Schools of fat kala and malolo fish darted among the blue fire and fan coral, and as Jessica extended a finger, the lovely, star-shaped kihikihi slipped below the brilliant silver and golden-yellow coral, which gleamed beneath the ocean in the refracted light in the undersea forest. There were some six hundred and fifty different varieties of fish in the Hawaiian waters, and Jessica believed she had seen all of them this morning when she had dived from the outrigger Ku's Vision into the famous Molokini crater just southwest of the Wailea coastline on the island of Maui. Here Jessica Coran was scuba-diving with the local dive set, and her mind was free, her body alive. It was the complete and utter feeling of weightlessness and freedom from all things human that excited her, along with the psychological distance from her normally grim work as an FBI medical examiner, that she so needed and wanted. She had dived in the Bahamas, the Keys, Aruba, but there was nothing quite like diving amid a gentle old volcanic crater buried below the ocean to make one step out of oneself and realize the enormity of life on earth.
At the surface, a crescent-shaped tip of the crater formed Molokini Island; less than a mile in size, it was a marine sanctuary and a haven for divers. Nobody, not even the new Chief of Division IV, Paul Zanek, could touch her here. She'd even forgotten about Jack Westfall, a hardworking FBI grunt whom she'd begun to have strong feelings for just before he killed himself. Jack's last conversation with her had been a call for help which she had not heard.
“ Ever been to the Smokeys?”
“ Smokey Mountains?” she'd asked.
“ Man can get lost in there; swallowed up.”
“ I get my kicks from hunting and diving, Jack, and when I can't get away, it's the firing range.”
“ I try to get there least once a year, to the mountains, I mean…” he'd continued. 'The bluest blues there.”
'Take me next time,” she'd dared him.
“ Place swallows you whole. Got to know your way. People get lost in those mountains every year. Children mostly. They're like… swallowed up.”
“ I used to hunt all the time with my dad,” she'd assured him. “I wouldn't get lost.”
“ I know the territory, Jess. And I'm telling you, anybody- anybody-can get lost in there.”
He hadn't been talking about the damned mountains; he'd been talking about something darker, something scarier, but she hadn't heard. Then it was too late.
She had managed to forget about Jack Westfall and Chief Zanek and everyone else here, just allowing her eyes to intermingle with the world of light and dark below the planet, a world ruled by the same instinct for survival as that of the land animals; yet here even the struggle between hunter and prey for life and death took on softer, subtler hues.
She caught sight of the sentient spindly polyps, their full length searching for food and lodging among the coral. The rainbow of colors that extended from so many forms of sea life dazzled her.
Amid the brain coral and the fire-red coral, the fish sped, dipped, rose and fell as if birds in flight, so at ease within their coral wood. A tubular, sleek trumpeter-a loner-swayed just above the bottom, so Jessica went down for a closer look. Near a bevy of sea fans an invisible flounder, buried in the sand, suddenly lifted and moved off, disturbed by the trumpet fish or her nearness, she could not tell. Like a leaf in an ocean wind, the flounder found a new home on the floor and bore into the sand and disappeared again.
A pair of sea turtles wafted into view, and she turned her attention on these playful creatures. They balleted about one another in perfect harmony, their movements synchronized like a pair of dolphins.
Jessica became part of the life of this new environment, allowing her body to be gently rocked in the ebb and flow of the surf as it spilled into and out of the crater reef.
The ocean here was a sunlit world even at forty feet below where the coral picked up the light and radiated a warm myriad of colors in return. The great crater, outlined in sunlight and shadow below her, seemed a cosmic symbol of life's unending cycle, a circle without beginning or end, and yet always there was a new beginning and a new end, ceaselessly and forever.
Maybe if Jack had been a scuba diver instead of a backpacker. Maybe if he'd not internalized so many of the unsolved cases of children disappearing. A world full of maybes waited for her on the surface.
The world caught up to Dr. Jessica Coran the moment she returned to her hotel room at the Wailea Elua Inn, where the desk clerk handed her a cryptic message that read:
Urgent. Call 1-555-1411
She recognized it as the local number for the FBI. She knew instinctively that something was up. She had purposefully avoided TVs and radios. She had no idea what the message might portend, but she guessed that Paul Zanek was somehow behind it. She took her time in the shower and leisurely dried her hair, and then dressed in casual white slacks and a baby-blue pullover before calling. Zanek, the FBI, and the rest of the damned world could wait another hour. She still had several days left on her leave, so why couldn't they leave her the hell alone? Unless it wasn't Paul Zanek but Alan Rychman trying to locate her, to tell her that he was on a plane, on his way to her at this moment. Could it be?
Delight and dread chasing her, she finally made the call and was put on hold. She cursed and almost hung up before she heard a series of clicks. She was patched through to the main Federal Bureau of Investigation building on Oahu in Honolulu, a gruff voice breaking the long silence, announcing himself as Chief Inspector James Kenneth Parry.
Chief, she thought, impressed that the bureau chief should be calling. “So what can I do for you, Inspector Parry? You called me, remember?”
“ We were informed of your presence in the islands some time ago, and when you failed to respond-”
“ I just got your message today.”
“ Well, be that as it may, we'd given up on you.”
“ Good, then I'll get off and return to my peaceful and much needed R amp; R, if that's okay with you, Inspector.”
“ Two Honolulu cops were murdered last night,” he said starkly.
She drew in a deep breath. “Reason or random?”
“ It would appear random at first glance, but something tells us differently.”
“ Oh?”
“ Radio dispatch had the two officers in pursuit of a suspicious vehicle. Both officers were shot outside their vehicles and tire marks indicate a third. Any rate, our most experienced forensics guy is in the hospital with a triple bypass, and when we began searching files and asking Washington for assistance, well, they came up with your name. Said you were nearby.”
“ But you just said you were leaving messages for me for days. Which is it, Inspector?” Zanek, she mentally muttered, angry that he'd put Parry onto her whereabouts.
“ Sorry,” he said. “I didn't make myself clear. I've been seeking your kind of assistance for a long time. Dr. Coran.”
“ Never mind,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Look, it'll take me some time to get there. A two-hour drive to the airport on the other side of the island, and God knows what the flights are like, but with my badge, I suppose I can get aboard a plane for Oahu. Will you have someone meet me at the airport?”
“ We can do better than that. We can have a plane at Kahului Airport when you arrive there.”
“ No, listen. I've got a return flight booked to Honolulu anyway and may's well use it. I won't be much longer and it'll save the taxpayers some jet fuel.”
“ If you like. Any rate, there'll be someone to meet you in Honolulu, and thanks, Dr. Coran.”
“ Meantime, no one's to touch the bodies. Understood?”
“ They're at the morgue, under guard.”
“ See you when I arrive, then.”
“ I'm sorry for having to intrude on your vacation, Dr. Coran, but we've no one else to turn to.”