would have some reasonable explanation for what had happened to Michael on the dive. “Couldn’t he be having dinner? Maybe he went to a movie?”
Rob shook his head. “The movies are down at Kukui Mall, so he would have taken his car. And the first time we called, he should have been here. I’ve known Ken Richter for years — we’ve dived together dozens of times — and he’s the most reliably scheduled person I ever met. He closes the shop at seven every night, but he’s always here until at least seven-thirty, closing up and getting ready for the morning. And if he has a dive scheduled, he’s often here till nine or ten. I’m going to take a look.”
They got out of the car and approached the building. Despite her suggestion that there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for Ken Richter’s failure to answer his phone, Katharine had the queasy feeling that something was not right. Both of them cupped their hands over their eyes to peer into the shop. The murky darkness within was broken only by a dim blue glow from a neon sign.
Nothing appeared to be amiss until they circled around to the side of the shop and Rob pointed to a counter clearly visible in the blue glow from the sign, on which a number of papers were strewn in disarray.
“Ken never leaves anything undone,” Rob said. “That’s what makes him a great diver. He hates for anything to be out of place.” Moving to the back door and squatting down, he slid his fingers under a big metal drum that sat, slightly elevated from the ground, on four small wooden blocks.
“What are you looking for?” Katharine asked.
“Same thing Michael and his friends were looking for the night they went diving. The key.” A second later he found it, hidden in the same magnetized metal box in which Josh Malani had discovered it a few days ago. Inserting the key into the lock on the back door, Rob twisted it, then pushed the door open. Reaching inside, he groped for the light switch, found it, and flipped it on.
For a second, half blinded by the sudden blaze of light, Rob didn’t realize exactly what he was looking at. But as his eyes focused and he saw the red pool of blood that was spread around Ken Richter’s head, his stomach churned. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, his voice catching as his throat constricted.
“What?” Katharine asked from behind him. “What is …” The question died on her lips as she caught a glimpse of what lay on the floor. The vision of carnage froze them both for a moment that seemed to stretch into an eon. Katharine instinctively put her hand into Rob’s. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s Ken Richter.”
Rob tried to speak and couldn’t. He made a move toward his friend.
Katharine’s hand tightened on his and she held him back. “No,” she said. “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch anything, Rob. Let’s just call the police.” As the seconds ticked by and Rob neither spoke nor moved, Katharine wondered if he’d heard her. Just as she was about to speak again, he found his voice.
“Go back to the car and call on the cell phone. Then come back here.”
“Come back? We should wait for the police outside.”
Rob shook his head. “Once the police get here, we won’t be allowed to look at anything. They’ll have the whole place taped off, and the first thing they’ll want to know is why we’re here.”
“Can’t we just tell them?”
Rob managed to pull his eyes away from the grisly scene on the floor of the dive shop’s back room. Putting his hands on Katharine’s shoulders, he looked directly into her eyes. “Tell them what, Kath?” he asked. “Tell them the truth? Do you really think we’re going to walk away from here if we tell them we think Takeo Yoshihara had something to do with this? Believe me, they aren’t going to be happy to hear us accuse one of the richest men on Maui of murder. We might as well accuse one of the Baldwins or the Alexanders, for God’s sake! And the minute we make any kind of accusation, Yoshihara’s going to hear about it. If he was willing to have Ken Richter killed to protect whatever he’s up to, do you think he’ll worry about you, or me, or Michael? Michael would be dead within the hour, and I’d be willing to bet you and I would have an accident — a fatal accident — before morning. All we can do is play dumb and find out everything we can. And we can’t waste any time being questioned by the police. One slip and it’ll all be over. Michael won’t have a chance.”
The warm Hawaiian evening seemed suddenly to have taken on a terrible chill. Katharine felt her whole body shiver as she realized the truth of what Rob had just said.
Returning to the car, she punched 911 into the keypad of Rob’s cellular phone and pressed the Send key. As she made the hurried call, hesitating when the operator asked her name, then ending the connection, her whole body was shaking.
All she could think about was Michael — getting back to the estate, getting Michael, and getting him out of there.
But she knew there was no way that Takeo Yoshihara’s security force was simply going to let her pick Michael up and drive him away. Even if they did let her take him, what good would it do? He’d die as soon as she took him out into the clean, fresh air.
For a moment she almost gave in to the sense of utter helplessness that washed over her, but then the thought of Michael in his Plexiglas prison coalesced her frustration and fear into a cold fury.
Michael wasn’t dead yet. So far, Takeo Yoshihara had no idea how much she really knew.
And the night wasn’t over yet, either.
Her body stopped shaking and the terrible cold loosed its grip. Still clutching the phone, she went back to the dive shop. This time, at the sight of Ken Richter’s body, the horror she felt was tempered by something else.
Rage.
“What have you found?” she asked Rob.
“Not much,” he admitted. While she’d been gone, he looked around the back room of the shop, but had neither touched anything nor gone into the front of the store. “There’s not much back here except the rental scuba equipment.”
“What’s that?” Katharine asked, pointing to a large white board on the wall, marked off into a grid filled with names,
“The dive schedule,” Rob said, looking carefully at it for the first time. “He always kept it—” His eyes widened and he moved toward the board, reaching out to it, pulling his fingers back just before he touched it. “Oh, Jesus! That’s it! Look!”
Katharine moved next to him. “Look at what?”
“It’s the board!” Rob said again. He was pointing to a section of the grid. “Look!” he repeated. “He had a VIP dive, the morning after Michael and his friends went on their night dive.”
Katharine frowned. “VIP? What’s that? Movie stars?”
Rob shook his head. “It was his special code. Every now and then Takeo Yoshihara’s office would call and set up dives for the kids of some of his business associates.”
“I still don’t see—”
“It wasn’t just that Yoshihara set up the dives,” Rob went on. “He sent over special equipment, too. Fins, masks, regulators, the whole works.”
“Including air tanks,” Katharine whispered, suddenly understanding.
Rob nodded. “If the boys took the tanks that were already here for the next morning’s dive—” Rob began, but Katharine was ahead of him.
Her notebook was out and she was already copying down the names of the five boys who had been scheduled for the dive that Ken Richter had designated as VIP.
Four of those boys, thanks to Michael and his friends, had undoubtedly escaped the fate Takeo Yoshihara had planned for them.
The fifth one might already be dead.
She had just slipped the notebook back into her purse when the first police siren wailed in the night.
CHAPTER 30
“What if he can’t do it?” Katharine asked. They were driving up Lipoa Street toward the Computer Center. In the fifteen minutes since they’d left the dive shop, Rob Silver had made two phone calls. Nick Grieco hadn’t answered, but Al Kalama had. On a terrible hunch, Rob had decided to swing by Nick’s apartment building. The
