Chapter 10 #2
“Shh.” Pua had pulled her chair right up against mine. Her shoulder pressed against my arm; her knee was bouncing with nerves she’d never shown in front of her Chang cousins.
On-screen, the lead officer hammered a gloved fist against the steel door. Lei’s voice came through, raised with authority. “Maui Police Department! We have a warrant to search these premises. Open the door immediately.”
Nothing. Just the tick of heat on metal and, far away, the drone of an outbound jet climbing out of Kahului airport.
The officer pounded again. “Maui Police! We are serving a search warrant. Open up or we will force entry.”
Silence.
Lei’s cam swung as she stepped back and gestured. “Do it.”
Two officers brought up a stubby black battering ram and swung it once, hard, into the steel door below the hasp and lock.
The boom of it came through my phone’s speaker like a gunshot. All three of us flinched.
The door gave way after another strike, buckling inward off one hinge. Another couple of swings and it caved entirely, clanging onto a concrete floor.
The camera was moving, the team flowing through the breach with flashlights cutting the dim interior gloom. “Police! Police! Hands where we can see them!”
The view swept across the inside of the warehouse. No humans appeared to be present. Even at fish-eye angle, through a phone, I knew what I was seeing.
Construction equipment, first—a small excavator with a hydraulic breaker, what you’d use to bust up rock; coils of chain; pallets of orange survey stakes; a generator the size of a chest freezer.
And then, against the far wall, under a sheet of milky plastic, a row of pale gray rectangular slabs propped upright and crated at the base.
The petroglyphs.
Pearl made a sharp, involuntary sound.
Lei’s cam moved closer, her flashlight beam sliding across the nearest panel.
She tossed up the plastic. There they were—a warrior figure with a spear raised overhead, a row of dots, the unmistakable forked sweep of an ‘Iwa wing carved into the volcanic rock. Cut clean out of the cave wall with tool marks still lighter at the edges, exactly matching the depressions we’d seen.
“They’re there,” I breathed. “We found them.”
“Oh, crap,” Pua whispered. “It’s really real. Everything we thought.” She pressed manicured fingers to her mouth. “Part of me didn’t really believe Victor was capable of this.”
Pearl said nothing. She was motionless, her dark eyes fixed on the screen. A single tear tracked through the powder on her wrinkled cheek. She made no move to wipe it away.
An officer’s voice called out, “Clear left!” and another answered, “Clear right!” The team was working the cavernous space in a grid.
Lei’s view tracked along the back wall, past the panels, toward a partition that walled off a corner of the warehouse into an interior office.
A cheap hollow core door, shut, caught in her beam.
Underneath it: a thin yellow line of light.
“Somebody’s in there,” Pua’s voice was high with tension.
Lei had seen the illumination too. On-screen, her gloved hand came up making a signal, then two fingers pointing at the door. The team reassembled around it—one officer to either side of the frame, one holding the door cannon, the others with weapons up, Lei behind.
She rapped the door with her knuckles. “Maui Police. If you’re in there, come out with your hands visible. Now.”
A beat. Two.
“Take it,” Lei said.
The officer hit the hollow door with the cannon, and it splintered around the latch and flew inward.
The cam surged forward into a small, cluttered office—a metal desk, a dead potted plant, a wall calendar two months out of date.
Flashlight beams converged on the gap in the knee-well beneath the desk, where a pair of expensive loafers and a hunched shape had folded themselves into a space far too small for any dignity.
“Out. Hands up. Let me see your hands,” Lei snapped.
A man sidled out from under the desk on his knees, palms spread, blinking into the lights. Even at the bad angle and through the grit on Lei’s lens, I knew that face: heavier than the last time I’d seen it, jowls gone soft, salon tan a little gray around the edges—but unmistakable.
“That’s David Santos,” I said aloud. Beside me, Pearl drew a slow breath through her nose like a woman smelling something she abhorred.
“You remember him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of course,” I said. The last time David Santos had moved against Pearl, it had been with poison. She had nearly died on her own lanai.
On-screen, Lei’s voice had dropped into the calm register she used when the situation had tipped entirely in her favor.
“David Santos. You’re under arrest. Your parole is hereby revoked.
” She recited the Miranda warning cleanly, the way she’d done it a thousand times—the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, each phrase landing with the weight of an anchor hitting the water.
“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you? ”
Santos got to his feet, slow, with his hands being cuffed behind his back.
“I understand,” he said. He glanced around the office at the officers, at the crated panels visible through the broken door, at the excavator with its rock cutter.
Something in him seemed to sag. He spoke in the flat voice of a man cutting his losses: “If I’m going down, Victor Chang is going down too. I want to make a deal.”
“Mr. Santos—”
“And I want a lawyer,” he said. “That’s it. I want my lawyer, I want a deal, and I’m not saying another word until my attorney is present.”
“That’s your right,” Lei said—to the room, to her team, and a little to the three of us watching.
The cam swung away from Santos as an officer moved in to escort the man out. Lei’s gloved hand reached up and tapped the button cam; the feed cut to black.
For a moment the three of us sat there in Pearl’s dining room, the silence ringing after all that focused intensity and noise.
Outside, the wind chimes had picked up. The lawn equipment in the Heritage Garden droned on, indifferent to the fact that the world had shifted on its axis quite a few miles up the coast. A whiff of cut grass blew in to tickle my nose.
“Santos gave up Victor,” Pua said. Her voice was stunned. “He said Victor’s name on a police camera. My cousin is his bargaining chip.”
“Once his lawyer gets to him, he’ll wish he hadn’t said anything,” I said.
“But Lei’s got it recorded. That’s a thread that ties Santos to Chang, in his own words, the day the petroglyphs turned up in a warehouse Sophie traced back to Chang’s shell company.
” I set the phone face down on Pearl’s table; my hand wasn’t quite steady.
“It’s not the whole case—but a big piece of it. ”
“Most importantly, the petroglyphs are safe,” Pearl said.
She had recovered herself; the tear was gone, blotted away at some point, and her chin was up.
“They will go home to Awawakapu and be safe. NAGPRA will see to that, and so will I.” She picked up a virgin square of gold paper from the side table and smoothed it across her chair’s armrest, her arthritic fingers creating the first crease for an origami crane.
Pua let out a long breath and slumped back in her chair, less like the town’s polished gossip queen and more like a woman who’d spent the afternoon doing the hardest thing she’d ever done. “I think,” she said, “I need to go home, take off these shoes, and lie on my floor for a while.”
“You earned it,” I told Pua. “I’ll go back and hold down the post office for the rest of the day—such as it is.”
Pearl nodded. “Now go on. I have calls to make—Edith, Ilima, my nephew on Oahu. People who will want to hear this from me before the coconut wireless spreads it.” Her eyes glinted. “And it will. It always does.”
“I’ll spread the news accurately, at least,” Pua said, rallying enough to flash a ghost of her usual smile. “Quality control.”
My phone buzzed against the table—it was Aunt Fae with a text that pulled me right back out of the case and into the ordinary machinery of my actual life:
Don’t forget. Dr. Yoshimoto at four. The cast comes off TODAY or I’m sawing it off myself. Need a ride. Bring the cat, she cheers me up.
I checked the time. “Dang it. I have to go,” I told Pearl, pocketing the phone. “Aunt Fae’s getting her cast off this afternoon, and if I don’t take her to the doctor, she will saw it off herself. She’s been threatening it for a week.”
“Then go,” Pua said wearily. “I can get through the rest of the day at the counter.” She perked up a little. “Especially with this news to share.”
Pearl waved a beringed hand, the gold crane finished and standing in her palm. “Tell Fae I’m glad her foot is mending. And Kat—”
I paused at the door.
“Thank you.” She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to.
“Anytime, Pearl.”
“You’re true ?ohana,” she said.
I found Tiki outside on the lanai railing, where she’d retreated to sulk after being denied entry to the human drama. She submitted to being scooped up with the long-suffering air of a cat who had, once again, done all the real work and received no credit.
“Come on, you,” I said, settling her against my shoulder. Tiki started her motor, that deep tractor purr buzzing through my collarbone. We headed out into the golden afternoon. “We’ve got a foot to liberate.”