The now-sure revelation made her sit down and lean back into the folds of the easy chair in the office that had been turned over to her. Lau alone, among all the assistants, seemed to suspect or know. He had helped her do the blood matching. He came in, and saw her confusion over their findings.
“ Odd, no?” he offered. “I mean about the arm and Kaniola's palm?”
“ Don't go jumping to any crazy conclusions, Mr. Lau,” she admonished. “This is just the kind of information that, in the wrong hands, could cause no end of confusion, embarrassment to your lab and our combined reputations, not to mention what I've been told is a volatile situation here in your city. We don't want the wrong people to know about this, understood?”
He looked stricken. “You do not trust me as a professional to keep silent about what is inside our house? I have been here long time before you come, Doctor, and I have to be here long time after you gone. No, you don't worry 'bout me telling people outside house what kine work we are here doing… no.”
She was immediately apologetic. “I only meant to say that the press can be awfully good at skinning people like me as well as you, Mr. Lau, so it was a cautionary remark, that's all. Chief Parry's going to want it hush-hush, top secret, I'm sure. At least for now.”
“ I understand. Haole press headline read: 'Kanaka Cop Is Trade Winds Kill'a, He Kill All Hawaiian Girls.' A Hawaiian man do this. I see it now, and then what happens?”
“ Exactly,” she agreed. Although she hadn't seen it happening in the same way, she knew as he spoke it that he was absolutely right. The whites, especially those in power, would assuredly like nothing better than to pin the killings of the Hawaiian women on a Hawaiian national, thus ending any suspicion that the monster was a white man-as Jim Parry believed. She'd read his profile of the likeliest age, sex, race and lifestyle of the phantom. And it made complete sense, based as it was on statistical averages. Still, statistics didn't always pan out; that was why they were called averages.
“ Not to worry one bit,” Lau assured her. “So what is next step?”
“ Late lunch,” she monotoned, dropping her head in her hands, fatigue now a constant companion.
She stood, stretched and stared out the huge windows for some time without saying a word, Lau becoming fidgety behind her. She stared fixedly at the western rim of Oahu, the gorgeous flood of green foothills spilling from out of the volcanic rim of the vast Waianae Range. If she could not look out the windows and see this sight, she might imagine herself back at her Quantico lab which overlooked the academy and training grounds. She'd learned that the greenness of Hawaii was actually man-made, created by the many canals built into the mountains to bring water down from the uppermost heights in order to irrigate an otherwise barren landscape that, if not so nurtured, would be the color of teakwood. She now wished that no one had told her, that the illusion was intact and whole.
“ Lunch a good idea,” said Lau, breaking the silence. “You work too hard, Dr. Coran. Not good for nobody.”
“ Lunch! My thoughts exactly,” said James Parry, who'd appeared at the door so stealthily that even Lau was shaken.
“ You're some G-man, Chief Parry… sneak up on a person like that,” said Lau.
“ Sorry, didn't mean to get on your nerves, Mr. Lau.”
“ No bother,” Lau lied, and started to leave, saying, “I think you guys have much to talk about.”
“ Our Mr. Lau reads minds,” said Parry as he made himself comfortable across from her, sitting in an office chair.
“ Whatya mean, reads minds?”
Failing to answer her, he said, “There's something we've got to talk about.”
“ Oh, something come up I should know about?”
“ I took the whole thing, what we know, what we suspect-all of it-to Dave Scanlon, the Commissioner of Police, Honolulu. Now he's sweatin' it.”
“ Sweating what? Why?”
“ Let's just say the commissioner's a good politico, and he simply wants to cover all his asses. Any rate, all the different districts of the HPD are pouring over their missing-persons case files for the past several years. No telling how long this thing may've been going on, you see?”
“ You think the disappearances could've gone undetected for much longer than we already suspect?”
“ No one's sure at this point.”
“ But you dug up some old cases that're suspiciously similar in addition to last year's here and two years ago on Maui?”
He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”
She realized that Parry was of a breed of men who looked differently at whatever fell under his purview, that while countless other cops on the island had seen the same information, it was Parry who'd put it all together. All of the material had been studied by others, but Parry and his team had looked at it in a fresh if twisted light, in the dark light cast by a stone-cold killer. Parry was what the FBI was all about. To him a crime scene wasn't simply a place where the evidence might be collected, bagged, collated and tagged, but a blight of the darkness within a killer's mind. Why had the killer chosen this place, this time, this person? It was the kind of approach pioneered by the late Otto Boutine, whom she had both admired and loved very much, a man who had died to save her from a terrible death at the hands of the infamous vampire killer, Matt Matisak.
Parry didn't work a crime scene backwards in an effort to reconstruct the crime, as the typical street-level detective might, formulating a mock-up of what might've occurred and then launching a neat and tidy investigation along a line of presumptions. Parry, like Jessica, knew that there are some clues left at a crime scene, which by their very nature do not lend themselves to a sane orbit. Parry obviously would be interested in items of tangible evidence left by the killer if there were any, but even if there were, he'd be even more interested in the implied clues lingering at the crime scene, each a passport to the mind of the killer. In the case of the Trade Winds Killer, or what the lab people had begun to think of as the Cane Cutter, there'd been no tangible clues-not a scrap-until Linda Kahala's misshapen arm had appeared; furthermore, there still was no crime scene as such, only a dumping ground, and even that was no ordinary dumping site, for it remained
Inaccessible. Now James Parry wanted to know for certain, “Is there any sign so far's you can tell of ritualistic, sadistic, pseudo-sexual acts performed on the victim?”
“ What in God's name do you think I am, Parry? A magician? No way I can tell all that with what little I have to work with. Get me more of Linda Kahala's body and maybe… just maybe…”
Still, she understood his burning need to know the answers to all the questions: Did the murderer take his time, or was he hurried? What insight into the mind of the maniac haunted the killing ground? What was he thinking before, during, after?
As her father had once put it, “To understand the 'artist,' you must first truly look at his “work.'“ Otto Boutine's profiling team had taught her that the killer must be defined as either an “organized” or a “disorganized” murderer, and that these traits were “symptoms” of orderly or disorderly behavior at the scene of his crimes, further defining the fiend far more than the type of weapon he used or the caliber of the bullet he preferred. Cane cutters on these islands were a dime a dozen.
“ What I can tell you now for certain is that given the severity of the mutilation to the arm alone, the ritual nature of the slashes, the blade marks against the bone itself, he definitely cut into her while she remained alive; we are also confident that such brutalization means that he's certain to continue. He enjoys it.”
“ So that's the reason for the consistent victim profile. He seeks women who have that certain look.” Parry stated it as a verification of what he'd already come to believe.