Micro

Chapter 29

Honolulu 30 October, 1:00 p.m.

In his windowless office, Dan Watanabe called an officer in the Missing Persons Detail. “Let me know if any new information about those students comes up.”

“Funny you should ask. You want to call Nanci Harfield. She’s out in District 8 right now.”

Sergeant Nanci Harfield was in the Traffic Division; District 8 covered the southwest side of Oahu.

“I’m at Kaena,” she said to him. “We’ve got a luxury car upside down in the tidal inlet below the 1929 Bridge. The vehicle is registered to one Alyson F. Bender slash Nanigen MicroTechnologies. There’s a body trapped under the vehicle. Female, by appearance. No other bodies visible.”

“I’d like to have a look,” Watanabe said.

He got in his brown unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and drove it at an easy ninety along the freeway around Pearl Harbor. He continued into Waianae, a town that lay on the southwest coast of Oahu. This was the leeward side of the island, dry and sunny, where the beaches were lapped by gentle waves and the smallest keiki s could play and paddle. It was the rougher side of the island in terms of law enforcement, though. Lots of car break-ins and petty thefts, but little or no violence, anyway. Back in the 1800s, in the days of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the leeward side of Oahu had been a violent place, a haven for bandits, who robbed and murdered people who ventured there. Now it was mostly property crimes.

At Kaena Point, a car rested upside down in shallow water. The police department’s heaviest winch truck was parked on the road. A cable ran from the truck down through hau tangle to the car; it had been a nasty job getting the cable down through the brush. The car tipped as the cable yanked on it, and it flipped over, landing right side up. A dark blue Bentley convertible. Its soft top torn and crushed. Sand and water streamed out of the car, and a dead woman sat in the driver’s seat, creepily upright.

Watanabe made his way down the slope. He tore his slacks, and slipped and skidded, regretting that he wore street shoes.

By the time he reached the car, the cable had winched it out on the rocks. The dead woman wore a dark business suit. Her hair swirled around her face and clogged her mouth. Her eyes were gone: reef fish had eaten them.

He leaned into the car, past the corpse, and looked around. He saw articles of clothing plastered all over the wet compartment, clinging to the seats and caught in the twisted metal of the convertible’s top. Board shorts. A belt made of snakeskin, chewed by fish. A woman’s underpants, lime-green. Another pair of board shorts, with a tag still on them, just purchased. A Hilo Hattie shirt. A pair of bootcut jeans with a hole in the right knee.

“Was the lady going to do laundry?” he remarked to an officer. The clothing was the sort that younger people wear. He noticed a plastic jug wedged under the dashboard and took it out and studied the label. “Ethanol. Hmm.” He found a wallet in the backseat. It held a Massachusetts driver’s license belonging to one Jenny H. Linn. One of the missing students. But there were no bodies in the car other than the woman’s—which might or might not be Alyson Bender. That would have to wait for the medical examiner.

He climbed back up to the road. There, Nanci Harfield and another officer had photographed and measured the tire tracks in the grit leading over the shoulder of the road.

Watanabe looked at Harfield. “So what do you think?”

“Looks like the car stopped here before it went over. Then it rolled straight off.” Harfield had searched carefully around the tire tracks for any shoeprints in the gravel. The gravel was scuffed but there were no clear shoeprints. She went on, “It looks like the driver stopped right here. Then the car goes off the edge, no use of the brakes. If she’d braked, you’d see the skidmarks in the dirt. No skidmarks means no attempt to stop. She could have sat here for a while making up her mind, then touched the gas and went over.”

“Suicide?” Watanabe asked her.

“That’s a possibility. It’s consistent with these marks.”

The evidence squad took photographs and video. They bagged the body and loaded it into an ambulance, which drove off silently, lights flashing. The totaled Bentley followed, riding on the deck of the police tow truck, still dripping seawater.

Watanabe ended up back at his desk at headquarters, looking at the scratched metal wall he would stare at sometimes to clarify his thoughts. He couldn’t get over the feeling that somebody had put the clothing in the car. Especially that wallet. People who are planning to go off don’t leave their wallets behind. If Jenny Linn had gone off voluntarily, she would have taken her wallet with her. What if she hadn’t gone voluntarily? Maybe kidnapped? Had this been a boating accident? A lost boat would explain so many people missing at the same time.

He called the Property Crimes Unit and asked if there were any reports of missing boats. Not lately. He stared at the wall some more. It might be time to eat an emergency Spam sushi.

But then his phone rang. It was an officer in the Missing Persons Unit. “I’ve got another one for you.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“A Joanna Kinsky called to report her husband didn’t come home from work last night. He’s an engineer at Nanigen.”

“Another Nanigen missing? You’ve got to be kidding—”

“Ms. Kinsky says she called the company. Nobody’s seen her husband since yesterday afternoon.”

The Nanigen security chief hadn’t reported this one. There were just too many Nanigen people dropping out of sight in the quiet little Honolulu town.

Another phone call. It was Dorothy Girt, a forensic scientist in the Scientific Investigation Section. “Dan—would you come down and take a look at something? It’s the Fong case. I’ve found something.”

Shit. The Willy Fong Mess. Not what he needed right now.

Don Makele walked into Vin Drake’s office. He had a disturbed look on his face. “Telius and Johnstone are dead.”

Drake gritted his teeth. “What happened?”

“I lost radio contact with them. They had located the survivors. They had begun the, uh, rescue operation,” Makele said. He was sweating again. “Right in the middle of this, they were attacked by something. I heard screaming and then—Telius—well…he got eaten.”

“Eaten?”

“I heard it. Some kind of predator. His radio went dead. I called for a long time. There were no more transmissions.”

“What do you think?”

“I think everybody’s dead.”

“Why?”

“My men were the best. Something got through their weapons and armor.”

“So the students—”

Makele shook his head. “Not a chance.”

Drake leaned back. “So there was an accident with a predator.”

Makele sucked on his lips. “When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed something about accidents.”

“What’s that?” Drake asked.

“Accidents happen more often to assholes.”

Drake chuckled. “That’s true.”

“The rescue—it failed, sir.”

Drake realized that Don Makele understood exactly what was meant by rescue. Nevertheless, Drake had his doubts. “How can you be sure, Don, that the rescue…ah…failed?”

“There’s no survivors. I’m sure of it.”

“Show me the bodies.”

“But there aren’t—”

“I will not believe the students are dead until I see evidence of their deaths.” Drake leaned back. “As long as there’s hope, we will spare no effort to save them. No effort. Am I clear?”

Makele left Drake’s office without saying a word. There was nothing to say.

As for Vin Drake, he felt reasonably good about what had happened to Telius and Johnstone. It meant he didn’t have to pay them bonuses in valuable stock. Nevertheless, he could not assume that all the students were dead. They had shown some survival skills, surprising tenacity, and so he would continue to try to flush them out, just in case some of them were still alive.