I gave him my cell number. “Don’t leave town, all right?” Ruiz asked. “I’m sure we’ll want to talk to you again, once we figure out what’s going on.” He paused. “You know the other guy at all?”
I shook my head.
“How about anybody who didn’t like your friend, anybody who might have reason to want to harm him?”
“He was a nice guy, lots of friends. But I got the feeling he had a tendency to pick up-guys who might not always be nice to him.”
“Meaning?”
“When I met Brad, I was looking pretty scruffy. I hadn’t showered or shaved in a while, that kind of thing. From things he said, and things his friends said, that was the kind of guy he often looked to pick up.”
“And they weren’t all as nice as you underneath?”
I shrugged. “I guess not. He said something to me right before we went to sleep, that first night.” I struggled to remember how Brad had phrased it. “It was something like, ‘I know you won’t be here in the morning, but at least I know my wallet and my stereo will be.’” Remembering that, in Brad’s voice, thick with sleep, made me want to cry, and I wanted so badly to get away from that beach.
“We’ll check out his habits,” Ruiz said. “For now, I think it would be best if you left the beach.”
I was happy to comply. Even if he hadn’t shooed me away, I couldn’t have stayed there any longer, and I certainly couldn’t have gone back in the water as if nothing had happened. I dragged my board back to my truck and headed toward The Next Wave. I need a cup of coffee and an internet connection.
Even though I wanted to curl up in bed and sleep until it stopped hurting, or pick up a six pack and drink myself into oblivion, I had to let Lieutenant Sampson know what had happened, and about my personal relationship with Brad. I was still a cop and I was still investigating the original three murders, so I would also need him to get me as much information as he could on the dead surfer, who I was willing to bet had been to Mexico recently, or at least had some connection to Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora or Ronald Chang.
It was going to be a lot more difficult for me to investigate now that the police knew me and knew I had a connection to the case, through Brad. I had to find out how Sampson felt about that. Maybe he would take me off the investigation, let me return to Honolulu and reclaim my badge.
As I pulled up in front of The Next Wave, I realized I didn’t want that to happen. I already felt connected to the three dead surfers, and wanted to know what had happened to them. And now with Brad, my personal sense of responsibility deepened. I couldn’t give up the case so easily.
My first email was to Lieutenant Sampson. I filled him in with everything I knew about the latest murders, including my relationship with Brad. I squirmed a little writing it, trying to balance an honest recitation of the facts with my own personal reticence about spreading my sex life around the department. But in this case, it couldn’t be helped.
I felt bad for Brad Jacobson, who had obviously been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he’d only gone home and waited for me to show up and apologize, he’d be alive, I thought. Or if I hadn’t let him leave the parking lot angry.
I finished the email and hit send. Then I sent a couple of other messages and did some surfing. Just as I was getting ready to start nosing around The Next Wave, my cell phone rang.
I recognized the 529 prefix as originating from police headquarters before I answered. “Kanapa’aka.”
“Sampson. I need to see you ASAP. How soon can you meet me?”
“I can leave now, and be in Honolulu in a little over an hour,” I said.
“Traffic is tied up inbound on the Kam,” Sampson said. “You’ll be stuck around Wheeler for at least an hour while they clear it. How about if I meet you half way. Parking lot of the Dole Plantation, 45 minutes.”
“I’ll be there.” I sat there wondering why things had become so urgent that Sampson had to see me immediately. Was he angry about my relationship with Brad? I hardly knew the man, so I couldn’t say, but I knew he had taken a chance on hiring me when I wasn’t exactly everybody’s favorite cop. Would this give him a reason to change the deal we’d made, and cut me loose?
An Explosive Situation
I spun gravel in the parking lot of The Next Wave, heading out to the Kam. All the way south I alternated between guilt over Brad’s death and worry over what Sampson would have to say to me. I made it to the plantation a few minutes before he did, and got out to look at the visitor’s center, a long, hipped-roof building with a vaguely colonial feel to it. A big sign advertised the world’s largest maze, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. I felt like this case was turning into a maze, and I was stuck somewhere inside it.
Sampson pulled up in a big silver Lexus. He had a folder in his hand when he got out of the car. “Hot off the press, just for you,” he said, handing it to me. “As much as we have so far on the latest victims.”
I stood there next to his car and flipped through a measly three pages. They’d gotten a quick ID on the guy with Brad. That was the good news. The bad news was that his name was Thomas Singer, and he was just a kid, twenty years old and a junior at UH. The worse news was that his father was a captain in the traffic division, which meant the pressure from inside the force to solve these murders was going to shoot through the roof.
We started walking, hoping to stretch both our legs and our cognitive powers. Sampson wore a gold short-sleeve polo shirt with khaki slacks, looking every inch the professional. I wore a pair of hibiscus-patterned board shorts, flip flops, and a t-shirt from the North Shore Cattle Company with an angry-looking black steer on it. No one would have made us for a pair of cops. “Any proof yet that they’re related to the previous three?” I asked.
“Same caliber weapon was used as on Ronald Chang. We’ll have to wait for ballistics tests to be sure, but my gut tells me they are.”
The fields around us were laden with pineapple plants, and we walked around an exhibit showing the different varieties of pineapple and where they were grown.
“Any particular reason?” I asked.
“Too many coincidences. Pratt and Zamora killed with the same weapon. Zamora and Chang killed on the same day. Then two more surfers killed in the same general area, with the same type of weapon used on Chang. You do the math.”
“Let me play devil’s advocate,” I said, stopping in front of a display of pineapples from Indonesia. “The first three were all involved somehow with professional surfing. I don’t recognize this kid’s name, so I’m willing to bet he wasn’t professional grade, at least not yet. The first three victims were all killed individually; this one is part of a pair. And by the way, Brad Jacobson wasn’t a surfer.”
“So the alternative is two different killers, both in the same area, with similar weapons and similar targets. My coincidence meter rings on that.”
Sampson toed the red ground with his black dress shoe. “Doc Takayama will do the autopsy tomorrow morning,” he said, “and I’ll get you the results as soon as I can. I already sent a detective over to the boy’s dorm room at UH to see what we can find out about him, and I’m talking to the parents myself as soon as I get back to town.”
“So this is a full-court press.”
Sampson nodded. “I have a daughter. If anything happened to her, I’d want to see the force do the same for me.”
I understood. We began to walk back toward the parking lot and our cars. Around us, tourist families were oohing and aahing over the tiny pineapples, the oddly-colored ones, the very idea that their morning juice began in fields like these.
“I’ll get on line as soon as I get back to Hale’iwa and see if I can find any record of the kid in any surfing competitions, and I’ll keep my ear to the ground and see who’s talking about him.” I hesitated for a minute. “Am I going to be able to talk to the local detectives at all?”