Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) (32 page)

“Very impressive. So this venom is in the brew? Interesting. What propelled our man, do you think?”

Chazz shrugged and he shifted into gear and drove the ancient VW van away from the curb. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t doubt he’s very sick – assuming he also killed the two women.”

Cobb nodded. “Taxeira doesn’t agree with us. He has his own theory. He thinks we get a lot of sexual deviants from the mainland. He thinks we got one in this case. Not related, says Taxeira. He’s on it: some actor from Los Angeles, he says. A creep. He says he’s closing in on him.”

Chazz did not notice the tan sedan that turned the corner of Umi Street and followed him through a series of left turns. It stayed well back. The driver, whose name was Hennet, drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel as he drove.

“Taxeira says all that?” Chazz asked. He pulled onto the highway and turned north. The moon cast long silver beams across the glimpses of water to their right.

“He does. This ‘actor’ stays at the Hilton, where the second victim was staying. He preys on lonely women, married or not. He acts out some ritual that includes death.”

“I see. What do you say?”

“I say the Phoenix has an obsession, but he also has a job. I say he killed the crew, probably to get rid of Noel Taviri, a thorn in the side of the French government. Maybe he didn’t mean or want to kill everyone, maybe he did. But even that wasn’t enough. He has a compulsion, a sexual thing, so he killed the women, too. Then he called the four goons from here, sent them after you. He’s been following your wife. I say Duvalois killed him in the lava and went home. That’s what I say. I say he’s a problem for the French now.”

The lights of Lihue fell behind them. Clouds drifted across the sky, shredding away from the top of Waialeale into streaks that floated across the moon; the silver light dipped into luminous gray, flooded back.

Chazz shook his head. “The guy was a creep for sure. So the theory goes that he was working for the French government, intercepted the
Ocean Mother
, got aboard in Raïatéa either as extra crew or as a stowaway, mixed up his messy concoction, spread it on the deck or got it onto or into the crew. Then somewhere off the coast of Kauai he took the lifeboat, rowed to shore, and slipped into the general population. He picked up the Richards woman on the tour at the DRC and took her back to his suite at the Westin, where he killed her. Right?”

“Right. Then he changed his appearance, and posed as a journalist named Hobart. When he learned we were going to Tahiti, he called his four friends to stop you. He was worried we’d find out things either he or the French government didn’t want us to know. The deaths of the two women would make him a liability to the French government, put him on the short list. Duvalois came after him and cleaned it up.”

“Meanwhile,” Chazz picked up the thread, “he had a rendezvous with the other woman, the one from the Hilton. Did her in and dumped her in the Wailua River.”

“Somewhere above the falls. She washed over. Patria and Kimiko found her.”

Chazz nodded. “And he dosed someone with his clever little Jimsonweed concoction, gave him a tattoo identical to his own to put us off and make us think he was out of the picture. That means…?”

“That means,” Cobb said when Chazz paused, “that he was not going to leave Hawaii, he was planning something else. He was baiting us. What more could his job require or his obsession drive him to do? A very good question. Any ideas?”

They passed the small Japanese teahouse where they had met earlier that day. It was dark and shuttered. Moonlight reflected white off the front, shrouding its humble entrance gate in shadow.

“He’s crazy. Patria might be able to say more. He thinks he’s a voodoo priest, or a kahuna master of
‘ana’ana
, of killing people with magic. But he uses venom from marine snails, blowfish toxin, frog skins, and scrapings of human bone. Nothing really magic in that at all.”

“Perhaps not. But this was a man who liked to play with your mind. We’ll ask Patria. I want to know why he came to my island. Most of all I want to know why he stayed, even if the question is more or less academic now.”

The scattered lights of the village of Waipouli came toward them, passed them, fell behind. Darkness flowed by on both sides, broken through the trees by the flicker of moonlight on water. Mars blinked above the moon through the palm crowns, a red sore on the soft black sky.

The car following them slowed as it passed through the small town, but not enough. A traffic patrol officer, bored with late night duty, clocked it at forty-three miles an hour, eight miles over the limit. The old white VW van was doing forty-six, but he knew it belonged to Chazz Koenig, a good friend of Lieutenant Takamura. He was working with the lieutenant on the Death Ship case. He was a Good Guy.

This one, though, was a tourist, and not a Good Guy. Not that tourists were bad, mind you. But they were definitely Not Good. So he turned on the siren and the lights and ran the tan rental car down and waited patiently for the driver to roll down the window.

Hennet watched in frustration as the van’s taillights disappeared around a bend in the road. He looked over with hatred when Chausseur called him a fool. Then he opened the window. It was time to be polite in another language. He found it difficult enough to be polite in his own.

He would not succeed.

Kapaa was a distant blur of streetlights and homes. At this hour, the main street was deserted. Chazz had turned toward the condominium complex when Cobb Takamura, who appeared to be asleep with his porkpie hat over his eyes said quietly, “Keep going. Turn right at the end of the street and head back to the highway.”

“All right.” A flare of alarm rose in Chazz, but he said nothing and kept driving. They passed a parked car. Patria’s vehicle was in front of the condo. Everything was dark.

“You’d think they’d stay up for us. Weren’t you planning to go home tonight?”

Cobb had not moved, but Chazz sensed his tension, his state of alertness. They turned right and coasted a block before turning right again. Headlights appeared in his rearview mirror as they made the second turn.

“Okay, I get the picture. What do we do?” Chazz’s hands rested lightly on the wheel. “This is not exactly a hot getaway car.”

“Pull over, up there.” Cobb nodded toward the side of the cafe. As they rolled to a stop, a bank of the lights inside went off, leaving half the cafe in darkness. There were still two or three people inside. “Kimura lives upstairs,” Cobb said. “They might think we went in, but the place will be locked up. It’ll delay them for a minute. How fast can you move?”

“My leg and side are all right now. I can move.”

“Shall we?” Cobb clicked his door open and slid to the pavement. Chazz was on the ground and in front of the car when the headlights appeared at the far end. Then they were walking quickly along the sidewalk in front of the café.

There was a small alley between the cafe and the next set of shops, a two-story wooden building with an old-fashioned facade and a row of stores on the bottom floor. Upstairs was a large loft that had once been home to a dance studio, and now was a warehouse for the retail tenants. They slipped behind a Dumpster in the alley and waited.

The car cruised slowly past, the two men inside looking intently at the cafe. It pulled to the curb and idled for a moment, but the men in the car decided Chazz and Cobb weren’t inside, and a minute later the car cruised slowly past the mouth of the alley.

“I guess it didn’t fool them. Familiar?” Takamura hissed.

“Only saw the passenger,” Chazz answered. “But he was one of my friends from the disco. Big man, broad, flat face. Limping.”

“Ah. So they are from Tahiti. What are they doing here on my island?”

“You’re asking me?” They watched the car turn the corner and followed on foot.

“I don’t like this,” Chazz said. The car had returned to its position in view of the condo.

“I don’t like it either.” They were already running lightly along the sidewalk, staying close to the shadows. They moved swiftly from one cluster of shrubbery to the next. Soon they were outside the complex.

The wrought iron gate was standing open. The apartments were in complete darkness.

Chazz crouched down and peered low toward the Frenchmen’s car. “I can’t see anyone,” he said softly.

With a touch on Chazz’s shoulder, Cobb moved back, around the wall. Chazz followed him. “That way,” Cobb gestured, “is a papaya plantation. Other side of the condos is a small vacant lot used to store road construction material— sand, graders, that sort of thing— and to the north a series of small apartment complexes. Out there is big open field to the next cross street. Back toward the mountains there’s a network of dirt roads, irrigation access and trail maintenance. I don’t think there’s any development in there, but I can’t be sure. Those guys were watching the condo, and they followed us. What are they doing here? If Phoenix is dead, they shouldn’t be here. Unless he’s controlling them from beyond the grave.”

The moon floated from behind a cloud and painted the field to the south in broad silver strokes.

“I’ve got to get inside,” Chazz said. “We’re awfully exposed here, and Patria and Orli are in there.”

“I’ll boost you.” Cobb cupped his hands and Chazz stepped into it. He grunted as he went over the wall.

“You all right?”

“Ribs hurt a little.” Chazz’s voice came from the top of the wall. “Come on.” He reached down, and soon the smaller man was beside him. They listened.

A car came down the street, but they couldn’t see it from their position on the wall. They could hear it stop, though, and a car door open and close. Soon there were voices, speaking urgently in French.

They dropped inside the wall and moved to the front. Tree ferns and the drooping leaves of a banana tree rustled around them. Chazz reached out and slowly closed the gate. When it clicked shut the four men across the street looked up. The two men froze in place. After a moment the heated discussion continued.

Cobb and Chazz slipped across the entry walk and up the steps to the condo’s front door.

It was closed but unlocked. They went in.

Across the living room the curtains in front of the door to the lanai filled and deflated gently. A faint nimbus of moonlight reflected from the back garden wall turned them into ghosts. The nearly invisible outline of the sliding door was half open.

Chazz moved quickly to Orli’s room and opened the door. He disappeared inside as Cobb moved toward the sliding door. Before he could push the curtain aside Chazz was at his elbow. “She’s gone,” he whispered. “There’s no one here. Patria, Kimiko, gone.”

Cobb nodded. He moved the curtain and a dark form loomed up in front of them.

Takamura took a step back. The figure, the dark outline of a man, lurched toward them, bouncing his shoulder off the frame of the door as it stepped into the room.

Chazz moved sideways and dropped into a centered
hanmi
, his awareness flowing out, taking in the room, the sounds in the street, the soughing of the trade winds through the curtains. He listened to the breathing coming from this creature before him, slow; it was slow, slightly labored. There was no threat.

“Who are you?” Cobb Takamura asked in a quiet, conversational voice.

The figure stood, swaying slightly. Cobb reached out and took the man’s arm. There was no reaction. Gently he led him into the room. Beside the couch he said, “Sit,” and the man sat.

“Do we risk a light?” Chazz asked. “There are four people out there watching us. If they see it…”

“We’ll be ready for them, but there is no front window in Orli’s room. We can take him in there and close the door.”

They moved the man into the second bedroom, and Chazz snapped on the overhead light.

Vincent Meissner blinked once. Otherwise he gave no reaction.

“What the hell happened?” Chazz asked.

“Mr. Meissner?” Cobb maneuvered the heavy man to a straight-backed chair and sat him in it. Meissner stared straight ahead through blackened eyes and said nothing.

“He looks like the others, like that woman in Tahiti and Tracy Ann.”

Takamura nodded, bent over Meissner’s face. “You watch the door. We were wrong about Phoenix. It looks like he rose from his ashes after all.”

The four men in the street finished their discussion. The Algerian opened the trunk, and they quickly unzipped their dive bags. They removed the air tanks and laid them on the sidewalk, where they unscrewed the top halves of the tanks. They took an assortment of weapons from inside. The tanks were fitted together and the dive bags stowed in the trunk in under four minutes.

They crossed the street and fanned out, surrounding the complex. One tried the iron gate, found it locked, and signaled the others.

They went over the wall and slipped into the garden in uncanny silence. Two of them moved up the short flight of stairs to the lanai of 1A. In the bedroom, Cobb and Chazz were looking into Vincent Meissner’s eyes.

Chazz stepped back and moved to the bedroom door. Behind him Cobb said, “Someone’s blacked his eyes. I wonder…”

“Shh.” Chazz switched off the light. “On the lanai. Two. The others probably in front. I’ll cross to the kitchen.”

“All right,” Cobb murmured, drawing his automatic. “I don’t like guns, but I’ll make an exception this time.” He waited by the door. Chazz was plunging through the arch to the kitchen nook when the shooting began and the lanai door exploded in a fountain of glass. Sofa stuffing and splinters from the coffee table flew into the air and whirled around.

Behind Cobb, Vincent Meissner whimpered.

Two men plunged through the wreckage of the doors and split up, one to each side. They covered the room with machine pistols. A moment later, the lock on the front door blew away in another blast of noise and smoke, and two more men entered and split up. The four men, one in each corner, covered the room.

Chazz waited in the kitchen. In the bedroom opposite, Cobb stood immobile. The apartment was in darkness. The four men called to each other in brief, urgent whispers. They moved around, checking the room. As one of them entered the kitchen, Chazz seized the hand holding the weapon, swiveled his hips a half turn, flipped the wrist in a merciless
kote-gaeshi
reversal that rotated the gun in a swift arc across the ceiling. A line of holes stitched their way through the plaster toward one of the men near the lanai door before the man dropped the gun and followed it to the floor. Chazz flipped him over, dragged him deeper into the kitchen, and, straightening the man’s arm, leaned on his wrist while he scooped up the pistol.