Right from the Gecko (5 page)

I took a deep breath. “How was she killed?”

“We don't have the autopsy report in yet, but it looks like strangulation. Afterward, whoever killed her deposited her body in the bay.”

I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I took a couple of seconds to get past that horrifying bit of news before I reminded myself that I'd come here with some important information of my own. “I don't suppose you found her cell phone when you discovered her body, did you?”

“No, as a matter of fact.” He looked surprised. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I think there's a lot more to Marnie Burton's murder than the scenario you just described,” I replied. “And the fact that her cell phone was missing is part of it.”

“Really?” He raised his eyebrows about a millimeter. “And why is that?”

In a low, even voice, I related all the events of the past twenty-four hours. Meeting Marnie after the governor's aide pushed her—at least, according to Marnie. Talking to her in my hotel room, when she'd mentioned, among other things, that she was on her way to meet with an informant. Discovering that she'd accidentally left an audiocassette in my room, no doubt because it had fallen out of her chaotic, overstuffed tote bag. Leaving a message on her cell phone that anyone—including her murderer—could have listened to, saying I had the tape and giving the name of my hotel and the room number. Then, soon after she was murdered, having an intruder break in to my hotel room and steal only one thing: an envelope that looked very similar to the one containing Marnie's tape.

After I finished, I watched the police detective's face expectantly. I was certain that this time I'd witness an explosive reaction.

Instead, he calmly asked, “And what exactly is on this cassette?”

“I don't know.” I tried to come across as forceful, but my words sounded pretty wishy-washy, even to me. “I haven't actually listened to it, since I don't have access to a tape recorder.”

“I do. Did you bring the tape with you?” He pressed a button on his phone and asked whoever answered to bring in a tape recorder. Within seconds, he was popping the cassette into the machine.

Detective Paleka and I sat in silence as it began to play. My heart pounded so loudly I hoped it wouldn't block out the sound. I was certain we were about to hear something that would incriminate Marnie Burton's murderer—or at least put the cops one giant step closer to knowing who had killed her and why.

I listened, motionless, to the sound of static. Then more static. Then even more.

“There's nothing on this tape,” Detective Paleka announced, looking more puzzled than annoyed.

“Maybe later on? Or on the other side?” I tried hopefully. “We didn't listen to all of it.”

A deep crease had appeared in his forehead. “I'll have someone play the whole tape, but so far, the only thing I can conclude is that you've been wasting my time.”

Aha. So he
was
annoyed. He was just better than some people at hiding it—probably the secret behind aloha spirit.

In a voice that came out sounding much meeker than I'd intended, I said, “Marnie mentioned she'd been having problems with her tape recorder, so maybe—”

“Let me make sure I understand all this correctly,” the detective interrupted, his voice suddenly loud and obviously strained. “You've come all the way into the station to tell me that you may have been one of the last people who saw Marnie Burton alive. But you literally meant
see
her. You didn't have any meaningful conversations, you didn't notice that she expressed any fear or apprehension, and she didn't give you any indication of who she was going to meet, aside from her boyfriend and some unnamed person she referred to as a ‘secret source.' In fact, you barely knew her. And then, shortly after she was murdered, you discovered that you'd misplaced the registration packet from the conference you're attending. Is that pretty much it, Dr. Popper?”

I glowered at him, wondering what the odds were that a Hawaiian police detective on the Maui police force could manage to look and sound so much like the Italian-American Chief of Homicide I was used to dealing with at home. Was it possible that Anthony Falcone and Peter Paleka were twins who had somehow been separated at birth?

“Look,” the Hawaiian half of the duo continued tersely, “I suggest that you go back to your hotel, find a comfortable spot on the beach, and enjoy the rest of your vacation. The most sensible thing you can do is leave this investigation to the professionals.”

I could feel my blood starting to boil. “But don't you see?” I protested. “I'm already involved in this! I left that message about the tape's whereabouts on Marnie's cell phone right before she was killed. Don't you think it's more than coincidence that her phone is now missing—and that hours after she was murdered, somebody came to the exact spot I described, looking for the tape? And don't you think it's likely that whoever stole the envelope out of my hotel room thinks I heard what was on it? That he thinks I know whatever it is they're so anxious to keep quiet?”

“There's nothing on the tape,” he pointed out.

“But they don't know that!” I insisted, trying not to sound as frustrated as I felt. “There was
supposed
to be something on it. Even Marnie thought there was. Don't you see? I could be in danger!”

The expression on the detective's face told me he didn't see at all. That, like Nick, he thought the business about the stolen envelope with the audiocassette inside was all in my head.

“I'll tell you what, Dr. Popper,” he said, his voice once again calm and unflappable. “I'll call you if we need you. Or if we come up with anything new on the case.

“As for your alleged hotel-room theft,” he continued, “I don't know that there's much we can do. According to what you told me, the only thing that was taken from your room was an envelope full of conference booklets. I suggest that you file a report with the hotel—and that you ask the nice folks at the conference to get you a replacement.

“My other piece of advice,” he added, “is to forget all about Marnie Burton and the terrible thing that happened to her.”

He stood up, a sure sign that, as far as he was concerned, this meeting was over.

“So much for putting all this into perspective,” I grumbled as I turned the key in the Jeep's ignition and pulled out of the police station parking lot.

I told myself that, given Nick's reaction, I probably shouldn't have been surprised Detective Paleka didn't believe the envelope containing the tape had been stolen from my hotel room as part of some cover-up related to Marnie's murder. Or that I was now involved because I'd had the bad luck to end up with her audiocassette.

Even though the tape had turned out to have absolutely nothing on it.

But the police detective's skepticism hadn't done a thing to convince me that I was wrong. And his assurances aside, I was scared. Maybe he was convinced that Marnie's murder had been the simple result of a rendezvous with the wrong guy, either a man she already knew or someone she met at the bar. But I believed there was more to it.

In fact, I was still ruminating about what I should do about the rumbling of fear in the pit of my stomach when I instinctively stepped on the brakes. I'd just spotted a sign that read
Kaohu Street,
a name I recognized from Marnie's business card.

Still driving slowly, I glanced at my watch. My mind raced as I did some quick calculations. It was already well past five, meaning I didn't have much time before I was supposed to meet Nick. Still, the hotel was only twenty minutes away…

Don't forget that you have to change your clothes and take other dramatic measures to make yourself presentable, a voice inside my head insisted.

But you're right here! a second voice interrupted.

Nick is expecting you back at the Royal Banyan, the first voice reminded me, sounding very practical and very firm. You don't have time for any detours. Go back to the hotel, put on a sexy sundress, and concentrate on spending a romantic evening with your beau.

I continued debating for about three more seconds. Then I eased into the right lane, made a quick turn, and scanned the signs on the buildings I passed, trying to find the one that read
Maui Dispatch
.

Chapter
3

T
he
Maui Dispatch
office was easy to locate. I'd been expecting something grand—if not a towering office building, then at least a modern, important-looking one with fountains and a formal lobby. Instead, a series of signs that looked as if they'd been printed on someone's computer indicated it was around the back of a low, warehouse-style building that housed a title company, a macadamia-nut wholesaler, and a surfboard distributor.

The door was locked, but the receptionist who could see me through the glass window set into it buzzed me in. Even though she was on the phone, she gave me a distracted wave. Waiting in the small entrance area gave me a chance to look around.

I didn't know what I'd expected to find. The entire staff in a frenzy, maybe, making phone calls and trying to answer the question of who had killed Marnie Burton. Or maybe I thought I'd find the whole office closed down for a few days of mourning.

Instead, it looked like business as usual.

The receptionist sat at a metal desk, collecting faxes in addition to fielding phone calls. She was probably in her forties, dressed in a yellow blouse that was as plain as her navy blue pants. Her light brown hair was held in place with a headband. I peered over her shoulder and watched the most recent fax come in. From what I could see, it was an announcement of an upcoming boat race.

Behind the receptionist's desk was a small office. While the door was closed, the top half of its front walls were made of frosted glass, enabling me to make out the silhouette of the person sitting inside. According to the plaque on the door, inscribed with R
ICHARD
C
ARRERA,
M
ANAGING
E
DITOR
, that silhouette belonged to Marnie's boss.

To the right was a large narrow space that stretched to the back of the building, with fake-wood paneling, well-worn gray wall-to-wall carpeting, and, at the very end, a small kitchen. It was furnished with four metal desks, each one outfitted with a computer. Two were pushed up against the wall, while the other two faced the windows that ran along the side of the building.

The only desk that was occupied was one of the two that offered a first-rate view of the parking lot. I decided the man sitting at it was most likely a reporter, since his desk was a sea of paper. Even from where I stood, I could see that most of the sheets were covered with neatly printed text and not-so-neat handwritten red scribbles. Whether those were his markings or the editor's, I couldn't say.

The man, probably in his thirties, was clearly someone who put a lot of effort into his appearance. He wore a crisp white shirt with wrinkle-free beige pants, and his dark hair looked carefully styled. He stood in sharp contrast to most of the other young men I'd seen in Hawaii, who looked as if they were no more likely to own an iron than they were to own a snowblower. Even though his attention was fixed on his computer screen and all I got were occasional glimpses of his profile, he struck me as unusually good-looking.

I figured that one of the other desks must have belonged to Marnie. Not the front desk on the left, since I surmised that one belonged to the newspaper's photographer. More than a dozen photographs that had been torn out of the newspaper were tacked haphazardly on the bulletin board above the desk. His best work, I figured, displayed either to inspire him or to impress the rest of the staff.

As for the desk next to the photographer's, it was meticulously neat, with stacks of perfectly aligned papers and a row of pens carefully lined up. The papers and personal photographs tacked onto the bulletin board above it had clearly been arranged with care.

There was no way that one was Marnie's. Hers had to have been the desk next to the reporter's, which, at the moment, was completely bare except for a lone pencil mug and a few stray paper clips scattered about. The sight of it made my heart wrench.

I focused my attention back on the receptionist, just in time to hear her instruct her caller, “Okay, send us a fax with the details like the time and place and the correct spellings of everyone's names. I'll make sure it gets into the next edition…. Just write
Attention: Karen Nelson
on top to make sure I get it. Have a great day.”

As she hung up, she looked at me and smiled. “Sorry about the wait. What can I do for you?”

“I wondered if I could have a word with Mr. Carrera.”

“I'll see if he's available. Is he expecting you?”

“Not exactly.” I hesitated. “My name is Jessica Popper. I'd like to speak to him about Marnie Burton.”

“But you don't have an appointment?”

“No.” I stood straighter, hoping to give the impression I actually belonged there.

“Does he know you?”

This time, I held my chin up a bit higher. “No.”

She just nodded. “Hold on. I'll see if he's free.” She disappeared into the office behind her desk for a few seconds. I had just about braced myself for rejection when she reappeared and said, “Go right in.”

“Thanks.” I took a deep breath as I made my way toward the frosted glass–enclosed space, surprised at how easily I'd gotten in to see Marnie's boss. Unfortunately, I still wasn't sure exactly what I hoped to learn from him. Maybe something that would reassure me that Detective Paleka was right, that Marnie's death had nothing to do with the audiotape I still feared could be putting me in danger.

“Mr. Carrera?” I asked politely as I strode into his office.

He stood up as I entered. Even though Richard Carrera was the head of this operation, he was barely over five feet tall. And he was as slight as he was short. I had a feeling I could have wrestled him to the ground without too much trouble. Just like the other man in the office, the one I'd pegged as a reporter, he wore a crisp white shirt. But he had on a necktie, one that was covered with palm trees but held in place with an expensive-looking gold clasp. An interesting combination of Hawaiian casual and no-nonsense business, I decided.

But his features made it clear his roots were not Polynesian. True, his neatly cut hair was as black as coal and his eyes were such a dark brown that they, too, were almost the same shade. But his features, like his name, struck me as Hispanic in origin. Especially his eyebrows, which were the thickest, blackest, and bushiest I'd ever seen in my life.

“Jessica Popper, right?” he greeted me. “Come in and have a seat.”

Even with those few words, I saw that Mr. Carrera's way of speaking involved moving his lips but keeping his two rows of white, even teeth tightly clenched. That was an idiosyncrasy I couldn't affix to any particular ethnicity.

It also made him a little hard to hear—and to understand. I wondered if it was more than coincidence that he'd ended up in a career that focused on the printed word.

“Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Mr. Carrera,” I said as I took him up on his offer and lowered myself onto one of the two metal folding chairs that faced his desk.

Unlike the reporter who worked for him, Richard Carrera kept his desk perfectly clear of paper. Unless, of course, he had made a point of straightening up before opening his office to a stranger. My suspicious side wondered if he had something to hide, while my practical side told me he was probably just one of those people who prefers a neat working environment.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. At least, I was pretty sure that was what he asked. Given the fact that his words came out sounding like, “Whahdoferyou?” I had to rely a lot on context.

“I was hoping you'd be willing to talk to me about Marnie Burton.” Before he had a chance to mumble an obvious question like, “Why should I?” or “Who are you?”—or at least something that sounded like that—I volunteered, “I was a friend of Marnie's. Needless to say, I've been frantic ever since I heard the news, and I've been desperate to find out anything I can about what happened. I even stopped at the police station earlier today and talked to someone named Detective Paleka, but he wasn't all that helpful about the details. I was hoping you might know something.”

He sat perfectly still, his dark eyes burning into mine in a truly unnerving way. I couldn't tell if he was angry or surprised or if this was simply the way he looked all the time. “Why would I know any more than the police?” he finally said, his teeth still clamped together.

“Because you were Marnie's boss. And because you're the person the police called in to identify her last night.

“Besides,” I continued, “you're a newspaperman. It's your job to find out things other people don't know and to find them out first. That's your area of expertise.”

One thing I'd learned being in business for myself was that it never hurt to butter people up a little. Especially people of the male persuasion.

And it seemed to be working. I could have just been imagining things, but the tension in the room seemed to decrease just a little.

“I suppose that's true,” he remarked.

“There's another reason too,” I went on, feeling bolder. “Marnie mentioned you the last time she and I talked. That was just a few hours before she was killed.”

He tensed his forehead, moving his caterpillarlike eyebrows a little closer to each other. “What did she say?”

“That you were the editor of the newspaper she worked for and that you were counting on her to meet the deadline for an article she was writing on the governor's press conference.” Figuring that slathering on a little more dairy fat would grease the wheels even further, I added, “From the way she spoke, I could tell she had a lot of respect for you. It was obvious that what you thought of her and her work really mattered to her.”

The muscles in his face relaxed. In fact, his whole demeanor shifted from wary to sorrowful. “Marnie was a good kid,” he commented. “I enjoyed having her on my staff. She was so committed. So passionate.”

Shaking his head slowly, he added, “And so energetic. Intense, in fact. That girl had big plans, and she was in a hurry to get to where she wanted to be. Seems to me she was on her way too. I'm sure she told you about the award she won.”

“Of course,” I said without missing a beat. Even though what I really meant was,
Of course not
.

“It's a pretty big deal, being honored by the Association of Professional Journalists like that,” Mr. Carrera noted. “Even though she won it in the category for reporters who've been working in the field for three years or less, she's still one of the youngest people to ever win it. Her series on illegal immigrants on Maui was very thoroughly researched. Insightful and well written too.

“To make it as a newspaper reporter,” he continued, “there are two things you need. Curiosity and pushiness. As I'm sure you know, Marnie had plenty of both. As a result, she could sometimes rub people the wrong way. But she was basically a sweet kid, and I think most of the people she came across could pretty much see that in her.”

Sweet, but intense. Marnie's editor's description of her was completely consistent with the impression I'd gotten.

“She did seem like she had a certain innocence,” I observed conversationally. “Maybe it was because she came from a small town. But that girl also had a real sense of adventure. I always thought she was pretty brave, coming all the way to Hawaii from Washington State.”

“Actually, we get a lot of people coming through here who grew up somewhere else. That's not at all unusual in Hawaii.”

“How about you?” I asked in the same chatty tone. I hoped we were bonding, at least enough for him to tell me something useful about Marnie. “Where are you from?”

“Born and raised right here on this island,” he replied. “Actually, my family's been here for generations.”

I was so used to thinking of Hawaii as either a tourist destination or a place people moved to because they wanted to get away from the real world that it hadn't occurred to me that, for some people, it
was
the real world.

“One of my ancestors,” Mr. Carrera went on, “that is, my great-great-great-grandfather—or however many ‘greats' there should be—was a
paniolo.
”

“Really?” I didn't mind showing how impressed I was. I'd read all about the
paniolos
—Hawaiian cowboys—in Nick's guidebook. Back in the late 1700s, a British sea captain named George Vancouver, the namesake of the city of Vancouver, Canada, presented the leader of the Hawaiian Islands, King Kamehameha, with some Mexican longhorn cattle as a token of friendship. Kamehameha allowed them to roam free, and within a few decades there were thousands of them all over the island. Cattle handlers from Mexico were brought over to teach the locals how to deal with them. They were called
españols
, meaning Spanish. Somehow, the word evolved into
paniolos
.

Ranching still took place on Maui, and the term
paniolos
was still used to refer to Hawaiian cowboys who worked on the cattle ranches. These days, most of them were of mixed heritage, every ethnic background imaginable from Portuguese to Japanese to Caucasian.

“From the research I've done,” he continued, “combined with family lore, I've learned I'm descended from one of the original
vaqueros.
A man named Juan Carrera, one of the first of the Mexican cowboys to come over in the mid-1800s.”

By the way he told the story, it was clear this wasn't the first time he'd related this bit of family history. It was equally clear that he was darned proud of it.

“Marnie never told me about any of that,” I told him, realizing that Richard Carrera's revelation about his roots provided me with the perfect opportunity to ask about the rest of the people she worked with. “In fact, even though she worked crazy hours and was really dedicated to her job, she never told me much about the other people at the paper. She mentioned them in passing, of course, but she was always much more interested in talking about the stories she was working on.”