Shattered Palms (Lei Crime Series) (6 page)

“
I’m counting on it—and for you to know what the dress should look like.”

“
Not a problem. I have just the thing in mind. You called the right Italian FBI agent, baby. I’m on a mission now.”

Lei and Pono stood outside the doors to the morgue. Maui Memorial’s morgue wasn’t as bad as some, but Lei always needed a moment to gather her fortitude for the smells and sights that lay before them—not so much because they were disgusting (though that was part of it), but because of the association they would always have with one of the most traumatic moments Lei had experienced in her adult life—identifying the body of a close friend.

Pono had been
with her.

He reached over and squeezed her arm just above the elbow.
“Gregory keeps it pretty clean in there,” he said. She nodded and followed him as he hit the pneumatic door with its lever bar. Leslie Tanaka, Dr. Gregory’s assistant, was working on a body across the room and hardly looked up, muttering something into a voice recorder. The ME was wearing an aloha shirt done in lurid rainbows. His rubber apron had a smiley face on it, and while Lei could objectively appreciate the attempt to lighten the atmosphere, the blood spatter on the design made her grimace.

“
Hey there, detectives,” Dr. Gregory said, hosing down a slab with a flexible steel hose attached to a metal arm above the table. “Here about your Haleakala John Doe?”

“
Yeah. Wondering if you have anything for us. Feeling no great need to see the body,” Pono said.

“
Probably wise, as four-day-old decomp doesn’t really improve with time. But I do have something for you. Follow me.”

He led
them to his office corner and punched up a list, ran his finger down the screen and hit another button, opening a file on their most recent murder case, labeled
john doe asian waikamoi.

Lei pointed to the screen. “We found an ID at his hotel. Xu Chang.”

“Good.” Gregory retitled the case, and Lei checked her phone, dictating the case number to him.

“
So I ran his prints,” Gregory said. “Not in the system. Given the Chinese writing on some of the implements he was carrying, I sent the prints over to Interpol. I haven’t heard anything back yet.” He toggled through various gory photos of the body and the autopsy process. “Cause of death was a single arrow. Extraordinarily well aimed. Arrows are often badly placed, and people can take a while to die by this method—but this one hit the vic in the heart from behind and dropped the man like a rock.”

“
Anything else interesting about the body?”

“
Well, the vic appears to be around age forty-five, and dental was consistent with foreign dentistry—in other words, his teeth were in bad shape and they were pulled when they rotted, which tells me he grew up somewhere poor and possibly undeveloped. Could be China; could be somewhere else. I also have an interest in the native birds on Maui and the conservation movement. Thanks for sending me copies of the bird photos. A real shame.” Gregory toggled to the series of photos of the birds Lei had forwarded him.

“
This isn’t the same as a full necropsy, mind you. Just an idea to see how they might have died. What’s sad is that these birds died of dehydration in the bag, from what I can tell by looking at the photos. Their eye sockets are sunken, as if the liquid in their tissues was lost.”

Lei looked at the photos of the birds, feeling
a pang of sorrow at the sight of their bent heads and tiny, curled claws. “This one was the Maui Parrotbill, or
Kiwikiu
.” He tapped his computer screen, pointing to the green one with the hooked bill and the band of yellow. “Critically endangered; only five hundred of them in existence.”

Gregory
’s pink lips worked, and he took his magnifiers off and wiped them vigorously on a towel hanging off a hook on the corner of his desk. “The one with the crest, the
Akohekohe
, is also very rare. In any case, it’s a real shame whoever shot this man didn’t go check what was in the bag.”

“
That’s so sad.” Lei’s words felt inadequate to express the magnitude of loss.

“
A man also died, but I have to say, I’m more upset about the birds, because at this point humans are definitely not endangered.”

“
So do you have any information on the arrow?” Pono asked. “And can we have it?”

“
Sure. I extracted it and cleaned it for you. No other interesting trace on the body.”

“
Were you able to identify the birds? We have a meeting scheduled with the Hawaiian Bird Conservatory people who manage the Waikamoi Preserve, but this would give us a little advance notice,” Lei said.

Gregory
rattled off the names of the birds in Hawaiian and Latin. Lei took notes but knew she wouldn’t remember the names without repetition—and it was unknown whether the type of bird they were had played a part in the crime. Still, the fact that the man was up there, on private conservation land, hunting them meant that, dead or alive, the birds were important.

“
Thanks, Phil.” Lei jotted the names as best she could in her notebook.

“
Happy to help. And happy to do anything I can to catch someone preying on our wildlife. So little of it, and so precious.”

“
Well, I’ll take you hunting next time,” Pono said. “Can you handle a compound bow? We hunt for pig, axis deer, and goat. All of them good eating, and all of them ruining the native forest.”

“
I’m not much of a shot, but I’d love to try,” Gregory said. “Let me make copies of some of this stuff for you.” With his usual attention to detail, the ME gave them individual photos of the bird bodies Lei had sent over with their names noted at the bottom, the man’s fingerprints, and the autopsy report. “Don’t forget to check with Interpol tomorrow on this.”

Back at the station, Lei sat at her desk and booted up her computer.
She logged the arrow and autopsy report into the case and did some work on their other cases. One was a domestic violence murder and another a meth-production-related murder, both more common Maui crimes than the new bow hunter case. Before she knew it, the front desk clerk paged them that the biologists from the Hawaiian Bird Conservatory were in the conference room. Lei scooped up the case folder. “Do you have the video recorder?”

“
Got it.” Pono waggled the small camera they used to video interviews. They found the two scientists in the conference room with its smoked-glass windows and whiteboards all around the walls. Both stood as Lei and Pono entered.

“
Dr. Jud Snelling,” a tall, thin man said, shaking Lei’s hand. “I’m head of Hawaiian Bird Conservatory here on Maui.”

“
Dr. Cam Rinker.” The other biologist, sandy-blond, also shook hands. “I’m head of the land management project at Waikamoi.”

Lei and her partner introduced themselves
, and they all sat. “Mind if we tape this? Helps us if we need to go back for clarification about anything,” Pono said.

“
No problem.” Snelling seemed to be in charge, by his posture and eye contact. “We were shocked to hear a man had been accidentally shot in the preserve.”

“
We don’t know how accidental it was,” Lei said. “We think he might have been a poacher, catching native birds. He had a number of dead birds on his body, and we’d like your help verifying their species.”

She opened the folder, spread the photos that
Gregory had identified out in front of the biologists. “Can you confirm that these are the species of birds that our medical examiner identified?”

Snelling and
Rinker leaned forward, and Snelling jerked back, picking up the photo of the green bird with the yellow banding. “Oh my God. This is a Maui Parrotbill!”

“
All of these are rare, but these two are the most critically endangered.” Rinker tapped the mottled black-and-white bird with the crest and the hook-billed one Snelling still held.

“
Can you confirm Latin and Hawaiian names of the birds noted on the bottom of these photos?” Lei asked. The biologist took the Sharpie she handed him. In a moment Rinker looked up. “These are identified correctly.”

“
What can you tell us about what this man might have been doing and how he was doing it?” Lei took out the photos of the equipment the man had been carrying. The conservationists took their time, and finally, Snelling tapped the photo of the net wrapped around a stick and the recorder.

“
This is probably how he caught the birds. The Parrotbill, in particular, is very territorial—part of why it’s so endangered. Only one pair can live in any given area, and our most common way to trap the birds for banding is to play the song of another Parrotbill. If there’s one in the area, it will be curious and come to investigate. Then we can catch it in these nets we string. They’re called mist nets because they’re almost invisible.”

“
What about these other things?” Lei tapped the sticky wire, the needle-nosed bottle.

“
These are other ways to capture birds. Except for the Parrotbill, the birds you have displayed here are nectar feeders and do what we call trapline feeding, where they work their way over the outside of an ohia tree—you know, the one with the fluffy red flowers called lehua,” Snelling said. Lei thought of the red flowers, each a round burst of fine filaments. She nodded, and Snelling went on. “If a birder observes their nectar-gathering pathway, he can be pretty sure the bird will be coming back by within a few hours and working the same trapline after the flowers have regenerated their nectar. So he could string a sticky wire or put the glue on branches where the bird is likely to land and catch them that way.”

“
Dr. Gregory said the birds were alive in the bag but eventually died of dehydration after the hunter was shot.” Snelling and Rinker both winced at this, and she felt echoes of that pain within herself. “What could be a reason to capture live birds of these types?”

“
Perhaps—and it’s a best-case scenario, —for a private citizen to captive breed them. Or they could just be part of a collection, alive or dead. The ranger said there were some indications that the man responsible might not be a US citizen?”

Lei pinched her lips together. Takama
and Jacobsen shouldn’t have been talking. “All we know for sure is that he had a Chinese passport.”

“
Well, something you should know is how very passionate birders can be. Many birders come from all over the world, wanting to just spot a Parrotbill in order to check it off their list of rare avians. It’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that some people might collect rare birds.”

“
So this isn’t something you’ve come across before?”

“
Well, the habitat and dietary needs of these birds are part of what makes them so rare. It makes breeding them in captivity, one of the ways one protects species, a tall order. The nectar feeders have to have these few types of flowers they will feed on, and the Parrotbill, while an insect and bark feeder, has a preference for the koa tree, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s territorial with other birds. So keeping the birds alive would take considerable commitment. That makes stuffing them for a collection more likely.”

“
It should be a crime,” Rinker said.

“
You mean it’s not?” Pono’s eyebrows rose.

“
Well, there are fines. But jail time? I’d be really surprised to see anything like that.” Snelling shook his head. “But you folks are law enforcement, so maybe you can tell me more about that.”

“
Actually, we were hoping you could tell us more about the blind in the tree the man was shot from,” Lei said, turning the question back to him. “Were you aware of it? Are there any more blinds in the preserve area?”

Snelling cleared his throat.
“Actually, yes. There are. We have noticed several of these hunting blinds throughout the conservation area. We’ve questioned our staff and volunteers; they all deny knowing who made them. What’s noteworthy is how cleverly they’re disguised to blend into the forest, how subtly the handholds and supports are done with found materials. We’ve also discovered evidence that someone may be living in the conservation area, but until now it didn’t seem urgent.”

Lei perked up at this.
“What evidence?”

“
Well. Whoever it is knows how to live rough. Just small signs, some singed plants showing a heat source was used, crushed bedding areas, a hand-dug latrine. Whoever it is just uses a bedroll, probably a camouflage tarp for rain, and a small gas cooker. Which means, at some point he or she has to go down the hill and resupply. There’s virtually nothing up there to eat but a few berries and fern tips.”

Lei and Pono both made notes.
“Can we track him?” Pono asked.

“
I don’t know,” Snelling said, frowning. “We’ve been thinking this person might be some sort of birder, as the blinds are for bird-watching rather than hunting. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”