Maui Madness (Zoe Donovan Mysteries Book 7) (16 page)

“I’ll go with you.”

I tried to run to keep up with Zak, but his sweatshirt, which hung past my knees, was getting in the way, so I took it off and wrapped it around my waist.

“Charlie,” I yelled as loud as I could.

The wind was whistling and waves were crashing, creating a loud background noise that drowned out my shouts. I knew in the back of my mind that we were on an island and Charlie couldn’t have gone far, but it was unlike him to simply wander off, so I couldn’t help but feel the first stirrings of panic. With each minute we searched and were unable to find him, my anxiety grew.

“Don’t worry
; he’s around here somewhere,” Zak assured me.

“I know. It’s just not like him to take off like this.”

Actually, it was exactly like him to take off like this, but only when . . . I didn’t want to think about that.

I stood still and turned slowly in a circle
, looking carefully for any sign of my furry best friend. The wind blew my hair from the topknot I’d hastily created, making it all but impossible to keep it out of my face.

“Maybe we should split up,” Zak s
aid. “You head to the right and I’ll go left. Meet me back here in this exact spot in twenty minutes, whether you’ve found him or not.”

“Okay.” I kissed Zak and then hea
ded toward sand dunes that had created a sandstorm in the wind. If anything had happened to Charlie, I’d never forgive myself. I should have been watching him more closely. How could I have let him wander off? He must have become disoriented with all the sand. I prayed he wasn’t hurt or frightened.

“Charlie,” I continued to call as I struggled against the wind. Tears streamed down my face
, mixing with the blowing sand to make a sort of mudpack. I knew I must look like a mess, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was finding Charlie.

It had been over ten minutes. I
’d need to turn back if I was going to keep to the timeline Zak and I had set up. I paused to consider my next move when I heard Charlie barking in the distance.

“Charlie,” I called as I
ran toward the sound.

He
continued to bark, but it didn’t appear he was coming toward me. Visions of his broken and bloody body raced through my mind as I ran as fast as I could in the blowing, sifting sand. As I made my way toward the sound of his barking, I saw Charlie standing next to what looked to be a bunker of some type. I remembered Rory saying that the island had been used by the military in the past. I called to Charlie, but he continued to pace in front of the structure, barking all the while.

I closed the distance between us in record time. I dropped to my knees and hugged Charlie to my chest. “Why did you run off?” I sobbed. “You scared the heck out of me.”

Charlie licked my face as if in apology for causing me so much stress. I picked him up and was turning to get back to the spot where I was to meet Zak when Charlie wiggled out of my arms and returned to the entrance of the underground bunker.

“Charlie
, it’s empty,” I said, trying to reason with my frantic little dog. “It has been for a long time.”

Charlie continued to pace and bark.

“Zak is waiting for us. We need to go,” I insisted.

Charlie began jumping against the door
, which was locked with a fairly new padlock. I frowned, and for the first time since I’d found him, I really looked around. There were footprints. A lot of them. The blowing sand had buried many of the prints leading to the structure, but the area behind it was protected by the wind. I also noticed that there were cigarette butts littering the ground that looked to be fresh. Someone had been here recently.

“Did you see someone?” I asked Charlie.

He jumped against the door and began scratching, as if trying to get in.

“Did someone go inside?”

Charlie sat down and looked at me. I knew he was trying to work out a way to tell me whatever it was he wanted me to understand. I tried the lock, but it was secure. The door didn’t give at all, and the bunker didn’t have any windows. The structure was only raised several feet above the ground. It was covered with sand and shrubbery so as not to be seen from the air. I’d seen similar structures on military bases. Most times they were used to store ammo.

I was debating what to do when Zak walked up behind me. “Thank
God you found him.”

“There
’s something in that bunker that Charlie wants us to find,” I told Zak. “Every time I try to leave, he throws a fit and starts scratching at the door.”

Zak frowned. He tried the lock
, as I had. He motioned for me to be silent as he put his ear against the door. “I hear banging.”

“What kind of banging?” I asked.

“I think its Morse Code.” Zak continued to listen. “It’s definitely an SOS. We need to get this door open. Someone is locked inside.”

I looked around. We didn’t have any tools. “How are we going to break the lock?”

“I’m sure there must be something on the boat.”

“I’ll stay with Charlie
while you go. Bring the others. We might need help.”

Zak probably wasn’t gone all that long
, but it seemed like forever. The island, which had once been inhabited, was now deserted, creating a ghost town. I stopped for the first time to look around at the deserted buildings in the distance. I noticed a sign warning people to stay away because there were likely to be unexploded shells in the area. I thought about my mad dash across the island. It was a good thing I hadn’t stumbled across any of the live shells the sign warned of. The island had been used for combat training and as a bombing target. It made sense that bombs might have been dropped that for whatever reason had failed to detonate and remained hidden as live ammo.

Suddenly
, the stress I’d been feeling left my body and I realized I was exhausted. I sank to the ground and wrapped my arms around Charlie, who seemed more than happy to cuddle now that he was satisfied I wasn’t going to leave. It didn’t make any sense that there would be a person or persons inside the bunker. The door was locked from the outside. Who would lock someone in such a desolate location?

I watc
hed as Zak returned with an armful of tools, as well as the other members of our party. Ellie and I stood back while Zak, Levi, Pono, and Malie discussed what to do. Normally, I’d want to be in on the discussion, but I found that my brain had settled into a state of numbness. After several minutes and at least ten attempts to break the lock, the door was finally opened. Zak, Levi, and Pono went inside, while Malie held the door open to provide light. When the men returned, they had three additional people with them.

“Judge Gregor
!” Malie helped the man to a spot away from the bunker that had been his prison. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. We all are. It’s just taking a bit of time for my eyes to adjust to the light.”

The other two men, who I assumed were Brian Boxer and Trenton Baldwin, had been helped to a spot next to the judge.

“We need to get back and call
the police,” Pono said.

“No
,” Gregor commanded.

By the time we got home, it was late into the evening. Talk about a crazy day. Judge Gregor had insisted that we not notify the police until we could talk things out and come up with a plan. Lives, he insisted, other than theirs, were still in danger. News of their rescue could trigger a situation that would lead to the deaths of other captives.

“Here’s your wine
.” Zak handed me a glass. Ellie had opted to go to bed and Levi was inside, watching television. Zak and I sat on the patio overlooking the ocean. The storm had blown in and created a rough, wet ride home, but as with most tropical storms, it had blown out within a matter of hours.

Zak and I sat side by side in silence
, each lost in our own thoughts as we watched the waves rhythmically roll into shore. Charlie was snoring from the bottom of my chair and once again all felt right with the world. I thought about everything we’d learned today, all the pieces to the puzzle that had seemed to fall into place. And all the other pieces that still didn’t fit at all.

It turned out that Judge
Gregor, Brian Boxer, and Trenton Baldwin had gone sailing after receiving an invitation to meet up with some men who belonged to the same yacht club they did. When they arrived at the marina, they were given a note that said that the others couldn’t make it, but they should go anyway, which they did. In retrospect, the men realized that the invitation must have been forged by whoever wanted them to go sailing that day.

While sailing to the north of Maui
, they came across a boat that was still, appearing to be in distress. When they pulled up to see if they could lend a hand, there were men wearing masks onboard. They had guns and quickly boarded Judge Gregor’s boat. After tying Gregor and the others up, the masked men forced them onto their vessel and sailed farther to the north after sinking the judge’s yacht. Then the masked men brought them to the island and locked them in the bunker.

They were left with food and water t
hat lasted three days, after which the masked gunmen came back and left more supplies. The pattern had been repeated every few days for as long as the men had been held captive. Gregor reported that the men never spoke or removed their masks, so they had no way of identifying who they might be or why they had been kidnapped.

On one of the supply runs
, the captives overheard one of the masked men talking about other people being held in some other location. It sounded as if once a decision of some sort was made, all of them would be dealt with.

Judge Gregor
’s opinion was that the kidnapping had taken place as a result of his ruling on the resort project. It seemed crazy to me that anyone would go to all that trouble over a simple project, but the judge pointed out that the profit to be made would be hundreds of millions of dollars. All three men in the bunker were involved in the injunction in one way or the other, and it made sense that for the injunction to be overturned, all of them would need to be out of the way.

Judge Gregor
had ruled on the injunction. The likelihood of arranging a hearing with a different judge who might rule differently on it while Gregor was still in the mix was slim.

Brian
Boxer had been the attorney for the conservation group that had sponsored the campaign to get the injunction issued in the first place.

Trenton
Baldwin, a developer himself, had provided studies he’d requisitioned when he’d considered building on the same exact spot years earlier. After the environmental impact reports had come back, he’d decided to move on to another location. He believed that the work he’d done in the past was what had led to the current injunction.

It was the belief of the three men that they
had been kept alive to be used as a bargaining chip to ensure that the injunction would be overturned.

“What do you think will happen on Monday?” I asked Zak.

“I suppose that after all of the trouble the kidnappers have gone to, they must be fairly certain the new judge will overturn the injunction.”

“Do you think the kidnappers plan
ned to kill the captives either way?”

Zak considered th
at. “Perhaps not. The kidnappers have gone to a lot of effort both to keep the men alive and to conceal their own identities. There’s a chance they would have let them go after the decision was made.”

“
But it would be cleaner to kill them and let the world think they drowned in the boat accident,” I pointed out.

“True.
I suppose that if word got out about what actually happened to the men, a new decision on the injunction would be looked at closely. Gregor can’t prove that the reason the men were kidnapped is because of the project, but it does seem likely, and they probably wouldn’t have a hard time creating suspicion even if they couldn’t actually prove anything.”

“
It seems Kingsley Portman has to be involved in this,” I asserted.

“I agree.”

I took a sip of my wine and considered things. The men we’d rescued insisted that if word of their rescue was made public, it would put the other captives in danger, so we’d taken them to a secure location where they could be reunited with their families without anyone knowing they’d been found. Judge Gregor insisted that we contact one man and one man only on the local police force. It was his opinion that there might be one or more dirty cops involved in the setup.

The three men we rescued
said that when the kidnappers had dropped off supplies that morning, they’d mentioned that they wouldn’t be back until Monday, after the decision was made public. We all hoped that was true, which would mean that the kidnappers wouldn’t know the men had been freed until the other captives could be identified and located.

“Are we still planning to make the trip to Oahu tomorrow?” I asked.

“We did tell Keoke we would attend his party, and he’s been more than gracious.”