Read Torch Ginger Online

Authors: Toby Neal

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Police Procedurals, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery, #Hawaii

Torch Ginger (6 page)

BOOK: Torch Ginger
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“Captain, I beg to differ. That’s ten people missing in the last five years, regular as clockwork in May and October. I want to show you this.”

She lifted the binder off her lap and passed it to him. “Apparently Jenkins and I aren’t the only ones to think this is a pattern.”

“Where did you get this?” Fernandez put a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses on his nose and leaned in to examine the binder.

“Health food store owner. Jazz Haddock.”

Fernandez set the glasses aside with a snort. “Man’s a pothead. Got a screw loose from too much drugs.”

“Doesn’t mean he isn’t just handing himself to me as a suspect.” Lei held eye contact with the captain. “I think he bears more investigation, sir. He seems to know too much about this.” She wasn’t above playing on the captain’s biases to get the investigation to move ahead.

Fernandez picked up the binder in one hand, the stack of printouts in the other.

“All right. You can work in some canvassing at the parks on this latest missing person, see what you can pick up—but until we get something harder, something indicating foul play, your priority’s the mansion burglaries.”

“About that, sir. That’s what led us to the Island Cleaning meth factory,” Jenkins said. “We think our lead suspect, Lisa Nakamoto, was behind the burglary jobs, and when we went out to her business we found evidence looking like meth production. Sergeant Furukawa wants us to wait until he brings Nakamoto in to do anything more.”

“Didn’t know it was your investigation that led to the Island Cleaning raid.” A long pause. Apparently Fury had taken credit for their discovery and they’d already raided the building. Lei felt a surge of frustration but bit her tongue.

Captain Fernandez stroked his beard some more. “Okay, wait on that one until the narco team brings in Nakamoto. You can move ahead with pursuing this, but keep it under wraps for now.”

“Of course.” She collected the folder. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Lei hurried back to the workstation, tense and energized. Jenkins followed as she started a new case file online, titling it “May/October Missing Persons,” while Jenkins got a case jacket going, filing duplicates of the missing persons photos with a two-hole punch.

“We’re on a roll now.” Jenkins rubbed his hands together gleefully and slapped them down on his thighs. “What next?”

“Let’s get out and do some canvassing, start at the south side of the island and work our way back through the parks to Ke`e Beach, the beginning of the Na Pali cliffs. This time of year more of the park dwellers will be on the dry side of the island.”

Lei put the file with pictures of the pairs of missing into her backpack, Jay Bennett’s on top.

“Sounds good.” They got to the parking lot and flipped a coin for which car to take. Jenkins won, so they got into the Subaru.

“It’s pretty unbelievable that so many people have disappeared without anyone in KPD putting the pieces together.”

Lei shook her head—conflicted. Jenkins criticizing the way locals did business wasn’t something she wanted to hear; but she couldn’t help agreeing that the law enforcement community had missed what was happening. If it had been local teenagers disappearing, the community would have been up in arms. Still, part of her understood resentment toward these outsiders, whose biggest contribution to the area was increased drug sales and overflowing toilets in the parks.

“We’re dealing with it now,” she said shortly.

Her cell rang.

“Texeira.”

“It’s Alika Wolcott. This an okay time?”

She glanced over at Jenkins. “Shoot. What’s up?”

“I wondered when you were coming by to check out my burglary.”

“Oh crap. I totally forgot.”

“Way to make me feel special.” Flirtatious, slightly mocking tone.

“There’s a big case. It’s taken over everything, and I completely spaced it. I can send a unit to take your statement.”

“I’d rather you came yourself.”

Lei paused, chewing her lip. Jenkins glanced at her, cocked an eyebrow.

“Okay. I guess I can swing by on my way home from work, but it’s going to be later, a lot later.”

“No problem. You got the address?”

“Yeah. You gave it to me at the office.”

“Bring a swimsuit.”

“What?”

“Bring a swimsuit. I want to show you my new pool.”

“This is business,” Lei said frostily. “I’ll come and take a statement and an inventory, see what I can see. That’s all.”

“I hope you’ll change your mind when you see the pool. Later, then.” He wisely hung up before she could.

“Who was that?”

“Dude I met at Paradise Realty. Wants me to check out a break-in at his place.” Her scalp flushed with annoyance and something else.

“He hitting on you?”

“Trying. Wants me to come swimming in his pool.”

Jenkins laughed. “He obviously doesn’t know who he’s up against, Sweets.”

“Hey. I like guys as much as the next girl. Just not slick developer dudes with pools.”

“Right. Tell that to the working slobs who’ve tried to ask you out.”

Lei ducked her head. “I’m getting over a relationship. ’Nuff said.”

“Okay, if you say so.” Jenkins concentrated on the road and Lei leafed through the folder of missing persons photos they planned to show around. They drove on in silence, out past Lihue and Waimea to the park called Polihale, which marked the southern end of the Na Pali Coast.

Polihale was in the lee of precipitous mountains that blocked rainfall, so it was as dry as the opposite side of the island was green and lush. A mile-long stretch of windswept beach culminating in rugged red cliffs, Polihale was the wintering ground of the peripatetic homeless community.

They parked the Subaru and got out. Hot wind tugged at Lei’s curls, and she bundled them back with a rubber band, taking off her jacket and draping it over the seat. She slipped her gun and her badge into her pants pockets; Jenkins did the same. No sense advertising they were cops—the park dwellers would pick up on that soon enough.

Locking the car, they set off across the dunes. Kiawe trees, brought in by missionaries centuries ago, strewed the path with thorny, brittle twigs.

“Good thing we’re not barefoot,” Jenkins said.

“Think that’s the idea.” Lei referred to the rumor that the missionaries had brought the trees in to force Hawaiians to wear shoes. She tipped her head back to look at one of the gnarled trees, slanting sideways from the prevailing wind direction. “Annoying as the thorns are, without the kiawe we wouldn’t have any shade at all out here.”

Over the rise of the first dune the park appeared—a series of desolate cement pavilions with built-in barbeques and chained-down picnic tables. Graffiti covered everything, and the metal oil-barrel trash cans were overflowing. Jenkins made a little disapproving sound and Lei surveyed the area with her hands on her hips.

Clustered beneath the rise of another dune were a group of tents. She pointed. “Over there.”

They struggled a bit though the shifting dunes, the wind-blown sand stinging like needles. The tent village had made the most of the landscape—huddled in a hollow and sheltered by several large kiawes, the area was pleasantly warm and still. On a carpet scrap in front of one of the tents a young mother changed a baby’s diaper. She shaded her face to look at them, and called to someone inside a nearby tent.

They slithered down the embankment into the cuplike hollow.

“Hey. We’re looking for some missing people and wondered if you could take a look at some pictures.” Lei indicated the file folder of photos.

“Sure,” the woman said. She wore a paisley smock, strings of puka shells, and her blondish hair was in waist-length dreads. The nut-brown baby burbled a greeting, waving both hands.

A lean, muscular man emerged from the nearest tent, standing upright in a patterned brown sarong. Thick sun-streaked hair brushed his shoulders, his skin gleamed with oil, and if Lei wasn’t mistaken, he wasn’t wearing anything but the sarong.

“Hey,” he said. “I’d like to take a look at those pictures.”

“Sure.” Something about his narrowed eyes and arrogant physical stance put Lei on alert, but she kept her voice and demeanor relaxed, her eyes down. She handed over the file of printed color pictures.

As they stood there, the occupants of five tents emerged one by one. They ranged in age from an older couple in their sixties to several young people. They clustered around Sarong, looking at the photos of the missing.

The older man pointed to one of the pictures with a knobbed forefinger.

“I knew her. She was a nice girl.” He was missing several teeth, so the words were slurred, but there was no mistaking the snap of intelligence in his eyes.

Lei took the picture out of the pile. He’d pointed to Tracy Enders, age twenty-six, disappeared in October of 2008.

“When did you see her last?”

“Ha`ena,” he said. “We switch parks when our permits expire. Tracy didn’t like Polihale as much, but the rain started early that year and so we were packing up to hitchhike out here, get away from the rain. When we went to leave, Tracy’s tent was still up but she was gone. We looked around, called for her, figured she’d hitched into town or something.” He shrugged.

“Did you find anything unusual at her tent? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. I knew something was wrong, though, when we went back after the ten days on our permit was up and her tent was still there. It was ticketed though—and then the park guys took it down eventually.”

The young woman with the baby piped up.

“I knew this guy.” She pointed to Jay Bennett’s photo. “Camped with him out at Ha`ena; he even came to the papaya farm a few times. Nice guy. What happened to him?”

“We don’t know.” Lei belatedly remembered she and Jenkins had meant to go by a papaya farm where a noise complaint had been reported. In the excitement of following up on the Island Cleaning lead, it hadn’t seemed important.

“All these people are missing?” Sarong asked, dark eyes piercing.

“Yeah. We want to know where they might have ended up.”

“I can guess.” He smiled, a wolfish display of extra-long canines that hadn’t seen a toothbrush in a while. “Suicides. Lotta people come here to disappear, find it lonelier and harder than they thought paradise should be.”

“We’re considering all angles,” Jenkins said.

The older woman spoke up, pushing long white braids behind her shoulders. “What Tiger is saying is that some things go on here, it’s better not to look into too much. Better to camp with friends and watch out for each other.”

“That’s right. For your own safety, stick together,” Lei said. “Can you look through these again?”

The file made the rounds. The old man handed them back.

“I hope you find them.”

Jenkins collected names. Lei doubted there was a single real one in the list he earnestly wrote down in the spiral notebook he carried, and the address had to be listed as “Local Parks” as the little colony made no bones about their lack of address.

Done interviewing, Lei and Jenkins trudged the length of the sun-scoured park and found no one else.

“Real tourist attraction, this.” Jenkins, back at the Subaru, dumped sand out of his shoes.

“Yeah, the hidden Hawaii no one misses seeing.” Lei took a pull off her water bottle. “Something about the way they live is kinda appealing…No responsibility, just enjoying the outdoors all day.”

“Those tents were hotter than hell and the shower didn’t look like it worked,” Jenkins said. “I’d rather go to work and be able to get in a comfy bed at night.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She looked back as they pulled away. The man they called Tiger looked down at them from the top of the dune, his brown sarong somehow blending with the sand, muscled torso gleaming. He did remind her of a big cat, watchful eyes on the car as they pulled away.

“Let’s run that guy they called Tiger,” she said, pulling the Toughbook computer out of its custom fold-down support arm in the glove box. “I like him for something. Not sure what, but he’s got a smell about him.”

“Yeah, BO,” Jenkins said. “He said his name was Jim Jones.”

The name reminded Lei of something, but she wasn’t sure what. She punched in the name. No matches on Kaua`i. Expanded the search. Came up with a few hits on the other islands, but no one matching his description.

Suddenly, she remembered the name.

“Jim Jones is the cult leader who made his people drink the Kool-Aid!” she exclaimed. “He’s sending us a message, all right. Turn around. I want to bring him in!”

Chapter 7

Jenkins cranked a turn, and they hauled ass back to the park. This time Jenkins drove the all-wheel drive as far as he could up onto the sucking sand while Lei radioed that they were bringing someone in for questioning.

Lei hit the dune at a run, her cuffs in her back pocket, baton in hand, gun in sight in the holster, badge clipped to her belt. Jenkins was right beside her as they ran into the little tent village.

It was deserted.

The tents were empty, belongings neatly stacked inside, but the campers were gone.

Lei hurried through, checking, then ran to the top of the nearest dune. She looked in all directions. Nothing but sand and sparkling ocean as far as the eye could see.

“Can we search these tents for ID, substances?” Jenkins asked, peering into the one Tiger had come out of.

“I think they are considered temporary dwellings, so we’d need probable cause.”

“I think I see some probable drugs in here,” Jenkins said mockingly, and unzipped the tent.

They ended up rifling through the belongings in all the tents. The total lack of anything personal was notable—left behind were sleeping bags, food in plastic Tupperware, toiletries, even a small kitten. But no personal items, not so much as a photograph.

They rezipped the tents but made no effort to conceal their search—after all, it was evident the group had anticipated it. Lei made sure the kitten’s water dish was full. She frowned.

“How did they do it? Where did they go?”

She surveyed the area again. Dunes, clumps of dry bushes, a few twisted kiawe trees, the barren pavilions. She and Jenkins tramped the length of the park and banged the bushes with sticks, getting hotter and more frustrated by the minute. There was nowhere to hide. And yet they were gone, vanished. “Jim Jones” was taunting them from some hideout; Lei was sure of it.

BOOK: Torch Ginger
6.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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