Beside Still Waters (3 page)

             
“I’d like to go back to my hotel now,” she said.

             
“Sure, I’ll take you,” he said, moving to stand up. 

             
Standing next to him she was overwhelmed by his height.  He had to be nearly seven feet tall.  She craned her neck to look up at him.  He was deeply tanned and wore his black hair a little longer than she was used to seeing.

             
He led her outside and she got into his car and rested her head against the seat.  A minute later they pulled away from the restaurant and she couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

             
“You haven’t exactly been welcomed with the spirit of aloha,” he said.

             
“Things were going really well,” she said, trying to keep the exhaustion and misery out of her voice.  Why was it that death seemed to follow her everywhere she went?

             
“Well, at least you’ll have an interesting story to tell your grandkids someday.”

             
“I have enough of those to last a lifetime.”

             
“That sounds intriguing.  Care to share?”

             
“No.  All I want is to get back to my hotel, grab my bathing suit and hit the beach.”

             
He grinned.

             
“What?”

             
“Spoken like a tourist.”

             
“What, you can’t tell me locals don’t go to the beach?”

             
He laughed.  “Of course we do, but we’re usually already wearing our swimming suits under our clothes.”

             
“You’re joking.”

             
“No, ma’am.”

             
“I wish I had more time here,” she said.

             
“You need a local to show you around.”

             
“I don’t know.  I think I might have seen enough local color.”

             
“Dumb luck.  But let me make it up to you.  Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?” he asked.

             
“Excuse me?” she asked, sure she had misheard him.

             
“Dinner.  I’m asking you out,” he said with a slow smile it was impossible not
to
be charmed by.

             
“Oh, well, I don’t think-”

             
“I get it.  You’ve got a guy back home waiting for you, right?”

             
She felt the heat rise to her cheeks.  “Well, no, not exactly.”  She sighed in frustration.  It wasn’t like she and Jeremiah were dating.  They were just friends.  Why then did his face come instantly to mind when the detective asked her out?

             
“So, it’s complicated, but there really isn’t a good reason why you can’t have dinner with me.”

             
“Yes,” she blurted out.  “How did you get that from what I said?”

             
“Detective.  Turns out it’s a skill that helps in all areas of life.  So, if there’s no good reason, then we’ll go out to dinner tomorrow night, talk story, have a good time.”

             
“That doesn’t sound like a question,” she accused.

             
“It’s not.  But here’s one: what time do you eat dinner?”

             
“Six-thirty.”

             
“Good answer.”

             
When he pulled into the parking garage beneath her hotel it was almost too soon.  She opened her door.  “Well, thank you, Detective.”

             
“Please, call me Kapono.”

             
“Alright.  It was a pleasure meeting you, Kapono.”

             
“I will see you tomorrow night.”

             
Something in the way he said it made her blush and she exited the car quickly.  She walked to the escalator that would lead upstairs to the lobby of the hotel.  She turned and gave a wave as he drove on.

             
Her stomach rumbled noisily, reminding her that she still hadn’t had lunch.  On a whim she turned away from the escalator and walked a few steps until she reached the sidewalk.  The hotel was next door to the International Marketplace which was brimming with stores and stalls selling every Hawaiian trinket imaginable and then some. 

             
She walked through, doing her best to ignore the man who tried to get her to pick an oyster to get a pearl and the brightly colored sarongs that beckoned from racks with large discount signs.  She saw a sign for the food court and she kept walking, deeper into the Marketplace until she finally found what she was looking for.

             
The first food stand was Rainbow Sushi.  It was the tiniest little structure imaginable, no bigger than the shed in her parents’ yard back home.  The menu covered the entire front of the stand and she gawked at the variety of sushi available.  More amazing still was how affordable it was.

             
She hesitated for only a moment before ordering a California roll, tuna tamaki, and a lava roll.  She watched in awe as the woman behind the counter prepared it all with swift hands.  Less than five minutes later her sushi was ready and she took it to one of the metal tables to eat.

             
The table next to her had a couple of locals, older women, who looked like they were finishing up their own lunches.

             
“Shot in own kitchen.  Terrible,” she heard one woman say.

             
Cindy froze, chopsticks in hand.  It had only been a few hours, surely they couldn’t be talking about Uncle.  Word couldn’t have spread that quickly.

             
“Yeah, but Uncle mixed up with bad types.  He get what coming to him.”

             
Then again, maybe news traveled faster here.

             
The first speaker nodded.  “Someone should have kicked him in the okole years ago.”

             
The other one nodded and then they got up to toss their trash.  Cindy struggled with her own curiosity and couldn’t believe that she wanted to stop the women and ask them about Uncle.

             
What’s wrong with me
, she wondered. 
This has nothing to do with me.  I go home in a couple of days and I can forget I ever even heard about Uncle.

             
But there was another part of her that knew she’d never be able to forget him lying there in a pool of blood with the bullet hole in his forehead.  And she worried that she’d never be able to have peace about it until she knew that his killer had been caught. 
A reason to stay in touch with Kapono.

             
She picked up a piece of lava roll and popped it in her mouth.  The flavors exploded and she closed her eyes to better savor the taste.  Twenty minutes later when she finished eating she had to admit it was the best sushi she’d ever had in her life.  It was almost good enough to make her forget her morning.  Almost, but not quite.

             
Finished she took her time walking back through the Marketplace, trying to decide what gifts to take home.  No matter how hard she tried to focus her thoughts elsewhere, though, they kept returning to the body she had seen that morning.

             
Whoever had killed him had left the money in the cash register and the tip jar.  That meant it wasn’t some kind of robbery. 
Unless they panicked and ran
, she thought.  She hadn’t seen anyone leaving the building when she walked up to it so it seemed unlikely that her arrival had scared the killer off.

             
At last, disgusted with her ability to focus on anything else, she headed back to her hotel.  Once in the lobby she made her way to the concierge desk and took a seat.  Ten minutes later she was back in her room, satisfied that the luau she would be heading to shortly and the sightseeing cruise she’d booked for the next morning would help her take her mind off of everything that had happened.

             
In the meantime the ocean was calling so she changed into her bathing suit, threw on a cover-up, grabbed her towel and headed for the beach.

             
She had to walk along the street, passing a myriad of shops aimed at tourists to get to the beach.  Waikiki beach was a comparatively small strip of sand separated from the main road by a low wall.  Still it drew crushes of people to it and now she was one of them.

             
As she passed by an electronics store something caught her eye and she stopped.  There, on a television screen in the window, was a news report about the murder of Uncle.  They flashed his face up on the screen and she stared at it transfixed.  Next they supplanted his picture with a blank outline of a head and a question mark over it.  The message was clear - the killer was unknown.  She stared intently at that dark outline.

             
“Who are you?” she whispered.

~

             
Mark was hunched over the keyboard of his computer in his home office, scrolling through page after page of information.  While he was still suspended from active duty on the police force he had been doing what he could to find out on his own exactly who his late partner was. 

             
Paul Dryer, that was the name he had known his partner under.  Apparently, though, that was a lie.  The body of the real Paul Dryer had been recovered from the mass grave at the Green Pastures campsite a couple of months before.  The real Paul Dryer had been kidnapped as a child by a dangerous cult and apparently killed.

             
No one knew yet who the man who had been his partner, who had been masquerading as Paul Dryer, really was.  He had tried reaching out to Paul’s family, but couldn’t get them to return his calls.  He wondered who at the department had been assigned the case and whether or not they were having any more luck.

             
He heard the front door o
pen and a few moments later
Buster jumped into his lap.

             
Mark rubbed the beagle behind the ears.  The last several months had been terrible ones for him and his wife, Traci.  The dog represented the one bright spot in all of that and the more time he was forced to spend at home the more attached he became.

             
“We’re back from our walk,” his wife, Traci, said as she entered the room.

             
“So I see.”

             
She kissed his cheek.  “How’s it going?”

             
“It’s not,” he said with a sigh.  He leaned back in his chair.  “I’ve tried searching for other kids that went missing around the same time who were roughly the same age.
”

             
“You think NP knew he wasn’t the Dryer’s lost son?”

             
NP stood for Not Paul.  It was what they had taken to calling him for ease of communication.  Somehow it seemed better than calling him John Doe even though that was essentially what he was.

             
“Your guess is as good as mine.  For all we know he thought he was the real Paul Dryer.”

             
“I can’t even imagine what the family must be going through right now.  I know if I were them I’d be in total denial.  I mean, think about it.  As far as they’re concerned they lost Paul and NP all on the same day.”

             
It had to be unimaginable. 

             
Traci touched his shoulder.  “Do you have an appointment with the psychologist today?”

             
He shook his head.  “I’m going to find someone else to talk to.  That guy gives me the creeps.”

             
“Are you sure?”
s
he asked.

             
He could hear the concern in her voice.  She was right to feel that way.  If he was ever going to be allowed back on the force it was only going to happen after the mandatory hours of counseling they had assigned him.  He knew that and knew he had to suck it up and get it done even though he didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had happened in that interrogation room two months earlier.

             
Why did you put me in this position, NP?

             
“Yes.  I know it’s important.  I just need to find someone else to talk to.”

             
“If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know,” she said.