Primal Instinct

18

Dr. Asa Holcraft and others at the academy had taught her that there was no such thing as the ideal crime scene, but here in Lopaka Kowona's murderer's den, she and Parry had come damnably close to perfection. With the help of the FBI's Major Crime Scene Unit and ident techs from the HPD, the hours-long search now under the blindingly bright lights went ahead. Through-out the lair they uncovered much that would insure that Kowona would go down quickly and efficiently, unless defense counsel saw the fantastic opportunity presented him, deciding the Kowona case would mean a major leap forward for anyone capable of proving Kowona innocent by reason of insanity. She imagined some hotshot lawyer calling in his shrinks-for-hire one atop another, to attest to Kowona's inability to know right from wrong, good from evil or pain from pleasure, muddying the waters just enough forjudge and jury with sad tales of civil-rights violations to the defendant, stories of childhood molestation, split-personality syndrome and a hundred other euphemisms for animal behavior. They'd done exactly that in the Matisak case and countless others. An eager young F. Lee Bailey could make Kowona out to be the victim, leave a jury believing that the real victims here-Lina Kahala, Kia, Hiilani and countless others-didn't much matter in the grand scheme of jurisprudence. Like the photos taken by the killer himself, which would likely be labeled as inflamatory and prejudicial and therefore inadmissable. Didn't matter, she kept telling herself, struggling to do her part to counter all the possible scenarios that lay ahead of them.

In order to convict, she had to do a painstaking job here and now.

“ The ideal situation is the one you don't have,” her M.E. father had once confided. “Whether it's a tourist attraction at Disneyland or a Georgia swamp. All you can do is your job, which is to protect the integrity of the crime scene and the gathered evidence, even from the fools who think it's their scene and evidence, too.”

She had done a fair job of keeping control here, knowing there was no such thing as total control. Fibers, hairs and minutiae from the living would find a way into Hiilani's innumerable wounds. Hell, even a single open wound at the crime scene acted like a vacuum for all the microscopic debris floating by. The CSU guys at least knew enough to strap on aprons and hair nets just like the ones she'd pulled from the side pocket of her black valise. Still, Lau and his staff would have their hands full back at the lab. Everyone remotely near the body, including Jessica, would have to be ruled out as suspects when the specimens were examined under microscopic conditions. Evidence of Kowona's hair, fibers from his clothes were what was needed here, to corroborate the gruesome photos heedlessly left by the killer. At least the crime-scene photos taken here by FBI and HPD photographers could not be held inadmissable, not since Jim had been so careful about securing a warrant to search on probable cause.

When Parry asked her if she needed help orchestrating efforts here, she'd been short with him, replying curtly, “Just be damned sure that you protect the place from everybody. That includes the PC.”

Harold Shore, Chief Medical Examiner for all Oahu, who had been gravely ill, had been escorted in by Police Commissioner Dave Scanlon, who wanted some say-so and input; in fact, he wanted the scene turned over to HPD, making loud noises about his jurisdictional powers here, regardless of the fact that “discovery” came out of an FBI investigation and warrant. The P.C.'s argument was that Kowona was wanted for killing two Oahu cops and attempted murder of a third, and also for killing at least three Honolulu civilians, not to mention the fact that Kowona's bloody bungalow sat just this side of his city limits.

“ This is no time to be playing your fucking little political games, Scanlon!” Parry erupted, silencing everyone in the place. “Besides, we got him on multiple murders dating back to 1987. He's our man and this is our scene.”

Jessica stopped in her work long enough to insist that the two angry men take it outside, which they did, Scanlon beet red. Shortly afterward, Jim Parry returned, his jaw firmly set but still quivering with rage. Yet he'd clearly come out today's winner. Jessica knew it for certain when the P.C.'s car squealed all the way down the street. Dr. Harold Shore, looking a little sheepish and uncomfortable, was left in the P.C.'s wake as both eyes and ears for his friend Scanlon.

Shore was not ancient by any stretch, perhaps in his late fifties, but his skin tone was ashen, his near-bald pate barely covered with angel hair, white, wispy and graveyard thin. Dark age spots made a polka-dot fabric of his forehead and hands, lending a britde appearance. He'd obviously seen a lot over the span of his career, but like everyone here, he was stunned by the condition of the body still dangling from Lopaka's rack.

Jessica knew that if she and Shore could not play well together in this macabre sandbox, then the nightmare of problems arising long after they'd both left the scene could be enough to hand that hotshot defense counselor just what he wanted to prove police bungling and poke holes in the evidentiary protocol that a Cat bulldozer could be driven through.

“ Some guys you just can't satisfy no matter what,” Parry now said of the P.C., his eyes boring into Dr. Shore.

“ Hey, Dr. Shore can't help it if Scanlon is a hemorrhagic fart,” she ventured.

Shore erupted with laughter, and she knew immediately that she could work with this man. Meanwhile, the CSU guys stretched a twanging, metallic tape measure from two fixed points in the room to Hiilani's body, triangulating to fix the exact spot where she was found. It would form a ghastly thumbnail sketch, which she and others could use for future reference. The body was found intact, that is in one place, the shoulders dislocated from struggling against the bonds that held her fast, impaled butterfly-like, one final sword plunge fixing her to the wall so that even her entire weight pulling on the rack could not bring it off the wall. The rack itself would also be taken in evidence. Let's see 'em try to keep that out of the courtroom, Jessica silently mused. Aloud she said, “Talk about premeditation…”

She and Shore both saw that the cuts and tears from which her blood had run were symmetrical, one long scar down each side, followed by two lesser cuts coming together at the center of the body. Each cut was done with some precision and care so as to not perforate a vital organ or collapse a lung, all save the final plunge; ugly rents marred each arm, each cheek, each side of the throat; each breast had two sharp, distinct slashes, all done as she'd lived as indicated in the vital reactions around each wound. No doubt, after the first of several such slashes, Hiilani had been sent into a convulsive and merciful traumatic shock with the sudden blood loss. The insults were quickly classified as incisions by both Jessica and Shore.

Shore looked as if he might faint at this point, but he was instantly alert when Jim Parry, on hearing Shore use the word incisions, shouted in his face, “What the hell do you mean, incisions?”

“ Not just incisions, Jim,” she cut in. “Slices, rents, cautious piercings and controlled stabs.”

“ This sure as hell doesn't look controlled to me.”

“ We'll know more when we do some molds of the stab wounds,” said Shore, “determine the exact number of cuts, the depth of each, the nature of each.”

“ But from where I stand,” she continued, “I'd say our boy toyed with her for hours before he began the deep wounds, and by then, she was already dead.”

“ Don't hand me a pile of crap about he didn't mean to do it, Jessica.”

“ No one's saying that,” she countered, angry at his tone.

“ This creep's not getting off on some fucking technicality or nut plea, Jess.”

“ No one wants that,” Shore insisted.

“ But we've also got an obligation to the truth here, Jim,” she said. “And no one knows that more than you. Besides, the fact the first cuts weren't meant to kill, but to torture, doesn't in any way lessen the crime. In fact, it makes it that much more grisly, and it makes Kowona even more vulnerable to an angry jury. The length of time she suffered is significant, but you know that already.”

“ So the first sallies weren't meant to kill, lending to the abduction murder the aspects of a true lust-killing,” said Parry. “The brutal bastard was flipping off as he killed her, right?”

“ Right.”

“ You got proof of that?”

“ Enough seminal fluid to bathe in,” said Shore dryly.

“ We can nail this bastard six ways to Sunday,” she assured Parry. “As soon as your people put him behind bars.”

A torture-murder case. Jessica had seen some of these “signature” channels carved in flesh earlier, in the Linda Kahala arm. The distinctive, ritualistic, ceremonial slash had been photographed. A jury, comparing today's photos of the cleansed wounds once they got the body downtown, could not help but see the patterns, the ugly precision.

“ This bastard knows how to handle his knives, just deep enough to draw blood,” she told Parry.

Shore, nodding, shaken, mumbled something about retiring, before he added, “She didn't feel the final plunges, the crazed hacking.”

Parry, amazed by the two medical people who were able to see patterns in the serrated, fleshy wounds and blood smeared torso, was duly impressed.

“ They said you were good, Dr. Coran,” said Shore, “but I had no idea. It has been a pleasure in one sense.” He started to get up off the floor where he'd gathered his last samples of the seminal fluids and blood found below Hiilani's body. “Now, what say we get this poor creature into a body bag and transport her downtown to my office?”

“ Sorry, Shore,” countered Parry. “The body will remain under Dr. Coran's care.”

Jessica, also fatigued, said, “Don't be silly, Jim.”

“ The body-” Parry began, but she quickly cut him off.

“ The body will be available to you, Dr. Shore, anytime, and I'll make sure any specimens I take, you will get a duplicate of, and as for any lab results, I'll be happy to share these with you as well.”

Shore's lined face compressed into a smile and he nodded approvingly. “You know how to soothe an old man, young lady. Very well, I'll take you at your word, and thank you.”

Without another word, Shore climbed from the den and was gone.

“ Did you have to be so rude to him?” she asked.

“ I don't trust him, all right?”

“ It's not Shore you don't trust, it's Scanlon.”

“ Exactly, and Scanlon controls Shore.”

“ I rather doubt that that's a fair assumption. Anyway, you're not going to last long as bureau chief if you can't sublimate some of those feelings, Jim. Trust me, I know. Politics and hopscotch: You've got to learn both.”

“ Or dance around 'em, like you? Yeah, well, I get a little upset when we do all the goddamned legwork and these clowns want to waltz in and claim all the glory.”

“ Jim, I know that's not what you're in it for, so give it a rest and who gives a damn about Scanlon's wanting to speechify before the damned cameras?”

“ Last thing he wants to do is make speeches over this one.”

“ What?” She was confused by the remark. He shrugged it off. “Forget it. Maybe you're right.”

“ I know I'm right, but just what-”

“ That's what I like about you.” He stared for a moment into her eyes. “Can we close down here now?”

“ Yeah, everything that can be done here's done… and I need to wash my hair, shower… get this smell off me.”

He nodded, understanding.

Whole rolls of film had been taken of the place and the body. Measurements and samples had been taken, and anything remotely looking like incriminating evidence was hauled away to join the swords headed for the property room downtown. The human hands, packed on ice, were headed for Lau's freezer. The crime- scene drawings were already being fed into a computer.

On the outside, more crime-scene sketches and a thorough search that had turned up nothing had been completed, and with darkness descending no one had turned up Lopaka Kowona.

In many ways now, she had come to know Kowona primarily through the results of his maniacal butchering, not unlike the crazed cuttings of another killer known by the public for so many terrifying months as the Claw.

Kowona's obsession with rending flesh and harvesting human hair for rope and human teeth for leis they'd found about the house, along with his liking for the victims' hands, painted him in a different hue than Archer's more “civilized” Jack-the-Ripper approach. Archer had been a medical man who'd taken a step toward godhood no one should take; he'd fed immediate impulses, cannibalizing the flesh far more than Lopaka. Still, there were unmistakable similarities: Each monster had had an overall game plan, a plan that squared with premeditation and plotting. Like Kowona, the Claw selected his victims from the faceless masses of a city, but Archer had known his victims in a professional sense, as their doctor. Kowona, so far as she could see, only saw his victims through the haze of a maniacal lust, with a savage instinct to reduce them to sacrificial lambs.

Was there a gene that dictated the evil pathways, connections and helixes in the brain, twisting, coiling, and ultimately leading one to madness, leading another to hear voices that instructed him to kill, leading another to place his own needs-body, soul and spirit-above the right of another human being to live?

All that was left to do was to maintain the integrity of the Kowona case's physical evidence. The evidence locker had to be truck size. The body, taken down with a reverential touch by a pair of silent, gaping paramedics, who'd earlier been told to go away and return in four hours, was prepared for safe transport to Lau's labs.

Lau himself, hearing of the discovery, had come on scene and remained for an hour, shaken to the core by what he had seen. Unauthorized people were kept out and the chain of custody, so crucial in any murder case, was carefully guarded. Neither Parry nor Jessica wanted a single mistake to later haunt them. To this end, Jim and Tony escorted the coroner of record, Jessica, back to property lockup at the bureau and the lab. There she placed all medico-legal evidence under lock and key. It had been the lack of such procedures in the Claw case that had pretty well allowed that New York monster to freely roam for as long as he had.

It would be a while before Jessica could shower. Throughout the evidence-gathering, she had been careful not to meet Hiilani's open eyes. In fact, after taking some fluid from the eyes, treating them-and her-like a specimen in a science experiment, she'd asked one of the CSU guys to close the lids, to symbolically put Hiilani to sleep at last. Neither had she allowed herself to feel what the child-woman had felt here at the hands of a savage slayer who'd pierced her with metal swords in one hand while ejaculating on her with the other, directing his flow at or toward her vagina. Jessica had clung to the merciful thought that Hiilani had never felt the deepest and most damaging of the stabs he'd administered in his perverted mockery of the climax to his “sex act.”

The victims of this brutal monster had been raped many times over, even, it appeared, after they'd left this world, making Parry's brutal fugitive also a necrophile.

“ Let's get out of here, Jess.” Jim's voice broke through her thoughts, and she looked back at him, her lower lip quivering a bit, the only sign of weakness in a day that called for incredible strength born of professional detachment. But at what cost, she wondered, unable to guess what it would ultimately mean to Jim and her.

How does Jim view me now? she wondered of Parry.

July 18, FBI Evidence-Property Room

Another night passed and still no sign of Lopaka. Moments after Kowona's door had been kicked in, an APB burned over the computer landscape to reach the entire island and her sister islands, and within an hour every law-enforcement official in the state was on the lookout for Lopaka Kowona, otherwise known as Robert Kowona.

Between bouts with the forensics gathering in Lau's labs, Jessica went to the sleek FBI evidence-property room, where she felt about as comfortable as at the Department of Motor Vehicles. She had to go through a near-endless round of paperwork and doors to examine the collective photographs and photo albums of Lopaka Kowona found at the scene. A stack of unopened letters taken from the Lopaka residence caught her immediate attention. She hadn't been told about the letters, which were written by Lopaka to his wife, Kelia. Each had come back unopened, postmarked undeliverable for one reason or another, return-to- sender rectangles in blood red. She opened each with great care and began reading. Each was a great outpouring of pain, regret and pleas for her to return to him. Maybe if she had… maybe she'd been dead, thought Jessica. Then she thought of the innocent string of young women who'd acted as stand-ins for his rage against her. In letter after letter, his handwriting coming more unglued as he wrote, he spoke of how for seven years he'd hunted down and killed for Kelia and the gods that directed him. He claimed it was all for her. For seven years, he had been trying to kill Kelia stand-ins, and now time was coming near for her to step into the breach, to sacrifice her self, if she wished to live forever.

The madness was apparent, but so too was the timing. The dates on the wedding pictures were well after the deaths of Lopaka's early victims. He'd somehow managed to marry one of his intended victims, it appeared, and she, suspecting his insanity perhaps, had left him. The fiend had rationalized killings that had taken place years before he'd ever met or married Kelia Laliiani, who had so feared him that she had escaped to the mainland, somewhere in southern California, it appeared. As evidenced by his photo collection, all the victims looked remarkably like Kelia. Little wonder he found Terri Reno not to his liking.

“ Damn,” she muttered aloud. She knew the letters and the fact he kept the gory death photos in albums were the perfect arguments for an insanity plea, that the letters documented his bizarre and singular behavior. He spoke of voices that were real to him, voices that would lead Kelia and him into the afterlife, a life filled with power and strength and dominance over all living things and the elements, such as the trade winds. He wrote that since she would not return, he could not be whole and would not be acceptable to his gods, and that if she did not come home, he'd be forced to find another to take her place.

He didn't speak of the details of his murders or of torture; he didn't speak of a depraved, perverted sexual drive that required blood for a hard-on and an ejaculation, except to say to Kelia that he would never again make her perform any sex act with which she felt uncomfortable.

“ How sweet of him,” Jessica said aloud to the notes.

A handwriting expert would be called in to testify to his madness. It was evident, the expert would say, in the absence of loops and ribbons, in the missing dots over the I's, in his failing to cross his T's, and in the pinched, pained flow of every word. An expert on sociopaths and psychos would be called in to testify how the poor devil had no feelings or emotional moorings, that he could not possibly empathize with the suffering of his victims, nor presumably help himself in his own compulsion for gratification gained only by hearing the screams and seeing the blood so that he could feel something-even if it was just an ejaculation.

“ Bastard.” She moaned inwardly, shoving the letters back into the stained manila envelope in which they'd been found. She questioned how they could possibly get a conviction if Kowona was judged mentally incapable of understanding his actions.

She wished momentarily that Tony hadn't been so thorough at Kowona's place, but the place had been so small nothing was overlooked. If only the madman's letters could disappear… But she knew there was no way.

A lot of cops and FBI agents were thinking exactly as she was, that in a way it was good that Lopaka Kowona was still on the loose out there, because now, armed with his identity, police might find it a simple matter to do the work of the courts for them. Were such thoughts blasphemous for someone in her position? Perhaps, but they were also undeniable.

She knew Jim Parry's thoughts were goose-stepping along the same tension wire when he'd asked her to review the letters in the first place, to see if she thought they were as damaging to a righteous conviction of Kowona as Jim did on his reading.

Alongside the love letters of the lust murderer, a pathetic little photo album found in a bookcase in the dark slaughterhouse, although less than half filled with images of Kowona and his wife, revealed a lot about Kowona besides his features. Kelia-as the hastily written captions below each shot called Mrs. Kowona- even in her jeans, looked like all of Lopaka's victims. A second and newer album had photos of Kelia on the right, Lopaka's victims in various stages of undress, distress, and mutilation on the left. It was self-evident from his ghoulish gallery that Lopaka was killing and dismantling his victims out of a cataclysmic hatred for the former Kelia Kowona.

Jessica found an office and a phone to use and worked most of the rest of the day trying to run Kelia Laliiani, a.k.a. Mrs. Lopaka Kowona, down. It took some extensive help from agents in California, but finally she was patched through to a woman answering to the name Kelia Laliiani in San Francisco.

Jessica found her most cooperative, her voice quivering from time to time as they spoke. Jessica opened with a warning, believing the woman had a right to know that her former husband was at large and wanted for mass murder.

“ I knew… I knew it… I just knew one day he… Lopaka would do something like this. I told them he would…”

'Told who?” she asked, surprised. 'Told family, friends?”

“ Yes, but not jus' them. I told the police.”

'Told the police? When?”

“ Four years ago, before I left the islands. I wrote a detailed letter to the Honolulu police.”

“ I'll be damned,” replied Jessica. “Did you address it to anyone in particular?”

“ A guy, yeah, a cop working on some disappearances then.”

“ Do you remember the officer's name?”

“ Yes.”

“ You remember from that far back?”

“ No, now I see his name all the time, in the papers, in the Ala Ohana.”

“ You get the Ala Ohana in San Fran-”

“ It comes late, but I never miss an issue.”

“ Wasn't that dangerous? He could've traced you from your subscription.”

“ No subscription. An aunt, unknown to him, sends hers. I am still Hawaiian, and I care about the movement.”

“ The movement?”

“ The nationalist movement, to return Hawaii to its rightful owners.”

“ Hmmmm, then you've also been reading about the Trade Winds Killer case all this time and failed to come forward?”

“ What do you mean, failed? I wrote to the police and told them everything I suspected.”

“ Who, who did you write to?”

“ Scanlon, the commissioner, but he was not commissioner when I first told him years and years ago about Lopaka, just before I left my homeland for here. I told him again when I read about the missing girls and the two police officers who were killed, and I reminded him that I told him so before.”

“ Scanlon,” she repeated, incredulously. “What kind of response did you get for your trouble?”

“ Nothing.”

“ Nothing?”

“ Nothing.”

It explained a lot. How the HPD happened by a dead-end street to find Lopaka's maroon sedan, leaking gas… how they had come to zero in on him some seven years too late.

“ Christ, tell me all you can remember about Lopaka, please.”

“ All I remember?”

“ What kind of man is he? Where is he likely to hide?”

“ He is an insane half-breed, mixed up in his head about his ancestry, and he talks to himself.”

“ Half-breed?”

“ Adopted by his father, or he was a stepfather, I'm not so sure, but he always talked about one day returning to his village and killing his father. He was cruel with me. Tied me up, played… toyed with me… with his knives. Once… once, and I ran first chance I got.”

Once again, it seemed the predictions of Lomelea, the old prophet, were coming true.

After she had gotten off the line with Kelia Laliiani, Jessica wondered what Jim Parry might make of this information; certainly it would put him in a much stronger position should the P.C. ever have the balls to go after him.

Finding her way out of the evidence lockup area, she gave a thought to the grotesque collection of hands Lopaka had foolishly kept; these could prove valuable, though long bones were always easier to identity via long-bone X-ray of arms and legs, if the victims' X-ray histories involved any of these. However, the rings still found on the hands-Lopaka was obviously disinterested in jewelry-could be identified by family members. Lau was also working on that tedious and sad process now.

She had to get back to the lab. The autopsy on Hiilani would begin at ten sharp. She'd gotten her rest, sleeping alone the night before. Parry having called her from his desk. He'd been obsessed with the case when she met him, and he was even more so now that he could smell something other than the odor of the victims' blood. Now he could smell the blood of his prey, Lopaka Kowona's blood.