Black Widow (2 page)

3

Detective Jones sat at his desk in the bullpen at Honolulu PD’s headquarters on
Beretania Street. The window nearest him looked out onto the grass of the front lawn and some trees beyond that. He found himself staring off at the trees more than he would have liked. They looked like the trees near his childhood home in a suburb of Seattle.

“That looks nasty.”

Jones glanced up and saw his secretary, Bella, whom he and three other detectives shared, staring at the photos on his computer. They were of the two victims he had spent the last week thinking about to the exclusion of everything else.

“Oh wow,” she said. “Is that the victims of the Black Widow?”

“I don’t know who leaked that to the press but I’m gonna have someone’s ass over it,” Jones said louder than necessary, making sure the few uniformed patrolmen in the room heard him.

“Calm down, no one cares that we released that name.”

“These two men had families. Children. I bet they care about everything they hear about this.”

She shrugged. “It’s news, Connor. You can’t stop that.”

He leaned back and put his feet on the footstool he had under his desk. “Something you needed?”

“Captain said he wants to talk to you.”

“’Bout what?”

“How do I know?”

Jones watched her walk away. Once you had the level of seniority in the PD that Bella had, you didn’t have any fear of being fired, and consequently no fear of giving shit right back to your bosses.

Jones rose and walked to the captain’s office. The door was shut and he knocked.

“Come in.”

Jones opened the door and walked in. He sat across from Captain Kai
Ma’hala and waited until Kai was done reading something on his computer screen. Jones could see a headline stating, “Black Widow Claims Second Victim.”

Kai was massive, easily four hundred pounds. But he moved like a man half his size. He had played football for Brigham Young University before blowing out his knee. After that, he moved back to his native Hawaii, and Jones knew he became a police officer for the benefits and the steady paychecks. But he seemed to genuinely love it now. There weren’t many people Jones respected, but Kai was one of them.

When the captain finished, he leaned back in the seat and exhaled. “Black Widow. Kinda catchy.”

Jones smirked. “Clichéd, if you ask me.”

Kai rubbed his chin and then took a drink from a bottle that had illustrations of fruit on it. “What you got for me?”

“
Nothin’. No video at the hotels. The victims walked in by themselves. Checked in under their names. No one saw anything that we didn’t know before.”

“So you got shit?”

Jones shifted in his seat. Kai had the ability to intimidate a lot of the detectives under him. He just had this face that let you know he was a second away from busting your ass. “I don’t have a lot of experience in this sort of thing, Kai. When was the last time we had somethin’ like this?”

“We had a dad once, some janitor or
somethin’. He was kidnapping girls from the University and rapin’ ’em in his car and stranglin’ ’em. He’d bury ’em under Farr Bridge. That was a year before you came up.” He opened Pandora on his computer and a soft, male voice came on and sang in Hawaiian. “You want the feds in?”

“No,” Jones said, shaking his head.

“Well, I know someone else.”

“Who?”

“Cop I worked with. I’ll get him to come in and talk to you.”

“I’m not desperate yet, Kai.”

He turned his eyes away and changed songs. “Yes, you are. Talk to him. He’ll help us.”

Jones nodded and rose. He got to the door before Kai said, “Connor?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t fuck it up. Tourists
is how we make money here.”

He nodded again and left.

4

Stanton sat on the dark ocean at the North Shore, the board between his legs buoying him on the surface. He saw some of the younger surfers leaving, but not before smoking a bowl next to their cars. A lot of the younger guys didn’t appreciate night surfing. For one, it was much more difficult because you couldn’t see well. But also, there were no girls.

The newbies were called kooks, those that were inexperienced but posing as though they knew what they were doing. The cycle that most people didn’t see was that at a certain age, all surfers became kooks again. Eighty-year-old men would be out on the waves and the thirty-year-olds would be wondering what they were doing, just as they would with the kooks. Life, Stanton thought, was similar. The elderly, mentally, were far closer to children than adults.

The waves were low but the water was warm. He lay down on the board and paddled into shore. When he got near the beach he stood and held his board upright as he waddled onto the sand.

Stanton lay on his towel and stared at the cloudless, shadowy sky.  The wetsuit was cold against him, but he tolerated it. The empty sky had an allure, a spell that he didn’t want to break just yet.

“How’d I know I was
gonna find you here?”

Stanton looked up to see a figure at least six foot five and bulky like a linebacker. Kai
Ma’hala plopped himself on the sand next to Stanton.

“You want a set?” Stanton said.

“I can’t even get on the board, brother. And Pua would kill me if I hurt myself and was home all the time.”

“The ocean takes care of you. If you respect it, it won’t give you more than you can handle at one time.”

Kai picked some sand up in his hands and started pouring it over his exposed legs. He was wearing shorts, and Stanton could see the long scar on his knee in the moonlight.

“So guess what I saw?” Kai said.

Stanton put his hands behind his head and turned back to the sky. “What?”

“An application that was submitted to
Ke Kula Maka’i.”

“That is odd.”

“Yeah. Thing is, under previous employment, they put
San Diego Police Homicide Unit for six years
.” He dumped the sand on the ground and slapped his hands together. “What you doing, Jon? You wanna go through the police academy again? You’re almost forty.”

“
I need a job, Kai. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“You told me the job cost you your wife.”

“My wife, and then my fiancée last year.”

Kai nodded and took off his sandals, burying his fat toes in the sand. “I got
Pua pregnant when she was fifteen. We ain’t been with nobody else since. I don’t even wanna be. I’m lucky, I guess.”

“Out of curiosity, how’d you know about the application?”

“The AC recognized your name. He emailed and asked if you was the same person. Then he said I should hire you. But not through the Academy.”

“A lateral hire?”

“You can test out of the Academy. Just pass the written and physical fitness tests… You look skinny.”

“I run every morning. You look good, too.”

“I’m too fat. I’m gonna die before fifty.”

He said it so matter-of-factly that Stanton was taken aback. “You can do something about it.”

“Nah. Food is evil to me, but evil is beautiful, too,” he said with a chuckle. “Nothin’ ugly to God, brother.” He lifted more sand and let it run through his fingers. “Lemme ask you somethin’, why you wanna be a cop again?”

“I have no idea
. There’s a part of us that I don’t think our conscious mind can reach. It seems to be the part that dictates our life, but we can’t understand its motivations. We’re ruled by dictators we can’t even see.”

He chuckled again. “Better than ruled by a wife that throws plates at your head.” He placed his hand on Stanton’s shoulder and rose. “You
wanna job, you come see me. We’ll get you tested out and get that badge back on you.”

5

The waiting room for Dr. Natalia
Vaquer was like every other psychiatrist’s office Stanton had ever been to. His own father had been head of psychiatry at a hospital in the Pacific Northwest and then San Diego. Stanton had enough exposure to the field to last him a lifetime.

The door opened, and an attractive woman in a business suit came out. She smiled and wordlessly held the door open for him. Stanton went inside the office and sat down on a couch. She sat across from him in a chair and pulled out a legal pad.

“How do you feel, Jon?”

“Good.”

“You look good. How’s the Prozac working?”

“I think adjusting the dosage was the right move. I felt jittery at sixty milligrams. Twenty’s a much better fit.”

She wrote something on the pad and said, “That’s good to hear. So what’s going on in your life?”

He crossed his legs and slung one arm over the back of the couch. He knew that Dr.
Vaquer preferred him to lie down; she was a traditionalist in many respects, but he preferred to sit.

“I got offered a job.”

“Really? You were searching for one last time. What is it?”

He hesitated. “Detective with the Honolulu PD.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“You can say it,” Stanton said.

“Say what?”

“You have the same look on your face my wife used to get when I told her I was being promoted.”

She tilted her head slightly to the side and was quiet a moment. “You’ve been coming here for the better part of a year, Jon. What do you think I’m going to say?”

“I think you’re going to tell me it’s a bad idea. That police work tears me apart and I shouldn’t do it.”

“I wasn’t going to say any of those things. But do you think it’s interesting at all that you said them?”

“I’m self-aware, Natalia. I’m not one of those neurotics in self-denial over the most trivial things that are obvious to everyone else. I know how bad it is for me.”

She nodded. “You’ve catalogued an enormous amount of injuries to me. Last year you were put in a coma by some man you were chasing and nearly died. Do you want to die?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t want to die.”

“If I’m not mistaken, you also held the record at the San Diego Police Department for the most officer-involved shootings. Isn’t that true?”

Stanton bit the inside of his cheek. A nervous tic he’d been trying to get rid of for years. “I don’t know if I still do, but I did. That was because I had a certain skill set and I would be assigned a certain category of cases. Psychopaths of the type I chased don’t typically go into custody easy. They usually fight.”

She wrote something else down. “Did you notice the use of the past tense in your statement, Jon? You
had
a certain skill set. The psychopaths you
chased
… What does that tell you?”

“It tells me that I, on some level, know that part of my life should be over.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

Stanton put his arms over his head and placed his hands behind his neck. His feet fell flat to the floor. “It gives me an anxious feeling.”

“Why?”

“Because the work was cathartic for me. It was a release.”

“Release of what?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Jon, you told me once about your sister. Liz. You said that she was kidnapped from a movie theater she was at with her friends, and that they never found her.”

“No, they didn’t.”

Vaquer placed the pen down over the notepad. “Jon, is that why you get anxious when you’re not doing police work? Do you think that maybe, through police work, you’re going to find Liz somehow?”

Stanton pulled his arms forward onto his lap. He was quiet a long time. “I don’t know.”

6

Stanton sat on the beach at six in the morning while his two sons fought the waves. He had caught a few sets himself and then decided he wanted to watch his boys.

Having sons was an odd feeling. He had a moment when they were born that he had never admitted to anybody. For each one, he didn’t feel a connection to them. Not at first. He took care of them and loved them as best he could but knew that strong connection that should have been there, wasn’t.

Then one day, out of the blue, the connection was there. His oldest, Mathew, was walking around at the age of two and hugged his leg and said, “I love you, Dada.” That single moment bonded them together. In a fraction of a second
, that link was there, and it overwhelmed him to the point that he picked up his boy and wept.

The boys came into shore. Mathew pushed his brother down and then ran as Johnny chased him. They tackled each other in the sand. Mathew flipped him onto his stomach and pinned Johnny there until he gave up.

“Come here a sec, guys,” Stanton said.

The boys flopped down next to him as the sun rose to its full height.
A half-circle of bright orange in the sky, the ocean lighting up gold.

“I’m thinking about taking a job and I wanted to see how you two would feel about it.”

“What is it?” Mathew said.

Stanton hesitated. “It’s as a detective.”

“Back in San Diego?”

“No, here. How would you two feel about that?”

The boys looked to each other.

“Mom said that job’s not good for you,” Johnny said.

“I don’t know if it is or not. There’s something… I never told you guys. I had a sister once. She was a teenager, fifteen, the last time I saw her. We were very close, as close as you two are now. My parents couldn’t really deal with me, so she basically raised me.” Stanton looked out over the ocean. “She was kidnapped when she was out with her friends, and I never saw her again. The police searched for her for almost a year before closing the case. I searched a lot longer than that but I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a kid at the time.”

“We had an aunt?” Mathew said.

Stanton nodded. “I want to know what you guys are thinking.”

“Mom’s just got brothers. I think it would’ve been cool to have an aunt.” Mathew’s eyes widened a little and locked onto Stanton’s. “Is that why you were a cop?”

Stanton shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m working through that right now.” Johnny was staring at the sand. “Johnny, how do you feel about it?”

“I
dunno. I feel bad.”

“Why do you feel bad?”

“I feel bad that you had to have that happen. I’m sorry, Dad.” Stanton felt emotion rise in him and he had to push it down. That his boy didn’t think of himself but only how it might have affected his father.

Johnny thought a moment. “So they never found her?”

“No.”

“So she could still be alive?”

Despite the years that had gone by, the counseling and the medication, Stanton’s heart dropped. “I…”

“Don’t be stupid, Johnny,” Mathew said. “It’s been like a zillion years.”

“I’m not that old,” Stanton said, lightly smacking the back of Mathew’s head.

“You’re ancient, old man.” Mathew jumped on him. “And I can take you now.”

Stanton wrapped his legs around Mathew’s hips and rolled him over. “I still got some fight left in me.”

Johnny jumped on him from behind shouting, “Banzai!”

Stanton pinned Mathew as he tried to deal with Johnny with one arm. The boys worked together and took him down. He rolled away, then stood and ran into the surf, the boys chasing after him.