The Presence (24 page)

“If it wasn’t for Kioki—” Uilani Kina began, but couldn’t bring herself even to finish the thought. A slim wraith of a woman with soft features framed by flowing black hair, she shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what Alice is going to do. He was all she had, and now …” She struggled to compose herself. “What were those
boys doing that night?” she asked, her eyes searching Cal Olani’s face for an answer. “Did something happen? Did they get in a fight or something? Was someone mad at them?” She shook her head, clucking her tongue softly. “Who could get mad at them? Such good boys.” Her voice changed, and Cal Olani had the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “Even Josh Malani. What can you expect with parents like that? I feel so sorry for him.…” Her voice trailed off again, but her liquid brown eyes remained fixed on the policeman. “Find Jeff for me,” she pleaded. “Please find him for me.”

Back in his car a few minutes later, with the memory of the distraught woman’s plea still fresh in his mind, Olani kept hearing echoes of her question:
Did something happen?

And he also remembered the faces of the four boys he’d talked to at the high school yesterday afternoon. The way their eyes had darted toward Josh Malani before they answered his questions, as if seeking his advice or his permission before they spoke.

And the new boy—the one Cal couldn’t remember having seen at all before yesterday—hadn’t actually answered his questions with anything more than a noncommittal shrug. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was just about time for school to be letting out. Maybe he’d swing back there and have another talk with those three. But just as he made the decision, the radio in the car came alive and he heard the dispatcher calling him.

“Car five here,” he said into the microphone.

“I have a report of an abandoned car, Cal,” the dispatcher told him. “Down in the park near Spreckelsville. You anywhere close?”

“Above Makawao,” Olani replied, then told the dispatcher what he was planning to do next.

“I think you might want to take this abandoned car report,” the dispatcher told him. “We’ve run the plates. It’s an eighty-two Chevy pickup, registered to Joshua Malani.”

Olani felt an uneasy chill ripple over him. “How long’s it been there?” he asked.

“Not very long,” the dispatcher replied. “The woman who reported it says it wasn’t there this morning.”

“Then why is it being reported as abandoned?” Olani asked. Who would report a truck the first time he saw it? After a day or two, maybe, but … The dispatcher’s voice cut into his thought.

“The keys are in the ignition, and his wallet was left on the front seat.”

The uneasy chill that had come over Cal Olani congealed into a feeling of dark foreboding. “Ten-four,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

“It certainly took you long enough.” The woman was sunburned and overweight and swathed in a wildly patterned muumuu in a particularly hideous shade of lavender. She made no effort to hide her displeasure as Cal Olani swung out of his patrol car nearly half an hour after he’d received the dispatcher’s call.

“Now, Myrtle,” her husband said, trying to soothe her. He sported a shirt that matched his wife’s muumuu, and a sunburn even more purple. “You have to remember, this is Maui, not Cleveland.” He offered his hand to Cal Olani. “I’m Fred Hooper, and this is my wife, Myrtle. We’re staying in a condo down that way about a mile.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of Spreckelsville. “I told Myrt she shouldn’t bother you with this, but—”

“Nobody goes off and leaves a truck with the keys hanging in the ignition, and their wallet just lying out on the seat where anyone could come along and pick it up,” Myrtle Hooper broke in, silencing Fred with a single quick gesture. “At least they don’t in Cleveland, and I just don’t believe things are that much different out here.” As Cal Olani started toward Josh’s truck, both Hoopers trailed after him, Myrtle still talking. “Something isn’t right about this. I know Fred thinks I’m being silly, but a mother knows these things.” They had reached the pickup, and as Olani turned to look questioningly at Mrs. Hooper, she pursed her lips. “We looked in the wallet, of course. We thought we might find a telephone number or something.” She sighed deeply. “Just seventeen. Such a shame.”

“Now, Myrt, we don’t know what happened,” Fred began, but once again his wife silenced him with a sweep of her hand.

“Of course we know what happened,” she said. “It’s happening to kids all the time now. Teenage suicide. I read about it in
Time
magazine.” She shifted her gaze to Cal Olani. “His clothes are on the beach,” she said. “At least I assume they’re his clothes. There’s no one else around here. And we put his wallet back on the seat of the car, exactly the way it was when we found it,” she added as the policeman peered into the truck’s open window.

Just as the woman had said, a worn wallet was lying on the seat of the truck, and the keys were hanging in the ignition. Picking the wallet up, Olani checked the driver’s license himself.

Josh Malani.

There were a few dollar bills, a student identification
card, some worn pictures, and various scraps of paper with girls’ phone numbers written on them, but little else.

Moving on to the beach, Cal Olani found a pile of clothes, also just as Myrtle Hooper had described. There were a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, Jockey shorts, socks, and shoes.

The jeans were on the bottom, then the T-shirt and the underwear, with the shoes resting on top of the pile, the socks tucked inside them.

Very neat.

Very tidy.

And from what Cal Olani knew of the boy, not at all like Josh Malani.

Unless Josh had been trying to say something.

Wordlessly, Olani went back to the truck. Shoved behind the driver’s seat was a slightly damp towel, wrapped around an equally wet bathing suit.

Even if Josh had a dry bathing suit, wouldn’t he have taken his towel down to the beach if all he was planning to do was go for a swim?

Of course, as Myrtle Hooper had pointedly implied, if the boy was planning to go into the water and not come out, what would be the point of having the towel on the beach?

He searched the cab of the pickup once more, looking for a note, but even as he hunted he knew he wouldn’t find one. A little too reckless, always a bit too wild, Josh Malani wasn’t the kind of kid who’d leave a note behind. Not the kind of kid, either, who’d commit suicide. Yet the evidence seemed pretty strong that that was exactly what he’d done.

He went back to the beach, where Mrs. Hooper waited
for him, a faintly smug expression on her face. Cal Olani found himself disliking her intensely: a woman who was more concerned about having her opinion validated than she was about what might have happened to a seventeen-year-old boy.

“There’s some footprints, too,” he heard Fred Hooper say. “We were careful not to disturb them.”

Olani moved closer to the neatly folded clothes and looked down at the sand. A single set of footprints led toward the water, disappearing where the surf—gentle today—had washed them away. Shading his eyes from the sun’s glare on the water, he peered out at the ocean, searching for signs of someone swimming, but saw no sign of Josh or anyone else. Not that he had expected to; his gut was already telling him that Josh Malani was dead.

“It’s tough for them,” Fred Hooper said softly, his eyes, like Cal Olani’s, fixed on the sea. “Not like when I was a kid. We didn’t have to worry about anything. Grow up, raise a family, retire, and come to places like this. But what do the kids have to look forward to now? Drugs, and gangs, and getting shot at when you’re just minding your own business.” He was quiet for a moment, then: “I wish we’d gotten here a little earlier. Maybe if he’d just had someone to talk to, it would have helped, you know?”

Cal Olani rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Maybe it would have,” he said. But as he started taping the area off to keep the people who’d been attracted by the presence of his squad car from messing up the site before it could be photographed, he wondered. Would talking to someone really have helped?

Yesterday, neither Josh Malani nor any of his friends had been interested in talking about anything.

Now Kioki Santoya was dead, Jeff Kina was missing, and Josh Malani had apparently drowned himself.

What the hell was going on?

Katharine Sundquist was excited when she returned to Takeo Yoshihara’s estate, convinced she held the key not only to the missing computer files, but to the mystery of the skeleton in the ravine. Arriving just as Rob and one of his workmen were transferring the last of the carefully tagged bones from the back of the Explorer into his office, she’d barely been able to hold her impatience in check until the entire find had been carefully laid out on a lab table in the room that adjoined Rob’s office.

The sharp edge of her excitement had been blunted, though, when the files proved less easy to locate than she’d hoped. It should have been so simple: they had the file names, and Phil Howell was certain they were somewhere on Takeo Yoshihara’s computer. But when Rob brought up a directory of the drive, no such file names appeared. Sensing Katharine’s disappointment, he’d tried to reassure her. “Not to worry. This is only one drive, and there have to be a lot more than that. I’ll run a search.”

The search, though it had only taken a few minutes, seemed to Katharine to go on forever, but then two lines appeared on the screen, showing the results of the inquiry, and her hopes leaped again.

“If the directories are set up with any kind of logic, at least we know where the skull came from,” Katharine said as she gazed at the screen. “But what does ‘serinus’ mean?”

“It’s one of Yoshihara’s projects,” Rob Silver said. “It has something to do with pollution. Serinus is the genus designation for finches. Specifically,
Serinus canaria—
canaries.”

“Canaries?” Katharine repeated. “I’m not sure I see the connection.”

“The connection comes from the old practice of lowering canaries into mine shafts. If the birds came up alive, it was safe for the men to go down. If the birds were dead, then there were dangerous gases in the mine.” He paused. “I don’t know much about that particular project, but I suspect Yoshihara’s looking for new ways to stop killing canaries, as it were. Hence the name of the project. Corporate cute, if you ask me. Let’s see if we can take a look at those files.”

With growing anticipation Katharine watched as Rob pulled up a viewer, then copied in the full path of the jpg file. Almost there, she thought, we’ve almost got it. Until the screen went blank and a new message appeared:

Rob had tried a few possible passwords, ranging from anagrams of the words “artifact” and “serinus” to Takeo Yoshihara’s name spelled backward. To neither his nor Katharine’s surprise, none of them worked. “Who knows?”
he’d finally sighed. “It could be someone’s mother-in-law’s birthday, or a random sequence of letters and numbers. And I suspect that if I just keep trying to break in, the computer will notice what’s going on and report me to someone.”

Katharine gazed dispiritedly at the monitor, unable to shake from her memory the disquieting images recorded on the strange video. “It’s probably not the right file anyway,” she said, disappointed. “What on earth would a tribe slaughtering some kind of primate have to do with air pollution?”

Rob shrugged. “I’m afraid you’d know a lot more about that than I would. You’re the bone person, remember?”

But Katharine had no answer. They spent a few minutes poking around in the directory named Serinus, but quickly discovered that without the password, only a single file was open to them.

A file that confirmed that Takeo Yoshihara and Mishimoto Corporation were indeed embarked on a major research project aimed at tackling the problem of global pollution head-on. “And making a fortune with whatever they discover, no doubt,” Rob remarked as they finished reading the file.

They’d abandoned the computer then, but for the rest of the afternoon, as Katharine concentrated on reconstructing the skeleton that had been exhumed from the ravine, the first faint tendrils of an idea kept reaching out to her. When Rob finally interrupted her to suggest they have dinner together, she realized that the afternoon had slipped away.

Though she was no closer to gaining access to the files containing the image of the skull and the video, the skeleton was almost complete. And the idea, though not yet fully formed, was starting to come together in her mind.
“I think I’m going to finish this,” she said. “You go on, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

After Rob left, she called Michael and told him she’d be late.

“How late?” he asked.

“Only a couple of hours,” she promised. “And then we’ll go out for pizza, okay?”

“I guess,” Michael replied, and she heard the anxiety in his voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

There was a long silence, then: “I’ll be okay. See you when you get home.”

She hung up the phone and hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t call it a day and go home now. But even as that thought came to her, the idea that had been poking at the edges of her consciousness all afternoon suddenly came together.

Once again she replayed the video in her mind, but this time, instead of trying to decide what kind of creature it was that she’d seen, she concentrated on how old it might have been.

If it was some kind of small primate, it would have been full-grown.

But if it wasn’t a primate?

More images flashed though her memory.

The way the tribesmen had stared at it.

The way its fear seemed to grow, and the look almost of surprise when the tribesmen had begun chasing it.

It had been so much smaller than the men.

And the woman had acted like …

The woman had acted like a distraught mother who had just lost a child.

A mutant?