Authors: Charles Knief

Diamond Head (14 page)

BOOK: Diamond Head

10.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Kate was an excellent listener. She paid attention to more than just words. She watched my face and listened with her whole being. She did not take notes but I knew she would remember the salient facts, and I understood that she was comparing and processing what she heard with what she already knew. Kate was a homicide detective, a good one, and she was working.

By the time my story was finished the coffeepot was empty, the croissants were gone and the sun was warming the Ko'olau Mountains above Manoa. I'd been awake for twenty-six hours. My eyes felt gritty.

“I've got to get to work,” said Kate. “I want to talk to my boss about this and I want to pull the files on the girl you saw. I want a positive ID. I'll also bring home some other missing persons files and Jane Does that turned up last year.

“If it's any consolation, this was what I had heard rumored about Thompson. The snuff films. You've corroborated the story I got earlier this year. Only I knew about it from a confidential informant.”

“Whom do I corroborate?”

“It doesn't matter now. The witness is dead.”

Choy. It had to be. The boy had been doing all kinds of back-channel work, getting money anywhere he could. I admired his energy, if not his judgment.

“I'll lock up and you can use my bed. Can you sleep?”

“I don't think I can do anything else,” I admitted.

I
huddled in the middle of Kate's bed surrounded by pink cotton ruffles. I pretended sleep, hopeful she would mistake my deep, regular breathing for the real thing. She didn't. I listened as a dresser drawer opened and closed, and then I heard her bathroom door close and lock. Her liberal attitude about nudity apparently wasn't mutual. I closed my eyes.

The next time I looked at her bedroom clock it was nearly noon. Kate hadn't turned on the air conditioning and I was suffocating beneath the pink ruffles. I turned down the covers and carefully rolled over.

“I'd like to say I'm impressed but I don't think that's for me.”

I opened my eyes.

The bedclothes were on the floor. I was flat on my back, uncovered and sporting a rock-hard erection. Kate stood at the foot of the bed, smiling a tired smile.

I rolled onto my stomach.

“The man's shy.”

“The man hurts,” I moaned. It was true. Every part of my
body was stiff, sore or on fire. My muscles were sore. My thigh throbbed from the gunshot wound. The back of my head pounded like the all-time world record hangover. I smelled like meat loaf. The meat tenderizer had taken some of the fire away, but not all of it. That pain wouldn't go away for days.

“I don't know who you were dreaming about, but it was an impossible dream,” she said. “You look like you might die if somebody touched you.”

She was right.
Air
hurt.

She covered my body with a sheet. “I forgot to turn on the air conditioning when I left. I'm sorry.” Her voice was tender and solicitous. I nearly didn't recognize it.

“I don't remember dreaming.”

“It's okay, cowboy. You don't have to tell me.”

“I have no secrets from you, Kate.”

“Yeah. Ain't that the truth.” She sat on the bed, close to me but not touching, as if I were a patient with an exotic, contagious disease. “Do you feel up to thinking? I've been working on this all day and I think I've got enough to go on.”

“Go where?”

“My boss thinks we have enough for a warrant. We'll hit the boat and his house. With your sworn statement we can getâ”

“I'm not giving anybody a sworn statement.”

“But you saidâ”

“Kate. Remember what I'm in this for?”

“Yes, butâ”

“I need to clear MacGruder's daughter.”

“But she's dirty!”

“She's dead! And she was killed because she objected to killing little girls! Getting her involved now will only destroy an innocent man and it won't hurt Thompson at all. We'll get Thompson. And you'll put him out of business. But we'll have to do it my way.”

“Too late,” she said. She glanced at her watch. It was a bit
of action for me to follow. Because I had been injured I was supposed to be slow and stupid, too. “There's a team on its way to Pele right now.”

I smiled. “There won't be any tapes, any incriminating evidence of any kind on that boat. Except a hole in the hull.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Thompson wouldn't leave anything to chance. He would not leave anything like that on a boat that is going to have service people aboard. I put a hell of a hole in the bottom of
Pele.
She won't be going anywhere until that's repaired. He's reckless in some ways but he won't leave those tapes lying around. They'll either be at his home or in another location we don't know about, a safe house.”

“What is this thing?” She held up the UM-1. I'd forgotten about it, and must have left it in her Mustang. For the first time I told her about the sharks. She shook her head. “You've got more lives than a cat! Jesus!”

“Wish I were Jesus,” I said. “I could have walked on water.”

“But you know what happened to him, don't you?”

“Couldn't hurt worse than I do now.”

“Get some rest. I'm waiting for the call. You hungry?”

“Starved.” That surprised me. I thought I was too tired to eat.

“I brought some hot and sour soup from Wo Fat's. That sound good?”

Chinese penicillin. I admitted that it sounded good and it made me think of an old man in Chinatown with a dead son and a dead concubine and a contract on John Caine. He had sacrificed his son for reasons too obscure for me to follow. He had played strange games with more people than I would have thought possible and for the most unfathomable of reasons.

This whole case was full of people taking the lives of others for questionable reasons and I was getting a little sick of it.

I knew the raiding team would come up empty. Thompson would like to believe he had killed me, but he wouldn't be sure
and he couldn't leave it to chance. He was so certain he would kill me that he ran off at the mouth and told me too much. If I were Thompson I'd have somebody watch
Duchess
to see if I turned up. And I'd make preparations for early retirement. I didn't see him making any more videos until he was certain I'd become shark bait. That made some unknown young girls safe for a while. At least from that predator.

He must have some nagging doubts about me. I couldn't imagine what had gone through his mind when the 44 slug rocketed up from the bilge.

I smiled at the thought.

Kate returned with the soup. I sat up, covering myself as well as I could.

“Don't bother,” she said. “I've seen it all.”

“Can you call off the boat search? I mean, is it really too late?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just thought if Thompson thinks I'm dead it could be useful to both of us. Raiding that boat is a tipoff that I survived. He'd know.”

She thought about it. She'd had a long day and night and it showed. I could see dark circles under her eyes. Even exhausted she was still beautiful, easy on my eyes. After all the horror of the day before, being with her was like finding a peaceful island with a safe harbor.

“It could be useful,” she said carefully, as if she were realizing the fact of the words as she uttered them.

“Can you turn it off?”

“I can try,” she said, making up her mind. Her eyes flashed twin smiles at me, mischievous dimples appearing on her face. Twenty years dropped and I could see her as she had been as a little girl. “I'm going to use you, John Caine. You might not like it, but I'm going to use you.”

“A guy could get used to it,” I said, wondering what she had in mind.

Y
ou might think you're doing something creative here, Mr. Caine, but you are nothing but an interloper. This is strictly a matter for law enforcement. You don't belong in this.” Kate's boss, Captain Dale Yoshida, loomed over me as well as he could. He was a thin, nervous nisei in a dark blue suit, white shirt and black knit tie. He was barely five feet tall. His cigarette-roughened, movie-tough's voice made him seem taller than he really was. He reminded me of a Japanese version of Humphrey Bogart.

I slumped in Kate's leather chair, dressed in freshly washed khakis and a black and green Aloha shirt she'd purchased for me. I was still barefoot.

“You wanna give us a statement or be held as a material witness? What's it gonna be?”

“Neither,” I said. “Let me go over it one more time.”

“Forget that. We're not taking any suggestions from you. What do you do for a living? Private detective?”

I nodded. “Most of my work is executive protection and asset recovery.” Asset recovery was a fancy name for retrieving stolen property. Because of the volume, that made up the bulk of my income. I liked the way the buzzwords sounded as they rolled off my tongue.

“Whatever. Tell me again how you got messed up in this?”

“I'm doing inquiries for Admiral Winston MacGruder, the father of the murdered girl. The trail led me to Thompson.” Well okay, it wasn't the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but this wasn't a priest I was talking to.

Yoshida glared at Kate, who was sitting on her couch, her legs curled underneath her body. Her posture and her poise were utterly feminine. Her face betrayed nothing.

“This clown licensed?”

“Yes. And he's known to HPD and DEA. Talk to Lieutenant Kahanamoku. He checked him out. According to DEA and Kimo he's loose, but he's straight.”

Yoshida grunted and turned back to me.

“You claim you saw a videotape of a girl being raped and murdered by two Japanese nationals. You subsequently identified the victim in the movie as Carolyn Hammel. And you claim the owner of the motor vessel
Pele
then murdered his receptionist, a girl named Jasmine, whom we both know works for Chawlie Choy, by feeding her to the sharks. And you claim that he threw you into the sea, right after that attack, and you managed to fight off the sharks and swim ten miles to shore in the middle of the night. You expect me to believe all that?”

“That's what happened.”

“But you won't give us a formal statement.”

“No, sir.”

Yoshida looked through his notes. “You claimed that you were fired on while you were in the water. With automatic weapons. Oh, and I like this. They handcuffed you and strapped a heavy weight belt on you before they threw you in. And you escaped. Who're you, Houdini?”

“I got lucky.”

“Yeah.” He let the silence continue for a few heartbeats to underscore his disbelief, his eyes never leaving mine. “You claim they fired on you while you were in the water and one of the rounds struck you in the leg. You returned fire. You
admit to firing a forty-four-caliber round from this”âYoshida held up my UM-1â“into the bottom of the hull, driving off the boat.”

“That's correct.”

“You admit to all that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You admit to an act of piracy on the high seas, a federal crime. Is that how you want me to charge you?”

I said nothing. I couldn't tell if Captain Yoshida was serious or if he were testing me. I decided he was too smart to actually believe what he was saying.

“Let me go over this part again. You admit to giving information to Thompson, this alleged criminal, about a man in his organization, one Garrick Choy. And this man subsequently was found tortured and shot to death in a cane field near Waipahu. You claim that this information was given to you by the man's father, who knew what you were going to do with the information. Is that right?”

“It isn't right, but it's what happened.”

“This isn't the time for humor, Mr. Caine. Is what I said accurate? Did the father of this boy intentionally set him up for murder through you, as unwilling or as unwitting as you claim to have been?”

“At the time, Garrick Choy was being held by some of Chawlie's people at his home. Garrick escaped and ran straight to Thompson. We didn't know until after it happened.”

“You know for a fact that he escaped on his own? Without help? Or was he set free?”

I shook my head. “I have some ideas on the subject, but you wouldn't be interested.”

“It sounds pretty fucking far-fetched to me,” said Yoshida.

Except it was the truth. I was grateful that Yoshida had keyed on the facts I'd presented in the order I'd presented them. He'd stayed away from Mary MacGruder, whose involvement in the torture films was known to Kate. And I was
gratified that Kate had not told Yoshida about Thompson's blackmail approach to the admiral, or MacGruder's apparent failure to report it.

MacGruder may have known who murdered his daughter when he hired Souza.

“What about this Jeep that's been impounded over at Young Street? It was left with its motor running and the keys in the ignition in the middle of an intersection. It's registered to you. You want to report it stolen? Or you want to admit to abandoning your vehicle?”

“I'll admit to all of that.”

“You're gonna have trouble getting insurance in this state, you know that?” Yoshida turned over another page of his notebook. “I can't decide whether to charge you with abandonment of a motor vehicle or with reckless endangerment, or with interfering with a police investigation. That's a felony. I think I can make it stick, too.”

When I did not respond, he continued.

“On the basis of Detective Alapai's report, which was based almost entirely upon two confidential informants, we acquired a federal search warrant and detailed a raiding party to the Honolulu Yacht Club this afternoon. Before we got there we were forced to call it off because our star witnessâyouârefused to cooperate. The other CI is dead. And if I'm to understand your statement made willingly to Detective Alapai, you gave the information to his killers as to his activities, which directly resulted in his death. And you're supposed to be my witness?”

“I'm not your witness,” I said.

“You're anything I want you to be, Caine. We have no evidence a crime has been committed, except the ones you admit to. Did you know that even if we had that fucking tape in our possession, even with a clear chain of evidence, we might not get a conviction in a court of law? Tapes are being thrown out of court right and left these days. Photographs, motion pictures
and videotapes are becoming inadmissible as evidence more and more. They're too easily changed by computers.

“So you saw a tape. So what? Hollywood does it all the time. They make it look real. It's their job, remember? And the receptionist, Jasmine? What's her real name?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you actually see her thrown to the sharks? Did you witness her murder?”

“No.”

“No. So you cannot give evidence that anyone else was even on that boat, much less thrown to the sharks. She could have been a prop, this whole thing just a charade to fool you.”

“I don't think so.” I remembered the bruises on her arms and legs and I remembered the terror in her eyes. Nothing had been faked. And they had been fairly serious about trying to kill me.

“You don't think so.” Yoshida's eyes bored into me, searching for the lie.

“But it happened,” I said, holding my stare.

Yoshida nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know it did.”

Behind Yoshida, Kate sat up on the couch and put her feet on the carpet, listening intently.

“This afternoon the Shark Task Force caught an eighteen-foot tiger shark off Sandy Beach. It vomited the contents of its stomach when it was brought aboard the boat. The crew found pieces of what looked to be the lower portion of a human torso. It had not been in the shark's stomach for long. Medical examiner's got it now, but it had been identified as a human female, twenty to twenty-five years of age. The time of death is impossible to determine, as is a positive identification. We're getting DNA typing but we need something to compare to.

“We have a missing person report on Thompson's secretary by her roommates. I've got a team of lab people going through
her bathroom. They're looking for hair samples and they might have to resort to her toothbrush for dried saliva. We might get lucky.

“Your story will be verified.”

“But the shark I killed was a twenty-footer.”

Yoshida shrugged. “There's plenty of them to go around out there,” he said. “One or two less doesn't bother me. Then there's the two-twenty-three Remington slug that Jane Wayne over there pulled out of your, ah, your leg. It's impossible to shoot yourself in the butt with a high-powered rifle without having traumatic injury so severe your leg would have to be amputated. And there would be powder burns. I've discussed your wound, as Detective Alapai described it, and the condition of the bullet with the medical examiner. He told me that your wound and the bullet's lack of impairment are totally consistent with your version of the events. Therefore, I'm willing to believe almost everything you've told us.

“You've confirmed what Kate's original confidential informant told her. We've suspected Thompson has been producing snuff films for over six months, but we can't find any victims and we can't find any real evidence that he's actually doing it. Other than the Hammel girl and the MacGruder woman, no bodies or even a trace of the crime have surfaced. From what you told me I think I know how he's getting rid of the bodies. And from what I know of sharks I think I know why the sudden increase in the number of large tigers and whites off our shores, and the increase in the number of shark attacks here.”

I nodded, waiting for what must be coming next.

“But that doesn't mean anything to us right now. We've got a one-man crime wave out there. Two, if we count you. But we've nothing to take to a grand jury for indictment. Thompson can leave the island any time he wants. I can't stop him. He can continue what he's been doing and I can't do anything about it. I wish you'd shot him, but no such luck. Our sources
told us he got off the boat, him and all his boys. Nobody seems to have been hurt.”

“Only murdered,” I said. I didn't count. I was getting my strength back. The gunshot wound was actually just a small puncture wound, no worse than I would have received sitting on a nail. The jellyfish stings were painful, but getting less so every hour. And the bump on my head didn't give me a concussion. My real physical problem was exhaustion and blood loss. With sleep and a decent meal or two I'd be running again. In a day or two.

“Yeah. It looks that way.”

“If you can find that AR-15 you can match the bullet. The one Kate took out of my leg.”

“Chances are he ditched it at sea before he reached the harbor.”

I agreed. That's what I would have done, given the circumstances of a possible miss and a flooding bilge, and the remote possibility of a police reception at the dock. The tapes would have gone overboard, too. Those were copies, of course. The masters would be carefully hidden. That set my mind working in another direction.

“Kate suggested that we could use you. Thompson thinks he's won, but he's not sure. In a day or two, if you don't show up at your boat, he'll know it. Lay low for a couple of days. Rest up. Let your wounds heal. We'll keep it our secret that you're still alive. Just the three of us. I don't want to hear that some Chinese criminal knows you're still breathing. In a few days we'll talk and decide what to do.”

I nodded. But I already knew what I was going to do.

“No official reports. No nothing. That way Kate doesn't get in trouble for practicing medicine without a license and not reporting a gunshot wound to the police.”

“I am the police, Dale.” She hadn't said much so far because her boss was talking to me.

Yoshida glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Yeah.
That's right. I almost forgot.” He turned back to me, the grin on his face fading as he turned. “Kate's CI report will be buried. You're a missing person as of tonight. Or you would be if someone cared enough about you to report you missing. Do you have anyone who would miss you, Caine, if you were to vanish?”

I thought about it. It didn't take long.

“No,” I said. “I don't have anybody.”

BOOK: Diamond Head

10.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads