Dark Lava: Lei Crime Book 7 (Lei Crime Series) (5 page)

Wendy reappeared, and he noticed her lipstick was the exact color as her suit, an annoying detail. He focused on her words as a series of photos, dramatically enhanced, showed the desecration of the hula
heiau
here on Maui. “Someone has extracted these petroglyphs quickly and professionally. Mr. Okapa, guardian of the
heiau
, is here to tell us what went on in the early hours of this morning.”

Okapa
’s rugged face filled the screen, his long gray hair whipping in a breeze off the cliffs. He’d worn a cloth
kihei
robe printed in traditional patterns, and a polished
kukui
nut lei encircled his neck. He looked almost regal as he recounted the story Stevens had heard from him earlier. “I goin’ tell you straight, anyone come here again going get it!” Okapa finished his tale with a threatening wave of a carved staff.

“
Well, Mr. Okapa, we appreciate your passion.” The reporter covering the story for Maui held a microphone to Okapa’s mouth. “Tell us about the citizens’ group you are a part of.”

“
All these folks who care about the
heiaus
, we getting together one watch patrol, da Heiau Hui.” Okapa held up a T-shirt in forest green with a graphic of a petroglyph warrior on it, spear raised. “You see this shirt? We going wear ’em, and we going camp out in shifts at the sacred places. And we going get that book banned!”

“
What book is that, Mr. Okapa?”

“
Maui’s Secrets
. We get one grant for buy all the copies. We going burn ’em. Then we goin’ picket the stores that carry ’em.”

“
Whoa,” Stevens breathed. “Shit.”

“
Yeah,” Lei said beside him. He felt the tension in her body, too. “This could turn ugly pretty easily.”

“
This case could become a lightning rod for resentment,” Stevens said.

“
Lightning rod?” Lei turned, reaching into his lap with a grin. “I think that’s a good name for my friend here.” She was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but it wasn’t working. He removed her hand.

“
Funny. And this isn’t. I gotta call Omura.”

Meanwhile, Wendy Watanabe had moved on to other disasters as Stevens speed-dialed Omura
’s cell.

“
I wonder if you’re calling me because you just watched the news,” Omura said in lieu of a greeting.

“
Exactly. Okapa was complaining about this
Maui’s Secrets
book when I interviewed him, but this is the first I’ve heard about some sort of backlash against it.”

“
I think we need to get some more detectives on this case, but I already don’t have enough manpower. Let’s call Oahu again tomorrow and see if we can pool our resources, maybe get that book pulled from the shelves temporarily as a sign of goodwill.”

“
Goodwill toward who? The Heiau Hui? My guess is, whoever’s targeting the
heiaus
already has the artifacts they want mapped out. Taking down the book is closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”

“
Still. It might placate people like Okapa, who blame the book for exposure.”

“
Okay, you’re the boss. Did you want me to try to contact the publisher?”

“
Wasn’t that what I said?”

Stevens blew out a breath. “
Yes, sir.”

Stevens hung up. He felt wired with worry and annoyed by Omura
’s directive. It could give this vigilante group a message that they had more power than they should, and he worried about where that could go, not to mention dealing with the book publisher’s response. He doubted they’d want to pull the profitable book for revision.

MPD needed eyes and ears in the Hui, to monitor it. His old war horse detective Joshua
Ferreira was way too well-known. So was Pono, and any of the other detectives he could think of. Even though Okapa knew Mahoe was a police officer, perhaps Brandon could pretend sympathy for the cause enough to believably join.

Stevens got up to wash the d
ishes for something to do. Lei came up behind him this time, reaching around his waist to put her hands into the dishwater with his. She played with his fingers until they twined together in the warm, soapy water, distracting him. He closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of her pressed against his back, the solidity of her presence.

After so long, she was finally his.

“I’m sorry you’re stressed,” she said, muffled against his back. She kissed his shoulder blade, nibbled his spine.

“
I’m really worried about this case. Nobody’s died yet, but I have a bad feeling. Okapa’s threats are the tip of the iceberg. Why don’t you talk to Pono about what the Hawaiian community is saying? He’s always got his finger on the pulse of things.”

“
All right.” She pulled her hands out of the suds, shook them, and wiped them playfully all over his front. “But let’s go back to bed soon.”

He finished the dishes, listening to her one-sided conversation with her ex-partner, a burly Hawaiian with the truest “
spirit of aloha” Stevens had ever met—a man he was now proud to call a friend.

Thinking of Pono reminded him of his brother, Jared. Jared had come to their wedding last month and had been looking to transfer to the Maui Fire Department.

“Thanks for leaving me to deal with Mom, bro,” Jared had said the day before the wedding. Their mother hadn’t shown—she’d gone on a bender the day before—and Stevens figured it was just as well. She probably would have made a scene at the wedding. But Jared, he felt bad about. His younger brother’s face was chiseled lean and his blue eyes had a hollow clarity that spoke of long days and sleepless nights.

“
I just had to get out,” Stevens said, referring to his move to Hawaii four years before. “I didn’t want to watch Mom drink herself to death.”

“
Well, I don’t either. This job is killing me, and summer’s coming.” Summer in LA.
Fire season
. Stevens felt for his brother and had said he’d ask around about openings on Maui, and that meant Pono.

“
Ask Pono about jobs in the fire department for Jared,” Stevens said, drying his hands on the dish towel. “Bro wants out from LA as soon as possible.”

Lei passed this on, covered the receiver with her hand. “
He says he’ll e-mail you a link tomorrow. Kahului Station is down a position.”

“
I knew he’d know something. Good.”

Stevens went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. His eyes fell on the white terry robe he
’d appropriated from their cruise-ship honeymoon. That reminded him of the shrouds. Someone had paid for two linen shrouds, given them to him and Lei’s family in a double threat, accompanied by a cryptic note that read,
There are plenty of these to go around
. He’d had them, and the box they came in, tested for trace and fingerprints.

Nothing useful had been found. Two twenty-foot lengths of
bleached linen haunted him.

As they
’d been meant to. Someone was still out there who wanted them dead.

He went back to bed, and it wasn
’t long before Lei and Keiki joined him. He didn’t fall asleep until Lei was pressed against him, her curly hair tickling his cheek.

Lei wound her hair into a bun and stabbed it with bobby pins at the stoplight as she drove into Kahului for work the next morning. Enough bobby pins would hold it a few hours, at least. She put in her Bluetooth and called Aunty Rosario, chatting until she pulled up in front of the barracks-like MPD building in the heart of Kahului, Maui’s biggest town.

Torufu was already at their cubicle when she hurri
ed in, slopping hot coffee from the dispenser in the break room on her hand.

“
Mrs. Stevens,” he said, wiggling a toothpick up and down between Chiclet-sized teeth. “Mrs. Stevens” was his nickname for her, though she’d kept her maiden name legally. “We have training review at oh nine hundred.”

“
Yippee. Can’t wait to revisit the fun of how we blew ourselves up,” Lei said, realizing she’d never finished talking with Michael about her bomb tech training. Just as well. He wouldn’t have liked the story, and it probably would have led to one of those variations-on-a-theme fights they had about safety.

She took off the backpack she carried in lieu of a purse and draped it over her chair. They still had regular cases, and as usual, she was backed up on her e-mail.

At the review meeting, she and Torufu sat with the other participants in the training and listened to the statistics on how many IEDs had been located (eighty-nine percent), successfully deactivated (sixty-two percent), and how many “fatalities” (eight).

“
What this tells us, people, is that we need more of these trainings,” the coordinator, a burly bomb expert from Homeland Security, said. “We have another one scheduled in six months.” A suppressed groan circulated the room.

Lei squeezed the web of flesh
between her thumb and forefinger, deflecting the feeling of failure she’d struggled with on and off throughout her career. And now she was on one of the most pressure-intense teams on the force, where failure could mean death—not just for herself, but for anyone in the area of an explosive.

Once again doubt assaulted her. Was she right for the bomb squad? Did she have the calm under pressure necessary? She still didn
’t know, and the further she got in the training, the harder it would be to pull out if she realized she couldn’t cut it.

Lei set her hands in her lap, and they brushed her abdomen. Maybe last night was the night she got pregnant. She shut her eyes for a second, transported by memory to those incredibly tender and passionate moments in Stevens
’s arms. She hadn’t realized how getting married and the decision to start a family would change something between them that couldn’t be put into words.

It wasn
’t like it hadn’t already been good. But now there was something almost sacred between them.

Sh
e still felt edgy, like something would happen to snatch their happiness away. Getting the shroud receipt on their honeymoon and the news about Aunty’s cancer hadn’t helped that feeling. But when she and Stevens reconnected in Honolulu during her brief stint in the FBI, she’d decided to live as if she was going to have
more
. More happiness and everything else that came with the risk of fully living—including heartbreak, if that was what came, too.

More
. For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

“
Lei. We’re up.” Torufu squeezed her arm, his hand massive as a baseball mitt.

Lei rose and followed Torufu to the side conference room, where instructors were debriefing each of the teams. They sat in molded-plastic seats in front of a kidney
-shaped Formica table with their two instructors, each equipped with clipboards and blank expressions.

“
So, your team placed eighth out of eleven teams,” Master-Sergeant Kent said, flipping pages. He had the buzz-cut, grizzled look of a career soldier. “Not very reassuring for Maui Police Department.”

Lei pressed the web of her hand but didn
’t respond. Neither did Torufu.

“
You located four IEDs in your section. Six were in the section, so that wasn’t the worst. The two of you earned points for your search technique and for good communication and teamwork doing the search. But you weren’t able to deactivate one of your IEDs, which is an automatic fail.” He flipped the papers he’d been consulting shut. “So. Tell us where that deactivation went wrong. We have video to help.” One of the staff people wheeled a TV set over so they could watch their humiliation all over again—apparently, they’d put small video cams over each of the places where the IEDs were hidden.

Lei was glad she hadn
’t known that at the time.

The video was a little jerky and grainy, but it showed them clearly: Torufu, head down as he scanned the ground, looming over Lei as she swung the hand-held metal detector with GPS they
’d been allowed for tracking the IEDs.

“
Here,” Lei said, in the video, pointing to something just off the trail. There was no audio, but she knew what she’d said. They approached the site, and Kent froze the action with a remote.

“
See how you’re going straight in? We gave you an ultraviolet detection light. Some of these IEDs are wired with motion sensors, and it would have been good to use it.”

Lei had her spiral notepad out, and she made a note for form
’s sake. Truth was, they’d counted on the IEDs being fairly crude, as this exercise was supposed to help with identifying the type of homemade explosives they had a greater chance of encountering. The competition had been timed. They’d cut a corner, and it had cost them.