“ I don't know.” He privately wondered about Tony, but instantly ruled him out. “Kaniola's just canny, that's all.”
“ Christ, she ought've known you don't expose yourself to an experienced-”
“ She took him to be the bereaving father.”
“ Son of a bitch is bereaving all right-bereaving right down our throats, Parry. He's got nothing kind to say about your bureau either. Read on!”
Parry shook his head, remaining calm. “He's blowing smoke and he knows it. There's no evidence the killer's a white man or that he's from the naval base, none whatever.”
“ But every Hawaiian thinks so now,” challenged Dr. Marshal. “There doesn't have to be any real evidence, not with these types who're just looking for an excuse to torch this city like L.A. in '92.”
“ It isn't going to happen here.”
“ You want to make bank on that?” shouted Scanlon. Jessica Coran pushed noisily through the door, her cane thumping out a requiem, Parry's secretary chasing gooselike after her, quite unable to stop her. The secretary was making excuses over Jessica's words:
“ I'm so sorry, Chief Parry, but this woman — ”
“ Chief Parry, gentlemen,” Jessica began, “I believe I should be in on this roundtable since I am the guilty party here and-”
“- I tried to stop her, but she's so rude and-” Parry motioned his secretary off and the woman stepped back, without turning, obediently closing the door in front of her, leaving Jessica Coran in the center of the big office full of men.
“ All right, Dr. Coran, please join us,” Parry said, trying not to show his displeasure and the dark circles around his bloodshot eyes. “Have a seat.”
She remained standing. “I'm sorry for my ill-timed words of yesterday to Kaniola. I won't be surprised to hear from Quantico, perhaps find myself replaced.”
Parry realized now that she thought she was doing the valorous thing, that she'd come to his rescue, somehow learning of the meeting.
Dr. Marshal cleared his throat and said, “Gentlemen, Dr. Coran, of one thing you can be assured, all leaves to servicemen will be temporarily canceled and every man confined to base at least until the news simmers down.”
“ Good thinking,” muttered Scanlon. “Now whata we do with all of the other white males living in the city? I'm telling you, Jim, your car the other night was just the beginning.”
“ If the newspaper leaks came from within my organization”- Parry fell short of admitting it-”I'll deal with the problems at this end.”
“ And from here on out, I want full cooperation, Jim. No more behind-the-back shit, like alia this crap about how the killer maybe is using the Blow Hole as a dumping site and maybe he's using a U.S. regulation-sized bayonet or machete on his victims.”
“ I said nothing of the kind to Mr. Kaniola,” insisted Jessica.
“ Joe's just feeding his people a pile of kukai, as they say, huh?” asked Scanlon. “For what reason then?”
“ Who knows,” Parry fired back. “To make his son look less like the asshole your department painted him for getting himself killed in the line of duty, maybe?”
“ Or maybe it's become a political thing with Kaniola. Everything's political with him,” suggested Dr. Marshal when the two lawmen had locked gazes. “Now everyone in this room has got to be supportive of each other, gentlemen. We have got to cooperate and stick together on this.”
“ I'll keep my hands on the table if you will,” Parry relented.
Scanlon at first said nothing, then frowned and said, “It becomes clearer the longer this thing goes on, Jim, that we need each other. To pool our resources.”
“ I realize that, Dave.”
“ Good… good…” Marshal, acting as referee, seemed delighted-missing something here, Jessica thought. There was bad blood between Jim Parry and Scanlon. She'd sensed it from the first moment she walked in, and now it was ripe and odorous.
“ Kaniola's facts are wrong and his story's full of shit, like you say, Scanlon, and I think most thinking people, white and Hawaiian alike, will see it for what it is.” Parry held tightly to a heavy paperweight in the likeness of a pair of handcuffs, squeezing hard as he spoke. Despite his words to the contrary, even the new girl on the block, Jessica Coran, knew that the newspaper story was partially accurate: that thanks to men like Scanlon at the top, the HPD nourished a certain amount of inbred prejudice against its own Hawaiian and minority cops, cops who'd been hired to fill quotas fifteen years before, cops who'd never see promotion in the ranks. Nor was Joe Kaniola far from the mark when he suggested that Scanlon's department wasn't pulling its weight in the investigation, that at best they'd fallen into familiar patterns of organizational behavior by arresting derelicts, the homeless, previously known sex offenders, all without the slightest clue as to who the Trade Winds Killer might be. She could almost hear Jim's seething thoughts below his painted smile: Hell, the HPD brass hadn't seen the strange pattern of disappearances of young women of Hawaiian and Oriental extraction over the past two years here in Oahu… nor the link with the missing Maui women before this.
Marshal cleared his throat and spoke up. “Jim, I've heard you call this killer the Cane Cutter, and now Kaniola himself says his favored instrument of death is a huge machete of the type used in cane cutting. We all know that information, leaked properly to the press, can lead to only one conclusion: that our killer is a field worker, one of them”
That information, thought Parry, had been confidential, held in abeyance for the day when a suspect could be brought in and presented with the facts, hopefully to press the man into a confession. Men were known to break during long interrogations when the interrogators had a series of facts in evidence that a killer could not ignore, facts which might cause a guilty man to gasp, fidget and raise an eyebrow. Interrogation only worked if the investigators could carefully walk a suspect along an inexorable path lined with the truth; only such overwhelming evidence might push a recalcitrant sociopath into a corner, awed by the light shone on his actions and secrets. A good interrogation meant laying out all the pieces of the case along the table, in full view of the suspect, like an archaeologist looking over the day's cache of relics and artifacts, but the artifacts of murder didn't lie silent on the table, at least not to the killer or the hunter who had cornered the killer; no, the artifacts of murder literally screamed out at them both.
Now the information regarding the killer's favored weapon, or at least what he'd used on Linda Kahala, was rendered weak and ineffectual by virtue of the fact it'd become part of the public domain, useless as an interrogation tool. Every madman in the city who chose to confess to the crimes could now state that he was the Cane Cutter, that he used a cane knife. Many would bring a weapon in, wasting hours of lab time in which each instrument had to be checked against Linda Kahala's wounds along the one arm.
At the moment, thanks to Kaniola, who no doubt believed in his heart that his news story could only help and never hinder the search for his son's killer, any nut with a big knife might walk into a station house and turn himself in.
Scanlon was right on this score. Joseph Kaniola's story ultimately meant more false leads, more trails to nowhere.
“ I didn't say a word about the weapon, Jim,” Dr. Coran swore.
“ Kaniola says the source of that information came from someone extremely close to the investigation, so if you didn't reveal the fact, who did?” Scanlon persisted.
Her eyes widened at the accusation, the fact the commissioner of police would not accept her word. “Dr. Marshal, here for one-”
Marshal was outraged at the suggestion, shouting, “You can't for a moment believe that I had any-”
“ Elwood Warner, the County M.E., any number of lab techs, cops and agents who are notorious gossips,” she continued, “and now Dr. Harold Shore, your own Oahu M.E.”
“ Dr. Shore? That's preposterous,” countered Marshal, defending the absent M.E.