“A night dive?” Katharine echoed uncertainly. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, her eyes widened. “You mean you went scuba diving at night?”
Michael hesitated, then nodded unhappily. “With Josh Malani, and some other guys.”
“What other guys?” Katharine asked.
Michael hesitated. “Jeff Kina and Kioki Santoya. And Rick Pieper.”
The first two names rang a faint bell in Katharine’s memory. They sounded familiar, but where had she heard them? Before she could even ask the question, Michael answered it.
“Kioki’s the guy whose mom found him in the cane field yesterday morning.”
Katharine remembered the radio report they’d heard that morning. “It was the night before that, wasn’t it?” she asked. “The night you came home late.”
Michael nodded.
“And that’s what you dreamed about last night? And tonight?” Again Michael nodded.
Katharine’s eyes fixed on Michael. “Did something happen?” she asked. “On the dive?”
Michael thought quickly, but he’d hesitated just long enough to let her know that the forbidden dive had not been uneventful. “It wasn’t anything serious,” he said. “The tanks weren’t quite full, so we had to quit early, that’s all. No big deal.”
“But it’s given you nightmares,” Katharine told him. “And after what happened to—”
Michael groaned. “Aw, come on, Mom. They don’t even know what happened to Kioki!”
Katharine studied her son. Not only had he lied to her, but what he’d done had been both stupid and irresponsible. She should ground him, she thought, take away all his privileges, do whatever it took to make certain he’d never do anything like it again. But right now, after having been up almost all last night, she was too tired to cope with it. Besides, he was alive, and at home, and nothing terrible had happened to him. And maybe the fact he hadn’t told her what he was planning was partly her own fault — after all, she’d been overprotecting him for years. If it hadn’t been for Rob Silver, she wouldn’t have let him go scuba diving at all.
The exhaustion that had been crawling through her body all day finally caught up with her, and she decided that this, at least, could wait until another time. “Go to bed,” she told him. “Go to bed, and get some sleep.” Then an idea came to her. “And Michael? You’re the one who screwed up, so you decide how you should be punished. I’m just too tired and too angry to deal with it. So you figure it out. Okay?”
Michael looked at her for a long time, and she could see by the expression on his face that she’d come up with the right answer: she was certain that whatever punishment he finally decided to mete out to himself would be far worse than anything she could have come up with.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I guess that’s only fair.” He got up and had almost reached his room when he came back, bent down, and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it, and I should have told you.” He straightened up. “G’night,” he said softly as he started once more toward his room.
“Michael?”
He turned to face her.
“Try not to be too hard on yourself. A year’s grounding will be way too much.”
By the time she collapsed into bed a few minutes later, Katharine’s exhaustion had reached the point where she was too tired even to sleep. Finally, feeling the house grow stuffier, she got up and opened all the windows. Not that it helped much; a kona wind had begun carrying a faintly acrid, smoglike miasma in from the erupting volcano on the Big Island.
Before she went back to bed, Katharine paused to listen at Michael’s door. Though she herself was wide-awake, her son was sleeping peacefully.
CHAPTER 22
Takeo Yoshihara awoke, as he always did, as the first glow of dawn was lighting the eastern sky. As fully awake now as he’d been deeply asleep the moment before, he rose immediately from his bed and, dressing in the aloha shirt, white pants, and sandals that were his standard uniform on Maui, he went to the small dining pavilion. His breakfast of miso soup, fish, and tea was waiting for him, just as always when he was in residence at the estate.
As he ate he reviewed the conditions of the financial markets and scanned the stack of reports that had come in from all over the world during the night.
It appeared that he was thirty million dollars richer than when he’d gone to bed last night.
Finishing the reports as he drained the last drop of tea from his cup, Yoshihara left the dining pavilion to make his way through the gardens to the research center, stopping only once to remove a wilting orchid bloom that the Filipino gardeners had overlooked.
Entering the research pavilion through the main doors, he nodded to the guard as he passed the desk, pushed open the double doors leading to the south corridor, and strode quickly down the long passageway to the elevator at its far end. Pulling his wallet from his pocket, he passed it over a nondescript gray plate above the call button, and the red light at the top of the plate immediately blinked green. A moment later the door slid open. Yoshihara stepped into the car, and the door closed behind him.
Less than a minute later he was in the laboratory to which the large wooden crate had been delivered late last night. The crate, though, had long since been taken away, as had the remnants of dry ice in which the contents had been packed, and the plastic sheeting in which it had been wrapped.
Only the body itself remained, and it was all but unrecognizable.
Stephen Jameson looked up as the laboratory door opened. Surprised to see his employer coming into the room, he glanced at the clock.
Nearly six-thirty.
Suddenly feeling the fatigue of the long night of dissection, Jameson took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and stretched.
Nodding a greeting to the doctor, Yoshihara stepped closer to the table and looked down at what was left of the body that he’d had removed from its grave and shipped to Maui. If the sight of the carnage caused Yoshihara any discomfort, he gave no outward sign.
The corpse had been laid open from the crotch to the neck, and what few organs still remained in the thoracic area lay in confused disorder, like the pieces of a quickly disassembled jigsaw puzzle. The rib cage had been split and spread wide to allow easy access to the lungs and heart — both of which were missing entirely — so all that now remained was a great yawning cavity that, since it was entirely free of blood, gave the body the odd appearance of never having been alive at all. Rather, the remains of the cadaver had an artificial and strangely impersonal look to them, as though what lay on the table had been sculpted of wax rather than flesh and blood.
Yet Yoshihara knew that such was not the case, for he himself had seen pictures of the boy taken only a few weeks ago. A white male, seventeen years old, he’d stood a little over six feet tall, with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of an athlete. In one of the photographs Yoshihara had seen, the boy was smiling broadly, showing perfect white teeth, deep dimples, and a slightly cleft chin. In combination with his blue eyes and blond hair, he’d been the perfect example of the California surfer.
Oddly, the boy’s good looks remained.
His blond hair, neatly combed and sprayed for his funeral, had been slightly mussed by the packaging, and before Yoshihara realized quite what he was doing, he found himself reaching out to smooth the stray locks back into place.
The pallor of death had been expertly covered with makeup, and the boy’s cheeks showed a rosy glow, as if he might wake up at any moment.
The cleft in his chin was as clear as it had been in the photo, though in the solemn expression of death, he showed no signs of his dimples.