Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) (15 page)

“I’m an anthropologist,” Patria said. The wall behind the black pine was plain, made of mud, and topped with a small roofline covered with gray tile. Behind it a series of trees blocked her view of Waialeale. The garden was shady and quiet and her voice sounded almost too loud to her.

Again Kimiko sprinkled the air with laughter. “Same thing.”

Patria laughed too. Orli snoozed on in her stroller. “All right. I didn’t like the journalist, and I’m uneasy now Cobb and Chazz are gone. Islands always seem like a wonderful place to get away until bad things happen. Then they seem like prisons.”

“Careful,” Kimiko warned. “I grew up here. My home, not a prison. Don’t worry. Whoever it is has no reason to be after us.”

“Then why did you leave your kids at your cousin’s in Kekaha?”

Kimiko smiled. “Convenience. So nice and peaceful at home without Kiki and Kenji. It’s vacation time and they like going to cousin’s. Kiki studies aikido with Shinawa
sensei;
Kenji goes surfing at Barking Sands. Kimiko does her gardening without interruption. More tea?”

Patria nodded, and Kimiko prepared her bowl again, measuring out the proper amount of the finely ground green tea with a bamboo scoop. She poured the hot water over the tea and whipped it with a bamboo whisk until it frothed. Then she held the bowl, turned it twice a quarter turn, and handed it to Patria, who turned it back the two quarter turns and sipped. She sighed appreciatively. “Good,” she said. “Very different from Upton’s.”

Kimiko nodded and prepared her own bowl. They sipped in silence.

“They should be on their way about now,” Patria said.

“Raïatéa,” Kimiko agreed. “Sounds very exotic, doesn’t it?”

“I should go there sometime. It was the seat of ancient Tahitian religion. Thick with gods, Raïatéa is. And guess what it used to be called?”

Kimiko thought, pursing her lips “Hmm They called it ‘Home’?”

“Very funny. Actually, they called it Havai’i.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The Maori settled New Zealand from Raïatéa.”

“It sounds like it was where the Hawaiians came from too.”

Patria nodded. “At least one wave of Hawaiians came from there, so the connections are old and intimate.”

A shaft of sun fell through the trees and lit up Orli’s face. She stirred, emitted a sharp cry, gurgled and opened her eyes. Patria leaned down and pulled her from the stroller. Orli snuggled for a moment and was instantly asleep again against Patria’s shoulder. The two women smiled at each other and waited.

The peace lasted moments before Orli woke up crying. Patria fed her and peace returned, but the child was awake and eager for adventure.

“A hike?”

“Sure.” Kimiko loved to walk along the river, so they drove out the Maalo Road toward the Wailua Falls. Patria parked and snugged Orli into her stroller. The late afternoon sun fell aslant of the river below, highlighting the ferns and pandanus that grew on the steep banks. To the right as they walked along the wide, well-maintained path, they could see the last shreds of a small rain squall dissipating before the trade winds. From time to time as they walked, they caught glimpses of the steep, wide chimney of Waialeale stark against the sky. The sun was settling toward the peak, and the bars of light and shade flashed as they walked.

Kimiko was thoughtful and said nothing for a while. They came around the curve of the river and saw the falls ahead, flashing blue and gray in their own mist. When they passed from sunshine into shadow, the chill of evening fell on them.

Kimiko cleared her throat. “Do you think…” she began with a questioning sidelong glance at Patria.

“Yes.” Patria was leaning down to click at Orli, but when she got no response she straightened and looked at her friend.

“I was thinking, that is, about what’s been happening. Ever since I went on that boat, I think how lucky I was nothing happened to me. If they were sick, I would have caught it. And if they had been killed… all of them, like that, I was doubly lucky the killer wasn’t still on board.”

“Yes.” Patria looked down at the top of Orli’s sunbonnet and the pudgy little hands that jerked sideways from time to time, and felt a chill.

“Fate was smiling on me then,” Kimiko went on. “Buddha was merciful, I suppose. Karma. But the killer’s here somewhere.”

“I was thinking that,” Patria said. “On the island. Assuming he took the lifeboat.”

“Or she.”

“Or she,” Patria agreed, with little enthusiasm. “It seems like a man to me. I can’t really see a woman killing seven people like that, in such a devious way.”

“A witch, perhaps,” Kimiko offered. “Casting her poison spells. In Japan she would be a lady who turned into a fox. Malicious and clever. Here, what did you call it…
’ana’ana?
A sorcerer praying his victim to death, with a little help from some kind of poison.”

“A lot of help, more like. But if it were someone on the boat, then it had to be someone they trusted. A member of the crew. Someone they knew.”

“That’s why Chazz and Cobb are in Tahiti,” Kimiko said. “He ought to be easy to trace.”

“But…?”

“But I was thinking, what if that person is the same one who killed that woman, what was her name, Richards? What if he, or she, is a psychopath, a killer who kills without reason?” Kimiko found this thought particularly disturbing.

“Then everyone here is in danger. But there are forty thousand people on this island. It isn’t likely he’s going to select one of us.” Patria wasn’t sure she was reassuring Kimiko or herself.

“Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless he— or she— the killer, knows that we’re connected with the police, and has some reason to want to threaten us.” They were getting to it, what was bothering Kimiko. Her husband was a cop.

“But this is a psycho, right, not a rational person.”

“Yeah. A psycho. Not rational.”

“That doesn’t reassure you? Me either. I’ve been so jumpy I keep seeing the same guy.”

“What guy?” They passed a loop trail down to the river and kept going.

“Men… they all look like that French journalist, Hobart.”

“I didn’t see him,” Kimiko pointed out. “Here, let me take her.” She took the handles of the stroller from Patria and pushed Orli in short little spurts. Orli gurgled with delight,
whee.
“Can you describe him?”

Patria frowned. “That’s the funny thing. He’s awfully hard to describe. I mean, I told you about the businessman, jogging to the library? Well, there was this other guy, this morning, down by the Pay ‘N Save. Except he was wearing green work pants and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. You see what I mean, it’s almost always clothes, or things like hair and mustaches that I notice. The journalist had a tattoo, a really vicious-looking octopus, wrapped around his forearm. But the guy this morning, at the Pay ‘N Save, didn’t have a tattoo, he had a scar, beside his eye. For a minute I would have sworn they were the same man, but of course they weren’t.”

They reached the end of the trail and stood looking at the falls. The mist rose from the darkening abyss into the sunlight, where it seemed to glow from within, as if filled with electric lights.

Patria was thoughtful for a while. Then she said, “There was the guy at the airport too.”

“The one in the aloha shirt?”

“Yeah. Chazz didn’t take it too seriously, did he?”

“Cobb was getting the tickets. You nudged Chazz and pointed the guy out. But he didn’t have a tattoo.”

“I know, I know,” Patria frowned. “It’s spooky though. Maybe it’s just a general jumpiness because of the murder and all, but these were all strangers. I mean, we’ve been around here for a couple of years now. There are tourists, and you can recognize them. And there are natives, and you can tell who they are too. But these are people who don’t look like tourists and aren’t natives. So they’re strangers, and that’s strange.”

“But they aren’t all the same person.”

“No. I’m seeing spooks everywhere, that’s all.”

The stroller bumped over a stone on the trail and Orli’s arms jerked out as she gave a small cry. “There, there, it’s just a little stone.”

“She’s laughing, Patria.” Kimiko was peering down into Orli’s face as she pushed the stroller along.

“Oh.” They approached the loop trail again and stopped beside the small wooden sign. “Want to go down? It’s only half a mile or so. I’ll take the stroller.”

Kimiko nodded and they started down the loop to the falls. The air grew chilly in the shadow of the ravine, and the mist rose around them, spangling their clothes with drops. The earth beneath the ferns along the trail was damp. The deeper they went, the darker and colder it grew. Kimiko wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

“Bad idea?” Patria asked. She was concentrating on Orli and hadn’t felt the chill as much.

“No. It’s all right. We could walk a little faster.”

“Okay.” The stroller bounced and jiggled over the gravel path, making a ratchet-like sound Orli seemed to like. She held up her face to the mist and licked her lips.

Patria stopped suddenly at a change in the sound the wheels made. She pulled the stroller back and looked at the ground.

“A comb,” she said.

Kimiko looked at it. “I wonder whose it is?”

“I don’t know.” Patria leaned down and started to pick it up, but Kimiko put her hand on Patria’s elbow and stopped her.

“No,” she said. “Very bad luck. We say in Japanese
Kushi wo hiroeba ku wo hiroh.
It means something like, To pick up a comb is to pick up affliction.
Kushi
is comb, but ku means affliction and
shi
means death, you see.”

“All right.” Patria laughed, but she left the comb where it was.

At the bottom along the river’s edge, the darkness gathered around them, and they found themselves hurrying. The dark water swirled at the bank, almost black in the shadow. The ferns were tall and dripping with moisture. Smells of damp earth and rot rose around them, too much life, too much moisture and heavy red earth. Something of the grave, something of dank cellars and locked rooms, of prisoners lost and forgotten.

Patria shivered now. Her fancy running away with her. She reminded herself that she was a scientist, not an idle daydreamer or a romantic poet. The psychological signs of self-delusion and paranoia were obvious, even to her. She was creating fears for herself. Yet she found herself looking around her carefully.

So she was the one to find it.

She stopped so suddenly that Orli gave one of her sharp cries, and Kimiko bumped into her. “What is it?” the Japanese woman asked.

“Look there. What is that?” It was under the ferns, at the very edge of the water.

“I don’t know. It looks like a child’s toy, a doll?” Kimiko leaned over the closest ferns. “Oh, my God.” Her voice was very soft, almost inaudible.

Patria felt colder than before, and tried to joke. “I guess that means it isn’t a toy?”

Kimiko stepped back and let Patria see.

“I guess we’d better report this,” she said at last. She pushed Orli’s stroller up the path a few feet and climbed through the ferns to the water’s edge.

The hand was resting on the bank, its fingers curled toward the palm. The nails were still lacquered a deep maroon, and although two of them were torn, the rest were very long. The fingers were tanned a rich cocoa brown, but the palm was pale and white.

The woman’s elbow was crooked over the low bank along the river; the upper arm disappeared into the water, which carried a deep stain of mud and silt. From time to time, the back of the woman’s head broke the surface and her blond hair swirled in the eddies.

Kimiko was right behind Patria. “Should we…?”

“I don’t think we can help her. She’s dead.”

“One of us will have to go back up.”

“And the other stay here?” Patria asked. “I don’t think I like that idea.”

“I’ll stay. You take Orli and go to the car. Get to a phone and call Captain Taxeira or Sergeant Handel. This could be an accidental death.”

“Yes. It could be. I don’t think either of us believe that, though.”

“No. I suppose not.” Kimiko sat down on a stone beside the trail. “Go on. I don’t really want to stay here too long.”

“Let’s think about this for a moment, Kimiko. If we knew how long she had been here we would know whether to worry about a murderer or not.”

Patria picked up the dead woman’s hand. The body rolled with it rigidly. “She’s stiff, Kimiko. She’s certainly been dead a while, hours at least. We have to worry about the murderer hanging around to see what happens. She’s not going anywhere. Come with me.”

“I wait. Cobb Takamura would not want me to leave the scene of a death. You can be back in twenty minutes. I can wait. Go.”

Patria didn’t like it. There were too many strangers, too many bodies piling up. She hurried up the trail, pushing the stroller and breathing hard. There was something ominous in the parking lot’s emptiness, as it was lit only by the pearly twilight gloom of the subtropics. The sun was gone. It would be completely dark down by the river. The body would be swollen with water, sluggish in the turbid current.

Except for Kimiko’s car, there was no sign of humanity. As Patria fumbled with the lock, the key kept slipping, and she glanced over her shoulder. Orli fussed in the stroller.

Was that someone in the trees at the far edge of the parking lot? A dark shape formed in the lesser darkness under the trees. A man, waiting, watching. She finally fitted the key and almost laughed with relief. This is stupid, she said. Stupid. There’s no one there. Of course not. Just the breeze. No murderer lurking in the woods, waiting to grab her as she climbs in the car. Waiting for her to leave before going after Kimiko.

She drove down the hill toward the nearest house, leaving a spray of gravel and dust in the air. Damn him, damn him, damn him.

This made her mad.

She wasn’t certain whether she was mad at the murderer or at their husbands. Chazz and Cobb Takamura were away, visiting Tahiti, a safe and pleasant paradise, while she and Kimiko had to deal with murder in the dark.

Damned, the two of them.