“ Call in our position, Hilani.”
“ No readin' this mother by no book. HQ, this is HPD 12 and 2E, leaving unit to investigate abandoned suspect vehicle. Our location is the Blow Hole, over.”
“ Roger that,” replies Dispatch.
Neither man mentions why he fails to call in a DMV check on the plates. The transmissions simply end. After an uncomfortable amount of time Dispatch tries to hail the two dead cops. There was already much criticism circulating about how Hilani and Kaniola didn't properly execute procedures, that they should have secured the area around the car, got that license plate, called it in, and called for reinforcements up there. But Parry, who'd now listened to the tape sixteen times, was convinced that these two men had not been given an opportunity to respond and had had good reason for their every action, because the plate was intentionally obscured. “No readin' this mother by no book,” Hilani had said.
Hilani, Kaniola and Lina Kahala's deaths were all linked as closely with their Hawaiian blood as with anything else. Hawaiians, by nature, were open and honest to a fault, like the Eskimos, inviting terror into their lives without even recognizing it for what it was, he thought. For now he allowed the tape to replay, but his attention floated away to the book lying next to him on the table, Lina Kahala's book of sonnets.
He lifted it, felt its heft in his hands, squeezed it in a fantastic hope that in doing so some clue would ooze from the damned thing, but the book remained as silent as ever.
In the still of the Hawaiian night, he feels time slow to a crawling, halting stop. He opens the pages and reads as he has each night from the dark passages the young woman, now beyond this life, had once marked for him to find.
Shakespeare's words… her words flow off the tongue easily, like a timeless riddle, and he wonders anew if he hasn't been placed on this earth to unite Lina with her prophet, Shakespeare, whom Jim Parry has never before thought of as a poet of darkness and despair. He wonders, too, what he has missed, what has escaped his eye and his consciousness.
He keenly feels that he is being haunted by Lina, that she pleads with him from every crevice and dark corner of his universe, that she is asking him specifically to untie the twisted ribbon of darkness that somehow links Lina with an embittered, saddened poet and her killer. What is the link that binds a white man who lived hundreds of years before in a place alien to all that Lina knew-England-and an adolescent teenaged girl trying to find herself in modern Hawaii, who instead finds a killer?
Does the book belong to the killer? Whose name, spoiled by water damage, has been all but erased? The killer's? Or someone close to the killer?
Why has he been so reluctant to turn the book over to the lab. to let the analysts conduct tests, to restore the badly damaged ink, to re-invent the name in the dark smudges? Why hasn't he let go of the book? Is it his only connection with the killer, or with Lina? If he loses this connection, does he lose all connection with her?
His tea is gone. He stares into the dregs wishing he could read something into them like some psychic, some fictional sleuth who, in the absence of reason, acts on instinct alone and wins. But heroes often fail, like the song says.
The night offers little more than an empty feeling inside him now-nothing more. He is left to pace, to think of his heavy responsibility, his burden to put an end to this madman. He paces until exhausted, until he again finds himself staring into the mirror and wondering if the killer, too, is awake at this ungodly hour, if he is pacing and staring at himself through a looking glass, questioning himself, his next step, wondering if he can go on, doubting his resolve to reach seven murders this season. Parry stares longer into the looking glass, and knowing the killer to be out there, he wonders if the killer is staring back at himself, pulling at facial stubble, washing white skin, or rinsing brown skin?
Unable to account for or remember his night's slumber, Parry, stupefied, awakens to the sound of military aircraft beating a thunderous approach and retreat overhead, as if he and his modest home are under siege. It is as if he has not slept at all.
10
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
July 16. 9 A.M., FBI Headquarters. Honolulu
“ Joe Kaniola's put your shit, my shit, everybody's shit on the street, in print, front page of his rag!” shouted Scanlon at the top of his lungs. “Only good news is nobody reads it and it's in Hawaiian. Course, it's going to be picked up and translated by every paper in the islands and on the fuckin' radio and TV and the mainland anyway, a story like this… Christ, Parry!”
Scanlon was a bear of a man, broad-shouldered and barrel- chested, whose once-hard, chiseled face had collapsed in and was now jowly and square, a near-hidden cleft chin below the folds, and a surprisingly thin nose no longer at ease with a pair of near-closed, squinting colorless eyes. There was a history between Parry and Scanlon, Jim Parry's office having embarrassed the HPD in the past on more than one occasion, but particularly on the Daiporice murders when Parry had, after extensive examination of the facts, quickly linked several island scams which had led to a brutal professional killing. It turned out the hit man was contracted for by a high-ranking city official who was dirtier than most Mafia types Parry had known.
Meanwhile, the HPD blithely followed a path that netted several suspects, all of whom had nothing whatever to do with the crime. The HPD districts weren't communicating well on the case, and each area had arrested separate individuals for the scam and the killing, maintaining the two incidents were unrelated, filing separate reports bearing no relation to each other.
Another body surfaced and this time the FBI, acting on a missing-persons report, got involved. As bureau chief of the FBI, Parry didn't need a formal invite from Scanlon or any of his captains to come in on a missing-persons report, especially if it involved a minor, and Daiporice's own son, aged seventeen, had somehow gotten in the way and been eliminated. The loss of his son brought Ted Daiporice to his knees.
Parry's take-charge style had been viewed as abrasive by some HPD personnel before Daiporice, and it was likely for this reason he'd been “unaccountably” left out of the loop on the seventeen- year-old's disappearance. Parry charged in and crashed HPD's party anyway, when they couldn't find a trace of the missing young man anywhere.
Then came the Wilson Lewis case. Parry studied forensic reports and police reports on the case, along with the so-called confessions of those men being held in connection with a string of brutal slice-and-dice mutilations. Those arrested were mental defectives, down-and-outs and PSOs-previous sex offenders. When Parry came in on the case, he immediately saw the links between the victims; wounds to the eyes in particular showed such force as to indicate uncontrollable rage and hatred. Even the bones around the eyes had been damaged by the hilt of a knife; sexual organs too were gutted and turned out, as if the killer had to look and touch inside them, not unlike the Trade Winds Killer in this regard.
To be fair to Scanlon and his detectives, the bodies were always found weeks later in deserted areas of the forests, far off the main roads, and in the summer heat, that year reaching into the nineties, a cadaver was stripped to skeletal remains within ten days. So Scanlon's people didn't have much in the way of evidence either to identify the victims or to reconstruct the crimes. Like the Trade Winds Killer, Wilson Solomon Lewis, an otherwise mild-mannered insurance salesman by day, didn't leave his victims where he had killed them, so there was no crime scene to analyze per se; all they had to go on was where the bodies were dumped-a stone whodunit, in police parlance, the hardest kind of case to resolve.