The implication was clear.
It was Rob who finally broke the silence. “What do you think? Any chance at all that the film was real?”
Katharine shook her head. “Absolutely not. Nothing like that has lived—” But then she cut her own words off as she remembered the skeleton that even now lay by the fire pit only a few miles away.
The skeleton that could have belonged to the very creature they’d just seen on the computer screen.
Yet she still couldn’t believe it. The video had to be an elaborate fake. “Let’s look at the film again,” she said.
Rob reached for the mouse to click on the link a second time. But even as he was moving the cursor across the screen, the window displaying the skull closed. “Damn,” he said softly. “Sorry about that.” Where the window had been a second ago, now only the list of files appeared. Rob once more manipulated the mouse, trying to highlight the file name again.
The file name, like the window, had vanished.
“Where is it?” Katharine asked.
They hunted for the vanished file for an hour, but finally gave up. It was almost as if the file had never been there at all.
In his private office, Takeo Yoshihara leaned back in his chair, staring at the skull that had been delivered to him by the courier from Manila. He’d photographed the skull himself, using a digital camera, and transferred the contents of the videotape that had accompanied the skull into a digitized graphics file. The videotape itself was now locked in the safe in this very office, to which only he had the combination.
Before he left his office, the skull would join the videotape.
The graphics files in his computer were equally secure, protected by security codes known only to himself and the few trusted lieutenants to whom he had transmitted copies of the files an hour ago.
The money he had spent on the skull had been well worth it. It was too bad, though, that the boy had to die.
Still, no progress came without a price, and what was the harm in spending a few lives, given what he was trying to accomplish?
CHAPTER 12
Sergeant Cal Olani had just come on duty that morning when he’d gotten the call sending him out to the lonely stretch of road where Alice Santoya had found her son’s body. As he’d driven out, he assumed he’d find the victim of a hit-and-run. Five minutes after he’d arrived at the scene, though, he’d known that no hit-and-run had been involved. The absence of tread marks, in itself, didn’t mean much, since the rain last night could have washed them away. But the condition of the boy’s body revealed nothing to confirm such an accident.
Except for a gash on his right palm, the boy exhibited none of the gross trauma that would have been apparent if he’d been hit by a car hard enough to kill him.
Olani had worked alongside the crew of medics who attempted to revive the boy despite the fact that it was obvious from his temperature alone that he’d been dead for hours. He’d stayed at the site until the photographer had come and gone, and searched the area for any clues.
Olani had tried to take a statement from Alice Santoya, but she’d been pretty incoherent as she sobbed over the loss of her only child.
After an hour, he was finished at the scene, having found no evidence that any crime had been committed. But Kioki Santoya had stayed in his mind all through the day as he’d dealt with one petty disturbance after another. There’d been a domestic squabble up in Paia. He solved that one by parking out in front of the house and tooting the horn a couple of times to let Lee and Rosie Chin know that if they didn’t settle down, he’d have to come in and do it for them.
Then there’d been a minor fender bender in which he had to convince the owner of a rusted-out 1974 Chevy Impala that he probably wasn’t going to get much of a settlement out of the tourist who “rear-ended me, man! I got whiplash real bad!” The problem for the Chevy’s owner was that three witnesses backed up the tourist’s story that he’d been waiting for a light to turn green when the car ahead of him suddenly slammed into his front end. If he hadn’t had his foot firmly on his own brakes, he probably would have crashed into the car behind him.
After sorting that out, Olani cruised up and down Front Street in Lahaina for a while, just showing the colors to let the troublemakers know he was around.
Through it all, he’d been unable to stop thinking about Kioki Santoya. Now, with only another hour before the end of his shift, when he could go home to Malia and the twins, he decided he might as well swing by Maui Memorial on his way back to the Sheriff’s Department. The hospital was barely a quarter of a mile from headquarters, and he knew he wouldn’t stop thinking about the teenage boy who had died last night until he found out exactly what had killed him.
He pulled the car into the nearly empty parking lot next to the hospital, and went in through the emergency entrance that was almost hidden in the L-shaped building’s corner. Jo-Nell Sims, the nurse on duty, looked up. “Ten minutes,” she said as she recognized him. “That’s all I have left on my shift.” Putting on an expression of exaggerated annoyance, she shook a finger at him. “Don’t tell me you’re bringing someone in, Cal. Please, just don’t tell me that.”
“Relax, Jo,” Olani told her. “All’s quiet out there. I just stopped by to find out what happened to the boy they brought in this morning. Kioki Santoya.”
Jo-Nell’s eyes lost their sparkle. “Isn’t it terrible? I just feel so sorry for his mother.”
“Have they finished the autopsy on him yet?” Olani pressed.
Still shaking her head in sympathy for Alice Santoya’s loss, Jo-Nell scanned a schedule. “Laura Hatcher was on it,” she said. Picking up a phone, she spoke for a moment, then waved Cal through the doors leading to the examining rooms. “She’ll meet you in a couple of minutes. First door on your left.”
Five minutes later Laura Hatcher came in. No more than five feet one inch tall, she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-three pounds, and looked to Cal Olani to be about twelve years old. Except that he’d dealt with her many times before, and knew that behind that incredibly slender and innocent-looking facade was the tough mind of a very well-trained pathologist.
“So what about Kioki Santoya?” Cal asked. “Any idea what killed him?”
Laura Hatcher flipped open a metal-covered clipboard she was carrying, riffled through a few sheets, then found what she was looking for. “Well, I can tell you what didn’t happen,” she said. “Nothing much in the way of external trauma at all — a few minor abrasions on his left palm, and a deep cut on his right one.”
“I saw that. Looked more like the kind of cut you’d get from a piece of broken glass than a knife wound.”
Laura Hatcher nodded. “No argument there. And it wasn’t nearly bad enough for him to have bled to death through it.”
“How about alcohol?” the policeman suggested. “The way some of the kids drink these days—”
“I thought of that right away. Nothing.”
