“It certainly took you long enough.” The woman was sunburned and overweight and swathed in a wildly patterned muumuu in a particularly hideous shade of lavender. She made no effort to hide her displeasure as Cal Olani swung out of his patrol car nearly half an hour after he’d received the dispatcher’s call.
“Now, Myrtle,” her husband said, trying to soothe her. He sported a shirt that matched his wife’s muumuu, and a sunburn even more purple. “You have to remember, this is Maui, not Cleveland.” He offered his hand to Cal Olani. “I’m Fred Hooper, and this is my wife, Myrtle. We’re staying in a condo down that way about a mile.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of Spreckelsville. “I told Myrt she shouldn’t bother you with this, but—”
“Nobody goes off and leaves a truck with the keys hanging in the ignition, and their wallet just lying out on the seat where anyone could come along and pick it up,” Myrtle Hooper broke in, silencing Fred with a single quick gesture. “At least they don’t in Cleveland, and I just don’t believe things are that much different out here.” As Cal Olani started toward Josh’s truck, both Hoopers trailed after him, Myrtle still talking. “Something isn’t right about this. I know Fred thinks I’m being silly, but a mother knows these things.” They had reached the pickup, and as Olani turned to look questioningly at Mrs. Hooper, she pursed her lips. “We looked in the wallet, of course. We thought we might find a telephone number or something.” She sighed deeply. “Just seventeen. Such a shame.”
“Now, Myrt, we don’t know what happened,” Fred began, but once again his wife silenced him with a sweep of her hand.
“Of course we know what happened,” she said. “It’s happening to kids all the time now. Teenage suicide. I read about it in Time magazine.” She shifted her gaze to Cal Olani. “His clothes are on the beach,” she said. “At least I assume they’re his clothes. There’s no one else around here. And we put his wallet back on the seat of the car, exactly the way it was when we found it,” she added as the policeman peered into the truck’s open window.
Just as the woman had said, a worn wallet was lying on the seat of the truck, and the keys were hanging in the ignition. Picking the wallet up, Olani checked the driver’s license himself.
Josh Malani.
There were a few dollar bills, a student identification card, some worn pictures, and various scraps of paper with girls’ phone numbers written on them, but little else.
Moving on to the beach, Cal Olani found a pile of clothes, also just as Myrtle Hooper had described. There were a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, Jockey shorts, socks, and shoes.
The jeans were on the bottom, then the T-shirt and the underwear, with the shoes resting on top of the pile, the socks tucked inside them.
Very neat.
Very tidy.
And from what Cal Olani knew of the boy, not at all like Josh Malani.
Unless Josh had been trying to say something.
Wordlessly, Olani went back to the truck. Shoved behind the driver’s seat was a slightly damp towel, wrapped around an equally wet bathing suit.
Even if Josh had a dry bathing suit, wouldn’t he have taken his towel down to the beach if all he was planning to do was go for a swim?
Of course, as Myrtle Hooper had pointedly implied, if the boy was planning to go into the water and not come out, what would be the point of having the towel on the beach?
He searched the cab of the pickup once more, looking for a note, but even as he hunted he knew he wouldn’t find one. A little too reckless, always a bit too wild, Josh Malani wasn’t the kind of kid who’d leave a note behind. Not the kind of kid, either, who’d commit suicide. Yet the evidence seemed pretty strong that that was exactly what he’d done.
He went back to the beach, where Mrs. Hooper waited for him, a faintly smug expression on her face. Cal Olani found himself disliking her intensely: a woman who was more concerned about having her opinion validated than she was about what might have happened to a seventeen-year-old boy.
“There’s some footprints, too,” he heard Fred Hooper say. “We were careful not to disturb them.”
Olani moved closer to the neatly folded clothes and looked down at the sand. A single set of footprints led toward the water, disappearing where the surf — gentle today — had washed them away. Shading his eyes from the sun’s glare on the water, he peered out at the ocean, searching for signs of someone swimming, but saw no sign of Josh or anyone else. Not that he had expected to; his gut was already telling him that Josh Malani was dead.
“It’s tough for them,” Fred Hooper said softly, his eyes, like Cal Olani’s, fixed on the sea. “Not like when I was a kid. We didn’t have to worry about anything. Grow up, raise a family, retire, and come to places like this. But what do the kids have to look forward to now? Drugs, and gangs, and getting shot at when you’re just minding your own business.” He was quiet for a moment, then: “I wish we’d gotten here a little earlier. Maybe if he’d just had someone to talk to, it would have helped, you know?”
Cal Olani rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Maybe it would have,” he said. But as he started taping the area off to keep the people who’d been attracted by the presence of his squad car from messing up the site before it could be photographed, he wondered. Would talking to someone really have helped?
Yesterday, neither Josh Malani nor any of his friends had been interested in talking about anything.
Now Kioki Santoya was dead, Jeff Kina was missing, and Josh Malani had apparently drowned himself.
What the hell was going on?
CHAPTER 21
Katharine Sundquist was excited when she returned to Takeo Yoshihara’s estate, convinced she held the key not only to the missing computer files, but to the mystery of the skeleton in the ravine. Arriving just as Rob and one of his workmen were transferring the last of the carefully tagged bones from the back of the Explorer into his office, she’d barely been able to hold her impatience in check until the entire find had been carefully laid out on a lab table in the room that adjoined Rob’s office.
The sharp edge of her excitement had been blunted, though, when the files proved less easy to locate than she’d hoped. It should have been so simple: they had the file names, and Phil Howell was certain they were somewhere on Takeo Yoshihara’s computer. But when Rob brought up a directory of the drive, no such file names appeared. Sensing Katharine’s disappointment, he’d tried to reassure her. “Not to worry. This is only one drive, and there have to be a lot more than that. I’ll run a search.”
The search, though it had only taken a few minutes, seemed to Katharine to go on forever, but then two lines appeared on the screen, showing the results of the inquiry, and her hopes leaped again.
X: \serinus\artifact\Philippine\skull.jpg
X: \serinus\artifact\Philippine\video.avi
“If the directories are set up with any kind of logic, at least we know where the skull came from,” Katharine said as she gazed at the screen. “But what does ‘serinus’ mean?”
“It’s one of Yoshihara’s projects,” Rob Silver said. “It has something to do with pollution. Serinus is the genus designation for finches. Specifically, Serinus canaria — canaries.”
“Canaries?” Katharine repeated. “I’m not sure I see the connection.”
“The connection comes from the old practice of lowering canaries into mine shafts. If the birds came up alive, it was safe for the men to go down. If the birds were dead, then there were dangerous gases in the mine.” He paused. “I don’t know much about that particular project, but I suspect Yoshihara’s looking for new ways to stop killing canaries, as it were. Hence the name of the project. Corporate cute, if you ask me. Let’s see if we can take a look at those files.”