ELEVEN

 

BONES were one thing: smooth, clean, ivory-colored, usually suggesting little that brought one up against agony or violent death. A nick here, a tidy, round hole there, a few harmless-looking cracks. Even when there was more extensive breakage bone seemed to have more in common with broken pottery than with bloody, broken heads and spilled brains. His most timid, queasy students had no trouble glueing together a shattered skull or a crushed pelvis. But horribly maimed bodies like this one . . . crispy critters, his colleagues called the burned ones, and while Gideon had no quarrel with the use of black humor to distance oneself from horror, for him it didn’t work. Neither did anything else.

“Here’s a picture of him,” he said, sliding it over to John, who had been browsing through the case file.

John put down an open folder. “Jesus, is that after or before they cremated him?”

On the other hand, he had to admit that sometimes black humor did help, and he was grateful for the opportunity to smile. “Before. But you’re right, he was pretty well charred, especially the upper body. Externally, he’s pretty well carbonized from the chest up. Not quite as bad below.”

“Is there one of him face-up? They must have flipped him over.”

Gideon paged through a few more photos. “Yes, here.”

Both men leaned closer to look at it. “Ugh. You can see why they wouldn’t have known who it was from the face,” Gideon said.

“Face, what face? His head looks like a . . . like a lump of coal, like a . . . I mean, where are the eyes, where’s the nose?”

Gideon nodded. “Notice the damage is so much more pronounced around the head and shoulders. Interesting.”

“I can tell you why that is,” John said. “I just read the arson investigator’s report. There’s no question at all about it being arson, by the way. They found traces of two different accelerants—paint thinner and diesel fuel oil—and at least five different origin points in the building, one of which was him.”

“Him? You mean they set him on fire?”

“Yeah, pretty much. His face was resting right on a roll of straw matting that’d been soaked in diesel oil.”

Gideon looked at the photographs. “Yes, I guess maybe you can see a few burned chunks of matting—of something, anyway—on the floor there.”

There were six pictures of the body in all, and Gideon fanned them out so they could both look at them. From the chest up, it was barely identifiable as a human form, more like a black, barely started sculpture than the remains of flesh and bone and muscle. Below the chest, the form was recognizably human, but made of charred, piebald skin, split in places like a sausage left too long on the grill. The clothing had been completely burned away except for the residue of a wide belt at the waist—or perhaps it was just the impression the burning belt had left on the burning skin—and the coalesced remnants of cowboy boots on the feet.

“John, I can’t tell anything from this. There’s just nothing distinctive, nothing to say if it’s Magnus or it isn’t Magnus. It’s human, that’s about it. And obviously, the toes aren’t visible. I just hope there’s something more in the autopsy report.”

“Well, I can tell you who Torkel wanted everyone to think it was: himself—Torkel.”

“Sure, but we already figured that out.”

“We thought that. We assumed that. But now there’s proof. Torkel took off his own ring and put it on Magnus’s body.” He leafed through one of the folders until he came to what he wanted. “Here. ‘Also under the decedent’s right hand was a signet ring made of white gold or similar material, with a ruby or similar stone set in a circular, braided border. This ring was subsequently identified by decedent’s family as belonging to him, an heirloom gift from his father when decedent joined the Swedish merchant marine.’”

“So you think Torkel planted it to fake the identification.”

“Sure, Doc, it’s obvious. What else could it be? He wanted everybody to think he was dead.”

Gideon shook his head. “John, I don’t know anymore . . .” He lifted one of the pictures and gazed at it for a while. “Maybe it is Torkel.”

John had a habit of suddenly flinging out his arms when he was excited, and he did it now. Gideon knew enough to anticipate it and was just able to get his head out of the way of a flailing right hand. “Doc, don’t start with me! Why do you do this? Jesus! First the guy in the plane is Magnus, positively. Then it’s Torkel, absolutely. And now you’re telling me this guy—”

“All I’m telling you is that I concluded the body on the plane was Torkel’s because of the amputated toes—a reasonable conclusion, you’ll agree—but now, according to Fukida, this guy here was missing the same two toes, which I can’t confirm or refute from these pictures. And when you tell me that Torkel’s ring was found with the body, how am I supposed to know what to think? Maybe somebody wanted everyone to think the body in the plane was Torkel’s, when it was really Magnus’s.”

John’s arms, still extended out to the sides, went to his temples. “Please let him tell me he’s joking.”

“I’m joking,” Gideon said. “Well, I think I am.”

“Doc—”

“No, I am, I am,” Gideon said. “Joking. Nobody doctored that foot for effect. Resorption, remember? Osteoporotic atrophy, remember?”

“Right, right,” John said, pacified.

“No, the man in the plane was Torkel Torkelsson, period. We can forget about him. But what we don’t know is who the guy in the fire was. There’s no way I can come up with anything solid from these pictures.”

“It’s Magnus,” John said stolidly. “There’s nobody else it could be. You heard Fukida.”

“So what happened to his toes?” Gideon murmured.

“What happened is what Fukida said. Torkel cut them off himself. Or maybe the guy who did the autopsy let his imagination run away with him. Either or both—probably both, would be my guess.”

“I suppose so,” Gideon said.

John had calmed down enough to go back to leafing through the folders while he was speaking. “Hey, here’s Auntie Dagmar’s statement to the detective working the case. Want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, ‘Statement of Dagmar Torkelsson, Date November 5, 1994, taken by Detective Paul Webster,’ blah, blah, blah . . . here we are:

 

DT: Yes, that’s right. After dinner my brothers went back to the hay barn to do some work.

PW: The hay barn? That’s the building that burned down? DT: Yes, in the old days it was our hay barn, but now it’s just used for storage space and the ranch offices. We still call it the hay barn. That is, we did.

PW: Did they always do that? Go to the hay barn to go back to work after dinner?

DT: Not always. Two times, three times a week.

PW: Did you go with them?

DT: No, I never do. I stayed home. I cleaned up the dishes and turned on the television.

 

“Yes, that’s right,” Gideon said. “They all lived together, didn’t they?”

“Yup. In the Big House. It’s Inge’s and Keoni’s now, home of Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch. Dagmar moved down to the coast after the fire. She has joint problems, so the weather’s a lot better for her down there.”

“Did they get along?”

“Like you’d expect two brothers and a sister in their seventies, living in one house, to get along.”

“In other words, they didn’t.”

“No, that’s not exactly right. Let’s just say they were really tight, but at the same time they could get pretty crabby with each other. With anybody, for that matter. They were all one-of-a-kinds, Doc. No problem with weak personalities for that bunch.”

Gideon laughed. “I’m starting to think you’re right about that.”

John began reading aloud again.

 

PW: And the next time you heard from your brother?

DT: I already told the officer—

PW: I know, but tell me again, please.

DT: Well, he called me . . . Magnus . . . and he said—

PW: What time was this?

DT: I don’t know. I was watching Hill Street Blues, so it must have been—

PW: Okay, and what did he say?

DT: He said that Torkel was . . . that they’d killed Torkel and he had to get out of Hawaii before the same thing happened to him.

PW: Now, when you say he said “they”—

DT: I don’t know who he meant. He said “they,” that’s all I know.

PW: He definitely said “they”? Plural? Not “him” or “her”? No names, no descriptions?

DT: He said . . . I think he said “they.” I’m not sure, I can’t remember.

PW: Did he say how your brother had been killed?

DT: (Shakes head.)

PW: Did he say there’d been a fire?

DT: I—I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Maybe he did, I’m just not sure. It was all so—

PW: Okay. And what else did he say?

DT: He said he had to leave. He said he’d come back as soon as he could. He said he loved me. He was . . . he was very excited, I could hardly . . .

PW: Just take your time, ma’am. Would you like some water or—

DT: He said they were after him, too, and—

PW: Ma’am, why did you wait so long to tell us this? Why didn’t you tell the police about it last night?

DT: He told me to wait.

PW: Your brother told you to wait?

DT: Yes, until today. Magnus said don’t tell anyone what he was doing until today.

PW: Anyone? Or just the police?

DT: Anyone. I keep telling you, he was afraid they were coming after him, too, and he needed a chance to get away.

PW: Did he tell you that? That “they” were coming after him?

DT: No, he didn’t say exactly that. Well, I don’t think so. It was very quick, only a few sentences. He was so excited.

PW: And did he say where he was going?

DT: (Shakes head.) He was taking the plane, that’s all he said.

 

At this point, Sarah returned. “Mission accomplished.” She put another clasp envelope, a thinner one, on the table. “Autopsy photos. And here”—she waved a thick sheaf of paper in her other hand—“is the autopsy report itself. It was less hassle to copy it than to check it out, so I made you one you can keep. Don’t tell anybody.” She slapped it into Gideon’s hand. “Enjoy.”

Dr. Meikeljohn, the deputy coroner, might not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he couldn’t be faulted on exhaustiveness. Or wordiness. His problem was organization. There was no breakdown into external examination and internal examination, no evidence of injury section, no evidence of medical and/or surgical intervention section, no pathology section, no put-it-all-together findings and opinion sections, no explicit structure of any kind. The report was simply twenty-two pages (compared to the usual four or so) of disorganized, densely typed observations, along with many lengthy stream-of-consciousness detours into conjecture, speculation, and hunches that were usually—and for good reason—not found in autopsy reports. It was difficult for Gideon even to locate the part in which the condition of the toes was described. Looking for it, his attention was caught by a few pages that described in fastidious detail the courses and locations of the two bullets found in the body.

 

Despite the charred condition of the external remains, a five-by-three-centimeter gunshot wound is visible in the ventral aspect of the thorax at the level of the third intercostal space, four centimeters to the left of the lateral border of the sternum. Because of tissue destruction of the dermal layers due to post-mortem thermal injury, the forensically pertinent characteristics of the wound, e.g., the existence or lack thereof of marginal abrasion, soot deposit, stippling, and other adjunct features are not possible to determine.

Subsequent dissection shows that both projectiles entered through this entrance, penetrating the left pectoralis major and proceeding medio-dorsally, grazing the superior border of the fourth costal cartilage and perforating the superior lobe of the left lung. Entering the medial mediastinum, the projectiles transpierced the heart through the right ventricle and the left atrium, separated the descending thoracic aorta—

 

“No problem positively identifying the cause of death, anyway,” Gideon murmured.

A few paragraphs before, he’d read that no soot or other carbon material had been found in the respiratory passages, proof positive that the victim had no longer been breathing at the time of the fire; he’d been dead when it started. And Meikeljohn’s description of the bullets’ horrific path made the reason for that crystal clear.

Gideon told John what he’d read, eliminating the jargon. “Shot right in the heart, huh?” John said, looking up from the case file.

“Right through the heart. Twice. And if that wasn’t enough, the bullets destroyed the aorta, too. You can’t get much more killed than that.”

“Two bullets,” John mused. “Both in the heart. Well, there you go, see? You had a couple of shooters who knew what they were doing. The cops did get one thing right, Doc. These were professionals, not one old crank shooting another.”

“Mm,” Gideon said and silently went back to the report.

 

—separated the descending aorta, and lodged in the corpus of the eighth thoracic vertebra (T8), one above the other, three millimeters apart. The projectiles were found to be somewhat deformed, medium-sized, non-jacketed lead bullets of different calibers, with the inferior, smaller one showing some fragmentation. Among the interesting circumstances associated with them was the presence of a cartridge case partially embedded in the intervertebral fibrocartilage separating T8 and T9. Various possibilities come to mind to account for its presence there . . .

 

And off the good doctor went on another of his roundabout excursions into supposition and surmise. Gideon paged on until he found what he was looking for at the bottom of page thirteen.

“Here we go, John.” He read aloud. “‘The right foot was naturally examined with especial care. External examination of the toes was not possible, inasmuch as the partially melted boot had fused to the skin. Therefore—’”

“Ah, there, you see?” exclaimed John, jabbing a finger in Gideon’s direction. “He was expecting to find those amputations. He already had them in his mind. Why else would he ‘naturally’ examine the right foot with ‘especial care’?”

Gideon nodded. “That’s a good point.” He continued reading.

 

Therefore, a partial deep dissection of the anterior dorsum was accomplished to reveal the condition of the toes. It was found that parts of the second and third toes had been amputated, resection having taken place approximately one centimeter from the distal ends of the medial phalanges.

 

He turned the page, scanned the next one. “I don’t believe it,” he exclaimed, flipping to the following page, and then the one after that. “You’re kidding me.”

“What’s the problem?” John asked.

“The problem? The problem is, that’s it: ‘On the right foot, parts of the second and third toes have been amputated, resection having taken place approximately one centimeter from the distal ends of the medial phalanges.’ Here this guy takes pages and pages describing every sulcus and pimple on the bladder, but when it comes to something important, something that could make or break an identification, what do we get? ‘On the right foot, parts of the second and third—’”

“Okay, okay, I heard you the first two times.” John shook his head, puzzled. “But I don’t get it. Isn’t that what you were looking for? I mean, the toes aren’t there anymore, what else is there to say?”

“There’s a lot he could have—should have—said. Was there any callus formation on the stumps? Was the medullary cavity open or capped? Was there any atrophy? All the things that would give us some idea of whether it was post- or antemortem.” He stood up, slammed the sheaf onto the table, and stormed around the room.

“Gee, Doc, don’t get yourself in a—”

“Was there anything to suggest whether it was a clean surgical procedure or some kind of amateur boondoggle? Was there—”

The door opened and Fukida walked in wearing a Colorado Rockies baseball cap and carrying a paper bag. “Problem?” he asked.

“Nah,” John said. “He gets like this sometimes. Don’t worry, he’s usually not violent.”

Fukida opened the bag and took out three lidded sixteen-ounce cardboard cups. “Here, I stopped on Ali’i Drive and got us some real coffee. I don’t know,” he said, looking hard at Gideon as he handed a cup to him, “I think I should have got you a decaf.”

“This’ll be fine,” Gideon said. He laughed and dropped back into his chair. “Thanks, smells wonderful.”

Fukida took a seat across the table from them, took the lid off his cup, crossed an ankle over one knee, and immediately started jiggling his foot. “I gather the autopsy report wasn’t too helpful?”

“Not about those missing toes, no. It’s the one place in the report where he decided to be concise.”

“What about the photos?”

“No, there wasn’t anything—”

“He means the autopsy photos, not the crime-scene ones, Doc. You haven’t even looked at them.”

“Autopsy photos! I forgot all about them!” He reached for the envelope.

“He’s also a little absent-minded,” John explained.

There were six black-and-white photographs: two pre-autopsy shots of the body from different angles, one of the entry wound, two taken during dissection that showed the bullets’ trajectory . . . and one excellent-quality close-up of the right foot, post-dissection.

“Ah,” Gideon murmured with satisfaction. He propped the photo against one of the case files that were now strewn on the table and settled back in his chair, hands clasped on his belly, to study it from three feet away. After a minute he leaned forward so that his face was twelve or fifteen inches from it. Finally, he straightened up.

“You were both on target,” he announced. “This was faked. It’s not Torkel. Those toes got hacked off after he died.”

“I knew it. I told you.” Fukida was pleased for a moment, but then he rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy, like I really need this.”

“Or possibly right before,” Gideon said, “but that makes no sense. Anyway, it was peri-mortem, not antemortem. It didn’t happen years ago, that’s for sure.”

“You’re positive about that?” Fukida asked dejectedly.

“Oh, yes. And it wasn’t done by any surgeon, I’m positive about that, too. Or if it was, you better hope he never operates on you.”

Whatever it was that had done the job, he explained, had been a sharp instrument, but sharp like a heavy chef’s knife is sharp, not like a scalpel or a surgical saw.

“See”—he pointed to the photograph—“if you look at the cut ends of the bones, you can see that they’re not clean. There’s been some crushing at the margins.”

Fukida wasn’t at all sure he could see it, but John, who’d had more experience in this line, nodded. “‘Hacked’ is the word, all right. An axe, that’d be my guess.”

“I don’t think so, John. Look at the second toe, right above the cut—those striations running laterally across the bone? They’re pretty clear.”

These Fukida was able to make out. “Hesitation marks?”

“Right. The same kind of thing you get when someone’s trying to cut his wrists and can’t quite get up the nerve, or find the right spot. I think they were the first attempts to cut the toe off, and Torkel—or whoever did it—was trying to cut through the joint, which is pretty hard to find if you’re not up on your anatomy, because the bases and the heads of the phalanges are wedged really close together; they kind of overlap, more so as you get older. So, on the next try he resorted to brute force and just chopped his way right through the bone; a single stroke each time, or maybe a single stroke to lop off both toes, but I don’t think so. Almost certainly used a hammer or something like it to drive the blade through. The weapon itself was probably some kind of small, heavy blade, something like a heavy-duty box-cutter, maybe.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an axe?” John asked.

“If he’d had an axe to start with, why would there be any hesitation marks at all? When you swing an axe, you swing it. You’re not looking for some delicate little joint to slip it through. Both toes would have come off with the first whack. Besides, you’d have to be pretty good with an axe, or with anything else big, to clip just those two and not damage the ones on either side; especially the big toe.”

“That’s true,” John allowed.

“And the reason we know it happened after he died,” Fukida said, “is because there’s no—what did you call it, Johnny?”

“Osteoporotic atrophy. And resorption, let us never forget resorption.”

“Also, the medullary cavities are wide open,” Gideon said. “No capping, no healing at all. This man had those two toes right up until he died. Ergo, whoever he is, Torkel Torkelsson he is not.”

Fukida expelled a long, disgusted breath. “Wasn’t there a ring? Do I remember right? Wasn’t he wearing Torkel’s ring?”

“Not exactly wearing,” Gideon said. “There weren’t any fingers, but the ring was near his hand, where the fingers would have been.”

Fukida nodded. “So that was a plant, too; part of the scam. And we bought it. ‘Screw-up’ is right.”

“Looks like it,” John said. “Doc, you want to tell me something? All you had to do was take one look at the picture and you spotted this. This coroner, he had the real thing right in front of him, and he never saw it? I don’t care how spaced-out he was. I mean, even I can see it—”

“Now that I’ve pointed it out.”

“Well, yeah, but I’m not a medical examiner. Jesus, Teddy, what kind of coroners do you have here?”

“Hey, give me a break,” Fukida said. “This isn’t like it was in Honolulu. People are nice to each other here. We don’t have a lot of homicides. We don’t have a real forensic pathologist. We don’t even have real coroners; the police are all deputy coroners, and the autopsies, when we do ’em, get done under contract, by local doctors. Meikeljohn was just a urologist from Waimea that was willing to do it, so we used him a couple of times. What would he know from bones?”

“True, not too many bones in the urinary tract. At least now,” Gideon said, smiling, “I know why the bladder got all that loving attention.”

“What about an ID?” Fukida asked. “The pictures tell you anything that indicates it’s definitely Magnus?”

“Or definitely isn’t?” John added.

A shake of the head from Gideon. “There’s not much to work with. The sex is right, and the age is in the ball-park somewhere. That’s about it, and that applies to a whole lot of people. So the answer is . . . I don’t know, not for certain.”

“So,” John said to Fukida, “what now?”

“Now? Now I put an addendum in the case file to the effect that we screwed up slightly.”

“And then?”

“Then what?”

“Then what do you do? Where do you go from there?”

Fukida twisted his baseball cap around so that it was backwards, leaned back in his chair, and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Beats the hell out of me. What do you suggest?”

John stared at him. “What the hell kind of—”

Gideon interrupted. “We thought,” he said mildly, “that you might want to reopen the case.”

Fukida rocked back and forth in his chair while he considered, his hands still clasped behind his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

“But—” John began.

“No, wait.” He took off the cap, ran a hand through his thick black hair, and leaned soberly forward. “Look, Oliver, Johnny—you convinced me. The guy that was autopsied isn’t Torkel Torkelsson. This guy pulled off the scam of a lifetime, making us—making everybody—think that the body in the fire was his, so he could get away without leaving a trail.”

“Right!” John said. “So—”

“So does somebody here want to tell me exactly what crime I’m supposed to investigate? What section of the penal code applies?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “Maybe—”

“And what about statutes of limitation? This all happened ten years ago.”

“Statutes of limitation don’t apply,” John said. “This was murder—a capital offense.”

“Sure, but he didn’t kill anyone. At least, we don’t think so,” he added in an undertone.

“Well, true, but—”

“More important, anybody want to tell me who I’m supposed to investigate? Everything that’s left of Torkel Torkelsson is sitting in a shoe box on my desk. Even if he did do something criminal, I’d say that puts him pretty safely beyond the long arm of the law, wouldn’t you?”

John and Gideon both nodded. “Guess so,” John said.

Fukida sat still for a minute, snapping the rubber band against his wrist, then jumped up and shook hands with both of them.

“Great seeing you again, Johnny. Doctor, that was really something, what you did. I’m very impressed.”

He walked them down the hall, through the lobby, and up to the front doors.

“Look, guys,” he said as he saw them out, “I’m sorry I can’t help, but I don’t see anything for me to do. If there’s a prosecutable crime involved here—and somebody to prosecute—give me a call when you figure out who and what they are.”

 

TWELVE

 

“SOMETHING’S screwy,” Gideon said.

John laughed. “You’re telling me.”

“No, I mean even screwier than it looks.”

With Gideon behind the wheel of the pickup this time, they had just left Fukida’s office, turning north onto the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to head back into the uplands, toward Waimea and the ranch.

“I know,” said John, nodding. “Every time we find out something new, it just gets more confusing. Not supposed to work that way.”

“It’s the timing that doesn’t make any sense, John. It’s impossible for it to have happened the way we think.”

“How so?”

“Well, when would Torkel have had the time to do what he did—cut off Magnus’s toes, leave the ring, switch clothing with him, and the rest of it?”

“How do you know he switched clothes? That’s not so easy with a dead guy. You ever try to move a dead guy? Dead people are heavy.”

“Well, at least we know Torkel got a boot back on his foot after the toes came off, and he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to put Magnus’s own boots back on him. I’m guessing he also dressed him in the rest of his own clothing.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean. And he must have switched wallets and any other identifying things, too, but they probably got burnt up—except for the ring.”

“Probably so, but when did he do all that? How could he get it done between the time of the shooting and the time they burnt the place down? Did they kill Magnus, then conveniently go away for an hour or two, leaving Torkel alone to tinker with his brother’s body, and then come back later, at their leisure, and burn the place down?”

With his eyes closed and his face pushed out the open window to derive the full complement of pleasure from the oven-hot breeze, John thought about that for a moment. “Pretty doubtful,” he agreed, bringing his head back in. His stiff, black hair was hardly mussed. “So what’s your theory? I know you have to have one.”

“Oh, hey, I’m not about to call it a theory. At best we’re talking hypothesis or—”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” John said, waving a hand. Finer academic distinctions were not his forte.

“Let’s call it a speculation, I’d be more comfortable with that,” Gideon said. “A supposition that’s unverified to this point, but one—”

“Doc, I swear—!”

“Sorry, sorry. John, what I’m wondering is if the killers never burnt the place down at all. I’m wondering if Torkel’s the one who came back and set the fire himself.”

“You mean to cover the identity switch.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, could be.” He nodded to himself. “Could very well be. Fits.”

“It goes along with cutting off the toes, doesn’t it?”

“It also goes along with putting his face right on that oil-soaked matting so there’d be nothing left to recognize.” He turned things over in his mind for a moment. “And what about his fingers? Remember the photos? His fingers were—well, his hands; he didn’t exactly have any fingers, did he?—his hands were positioned up by his face, too, where they’d get all that heat. No fingerprints that way.”

“Well, possibly, but that just might be—”

“Oh, right, right, where the muscles tighten up . . . the . . . what do you call it again?”

“The pugilistic attitude,” Gideon said. “The muscle fibers dehydrate and shrink, and pull on the tendons, so the forearms flex and the hands come up around the face like a fighter covering up. The knees bend and the feet come up, too. Remember how his feet stayed in the air when they turned him over?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Okay, scratch that idea. But the rest of it holds together.” John was getting into it now. His hands were starting to chop the air. Gideon shifted left to give himself a little more protection. “The shooters kill Magnus. Torkel gets away. He knows, or thinks he knows, that they don’t know which one they shot. So after they’re gone, he comes back, chops off his brother’s toes, leaves his ring, and burns the place down. Everybody figures the bad guys did it, and the bad guys—and everyone else—think it’s Torkel’s body laying in the barn.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “I like it.”

“That’s one scenario,” Gideon said gingerly. “I have another one, too. Another possibility.”

“That nobody else was involved at all? That there never were any ‘bad guys’? That Torkel not only burnt the place down, but killed his own brother?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, surprised. “Is that what you think?”

“No, that’s not what I think. I just know the way you think. You got this bug in your ear. First it was Magnus who killed Torkel, and since that didn’t work, now it’s Torkel who killed Magnus. What have you got against these guys?”

“John, I’m just—”

“Doc, we’ve been all over this. There’s all kinds of evidence against it. The slick, two-man execution, the statement from Dagmar—”

“Sure, but wouldn’t Dagmar have lied if it helped her own brother get away with murder?”

“Of her own other brother? I don’t know, but, yeah, okay, it’s possible. Theoretically. But look, the main thing is—why would Torkel shoot his brother? Give me one possible reason.”

“How would I know that? Because of the will, maybe? To get full title to the ranch?”

“No, how does that add up? If that’s what he wanted, why pretend he was dead? How would that get him the ranch?”

Gideon nodded, worn down by John’s more than reasonable arguments. “Yes, you’re right about that, too. Okay, forget it. One more unverified supposition bites the dust.”

“One more crackpot theory,” John said.

They were climbing now. The breeze flowing in the driver’s-side window was laced with pine and eucalyptus, and was refreshingly cool. John, finding the chill unwelcome, rolled up his window, leaned his head against it, and settled his body as comfortably as he could. After a few minutes he began to slip into a doze but then sat up with a sudden “Damn!” He turned with an earnest look at Gideon.

“Doc, maybe you’re on to something after all. They have been lying to us. I just realized it. Well, holding back, anyway.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“The family. The whole damn family. They knew it was Torkel in the plane all along!”

Gideon frowned. “How do you figure that?”

“Look, when we told them the body in the plane was Torkel’s, how come nobody mentioned the ring? How come nobody jumped up and said, ‘No, that’s impossible, it can’t be Torkel; we know the one that burned up was Torkel because he was wearing Torkel’s ring’? Or at least brought it up?” He pounded his thigh with a fist. “Wouldn’t you have said something? But there was nothing, not a peep. Why not?”

“Is it possible they didn’t know about it?”

“No, it isn’t. The file said it was family members that identified it, remember?”

“Well, yes, but it didn’t say which family members.”

“What’s the difference? Even if it was only a couple of them, why would they keep something like that to themselves? No, I’m telling you, somebody should have said something.”

“Somebody should have,” Gideon agreed.

“What do you say we go talk to Axel about it?” John suggested. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

For the next few minutes they retreated into their own thoughts. At the gate to the Little Hoaloha, it was John who got out to swing it open. When he climbed back into the truck, Gideon wore a look on his face somewhere between confusion and exasperation, with emphasis on the former.

“What?” John asked. He had the worried expression that meant he knew in his heart that his friend was about to complicate things even more.

“None of that makes any sense either,” Gideon told him.

John exploded. Out shot his arms. He banged an elbow hard into the doorpost and winced. “I knew you were going to say that. I knew it’d be too simple for you. What’s the problem, not enough loose ends?”

“No, I’m serious. Look.” He waited for John to settle down before going quietly on. “If they all knew what really happened—that Magnus wasn’t Magnus and Torkel wasn’t Torkel—then why would they ask me to look at the autopsy report? Why did they ask me to go out to Maravovo Atoll and check the plane in the first place? They’d have to be crazy to take chances like that. There was no reason they had to do that. They could have just let the salvage company bring the bones back, buried them, and left me out of it. None of this would have come up.”

“Yeah, but . . . well, maybe they . . .” John sagged against his seat. “My head hurts.”

“John, what do you say we forget about going up to see Axel? What do you say we turn the truck around and go back and talk to Fukida again? Tell him what we’ve been talking about, see what he thinks.”

“Dump it in his lap, you mean.”

“Absolutely. It’s his baby, not ours.”

Now John hedged. “All the way back to Kona? It’s not like we have anything definite here, Doc. There might be a simple explanation for everything. We might be stirring up a lot of trouble for everybody for no good reason. These are good people, basically.” He scowled down at his hands. “I think these are good people.”

“Well, you’re the cop. I’ll leave it up to you. If you just want to drop the whole thing—”

“Nah,” John said wearily, “you know better than that. Okay, let’s go. Imagine how happy Teddy’ll be to see us again.”

 

 

SERGEANT Fukida looked anything but happy. From across his desk, he eyed them with the wary expression of the barnyard rooster looking at a couple of smiling foxes come calling. He was wearing two rubber bands on his wrist now, wide ones, and was snapping them both with a forceful little twist of the thumb. That’s got to hurt, Gideon thought. His baseball cap was still on, but no longer backward.

“I knew you guys would be back,” Fukida said. “I could feel it in my bones. I just didn’t think it would be today.”

“This is serious, Teddy,” John said. “There are some problems.”

Fukida heaved a colossal sigh. “Okay, let’s hear’em.”

The possibility that Torkel himself had set the hay barn fire to obscure his escape left him unconcerned and impatient (“You came back to tell me this?”), but the question of why no one had brought up the ring after Gideon had identified the body in the plane as Torkel’s did catch his interest, and for few minutes they tossed possibilities back and forth. It didn’t take long to narrow the likely explanations down to one: When the Torkelssons had learned that Gideon knew the body in Maravovo Lagoon was Torkel’s, they realized that mention of the ring would make it clear that the confusion of identities had not been accidental, but purposeful; that Torkel had left his ring on Magnus’s body in a deliberate, premeditated attempt to mislead the police.

And if they were afraid of bringing that out, didn’t it mean that they’d been aware of the switch from the beginning? That they’d known all along that Torkel had actually outlived Magnus? That they had kept it to themselves because they much preferred their lives under the provisions of Magnus’s generous will? (And who wouldn’t?) If Torkel’s will had gone into effect instead, the great bulk of the estate would have gone to the Swedish Seamen’s Home.

Why they would have asked Gideon to look at the remains in the plane was still an unanswered question, but that didn’t change the rest of it.

“And if it’s all true,” a glum-looking John mused, “then they’re guilty of collusion to commit fraud for monetary gain.”

“Even your friend Axel?” Gideon asked after a moment.

John rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair. “Whew, that’s pretty hard to believe.” But the cop in him came through. “I’m not ruling it out, though.”

“They did more than that,” Fukida said. He held out a pack of spearmint gum. When they shook their heads, he folded over two sticks, inserted them into his mouth, chawed them down to a single manageable bolus, and continued. “If they knew all along that Torkel got away and they’ve been covering for him all this time, then they’ve participated in”—he began counting off on his fingers—“one, falsification of public records; two, providing false information to the police; three, identity theft. And if Torkel set the fire and they knew about it and didn’t say anything, then there’s insurance fraud, too. And if they knowingly accepted property that should have gone to the Seamen’s Home, that’s not just fraud, that’s theft.”

“This is really getting ugly,” John mumbled. “Are you going to reopen the case?”

There followed a period of gum-cracking, band-snapping, and general chair-jiggling while Fukida thought it through. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked.

John shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well, so would I. I’ll have to talk to the lieut
enant, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. At least it’s worth stirring things up. Maybe not a full-scale, official investigation at this point, no, but a look. Really sit down with the files, re-interview these characters . . .”

“What about the statutes of limitation?” Gideon asked. “With ten years gone by, are any of those things still prosecutable?”

“Who knows?” Fukida brushed the question aside and leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t give a damn about fraud or identity theft, not from ten years ago. But if those people helped Torkel switch identities—if they knowingly participated in that faked ID—thereby misleading the police, then they just might be criminally responsible, at least as accessories after the fact, to Magnus’s murder. That’s worth looking at—and no statute of limitation to worry about.”

“Murder?” John exploded. “Come on, Teddy, get real. You’re stretching the hell out of—”

Fukida out-yelled him—not an easy thing to do. “They are also criminally responsible for making the Kona CIS look like a bunch of incompetent assholes, and laughing about it all the way to the bank!” The declaration was shouted into a vault of silence. The hum of conversation from other cubicles and desks had stopped entirely. Everyone was listening in. Everyone could hardly help it, Gideon thought.

John lowered his voice to a hiss. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Teddy? They made you look like idiots, and now you want to get back at them.”

Fukida glared at him, opened his mouth to shout some more, changed his mind, and settled back, shaking his head. After a second he sat up straight again, snorted, and angrily flung his cap into a corner. “I don’t understand you, Lau. You walk in here uninvited, you rake up all kinds of dirty laundry, you tell me we got this wrong and that wrong, you raise a million questions . . . and then when I tell you, well, maybe there’s something to it and we ought to reopen, you climb all over me. What do you want? Do you want us to investigate? Or do you want us to drop it?”

John had calmed down while Fukida spoke. He looked about as miserable as his open, cheerful face would permit. “Yes,” he said. “And yes.”

A beat passed before Fukida spoke. “What is that, zen? I don’t get it.”

Gideon did. It was what had been bothering John all day; the conflict between human being and lawman. By coming to Fukida, he felt, understandably enough, as if he were betraying his friends. But as a cop himself, he couldn’t bring himself to pretend that all the equivocations, misrepresentations, omissions, and generally dubious behavior on the part of this family he’d known so long had never occurred.

“I have an idea,” Gideon said. “For all we know, we’re blowing things up way out of proportion. Basically, we’re operating without facts. Maybe they didn’t do anything illegal. Maybe we’re seeing things all wrong. I know it looks bad, but maybe there’s a simple explanation for everything that we haven’t thought of.”

John’s and Fukida’s faces showed that they believed this about as much as he did, but that they were willing to listen.

“So what I suggest, before you go barreling in in any kind of official way, Sergeant, is that you let us poke around a little more. Discreetly, of course.”

“Like how?”

“Well, like the two of us—John and I—going back and having a chat with Axel. Informally. We were going to do that anyway, before we decided to come back here. Bring up some of these same questions and see what he has to say.”

Fukida was shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for civilians—”

“Who you calling a civilian?” John demanded. “And who dug up this stuff for you in the first place? Where would you be if not for us? Exactly where you were ten years ago—fat and happy and way out on a limb you didn’t even know you were on.”

“That’s the truth,” Fukida grumbled. “Happy, that’s for sure. Okay, I won’t do anything for a couple days. Go talk to Axel. Don’t shake things up, though. Be discreet, you know?”

John put a hand to his heart. “Discretion is my middle name.”

 

“THIS is good,” John said as they headed to the truck. “I trust Axel. He’ll level with us.”

“I hope so.”

John climbed in and buckled the seat belt. “Especially if we nudge him a little,” he said under his breath.

 

THIRTEEN

 

THE old man didn’t look up as John and Gideon climbed the steps of the front porch. He was moving slowly along on his knees, his mouth full of nails, hammering down the warped ends of the porch floorboards.

“Hey, Willie,” John said. “I see they got you doing handyman jobs now, huh?”

“Got me doing everything,” the old man muttered through the nails, still not looking up. “What else is new? You name it, I do it.”

Then something about John’s voice got his attention. He looked up, tipped back his curling, sweat-stained, flower-garlanded hat, spat the nails into his hand, and grinned. His good-natured face was as weathered, and almost as dark as the unpainted wood of the porch.

“What do you know, it’s Johnny Lau, the kid that could never get enough to eat. You done growing yet?”

“I sure hope so,” John said. “It’s not easy finding shoes this big. How’s it going, boss?”

“Not bad. Fine.” He got to his feet, wincing a little as his knees straightened. A short, stubby man in old jeans and ancient, scuffed work boots. “You know, I saw you out here on the porch yesterday. Thought it was you. So how come you didn’t say hello?”

“Well, you know,” John said.

“Yeah, right. I’m Willie Akau,” he said to Gideon. “Foreman here. I’m the guy that taught Johnny everything he knows. All the important stuff, anyway.”

“Truer than you think,” John said. “Willie, we’re looking for Axel. Is he inside?”

“Naw, he’s out at Paddock Number Four with the rest of ’em.”

“They branding?”

“Branding, castrating, inoculating, the whole bit. Springtime, you know? Tell you what, I’m about done here and I want to see how they’re doing anyway. Lemme get one of them Japanese quarter horses, and we’ll go out and have a look.”

“Japanese quarter horses?” a puzzled John echoed. “What’re they?”

Willie grinned at him. “Things have changed since you worked here, brudda. A Japanese quarter horse—that’s what we call a Honda ATV.”

“ATV? What, you paniolos don’t ride horses anymore?”

“Sure we do, most of the time. I was thinking about your friend. He don’t look like no horseman to me.”

Gideon laughed. “You’re right about that.” A few years earlier, in Oregon, he’d been thrown from a horse, fallen down a hillside, suffered a concussion, and almost gotten squashed flat when the terrified horse came within inches of rolling over him. Since then he’d been leery of getting on one again.

“Looks like some kind of professor or something.”

“Right again.” Good God, he thought, has it come to that? Have I started looking like a professor? “How can you tell?”

“It’s your aura,” John said. “Okay, Willie, let’s get going.”

“I’ll get the ATV. You better sit in back, Professor. Easier to hold onto the roll bar back there.”

 

 

THE ATV that Willie came back with wasn’t a Honda, but a yellow, six-wheel-drive Argo equipped with caterpillar tracks; a cross between a beach buggy and a topless mini-tank, with room for six.

“Thought you’d be more comfortable in this monster, Professor. Safer, you know? Make sure you hold on tight to that bar now.”

Muttering, Gideon got into the back as instructed but determinedly refused to grasp the roll bar, twice coming perilously close to tumbling out as a result. But once they got off the dirt trails and onto the grass-cushioned, rolling hills the ride smoothed out, and they made it to the paddock without incident. Willie went into the pipe-fenced corral to join his paniolos. Gideon and John stayed outside, leaning on the fence with Axel.

From his reading, and from what John had told him, Gideon expected—and hoped for—a colorful scene, with whooping paniolos roping the calves and throwing them, rodeo style, for the branding. But ranching, as he kept hearing, had changed. All it took was a little quiet clucking and nudging for the horsemen to urge the five or six dozen calves, one at a time, up a ramp and into the “squeeze box,” a narrow, ten-foot-long wooden enclosure in which, Axel explained, they were inoculated against blackleg, branded with the Little Hoaloha “LH,” had their ears notched for tags, and, if they were bulls, painlessly castrated—the method involved a rubber band that would cut off blood supply to the testes over the next few weeks; not a knife or a set of pincers, as in the old days. And everything was under the supervision of a veterinarian who was in there with them; another change from the old days.

There was no terrified baying or bellowing from the squeeze box. After a minute or two, the calf would simply emerge from the other end, snorting and shaking its head, but looking more offended than hurt or frightened. And in would come the next one.

“We don’t castrate them all,” Axel said. “A few of them are just vasectomized and kept around as teasers.”

“Teasers?” Gideon said.

“We use them to determine when a cow is ready to be inseminated. See, the stud fees for good bulls are pretty scary, so we don’t send for the big guys until we know the cows are willing to go along with it. Well, no cow will let a bull mount her except when she’s in heat, so the way we know one of them is ready is when we see one of our vasectomized bulls mount her and go to work. That’s why we call them teasers.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” John said. “Uh, Axel, we need to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Axel said, his eyes on the paniolos. “Go ahead, shoot. Willie!” he called. “The one that just came out. Take a look at that foreleg, would you? There’s something the matter with it.”

“No, let’s go somewhere where you can pay attention,” John said. “This is important.”

The sudden change in tone made Axel blink. “All right. The tack shed.”

They went to a tin-roofed, rough-hewn lean-to with ropes and rawhide straps hanging from the ceiling and the walls, and tools, sacks, and old saddle gear draped over racks, lying on work benches, or strewn about the dirt floor. The leather items were cracked and dusty, as if the shed hadn’t been used as a workplace for years. Axel pulled three banged-up folding metal chairs from a stack that had been stored against one wall.

“Never mind the chairs, Axel,” John said.

But Axel set them out anyway. There was something dogged in the way he did it, as if he sensed that nothing good was coming and he was trying to head it off as long as he could.

“What’s the problem, John?” he asked when they’d sat down, the three of them facing each other somewhat awkwardly, three pairs of denimed knees almost touching. “Did you see the autopsy report?” He looked at Gideon. “Was it Magnus?”

“That I can’t say for sure,” Gideon answered. “It’s impossible to tell from—”

“What we can say for sure,” John cut in, eager to get started nudging, “is that, whoever it was, somebody chopped off two of his toes.”

Axel was satisfactorily nudged. His face twisted in a grimace. “Somebody chopped off his toes—you mean on purpose?”

“I don’t figure it was by accident.”

“No, well, of course not. I mean . . . Jesus, that’s horrible, that’s disgusting! Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Gideon said. “That’s what made the autopsy doctor so positive he was Torkel.”

“But who would . . . who would—”

“We’re assuming it was Torkel,” John said.

“Ah, no, that’s crazy, that’s—”

“We’re also assuming it was Torkel who left his own ring on the body.”

“What are you—” Axel began with a vehement shake of his head, but stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth open. “The ring!”

“So you did know about the ring?”

“Yes, sure, everybody knew about it.” He took off his black-rimmed glasses and gnawed on the temple piece, thinking hard. Without them, his face was oddly blank and defenseless. He didn’t have eyelashes, Gideon noticed. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. Torkel must have left it there to fool everybody. Oh, this is too weird!”

“How come nobody mentioned it when we came back from Maravovo and said the body in the plane was Torkel?”

“Mentioned what?”

John sighed. “The ring, Axel.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess we forgot about it. It was ten years ago.”

“Did you?” John asked, sounding more like a policeman with every word. “You’re telling me that every single one of you forgot there’d been a ring?”

Axel thrust out his unforgivable chin. “Well, I sure did.”

“You, I can believe,” John said, relaxing enough to let a smile come through. “You were probably thinking about all those macro-nutrients in manure at the time. But the others . . .” What was left of the smile slowly vanished. “Something’s wrong, Axel. It didn’t happen the way everybody said. People haven’t leveled with us, and I don’t think they leveled with the police either. I’m hoping you’ll—”

Axel abruptly shoved his chair back and jumped up, raising a cloud of flour-like dust from the floor. “John, you’re . . . you’re pushing me.” He stamped around in tight little circles, whapping his hat—a blue tennis hat with the names of the Hawaiian islands on the band; the kind every ABC store carried—against his jeans. Dust flew with every whap. “I mean, I appreciate that you’re concerned, and I certainly appreciate what you’ve done, Gideon, but . . . look, no offense, but I really can’t see how any of this is your business, either of you. I don’t see why you’re so damn interested in this, and I don’t like it that you’re trying to get me to say something against my own family. I don’t know what Torkel did or didn’t do, but I can tell you that nobody here, nobody in this family, did anything wrong!”

He had let most of it out in one breath, his voice rising to a squeak, and now he gulped air, staring down at them, pop-eyed and agitated. There were tears in his eyes.

“Sit down, Axel,” John said calmly.

“I mean . . . it’s just that . . . you come here, you act like—”

“Sit down, Axel.”

“Well, I’m just—” Axel sat.

“Put your glasses back on.”

He knuckled at the corners of his eyes, sniffled, and put on his glasses.

John put a hand on his knee, an extraordinary gesture for him. “Axel, listen to me. You’re my friend, you have been for a lot of years. But more than that, your family has meant a lot to me. Torkel and Magnus especially, those guys really straightened me out, they taught me to . . . well, to grow up. The second best thing that ever happened to me was when Magnus fired me my first day on the job because I didn’t show up on time. The best thing was when Torkel hired me back. And Dagmar—she bailed me out of trouble a hundred times. She was the first one that told me I ought to go into police work, did you know that?”

“Of course I know all that,” Axel said uncomfortably, “and it’s not that I don’t—”

“So sure I’m interested. There’s trouble on the way, Axel, and if there’s some way I can help, I want to do it. We’ve just come from a long talk with a sergeant at CIS. He says—”

Axel’s jaw dropped. “The police? You told them all this?”

“Yes, we did. Fukida wants to reopen the case—”

Axel’s hand flew to his forehead. “Oh, mercy.”

“—but he’s not going to get on it for a couple of days. We said we wanted to talk to you first, and he said okay. So if you know something you haven’t told us—or didn’t tell the police back then—now’s the time to do it, trust me. You’re a lot better off—you’re all a lot better off—if you come forward with it now than if you make Fukida dig it out on his own. I know this guy, Axel. You don’t want to tangle with him. This is one hard-nosed sonofabitch, and he’s already ticked off.”

Axel had listened intently, growing mulish and frightened-looking. “But I don’t know anything! There isn’t anything to know!”

“We think there is,” John said. “For example, we think that Torkel was the one who set the fire, too.”

“You mean, to get away? To cover up the . . . the switch?”

Gideon thought he was going to deny it, to argue, but after a moment he nodded jerkily. “Okay. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s possible, I don’t know. I mean, how would I know? But I still don’t understand why the police would want to get involved after all this time. What difference does it make now?”

“Oh, I can tell you why it makes a difference,” John said impassively. “It makes a difference because a scam was perpetrated ten years ago, and the result of that scam was that you, your brother Felix, your sister Hedwig, and your sister Inge”—he was speaking very slowly now, emphasizing each word—“all inherited big, valuable chunks of land that shouldn’t have gone to you. If the truth’d been known about who really died first, it wouldn’t have happened that way. Torkel’s will would be the surviving one, and you’d each have come out with a few thousand bucks apiece, period. And the seamen’s home would be the one that was rolling in dough.”

“Oh,” Axel said wretchedly, “I see.”

“And listen to me now—if any of you knew about this—”

“We didn’t! I swear! The first I heard it was Torkel was after you two—”

“—and failed to tell the police, then you’ve committed the crime of fraud, or at least you’d be accessories after the fact.”

“John, you have to believe me!”

“Axel, did Torkel kill Magnus?” Gideon asked. It wasn’t something he could honestly say he believed, but he figured it was his turn to do a little nudging and see what came of it.

On the other hand, it was interesting, the way his mind kept coming back to the question.

Axel stared bug-eyed at him. “Where did that come from?” Apparently unable to sit still, he jumped out of his chair again, jammed on his hat, and wandered distractedly outside, squinting in the bright sunlight. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” he said to the empty air. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Axel, take it easy,” John called. “We’re floundering here. We’re just trying to make sense of what happened.”

Axel’s stooped shoulders rose and fell. He came back, flopped down in his chair again, and spread his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t know what to tell you.”

John shook his head. “Well, between us, I’m not sure where the hell we go from here.” He glanced at Gideon for help, but all Gideon could do was shrug. He wasn’t sure either.

“Can’t we just leave it alone?” Axel pleaded. “It was ten years ago.”

“Well, I know, but this whole thing is too bizarre—”

“John, I am not going to lose my ranch! I swear to God, I didn’t do anything wrong. Not knowingly. None of us did.”

John hesitated. “Axel . . . I’m your friend, you know that, but I’m also a sworn officer of the law. I have an obligation to, to”—he flushed, something he did when he thought he was being pompous—“Well, not technically, but . . . I mean . . . I guess . . . oh, hell, I don’t know. I guess we just leave it to Fukida. I don’t know what else to suggest.”

For a few seconds the three men sat without speaking. The smells of dust and worn-out leather seemed to be coming from their skin by now. At the rear of the shed a couple of flies buzzed listlessly and intermittently against a window pane. John continued to shake his head silently.

What a rare thing it was, Gideon thought, to see John Lau look irresolute. “Look, this whole thing really is none of my business,” he said, “but I have an idea.”

John and Axel looked up hopefully.

“Before Fukida comes in, maybe somebody should have a talk with Dagmar.”

Axel frowned. “Why Dagmar?”

“Because if anybody knows what really happened that night, it’s Dagmar.”

“Oh, that’s really ridiculous,” Axel said hotly. “I’m sorry, but this is really over the top. I can’t believe you’re accusing that fantastic old lady who’s been through so much—”

“I didn’t hear anybody make any accusations,” John said stiffly. “Go ahead, Doc.”

“Frankly, I’m not sure if I’m making any accusations or not, but if you think about it, everything we know, or think we know, about that night came through Dagmar: the story about Torkel’s telephoning her, pretending to be Magnus; the whole business about how ‘they’ killed his brother and were threatening him—every bit of that came out of Dagmar’s deposition. There was no other source for it, no independent verification.”

“That’s so, but—” Axel began.

“All I’m saying is that it would be good to hear what she has to say about all this.”

“Well—”

“Doc’s right,” John said. “We ought to talk to her. Better us than the police, to start with. If we can’t head this whole thing off, then maybe at least we can soften it.”

Axel gave in. “I guess I can see that. Look, don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do.”

“When would be a good time to see her?”

“Well, she has cinnamon buns and coffee on her terrace every morning and sits there for an hour or so. She’s always in the best mood of the day then. That’d be a good time.”

“What time in the morning?” John asked doubtfully.

“Nine, nine-thirty.”

John brightened. “Oh, that’s fine. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow, she’ll still be in the hospital for her tests. She doesn’t get out till three in the afternoon.”

“Okay, the day after tomorrow, then—what is that, Tuesday? We can hold Fukida off that long. Doc and I could just sort of stop by in the morning, say we were in the neighborhood—”

“No, count me out of this one,” Gideon said.

John was surprised. “It was your idea.”

“Yes, but I only met the woman a couple of times. She hardly knows me. How can I come barging in uninvited with a bunch of questions?”

John understood. “Well, that’s okay, I’ll do it myself. No problem.”

“I could go with you if it’d make things more comfortable,” Axel offered. “I drop by for a cup of coffee every now and then anyway, if I’m on my way to Kona.”

“No, that’s all right. Auntie Dagmar and I are old pals.”

Axel hesitated. “You’re not going to grill her, are you?”

John laughed. “No, Axel, I’m not going to grill her. I’ll leave my rubber hose back at the house.”

 

 

“WE worked your friend over a little hard,” Gideon said when Willie Akau had dropped them off in the equipment yard near the ranch house. “I feel kind of bad about it.”

John nodded. “Had to be done. We’ll make it up to him. How do you think it went? Do you buy what he said? About none of them knowing?”

“I don’t know, John. It’s pretty hard to believe that the reason nobody spoke up about the ring is that every single one of them just conveniently forgot about it.”

John nodded. “You’re right about that, but as far as Axel himself is concerned, whatever else he is, he’s no con artist. With Axel, what you see is what you get.”

 

FOURTEEN

 

EVEN with the cell phone jammed against her ear, Inge could hardly hear him, what with all the yee-ha-ing and kiyi-yi-ying, let alone the mooing and stamping of the cows. She was riding postern on the afternoon’s Cattle Drive Adventure (“An honest-to-goodness cattle drive in which you will ride trained cow horses as you help the wranglers drive our mini-herd of Angus crossbreeds over the open range”), and she had been lucky simply to hear the phone beep.

She pulled her horse to the side and cantered away from the tumult.

“Axel, calm down. Say again?”

“I said I think they know everything! Or they’re about two inches away from it. John and Gideon, they were just here. You should have heard their questions. And . . . and . . .”

“Axel, take a deep breath. Now, what the hell are you talking about?” She took a breath herself and closed her eyes. Don’t let this be what I think.

But it was. Through his babbling she managed to make out the gist of what he was saying. No, she thought, they hadn’t figured out everything, but they were close. At the least they knew that the accepted version of events had some holes, big holes, in it. She’d feared this might happen from the moment they’d came back from Maravovo with the news about Torkel, but by that time there had simply been no way to head them off. Think, she told herself. Think.

Axel was just repeating himself now, in stuttery, fragmented phrases, like an old-fashioned record with a needle stuck in a groove, and she interrupted. “What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything. Inge, they kept talking about the wills, and how the wrong one went into effect, and how we could be accomplices—I mean accessories—”

“How did they find out there was a ring?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they—”

“What did you say when they asked why nobody mentioned it?”

“I said . . . I don’t remember what I said. But I know I didn’t tell them anything.”

“But you don’t remember what you said,” Inge said wryly.

She’d dismounted now and was wandering about with the reins in her hand, letting Betsy nibble at the coarse grass. She could hear him clearly now. The whooping Indonesians and the disgusted cattle had moved off a hundred yards.

“No, but I know I didn’t tell them anything that . . . Inge, I was so flustered, I hardly knew what I was saying. They kept talking about how the will might be invalidated if we knew all along it was Torkel in the plane—”

“Okay, Axel, shh, it’s all right, you did fine. It couldn’t be helped.”

What rotten dumb luck that they had picked him to come to with their questions. If it had been her, she might have . . . well, what?

“Inge, they asked me if Torkel killed Magnus!”

That stopped her. “They asked you what?”

“They asked me—”

“I heard you, I heard you! Where would they get that idea?”

“I don’t know! It was Gideon—”

“And what did you say to that? Or don’t you remember that either?”

“What do you mean, what did I say? I told them it was ridiculous. But the fact that they would even come up with a question like that . . . what does it mean?”

“It means they were fishing. They know something’s wrong, but they don’t know what. This isn’t good, Axel.”

“You don’t . . . you don’t think . . . I mean, nothing could happen, not after all this time, could it?”

“Nothing serious, only that we might all go to jail and lose our inheritances,” she snapped.

She heard his gasp. “But what should we do now?” he whispered.

“Let me make sure I have this straight. This Sergeant Fukida wants to look into it, but he’s given John and Gideon a couple of days leeway before he gets started, and John is going to see Dagmar Tuesday? The day after tomorrow?”

“In the morning, yes. I think he wanted to head right over from here, but I told him she was in the hospital till tomorrow afternoon and it’d be better—”

“All right, that was good. Now be quiet, let me think.”

He continued making agitated little sounds, as if he were walking around in a circle talking to himself, which he probably was. “Christ,” she muttered, sticking the telephone in a saddle bag. She placed her hands on Betsy’s rump, leaned her forehead on her hands, and thought. When she got the telephone out of the saddlebag again, Axel was still chattering away.

“But there have to be some kind of statutes of limitation. Felix would know—”

“All right, here’s what we do,” she said, and Axel fell instantly silent. “This is not something that we want Dagmar to have to deal with on her own. You saw how shaky she was the other day. She’ll need some propping up.”

“I know, I know. That’s exactly what I was thinking—that we all better be there when John arrives—”

“No, how would that look? Axel, for a smart guy, you can be the most . . .” She sighed. “What we need to do is talk to Dagmar first, but, yes, everybody should be in on it. This concerns everyone, and everyone has a right to have their say. Here’s the way it’ll work: I’ll run down to the hospital tomorrow morning to drive her home.”

“She doesn’t get out till the afternoon.”

“Axel, for Christ’s sake, they’re not holding her prisoner! We don’t have a lot of time; we’ll cut the tests short. I’ll tell them to have her ready early, and I’ll explain everything to her on the way back. She’ll be tired, and this is going to upset her—”

“It’s sure upsetting me,” Axel mumbled.

“—so we’ll give her a few hours to rest and get herself together. We’ll all meet at, oh, one o’clock. Can you have everybody at her place by then?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to meet up here, maybe at your place?”

“Axel, will you please try and use your head for once? We don’t want John and Gideon to see us all getting together with her first, do we?”

“Oh. Well, I guess—”

“Don’t guess. Just get hold of the rest and have them there by one.”

“Everybody? But Felix is in Honolulu.”

She clenched her teeth. “I know that, little brother, but he is fully capable of catching a plane and being on the Big Island an hour after walking out his front door. We’re going to need him. He’s our lawyer.”

“All right, I’ll get right on it. ’Bye, Inge.”

“Axel?”

“Inge?”

“When I said ‘everybody,’ that didn’t include Malani. Don’t bring Malani.”

She could tell he was holding the phone away from his ear and staring at it. “Well, holy cow, Inge, I’m not stupid.”

“’Bye, Axel.”

 

 

WHEN Gideon and John got back to the house, they found Julie sprawled on one of two porch chairs, watching them and looking tired but contented. On a table next to her was a pitcher of iced orange-guava juice and two glasses.

“Pull up a couple of chairs. Malani’s in the house, putting together something to nibble. The glasses are in the dining room, in the cabinet over the—”

“I know where they are,” John said, going in to get some.

“You look happy,” Gideon said as he dragged over two more chairs. “Have a good day?”

“Very,” Julie said. “Malani showed me over the ranch. It’s huge. We rode for three solid hours. It was wonderful.” She rubbed her thigh and winced. “But I doubt if I’ll be able to walk tomorrow. I used muscles I forgot I even had.”

Gideon nodded. “Oho, the good old medial rotators. You don’t put much stress on them day-to-day, but you need them for hanging onto the horse with your knees. The adductors would have gotten a workout too: the brevis, the pectineus . . .”

“See? Didn’t I say he gives lectures?” John said, coming back with the glasses.

“I assumed she’d want to know,” Gideon said. “I know it will come as a shock to you, but some people are intellectually curious.”

“I most certainly did want to know,” Julie said loyally. “I’d been just about to ask.” She smiled affectionately at the two men, picked up the pitcher, and poured for them. “So how did it go at the police station? Did you come up with some good answers?”

“No, but we sure got some great questions,” John said. “I’m hoping Dagmar can help with the answers. I’m gonna go see her Tuesday morning.”

“Why Dagmar?”

By the time John, with Gideon’s help, had finished explaining, they were on their second glasses, and the three of them were covering the same ground and arriving at the same dead ends that they’d reached with Axel and with Fukida.

“John, aren’t you putting yourself in an uncomfortable position, talking to Axel, and now to Dagmar?” Julie asked. “These are your friends, not just some anonymous suspects.”

“Tell me about it. I am uncomfortable, Julie, but I already said I’d do it.”

“To Axel, right? Dagmar isn’t expecting you, is she? Are you sure you don’t just want to leave it to Sergeant Fukida? In the long run, it might be better.”

John hesitated, debating within himself. “Maybe I do, at that,” he said softly. “It’s not as if I really think there’s anything I can do for them. I can call Fukida and let him know the ball’s in his court, I’m out of it. Somehow, I don’t think he’ll complain.”

“I’m uncomfortable, too,” Gideon said. “It’s been bothering me all day.”

“What do you have to be uncomfortable about?” John asked.

“I’m uncomfortable about accepting these nice people’s hospitality at the same time I seem to be doing everything I can to sic the police on them, and totally upsetting their lives, and maybe losing them their inheritances. I can’t keep riding around in their pickup, eating their food, acting as if . . . well, as if everything is all right, when it’s clearly not. And most of it is my fault.”

“And the rest is mine,” John said.

“Obviously, this is not turning into much of a vacation—for any of us.” Julie said. She set down her glass with a thump. “I have a suggestion. I think we should all check out of Chez Torkelsson, go on down to one of those gorgeous resorts on the coast for a few days, forget about all this, and have ourselves a real vacation. Swim, sightsee, take in a luau, eat ourselves silly, and just relax in the sun. How does that sound?”

“Terrific,” said Gideon, brightening.

John shrugged. “Nah, I think I’d probably just go on home if you guys do that.”

“Have you seen the Seattle weather?” Julie asked him. “Let’s see, I think I remember: tomorrow, low clouds and scattered showers; Tuesday, showers in the A.M., increasing to steady rain, sometimes heavy, in the afternoon; Wednesday, cloudy with likelihood of heavy—”

John threw up his hands. “Okay, okay. Sounds awful.”

“And what about Meathead? You can’t forget Meathead,” Gideon said.

John laughed. “All right, you convinced me.” He sobered. “But how the heck do we tell Axel and Malani? That’ll be a little awkward.”

“That’s women’s work,” Julie said. “It takes a sensitive hand. You leave it to me. I’ll square it with Malani after dinner tonight, and we can leave tomorrow. I guarantee: no hurt feelings.”

As if on cue, Malani came out with a tray of crackers and mixed cheeses. “I thought I heard your voices,” she said cheerfully. “Good, let’s plan dinner.” She set the tray down and took a chair. “I want us all to get away from the ranch and go into town for a meal for a change. I don’t know about you, but if I have to look one more overdone steak in the eye, I . . . will . . . barf.”

“How about pizza?” John suggested hopefully. “We passed a Domino’s in Waimea.”

“We’ll eat Chinese,” Malani went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know a place.”

“Yes, ma’am,” John said.

“And now,” Malani said, putting a hand to her forehead and pretending to peer up at something through the surrounding tree branches, “the sun is over the yardarm. Who wants a glass of wine?”

In the kitchen, she got a bottle of Chardonnay out of the refrigerator and put it on the counter. Gideon, with the corkscrew in his hand, suddenly recalled something. “Malani, remember that box you couldn’t find the other day?”

She looked up from setting out four big wine glasses. “Box?”

“Yes, with the effects from the plane. You said it’d been on the counter, but—”

“Oh, that’s right, the one . . . well, I forgot to ask.” She put her head in the doorway to the living room. “Kilia!”

Kilia—short, fat, and energetic—trotted into the dining room with a cleaning cloth in her hand. “Yes, missus?”

“Kilia, remember the box those young men brought the other day? With the cup and that little ceramic map—”

“Sure, missus.”

“Did you put it away somewhere?”

“No, ma’am!” Kilia declared with a shudder. “That box and the one with the skeleton bones—I wouldn’t touch them things.”

“Thank you, Kilia. Well, not to worry,” she said to Gideon. “It’ll show up.”

 

 

AUNTIE Dagmar was getting old.

The thought hit Inge like a blow when she peeked through the open doorway of Dagmar’s room at Kona Hospital. She had certainly seemed depressed for a couple of days, but this was different. She was old. Old, and shrunken, and . . . frail. The ageing and shrinking had been going on for a long time but the frail was something new. So even Dagmar was not indestructible, she thought with a tiny, unanticipated catch in her throat; even Dagmar, who had seemingly been here since the beginning of time, was not permanent in this world.

The old woman was sitting hunched on the side of her bed, fully dressed in a black pant-suit, legs hanging down with her feet not reaching the floor, holding onto a small, blue, hard-sided suitcase that was set upright beside her. She’d put on lipstick and rouge for once, and her jet-black wig was actually on straight, but with her white, papery skin the effect was somewhere between clownish and ghoulish. She was like an ancient, wizened child—an unwanted wartime orphan—dumped in some deserted train station with her pathetic belongings, and waiting pitifully, hopelessly, for someone to come and get her.

“It’s about time,” she snapped when she saw Inge. “Rush, rush, rush, so I’m ready to be picked up, then wait, wait, wait. They didn’t even give me a breakfast. Help me down from here. I don’t suppose you thought to bring any schnapps?”

Inge smiled. That’s what she got for getting sentimental about Auntie Dagmar. “Never mind the schnapps, Auntie. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. We have a problem, a big problem.”

“I hate problems,” Dagmar said.

“Don’t worry, I have it all worked out.” She took Dagmar by one elbow—her arm was like a dried twig—and helped her down with the aid of a stepstool. “We just need to talk it over. Let’s go somewhere and get something to eat.”

“Now you’re talking. Island Lava Java? Cinnamon rolls?”

“Anything you want. But I don’t think they have schnapps.”

 

 

DAGMAR cut her cinnamon roll precisely in half and lathered one portion with the extra butter she’d ordered, but didn’t raise it to her mouth. Her coffee had been likewise creamed and sugared while Inge spoke, but otherwise untouched. She stared out at the tourists exploring Ali’i Drive, and at the sea wall on the other side of the street, and at Kailua Bay beyond. A white Norwegian Line cruise ship lay anchored a few hundred yards offshore and Kona was swarming with curious, tentative sixty- and seventy-year-olds in tank tops, flip-flops, and sunglasses. Even from their table, Inge could smell the sunscreen.

“No,” Dagmar said.

Inge stared at her. “No? No, what?”

“No, everything. I’m not going to sit there with people pulling me this way and that way, telling me what to be careful about and how to act and what to say when I talk to John, and what not to say. And I’m not talking to John either.”

Inge sighed. It was Dagmar’s nature to be recalcitrant; there was no point in becoming impatient. “It won’t be like that, Auntie,” she said kindly. “We can just come up with a few guidelines—topics to steer clear of—”

“It will be like that. Felix will order me to say this, you’ll order me to say that, Hedwig will lecture me on karma.” She picked up the piece of cinnamon roll only to put it down again. “No,” she said again, more firmly still. “I can’t remember what I told the police before, it was so long ago. They have a record of it. I’m bound to contradict myself. John would catch me. Isn’t he a detective or something now?”

“He’s an FBI agent.”

“Well, he used to be a detective.”

“He used to be a policeman in Honolulu—”

“Don’t keep changing the subject. That’s a bad habit you have. The point is, I can’t go through any more of that, where they harp on every word I said before. Impossible.”

“But what do you suggest, Auntie? You can’t avoid seeing him tomorrow.”

“I most certainly can.”

“How?”

“By going to see this Sergeant what’s-his-name and telling him the truth today.”

Inge was stunned. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. “But if you tell him the whole truth—”

“I didn’t say the whole truth, I said the truth.”

Confused, Inge jerked her head. “I don’t—”

Dagmar grasped her wrist. “Inge, think about what you just told me. What do they know? They know that Torkel changed identities with Magnus. What do they suspect? They suspect that I—that we—were aware of it and lied to protect him.”

“No, they also think we lied to protect our inheritances. Well, not you, because you got the same under both wills, but—”

“Yes, all right. So, do you think they’ll simply drop it now? It’s only a question of time until they ferret out what really happened. Isn’t it better to come out with it voluntarily, than to be caught in one lie after another, like rats in a trap?”

“But you’re not saying you’d tell them . . . ?”

“Everything? Of course not. I may be getting a bit senile, but I’m not crazy yet.”

“I see,” Inge said reflectively. It just could be that Dagmar had the right idea. The old lady might be getting frail, but not in the head. Still, there were problems. She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Auntie, there may be criminal charges involved. And . . . what about our inheritances? We could lose them.”

“Pooh, I don’t believe that for a minute. Not after so much time. There are statutes about such things. Felix can straighten out any problems.”

That was what Inge believed, too, but it was good to hear Dagmar say it. “But how will it look?”

“It will look as if everything possible was done to protect my dear brother and your dear uncle from the vicious assassins that threatened his life, even if the law did happen to be slightly violated in a technical sense. People will understand.”

Not so technical, Inge thought, and yet, the more Dagmar talked, the more convinced she became that this was the best course. People would understand. “The rest of the family, though—they might not like it,” she said. “This affects all of us.”

“Then they’ll have to lump it, won’t they?” Dagmar said cheerfully. Sensing Inge’s incipient agreement and satisfied with the way the conversation was going, she finally took a bite of the roll, smacked her lips, and licked butter from her fingers. “Now, Inge, dear, I imagine you’d like to argue with me about it for a while. Will fifteen minutes do? If it’s going to be longer, I’ll want another cup of coffee.”

“I’m not going to argue,” Inge said, laughing. “You have my complete support. Would you like me to be with you, or do you want to see him alone?”

“Suit yourself, dear,” Dagmar said. Her sharp gray eyes glinted happily from their parchmentlike folds of skin. She no longer looked frail. She was, as always, looking forward to stirring things up.

 

FIFTEEN

 

SERGEANT Fukida was in no mood to be trifled with. His annual mock-orange pollen allergy attack, late this year, had finally caught up with him as he’d gotten home from work the previous day, smiting him with itchy, runny eyes, headache, sinus congestion, achy joints, and all-around misery. With Chiyoko staying at their daughter’s on Oahu overnight, he’d had to fend for himself, which meant not only an absence of much-needed wifely care and sympathy, but a pathetic, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs over rice, representing the extreme limit of his culinary virtuosity. He’d taken a couple of allergy tablets at eight and gone to bed, another two at midnight, and two more at three A.M. when a stuffed nose had strangled him out of sleep. He’d awakened to the alarm at seven with a vicious antihistamine hangover and nasal passages that felt as if they’d been cleaned out with a paint-scraper.

Headachy, dull-brained, and generally mad at the world, he’d driven to work on a breakfast of microwave-warmed, leftover scrambled eggs and rice and three cups of tea. His plan was to tell Sarah, “No visitors, no phone calls,” to barricade himself in his cubicle, and to spend the day on paperwork, of which he had plenty to catch up on, sleeping through lunch, if at all possible. This was not a day on which he should be expected to deal with living, speaking human beings. Fortunately, there were no appointments or meetings on his calendar.

His plan did not work.

“Morning, Sarge, couple of ladies waiting in there to see you,” was Sarah’s gratingly cheery greeting. “They were sitting in the lobby when I got here.”

He stifled a groan. “To see me in particular, or anybody?” he asked, but without any real hope.

“Sorry,” Sarah said with a grin. “To see you. I checked with the lieutenant, and he said it’s you, all right.”

“You know what it’s about?”

“The Torkelsson thing.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have come to work,” he said bitterly. “My head is in no condition to deal with the Torkelsson thing.”

“Do you want me to—”

“No,” he said, drawing himself up and looking for the first time into the opening to his cubicle. He could just see a pair of black-pant-clad legs, the feet of which barely touched the floor. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Brave sergeant,” Sarah said. “Good sergeant.”

 

 

HE disliked them right off the bat. The old woman sat as if she owned the place, barely turning her head to cast a beady, disapproving eye on him as he entered his own office. The younger one, in jeans and Western shirt, sprawled in his other visitor’s chair like a man, legs akimbo, one booted ankle on the other knee. He didn’t much care for that either.

“We’ve been waiting some time,” the old woman told him.

Tough. He squeezed around the desk, took his seat, and looked at them inquiringly, his expression neutral.

“I am Dagmar Torkelsson,” the old lady said. “This is my niece, Inge Torkelsson Nakoa. Do you know who we are?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“You are familiar with the Torkelsson matter of some years ago?”

Fukida nodded.

“Excellent. We are here to correct certain misapprehensions that the police may have in regard to those events.”

You are here, Fukida thought, because Lau and Oliver had gone about their “discreet” inquiries like a couple of bulls in a china shop, rattling the teeth of the entire Torkelsson establishment. They were now aware that the lies they had told ten years ago had caught up with them, and unless he was mistaken he was about to hear some bogus, newly concocted version of events that would supposedly explain away the old contradictions and ambiguities. A little more fancy dancing by the doyenne of the clan to once again boggle the minds of the credible, gullible, Hawaii County PD. Well, let’em try. Irritable as he was, he was genuinely curious to see what they’d come up with. His headache, he found, had receded. He rearranged himself more comfortably in his chair and pulled a pad and pen to within easy reach.

“Misapprehensions?” he said.

The niece, Inge, spoke for the first time, doing her best to look helpful and remorseful. “You see, we weren’t entirely truthful before.”

No! Really? he thought but didn’t say. “In what way would that be, Mrs. Nakoa?”

After the briefest of glances between the two women, it was Dagmar who picked up the ball. “The fact is that we—all of us—have been aware from the beginning that the body in the hay barn was not that of my brother Torkel.”

He tried not to show his surprise, but an outright, unforced admission of this central, critical fact was not what he’d been expecting. What game were they playing? He felt himself suddenly off-balance. His headache stabbed at him again. “You were—?”

“Young man,” Dagmar said harshly, “will you kindly stop that wiggling? It makes it difficult to concentrate.”

“Wiggling?”

She made a series of irritated gestures toward the ballpoint pen that he was inarguably clicking open and shut, toward his tapping foot, toward the base of his chair, which creaked with every little bobbing movement of his body. Angrily, he made himself be still, but who the hell did this old—

It was time, he decided, to retake the initiative. “Do you also happen to be aware of who chopped off two of his toes to make us think he was Torkel?” he asked brutally.

“Yes,” Inge responded. “That was me.”

 

 

“THAT was you,” Fukida repeated stupidly, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Was he supposed to believe her? What were these two up to? Damn those allergy pills; the inside of his skull felt as if it were crammed with cotton balls.

“Uh-huh,” he went on. “You cut off the toes. And what did you use to do that?”

She replied without hesitation. “I used a Swiss garlic-chopper, a sort of tiny little cleaver. And a paperweight—it was the business end of an old branding iron—as a mallet, to drive it through.” She held an imaginary handle in one hand, pretending to tap it with an object in her other hand.

It has to be true, Fukida thought. Who could make up something like that? A Swiss garlic-chopper, for Christ’s sake.

“I think we better get this on the record,” he said. “Let’s go someplace a little more comfortable.”

 

 

HAPPILY unaware of what had been unfolding at the police department, Julie, Gideon, and John spent Monday morning acting on their decision of the day before. As Julie had promised, the previous evening she had extricated them from their awkward position at Axel’s and Malani’s without seriously raising anybody’s hackles. And early today they had checked in at the Waikoloa Outrigger, left their bags with the concierge, and breakfasted at the pool-side grill with a guilty but welcome sense of freedom. Then they had rented a Ford Taurus and driven down the South Kona coast to visit a few of John’s favorite places: the hidden-away black sand beach at Ho’okena, the Captain Cook Monument at Kealakekua Bay, the evocative and beautiful Pu’ohunua O Honaunau—the Place of Refuge Historical Park, a city of stone where ancients who had broken laws against gods or kings (who were much the same) could find sanctuary and avoid the all-too-frequent death sentences of the old days.

In the town of Captain Cook, they stopped at a farmers cooperative to watch the processing of macadamia nuts and pick up a few gifts to take home. Never once had the words “Torkel,” “Magnus,” “toes,” or “ring” come up.

On the way back, at Gideon’s urging, they stopped in Kona to visit a place that even John didn’t know about: a lovingly restored Hawaiian compound on a grassy tongue of land on the grounds of the King Kamehameha Hotel. From an anthropological point of view, Gideon told them, this was perhaps the most important site in Hawaii, the Ahu’ena Heiau, where the kind of event beloved of anthropologists had taken place over a century earlier; that rarest of occasions on which an entire society had changed literally overnight. It was here, in the largest and most impressive of the thatched structures, that Liholiho, son of Kamehameha, had sat down to dine in the company of women, thereby turning convention on its head and ending with one stroke a long-standing, strictly enforced tabu, and—eventually—totally changing the relationship of men and women in Hawaii. Gideon wandered about, enchanted: This would have been the lele, where subjects left gifts. Look, this must have been the oracle tower, this must have been . . . Julie and John trailed patiently along among the buildings and carved statues, making respectful noises until Gideon had his fill.

At a little before one, they were leaving the hotel’s parking lot, looking for a likely place to have lunch, when John, sprawled sidewise in the Taurus’s back seat and reading something that he’d brought along with him from the ranch, let out a yell.

“What?” He sat straight up and excitedly read aloud from the sheets of paper in his hand. “‘Among the interesting circumstances associated with them was the presence of a cartridge case partially embedded in the intervertebral fibro . . . fibrocartilage separating T8 and ...’” He shook the papers and practically moaned. “Doc, Doc, how could you not tell me about this?”

“John, what are you talking about? Is that the autopsy report? How’d you get it? I thought we weren’t supposed to—”

“This is a copy that clerk made. Sarah. She gave it to us, remember?”

“And you’ve had it ever since?”

“Yeah. Why didn’t you tell me about the cartridge case?”

“The case?” He barely remembered reading about it. “It didn’t seem important. Meikeljohn thought it was just some kind of freak accident. I didn’t want to bore you.”

“Okay, okay, never mind. Let’s get back on the highway. We gotta go see Fukida.”

“I thought you were all done—”

“So did I, but I was wrong.”

“Do we have to go right this minute?” Julie said. “I was just thinking that Greek restaurant up on the corner, with the outside balcony tables, looks very appealing.”

“Forget lunch, will you? We can eat later. We gotta go to the CIS.”

“Forget lunch?” Gideon murmured. “We can eat later? This must be serious.”

“You got that right,” John said.

 

SIXTEEN

 

“TEDDY, you got a forensics library here?”

They had left Julie in Kona—where she wanted to see the old church and royal palace—and barged in on Fukida, who was having a tuna sandwich on rye and a can of Diet Coke at his desk. He had a mound of files spread out in front of him, was wearing his Colorado Rockies cap, and he was thinking hard, staring out the window with a dreamy, thoughtful look on his face. Although the sandwich was in his hand, he wasn’t eating. Gideon and John’s entry snapped him out of his reflections and into a more characteristic temper.

“What is this, more Torkel-Magnus crap? What do you people think, I don’t have enough to keep me busy?”

“You got a forensics library?” John repeated.

“Sit down a minute. I got a little news for you two.”

“I got news for you, Teddy,” John said. Hands on his hips, he shifted from foot to foot, while they stared at each other. “So, I guess you’re not gonna tell me if there’s a forensics library?”

Fukida sighed and slapped down his sandwich. “Sarah!”

“My master’s voice,” floated over the partition from the clerical bullpen and in a moment Sarah herself followed. “You bellowed, sire?” She’d been having lunch, too. She was still chewing.

“Take this guy to the library, will you please?”

“Uh . . . the library?” she said doubtfully. “It’s lunch-time. The boys have their poker game going.”

“I’m not gonna bother them,” John said. “Oh, and I also need the report from ballistics, if there is one, Teddy. On Torkelsson.”

“What do you mean, if there is one? What kind of outfit do you think we run here?”

“I’m starting to wonder. So, can I look at it or not?”

“Give the man whatever he wants,” Fukida said with a magisterial wave. “Mi casa es su casa.”

As John left, Fukida motioned Gideon to a chair. “Sit, chief. You want a Coke or something?”

“No, thanks.”

“So what’s the big guy all excited about?”

“I have no idea, Sergeant. But it was important enough to skip lunch, so, whatever it is, hold on to your hat.”

Fukida went back to his sandwich. “May as well call me Ted,” he mumbled.

“Thanks, Ted.”

“As long as you’re going to be coming in here every day.”

“Not every day, I hope,” Gideon said, smiling. He saw now that the folders spread across Fukida’s desk were from the Torkelsson file. Now that was interesting. “You said there was some kind of news?”

“Plenty, but wait’ll Lau gets back. I don’t want to have to go through it twice.” He swiveled his chair to look out the window and chomped methodically, as if he were counting chews. “I wonder what he wants the ballistics report for.”

“Beats me. I don’t know if you know it or not, Ted, but one of John’s specialties at the Bureau is ballistics. He really knows his stuff. He lectures on it in Quantico every couple of years.”

“No, I didn’t know. I’m impressed. That’s a good outfit, the Academy. I took a fingerprint technology course there a little while ago; learned a lot. The kid’s come a long way. I knew he would. Don’t tell him I said that.”

At which point John came barreling into the room with an open book in one hand and a green folder in the other. “Here it is. Listen.” He held up the book so they could see the cover. “This is Di Maio, Gunshot Wounds. He’s talking about this case where this guy got shot in the knee, okay? Here’s what he says—”

“The knee?” Fukida exploded. “Who gives a shit about a guy who got shot in the knee?”

“The point is—”

“Sit down, Lau,” Fukida commanded. “I got something important to tell you.”

“Well, this is important, too. You think I—”

“Johnny, for the last time—”

“Okay, okay,” John said, taking the remaining chair. “You want to tell me? Tell me. See? I’m sitting down.” One conspicuous fore-finger remained in the book, marking his place.

“And listen.”

“I’m listening.” He closed the book and held up the finger for inspection. “See?”

“Okay. Now. Dagmar and Inge Torkelsson were in to see me a little while ago. Apparently, you two guys scared the bejesus out of Axel with that ‘discreet’ interviewing, and Axel called Inge, and Inge talked to Dagmar, and the two of them decided the best thing was to make a clean breast of it right now, before they got in even deeper.”

He folded his hands, started his thumbs circling around each other, and leaned back. “The brunt of it is, they all knew about the Torkel-Magnus switch from Day One—all of them, the whole damn family, and they all conspired to cover it up. They sat right here and admitted it.”

He sat back expectantly, waiting for their reactions.

Gideon wasn’t sure what his own was. Was he surprised? No, not really; not after the questions he and John had been raising the last few days. Did that mean he’d been expecting this? No, he couldn’t say that either. He’d known that a lot of the Torkelssons’ story was bogus, but he couldn’t say that he’d explicitly formed the theory that they were all involved in the switched identities. At the same time, he was conscious of a curious sense of anti-climax, as if he’d been anticipating something more, something worse, but what that might be he wasn’t sure.

Aside from that, did he feel exploited by them, made a fool of? Well, yes. They’d trundled him off to a humid, fly-infested atoll to do his thing when they’d already known perfectly well who was in that plane. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that he’d enjoyed the day, and Waikiki had been a pleasant interlude, so what was there to be angry about?

There was one other thing. When John had suggested visiting Dagmar at home that morning, hadn’t Axel said she’d be in the hospital till three in the afternoon, two hours from now? But obviously, she wasn’t. What was that all about?

But mostly he was confused, wondering once more why, if they knew about the Torkel-Magnus switch and wanted to keep it to themselves, they would have encouraged him, first to go to Maravovo, and then to examine the autopsy report. Surely they would have realized he might come up with the truth about the identities. Had they really thought he’d fail to notice the chopped-off toes?

John’s reaction was more defined. His face had darkened, his well-fleshed cheeks had flattened, and his chin had settled almost down to his chest. He was angry and he was hurt. “All of them knew?” he asked. “You’re including Axel in that?”

“Oh, yeah. They were all in on it, every last one of them.”

“Hell.”

“Well, listen to the story before you get too tough on him,” Fukida said. “Here’s the way they say it happened.”

The first part of Dagmar’s deposition was accurate, she had said. Torkel and Magnus had gone to the hay barn after dinner to put in some work, and there they had been attacked by two gunmen. That was so. But everything after that had been a lie. There had been no telephone call from Torkel pretending to be Magnus. Instead, he’d shown up at the house, dazed and cradling his bloodied hand. He’d explained to his sister that Magnus had been murdered, but he himself had managed to escape into the darkness, although one of the shots they’d fired after him had gone through his hand. He’d hidden on the roof of a nearby shed until well after they’d left, then walked the half-mile of dirt track back home.

“Who shot him?” Gideon asked. “Did he tell her, or was it just ‘them’ again?”

“She says he saw them, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know them. Had no idea who sent them. They just showed up out of nowhere. Two guys, both white, both on the small side, both with revolvers—”

“Revolvers?” John interrupted. “She said ‘revolvers’? Not just ‘pistols’ or ‘guns’?”

Fukida frowned. “She said ‘revolvers,’ but I’m not sure she knows the difference, or that Torkel was quick enough to see what they were carrying in the dark. She probably just meant handguns. Why, what’s the big deal?”

“Forget it,” John said. “Go ahead.” But Gideon caught a little tilt of his head that told him that he knew something they didn’t and was reserving it for later.

“Anyway,” Fukida said, absently getting a couple of thick rubber bands from a cup on his desk and slipping them over his wrist, “Dagmar telephones Inge, and Inge runs right over, and they doctor him up a little and try to tell him that the best thing to do is to go to the police right then and there, but he doesn’t want to hear it. The guy is in shock, and he’s scared to death they’re coming after him, too, and all he wants to do is get the hell out of there. Only where’s he supposed to go?”

“He had no idea who they were or why they were there, and yet he was positive they were coming back for him?” Gideon said. “Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”

“Guy was in shock,” Fukida repeated with a shrug. “That makes you strange.”

John held his counsel, looking more inscrutable by the minute.

Fukida continued: “At that point, they call the others over—Hedwig, and Axel, and the one that lives in Honolulu now—”

“Felix,” Gideon said.

“Felix, right. Felix the Cat. And they hold a war council. Everyone tells Torkel the best thing for him to do is to go straight to the police—”

“So they say now,” John said.

“So they say now,” Fukida agreed.

But nobody could convince him, Fukida continued. They couldn’t shake his certainty that he was next on the list. They finally gave up and, putting their heads together, came up with what would be their plan. Torkel would flee, heading for the tiny landing strip on the privately owned island of Tarabao, where Hedwig’s ex-husband, an osteopath turned beachcomber, now lived, and there he would stay until it was safe to return; they hoped, with luck, that it would be a matter of a few weeks or months. The idea of exchanging identities with Magnus was all Torkel’s. They had argued vociferously against it—

So they say now, Gideon thought.

—but had finally gone reluctantly along when they were unable to sway him. The leaving of the ring, the removal of the toes, and the burning of the hay barn were cover-ups following from that. And they decided that, if it was going to be done at all, it would be best if the responsibility for the deception was shared by everyone. So each niece or nephew had taken on a specific task. Inge and Hedwig had gone back to the hay barn, where Hedwig set the fire and Inge had forced the ring on his finger and removed the offending toes.

“What’d she use?” John asked.

“She used a Swiss garlic-chopper,” Fukida said.

“Come again?”

“A Swiss garlic-chopper. Like a miniature cleaver. With an old branding-iron paperweight as a mallet.”

John glanced at Gideon. “Score one for you, Doc.”

Gideon modestly shrugged it off. “Easy when you know how. I wonder what she did with them—with the toes.”

“I asked her that,” Fukida said. “They had pigs at the time. She said she tossed them in the trough.”

Gideon shuddered. “Tough lady.”

Axel’s job had been to drive the fainting Torkel to the airport, get the plane out of the hangar and gassed up, and get his uncle into it to await the arrival of the pilot. Felix had stayed the night with Dagmar to provide moral support and assistance once the fire and the body were discovered and the police and fire departments got into the act.

As soon as the Grumman had taken off, everyone but Felix had gone back to their homes. The spouses—Malani and Keoni—had been kept in the dark and fed the same story that the police were shortly to hear. Torkel was to call Inge the next day to let them know he was safe, but of course that never happened.

Fukida, now chewing a couple of sticks of spearmint gum, tipped his chair back and clasped his hands behind his neck, signifying that he had come to the end.

“It all fits,” John said half to himself. “It all goddam fits.”

“I don’t quite get it,” Gideon said. “Were they ever going to tell the police what really happened, or did Torkel plan on being Magnus for the rest of his life?”

“At the time, I don’t think they had it all worked out,” Fukida said. “They weren’t exactly doing a lot of long-range planning. They were all scared, not just Torkel.”

“And what about the wills?” John asked sourly. “Don’t tell me it didn’t occur to them that they were whole lot better off if Torkel was supposedly dead, gone, and out of the picture, and Magnus’s will would be the one that counted. They all profited from the switch.”

“I don’t know. They say that didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“And you buy that?”

Fukida stretched the thick rubber bands on his wrist. Gideon braced himself for the snap, but the sergeant just eased them back. “I think I do, yeah. I’d guess it didn’t cross their minds at the time.”

“Well, then, you have more faith in people than I do.”

“Not much. Because I would also guess it damn well did cross their minds later on, especially when they never heard anything from Torkel—and that it had a whole lot to do with why they stuck to their story. Right up until today.”

“Another reason being,” John said, “that it also occurred to them they’d committed all kinds of prosecutable offenses, jail-time offenses.”

“That, too.”

“What’s going to happen with the wills now?” Gideon asked.

“Not my worry. Question for the lawyers.”

“Are you going to reopen the criminal case?”

“Counsel’s checking the various statutes of limitation now. If there’s anything still actionable, you bet we are. I don’t like being jerked around like that.”

“They did come forward on their own,” Gideon pointed out, wondering why he was defending them.

“Yeah,” John said hotly, “but only because they were scared. And there’s something still actionable, all right. There’s no limitation on murder.”

Now rubber thwapped against flesh. “You see these people as accessories after the fact now?”

“Maybe before the fact.”

Fukida eyed him. “Now wait a minute. Are you saying you think they had something to do with the murder itself? I thought these were your buddies.”

John sighed. “Teddy, are you done? Can I tell you what I came here to tell you?”

Fukida crossed his arms, uncrossed them, turned his cap around backward, which made a boyish shock of black hair pop ridiculously out of the opening, and crossed his arms again. “I wish you would, already, instead of sitting there like the goddamn cat that ate the canary.”

“Okay, then, let me read what I was going to read before.”

“About the guy that got shot in the knee,” Fukida said with a sigh. “Sure, what else do I have to do today?”

“Just shut up and let me read.” He found his place in the book, cleared his throat, and began to read aloud, something he did clumsily.

 

... on surgical exploration there were found to be two bullets and a cartridge case in the knee joint. All three missiles entered through one entrance wound. The bullets were .32 ACP and .380 ACP caliber and the case was .32 ACP.

 

He looked up, scowling. “You guys following?”

“No,” said Fukida through his sandwich. Gideon had never seen anyone take such small bites, or work his way around the edges the way he did. The thing looked as if it had been nibbled by a family of rabbits.

“I’m following,” Gideon said. “It’s pretty much the same situation described in the autopsy report.”

“It’s the exact same situation.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. Two bullets through the knee is not the exact same situation as two bullets through the heart.”

John brushed this aside. “I’m talking about the situation with the bullets and the cartridge case. That’s the same.”

“Okay, so?”

“So this.” He went back to the book.

 

It was hypothesized that a .32 ACP cartridge was inadvertently put in a .380 automatic. The cartridge slipped forward, lodging in the barrel. A .380 ACP cartridge was then chambered. On firing, the .380 bullet struck the .32 ACP primer, discharging the cartridge. The whole complex of two bullets and one case was swept down the barrel, emerged from the muzzle, and entered the victim.

He slapped the book closed, tossed it onto the files on the crowded desk, and loomed over Fukida. “In other words, piggyback bullets!” he yelled, arms spread. “Tandem bullets! You ever hear of those before?”

“No!” Fukida yelled back up at him.

“Me neither,” Gideon said slowly, as John’s point sank in, “but I see where you’re going with this. You’re saying—”

John dropped back into his chair. “Right!” he said, still shouting. “I’m saying that it’s all baloney, the whole cockamamie story. There weren’t any hitmen, there wasn’t any execution, there wasn’t any—”

“Whoa-whoa-whoa,” Fukida interrupted. “Slow down, sport. Control yourself, breathe deeply.” He made calming motions with his hands. “Look, I’m just a simple island cop, I don’t know from piggyback bullets. You want to explain what the hell you’re talking about?”

John made a visible, not-altogether-successful effort to contain his agitation. “I am talking,” he said with excruciatingly precise diction, “about the old Walther semi-automatic that they had in the Big House back then. It was—”

“What big house?” Fukida asked.

“The Big House. It’s where Inge’s dude ranch is now. Back then, it was where Torkel, Magnus, and Dagmar lived. They built it—”

“Wait, goddammit! They had a gun right in the house?” Fukida made a disgusted gesture at the files. “I was just looking at the early interrogations. Dagmar was asked if they had one.” He poked irritably among the folders, looking for the right one to prove his assertion, but gave it up and batted them aside. “She said no, definitely not, except for some old varmint rifles that the section managers had.”

John shrugged. “She lied. What else is new?”

Fukida slowly shook his head. “These people.”

“John,” Gideon said, “is this the pistol you and Felix were talking about in Waikiki? I thought it didn’t work.”

“They said it didn’t work. Obviously, it worked, all right, only not real well. That’s exactly my point.”

Fukida swiveled in his chair to look at Gideon. “That’s his point? What’s his point, do you know?”

“I think so, yes,” Gideon said, and to John: “You’re saying that both of the bullets found in Magnus may have come from one gun—just the way they did in the guy that was shot in the knee. Right?”

“Right.”

Fukida considered, energetically cracking his gum for a few seconds before arriving at his conclusion. “Nah, I don’t think so. That’s too crazy.”

John sighed. “Jeez, Teddy, and you used to be so sharp. Look, the Walther was an old World War II job chambered for 9mm. short bullets. Now, what do we call 9mm. shorts in the States, or wouldn’t a simple island cop know that?”

“We call them .380 ACPs,” Fukida said slowly, and Gideon had the impression that he was starting to think that John just might be onto something after all.

“And what were the two bullets found in Magnus’s body?”

“Let’s see . . .” The tiny part of the tuna sandwich that was left was put aside again on its bed of waxed paper. “One of them was a .380 ACP. I forget what the other one was, but I got this hunch you’re gonna tell me it was a .32.”

John tossed the green folder he had with him—apparently the ballistics report—onto the desk. “I am. See for yourself.”

Fukida sat there. “Just like in your book.”

“Just like.” He patted the book.

“Okay,” Fukida said, “either I’m losing my mind, or you’re starting to make sense.” He paused and thought of something. “Or are you . . . ?” He reached for the ballistics report after all. “Let me see that thing.”

There were three sheets in the folder. Fukida found what he was looking for on the second.

“Here, listen”:

 

Comparison microscopic examinations were made involving the submitted .32 and .380 ACP bullets. Based on the total dissimilarity of rifling class (the .32 was free of rifling marks; the .380 ACP was deeply and distinctively marked) and the absence of individual characteristics common to the two missiles, it is the conclusion of the examiner that the bullets were fired from different weapons.

In the case of the .32, the absence of rifling marks suggests that the weapon was either a zip gun, a smooth-bore pistol or rifle, or a revolver, the barrel of which had been removed to prevent the imparting of such marks. In the case of the .380, the weapon was most likely a semi-automatic pistol.

 

“The lab guys in Honolulu are good, Johnny,” he said, closing the folder. “You know that. If they say two different guns, I have to accept it. They don’t make that kind of mistake.”

“Well, this time they did, but it wasn’t their fault. The rifling didn’t match, that’s true, but there was a reason. See, the .380 would have gotten grooved when it went down the barrel, just the way it was supposed to. But the .32 would have been too small for the Walther’s barrel. It just slipped on through without getting grooved.”

Fukida leaned back and nodded. “You’ve really thought this through.”

John was transparently pleased at the closest thing to a compliment he’d gotten from his old superior. “Thanks, Teddy. It makes sense if you think about it. Doc here doesn’t think so, though.”

Gideon hadn’t realized his doubts were that apparent. John was getting to be as good as Julie at reading his face—a sobering thought. “No,” he said, “what you’re saying makes a whole lot of sense. I’m just wondering why the crime lab was so off-base. Why didn’t they come to the same conclusion?”

“Simple,” John said. “First of all, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day of the week. Second, all they had to go on were the two bullets. They didn’t know about the cartridge case. It was never forwarded to Honolulu. And without that, there’s no way they’d come up with what really happened. I wouldn’t have, either.”

“We didn’t forward—?” Fukida leaned over, snatched the folder back from John, leafed furiously through the three pages, and threw it back down with a groan. “It’s true. They never got it. I can’t believe it.” He tore off his cap and tossed it onto the desk as well.

“Ah, these things happen,” John said kindly.

Gideon knew that they did indeed, and a great deal more often than most people realized. Some clerk or officer down the line, reasoning that Ballistics’ job was to examine bullets and weapons, had decided, probably without giving it any conscious thought, that cartridge cases, being neither bullets nor weapons, were not to be sent on to the ballistics lab. Many an otherwise solid prosecution had fallen apart as the result of similar innocent, reasonable errors of judgment and omission.

“Not on my watch, they don’t,” Fukida said grimly. He stood and went to the window. Leaning on the sill, he watched a white airliner lift off over the lava fields, wheel overhead, almost directly over the police station, and head for Honolulu. “You sure had it right, Johnny,” he said, shaking his head. “This whole thing has been a royal screw-up right from the get-go.”

“But it’s not like it’s your fault, Ted,” John said. “You weren’t even on the case.”

An awkward period of silence followed while Fukida continued to stare blindly out the window. “So,” he said quietly, “the hitmen were bullshit after all. So who killed Magnus?”

“Gotta be Torkel,” John said. “Why else would he run? Why else would he change his identity? Besides which, the gun was in his house.”

“It was Dagmar’s house, too,” Fukida said. “She must have known where the gun was. And anyway, couldn’t any of them—Axel, Inge, the whole bunch—have gotten to it if they wanted to?”

“Yeah, but ‘any of them’ didn’t secretly take off in the middle of the night and run for it. ‘Any of them’ didn’t change identities with his brother. That’s not something you do—give up your whole life, give up who you are—unless you’ve got a hell of a reason for it. Nah, Torkel’s our man.”

Gideon saw it that way, too. “And the others have been covering for him ever since—to protect him.” A moment later he added: “And their inheritances.”

“And themselves,” said Fukida. “If even half of this is true—”

“It’s true,” John said.

“—they committed a bookful of crimes. Add that to what they told me today—”

“Yeah, but I wonder if any of that’s true,” John muttered.

“Oh, yeah, some of it is, all right. They told me exactly what the accelerants were and where they were placed. It squared right down the line with the arson report.”

“And the garlic-chopper,” Gideon added. “That fits the facts, too. A lot of other things wouldn’t have.”

“Besides which, who could make up something like that?”

“It looks like the only thing that slipped their minds was who actually killed Magnus,” John said wryly.

“You don’t suppose it’s possible that they honestly didn’t know?” Gideon wondered aloud. “That Torkel hoodwinked them, too?” He looked at their expressions. “No, I guess not.”

“Get real,” John said.

“All right, then, isn’t it possible that Torkel and Dagmar together hoodwinked the rest of them? If the two of them came up with the hitmen story, then got on the phone to the nieces and nephews, how would any of them know any better?”

“Well, now, that’s possible,” John said.

“That old lady, she’s a piece of work,” Fukida said almost admiringly. “One way or another, she’s in it up to her hips. I think I’m gonna go have another talk with her tomorrow.”

“Teddy, I was planning to talk to her tomorrow morning, too,” John said. “Can I go with you? I know her pretty well. Maybe I could help.”

“I thought you weren’t going to—” Gideon began.

“That was then. This is now. I’m not crazy about being jerked around either.”

“Sure, you can come,” Fukida said. “That’d be good. You’re at the Outrigger? I’ll pick you up at a quarter to nine. I hope you weren’t thinking of coming, Gideon. I’d have to say no to that.”

“No, sir, count me out. I’m on vacation.”

Fukida laughed. “That’s right, screw everything up for everybody else, then opt out and say you’re on vacation. Very nice.”

“Always happy to be of help.”

Fukida played a quick rat-tat-tat on his thighs and reached for the phone. “Okey-doke, I’m gonna get a warrant.”

“What for?” John said. “You don’t need a warrant to talk to—”

“Not for Dagmar. A search warrant. For the Big House. I thought I’d see if that old Walther just might still be around.”

“You think they’d have kept it all these years?” Gideon asked doubtfully.

“Probably not, but it can’t hurt to look. I’m gonna send a couple of guys out right now.”

“Right now?” John said. “You can get a warrant just like that?”

“Watch me,” Fukida said and punched a button on his phone.

 

SEVENTEEN

 

“DON’T be greedy, Einar,” Dagmar said absently, watching the largest of the sea turtles nudge its fellows aside in pursuit of a fast-sinking gobbet of bran-raisin muffin. “You’ve had your share.”

As had they all. This was an unscheduled feeding, the result of an abundance of leftovers from the pastry basket she’d ordered when that horde of nephews and nieces had unexpectedly descended on her, exuding concern for her welfare and consideration for her feelings.

God damn them to hell.

For once, the lovely cove and her old friends the green turtles had failed to work their magic. Her mind, far from being calmed, strummed like tightened wire with what seemed like a hundred emotions: frustration, shame, disgust with her spineless, selfish family—so strikingly different from her own generation—anger at being exploited by them, anger at being a weak old woman . . .

At first, the meeting had gone as well as could have been expected. Of course, there had been the predictable eruptions from the weak ones—Hedwig and Axel—on hearing that she’d gone to Fukida. How could she have taken it upon herself to do such a thing? What would happen to them now? Would they all go to jail? What did this mean for their inheritances? Would everything now go to the Swedish Seamen’s Home?

But Felix, all puffed up with noisy self-importance like the lawyer he was, had overridden and pacified them. If they thought about it for a moment, they would see that Auntie Dagmar had done nothing so terrible. Statutes of limitation made it unlikely that the police would find it worth their while to reopen the investigation or begin a new one. As to the Swedish Seamen’s Home, there was little to fear, due to the delightful legal principle known as adverse possession: Once property had been held without challenge for a prescribed period of time, the courts would frown upon the bringing of new suits. And, as fortunately happened to be the case, that period of time was almost always considered to be . . . ten years. So in order to challenge the Torkelssons’ right to their land, the Seamen’s Home would have to prove—not merely assert—intent to defraud. That they might try to do so was of course possible, but given the passage of a decade, the imponderables of proving anything in court, and the enormous hassle and legal costs of mounting such a suit, Felix would be very surprised if it were to come to anything.

And even in the unlikely event that it did, that a suit was actually brought, then the Seamen’s Home would be up against the hoary old concept of res judicata: A thing, once settled by a competent court (as in probate), was not to be subject to future litigation . . .

The sludgelike flow of verbiage had soothed them. Everyone had settled down. Then came the call from Keoni. Inge, who took it, came back as pale and frightened as Dagmar had ever seen her. The police had been to the Big House—were even at that moment in the house—with a search warrant: They were looking for—Inge closed her eyes as if she were wishing the reality away—a World War II model Walther PPK semi-automatic pistol.

After the first mute shock, all hell had broken loose. Even Felix was at a loss to put a good face on the clear meaning of this development: The police had somehow concluded that the story of the unidentified assassins was a sham; that Magnus had been killed with a weapon that had been in his own home. Of course, they wouldn’t find it; the gun had been rusting in fifty feet of water off Upolu Point ever since that night. But that didn’t change the horrific implication: The police knew.

They had all turned on Dagmar at that point, even Felix, even Inge. Why couldn’t she have left well enough alone? What had she told Fukida that could have led him to this?

Nothing, nothing, she had bawled back at them—Inge was there, Inge knew! To her dismay, her voice had cracked and spiraled into a witch’s shriek. At that point, Felix had outshouted them all and taken control again. This was no time to panic and hurl accusations at each other. More than ever, they had to stick together, be a family. They were most certainly in serious trouble now. Their inheritances, their very freedom, were in jeopardy. Still, all was not lost. Fukida couldn’t know what had really happened, he could only suspect. There was still time to avert disaster, but they had to put on their thinking caps . . .

It was Axel, of all people, who had come up with a plan. If Dagmar was willing to bend the truth just a little more—what little truth still remained to bend—she could save them all. If not, it was all over. Their futures, their very lives, were in her hands, in the hands of their dear Auntie Dagmar.

No, it was impossible, she had told them. She had borne the brunt of this for too long already. She couldn’t remember what she’d told the police before, and now, with this new trumped-up story they were thrusting on her (“tweaking the facts a tiny little bit,” Axel called it), how did they expect her to keep everything straight? How could she avoid tying herself in knots? They weren’t stupid, these detectives, they were bound to see through her, and then where would everybody be? And she was sick to her soul of bending the truth and said so. But in the end, worn out by the ceaseless prodding, by the endless self-justifications and airy reassurances, she had knuckled under to them, too old and too tired to fight any more.

Yes, she understood how much more important it was to all of them than it was to her, but by God, it had stuck in her craw. What about her? What they were asking her to say, if she understood it correctly (and she wasn’t at all sure she did), was tantamount to admitting to the police that she’d been guilty of committing a crime, a serious crime. What would happen to her? But Felix had poohpoohed this, blandly assuring one and all that the authorities would never prosecute an eighty-two-year-old woman, an island legend, for a few transgressions committed ten years before in an effort to protect the life of her one living brother and to help her beloved family through a difficult time. Besides, there were statutes of limitation that applied, blah blah blah. No, no, nothing at all to worry about there.

Easy for him to say.

The last of the pastries had been thrown to the turtles now, and she abstractedly wiped her fingers on the linen napkin. The turtles, not so different from her nieces and nephews, turned and swam off the second they saw they had nothing more to get from her. She filled the cap of her flask with aquavit, drank, and refilled it. It had been a long time since she’d been really soused, but if this wasn’t a good day to get soused, she didn’t know what was. Tomorrow would be time enough to deal with her problems.

There were a few crumbs left on the liner of the pastry basket and without knowing it she lifted them to her mouth with a moistened finger. She had lit a cigarillo earlier but had let it go out after one puff; her throat was too tight and raw to smoke. A few more tipples would take care of that.

When she heard a footstep on the gravel path behind her she instinctively reached for her wig, but then changed her mind. The hell with it, it was far too early for the good-looking kid with her dinner, and who else did she need to put on any pretenses for? She was eighty-two years old, she had a right to be going bald if she wanted to. If whoever it was didn’t like it, that was too bad for him, he could just keep going.

So deeply was she mired in resentment and recrimination that his presence didn’t register again until she sensed it just behind her. Her neck prickled. He was standing too close. She didn’t like that, didn’t like anyone looking right down at the top of her scalp. She should have slipped the wig on, damn it.

He was so close now that she felt his belt buckle brush against the back of her head. Repulsed, she pulled angrily to one side to get away from him. “Now see here—”

But when his hand clamped on her shoulder from behind like some terrible talon, the air went out of her, as much from astonishment as pain. What . . . what . . .

Too quickly for her to absorb, his other hand closed on her wrist, and she was somehow no longer in contact with the earth, but flopping wildly in the air, dropping like a stone toward the sharp, black rocks that rimmed the cove. She goggled at them, and then at the cloudless blue sky as she tumbled, mouth open, eyes wide with incomprehension.

What ... what ...

 

EIGHTEEN

 

THE needle-sharp bisection of the North Kohala lowlands into parched lava fields and huge, lavish coastal resorts is stunning. On one side of the coast highway is a brown, dusty, lifeless plain of a’a lava. On the other is the lushest landscape that can be imagined: thick, soft grass, palm trees, frangipani, jacaranda, glorious masses of wonderfully fragrant blossoms—red, orange, white, purple. Two people could walk along the border, practically hand in hand, for miles, with one in a moist, green land of tropical plants, bright colors, and verdant lawns all the way, and the other never leaving a blasted, barren moonscape of jagged, dun-colored rocks.

Taking the turnoff for the Outrigger and the other Waikoloa area resorts, John, Julie, and Gideon turned abruptly from the latter into the former, heading down a broad, curving parkway lined with lush trees and redolent with every sweet smell of the tropics.

“I’ve been thinking . . .” Julie began.

“Uh-oh,” John said. He’d been in one of his funks ever since the session with Fukida, and this was as close as he’d come to a coherent sentence in a while. They’d picked up Julie, had a late lunch at the Greek restaurant, and headed back to the hotel, all without any notable input from him.

Gideon looked over his shoulder at him. “John, do you know that whenever anybody says, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say, ‘uh-oh’?”

“Not anybody. Mostly just you two.” He laughed and sat himself up straighter in the back seat, signs that he was ready to rejoin the world. As his funks went, it had been a long one.

“What have you been thinking, Julie?” Gideon asked.

“Well, you know how you keep wondering why they let you get involved with this thing in the first place? I think I know.”

That surprised him. “Why?”

“Well, who exactly asked you to go out to that atoll?”

“They all asked him,” John said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed.

“No, that’s not what you said when you first told me about it. You said Malani asked you.”

We did? Gideon thought.

“Umm . . .” said John, thinking.

“Yes, you did. You said she was the one that called the salvage company, and when she came back from talking to them, she said—”

“She said they didn’t know how to handle skeletons,” Gideon remembered, “and she volunteered me.”

“That’s right, and why wouldn’t she? From what Inge and Dagmar said, she didn’t know anything about the cover-up. She didn’t know there was anything to hide.”

“That’s a good point, but look, they all agreed to it, no objections. Why would they do that? Felix even put us up in Honolulu.”

“What choice did they have?” Julie countered. “Think about it. How would it have looked if they said no you couldn’t, after the salvage company said they wanted you and you said you would?”

“But how could they not have worried that I’d find out it was Torkel in that plane? You’d think they’d have come up with some excuse, any excuse, to keep me from—”

A snort of laughter came from the back seat. “They didn’t worry because you told them there was nothing to worry about.”

“I told them?”

“You said—and I pretty much quote—that with any luck you could maybe tell the age, the sex, the race, and, um . . .”

“The approximate height,” Gideon supplied. “All of which would have fitted Magnus as much as it did Torkel. I think you’ve hit on it, Julie. Malani didn’t know she was putting her foot in it—”

“Or Torkel’s foot,” John said, throwing up his hands. “Sorry.”

“—but when she did, the others went along with it because they thought they were safe. Good thinking, Julie. That’d explain it.”

“Amazing,” John said. “She wasn’t even there and she remembers it better than we do.”

“Thank you,” Julie said happily. “Shall I go on?”

“There’s more?”

“Oh, yes. Who was it that got you to look at the autopsy report after you got back from the atoll?”

John and Gideon looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Malani?” they both offered.

She nodded crisply. “Yes. And I was there for that one.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said, thinking back to the gathering on Axel’s porch. “Malani was the one who forced the issue . . . again.”

“That’s right, she was,” John said. “Malani’s like that. If she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t hang back.”

“But this time the others did,” Gideon said. “Remember? Hedwig wanted to put me in a lotus leaf instead, and Axel didn’t want to stir things up, and Inge wanted to let him rest in peace—”

“But then the two of you convinced them they’d better have you do it, right?” Julie said. “So it was like the first time. How could they say no without making it obvious they were covering something up—even if they thought you might find out about the ring?”

“Ah, ah!” John exclaimed; he was completely back in form now. “But they didn’t think we were going to find out about the ring. The ring wasn’t in the autopsy report, it was in the case files! And as far as they knew, we weren’t going to be looking at the case files!”

Gideon slowly nodded. “It all makes sense.”

Julie tapped her mouth, covering a yawn of mock boredom. “Anything else I can help you boys with, you just let me know. Oh, look, here’s the Outrigger. Swimming pool, here I come. And I’m for another moratorium through tonight. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Me too,” Gideon said.

John raised his hand. “Count me in. Enough is enough.”

 

 

FAUSTINO Parra arranged the place-setting the way the old lady liked it on windless days like this: on the round, glass-topped table at the foot of her terrace, with the Spanish-tile fountain behind her and the big blue Pacific spread out in front of her. He removed three of the four chairs—they made her feel lonely, she said—and opened the zipper of the thermal carton a couple of inches more so that her dinner wouldn’t continue to baste in its own juices. Oyster stew, grilled moonfish with black-olive polenta and shiitake mushrooms, and, in a separate cooler bag, a half-bottle of Sauvignon blanc and a macadamia-nut torte topped with currants, whipped cream, and toasted coconut for desert. For a woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she could certainly put the stuff away, he thought respectfully. Not that a lot of it didn’t go to the turtles, of course.

He stood back, took one more look at the setting, straightened the silverware so that it lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the bamboo place mat, nodded with satisfaction, checked his bowtie to make sure that it was straight, and went to find her at her cove, looking forward to bringing her back.

He hadn’t always looked forward to it. At first, he’d actively disliked her. It didn’t seem right to him that a woman—let alone a woman of that age—smelled morning and night like the inside of a bar after a hard day: booze and cigars. And the way she waited for him to offer his arm, as if she was the queen of Hungary or something. That wasn’t part of his job and he’d resented it. She hadn’t made things any better when he handed her her first bill to be signed. “Now Raymond,” she’d said (sometimes it was “Raymond,” sometimes “Steven,” once in a while “Faustino”), “let’s get something clear right at the start. I can’t be bothered with calculating percentages every time I sign for something, you understand? So you keep track of what you bring, and whenever the amount comes to four hundred dollars, you tell me and I will tip you accordingly. Is that satisfactory?”

What could he say but yes? But in his heart he simmered. Why should he have to ask for his tip? It was demeaning. More than that, he assumed it was her way of getting out of tipping him at all, in hopes that he wouldn’t have the nerve to bring it up. But he had, and two weeks later when he told her that her bill to date had been $405.24, she smiled and handed him two crisp fifty-dollar bills that she’d had all ready and waiting—over and above the automatic eighteen percent that had already been added for service.

It had blown him away. And it was in cash, that was the best part. Nothing to go into the service pool, nothing to be declared as income. It had made all the difference in the world. He still didn’t like the way her breath smelled, and he still didn’t like the way her fingers dug into his arm like hard little toothpicks, but she was good for a minimum of $200 a month, his best customer by a mile; he’d come to depend on it. More than that, he’d eventually come around to actually liking her. After you got to know her, you began to see her good side. She was generous, she was funny, she had a lot of good points.

And now he had another $400 to report; $418, actually, but nowadays he returned her generosity by regularly rounding down, something that made him feel good. Besides, he suspected that she kept a more accurate account than he did, so it was another way of staying on her good side. His money had really been due that morning, when he’d brought the pastries, but she’d had company and he didn’t like asking in front of them.

As he approached the curve that opened onto the promontory he paused to scuff his feet a bit on the gravel so that she’d have time to get that pathetic wig on, but when he rounded it he came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t there waiting for him; something that had never happened before in all these months. There was an empty, overturned pastry basket on the ground next to the bench, and on the bench itself there was something black, silky . . . the wig.

His throat constricted. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. He crossed himself without knowing it, held his breath, took two quick steps to the rim of the promontory, and looked over.

“Oh, my God,” he said and turned his face away, retching.

 

 

“CALL for you on two,” Sarah told Fukida over the telephone.

“Who?”

“Two people on the line. Ms. Sakado, the day manager at the Mauna Kai, and a waiter named Faustino Parra—who’s a little hysterical, so be gentle with him.”

“What’s it about, do you know?”

“Something about the Torkelssons again.”

He laughed a little wildly. “Of course. What else could it be? Why did I bother asking?”

“You can handle it, boss. I have complete confidence.”

He punched the button for line two. “Sergeant Fukida,” he said, doodling horses on his note pad, “how can I help you?”

Five seconds later the doodling had stopped. The pen had been thrown down. “Jesus. We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone within fifty yards of her.”

 

 

ARRANGED neatly over a low glass table on the broad, columned terrace of the Outrigger on a sunny morning, overlooking an agreeable panorama of man-made streams, waterfalls, and exquisitely tended tropical gardens, the lurid photographs seemed wildly out of place: blood and trauma and violent death.

Julie and Gideon had met John for morning coffee while John waited to be picked up by Fukida on the way to Dagmar’s house just a couple of miles up the coast. They had gotten lattés and muffins at the lobby coffee bar and carried them out to the terrace to enjoy them in the fresh air. When Fukida hadn’t shown up at 8:45, as agreed, they’d gotten seconds on the lattés. At 9:05, he arrived.

“Hey, you’re late,” John began, “I thought you were the one who always—” But the look on Fukida’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter?”

Fukida hesitated, looking at Julie. “And this lady . . . ?”

“My wife, Julie,” Gideon said. “Julie, this is Sergeant Fukida.”

Fukida nodded a curt greeting and sat down. “Dagmar’s dead,” he said.

He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, trousers that almost but didn’t quite match it, and a nondescript tie. No baseball cap. He seemed diminished, like an over-aged, undernourished department store clerk.

The three of them stared at him and he quickly explained. Her body was discovered by a waiter from the Mauna Kai at five o’clock the day before, at the base of a twenty-foot cliff near her house.

John closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Ah, no.”

“The doc says death occurred somewhere between noon and four yesterday, resulting from severe injuries to the head, apparently from the fall.”

“An accident?” Gideon asked. “Or—”

That was when the photographs came out. “You two are good with pictures. You tell me.” But he held on to them, looking at Julie before laying them out. “These are pretty graphic, ma’am. You might not want to—”

“That’s all right, I’ll stay,” Julie said, which surprised Gideon. “I want to know. There was something about her,” she said to him by way of explanation. “I liked her. . . .”

“Yeah, and if you’re married to him, I guess you’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Fukida said, fanning the photos out over the table. “So where do you get the coffee?”

They pointed him toward the coffee bar, and as he left they began going through the color photos. Fukida had apparently brought only a select few; six altogether. Gideon lifted the first one. It had been taken at the top of the promontory, an overview of the bench and the area around it.

“What is that, her wig?” Julie asked.

“Looks like it,” said John. “So we know one thing it wasn’t, anyway.”

“Right, we know it wasn’t suicide,” Gideon agreed. “People like to look nice when they kill themselves. She’d never have done it, letting strangers find her without the wig.”

“Not Auntie Dagmar, that’s for sure,” John said.

The rest were photographs of the body, going from full-body shots to close-ups of Dagmar’s bloodied head. Julie swallowed and looked away once or twice, but stuck it out. One of them had been made after unbuttoning the top two buttons of Dagmar’s blouse and pulling it down over her right shoulder.

“It seems . . . indecent,” Julie said. “A dignified, private old woman like that—dead, helpless—exposed to public view like a . . . like a . . .”

“It has to be done,” John said softly. “And not many people see these.”

“I know that.”

“Ah, look at this,” Gideon said. He tapped the area just to the right of her bared neck, where even Dagmar’s scrawny trapezius muscle created a triangular cushion of flesh above the collar bone. “These three blueish spots . . . you can hardly see two of them . . . that’s extravasated blood just under the skin.”

“Would that be ‘bruises’ in English?” Julie asked.

“Yes, bruises.”

“Fingermarks,” John said.

Gideon nodded. He poured a little coffee onto a napkin, wet his index finger, middle finger, and ring finger with it, and grasped the edge of the table, his thumb underneath, pinching hard. When he lifted his hand, there was a curving row of three spots on the glass, to all intents and purposes exactly like the bruises on Dagmar’s shoulder.

“Somebody grabbed her from behind—hard—maybe while she was sitting on the bench.” He gently placed his fingers on Julie’s shoulder to illustrate, his thumb in back.

She shivered. “And pushed her over the edge?”

“Looks like it.”

“So what’s the verdict?” Fukida asked, coming back with his cardboard cup of coffee; the four-dollar vente size.

“Murder,” John said. “You agree?”

“Sure, no question about it. Also—and this you probably can’t tell from the pictures—she was laying a good four feet from the base of the cliff. No way did she just fall off, or even jump. Somebody shoved her, good and hard.”

“Or threw her,” Julie said. “How hard would it have been? She’s nothing but skin and bones.”

“That’s true, too.”

“Fingerprints?” John asked.

“No.”

“Did you check the bench? The paint might have been soft from being out in the sun, there might—”

“Johnny, for Christ’s sake! Of course I checked the bench. We dusted everything. Give me a little credit, will you?”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, whoever did it wore gloves.”

“How can you know that?” Julie asked.

“We picked up some glove-leather impressions. One on her watch, one, maybe two, on the bench.”

“Glove smears,” John said. “That’s not gonna do you much good.”

Fukida shrugged. “Yeah, well.”

“What about suspects?” Gideon asked, handing back the photos.

“Oh, yeah, suspects, we got suspects.” He sucked coffee through the opening in the lid, made a face, and twisted the lid off to get a healthy mouthful. Gideon could smell the sprinkling of chocolate on top. “The kid that found her, the waiter, he was there earlier, too, delivering pastries to her at about one—”

“One?” John interrupted. “Wait a minute, that means the noon end of the TOD range is wrong. It had to be after that.”

Fukida put a finger to his temple and looked archly at him. “Whoa, not too much gets by this guy.”

“Duh,” John said, not taking offense.

“And the kid told us she had company. Guess who.”

“Inge?” Gideon answered on the spur of the moment.

“Hedwig?” John offered. “Axel?”

“Right, right, and right. Also Felix the Cat, all the way from sunny Waikiki. The whole sorry bunch of them.”

“Felix?” John repeated. “Must have been important to bring him over. Do you know what it was about?”

“No. The kid says he didn’t hear anything, but they looked like they weren’t having any fun. He thought they were fighting about something and shut up when he came in. He said Dagmar looked really upset.”

“What do you think it was about?”

“What do you think it was about?”

“I think they were having a strategy session,” John said bluntly. “Figuring out where they go from here, coming up with whatever new cockamamie story they were going to befuddle you guys with.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“And so those are your suspects?” Gideon asked. “The nieces and nephews?”

“Who else? Last people to see her alive . . . fighting about something . . . all kinds of nasty, threatening things popping on the old case . . . sure, they’re my prime suspects, you bet. Well, and the two spouses, too—Malani and what’s his name, Keoni. They’ve got a stake in this, too. My guess at this point is that one of them—who knows, maybe more than one of them—wanted to make absolutely sure she never told anyone what really happened.”

“Yes,” Julie said nodding, “I remember, the other day when we were all talking on Axel’s porch, she looked really depressed, really tired. She talked about being ready for it all to come out.”

“Well, there you go.” Fukida was impatiently twirling the cup lid on the table, leaving little rings of foam. He was ready to leave. “Well . . .”

“And at this point, we think the real story is that Magnus was murdered by Torkel?” Gideon suggested.

“That . . . or by one of the nephews—or nieces.”

John looked hard at him. “Are you serious about that, Teddy?”

“I’m serious about it as a possibility, yeah, you bet.” Fukida tipped the cup all the way up to finish his coffee, sucking up the last of the foam, and stood. “Everybody’s being interrogated today, this morning. I’m on my way to talk to Inge now, and I’ve got two of my detectives going to see Axel and Hedwig.”

“What about Felix?”

“Honolulu PD is helping out there. We gave them a list of questions. I want everybody talked to at about the same time so they can’t compare notes ahead of time.”

“That’s good,” John said.

“I’m glad you approve.” Fukida paused before leaving, leaning on the back of his chair. “I’m not asking you along, Johnny. You’ve done great, but I think maybe it’s time for you to step out of this.”

“You’re not gonna get any argument from me on that. If I never see any of that lousy bunch again, it’ll be too soon.”

When Fukida had gone, the three of them sat looking out over the gardens toward the sea. “What awful news,” Julie said, following which there was a long silence.

“I have to get away from here,” John said, still staring out to sea. “I just don’t want to hang around here anymore.”

“You’re ready to go home?” Julie asked sympathetically.

“Not if I can help it, not while Meathead is still loose. But my sister Brenda wants us all to come down to Hilo. You guys interested?”

“That’s your sister who’s a park ranger?” Julie asked. “I’d love to meet her.”

“Right, at Volcanoes. You two would have a lot in common. So I’ve been thinking—”

“Uh-oh,” Gideon said.

John responded with a fleeting smile. “—that we could head down south today, maybe get rooms at Volcano House for a couple of nights—it’ll be a whole lot cheaper than the Outrigger, I can tell you that. We could go up into Hilo for dinner with Brenda and her family tonight, and then maybe tomorrow Brenda could show us around the park. What do you say?”

“Sounds good,” said Gideon.

“I’d love it,” Julie said.

 

NINETEEN

 

IT was a view that the pony-tailed old man in the gold-braided captain’s hat never got tired of—that, as far as he knew, no one had ever gotten tired of: the island of Tahiti, rearing up before him in the morning, the upper slopes of its green mountains and hanging valleys glowing like fire, the heavy mists that had clung to the bottoms of the deep ravines all night slowly separating into feathery tendrils as the sun hit them, the sky itself still a pellucid aquamarine, not the pale blue it would turn later on. Behind him, nine miles away across the Sea of the Moon, was the even more lushly exotic island of Moorea, where he lived and from which he’d just motored.

God, what a place.

With a sigh of self-satisfaction, he slowly steered Cap’n Jack’s Reward, a converted fifty-foot Danish fishing trawler, through the ships anchored in Papeete Harbor and then, edging it forward and back as deftly as if it were a twelve-foot dinghy, slipped it into its space along the concrete bulkhead that edged the long waterfront quay. Good. Done.

Nine-thirty, according to the clock on the cabin wall. That left him over an hour before the day’s clients, six Hemingway wannabe’s referred to him by Tahiti Nights Travel Agency (for the usual fifteen percent), showed up to spend a manly day on the high seas in pursuit of marlin and mahi-mahi. He just hoped nobody threw up on his beautiful, newly stained but not yet polyurethaned teak deck.

“Mornin’, Cap’n Jack, toss me a rope, I’ll tie you up.”

Teoni, waiting for him on the quay, was his one-man crew; reliable, competent, and unfailingly good-humored, even with problem customers—of whom there were many. Cap’n Jack had often wondered what it was about deep-sea fishing that brought out the worst in so many men. In Teoni’s opinion it was the result of the temporary absence of the civilizing influence of women, and Cap’n Jack thought it was as good a theory as any.

A final check of the ice chest (ham and cheese sandwiches, taro chips, beer, bottled water, fruit juice, apples and oranges, Twinkies, chocolate chip cookies), a quick look in at the head to make sure the toilet paper and paper towels were out and that it was generally ship-shape (by the end of the day, it sure wouldn’t be), a few unnecessary instructions to Teoni, and after flipping down his eye patch so as not to disturb squeamish passersby, he was off on his two-block walk to the Tiki Soft Internet Café for his morning coffee and a little surfing of the twenty-first-century variety.

Half an hour later, with a chocolate croissant and a heavily creamed and sugared coffee under his belt and a fresh cup on the table in front of him, he had checked and responded to the meager collection of e-mail in his inbox, had ordered two new rod-holders from Pomare Marine, and had opened his Favorites folder to relax for a final few minutes with “Upcountry Doings, Your E-News Update for North Hawaii.”

As usual, there was little in it of concern to him, but reading it was an ingrained habit by now and he scrolled dutifully through it, looking for names and places that rang a bell. He had already hit the PAGE DOWN key to scroll past “Sad News from the North Kohala Coast”—there wasn’t anything on the coast that interested him—when his mind registered a glimpse of the name “Torkelsson” in the body of the article.

Now that interested him.

He scrolled back up the page and read intently, his hand rhythmically stroking his beard, his coffee forgotten.

Sad News from the North Kohala Coast

The body of Dagmar Birget Torkelsson, one of our true pioneers, was discovered yesterday afternoon on the beach near her home at Hulopo’e Beach Estates. Ms. Torkelsson is believed to have died of injuries suffered in a fall. Kona police are investigating the matter.

Dagmar Torkelsson was eighty-two years old. She had lived on the Big Island since arriving from Sweden with her three brothers in the 1950s. Over the next forty years, this remarkable family created and slowly developed the Hoaloha Ranch above Waimea. Now broken up, the Hoaloha at one time represented a cattle empire second only to that of the Parker Ranch.

Ms. Torkelsson is survived by her nieces Hedwig Torkelsson and Inge Nakoa, and by her nephews Axel and Felix Torkelsson.

A private memorial service will be held Friday at the Waimea United Church of Christ, followed by an RSVP reception at the Waimea Community Center for family and close friends. Others wishing to pay their respects to the deceased are cordially invited to a public memorial and reception at the Center on Saturday at two P.M.

 

The old man finished his coffee, paid ten cents to print the article, put the gold-braided captain’s hat back on his head, and went thoughtfully back to his boat.

 

TWENTY

 

UNLIKE the West Hawaii police station in Kona, the headquarters of HPD—the Honolulu Police Department—are on a busy street in the heart of downtown. There is not a garbage dump or compost heap in sight. The building itself is large, handsome, and imposing: a white, four-story structure with banks of concrete steps leading up to the pillared entrance, thirty-foot palm trees at the corners, and a gleaming red-tiled roof. The lobby buzzes with activity and purpose, as in any big-city police department.

But two floors below the lobby, on Level B-2, where the Scientific Investigation Section—the only police crime lab in the Hawaiian Islands—is quartered, you wouldn’t be aware of any of this. There, white-coated criminalists, in their brightly lit but windowless quarters, go quietly about their work, bent over microscopes, spectrographs, and computer screens.

One such, Benjamin Kaaua, stared fixedly at the screen of his fingerprint-comparator, on which two magnified images were projected side by side. On the left was a print—not a fingerprint, but a greatly enlarged print from the base of the thumb of a left-handed leather glove—lifted from the face of a watch on the wrist of the old woman that had been killed. On the right was an equally enlarged image of a small portion of the same area from one of the four left-handed leather gloves that Fukida had obtained from two of the suspects in the case. The image on the left was steady. The one on the right changed as Kaaua periodically moved the card on the focusing platform below the screen. On the card were twelve tiny photographs of different parts of the glove’s surface. This was the second of three such cards for this glove, and he was now on the last of its twelve images. A similar process on the three cards for the other three gloves had produced nothing. Altogether, he had been on the machine for two hours without a break. The final image on the card didn’t match either, and the card was pulled from under its clip and set to the side.

Before inserting the last one, Kaaua stood up to get the blood flowing to his legs again, stretched, and walked around the table, working his head from side to side and squeezing his eyes shut. Time for a break, really, but with one card to go he was eager to finish up.

What he was doing—what criminalists spent most of their time doing—was applying the First Law of Criminalistics: No two objects in the universe are exactly alike. Even mass-produced objects or things made in a mold, while they might be extremely similar when new, would quickly become different. No two things ever wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever tear, or break, or get used, or rust, or get nicked in exactly the same way.

The leather of any cowhide glove, coming as it did from the skin of an animal, was different from every other cowhide glove that had ever been made or would ever be made. And once it had been used, there would be flexure creases, tension lines, wear-furrows, and scuffs that would make it even more observably unique.

So if this glove was indeed the same one that had left the print at the crime scene, there would be a visible match somewhere on the final card.

In theory.

The original print, the one from the watch face, was unusually clear, barely smudged, not at all the usual fuzzy smear. And Fukida, thanks to the course he’d taken at the FBI Academy, had known enough to look for it, and to realize it might be important when he saw it. He’d done a good job of lifting it, too, using superglue and dye stain. He’d lifted another print from the back of the bench Dagmar Torkelsson had been sitting on, but it was too indistinct for comparison.

Kaaua took his stool again, wrapped his feet around the base, rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, refocused on the final card’s first photo, and caught his breath. To be sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, he increased the magnification all the way up to twenty-seven times, then way down to three so he could look at a wider area. He flicked off the light and hummed happily to himself.

We have a match.

 

 

FOR once, Sergeant Fukida was motionless. His hands lay quietly on his desk, his feet flat on the floor. His Colorado Rockies cap was on his head in thinking position (backward). He was cogitating.

Dagmar wasn’t the only Torkelsson who had been a piece of work. In all his career he’d never encountered a bunch quite like this one. It was as if they had an unlimited number of versions available to answer anything they were asked. Catch them in a lie, and out popped another one, like sausages out of a sausage machine, to explain the first one away. When he and his detectives had compared notes at the end of the day yesterday, it was as if they’d all been working on completely different cases.

But today things had turned around. Obviously, the family members had compared notes, too, because early this morning Felix had called from Honolulu; they had concluded it was past time to set the record straight.

“Mm,” a skeptical Fukida had replied. He’d heard this before.

Yesterday, Felix explained, they had been in a state of shock on learning of Dagmar’s death—of Dagmar’s murder —and had been frightened and off-balance, hardly knowing what they were saying. Now they wanted to clear the air and do whatever they could to demonstrate their innocence in her murder and to help in finding her killer. They had designated him as their spokesman, and if it was all right with Fukida he would like to meet with him as soon as possible.

Would he be acting as their lawyer, Fukida wanted to know. Felix said he would not, but merely as their representative. Indeed, he hoped that, when all was known, there would be no need for a lawyer. There had been an implied question mark at the end of the sentence, to which Fukida had not responded.

“Come on over,” was all he’d said. “When can you be here?”

Two hours later, they were sitting in the most spartan of the interrogation rooms, a running tape recorder on the scarred table between them. No coffee, no soft drinks. Despite the austere surroundings and the chill in Fukida’s greeting, Felix was annoyingly self-assured and at ease, as if he were there to do a favor for a friend. Fukida had a strong sense of another load of bullshit on the way to being shoveled up.

He pressed the start button on the recorder. “All right,” he said with no preamble other than stating their names and the date for the record, “first I want to know why you all got together with her at her house yesterday morning. What it was really about,” he added as Felix opened his mouth. “I don’t want to hear the same crap about ‘moral support’ and ‘shoring her up’ that I heard yesterday. They didn’t need to fly you in from Oahu for moral support.”

Felix threw back his head and laughed, as if Fukida had told a joke. “Actually, I think it would be better if I started at the beginning.”

Fukida was stone-faced. “I think it would be better if you answered my questions.”

Felix responded with an accommodating shrug and carried on, unflustered. This, Fukida thought, was a very cool guy, probably a hell of a lawyer. “The fact is, the meeting was supposed to be about moral support, in a way—you know, let’s all stick together and keep things close to the vest—but when we got there we found out she’d already been to see you and told you some things, and then when Inge’s husband called to tell us your men had just showed up at their place with a search warrant for the old gun—”

Fukida’s interest quickened. At yesterday’s interviews, no one—including Felix—had mentioned such a call. Was he actually about to get some reliable information here?

“—everything changed. We knew that tired old story about the hitmen couldn’t stand up any more, but we couldn’t afford to let the real story come out—”

“Because of your inheritances?”

Felix showed his first sign of unease. “Yes.”

“But now you feel you can let the real story come out?”

“That’s right. Somebody murdered our aunt—I mean, this is Auntie Dagmar, for God’s sake. That changes things. It took a while to sink in, but it finally did. So did the idea that it pretty much had to be one of us.”

“I wouldn’t say—”

“Come on, Sergeant, I’m leveling with you. You can level with me.”

“Go ahead,” Fukida said. “You couldn’t afford to let the real story come out . . .”

“No. We wanted her to . . . well, to lie—to tell a new lie—all of us did. Including me. And we would back her up.”

“And that lie was . . . ?”

“That Torkel murdered his brother Magnus.”

“That—” The puzzle pieces that Fukida had all poised and ready to press into place fell apart. “You mean that he didn’t?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then . . . who did?”

“Nobody murdered him, Sergeant. The whole thing was an accident.”

“Dammit, Torkelsson, don’t jerk me around. I’ve had it with you people. If it was an accident, what was the problem with letting it come out? Why couldn’t you . . . why would you . . .” He shook his head. “I think maybe you better start at the beginning, Counselor.”

 

 

THE story Felix told took an hour and a half, and, bizarre as it was, it had a ring of authenticity to it that none of the other umpteen constantly evolving versions had ever had. And it fit the known facts.

The two elderly bachelor brothers, Felix said, had increasingly gotten on each others’ nerves over the years. Seemingly once a month they decided they’d be better off living apart, but Dagmar had always smoothed things over. The three of them had lived together for forty years, after all, and the prospect of breaking up—“divorcing,” she called it—in their seventies was just plain ridiculous. Unseemly. So they stayed.

But it wasn’t only the annoyance of constantly being in each others’ way. The two men had different philosophies of running the ranch. Magnus’s attention was focused on the bottom line, on expenses and debits and cash flow. Torkel was more the dreamer, and the older he got the more cockeyed and expensive his schemes became. On the night in question they had been quarreling throughout dinner over his grandiose plan to collect run-off water from the higher elevations of the Kohalas into a concrete-lined catch-basin, from which it would be piped by gravity-feed to a dozen reservoirs and then sent on to five hundred giant troughs placed at strategic locations on the ranch. It would have cost millions. They had consumed a few glasses of wine, as they usually did at dinner, and Torkel, pushing things, pulled out a checkbook and said he’d write a check for the digging of the catch-basin right then and there.

Infuriated, Magnus had gone to get the gun—

“Wait a minute,” Fukida said. “Are you telling me Magnus tried to kill Torkel for pulling out his checkbook?”

“No, no, not kill. Look, that gun had been there forever. Nobody knew it had any bullets in it. Nobody thought it worked. The clip was so rusted you couldn’t get it out.”

“So why did he get it?”

“Because that’s what he did. He’d done it before; it was an old routine.”

“It was an old routine to threaten his brother with a gun?”

“You don’t understand. It was a game they played.”

“That’s some game.”

“Nobody took it seriously. He’d wave it around, and Dagmar would say, ‘Oh, put that thing away,’ and he’d put it away, and they’d all go to bed mad at each other, and the next morning it’d be forgotten.”

“But not this time.”

Felix shook his head. “No, not this time. He would have put it away, but when he waved it in Torkel’s face, Torkel made a disgusted grab at the barrel and sort of bent Magnus’s arm back . . . and bang. The bullet—bullets, rather, although nobody knew it at the time—went through Torkel’s hand and into Magnus. Magnus dropped dead on the spot. The other two were pretty well stunned, as you can imagine.”

“Mr. Torkelsson, how do you know all this? Were you there?”

“No, only the three of them. But Dagmar told us later. Torkel, too, although he was barely coherent by the time we arrived.”

Dagmar again, thought Fukida. The only living eyewitness. Only she was no longer living.

Other than the fact that Inge and Hedwig, with Felix’s help, had loaded Magnus’s body into a pickup truck and taken it to the hay barn before they lopped off his toes and set the fire, the remainder of the story—how Torkel had been desperate to leave, how they’d gotten him to the airport, etc.—fit perfectly with what Inge and Dagmar had told him the day before.

Which hardly proved it was true, but Fukida was increasingly inclined to accept this latest retelling. The gun’s neglected condition—rusted, loaded with the wrong bullets—made the idea of an accidental killing highly believable. More than that, if there was anything self-serving about this version, he couldn’t see it. Telling the story opened them all up to a ton of legal problems, some of them criminal.

Still, there was a lot about it that didn’t compute. “Look, if it happened the way you said, if there weren’t any hitmen to worry about, what the hell was Torkel so desperate about?”

“He was desperate because he figured it would look like murder and he couldn’t face the idea of jail—or even of a trial—not at his age. Dagmar kept telling him not to do it, that if he ran he’d really look guilty.” Felix shook his head. “But you couldn’t reason with him.”

“So who came up with the idea of switching identities?”

“That was Torkel, but, you see, the idea wasn’t to switch identities, not at first. He wasn’t interested in being Magnus. He just wanted to make it look as if he was dead. He figured that’d make it a lot harder for the police to find him, since they wouldn’t be looking for him.”

“It wouldn’t make it any easier,” Fukida agreed.

“So we all went along with that. But then we started talking. If you people bought the story that it was Torkel’s body in the barn, you were going to want to know what happened to Magnus . . . for instance, where was he? And how the hell were we going to handle that? So we started throwing around ideas and the best thing we came up with—I honestly forget who came up with it first; Hedwig, maybe, or maybe it was me—was to pretty much tell the truth . . . with a twist. One brother got killed, the other one flew away. Only we’d reverse them.”

Fukida nodded. “Since Magnus was now Torkel, Torkel would become Magnus.”

“That’s about it.”

“I’m surprised he went for it. That’s a hell of a decision, to become somebody else. Especially your own brother.”

“Yeah, but you see, it wasn’t that cut-and-dried, Sergeant. At that point nobody was thinking about who Torkel would become. We were just thinking about the story we were going to tell the police. Anyway, all he was interested in was getting out of there and covering his tracks, so he jumped right on the idea and we all went along with that, too. After that—”

“Why?”

Felix was startled. “Uh . . . why?”

“Yeah, why’d you all go along? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’d all come off filthy rich if everybody thought Magnus was the last one alive?”

For the first time Felix showed a flash of anger. “In the first place, none of us are ‘filthy rich’—”

“Don’t yell. It screws up the recorder. It also irritates me.”

“I’m sorry.” He lowered his voice to what he thought was a whisper. “In the second place, Torkel wasn’t supposed to get himself killed in a plane crash. He was supposed to be back in touch with us as soon as he could. The idea was that I was going to explain things and straighten everything out with you guys and with the prosecuting attorney, and then, assuming I could get it all taken care of, he was supposed to come back and be Torkel again.” He folded his arms and glared at Fukida. “So you want to tell me how was that going to make us filthy rich? I think you know what Torkel was going to leave us—zilch.”

Fukida responded equally heatedly. “Yeah, right, but then, after he didn’t show up, and you all tossed things around some more, you figured, well, why not just leave things the way they are? I mean, it was a lot simpler than stirring everything up again, and you’d all come out of it a lot better, and who would it hurt? Except for that seamen’s home, of course.”

Felix sagged, unfolded his arms, and dropped his eyes. “I guess that’s about right,” he said wearily. “I’d want to put it a little more . . . positively than that, but . . . that’s about right. We acted in our own selfish interests. And we broke the law.”

We’re getting there now, Fukida thought. Maybe not quite the whole truth yet, but close, and getting closer. “Listen, Mr. Torkelsson, you might want to have a lawyer of your own here before we talk much more. I don’t want to be accused of—”

“No lawyer,” Felix said firmly. “Unless I’m under arrest.”

Fukida shook his head. “Not at the moment.”

Felix laughed and relaxed. “All right, what else do you need to know? And if there’s really any coffee in that machine, I’d appreciate some.”

“You’re a braver man than I am,” Fukida said, walking with him to the break room.

Felix put in his dollar and punched buttons—two sugars, two creams (no wonder he was able to drink the stuff)—and waited for the cup to fill with the resultant slush.

“So tell me,” Fukida said, “who came up with the idea of these mysterious hitmen? You?”

Felix laughed. “No, you.” Standing at the machine, taking short, rapid gulps of the too-hot coffee, he explained.

When Dagmar had first talked to the police about what “Magnus” had supposedly said on the telephone, she’d used the word they—“they” killed Torkel, “they” were coming after him—but it was just a figure of speech; she hadn’t meant to suggest that there was more than one person. But when the autopsy was performed and two different-caliber bullets were found in the body, the police had understandably taken the “they” seriously. With both bullets right through the heart, the leap to “professional, anonymous hitmen” had been easy and logical. Of course, the family had embraced the idea as a godsend that temporarily took the pressure off Torkel. Later, after he hadn’t been heard from again and was presumed lost, it had simply been easier all around to stick with it than to change their story. And so the police had spent months on a pointless wild goose chase.

A royal screw-up, Fukida thought, shaking his head. That was the term for it, all right.

Back in the interrogation room, he had Felix repeat the story for the recorder. “That about it?” Felix said when he’d finished.

They were both getting tired now. Fukida’s sinuses ached and Felix looked as if he might be thinking that the coffee hadn’t been such a hot idea after all.

“Almost. Let’s go back to the meeting with Dagmar the day she was killed. You said you all wanted her to lie and say Torkel murdered Magnus?”

Felix nodded. “Right.”

“I don’t get it. What was that about?”

“The wills again, the goddamn wills. See, if the truth came out—that it was an accident—then Torkel, as the last survivor, would be the one with the valid will, right? And the seamen’s home would be the big beneficiary. But if Torkel killed Magnus—murdered him—then—”

“Then Magnus’s will would be the one that counted, because you can’t inherit from someone you murder—so the money couldn’t go to Torkel in the first place, and he couldn’t leave it to the home. It’d go straight from Magnus to you.”

“That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, but—you’re a lawyer, you tell me—would the courts really turn everything upside down and reverse a ten-year-old will?”

“Sarge, I don’t think I have to tell you about the courts. Anytime you go before a judge or a jury, you’re in a crap-shoot. You never know. My guess is that if the home didn’t bother to bring suit, things would stay the way they are. But if they did . . .” He raised his hands and flicked out his fingers, shooting untold possibilities into the air.

“And Dagmar wouldn’t go along with it? That’s why you think someone killed her?”

“Well, she went along with it, or said she did. But anybody could see her heart wasn’t in it. She was on the edge, she just wanted to be done with it. Whoever killed her just couldn’t risk it. That’s what I think.”

Fukida smiled crookedly. “This whole thing gets weirder and weirder,” he said slowly. “I know about cases where someone got killed to keep them from telling the police that someone else was a murderer. But killing somebody to keep them from telling that someone else wasn’t a murderer? Now that’s different.”

Felix smiled in return. “We’ve always been an innovative family,” he said, softly for him.

 

 

AND that had been the end of it. Felix had hung around while the tape was transcribed for his signature and had left. Now Fukida, with the transcription in front of him, was mulling things over. He was inclined to believe what he’d been told, and it was all very interesting and explained a lot, and so on, but did it put him any closer to finding Dagmar’s murderer? All four of the nieces and nephews—he was by no means excluding Felix—would have had exactly the same motive for killing her. As to opportunity, none of them had a solid alibi for the time of the murder, but none of them needed one. She’d apparently been killed not long after the meeting at her house broke up, and any of them could have done it before heading home—they’d come and gone separately—and still have been back up in the mountains well inside of an hour. So—

The telephone’s buzz broke into his thoughts, which hadn’t been going anywhere anyway. “Yup?”

“Line four for you, Sergeant,” Sarah said. “It’s Ben Kaaua from Honolulu.”

“Hello, Ben, I sure hope you have something for me.”

“Well, what we have,” Kaaua said smugly, and paused for dramatic effect, “is . . . a . . . match!”

“You’re positive? You could say that in court?”

“Say it, and mean it, and prove it.”

Fukida banged his fist on the desk. “Ben, that’s fantastic. Next time I see you for lunch, I owe you one steak sandwich.”

“Hell with that, buddy. You owe me a steak dinner.”

 

TWENTY-ONE

 

WILLIE Akau stood motionless, one arm raised straight above his head, his dusty, garlanded hat in his hand, as the last of the trailer trucks was backed up, inch by inch, to the long, narrow, high-walled loading ramp that fed into the hold of the Philomena Purcell, the old Corral Line cargo ship that had been taking Hoaloha Ranch cattle—and more recently, Little Hoaloha cattle—to Vancouver for the last fifteen years. In air-conditioned comfort, no less.

At just the right moment, the hand holding the hat flashed down and the truck stopped instantly. “Okay, Somoa, open ’er up,” Willie yelled to the young paniolo standing at the ready.

Somoa hopped up onto the truck bed and tugged on the pull-chain, hand over hand. The perforated metal door clattered up, Somoa jumped out of the way, and the cattle, bawling uncertainly, but docile and cooperative, headed onto the ramp, their hooves drumming satisfyingly on the wooden floor.

“Eh-hoo! Ehhhhh-hoo! Hoo!”

Willie had been hearing that call as man and boy for going on sixty years now. Today it came from the two additional paniolos he’d stationed on either side of the ramp with pole prods to urge the cows along in case any of them needed coaxing.

But they didn’t need the poles this time, and in fact, they rarely did. They didn’t really need the eh-hoos either. When it came down to it, they didn’t much need Willie Akau.

In the old days, it was different. The trip to the Kawaihae docks had been a wild and woolly affair then, a full-fledged, old-fashioned cattle drive from the mountains to the sea. They had to start at one in the morning to get the cows there on time. And then when you got to the docks, you had to ride horseback right into the water and swim every damn cow out to an anchored ship, one at a time, then struggle to get a belly band around the frightened animal (he’d gotten his hand broken once and his nose twice doing it) so the deckhands could haul it up in a sling. You had to know what you were doing every step of the way.

Now they just walked them onto the trucks before ever leaving the ranch, and walked them off when they got to the dock. And they started at nine, not at one.

Willie had gotten $1.50 a day on his first cattle drive—which was exactly what Somoa had plunked into the nearby vending machine to get the super-sized chocolate milk he was working on. Now Willie made damn near a hundred times that for doing about a hundred times less work.

It was getting to be retirement time, he thought with a sigh. He’d done a good job training the hands, and Somoa was more than ready to take over. It was time, all right. The Torkelssons had done right by him when it came to a pension, but he wasn’t going to live forever, and if he kept this up he’d wind up dropping dead in the saddle—or more likely at the wheel of an ATV. Not that that’d be so bad, but it’d be kind of nice to get to spend some of that pension, to kick back, do some fishing, do some traveling, do some hanging around the docks, schmoozing and drinking beer in the afternoon, like so many of the old ranch hands turned beach bums.

He watched one of them now, coming down the dock toward him with a rolling, limping gait. Sunburnt and bearded, shaggy gray hair caught in a pony tail, shapeless old captain’s hat on his head, black patch tied over one eye. Interesting-looking guy. Not a ranch hand, though. An old salt, a tough, gristly old pirate, really; nobody he remembered seeing around before.

“How you doin’, buddy?” Willie said. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, I expect you can, Willie,” the old man said, and his lean, leathery face split in a grin.

Willie did a double-take, then peered hard at him for a good five seconds. The Philomena Purcell did a short test-burst of its powerful foghorn, startling the cattle into a round of jostling and stamping, and bringing a chorus of eh-hoos from the hands.

Willie heard none of it. “Oh . . . my . . . gawd . . . ,” he said.

 

 

“YOU know, I bet my Uncle Jake would like that,” Julie said.

“Absolutely,” John said. “How could anybody not like a topless dashboard hula dancer that plays the Hawaiian War Chant while she jiggles?”

“I don’t know, it’s pretty hard to beat this coconut piggy bank carved into a monkey head,” Gideon said, fingering it. “I think it’s meant to be a guenon, or maybe a mangabey. One of the Cercopithecinae, at any rate.”

“Well, obviously,” John said, yawning. “Cercopithecinae, for sure.”

They were in Hilo Hattie’s in Kona. The two-day get-away to Hilo and Volcanoes National Park had done its work. They had put the Torkelsson affair behind them. The subject of Dagmar’s murder had naturally come up a few times, but only in a desultory way. Talking and surmising had led nowhere and had been depressing, and, in any case, they now understood and accepted—even John did—that it was Fukida’s baby, not theirs.

Besides that, their thoughts had naturally enough begun to turn toward home. They had seats on a Hawaiian Airlines flight the following afternoon and they had stopped in the giant store on their way back to the Outrigger, where they planned to spend their last night, to pick up presents for friends and family. The “serious” purchases had already been made—a handsome coral belt for John’s wife Marti, and a Tommy Bahama Aloha blouse for Julie’s sister. Now they were meandering down the souvenir aisles, searching for a few less formal gifts. John, done with his shopping and getting bored, called the Outrigger to see if there were any messages.

“Call from Inge,” he told them when he’d hung up and they were in the checkout line. “We’re invited to a memorial reception for Dagmar. Casual dress. Just family and close friends.”

“I doubt if Julie and I qualify as close friends,” Gideon said.

“No, she made a point of saying they’d like to have you. She sounded like she meant it. I guess they really don’t want there to be any hard feelings.”

“I don’t think so,” Gideon said doubtfully. “I’ve stirred up a lot of trouble for those people.” He swiped his credit card through the machine on the counter.

“I think we ought to go,” John said.

“When is it?” Julie asked.

“Two o’clock, at the community center in Waimea. We’ll be a little late, but we can make it. I think it’d be a nice thing if we showed up. For a few minutes, anyway.”

“I think so, too,” Julie said. “To pay our respects.”

“Yes, but—”

“Good, it’s settled,” John said. “Let’s get going.” Gideon gave up with a sigh. “Okay, I’ll go along.” He signed the $57 receipt and tucked a copy in his wallet.

“I still think we should have gotten him the monkey head,” he muttered as they left, just to prove he did have a mind of his own.

 

 

HEDWIG, Inge, Axel, and Felix, forming a ragged reception line, seemed genuinely grateful when John, Julie, and Gideon made their appearance. Hedwig, reeking of jasmine and splendidly draped in a shimmering silk muu-muu of royal blue threaded with gold, hugged them all to her soft bosom. A teary-eyed Inge energetically pumped their hands. Axel, also showing emotion, hugged John and Gideon, but shyly shook hands with Julie. Felix went the other way, throwing wide his arms and bear-hugging a startled Julie—it was the first time they’d met—but cordially shaking hands with John and Gideon. Malani and Keoni beside their respective spouses, politely nodded and murmured appreciation for their coming. All very hospitable and sincere and gratifying.

And yet, thought Gideon, there was something surreal about it all. If Fukida was right—and he, Julie, and John agreed with him—then one of these people, these warm, nice, decent people (if you made a few allowances for fraud, theft, and one or two other little transgressions) was the murderer of the woman they were all there to memorialize.

Not that there were so very many. The Torkelssons, it appeared, did not have many friends. In addition to the four siblings and the two spouses, there were perhaps a dozen people who looked as if they were probably ranchers and their wives, and about ten Hawaiian and Asian men, some old, some young, but all with a compact, athletic grace that marked them as current or retired paniolos. Gideon recognized Willie Akau and a couple of the others he’d seen around the Little Hoaloha. The paniolos, some of whom still had range dust on their work clothes, were gathered in two clumps near the refreshment table, most of them clutching tiny paper cups of pink lemonade and looking thoroughly ill at ease.

The refreshments were ample—punch, lemonade, coffee, trays of cookies and fruit breads—but the room would comfortably have held a hundred—a plain, linoleum-tiled, echoing space, far too large for the two dozen or so people in it, so that the affair had a forlorn quality, with guests whispering rather than talking, to keep from making too much noise.

Until Felix took over. “I think we’re all here now,” he honked from the middle of the room. “On behalf of my family, I want to thank you for coming. My aunt would have really appreciated knowing you were here.”

“She does know,” Hedwig said with a wise smile.

Felix looked pained. “You all know my sister Hedwig, who is now going to lead us in a . . . in a what, Hedwig?”

“In a Circle of Karmic Energy.”

With a theatrical half-bow, Felix stepped aside and turned the floor over to Hedwig. “Whatever,” Gideon heard him mutter out of the side of his mouth.

Hedwig spread her massive arms, bringing silence. In the full, gorgeous, blue-and-gold muu-muu she looked immense, the Mother Goddess herself.

“It must be hard to get that big being a vegetarian,” Gideon mused.

“Be good,” Julie warned him, but she was smiling.

Hedwig lowered her head and waggled her outstretched fingers. “We will hold hands and form a circle.”

A circle was duly formed. John held Julie’s left hand, Gideon her right. On Gideon’s other side, he grasped the callused hand of a wiry old paniolo, making both of them uncomfortable.

Hedwig looked up to see that all was proper and again lowered her cropped blonde head and began to intone.

“Let those who form this circle be here in peace and love, and may it be a protection against any negative energy that may come to do us harm. We are here to honor a beloved person who has moved to another plane. By the formation of this circle we make thinner the veil between the worlds, so that we can call to those who have gone on before us and they will hear us . . .”

Although his head was bowed, Gideon managed to throw a pointed look across Julie and at John. This is your fault, pal, and don’t think I’m going to let you forget it.

“I ask you now,” Hedwig went on, “to sense the presence of the entity we knew as Dagmar Torkelsson among us, and to allow the energy and love she brings us to build and grow. Visualize the energy circling round, gathering strength.” She paused for the space of three long breaths, visualizing. “And now I want you to bask in this energy a moment longer, and then divide yourselves into groups of three or four, and to share with each other your memories and reflections. In that way, we release this positive energy back into the universe . . .”

Gideon, his mind wandering, found himself looking into the community kitchen at one end of the room. Something there—something important, he thought—had fleetingly engaged his attention, but whatever it was, he’d lost it as suddenly as it had come. He scanned the stainless-steel sinks, the counter, the two big stainless-steel refrigerators, the electric coffee percolators, the open shelves of dishes and utensils. His eyes went back and focused on the refrigerators, both of which were covered with little notes attached by a colorful multitude of refrigerator magnets. There were surfboards, pigs and penguins in grass skirts, hula dancers, palm trees, martini glasses with olives—

He froze. “John!” The exclamation popped out on its own. Fortunately, the circle was now breaking up into its smaller groups, so he didn’t disrupt the visualization in progress.

John looked curiously at him. “What?”

He began to point into the kitchen, then said: “Come on, you two. I want to show you something.”

“My goodness,” Julie said as he grabbed her wrist, “what’s all the excitement about?”

Once in the kitchen, he pointed at one of the magnet-laden refrigerators. “Take a look at that.”

“Look at what?” a puzzled John asked. “What’s so—”

When he realized which one Gideon was pointing to, it stopped him in his tracks. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered and plucked it from the metal surface. “Holy cow, am I nuts, or is this the same . . .”

“I think it’s exactly the same.”

“I think so, too.”

“John, do you realize what this means? It must—”

“I know,” John said, running his hand over the irregular surface. “It’s almost too fantastic, but—”

“I know.”

“I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to observe great minds in action,” Julie said dryly, “but if one of you could manage a coherent sentence, I would be endlessly grateful.”

“This thing is a ceramic map of the Big Island,” John said, offering it for her inspection.

“Ah. Well, as a matter of fact, I did manage to grasp that much on my own.”

“It’s also a magnet, Julie,” Gideon said. “A big one, for a refrigerator magnet.”

“Uh-huh. And . . . ?”

“You remember that box of stuff from the plane that nobody could find? One of these was in it.”

“We figured it was a coaster,” John said, “or a . . . what do you call it?”

“A trivet,” Gideon supplied, shaking his head. “We should have realized.”

“How could we realize?” John protested. “We had no idea what was going on.”

“Well, I guess those would have to qualify as coherent sentences,” Julie said, “but I still don’t—”

“Julie,” Gideon said, “what would a magnet be doing in the cockpit of a small plane? Think what it’d do if it got anywhere near the compass.”

“Are you saying—” Suddenly aware that she was nearly shouting, she looked quickly around and dropped her voice. The three of them moved their heads closer together. “Are you saying that someone purposely tried to make the plane go off-course—”

“Tried and succeeded,” John amended. “Maravovo’s a long way from Tarabao. And there isn’t much other land out there.”

Julie jerked her head as if to clear it. “But wouldn’t that be murder? Doesn’t it mean that someone murdered Torkel?”

“And the pilot, Claudia,” Gideon said, nodding.

“But why would anyone—”

“And, hey, remember,” John said, “it was all tangled up in a wad of duct tape. It must have been stuck somewhere where they wouldn’t see it—under the console, I bet, right near the compass. The compass would have been all screwed up and they’d never know it. And they were flying in the dark, so they wouldn’t have been able to tell from—”

“Stuck by whom?” Julie demanded, her voice rising again as her frustration increased. “And why?”

John and Gideon looked at each other. It was Gideon who answered. “I can’t vouch for the why, but I think we can make a pretty good guess as to whom.”

“More than a guess,” John said grimly. “Only one guy went to the airport with Torkel. Only one guy got the plane out of the hangar and waited around till the pilot showed up. Only one guy was there. And he used to be a pilot himself, don’t forget that. He knew all about compasses and planes.” His eyes, narrowed now, roved the room and focused. Julie followed the direction of his gaze. Her hand went to her mouth.

“Axel,” she breathed.

“The miserable sonofabitch,” John said.

 

 

JOHN wanted to go over to him right then, put him under citizen’s arrest, and drag him off, preferably forcibly, to the Kona PD, but Gideon convinced him things would go more smoothly all around if he called Fukida instead and let him make the arrest. John, sagging a little after the first wave of anger passed, agreed, but suggested that Gideon make the call. “It’ll go over better if he thinks you figured it out for him, not me.”

“Besides,” he added with a half-smile, “you did figure it out.”

“It sure took me long enough. Okay, I’ll call from out in the hall. Julie, keep this guy”—he gestured with his chin at John—“in check. Don’t let him get his hands on Axel. It’d be better if he’s still alive when the police get here.”

 

 

USING one of the pay phones in the hallway, Gideon called the CIS only to learn that Fukida was out on a call.

“This is pretty important, Sarah. Isn’t there any way I can get hold of him?”

“I’ll have him radioed,” Sarah said. “He’ll call you right back. What’s your number?”

It took less than a minute for Fukida’s call to come through. “How ya doin’, sport?” he practically chirped. “What’s so important?”

Gideon had never heard him so upbeat. “Where are you?” he asked. “What happened, Ted?”

“Where I am is in my car. And where I’m going is to the Waimea Community Center. And when I get there I’m going to collar our killer. The CIS has done it again, chief. We got our man!”

“Axel,” Gideon said.

Gideon heard him whoosh out his breath. “Now how the hell do you know that?”

“The magnet. How do you know?”

“The glove.” And then, after a few seconds: “What magnet?”

“The magnet that . . . uh, Ted, I’m not sure we’re tracking here. What glove? Who are you talking about?”

“Who am I . . . I just told you. Axel—Axel’s glove. He’s our murderer, he killed Dagmar. I thought you agreed with me.”

“No, I’m talking about the other murder.”

“The other . . . ? You mean Magnus? Are you telling me Axel also—”

“No, not Magnus. Torkel. Look, I’m at the Center myself—”

“So now Torkel was murdered, too?” Gideon winced and held the receiver away from his ear. “You guys are driving me nuts!”

And with that, Fukida hung up, but a few seconds later he called back. “Don’t go away,” he growled. “I’m gonna want to talk to you.”

 

 

UNDER the stunned and recriminatory stares of his relatives and friends, a drooping, unresisting Axel Torkelsson was cuffed, read his rights, and led away by Fukida and a uniformed officer. Malani, dry-eyed but too dazed to speak, was enfolded in Hedwig’s warm, fragrant arms. People looked at one another but mostly said nothing.

After a few seconds, Felix took charge with his usual élan.

“I guess that’s it for the reception, folks,” he announced. “Thank you all for coming.”

 

 

“ALL right, I understand why he killed Dagmar,” Julie said. “Sergeant Fukida explained that. He was afraid she was going to break down and tell the police the truth; that is, that Torkel was not a murderer, which would have meant there was a real chance—especially once the seamen’s home found out about it—that Magnus’s will might be thrown out and Torkel’s implemented instead. Whew, do I have that right?”

“That’s the way I understand it,” John said. “Of course I’m just a simple federal cop.”

“All right. Fine. What I don’t understand is why he wanted Torkel’s plane to go down. Why would he want to kill him?”

“Well—” Gideon began, then paused as the cocktail waitress put down their drink orders: iced tea for Julie, a Mai Tai for John, and a glass of Chardonnay for Gideon. They were in Hawaii Calls, the Outrigger’s wall-less restaurant, at a tree-shaded outdoor table in the rear, toward the beach. They clinked glasses and took their first welcome sips.

“Well,” he continued, “that’s something we don’t know for sure yet, but at a guess, it was probably pretty much the same reason. Axel must have realized that if Torkel ever did come back and explain that he wasn’t Magnus—which he was supposed to do, eventually—it would turn out the same way: goodbye, Magnus’s will, hello Torkel’s.”

“Goodbye, Little Hoaloha,” John said, “hello, nothing.”

Julie slowly shook her head. “And so he murdered two people—took away their lives because they got in the way of getting something that wasn’t really his anyway . . . that pleasant, harmless-looking little man.”

“Three people,” Gideon said. “Don’t forget Claudia.”

“You two ready to order dinner?” John asked restlessly. He was more than ready to change the subject.

“Sure, I guess so,” Julie said, then suddenly shuddered, the shiver running visibly down her body.

“Cold?” Gideon asked. “Do you want to move in under the roof?”

“No, it’s beautiful out here with the ocean, and the sun going down. I think I could use a pullover, though. The tan one in the closet to the right—would you mind?”

Gideon, with the pullover over one shoulder, was closing the door to their room behind him, when he heard the phone ring. On the line was Fukida.

“Hey, chief, I’m glad I caught you. Listen, have you people had dinner yet?”

“No, we were just thinking about it.”

“Great. How about if I join you?”

“Well, sure,” Gideon said, puzzled. He and John were scheduled to be deposed by Fukida the next morning at CIS. What couldn’t wait until then? And dinner? Why the sudden sociability?

“Um, fine, Ted. We’ll wait for you. We’re at Hawaii Calls, in the resort.”

Fukida heard the ambiguity in his voice and laughed, rather merrily for him. “Ah, don’t sound so worried. My wife’s in Honolulu this week. I just thought it’d be nice to have some company, and eat some decent food, too. See you in a few minutes.”

“Fine.”

“Oh, also . . . there’s somebody I’d like you to meet.” And with an improbable final happy chuckle he hung up.

 

TWENTY-TWO

 

“HE’S got something up his sleeve, that’s all I know,” Gideon said. “He was chuckling.”

“Chuckling?” John said. “There’s something wrong there. Snicker, I could see. Sneer, for sure. But chuckle? Whoa, this looks bad. I’m telling you, Teddy can be . . . Teddy can be . . .” The words trailed off. He was staring into space, apparently at nothing. “... He can be ...”

“John, what is it?” Julie asked.

But John was at a loss for words in the most literal sense of the phrase. He had jumped up, knocking over his chair, and all he could do was point.

Gideon turned to see Fukida coming toward them through the restaurant with an old man wearing a captain’s hat with faded gold braid, a yellow T-shirt with some kind of logo on it, and rumpled khakis. Not much taller than Fukida, he had the look of an old rake, bearded and pony-tailed, with a black patch over one eye and a rolling limp. When they got closer, Gideon was able to read the T-shirt logo: Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.

“Hello, everybody,” Fukida said, grinning.

John, still staring at the old man, found his voice again. “Mr. T! How did you . . . we thought you were . . . we were sure you were . . .”

“Well, as you can see, I’m not,” the old man said. “I’m hale and hearty and crabbier than ever. It’s nice to see you, boy.”

“And this is Gideon Oliver,” Fukida said, “the one I’ve been telling you about.”

The old man laughed delightedly. “Oh, yeah. You’ve been working on my case, I hear.”

As he got to his feet, Gideon’s mind was whirling at top speed, teeming with what seemed to be impossibilities. Who was this guy supposed to be? Could he actually be Magnus Torkelsson, whose body, after all, was never positively identified? But if so, whose burned body had been left in the hay barn? Or could it be . . . what was his name, Andreas, the oldest brother, who had supposedly died decades ago? But if so, what did “you’ve been working on my case” mean?

“You’re—you’re Magnus Torkelsson?” he asked, choosing the less improbable impossibility.

The old man threw a glance at Fukida and laughed, both of them looking pleased with themselves. “Magnus? No, I’m not Magnus.” He sat down at the table. “Me, I’m Torkel.”

Gideon was flabbergasted. “You can’t be Torkel. I examined your remains myself,” he said stupidly. “I identified you from your right foot. It’s in a . . . it’s in a box at the Kona police station.”

“Oh, so that’s where it is.” Smiling, he pulled his right cuff up above his white sock and rapped with his knuckles on the almost-flesh-colored plastic shell that substituted for his right lower leg.

 

 

HE had seen the lights when the Grumman was fifty feet above the surface of the lagoon, he told them, but he hadn’t known what they were—a pair of whale-oil lanterns hung on posts at the front ends of two dugout canoes that had been night-fishing for rockfish and rays along the reef. Four men altogether, they had come from Tiku, the nearest inhabited island, and they had been flabbergasted when the plane fell without warning out of the sky and plowed itself into the water within a few hundred feet of them.

The last thing he remembered from that night was the wrenching screech of the wing shearing off as it hit the water. The next thing was waking up in a pandanus-roofed hut two, or possibly four, days later—he had never figured out their language well enough to know for sure. But what he did know for sure was that they had paddled to the downed plane before it sank. They had found the pilot dead and Torkel unconscious, with his foot caught inextricably in the twisted metal under the console. Using the tools they had brought for gutting and quartering the rays, they had taken his leg off at the knee, staunched the blood with a tourniquet made from his shirt, and taken him to Tiku.

There, with the stump bound up in pandanus leaves that had been soaked in an evil-smelling poultice, he slowly recovered, although one eye was damaged beyond repair. He remained on Tiku for five weeks, leaving with the first people to call there during his stay—a Japanese scientific team studying the effects of ocean currents on intertidal marine life. They had taken him to Tarawa, from where he’d gone first to Australia, then to Fiji, and then, a year after the plane crash, to the island of Moorea, part of French Polynesia. And there he’d stayed, living a lonely and isolated life, carving furniture and drums from the local milo and kamani woods, until he met and married a beautiful French widow, his “trophy wife” (she was seventy-one).

After that he’d given up the furniture shop, bought a boat (she was rich as well as beautiful), and set himself up in the fishing charter business, which he still worked at two or three days a week whenever he felt like it.

“And that’s about it,” he said. “The story of my life. Never for one minute did I regret leaving Hawaii and the ranch behind. The best decision I ever made.”

“Is that a heck of a story, or what?” Fukida said with a delighted, almost proprietary air. “I’ve been on some pretty strange cases, but that has to be a first.”

“It’s a first for me, too,” Gideon said slowly, still struggling to absorb what he’d just heard. “It’s the first time I ever identified a living man from his skeletal remains.” He couldn’t help laughing. “It’s probably a first for the science of forensic anthropology.”

Torkel guffawed. He was really enjoying himself. “I never would have come back either, but then I read about what happened to my sister, and I knew it just had to have something to do with what happened back then, and the will and all, and I figured I owed it to her to come back and finally straighten things out”—he sobered—“and do what I could to help the police find out who killed her.”

“And Mr. Torkelsson has been very helpful,” Fukida said. “What he said jibed right down the line with what Felix told me.”

“Were you surprised that it was Axel, Mr. Torkelsson?” Julie asked.

Torkel leaned back in his chair, lifted his cap, smoothed down his lank gray hair, and screwed the cap back on. Cap’n Jack’s Charters, it said in faded gold braid. “Not really. The boy always seemed like a little apple-polisher to me. ‘Yes, Uncle Torkel, no, uncle Torkel.’ But I never knew until today that anybody tried to kill me, though. That was some surprise.”

They hadn’t thought to order food until well into Torkel’s account, and now the waitress and a busboy showed up to remove their salads and set out the main courses. Since no one had wanted to interrupt his narrative by studying the menu, they’d all followed the waitress’s recommendation: blackened tuna in a soy-mustard dressing.

Once the luscious-smelling plates were set in front of them, however, they seemed to realize how hungry they were, so for a few minutes they simply shoveled the food in, limiting their conversation, such as it was, to little more than appreciative grunts.

“Ted,” Gideon asked when they’d slowed down a little, “what’s going to happen to the nephews and nieces?”

“Well, Axel’s gonna go away for a while,” Fukida said, chewing.

“Of course. But what about the others? Inge, and Felix, and Hedwig?”

Fukida nodded. “You mean am I going to do anything about all the fudging from ten years ago.” He laid down his fork. “I haven’t made up my mind. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances. And a lot of problems with reopening.”

Gideon looked at him, his head cocked. “Am I reading you wrong, or does that mean you’re inclined to let it go?”

“No, you’re not reading me wrong,” Fukida said and went back to his blackened tuna.

“Wait, hold it,” John said. “How can you just let it go? That’s Mr. T’s property they’re living on, and he’s sitting right here. He was declared dead by accident.”

“Not quite by accident, Johnny. He was declared dead because he went out of his way to mislead the police and everybody else to make it look as if he was dead—his own doing. I don’t really know how the courts would feel about giving him back his property now.”

“Mm. I see what you mean about extenuating circumstances,” Julie said.

“Oh, hell, it’s a moot point, anyway,” said Torkel, who had cleaned his plate as if he hadn’t eaten in two days. “I’m happy where I am, I’ve mellowed, and I have everything I want. No worries. Why would I want to be a rancher again? That was somebody else, not me.”

“But what about the seamen’s home?” Gideon asked. “You wanted them to have the money from the ranch.”

“Now that’s another funny thing. The Swedish Seamen’s Home went kaput in 1997. There aren’t enough old Swedish sailors around anymore to make it worthwhile; not indigent ones, anyhow.” He shrugged. “So, what do I care who has the property? I like those kids all right, they’re welcome to it. In my eyes, they didn’t do anything wrong.”

“See?” Fukida said. “Not much point in my resuscitating the case, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Who would benefit? No, let me get Axel put away, and I’m done with it. Seems to me I had a life before the Torkelssons, and it’d be nice to get back to it.”

John mopped up the last of the soy-mustard sauce with a roll and sat back. “So what happens now, Mr. T? What’s next for you?”

“Me?” Torkel said. “First, I’d sure like to see that box with my foot in it. I haven’t seen that foot for a long time. Then I need to arrange for Dagmar’s burial when the sergeant here releases her. And then . . .”

He took a deep breath, filled with contentment. “Then I’m going to go back to my beautiful Tahiti, back to my gorgeous trophy wife, going to catch some marlin and mahi-mahi when I feel like it, live in sandals and shorts, and watch the sun go down over Mount Tohiea from my patio every single night of the week, with a cold gin and tonic in my hand.”

John, Gideon, and Julie looked at each other. “Makes sense to me,” John said.

 

Acknowledgments

 

As usual, Professor Oliver needed a bit of help before he finally sorted things out. On his behalf, I would like to thank the following people:

• For continuing education on planes and flying: my friends, former airline pilot Bill Benedict; Captain (ret.) Ivory Brummett, United Airlines; and Captain Norm Hapke, American West Airlines.

• For freely sharing their expertise and experience in the forensic sciences: Professor Emeritus Ted Rathbun, University of South Carolina; Professor Emeritus Stan Rhine, University of New Mexico; Professor Steve Byers, University of New Mexico; Professor Alison Galloway, University of California-Santa Cruz; Paul Holes, Supervising Criminalist, Contra Costa County, California Sheriff’s Office; and pathologist Alexey Nicolaevich Zolotarev of Russia.

• For an introduction to Hawaiian cattle ranching and a great day on horseback riding the Kohala range: Jeanette Rutherford, Barn Manager, Ponoholo Ranch, Hawaii.

• For their guidance on the law and on law enforcement: Lieutenant (ret.) Alicia Lampert, San Diego Police Department; and Andy Slater, Assistant State Attorney, West Palm Beach, Florida.

• For a hands-on education on handguns: Bob Lampert, former photojournalist, McGraw-Hill, Inc.

• For reconnaissance on the Big Island of Hawaii: Major General (ret.) Dave de la Vergne.

 

Other Titles by Aaron Elkins

 

Gideon Oliver Novels

WHERE THERE’S A WILL*
GOOD BLOOD*
SKELETON DANCE
TWENTY BLUE DEVILS
DEAD MEN’S HEARTS
MAKE NO BONES
ICY CLUTCHES
CURSES!
OLD BONES*
MURDER IN THE QUEEN’S ARMES*
THE DARK PLACE*
FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR*

 

Chris Norgren Novels

OLD SCORES
A GLANCING LIGHT
DECEPTIVE CLARITY

 

Lee Ofsted Novels (with Charlotte Elkins)

NASTY BREAKS
ROTTEN LIES
A WICKED SLICE

 

Thrillers
TURNCOAT
LOOT