Chapter 17
Malia turned and made a single sharp gesture—edge of her hand across her throat: lights off. Silence.
Keone and I killed our lights.
The dark dropped over us like black cloth, total and instant, the no color of underground without a light source. I put my hand on the rough wall to my right and felt Keone’s palm settle between my shoulder blades, a point of warmth.
We stood a moment letting our eyes adjust, beginning to detect a faint gray bruise of daylight leaking from the entrance ahead—enough to feel our way toward the brightness.
Malia pulled her weapon and went first, heel-to-toe, soundless. I followed the way she moved, rolling my weight through each step, Keone a breathing presence behind me.
The voices—and now there were two—came and went as we moved, and that was the strange thing.
They didn’t come from straight ahead, where the slope and the entrance were.
They came around sideways, bent, bouncing off some fold in the rock so that two women talking up the slope outside seemed to murmur from the very stone beside my ear.
I’d heard Lei’s voice come up out of a pit the same way. Sound traveled crooked down here, carried on the cold air and wet walls, and it suddenly delivered those voices to us as clearly as if we crouched at their feet.
“He’s out cold, I think. But I don’t trust him—maybe we need to put the cuffs on him. Tie his feet.” A woman’s voice, low and even. “He could be faking.”
“He’s not faking.” That was Madison, sounding frayed and exhausted. “You hit him hard. There’s a lot of blood.”
“Scalp wounds bleed. It seems worse than it is.” A pause, the scuff of a shoe on stone. “Help me decide. Do we leave him, or do we put the cuffs on him before we go? If he wakes up and we’re only halfway up the trail—”
“Take them off me and put them on him and let’s get out of here,” Madison hissed. “I don’t care. I want out of this valley.”
“Okay. Stay calm.”
I stopped breathing.
I knew that voice. The evenness of it, the measured cadence, the way she talked like she was conducting a seminar.
I’d sat across a worktable from that voice in the K I dearly wished we hadn’t let him walk away with it.
Patel had come for the archive—to sell it to the Changs and keep its glory for herself. She’d failed. The archive wasn’t hers and it wasn’t the Changs’ and that part was good.
Patel’s wanting it I understood, root and branch. It was Pali’s claiming of the archive that I didn’t understand. Pali had no big career to make and no buyer to please, but a man like him doesn’t go toe-to-toe with cops for a bag of paper unless he means to do something with it.
The small wrong feeling I’d set aside in the dark stopped being so small. What was Pali Moku’s agenda? I had no real idea, when it came right down to it.
Malia came limping out of the cave one painful step at a time, her face ashen and set, her weapon holstered. She braced against a boulder for balance. “Anyone seen Souza?”
Keone answered. “He’s up the trail and conscious. Bleeding from the head, but okay.”
“I radioed Lei. The medics on the north rim will come back after their run to Kahului to get Souza.”
I hauled Patel up from the grass and marched her down the slope to where Malia, Keone and Madison stood near the cave entrance.
Malia reached us and stood in front of Patel, swaying a little. I watched her put the personal away and become the careful officer who took notes in precise shorthand.
She removed cuffs from her belt as I turned Patel and presented her wrists.
Balancing on her good leg, Malia ratcheted the cuffs on.
“Susanna Patel, you’re under arrest for assault on a police officer, and we’ll be adding to those charges.
” She recited the Miranda rights. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”
“I understand.” Patel hung her head; there was little of the pride with which she’d carried herself remaining.
Keone eased Madison to sitting in the grass, keeping his hand on her shoulder. Malia limped over to cuff her with the restraints she’s had on before.
Above us, the air ambulance thundered away and would be back soon. Below us, the valley breathed green and ancient and unbothered, keeping its secrets the way it always had. Beneath us, the cave waited for justice and restoration.
We had Patel and Madison. Souza would soon get the care he needed. Malia had her dignity but might need to go with Souza for treatment.
And somewhere on or below the mountain, Pali Moku carried an archive of priceless documents to an unknown destination, for an unclear purpose.