Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) by Chris Bauer (mobi ebook reader .TXT) 📗

their comments to the same effect. These were not no as an answer, more like only probably no.

“Tell you what, Frogman Trout,” Mr. Logan said. “I can check my records back home, on my ranch, if you’d like. Some hard-copy info we’re in the process of cataloging for a database. You, your friend Patrick”—he glanced at Evan—“and you too, Commander, you’re all invited to my ranch where we can go over whatever we find. I’ll check my records regarding your friend more closely. Please call my secretary.”

He handed Philo a business card, hesitated releasing it, then did. “You don’t remember, do you, Mr. Trout?”

“Sir?”

“What happened during your SEAL training when you were with us?”

“Well, I—”

Philo sensed Douglas Logan had found a happy place to blunt the pain of losing Chester Kapalekilahao, the dead copter pilot. A moment that apparently gave the island owner comfort, as short-lived as it would be, something that made him proud. For Philo, it was a moment in his SEAL career that was less than flattering.

“Your capture.” The warm smile spread across Logan’s face like a grade-schooler telling tales.

“Do you know about this, Commander?” he said to Evan. “I don’t expect Mr. Trout would have told you about it. It was during one of the exercises the Navy puts you SEALS through. What Miakamiians call ‘Hide and Seek.’”

Philo knew where he was going, made no attempt to short him on reliving the glory he was about to re-bestow on one of his island charges.

“A SEAL team in training entered one of Miakamii’s jungles in full gear,” he began, “for an overnight stay. They were expected to make hidey-holes for themselves. A survival exercise. Sole purpose was to stay camouflaged, hidden all night until they could all be rescued in the morning, simulating their retrieval after a mission. Except one frogman was captured that night—”

Mr. Logan’s smiling eyes shifted from Evan to Philo. He awaited a reaction, was being cute—and inclusive—by letting Philo join in the warmth of the anecdote.

A sheepish Philo raised his hand. “That frogman… was me.”

Mr. Logan nodded. “And to add insult to injury—”

Philo finished it for him. He knew the impact Mr. Logan was going for. “The person who found me was a teenage girl.”

Mr. Logan’s smile broadened, stayed close-lipped, but his eyes now showed appreciation for Philo having played along. “You were a good sport about it back then, and you are a good sport now. No shame to be had here, Mr. Trout. Let me just say she was an extraordinary kid, very resourceful, cunning, fearless. Not a wallflower. And like other islanders she also had an acute sense of smell, her other senses heightened as well. She’s someone who captured more than one SEAL during the Hide ’n’ Seek exercises the Navy approved over the years. I hope you learned something from it.”

Philo’s answer was only half tongue in cheek. “I did. I changed to unscented soap.”

The group shared a chuckle that petered out when the detective rejoined them, announcing he was leaving as soon as his ride arrived. Ella and Ben’s reaction was simultaneous, like a reflex: alert to the point of agitation, both with furrowed eyebrows and a laser-beam focus at a break in the trees that lined the clearing.

“Your ride is here, Detective Uji,” Ella said. “The outboard just beached.”

Uncanny; something Philo hadn’t heard. Impressive.

“Detective—” This was Evan. The cat no longer had his tongue. “Mind if we walk with you?”

They paid their respects to Mr. Logan and friends and waved to the two NTSB employees still busy investigating the wreckage. Once through the trees, out of listening distance from the crash site:

“Chief Koo’s your boss, last I remember, right?” Evan said to the cop.

“You know he is,” the detective said.

The beached skiff’s pilot in shorts and shirtsleeves leaned against the boat, his arms crossed. The lagoon’s turquoise water rippled over the sand, a sea breeze catching Philo’s hair, Philo wanting to drink in this vista and blank out all the chaos they’d just seen—today’s gore, and all the gore of recent memory…

“Great.” Evan stepped directly into the detective’s path and got up into his facial shit as close as he could without assaulting him. “You tell that motherfucker—”

Philo leaned in to stop Evan from doing something he’d regret. Evan pushed Philo out of the way, got nose to nose with the detective again.

“I wanna know why—the fuck—the Kauai police didn’t share with me what they found in my fiancée’s bathroom. Why I had to find that mess myself a whole day later with my posse here, no mention of any of it to me beforehand. Why the cops didn’t find my fiancée’s dead dog asphyxiated by carbon dioxide, from dry ice, damn it, thirty yards from her house. And why no one is returning my assistant’s calls! You get your fucking boss on the phone right the fuck now!”

To the detective’s credit he stood his ground, withstood the verbal onslaught without flinching, and best of all, Philo thought, he did not retaliate. But he also didn’t retrieve his phone.

“Commander—”

“Call him!”

“I don’t need to. I drew your fiancée’s case. Me. I was one of the detectives who processed the scene.”

Evan, seething, stayed in close. “Then you better talk to me, Uji.”

“You want me to talk to you, Commander, take a step back.”

The man from the outboard, also a cop, had already hustled alongside Evan opposite Philo, the two of them bookending his aggrieved bravado. Evan gave ground. Somewhere other than this island, there would have been four guns in close quarters by way of two cops, a Navy captain, and a Navy SEAL. Chalk one up to Douglas Logan for his no-guns-on-the-island regulation.

“It was info we held back. To help with the investigation. To rule out the crazies on the tip line.”

“But you released the scene—”

“An internal screw-up. It should have been handed off internally before they released it. A crew is probably onsite as we speak, something we never do, working the bathroom and replacing the