Chapter 13
Keone and I got to the unmarked trailhead leading into the valley first, but we’d barely climbed out of his truck when Malia Peahi’s Hana Police Department SUV came nosing up the rutted track behind us, followed by a second unit.
The reddish island dust we’d raised hung in the slanting light and drifted slowly over the grass.
Malia got out, adjusting her duty belt, her dark hair scraped into a regulation knot. She did not appear to be a woman who’d been pulled off her Saturday for nothing; she was ready for action.
Behind her, a younger officer I half-recognized from the Hana station unfolded himself from the second cruiser—lean, watchful, with a tight jaw.
Lei had done the right thing, calling in Hana PD.
This was their case. I caught Keone’s eye and saw he’d landed in the same place.
We were interested parties who knew the situation, but we weren’t the law.
“Officer Daniel Souza,” Malia said, by way of introduction. “He’s solid. Lei called me on the way to the airfield—said you two made the connection about Chang being in the valley. I hope you’re right.”
“Kat did,” Keone said. “She’s usually on target.”
“But I’d feel better about this if the Changs’ Escalade was here to confirm my guess,” I said. “You’re running this op. Keone and I know the trail and the cave layout—we’re here for support, but it’s your scene and your call.”
“Well, of course.” But something eased fractionally in Malia’s shoulders; she’d evidently been braced for me to be a problem. “Appreciate that. Walk me through what we’ve got so far while we gear up.”
I gave it to her clean and short: Lei’s warrant, Santos giving up Chang’s hunt for the archive, Chang unseen since Pearl’s, my read that he’d come here for the documents before the cultural protection lockdown closed his window for good.
Malia listened, not interrupting, her eyes going distant as she fit it against what she already knew, while Souza pulled vests and a coil of rope from the cruiser’s trunk.
“Lei’s bringing the airship,” she said when I finished.
“ETA—thirty minutes. She wants eyes from above before anyone goes into the caves.” She stared down the green throat of the trail where it dropped away into the folded shadows of the valley.
“But thirty minutes is a long time if he’s down there moving around. ”
“Don’t forget his daughter Madison’s with him,” I said. “She might slow him down.”
The morning smelled of wet earth and fern, the green pepper sharpness of growing things—and under it all the mineral cool that breathed up out of the lava tubes like the land was exhaling. Somewhere high above, a pair of ‘apapane traded liquid notes back and forth across the gulch.
Meanwhile, I missed my cat.
Standing there at the lip of the trail buckling into the bulletproof vest Souza handed me, I was hit with the sharp absence of twenty pounds of tortoiseshell opinion that should have been winding around my ankles, complaining about the dew but eager to hit the trail.
Tiki was on Aunt Fae’s lap, no doubt being fed something off a plate, and I was here, and it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain.
And not for the first time, I found myself turning the original thing over in my mind.
How in the wide world had my cat come trotting into the Ohia post office weeks ago with a potato chip of carved basalt clutched in her jaws?
A genuine fragment of petroglyph, snapped clean off a stolen panel, carried in like a tribute and dropped on my desk.
Tiki ranged a long way, sure—she was a barn cat at heart, she went where she pleased—but the valley was miles from home.
She couldn’t have walked the whole route.
Somebody, somewhere, had handled that stone, dropped it or stashed it close enough that a wandering cat could find it, and my tortoiseshell familiar had decided it belonged to me.
As if she’d known. As if she’d reached into the whole tangled mess and pulled the one thread that would unravel it when she handed it to me with that smug expression she wore sometimes.
I’d probably never know. Some things about that cat I’d have to make peace with.
“Ready,” Keone said beside me, and I came back to the morning and the trail and the job.
“Single file,” Malia said, low. “Texeira’s orders are observe and contain, not engage. We find him, we hold position, we wait for the bird. Kat, Keone, you’re our eyes on the ground. Souza, you’ve got our six. Let’s move.”
We started down.
The trail dropped fast off the pullout, a steep root-riddled scramble that turned the first hundred yards into a careful negotiation of mud, vegetation and stone.
Keone went ahead of me with the easy long-legged sureness of a man who’d run these hills as a kid, reading the ground without seeming to.
I came next, and behind me Malia and her officer moved with the contained quiet of people who did this for a living.
The canopy closed over us. The light went green and underwater.
The temperature dropped a few degrees as the trail bent down toward the gulch and the old cane road, and the sound of an unseen stream rose to meet us, that constant valley music of water finding its way down through black rock to the sea.
We’d gone maybe a quarter mile to where the side trail forked off toward the cave system, when my phone went off against my hip.
Not a ring. A hard insistent triple-buzz I didn’t recognize for half a second—and when I did, my whole body lit up with it.
“Stop!” I pulled the phone out. The screen was flashing a red banner I’d half-forgotten I’d set up: the notification Sophie’s alarm system was rigged to push the instant the cave sensors tripped: MOTION DETECTED—AWAWAKAPU CAVE—CAM 1.
“The alarm,” I breathed. “My alarm. It works! Somebody just walked into the chamber and tripped the cave cameras.” A grin pulled at my face that had no business being there given the circumstances, but I’d half believed the whole five-thousand-dollar surveillance setup would sit out there and never catch a thing.
“Malia—we’ve got motion in the cave, right now, this second! ”
Malia was at my shoulder in an instant, reading the screen over my arm. “Live?”
“Live. Camera one’s the outer chamber, just inside the entrance.” A second banner stacked under the first as I watched—CAM 2—and my pulse kicked. “There. Camera two, deeper in. They’re moving inward. Somebody’s entering the cave, right now.”
“Or somebody’s already in and moving around,” she said.
“Could be Chang. Could be his people. Could be more than one.” She keyed her shoulder radio.
“Airship One . . . (a beat of static) . . . be advised, we have motion confirmed inside the cave system—repeat, confirmed motion in the cave, we are proceeding to contain the entrance. Get that bird here ASAP!”
Lei’s voice crackled back, thin and wind-torn, almost drowned by engine noise. “Copy. Eight minutes out. Do not let the suspect back out the entrance.”
The careful pace was over as Malia gave a signal with her hand to move out. We picked up speed on the trail to a fast, controlled jog, the path swallowing us into deeper green, roots and wet stone flying underfoot.
Somewhere ahead of us, behind three fallen boulders and a curtain of fern, a desperate man with everything to lose had entered a dark chamber full of stolen history and tripped a wire he didn’t know was there.
If we moved fast enough, we could have him sealed inside.
I ran, with Keone ahead and the law behind and my phone flashing red in my fist, and now I was glad my cat was safe and far away—because whatever was about to happen at the mouth of that cave, it was no place for Tiki.