Where There's a Will (16 page)

“Beats me,” Gideon said. “That’s way out of my line.”

“Well, I tell you,” Keoni said knowledgeably, “I’ve had a little experience with wills, and the way I think it’s going to play out is that it’ll all depend on whether the Seamen’s Home wants to take us to court over it. They might not.”

“They’d have to hear about it first,” Inge said grimly, then laughed to show she was joking. “But the thing is, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Felix gets back home tomorrow, doesn’t he? We’ll see what he says. In the meantime, let’s see what Gideon turns up or doesn’t turn up when he looks at the report.”

Everyone appeared to agree with this.

Gideon looked at his watch. “It’s four-fifteen. A little late to start with the police today. Let’s wait till tomorrow.”

That seemed to end the discussion. People were getting to their feet when Gideon exclaimed: “Oh, I almost forgot. The Ocean Quest people were going to drop off another box here. Did they ever do that? I mean, besides the foot bones.”

“Yes, they did,” Axel said. “We were out when they came, but they left them with Kilia-our housekeeper. It’s on the kitchen counter. What is all that junk, anyway?”

When Gideon explained that it contained what might well be Torkel’s last effects and the family showed interest, Malani went to get it. A minute later she was back. “No, it’s not there,” she said to Axel. “I wonder if she put it away somewhere when she cleaned up this morning.”

“Probably-you know Kilia and her clean countertops. We can ask her when she comes in tomorrow.”

As they broke up, John approached Keoni. “So Keoni… how does a Haole show his racial tolerance?”

Keoni grinned at him. “Hee, hee. By dating a Canadian.”

Gideon, Julie, and John had a quiet dinner-steak again-at the ranch house with Axel and Malani, during which, by mutual but unvoiced consent, no one talked about Torkel, Magnus, or the wills. They did, however, briefly discuss Dagmar.

“Is she all right?” John asked. “She looked like absolute hell.”

“She sure did,” Axel agreed. “Well, we’ve been raking up some pretty painful memories, but she’ll be all right. You know what a tough old bird she is.”

“She also went in for her annual lube and oil change this afternoon,” Malani said, then laughed at the puzzled expressions on her guest’s faces. “That’s what she calls her annual physical at Kona Hospital. She stays overnight, and she’s always worried before she goes in… you wouldn’t think she was a hypochondriac, would you, but she is. But she always comes out with flying colors. She’ll make it to a hundred, you’ll see.”

“Knock on wood,” Axel said and demonstrated on the table top.

The rest of the dinner conversation was devoted to Axel’s ranting about a letter to West Hawaii Today in which a local environmental group had complained about pollution of the land due to cattle manure.

“You should never, never confuse human waste with animal waste,” he fumed. “Cattle manure is not your everyday, ordinary crap, and cow droppings are not cat droppings. Cattle manure is nothing more nor less than a dilute multi-nutrient fertilizer filled with micro- and macro-nutrients that improve the soil-nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium. Not only that, it has physical advantages. It improves carbon exchange capacity, it increases water filtration, it does all kinds of beneficial things. Now, of course, I admit that the smell can sometimes be a little-”

“What charming subjects we talk about at dinner,” Malani mused.

Julie laughed. “At my house it’s skeletons and exit wounds.”

“It is?” She thought about it. “Well, all things considered, I think I’d rather eat at your house.”

That was the high point of the meal, and breakfast the next morning was much the same, with no talk of what was really on everyone’s minds. But afterward, when Malani and Axel left to attend to ranch affairs, John, Gideon, and Julie went out onto the porch. Breakfast had been a heavy affair of sourdough pancakes, thick-sliced bacon, potatoes, fresh pineapple and mangos, and pot after pot of thick coffee, and it felt good to stand out in the fresh morning air, looking out over the morning-mist-cloaked hills, feeling the dew on their faces and listening to the hollow, distant lowing of cattle they couldn’t see.

“You know,” Julie said, “I was just thinking that now there does seem to be another one of those loose ends you two were talking about.”

“What’s that?” Gideon asked.

“No body.”

“Nobody?”

“No… body,” Julie said. “No Magnus. Presuming it is Magnus, he’s just a pile of ashes in a little box.”

“You know, that’s true,” John said reflectively. “No body, no trial, no perps, a misidentified victim… I have to admit, that’s a lot of loose ends.” He looked at his watch. “Well, time to see if we can tie a few of them up. Doc, ready to go talk to the Waimea PD?”

Gideon hesitated. “I guess.”

John frowned. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I’m going to barge in on some detective’s turf, totally unasked, a complete stranger, a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ he’s never heard of, and tell him he botched a case he handled eight years ago, not even getting right who got killed. I’ve been there before, John, and I can imagine his reaction. I know how I’d feel.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. In the FBI, we come up against that kind of situation all the time. There are techniques for defusing it. See, the trick is you have to make them see you as helping them, not horning in. Besides, I used to work for Honolulu PD, remember? I know these people, I know how they think. Trust me. Just follow my lead, we’ll get along great.”

“John, you have my implicit trust,” Gideon said, “but if it was the Kona CIS that handled it, why are we going to the Waimea PD?”

“Because they would have been the first on the scene, and the ones who opened the case. And they’re the local police force. It’s a matter of professional courtesy. See what I mean? There’s a right way to do this.”

The Waimea Police Department was closed.

“Closed!” John yelled through the glass front doors at the stern and preoccupied-looking woman on the other side. In response to their thumping on the glass she had grudgingly emerged into the unlit vestibule from somewhere in back to bark at them: she couldn’t let them in; the office was closed. In one corner of her mouth a cigarette jiggled up and down as she spoke.

“How the hell can you be closed?” John shouted. “What, there’s no crime in Waimea on Sunday?”

Her eyes narrowed. She took the cigarette out of her mouth. Her lips, thin to begin with, disappeared altogether. “Do you have an emergency, sir?”

“No, we don’t h-”

“Are you in immediate need of the assistance of a police officer?”

“No, dammit, but we need to talk to-”

“Office hours are Monday through Friday, eight to five.”

“Look, lady,” John yelled even louder, holding his identification up to the glass. “I’m trying to be polite here. My name is Special Agent John Lau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I damn well want to talk-”

“Monday through Friday, eight to five.” She stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and went back out of sight around a corner. John was left steaming, holding his card case up to the deserted vestibule. “Do you believe this?”

Gideon had been prudently silent throughout. “Well, now, John,” he began as they walked back over the neatly trimmed lawns of the Civic Center toward the parking lot, “that was certainly an instructive example of-”

John cut him off, jabbing the air with a warning finger. “Don’t. .. say… anything.”

“Are you planning to tell me where we’re going?” Gideon asked after they’d been driving a while. “At some point?”

“Where we should have gone in the first place,” John muttered, eyes fixed on the highway ahead. “The Kona CIS.” He set his jaw. “And they better be open.”

The West Hawaii Criminal Investigation Section was on a side road off the coast highway, in the flat lowland country between Kona and the airport. Its neighborhood was, to put it mildly, unprepossessing. The idea, it seemed, had been to gather up most of the necessary but unlovely community services and deposit them in one out-of-the-way place, where they would be least likely to offend the eyes, ears, and noses of the sensitive: the garbage dump with its huge, surreal pile of wrecked cars waiting to be compacted, the Humane Society holding pens… and the West Hawaii CIS, which doubled as the Kona police station. A trailer and heavy-equipment repair yard and two huge, steaming piles of “organic waste” rounded out the complex, adding their own distinctive touches.

But the police building itself was reassuring: a modern, white, one-story structure, clean and well-maintained, on its own little island of concrete walkways and decorative plantings.

And it was open.

Even better, the detective they were sent to when John said they wanted to talk about the Torkelsson case turned out to be an old acquaintance. Detective Sergeant Ted Fukida had been a new sergeant in the Honolulu Police Department when John was a young cop there, and he remembered him.

“How could I forget you, Lau?” Fukida said, extending his hand. He was a waspish man in his fifties who looked as if he was fighting a low-grade toothache. “You’re the guy who couldn’t fill out an expense form right if his life depended on it. So how’re you getting along with the Feebies?”

“Still can’t fill out the forms right,” John said. “Other than that, okay.”

“Good-good. So what can I do for you? Please, tell me this is not official Feeb business.”

He was a study in restlessness: flip, talky, and fidgety. At the moment, he was cracking gum between his teeth, bobbing back and forward in his swivel chair, and jiggling a toe against the plastic carpet protector underneath him.

“No, actually, it’s old CIS business,” John told him.

Fukida, they quickly learned, had not been the original case-handler. When the detective who had run the investigation had retired not long after the active phase was over, the case had been given to Fukida to oversee; more or less a pro forma gesture, inasmuch as unresolved homicide cases, while they might well go dormant, were never formally closed. There had been little to oversee, but the workmanlike Fukida had familiarized himself with the case file, which meant that it wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time bringing him up to snuff. More important, from Gideon’s point of view, since it hadn’t been Fukida’s case during the investigative phase, he had nothing to be self-protective about.

Which didn’t mean that he was going to sit there and accept everything he was told; certainly not on the strength of Gideon’s supposed reputation. (When John had somewhat effusively introduced Gideon as the world-famous Skeleton Detective, his response had been a laconic, gum-cracking, “Yeah, I think I might have heard of him.”) Indeed, when Gideon began by stating-maybe a bit too baldly-that the skeleton in the Grumman was not that of Magnus Torkelsson but of his supposedly murdered brother Torkel, Fukida had interrupted before Gideon had gotten out his first complete sentence.

“What? You’re out of your mind. What is this supposed to be, a joke? We had an autopsy, we took depositions, we had a-how the hell did you come up with a royally screwed-up story like that?”

“There was a royal screw-up, all right,” John told him levelly, “but you guys made it.”

Fukida’s head rolled back and then round and round on his neck. Gideon caught a waft of spearmint.

“All I can say is, you two better have a good reason for wasting my time.”

“It’s all yours, Doc,” John said. “Just wait, Teddy, you’ll love this, this is great.”

Thanks a lot, John, Gideon thought.

“Mmf,” Fukida said, his eyes closed, continuing to stretch his neck muscles.

Gideon was generally good at telling when a cop was going to be open-minded about what forensic anthropology could do and when he was going to dig in his heels and resist, and Fukida didn’t strike him as a promising student. Happily, however, the sergeant proved him wrong, although he was anything but an easy sell. With the foot bones laid out in their anatomical relationship on his desk blotter, he had put Gideon through a detailed show-and-tell drill, interrupting with questions and argument, until he had more or less satisfied himself that the old talus fractures were really there and they meant what Gideon said they did. By the time they were through with it, he seemed a happier, more engaged man, his toothache perhaps gone.

“Okay, I’ll buy it,” he said, handing the talus back to Gideon, who wrapped it in a Kleenex from Fukida’s desk and put it in the box. “I like that. And I like the age stuff. It’s interesting. But you want to know what I don’t get? I don’t get why this has got to be Torkel. Why isn’t it Magnus? They both rode horses, right? They were both the same age, right? As far as I can see, it could be either one of them, or am I missing something?”

“Yeah, you’re missing something,” John said. “Maybe if you’d shut up for one minute, Doc here could get to it. You sure haven’t changed, Teddy.”

Gideon expected Fukida to flare up at that, but he laughed instead; a not-unfriendly noise somewhere between a snuffle and a one-note giggle. “Okay, ‘Doc,’ get to it. I’ll try and be quiet. But that’s not a promise.”

“It’s the toes,” Gideon said. “The toes are the clincher.” He pointed to the foot. “The two that go here are missing. The distal phalanges of the second and third toes. They were amputated decades ago, the result of an accident that Torkel had forty years ago. Magnus didn’t have any missing toes.”

Fukida stared at the remaining bones. He was frowning and working his lips; he seemed surprisingly disturbed; the gears spinning in his mind seemed just short of audible. In the silence, the low hum of conversations drifted from the other cubicles. “You’re sure you never saw his face?” a detective asked kindly. “You wouldn’t recognize him if you saw him again?”