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

he said, “our bows and darts, our swords—they’re in fine condition, Ella. Always have been, always will be.”

“Fine weapons, but no match for firearms. Someday Douglas will see the need…”

To change the ban, Ella finished in her head, and let them have guns on the island. It would not, however, have made a difference those many decades ago, the outcome of a certain memorable Japanese “siege” on the island that went the natives’ way, belying that they had only rudimentary weapons. But firearms could likely make a large difference going forward, should there be future incidents.

The path bottomed out, and they pedaled to a shuttered house, stopping at the front gate. They laid their bikes down, faced the house head-on, its roof overgrown with vegetation, its lawn a collection of short weeds. Here was Ella’s grandparents’ home, abandoned after their deaths. Her grandfather Tom Imakila, a WWII Medal for Merit winner and a Purple Heart recipient as a civilian, had been shot in three places during “The Siege,” yet he’d still managed to kill his assailant, the Japanese Zero pilot, with his bare hands, his wife Lani assisting. Heroes. Both gone for decades, their home was a shrine to them and their wartime efforts. Ella and Ben made the sign of the cross, then stood solemnly side by side as they paid their respects, Ben’s arm around Ella’s shoulder.

They rode farther along the path, reached an opening in the tree canopy. Ahead of them, a large, barren field. “Here we are,” Ella said.

In front of them a trough of barren, arid soil bunched up like it had been scraped by an earthmover. Here was the path the wounded WWII Zero had taken after it hit the ground, the warplane’s slide still noticeable eighty years later. The skeleton of the aircraft lay for years at the end of the furrow, a metallic mastodon rusted and craggy, its ribs picked clean. Nature had tried to absorb the carcass, tried to pull it under and swallow all the remaining jagged, sun-bleached metal pieces whole, had had decades to do so but failed. It finally lost out to museum experts and war historians who photographed the remains where they lay, then carted them off to reassemble them in an aviation museum on Oahu.

Their next stop would be the only other crashed aircraft site the island had ever experienced, where Chester’s helicopter had come to rest after his murder. They remained on the fringe, the NTSB people still engrossed in analyzing the copter’s wreckage. Again they prayed, this time for Chester.

They rode until they found a deep-bellied cut in the scrub overgrowth along the coastline that gave a good view of the ocean. A tourist helicopter buzzed the shore, a different sightseeing operator, not Douglas Logan’s. It followed a school of dolphin breaking through the whitecaps, jumping over each other, frolicking, enjoying life, the copter’s occupants treated to a spectacle that would make their vacation highlight reels for sure. Ben and Ella headed back inland, toward their village.

A voice crackled through their citizens band radio when they opened their front door. “Ella and Ben. Douglas Logan here. Come in, Ella. Come in, Ben…”

Ella sat at a desk in their small, wallpapered parlor, grabbed the CB radio’s microphone. “I’m here, Douglas. What do you need?” Ben stood behind her.

Douglas spoke through the static, began with, “I have news from Chief of Police Koo…”

A cigarette boat similar to the one Ella had seen, the one that made the ocean retrieval of the skydiving passenger from Chester’s helicopter, had been found at a Lihue boat rental dock not far from the airport.

“White with red stripes across the bow. Sound familiar to you?”

“Yes.”

“It was rented that morning for the day but returned within three hours of putting out into the channel. A cash transaction, with a hefty deposit that was left uncollected. The person who rented it had what proved to be a fake boating license…”

The renter wore sunglasses and a hip-hop beanie, Douglas told her. The name he gave the establishment owner wasn’t traceable anywhere. There was security camera video inside the rental office and on the dock. Two people left the dock for the charter, three came back.

“Maybe Polynesian, maybe Asian, maybe even white according to the person handling the transaction. He couldn’t be more specific because of the head coverings and sunglasses. The security video was too indistinct. And Ella?”

“Yes, Douglas?”

“Chief Koo ruled out one aspect, that it had anything to do with Chester personally. They checked him out, found nothing. Straight and narrow, that was our Chester. Simply a case of wrong place, wrong time for him.”

Ella had assigned no blame for this horrific tragedy to their childhood friend; it hadn’t even been a consideration. But this confirmation left a gaping hole in the investigation: no motive.

“But Douglas…” Ben’s hands rested on Ella’s shoulder as she spoke. She gave one of his hands a squeeze, and he squeezed back. “Who will the police look at next? Hello? Douglas? Can you still hear me?”

“I hear you, Ella. I think they will look at my family. Something to do with the island maybe, or its finances”—he paused—“or me.”

12

Philo and Patrick motored into another Kauai neighborhood on recon. Koloa Breeze’s ground-level sign fronted a manicured shrubbery entry. All homes were single residences, mostly single-story, some modest, some gaudy, no structures older than ten years, was Philo’s guess. They came out the other side, at an intersection busied by a pokey street sweeper washing mud from the curb, the stirred mud turning the blacktop brown. The SUV idled, Philo needing to give the bright green truck and its swirling orange brushes the right of way as it crossed in front of them.

“C’mon, hustle it up, how dirty can these streets be,” Philo said, impatient.

“Mud from flooding,” Patrick said. “It moves downhill. Be glad it’s not lava, sir. It wouldn’t be good if it was lava, Philo sir.”

“Yes, I get it, bud, lava would be worse.”

“This thing here is