“ Good… good,” replied Parry, popping a mint. “Keep it that way.”
“ I'm telling you, Chief, another go at this kid's a waste of time. And it could expose him to some ugly feelings in the community.”
“ Maybe, but I've got to ask him a few questions. After we're finished with the Kahalas, you can run me over there.”
“ Waste of time.”
“ Maybe, but perhaps I can shake loose something from the kid.”
“ Something I missed?”
“ Something you weren't aware of.”
“ Swears he knew nothing about how she was living in between the time he dumped her and last saw her.”
'Ted Bundy swore a lot of 'truths' too. Come on, Tony, the kid freakin' lied to you about the timing.”
Gagliano shrugged. “Whatever you want, Boss.”
“ What I want is some answers. So far, we got shit, Tony.”
“ What about the doctor lady? She come up with anything?”
Parry brought his agent up on the news from the lab. It was enough to light Tony's eyes up. “Then those kanaka cops were on to something. Too bad they failed to follow proper procedure.”
“ They were good men, Gag.”
“ First thing they ought've done was call in the damned plate. Had they done that, we'd have their killer, the Trade Winds Killer, locked away for life right now.”
“ Maybe there was a good reason they didn't call it in immediately. Plate might've been obscured.”
“ So they inspect the car instead?”
“ Yeah, like that and-”
“- and they find blood on the interior, maybe the girl's clothes, but before they can make another move, they're under fire.”
“ Like sniper fire from the brush. Never saw it coming.”
Both the FBI men had served in Viet Nam and both understood how sudden death could strike.
The time in and out with the Kahalas to inform them of the positive I.D. made on Linda's torn limb, making it a certainty that their daughter was at peace with her Maker, was a mere twelve minutes, but it seemed like an hour. The mother crumpled under the weight of the news, supported only by her husband, who also slid to the floor. In their dark house of mourning, the couple reminded Parry of the twisted, sad figure in Picasso's Blue Guitarist.
The FBI men left a card and quickly disappeared, leaving the grieving parents to themselves.
“ Get me to this Oniiwah kid,” Parry said in an acerbic voice.
Gagliano knew the tone and what it meant. He said nothing as he and Parry, boarding Tony's car together, drove for the University of Hawaii. After a few miles, Tony said, “The kid lives in the dorm. We may not catch him. Could be out at a pizza joint, a dance, a party, a rat's-ass gala, anything.”
'Tonight, Tony.”
“ We'll find him…”
Just then the usual clatter and clutter of the police ban radio in Tony's unit caught their attention, the dispatcher calling on a city squad car to investigate a disturbance on Paani near Kapiolani
Boulevard. It was coincidentally the same street on which the Kahalas lived and where Parry had left his car.
Each of the men looked at one another. “What do you think, Jim?”
“ Dispatch gave it a 10-6. Couldn't be anything too big. Let's push on for the college.”
As they did so, Parry thought of Linda Kahala's small, tight-knit community, thought of her hanging out on the corner at the drugstore where she and other children bought their crackseeds and Coca-Colas, thought about her walking the few blocks to Iolani School as a child, about her later catching the bus for Kapiolani Community College, which she'd attended for two years before going on to the university. She'd seemed a determined young woman with a plan. Parry had to know what had happened to end that plan.
They were now entering the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, its peaceful, serene setting at the base of the mountains where the lush, green blanket of the Honolulu Watershed Forest Preserve marked its boundary, making it appear a place where nothing bad in the world could ever happen. For the FBI men such a fantasy world did not exist; they knew that no matter the place, so long as there were people, evil was very much in attendance.
They located George Oniiwah, pudgy and smug, squatting in a rat's nest called Paniolo's, a cave into which the patron had to climb down and in, sheltered from any street light or noise. From the sign outside it was ostensibly a bar and grill that existed just off campus as a place for students to get a pizza and a beer, to shoot some pool and hang out. To Parry's trained eye it was much more than this.
Oniiwah sat in the gloom far to the rear and close to the pounding jukebox, which was blaring out the most recent death- metal tune, an ear-shattering mix of high-tech guitar, screams about sex with corpses and a pretty fair drum section. The lyrics would make any maniac proud.
Everyone in the place had marked the FBI men as exactly what they were the moment they'd entered the dark entrance to this lair: cops. Still, George feigned indifference and simply continued to sip his Hawaiian homeboy brew, a beer called Kona, with a girl at his side and another couple across from him.
An amorphous spirit floated about the place, going in and out of what little light was afforded by a Schlitz beer sign, cigarette smoke that'd been trapped there forever. Paniolo's, or Cowboy's, was outwardly a typical Hawaiian watering hole, its patrons' faces all dark-skinned and leathery. Tony knew a little bit about the owner, who had been a Hawaiian cowboy for years over on the island of Maui, working with free-range-fed cattle and horses there until he got tired of eating dirt. Before establishing himself here, he had been arrested on drug-trafficking, but he'd not served time due to technicalities brought about by an improperly obtained search-and-seizure warrant with probable-cause violations and violations against his civil rights. Since then, his lawyer, a man looking for places to invest, had set him up with the tavern.
The disreputable owner, a full-blood Hawaiian, went by the name of Halole, Hal to his friends, better known to police as Harold Ewelo. It looked to Parry that the “Cowboy” was still eating dirt, only of another kind, as the place was an obvious front for drug-dealing, with Hal set up to run the operation from both the front and the back door. Somewhere in the bowels of this underground labyrinth where not even the trade winds could penetrate, Parry had no doubt you could get just about anything on your mind.
Tony needn't have pointed out George Oniiwah. Something about the kid called out to Parry. He looked out of place, a child among thieves. “Thought you said he was squeaky clean,” Parry shouted, having no need to whisper over the roar of the music.
“ I'm tellin' you he is.”
“ Then what's he doing here?”
“ His crowd comes for pizza, the jukebox, the beer, I tell ya. They're not what you'd call heavily into drugs.”
What about prostitution? Is Georgie above that? Parry wondered. And what possible reason was there to attract Linda Kahala to this turkey? As Parry approached the young people at the table, he could believe Tony's assessment. They were all clear-eyed and intelligent and quite aware of the two cops bearing down on them, their nervous necks twitching, eyes casting about at one another like ping-pong balls, hands alternately opening and closing, stock defensive gestures. In fact, Oniiwah's thumbs were closed over by his clenched fists, a sure sign of more than just nerves. Even the girls gave off body language that told the cops they were guilty of something. So did the man behind the bar, and another at the grill, each eyeing the other until the first one disappeared into a back room.
“ Hello, young people,” said Gagliano to the group in a mock show of grandfatherly concern.
At the back door Parry caught a glimpse of a pair of onyx eyes that had followed the bartender back in; the eyes now stared out at the FBI men. The owner whom Tony had described to him? Jim wondered.