His throat constricted. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. He crossed himself without knowing it, held his breath, took two quick steps to the rim of the promontory, and looked over.
“ Oh, my God, ” he said and turned his face away, retching.
“Call for you on two,” Sarah told Fukida over the telephone.
“Who?”
“Two people on the line. Ms. Sakado, the day manager at the Mauna Kai, and a waiter named Faustino Parra-who’s a little hysterical, so be gentle with him.”
“What’s it about, do you know?”
“Something about the Torkelssons again.”
He laughed a little wildly. “Of course. What else could it be? Why did I bother asking?”
“You can handle it, boss. I have complete confidence.”
He punched the button for line two. “Sergeant Fukida,” he said, doodling horses on his note pad, “how can I help you?”
Five seconds later the doodling had stopped. The pen had been thrown down. “Jesus. We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone within fifty yards of her.”
Arranged neatly over a low glass table on the broad, columned terrace of the Outrigger on a sunny morning, overlooking an agreeable panorama of man-made streams, waterfalls, and exquisitely tended tropical gardens, the lurid photographs seemed wildly out of place: blood and trauma and violent death.
Julie and Gideon had met John for morning coffee while John waited to be picked up by Fukida on the way to Dagmar’s house just a couple of miles up the coast. They had gotten lattes and muffins at the lobby coffee bar and carried them out to the terrace to enjoy them in the fresh air. When Fukida hadn’t shown up at 8:45, as agreed, they’d gotten seconds on the lattes. At 9:05, he arrived.
“Hey, you’re late,” John began, “I thought you were the one who always-” But the look on Fukida’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter?”
Fukida hesitated, looking at Julie. “And this lady…?”
“My wife, Julie,” Gideon said. “Julie, this is Sergeant Fukida.”
Fukida nodded a curt greeting and sat down. “Dagmar’s dead,” he said.
He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, trousers that almost but didn’t quite match it, and a nondescript tie. No baseball cap. He seemed diminished, like an over-aged, undernourished department store clerk.
The three of them stared at him and he quickly explained. Her body was discovered by a waiter from the Mauna Kai at five o’clock the day before, at the base of a twenty-foot cliff near her house.
John closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Ah, no.”
“The doc says death occurred somewhere between noon and four yesterday, resulting from severe injuries to the head, apparently from the fall.”
“An accident?” Gideon asked. “Or-”
That was when the photographs came out. “You two are good with pictures. You tell me.” But he held on to them, looking at Julie before laying them out. “These are pretty graphic, ma’am. You might not want to-”
“That’s all right, I’ll stay,” Julie said, which surprised Gideon. “I want to know. There was something about her,” she said to him by way of explanation. “I liked her…”
“Yeah, and if you’re married to him, I guess you’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Fukida said, fanning the photos out over the table. “So where do you get the coffee?”
They pointed him toward the coffee bar, and as he left they began going through the color photos. Fukida had apparently brought only a select few; six altogether. Gideon lifted the first one. It had been taken at the top of the promontory, an overview of the bench and the area around it.
“What is that, her wig?” Julie asked.
“Looks like it,” said John. “So we know one thing it wasn’t, anyway.”
“Right, we know it wasn’t suicide,” Gideon agreed. “People like to look nice when they kill themselves. She’d never have done it, letting strangers find her without the wig.”
“Not Auntie Dagmar, that’s for sure,” John said.
The rest were photographs of the body, going from full-body shots to close-ups of Dagmar’s bloodied head. Julie swallowed and looked away once or twice, but stuck it out. One of them had been made after unbuttoning the top two buttons of Dagmar’s blouse and pulling it down over her right shoulder.
“It seems… indecent,” Julie said. “A dignified, private old woman like that-dead, helpless-exposed to public view like a… like a…”
“It has to be done,” John said softly. “And not many people see these.”
“I know that.”
“Ah, look at this,” Gideon said. He tapped the area just to the right of her bared neck, where even Dagmar’s scrawny trapezius muscle created a triangular cushion of flesh above the collar bone. “These three blueish spots… you can hardly see two of them… that’s extravasated blood just under the skin.”
“Would that be ‘bruises’ in English?” Julie asked.
“Yes, bruises.”
“Fingermarks,” John said.
Gideon nodded. He poured a little coffee onto a napkin, wet his index finger, middle finger, and ring finger with it, and grasped the edge of the table, his thumb underneath, pinching hard. When he lifted his hand, there was a curving row of three spots on the glass, to all intents and purposes exactly like the bruises on Dagmar’s shoulder.
“Somebody grabbed her from behind-hard-maybe while she was sitting on the bench.” He gently placed his fingers on Julie’s shoulder to illustrate, his thumb in back.
She shivered. “And pushed her over the edge?”
“Looks like it.”
“So what’s the verdict?” Fukida asked, coming back with his cardboard cup of coffee; the four-dollar vente size.
“Murder,” John said. “You agree?”
“Sure, no question about it. Also-and this you probably can’t tell from the pictures-she was laying a good four feet from the base of the cliff. No way did she just fall off, or even jump. Somebody shoved her, good and hard.”
“Or threw her,” Julie said. “How hard would it have been? She’s nothing but skin and bones.”
“That’s true, too.”
“Fingerprints?” John asked.
“No.”
“Did you check the bench? The paint might have been soft from being out in the sun, there might-”
“Johnny, for Christ’s sake! Of course I checked the bench. We dusted everything. Give me a little credit, will you?”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, whoever did it wore gloves.”
“How can you know that?” Julie asked.
“We picked up some glove-leather impressions. One on her watch, one, maybe two, on the bench.”
“Glove smears,” John said. “That’s not gonna do you much good.”
Fukida shrugged. “Yeah, well.”
“What about suspects?” Gideon asked, handing back the photos.
“Oh, yeah, suspects, we got suspects.” He sucked coffee through the opening in the lid, made a face, and twisted the lid off to get a healthy mouthful. Gideon could smell the sprinkling of chocolate on top. “The kid that found her, the waiter, he was there earlier, too, delivering pastries to her at about one-”
“One?” John interrupted. “Wait a minute, that means the noon end of the TOD range is wrong. It had to be after that.”
Fukida put a finger to his temple and looked archly at him. “Whoa, not too much gets by this guy.”
“Duh,” John said, not taking offense.
“And the kid told us she had company. Guess who.”
“Inge?” Gideon answered on the spur of the moment.
“Hedwig?” John offered. “Axel?”
“Right, right, and right. Also Felix the Cat, all the way from sunny Waikiki. The whole sorry bunch of them.”
“Felix?” John repeated. “Must have been important to bring him over. Do you know what it was about?”
“No. The kid says he didn’t hear anything, but they looked like they weren’t having any fun. He thought they were fighting about something and shut up when he came in. He said Dagmar looked really upset.”
“What do you think it was about?”
“What do you think it was about?”