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

Horse and rider galloped off the beach onto a path through the surrounding thick and prickly scrub brush.

They wrapped the body tightly in boat canvas and laid it lengthwise in the bottom of the skiff. Ben piloted their seaworthy outboard, at one time a lifeboat, back out into the water through the low-tide risers on a calm, late-afternoon sea. He and Ella and the body of Chester Kapalekilahao headed across the seventeen-mile channel that separated Miakamii and Kauai, the sun to their backs. As Ben guided them around the Kauai surf for their push into the bay at the edge of Howling Sands, Ella raised her binoculars. She called over her shoulder to her husband in her native Miakamiian, letting him know that she could see the police chief on the pier.

“Roger that,” Ben said in English. “I’ll bring us in on the sand next to it.”

Closer to Kauai’s cell towers Ella found a cell phone signal. A 9-1-1 call had engaged the island police. Ella’s second call went to Mr. Logan, whose silver Range Rover was now arriving. He parked it next to one of four police cruisers.

After the tears that Mr. Logan—Douglas to Miakamii’s resident islanders—and Ella had shared on the phone, he’d heard Ella explain in a calm voice about where the tourist helicopter, one of five copters the Logan family owned, had crashed in the island’s interior. The wreckage would need remediation that wouldn’t come until after scrutiny by the Kauai police and the National Transportation Safety Board.

“It killed some of our cows and sheep, Douglas,” she told him, “and the church, it… the church, Douglas! It’s damaged…” With Douglas Logan, she hadn’t had to go into detail about the livestock loss and what it meant. He knew the hardship this would cause. The Logan family had been supplementing the island’s food needs through times of hardship that often lasted years. But damage to the small island’s only church had made the cut to Chester’s throat seem even deeper, crueler.

“Ella, you needn’t worry about any of it,” he said. “We’ll get through this. I want to see my good friend Chester first. We’ll talk about the damage later.”

Chester had left Miakamii at age eighteen, went to work for the Logan family on their cattle ranch in Kauai. He attended flight school at Douglas Logan’s expense, learned to fly helicopters, and had stayed in the family’s employ ever since, handling tourist sightseeing. The bond Douglas shared with all Miakamii islanders was real, but the one he shared with Chester was special, like father and son, and not unlike the love Douglas also had for the island of Miakamii itself.

But the Logan family was in a financial tailspin, Miakamii the cause of it. Their ventures—a cattle ranch and a sheep farm, the shell leis made by island craftspeople, a robust Hawaiian honeybee and honey business—had all taken a hit lately. The ranches and farms and the honey business had been shuttered, with the cattle ranch resurrecting itself on Kauai but costing the Logan family a fortune to transition it. Adding to the family’s financial miseries was their impact on the Miakamiian people, whose jobs relied on these ventures. The island’s poor prospects were sinking the Logans in debt and throwing the native inhabitants into poverty.

Which put the island’s ownership in question, and this in turn put the island in play as an available property. There’d been a long-held opinion that the state or federal government could and should claim eminent domain, this due to the island’s strategic military location as an early-warning site in the Pacific. Losing its viability as a privately held commercial enterprise also made it a prime acquisition target for someone who could make it financially healthy again, maybe resurrect its cattle farming and honeybee businesses. Miakamii’s stewardship by the Logan family, in place for more than 150 years, was in jeopardy.

A new player had emerged, much to Douglas Logan’s dislike: another well-heeled family that claimed its interest wasn’t in owning the island. A certain consideration could help the Logans climb out of their mountain of debt: the island’s shell lei business. They wanted the Logans and the island residents to allow an indigenous family to manage it. Miakamii shell leis were like gold and rare gems, coveted worldwide. An important enterprise for sure, some of the leis bringing more than ten thousand dollars each on the open market because of the rarity of the shells. The mollusks that produced them were, to anyone’s knowledge, found nowhere else on the planet, and the unpolluted water gave the shells an uncommon luster.

Ben motored the skiff parallel to the thin pier jutting from the beach, the pier empty of fishermen or other foot traffic, the police having chased everyone off its fifty-yard length. He steered the skiff through the sea foam to the beach’s edge. Four Kauai police officers met them near the “No Boat Landing or Launching” sign and helped pull the skiff onto the sand.

Police Chief Terry Koo legged his way down the pier in time to join Mr. Logan in his trot from the parking lot. The two were soon walking side by side through dried seaweed, Chief Koo slowing his gait to remain alongside the shorter yet trimmer Douglas, determination etched onto their faces. Their footsteps sank into the dark, wet sand.

“Douglas,” Chief Koo said in acknowledgment.

“Terry,” Douglas said, breathing hard.

“Let us handle this, Douglas.”

“No issue, after I see Chester.”

Blue-eyed and with thinning hair, the Douglas Logan that Ella knew could be both ornery and polite inside the same exchange, a benevolent employer, and very much a Christian. While under the Logan family’s tutelage, Miakamii residents were expected to always behave in a Christian manner, and they had done so dating back generations. Douglas steadied Ella after she climbed out of the skiff onto the sand and leaned into a hug as tight as one he’d give a grieving child. Douglas also gathered the rugged Ben in