“No body.”
“Nobody?”
“No… body,” Julie said. “No Magnus. Presuming it is Magnus, he’s just a pile of ashes in a little box.”
“You know, that’s true,” John said reflectively. “No body, no trial, no perps, a misidentified victim… I have to admit, that’s a lot of loose ends.” He looked at his watch. “Well, time to see if we can tie a few of them up. Doc, ready to go talk to the Waimea PD?”
Gideon hesitated. “I guess.”
John frowned. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem is, I’m going to barge in on some detective’s turf, totally unasked, a complete stranger, a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ he’s never heard of, and tell him he botched a case he handled eight years ago, not even getting right who got killed. I’ve been there before, John, and I can imagine his reaction. I know how I’d feel.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. In the FBI, we come up against that kind of situation all the time. There are techniques for defusing it. See, the trick is you have to make them see you as helping them, not horning in. Besides, I used to work for Honolulu PD, remember? I know these people, I know how they think. Trust me. Just follow my lead, we’ll get along great.”
“John, you have my implicit trust,” Gideon said, “but if it was the Kona CIS that handled it, why are we going to the Waimea PD?”
“Because they would have been the first on the scene, and the ones who opened the case. And they’re the local police force. It’s a matter of professional courtesy. See what I mean? There’s a right way to do this.”
The Waimea Police Department was closed.
“Closed!” John yelled through the glass front doors at the stern and preoccupied-looking woman on the other side. In response to their thumping on the glass she had grudgingly emerged into the unlit vestibule from somewhere in back to bark at them: she couldn’t let them in; the office was closed. In one corner of her mouth a cigarette jiggled up and down as she spoke.
“How the hell can you be closed?” John shouted. “What, there’s no crime in Waimea on Sunday?”
Her eyes narrowed. She took the cigarette out of her mouth. Her lips, thin to begin with, disappeared altogether. “Do you have an emergency, sir?”
“No, we don’t h-”
“Are you in immediate need of the assistance of a police officer?”
“No, dammit, but we need to talk to-”
“Office hours are Monday through Friday, eight to five.”
“Look, lady,” John yelled even louder, holding his identification up to the glass. “I’m trying to be polite here. My name is Special Agent John Lau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I damn well want to talk-”
“Monday through Friday, eight to five.” She stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and went back out of sight around a corner. John was left steaming, holding his card case up to the deserted vestibule. “Do you believe this?”
Gideon had been prudently silent throughout. “Well, now, John,” he began as they walked back over the neatly trimmed lawns of the Civic Center toward the parking lot, “that was certainly an instructive example of-”
John cut him off, jabbing the air with a warning finger. “Don’t. .. say… anything.”
“Are you planning to tell me where we’re going?” Gideon asked after they’d been driving a while. “At some point?”
“Where we should have gone in the first place,” John muttered, eyes fixed on the highway ahead. “The Kona CIS.” He set his jaw. “And they better be open.”
TEN
The West Hawaii Criminal Investigation Section was on a side road off the coast highway, in the flat lowland country between Kona and the airport. Its neighborhood was, to put it mildly, unprepossessing. The idea, it seemed, had been to gather up most of the necessary but unlovely community services and deposit them in one out-of-the-way place, where they would be least likely to offend the eyes, ears, and noses of the sensitive: the garbage dump with its huge, surreal pile of wrecked cars waiting to be compacted, the Humane Society holding pens… and the West Hawaii CIS, which doubled as the Kona police station. A trailer and heavy-equipment repair yard and two huge, steaming piles of “organic waste” rounded out the complex, adding their own distinctive touches.
But the police building itself was reassuring: a modern, white, one-story structure, clean and well-maintained, on its own little island of concrete walkways and decorative plantings.
And it was open.
Even better, the detective they were sent to when John said they wanted to talk about the Torkelsson case turned out to be an old acquaintance. Detective Sergeant Ted Fukida had been a new sergeant in the Honolulu Police Department when John was a young cop there, and he remembered him.
“How could I forget you, Lau?” Fukida said, extending his hand. He was a waspish man in his fifties who looked as if he was fighting a low-grade toothache. “You’re the guy who couldn’t fill out an expense form right if his life depended on it. So how’re you getting along with the Feebies?”
“Still can’t fill out the forms right,” John said. “Other than that, okay.”
“Good-good. So what can I do for you? Please, tell me this is not official Feeb business.”
He was a study in restlessness: flip, talky, and fidgety. At the moment, he was cracking gum between his teeth, bobbing back and forward in his swivel chair, and jiggling a toe against the plastic carpet protector underneath him.
“No, actually, it’s old CIS business,” John told him.
Fukida, they quickly learned, had not been the original case-handler. When the detective who had run the investigation had retired not long after the active phase was over, the case had been given to Fukida to oversee; more or less a pro forma gesture, inasmuch as unresolved homicide cases, while they might well go dormant, were never formally closed. There had been little to oversee, but the workmanlike Fukida had familiarized himself with the case file, which meant that it wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time bringing him up to snuff. More important, from Gideon’s point of view, since it hadn’t been Fukida’s case during the investigative phase, he had nothing to be self-protective about.
Which didn’t mean that he was going to sit there and accept everything he was told; certainly not on the strength of Gideon’s supposed reputation. (When John had somewhat effusively introduced Gideon as the world-famous Skeleton Detective, his response had been a laconic, gum-cracking, “Yeah, I think I might have heard of him.”) Indeed, when Gideon began by stating-maybe a bit too baldly-that the skeleton in the Grumman was not that of Magnus Torkelsson but of his supposedly murdered brother Torkel, Fukida had interrupted before Gideon had gotten out his first complete sentence.
“What? You’re out of your mind. What is this supposed to be, a joke? We had an autopsy, we took depositions, we had a-how the hell did you come up with a royally screwed-up story like that?”
“There was a royal screw-up, all right,” John told him levelly, “but you guys made it.”
Fukida’s head rolled back and then round and round on his neck. Gideon caught a waft of spearmint.
“All I can say is, you two better have a good reason for wasting my time.”
“It’s all yours, Doc,” John said. “Just wait, Teddy, you’ll love this, this is great.”
Thanks a lot, John, Gideon thought.
“Mmf,” Fukida said, his eyes closed, continuing to stretch his neck muscles.
Gideon was generally good at telling when a cop was going to be open-minded about what forensic anthropology could do and when he was going to dig in his heels and resist, and Fukida didn’t strike him as a promising student. Happily, however, the sergeant proved him wrong, although he was anything but an easy sell. With the foot bones laid out in their anatomical relationship on his desk blotter, he had put Gideon through a detailed show-and-tell drill, interrupting with questions and argument, until he had more or less satisfied himself that the old talus fractures were really there and they meant what Gideon said they did. By the time they were through with it, he seemed a happier, more engaged man, his toothache perhaps gone.