Primal Instinct

23

All the bones were fleshless and from the creamy surfaces and the growths and green, easily smudged life that clung to them, it appeared they were old. When Jessica mentioned this, Jim immediately wanted to know, “How old?”

“ I couldn't say. I'm not a forensic anthropologist, but suffice it to say they're a hell of a lot older than Linda Kahala's was.”

'Two, maybe three years old? What?”

“ If I had to hazard a guess, yes… if not older.”

“ Older?”

“ Yes, older, maybe a great deal older, and Jim, some of them…” She paused.

“ What? Some of them what?” They'd spread out some of the bones along a ledge, staring down at them, while most remained in the net.

“ Some look to be male.”

“ Male?”

“ Either that or quite large women, and Kowona doesn't do large women. He does-”

“ Small women,” he finished for her.

“ Petite women, yes.”

“ Then this has been just another wild-goose chase, all for nothing?” He cursed under his breath and glared at one of the bones he held in his hand, making her believe he was about to hurl it back into the depths from which it had come.

“ Don't jump the gun. We need to study them all. Maybe we've got a real mixed bag here. Maybe some of the pieces'll fit our puzzle, some not. It'll take some lab time.”

“ Yeah, sure…” he finally agreed, dropping the femur he held in his hand back into the net. “Come on, let's pack up and be ready for the chopper. We've got to get back up the trail with the tanks and our cache.”

“ If it helps, two of the skulls are definitely female, and they look relatively new, in comparison to the others, I mean, and I think they came from the top of the mound.”

'That's something, but how do you explain the others?”

“ Well, there once was a community here, you said.”

“ But they buried their dead in the earth. You saw the graveyard, the stones.”

She considered this, turning one of the skulls in her hand as she did so. “What if they had some members of the village who weren't exactly fit for what they considered a proper burial? Do you know anything about Hawaiian religious practices and rites? Suppose they did sacrifices at one time…”

“ To the sea? I haven't ever heard of it, no.”

'To the sea… to the Spout?” she suggested.

He pondered this possibility. “Of course, makes good sense… more 'n' likely, you're right.”

“ And if Kowona grew up in a primal culture like they say, he'd have seen the ceremony performed, perhaps more than once. Perhaps it's the way the bones of his brother went, if the old great-granduncle of Kaniola can be believed. Maybe it's what led Lopaka to the Blow Hole, and maybe here before that?”

“ Now I feel strange about taking these bones from their eternal resting place,” lamented Parry. “I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's rather ghoulish, seeing as how it was their burial ground.”

“ We can always return the bones that belong here, but we need to know the truth about those that may not.”

“ Can you make good enough distinctions now, so we can return the older bones?”

“ I think so, but there's no time for another dive.”

“ Hell, we can shoot them back through the Spout.”

“ And they'll likely return to within feet of where we found them,” she agreed.

Just hurry. I don't want anyone seeing us. Some tourists come poking about here and see us, and God knows the consequences.”

She began to cull the bones, soon finding it easy to discriminate between the newer and older, particularly the skulls. Above ground, under the illumination of the sun, she found no difficulty in distinguishing a male jawbone from a woman's, a male hipbone from a female's, and so it went. She placed all the bone parts they would keep to one side, refilling the net with the others. The amount of new bones was considerably less than the old, and as she worked with the aged bones, finding them so brittle to the touch, worn paper-thin by time and water, they flaked easily in their new, arid environment. She realized just how ancient some of the bones were; certain they must date at least to the early 1900s and perhaps the late 1800s.

She kept one ancient bone fragment for comparison and carbon-14 dating later.

While she conducted this process, Jim worked on getting all their gear back to the chopper pad. He was pretty much finished when he found her at the Spout with the net filled with returnable bones. He helped her out over the ledge with her burden and together they lifted the net and allowed the bones to return to the outgoing waters via the Spout. Standing there, Jessica could imagine the ancients worshipping this place as sacred.

Each roaring plume of the geyser was an angry godlike outburst, a counterpoint to her quiet thoughts.

Several of the thigh bones and long bones of the arm and hand got caught up in the netting and refused to return to the sea so easily. Jim fished them from the net and one by one tossed these final fragments back into the sea. The entire time they both were drenched by the incoming tide as it flew into the funnel of the Spout and cascaded up and over them. Before it was over, they were soaking wet. They returned to the most likely usable bones from their cache and replaced them in the net. Jim carried these up along the winding trail with Jessica following.

“ I'll give you the background on the missing Maui women… kids really, all the medical papers, see if you can match any of the dental charts with the two skulls we've got.”

“ It should prove interesting,” she said from behind, watching her footing as they went, seeing now just how awfully treacherous both the terrain and the pukas hereabouts were. One hole in particular looked like the mouth of an enormous serpent just asleep below the earth, waiting patiently for a passerby to careen down into its gut. The bottom was mere darkness. She dared stare too long into this natural abyss, feeling a dizzying disorientation wash over her. Maybe she'd gone too long without a bite to eat, she thought, regaining her composure.

After the chopper's arrival, they flew on to Kahului, where they disembarked with all that belonged to them. A rental car awaited them at the airport, the bones carefully concealed in its trunk as quickly as possible to arouse no one's concern. While still on the helicopter, Jim had radioed authorities in Maui about the find and the likelihood it might prove connected with the Kowona case. He'd made arrangements for a field operative based on Maui to meet them at the airport and see personally to the careful boxing and transporting of the evidence to Lau's labs back on Oahu while Jessica drew up instructions for Lau to go along with the bones. Working with local authorities on Maui, Parry warned that Kowona could be somewhere on their island. Patrols were stepped up, everyone put on alert, and a surveillance team was sent out to monitor the area around the Spout for any sign of a man dumping any sort of strange parcels into the ocean there.

Lopaka Kowona, Jim was assured by one patrol officer, would not slip through the hands of the authorities on Maui as he had with those “fools” on Oahu.

“ That hurt,” Jim said to her when the transmission ended.

From the airport they drove to their next destination, a quaint cow town like something out of a movie set in the deserts around L.A., she thought. But even though there were hitching posts along the main street and horses tied to the posts, there were also Ford, Chevy and Dodge pickup trucks sporting gun racks and rifles through cab windows.

There were hardware stores, feed stores, millinery stores, grills, bars and taverns-she counted four within the two-block length of the little town of Makawao, where a banner proclaimed the date for the upcoming rodeo, to be held on July 4th, long since come and gone though the tattered banner waved on.

Everyone walking the concrete walks and onto the boarded steps of establishments here had chaps and boots, it seemed, and the cowboys were of every size, shape and ancestry.

“ What the hell is this?” she asked.

“ Kowona's home for a long time. He worked the Omaopio Ranch just outside of town here, same as Ewelo the Paniolo. People here will know Kowona, and maybe they'll talk.”

“ Let's do it, then. You want to canvass together or make a split?”

“ Together. We might be less threatening that way.”

“ Or more.”

“ Just follow my lead.” They got out of the car and instantly the locals pegged them as not the usual touristy couple. In fact, Jessica fit right in with her tomboy appearance, in two-day-old jeans, her hair stringy from the early morning dive, bruises showing on her arm as if her man had given her a good and deserved smacking around. She couldn't help but feel self-conscious, and it didn't help having the locals stare at them as if they were wearing horns. She wasn't wearing a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle or boots, and she didn't know how to square-dance, nor did she know the achy-breaky line dance. Over the saloon door a notice for tonight's dance was posted.

Parry, trying to fit in, actually sauntered to the bar, leaving her to traipse after in the best Western tradition, following her man like a heifer in heat. She wasn't sure she liked the role, even for a little bit.

“ Looking for some information,” Parry said to the man behind the bar.

“ Tourist booth is on down the road 'bout twelve miles when you come to-”

He flashed his badge. “I'm no tourist, Slim, and I know the island. I want to speak to you about a girl named Merelina.”

“ Merelina?”

“ Merelina Wailano, disappeared around here two and a half years ago, last in a line of seven young women on the island to disappear that season of the winds.”

The bartender breathed in deeply. “We know Lopaka Kowona's up on charges-”

“ He's not up on charges, mister. He's wanted and he's a fugitive. We charge him after we catch him.”

“ Well, either way, we heered 'bout all this, but nobody to my knowledge has seen that ol' boy 'round these parts.” The man behind the bar was white with a near black Hawaiian tan.

“ Get this, Slim. I want you to tell me what you hear. We know the creep's on the island, and if I find out he's been helped out here, this whole cowboy town of yours is going to be in deep shit. There'll be so much federal in here, you boys won't have much of any fun anymore playing shoot-ups and breaking nudity and gambling laws, not to mention drug laws.”

“ You sure as hell don't want that,” added Jessica, “do you?”

Several men who'd been seated at a nearby table, looking on and listening carefully to Parry's threats, began first to mumble among themselves, and then two of them kicked their way over in their crocodile boots.

“ We're with the Omaopio,” said one of the men in a deep, resonant voice. His ballcap sporting an emblem of a P within a circle. “Hain't no killing sonofabitch gonna dare set foot on the Circle P.”

The other, nodding, added, “We don't none of us hold with what this monster done to those women, and Lopaka'll know our feelings.”

“ He knows us boys.”

“ He knows we ever get hold of him here, we'd likely lynch the sonofabitch even b'fore you boys-and ladies”-he stopped to tip his hat-”could do a damn thing 'bout it.”

“ So you're saying he's not welcome here?” asked Jessica.

Parry leaned in toward the first man and conspiratorially said, “He's got no one here, not even family he'd turn to?”

“ Not at the Omaopio,” said the first cowboy.

“ And not in Makawao,” added the bartender as he wiped at the bar. “People here hate the son of a bitch. Brought nothing but shame on his hometown, so far's we're concerned. Like David Koresh in Texas and Jeffrey Dahmer in Wisconsin. I reckon if he was seen on the streets here, he'd be shot down like a dog, don't you, Hiram?” Hiram, a stocky Samoan cowboy who'd remained at the table, drinking sofdy from his less-than-foamy Kona beer, grunted and said, “This ain't his home no way. He come first from Molokai. I figah if anybody going take dat brah in, it be deah.”

“ Have you heard anything concrete about that?” asked Jessica, going to the man, her eyes pleading.

“ Jus' talk is all.”

“ But if he was banished from that place,” she began.

“ Banished, yeah, but dem people who banished him ain't no now on Molokai. Dey move on.”

“ Moved on?” she asked. “Where?”

“ Nobody can say, but dey all no stay deah now.”

'Then it is possible that he's gone back to Molokai?” she said, turning and staring at Jim.

“ It's possible,” replied the stony Samoan, shutting down now.

The cowboy at the bar added in his broken English, “I wen talk wit' him wen he was heah. Him, he nevah sat long for a beeah or a gab. Nobody evah knew where he was or what he was up to.”

“ Yeah,” agreed the other man at the bar. “He hated Molokai, where he was bom, and he no much care for here either. Always talking about going off to Oahu, Honolulu, he said.”

“ If any of you see or hear of anything regarding this wanted man with a fifty-thousand-dollar reward on his head, please call this number. I'll leave it with the bar man,” said Parry, tossing down his card.

“ You got a place where we can call fo' you, missy?” asked one of the cowpokes.

“ Jake, a classy lady like dis not going to sit your horse.”

The others laughed while Parry, frowning, escorted a smiling Jessica from the bar.

“ One watering hole down, three to go,” she said.

“ You get the feeling we're wasting our time here?”

She laughed.

“ What?” he asked.

“ The feeling I get here?” She looked again around the town of Makawao, seeing the white Stetsons and vests going by. “The feeling is Twilight Zone, partner.”

“ That doesn't answer my question.”

She considered it anew. “Maybe we are wasting our time, maybe not. Either way, it's sooooommme town.”

They found a small cafe, ordered a lunch of burgers, fries and Cokes, rested from the heat and afterward continued their survey of the townspeople.

It was soon all over the little hamlet that the FBI was in town.

Their stay remained uneventful, people shying away from them for the most part, and Jim leaving word where he could be reached in each location he thought useful. Then they reached the last bar at the end of the street. Inside, they were immediately confronted by the huge proprietor, who, if cleaned up a bit, might resemble a grizzled Clint Eastwood with weight on. In his grip was a well-used and dented Louisville Slugger. He marched up to Jim and told them to get out.

“ I heard how you creeps been treating my pal Ewelo over there in Oahu,” said the owner of the bar, crowding Parry before he might get a word out. “And here's what I think of that.”

Before Jessica knew what was happening, the man drew back the ball bat and it came at Jim with a powerful whoosh. Jessica drew her gun and went on one knee, but she needn't have. Jim expertly avoided the bat like a prizefighter. Bobbing and weaving, Parry sent several successive punches into the big man's cheek and jaw each time he swung the bat and missed, until finally Jim rained a series of small explosions into the man's eyes, forcing him back and back until he came to a wall, where Parry's fencing style of fighting took on a new nature; a serious uppercut sent the man's jaw skyward and his form slid down the wall, unconscious. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

“ Christ-a-mighty!” shouted someone from a table.

“ Look what he done to Big Stan!”

The others gave Parry wide berth, listened politely to what he had to say between his panting, and nodded as they left, all but Big Stan.

“ Maybe this was a stupid idea,” said Parry, blowing on his bruised knuckles to cool them down.

“ Hey, you're just going to infect those cuts,” she cautioned. “Come on, here's a water trough.”

“ Oh, really sanitary,” he said, shaking his head, but following her orders nonetheless.

After cleaning up a bit, they went back for the car. Along the way, an elderly Hawaiian woman with squinting eyes held up a hand to them and in hurried, hushed tones she said, “You come wrong place for Lopaka. Family hiding him from you. Dey know where he is. “Whataya mean by that?” pressed Parry, but the woman turned into a wooden creature, not daring another word, continuing on her way as if she could neither see nor hear them.

“ Does that mean Molokai?” asked Jessica, but again the woman's frozen features revealed nothing.

“ I think, Jess, what everyone wants us to believe is that Lopaka's returned to Molokai.”

“ It might seem so,” she agreed, shading her eyes against the brilliant sun. The rancher town of Makawao was not at a high elevation, but rather on the fertile slopes of the lee side of the island, in the shadow of Mt. Haleakala.

“ If they wanted to steer us away from Maui to Molokai, then they've got to do better than they're doing. And if they are trying to steer us back northward to Molokai, then which way is Lopaka heading? It would follow that he's going southward from here.”

“ What's southward from Maui?”

“ The big island of Hawaii, but just southwest is…” Jim hesitated.

“ What? What's southwest?”

“ The island of death-Kahoolawe.”

“ Kahoolawe, but isn't that-”

“ It's the closest point from Maui by boat.”

She saw a light in his eyes which burned intensely. He believed he had hit on the secret where Lopaka was. “If Lopaka's not on Maui, then he's there,” said Jim, leaning against the rental car, a certain finality in his voice. “Look, if that's the case, he'd have left from somewhere around Cape Hanamanioa on the windward side of the island. The channel between the other island and Maui is known as the Alalakeiki, the distance a mere ten miles.”

“ It's that close?”

“ Just down the coast from there at Hekili Point is the only place in all of Hawaii where you can stand and see four other islands. Lopaka knows that if he makes it to Kahoolawe, he can be free. He's got to know that, and if he's being helped…”

She tried to decipher all this new information, recalling what Jim had told her of the no-whites policy of the Kahoolawe preserve, that even the FBI was off-limits there. “So, if Lopaka has in fact made it to Kahoolawe island, we may've seen the last of him?”

Upset now, Jim said, “Get in the car. We've got to move.” He hurried around to the driver's side and got in. She slid into the passenger seat, and in a moment they were pulling from the curb, doing a U-turn on the main street of Makawao.

“ What about a warrant, extradition papers?”

Parry shook his head.

“ But there's got to be a way we can extradite the-”

“ No go under these circumstances. U.S. authorities can't set foot on the island under any circumstances without express and unequivocal invitation. And to further complicate the situation, he could be given immunity by virtue of his lineage.”

“ Lineage? Whose invitation?” She was so angry she could hardly see the island road ahead.

“ The head of the tribal government on Kahoolawe.”

“ Who is?”

“ Kowona… the elder Kowona, don't you get it?”

“ Lopaka's father?”

“ Yes, he'd be one of the first to seek out Kahoolawe as a refuge from encroaching Western civilization on Molokai. He'd be one of the first to take up residence on Kahoolawe, braving whatever hardships he and his people there might face.”

“ You're sure you're not clutching at straws? I mean, on the word of those cowboys back there that Lopaka's people are no longer on Molokai? Is that enough?”

“ When we get to the hotel on the other side of the island, I'll confirm it with our guy on Molokai.”

“ Our hotel's on the other side of the island? Near this bay that looks out over Kahoolawe? Then you knew all along?”

“ I feared all along, the moment it sank in that the bastard had escaped Oahu, yes. It's a hole-in-the-wall, a place where a parasite like this might find refuge. There is no law there as we know it, Jess.” Parry drove onward to their next destination, his teeth set and clenched.

“ You've known where you're going all along… known about Lopaka's run for Kahoolawe all along? Hell, you forwarded our luggage there!”

“ I didn't know Lopaka was related to the big muckety-muck on Molokai, not at first. Hell, over here Kowona's as common as Smith in the States. But after you told me about what the old man said, Kaniola's great-granduncle, I began to wonder and to consider the geography of it all.”

“ Lopaka's boyhood village was supposedly on Molokai,” she said. “And everyone's trying to rivet our attention there. So you, being of a suspicious turn of mind…”

“ Yeah, but in the meantime, over the last year or so, his people removed to Kahoolawe. Who better to reclaim the island for the PKO when the U.S. Navy relinquished their hold over it.”

'Tell me more about this unusual island and its special status,” she asked. “Isn't there some way around it, given the circumstances, the dire-”

“ The kid'll have diplomatic immunity there, simple as that…”

“ God damn it!” she burst out.

He wheeled the car now back out to the main highway off which they'd descended into the town of Makawao. Back on U.S. 37, they made a beeline for the other side of the island and the Alalakeiki Channel.

“ The island was used as a bloody bombing target for aircraft and naval vessels by our armed forces since 1942 and-” he began.

“ Christ, it must be one helluva piece of screwed-up real estate.”

“- and for a hell of a long time only wild goats and sheep lived there, but since the Hawaiians have gained in political power and influence, they've gained the island back and along with it this special status. Some of the traditionalists, the tribesmen from all the various islands in the chain, returned to Kahoolawe to re-colonize-”

“ Re-establish their culture, you mean?”

He nodded, adding, “Living purely by ancient means, or so everyone says.”

“ You're not so sure?”

“ I have my suspicions they're not about to turn up their noses at certain modem devices.”

“ Such as?”

“ Motor boats, nautical equipment, firearms.”

“ Firearms, really?”

“ There's scuttle that they've been amassing their own arsenal against the day when we-the U.S.-decide to reclaim Kahoolawe. Next time, they intend to fight to the death. Anyway, they're big on fishing. And they do some trading in canned goods and other foods and necessities with the Maui islanders.”

“ And what do they have to trade?”

“ Fish mosdy, exotic and authentic shell leis, some ancient arrowhead artifacts. Couple of archaeological sites found on the island now belong wholly to the tribesmen, too.”

“ So, they've worked a trade for the return of a native son, and we can't touch him?”

“ Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe he declined their invitation. Maybe he did go on to the big island south of here… maybe…”

He didn't sound convinced. The island traffic had thinned to a trickle here, the road bordered on one side by a sugarcane field through which the wind raged, setting the stalks into a frantic dance as the car sped by.

“ Where to now, Jim?”

“ I know some friends in the vicinity who might take me to Kahoolawe.”

“ What?”

“ For a price.”

She took in a deep breath of air and stared out at the pineapple fields on either side of the road now, wondering why Jim seemed so hell-bent on destroying his own career.

It appeared that Jim Parry meant to track Lopaka to the ends of the earth if necessary, to see justice done. Still, his obsession was her own.

“ What the hell're you going to do, Jim? I mean, even if you can determine that he's on that island, you… we have no juice there. You can't take him off the island, not without risking your own career, not if the government says stay out, that it's not the jurisdiction of the agency.”

“ At this point, Jess, I just want to get my hands on him.”

'To kill him?”

“ Look, if I can take him alive and get him off the island without anyone's knowing I was there, then he's my prisoner.”

“ I see. And you think that's possible?”

“ I don't know, but I'll never know if I don't get within spitting distance.”

She fell silent, scanning the incredible scenery as it flew by. Jim, having been introduced to the island long ago, raced full ahead toward their next destination.

“ I could use a bath, you know,” she complained. “Get this seawater off my skin. I got sand in places I didn't know existed.”

“ There's lovely accommodations the other side of the mountain range along the ocean. Don't worry on that score.” When they arrived, she began to see familiar sights. It was the area of the island where she had dived in the marine sanctuary and a haven for snorklers and scuba divers, Molokini island and its underwater crater just off the coast and Kahoolawe just beyond; in fact, she had seen Kahoolawe island in the distance and had asked about it, but the Hawaiian dive-master had said it was no place for diving, and she'd let it go at that.

“ We'll have to go in under cover of darkness,” she told him.

“ We? There'll be none of this 'we' stuff here, Jess. One FBI agent getting his ass canned for this kind of a stunt will be quite enough.”

“ I'm going with you, Jim. We've acted as a team this far, and this is no time to start acting any differently.”

“ Jess, this is something I have to do. You… you can walk away from it, return to D.C. tomorrow knowing you did a fine job.”

“ Not without Lopaka's head on a stick, no way. I feel as strongly about this damned, bloody case as you, Jim. You owe me. I'm going in, too.”

“ We won't be able to land a boat there. We'll have to do this frogman-style, Jess, and it'll be dangerous.”

“ What the hell do you call the Spout? And now you're planning to leave your diving partner behind? No way!”

“ Jess!”

“ If I don't go, you don't go.”

“ Are you absolutely sure?”

“ Absolutely.”

They came careening out of the mountains and around a cliff to come into view of the distant small island that was taboo to the Westerner, Kahoolawe, their next destination.