Chapter 18
It takes Kauai’s finest forty minutes to reach the end of the road and another twenty to climb the trail, which gives the screaming plenty of time to mature into an art form.
Because the contestants are screaming. There is no containing it.
The moment the word body travels down the line, forty women who could not be convinced to walk uphill an hour ago discover they can absolutely sprint, in either direction, at top volume, and the sound coming off this trail is something between a horror movie and a flock of very well-dressed geese.
Someone is howling. Someone else is howling about the first someone howling.
A contestant near the back faints with such theatrical commitment that two others faint in response, like dominoes, like it’s contagious, like grief is a group activity and nobody wants to be left out.
Somewhere in the brush, a rooster joins in, out of either solidarity or jealousy.
Koa reaches me first, because Koa always reaches me first, and crouches at the edge beside me where I’m staring down at what used to be Flash.
“You found him,” he says.
“I tripped over a branch and found a corpse,” I say. “At this point it’s less a hobby and more a calling.”
He looks down at the rocks, at the cameras, at the angle of the neck, and his jaw does the thing it does when a day has just gotten significantly longer. “Did you see him fall?”
“No. He was already down there when I tripped.” I shake my head. “And I don’t think he felt much. I think it was fast.” I look at the drop, the loose lip of trail where the dirt’s been scuffed away, the way Flash is lying. “I also don’t think he fell. I think somebody helped.”
Koa is quiet for a moment. Then, in his flattest, most procedural register: “Did you push him?”
I turn and look at him, and my eyes grow the size of Pele’s hubcaps.
“I have to ask,” he says.
“Detective Hale,” I say, “I have been your girlfriend for the better part of a week, and this is the relationship milestone you pick. Not a standing invite to Sunday dinner. Not a key to your place. Just straight up—did you commit a homicide on a cliff?”
He takes a moment to frown and looks unjustly handsome while doing so. “It’s a question I’m required to ask the person who found the body.”
“I found the body because I trip over my own feet in paradise, which you know, because you’ve watched me do it at least nine times.”
“Eleven,” he says. “And no, I don’t think you pushed him. But now it’s on the record that I asked, and you didn’t confess, which helps us both.” The corner of his mouth moves, barely. “You’re free to go. Don’t leave the island.”
“I live here.”
“Lucky island.” His cheek twitches as he says it, and my stomach bisects with heat.
There’s a body at the bottom of a cliff, forty hysterical women behind us, and an active killer somewhere on this island, and this is the moment the man chooses to flirt with me. I’d object, but my heart has already responded, and it isn’t an objection.
But before I can flirt back, Pickles arrives.
She comes up the last stretch of trail breathless and pale, one hand pressed to her chest, her beaded reading-glasses chain swinging, and she takes one look over the edge and her face crumples so completely it would melt the hardest heart on this island.
“Oh, no,” she breathes. “Oh, no, no, not Flash.” Her hand goes to her mouth. “That poor man. That sweet, ridiculous man.” She turns to me, eyes shining, every inch the devastated grandmother. “How? How did this happen?”
“We’re still figuring that out,” Koa says, gently, before I can say murder.
“It’s this trail,” Pickles says, and there’s a tremble in it, a real one, or one good enough to pass.
“I knew it. I knew it. It’s wet, it’s narrow, I told the girls a dozen times to stay back from the edge, and Flash—well, you know Flash.
He never looked where his feet were, only where the light was.
Always backing up for the shot, always one more frame.
” She presses the glasses to her eyes. “He must have lost his footing. Stepped back one too many times. Oh, I should have made him wear proper shoes. I should have insisted.”
It’s a lovely speech. It’s warm and it’s grieving and it accounts for everything, and it ties the whole tragedy up in a bow labeled accident, and I stand there nodding along like I believe a word of it, but I don’t.
Because Flash never struck me as a man with careless feet.
Flash worked cliffs and crowds and chaos for forty years and never once dropped a camera.
But Pickles is so certain, and so soft about it, and so busy being heartbroken, that arguing feels like kicking somebody’s grandmother.
There’s no version of that where I come out ahead.
“Was he—” Pickles starts, then stops, pressing the glasses to her eyes. “Was anyone with him? Up here? I just can’t bear the thought of him out here all alone when it happened.” She shakes her head. “Listen to me. As though that changes anything now.”
“We don’t know yet,” Koa says.
Pickles nods, gathers herself with visible effort, and then does what she does best, which is take charge of forty hysterical women.
“All right,” she calls, turning back to the trail, voice steadying into command.
“My darlings, I need you to come away from there. Come to me. Look at me, not down there. We’re going to walk down together, slowly, and we’re going to hold hands like sensible people, and nobody is going near that edge. ”
And just like that the howling drops to sniffling, because Pickles apparently has the ability to gather a panic into her arms and pat it quiet. I watch as she shepherds her shaking flock back down the mountain.
Down the trail, Lani and Ruby are conducting their own rescue operation, peeling cats off rocks and roots where four stowaways have scattered in the commotion.
Ruby has Mango under one arm and Mochi under the other, both of them deeply put out about the arrangement and yowling their protest to the sun.
Lani has gone after Coconut and Spam, who has wedged himself into a crevice and is hissing his feelings about law enforcement.
Jelly comes hurrying up the path, looking flushed, and scoops Spam Musubi into her arms, the little dog still whining low in her throat, still looking back toward the edge as if she wishes she could do something about the tragedy.
“There you are,” Jelly murmurs into her fur. “Let’s get you to safety, sweet girl.”
Spam Musubi gives one small bark over Jelly’s shoulder, aimed back at the cliff’s edge, sharp and final, as if she’s putting the whole terrible afternoon on notice. For once, the dog and I are in complete agreement.
Once the scene has been secured and the body is being seen to and the worst of it is behind us, Koa pulls me a little aside, away from the radios and the tape and the last of the sniffling.
“Koa,” I say quietly. “There’s something you need to know.
Yesterday, in the lobby. Flash stopped me.
” I keep my voice low. “He told me he knew who killed Vera. He said he had to tell me, that he’d say it the second we got somewhere alone.
He was scared, Koa. He was looking over his shoulder the whole time.
And then he said he’d tell me soon.” I look back toward the edge. “Soon was supposed to be today.”
Koa goes still. The humor leaves his face, and something harder settles in behind it, the part of him that carries a badge for a living.
“He knew,” Koa says slowly, “and somebody made sure he never told a soul.”
“And now he’s dead,” I say. “Just hours after he told me. On a trail. With forty potential witnesses and not one of them looking.”
Koa’s gaze sweeps the mountain, the trail, the scatter of contestants being led back down by a grieving woman, and when he speaks again, it’s almost too quiet to hear over the wind coming off the Nā Pali.
“Then we’re not chasing somebody who snapped, Jinx.
We’re chasing somebody who plans. Somebody who smiled at us in the lobby this morning and pushed a man off a cliff before lunch.
” He looks at me, and there’s no warmth left in his face, just the hard math of a man adding it up.
“Whoever’s doing this is patient, they’re careful, and they’re not finished. ”
I look down at the rocks where a kind man who didn’t have a mean thing to say about anybody, except maybe Vera, is lying very still, and I feel the island go quiet around me, as if it’s holding its breath right along with me.
Welcome to paradise.
Try not to be next.