Black Jasmine (2012) Read online

  Something was wrong. She wondered if she had what it took to ask about it. Decided she didn’t. She’d never been good at the talking part of being a couple—Pono said she was more like a dude that way.

  Lei helped herself to seconds. He’d bring up the problem when he got tired of waiting for her to ask, and the truth was that she wanted to talk to him about the case. He’d been promoted during the transfer and was now detective sergeant for Kahului Station, while she was still only a detective grade II at the small Haiku station. She missed working with him, but now that they were living together, a little distance had been a good thing.

  “So we got a weird one. Teenage-looking Jane Doe went off a cliff in an old Plymouth at Pauwela Lighthouse. Plates come back to a stolen Lahaina car.”

  “Suicide?” He perked up. They could always talk about work. She got to see his eyes finally, and there was sadness behind them that interest in a murder couldn’t dispel.

  Shit. She hoped it wasn’t the marriage thing again.

  “We’ll know more at the autopsy, but when we canvassed we found a wit who saw the whole thing, says the car drove to the edge, shut down, and then a few minutes later, rolled off. Says she saw a penlight turning on and off as someone walked away from the scene.”

  Stevens straightened up, that spark of intensity back in his eyes. She loved that about him.

  “Does sound weird. The scene tell you anything?”

  “Nothing but a shiny door key I found in the rocks. Interior of the car was empty, no purse or anything left inside. Body spent the night in the ocean rinse cycle, so I wonder how much it’s going to tell us.”

  “Interesting. What are you going to do about those other cases? They’ve been taking a lot of time.”

  “Oh, that.” Lei plunked down her beer and sighed. “You know, I don’t know why we try. Damn chicken fighting is a whole layer of economy around here. A part of me hates even busting these people. It’s their main source of income.”

  “That’s why the Maui Police Department’s kind of been turning a blind eye for years. But with Mayor Costales in office on his reform platform, we gotta bring in some numbers.”

  Now that Stevens was doing administration, he’d developed a sensitivity to what he liked to call “The Big Picture” and Lei called the “Company Store Line of Crap.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’ve got some good confidential informants on it; Pono’s amazing at working that end. Good thing, too, because I suck at getting people to talk without giving ’em a smack upside the head.”

  “Yeah, you have a way about you.” The tension around his jaw had eased; he patted his knee. “C’mon over here, shrew.”

  “What?” Lei felt a grin moving across her sunburned face. He wasn’t going to bring up whatever-it-was—she’d dodged a bullet again. “What’s a shrew? This isn’t a Hawaii thing, is it?”

  “It’s a Shakespeare thing.” He’d minored in English lit and liked to show off now and then.

  “I know to come when I’m called.”

  She sat on his lap, put her arms around his neck, and stroked the hair out of his eyes. He felt so good in her arms, like everything about him fit everything about her.

  “I’m gonna be sore tomorrow. Fell out of a bush on the way down the cliff and tweaked my back. Not to mention my ass. Think you can help me with that?”

  “I can do something with my hands, yeah.”

  He demonstrated, and she forgot to ask more about what it meant to be a shrew.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, Lei and Pono sat with the commanding officer of Haiku station. Pono had downloaded their pictures from the crime scene and printed color copies for the lieutenant to review.

  Lieutenant Omura was a petite Japanese woman with a poker face and the imposing presence of a much larger person. Lei had heard a rumor that Omura had an IQ of 155, a black belt in judo, and a master’s in criminology. Her flinty dark eyes scanned the hastily written paperwork and photos.

  “Homicide or suicide?”

  “ME hasn’t said yet. Initial impression is suicide. Our meeting’s at ten a.m. He said he was still working on it.” Pono got along better with the “Steel Butterfly,” so he did the talking.

  Lei was still smarting from the dressing-down she’d received for being late. She’d awakened stiff and sore and had tried to fit a run in before the briefing. The run hadn’t helped with the stiffness and it had made her late—something the lieutenant looked upon as a sign of bad character.

  The commanding officer was immaculate in a trim navy uniform she must have had altered to hug her perfect figure. She wore a pair of decidedly nonregulation heels on her tiny Asian feet—Imelda Marcos shoe habits had contributed to the nickname she didn’t know she had. Lei felt lumpy and unkempt beside her, and nocturnal activities with Stevens hadn’t done good things for her hair. She wriggled in her plastic seat, feeling like she had to pee. The lieutenant did that to her every time.

  “Hear you made a Child Welfare call, Texeira.” Those sharp eyes were on Lei now. Her bladder cramped.

  “Yeah, there was a baby out there. Not a good situation. Wanted to have it looked into, just in case.”

  Omura clicked her tongue, looked back at the paperwork. “Your complaint isn’t going to go anywhere and you might need the parent as witness, so I wonder at your judgment.” She assembled the materials into the folder and handed it to Pono, giving a tiny flick of dismissal with glossy red nails. “Keep me informed.”

  They got up and filed out.

  Lei contained herself until they got to their cubicle.

  “I hate her. I mean, I really hate that bitch.”

  “I get the feeling it’s mutual, and we know who’s on top.” Pono gave her a worried glance, stabbed a thick finger at her. “You don’t want to piss her off, Sweets. She’s made tougher men than you cry. How do you think she edged out the competition in a department that’s never ranked a woman higher than sergeant?”

  “Okay, I know. I’ll keep kissing the toes of her shoes. How much do they cost, do you think?”

  “More than you make in a week.”

  Lei sighed. “So let’s work on the cockfighting thing until the meet at the morgue.” She fumbled in her drawer for a rubber band, but her hair was too short to pull back. She took an MPD ball cap and stuffed it on her head, booting up her computer to review their contacts on the underground gambling and cockfighting case.

  Lei and Pono took the stairs to the basement floor of Maui General Hospital, where the only morgue on the island was located. Lei practiced some relaxation breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—as she approached beige double doors bisected by a steel push handle. Pono glanced at her, patted her elbow.

  He knew how she felt about morgues.

  Dr. Gregory was hosing something nasty off one of the long steel tables as they breached the inner sanctum. He looked up, pushing multilensed glasses up onto his egg-shaped head.

  “The report’s not done.”

  “That’s all right,” Lei said. “We’re just hoping for some preliminary results. The lieutenant’s on us for a homicide ruling—or whatever you think.”

  “Okay.” He gestured for Tanaka, who was tying a toe tag onto a body, to come take over his cleanup.

  He led them over to the bank of refrigerator boxes, flipped the compression handle on one. It made a sound like popping the lid of an old-fashioned Coke bottle that had been shaken up. He picked up a clipboard and rolled the shelf out.

  The body wasn’t draped and the girl’s eyes were still open, the Y incision on her chest cartoonishly stitched into rubberlike skin. Lividity had set in, mottling her face, neck, and shoulders to a dusky shade. She looked like she’d been dipped headfirst into something purple. The girl’s midsection was pulverized, organs barely contained by perforated skin blackened by bruising, the rib cage crushed.

  Lei breathed through her mouth, slipping her hand in her pocket for the stone, but she’d forgotten to pick it u
p in her hurry that morning.

  “I should be able to get the report done by tomorrow, but I can give you an oral recap.” Gregory read from the clipboard. “Female, approximately seventeen years old. She has a butterfly tattoo on her ankle. Maybe that will help identify her.” He indicated a tiny, optimistic yellow butterfly on the girl’s anklebone, tapping it with his pen. “Cause of death is massive blunt force trauma.”

  “What about her broken neck?” Lei was glad the girl’s head was held upright in a small metal stanchion on the shelf, but her imagination supplied a picture of the head flopping off the table, held on with nothing more than skin.

  “Broken neck also a result of blunt force trauma, simultaneous with impact of the steering wheel. Premortem injuries indicate the victim was alive when the car crashed. She has some interesting bruises. Look here.” He held up a hand. A sharp, dark line encircled each wrist. “She was bound at some point. There are no other injuries, except the obvious.” He made a dismissive gesture that encompassed the girl’s mangled torso.

  “Any signs of sexual activity?” Lei asked.

  “No, but we did all the usual swabs. The toxicology report will tell us more, but it’s going to be at least a week.” He handed her a card with the girl’s fingerprints on it, then pressed a couple of buttons on his computer keyboard and the printer spit out an image on photo paper. “Jane Doe’s picture, for your canvassing. I scanned the prints into the computer as well. I’ll send ’em to you with the picture.”

  “Thanks.” Lei was impressed with his efficiency. “So, you said blunt force trauma. Suicide or homicide?” She knew the answer but wanted to hear him say it.

  “Given the ligature marks, homicide. Vehicular homicide.”

  Chapter 5

  Lei ate a cold piece of leftover teriyaki chicken at her workstation as she ran the girl’s scanned-in fingerprints through the AFIS database. It didn’t take long for the dialogue box to pop up. NO MATCH.

  “Shit.” The case had just gotten a whole lot harder. She wiped her hands on a paper towel and hit Print on the page for the file. She and Pono had already sent the photo of Jane Doe out over e-mail to all the stations. They’d need to send it to the newspaper, blanket the town with flyers. Surely someone knew this girl.

  Lei glanced down at the newly doctored photo of Jane Doe. Pono’d taken the e-mailed shot from the doctor and run it through NCMEC. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s database had sent it back with a disappointing NO MATCH and a digitized version that washed out the ugly mottling of lividity that would distract from identification.

  Lei was finally able to really look at the girl’s face, now that the eyes were closed and the dusky purple was bleached out of her skin. Jane Doe had full lips and winged brows, and with that long red hair and knockout body, she’d have been a traffic stopper.

  Sometimes Lei’s brain made unfortunate puns.

  What was a seventeen-year-old girl doing in an old, stolen Plymouth Volare in the ass-end of nowhere, plummeting off a cliff?

  Lei studied the photos of the girl’s clothes that Gregory had e-mailed. She hadn’t really noticed them at the crash scene. The clinical layout of the short, black pleather skirt, thong, lacy black bra, and hot-pink tank top added up to one kind of job that would put a beautiful teenage girl in danger.

  The oldest profession in the world.

  There were no shoes on the girl’s feet—another oddity. Included in shots of the clothes was the girl’s oversized jean jacket, the reason Lei hadn’t jumped to the obvious conclusion at the scene. Because, as she’d told Pono, a lot of the time the obvious was just the obvious. Lei was so deep in thought that the ringing phone made her jump.

  “Texeira here.”

  “Hey. It’s Pono. Looks like there’s going to be a big cockfight this afternoon out by Giggle Hill.” Giggle Hill was a nickname for the WWII memorial park out in the lush East Maui area of Haiku, surrounded by jungle and abandoned pineapple fields. “Can you round up some uniforms? Let’s see who we can rope in and shake down. Get those numbers the lieutenant’s after.” Pono’s voice was tight with preraid adrenaline.

  “What time?”

  “Three o’clock.” It was now two p.m.

  “Yeah, I’ll speak to the shift commander. Call me when you have the exact location.”

  “Copy that.”

  Lei printed several more copies of Jane Doe’s face. Might as well show them around to whoever they rounded up at the cockfight. She closed the file, grabbed her jacket off the office chair, and headed for the shift commander’s office.

  Lei’s Tacoma bounced down a rutted dirt road, Pono clutching the dashboard and sissy handle. The fight was going to be in an empty field behind a grove of banana trees, someone’s abandoned foray into farming. Lei’s bulletproof vest, procedurally required on any kind of raid, restricted her breathing as she wrestled the steering wheel.

  “Hadn’t noticed before with that big jacket on her, but Jane Doe’s clothes are hookerwear.” Lei spoke in little pants.

  “Doesn’t every teen girl dress like a hooker?”

  “Maybe. That would put her on the wrong side of bad news, though. Might be a reason someone offed her.”

  They passed the banana trees and reached an open area marked by a ring of trucks. Behind them rolled several unmarked squad cars and the station’s Bronco. Lei pulled her Tacoma in behind another truck, and the others did the same, physically blocking in the rest of the vehicles. Adrenaline brought Lei’s heart rate up, but the tight vest restricted her breathing. Lei wished for the hundredth time that day that she’d remembered to pick up her little black stone, even though both hands were occupied.

  Her eyes flicked here, there, everywhere, scanning for threats as she put the truck in park. A raid like this was one of those situations where anyone anywhere could be carrying a weapon, and a seemingly low-risk operation could turn deadly.

  Pono gave the signal in the radio, and they all hit their sirens and lights at the same time, jumping out of their vehicles and running to the collapsible fight ring, a structure made of three-foot-high sections of heavy wire fencing.

  Lei had her zip ties out, and Pono worked the bullhorn as they ran toward the fight area, the other officers right on their heels.

  “Maui Police Department! Get on your knees and put your hands on your heads!”

  Of course, that wasn’t what they did. Lei was reminded of hitting the floodlight on the side of the house and surprising cockroaches covering one of Keiki’s beef bones—the way they’d scattered in all directions. At least fifty men and boys bolted for their vehicles, headed into the deep grass, or hoofed it for the bananas. Many of them stayed, though, holding cages, unwilling to leave their prize birds.

  The two cocks in the ring, oblivious of the human chaos, continued to fight. Lei was struck by their savage commitment, the height of their jumps, the whirl of red and black color like flamenco dancers in full swing.

  The owners of the two birds hadn’t moved, eyes intent, screaming at the birds. Lei grabbed one of them, a burly, bald Hawaiian in a Kirin beer shirt, and kicked the back of his knee so that he folded as expertly as a collapsible chair. He never took his eyes off the fight as she whipped his arms behind his back and bound his hands with a zip tie.

  She ran and did the same to the other man. Several other spectators, committed to the match, merely dropped to their knees and put their hands on their heads while continuing to cheer on the birds. She was putting a tie on the last one when the black cock got the upper hand.

  Lei looked up as Kirin Beer Shirt emitted a groan. The black cock stood on the red’s back, the blade tied to his leg embedded and tangled in the other bird’s neck plumage, and as the red collapsed, he continued to peck at the bird’s head and eyes with an intensity that was unnerving.

  “Son of a bitch,” the man she was holding said. “Could this day get any worse? I just lost a hundred bucks.”

  “That’s not all you’re going to
lose,” Lei said, giving his arms a little yank. The owner of the red cock—the bald guy she’d first restrained—emitted a cry as the black continued to mangle the bloody head of the downed red.

  “Get that fucking black off my bird! He’d have won if the cops hadn’t distracted him!”

  “He got the eyes fair and square!” yelled the black’s owner. The big, bald guy uttered a roar, lumbered up from his knees with his hands still tied behind his back, and hurtled across the ring to ram the other owner.

  The two huge Hawaiians went down in front of Lei in a cloud of dust and curses.

  Lei blew her whistle for help as the men she’d zip tied, realizing there was a distraction, jumped up and took off, since she hadn’t had time to do their legs. More chaos ensued as the other officers tackled them. It took Lei, Pono, and another officer to pull the two rooster owners off each other.

  They eventually got the scene under control and secured eighteen cockfighters for the station’s arrest count. Lei glanced back at the ring. The triumphant black cock stood square on the red’s body, stamped his long, elegant bladed legs, flapped his wings, and crowed.

  Pono called Animal Control to come take charge of the stacked, portable cages of birds that had all begun to crow once the black got them started. Pono approached the black cock, crouching low and speaking in a soothing voice. The bloodied bird was reluctant to leave his trophy, bobbing a sleek head that had been razored of the comb and wattles, prancing back and forth over the corpse of his enemy.

  Pono took a handful of grain from one of the fallen cages and, clucking his tongue softly, extended it to the bird. Mincing like an eighteenth-century dandy, the cock approached and deigned to eat from his hand. Pono encircled the bird’s body, and the rooster seemed to go limp as he untied the wicked, bloodied spurs from the cock’s legs.

  “You look like you know what you’re doing,” Lei said as Pono put the bird into one of the cages, still talking to it, and gave it some more grain. Her partner’s teeth flashed in a grin.