The Presence

CHAPTER 12

Sergeant Cal Olani had just come on duty that morning when he’d gotten the call sending him out to the lonely stretch of road where Alice Santoya had found her son’s body. As he’d driven out, he assumed he’d find the victim of a hit-and-run. Five minutes after he’d arrived at the scene, though, he’d known that no hit-and-run had been involved. The absence of tread marks, in itself, didn’t mean much, since the rain last night could have washed them away. But the condition of the boy’s body revealed nothing to confirm such an accident.

Except for a gash on his right palm, the boy exhibited none of the gross trauma that would have been apparent if he’d been hit by a car hard enough to kill him.

Olani had worked alongside the crew of medics who attempted to revive the boy despite the fact that it was obvious from his temperature alone that he’d been dead for hours. He’d stayed at the site until the photographer had come and gone, and searched the area for any clues.

Olani had tried to take a statement from Alice Santoya, but she’d been pretty incoherent as she sobbed over the loss of her only child.

After an hour, he was finished at the scene, having found no evidence that any crime had been committed. But Kioki Santoya had stayed in his mind all through the day as he’d dealt with one petty disturbance after another. There’d been a domestic squabble up in Paia. He solved that one by parking out in front of the house and tooting the horn a couple of times to let Lee and Rosie Chin know that if they didn’t settle down, he’d have to come in and do it for them.

Then there’d been a minor fender bender in which he had to convince the owner of a rusted-out 1974 Chevy Impala that he probably wasn’t going to get much of a settlement out of the tourist who “rear-ended me, man! I got whiplash real bad!” The problem for the Chevy’s owner was that three witnesses backed up the tourist’s story that he’d been waiting for a light to turn green when the car ahead of him suddenly slammed into his front end. If he hadn’t had his foot firmly on his own brakes, he probably would have crashed into the car behind him.

After sorting that out, Olani cruised up and down Front Street in Lahaina for a while, just showing the colors to let the troublemakers know he was around.

Through it all, he’d been unable to stop thinking about Kioki Santoya. Now, with only another hour before the end of his shift, when he could go home to Malia and the twins, he decided he might as well swing by Maui Memorial on his way back to the Sheriff’s Department. The hospital was barely a quarter of a mile from headquarters, and he knew he wouldn’t stop thinking about the teenage boy who had died last night until he found out exactly what had killed him.

He pulled the car into the nearly empty parking lot next to the hospital, and went in through the emergency entrance that was almost hidden in the L-shaped building’s corner. Jo-Nell Sims, the nurse on duty, looked up. “Ten minutes,” she said as she recognized him. “That’s all I have left on my shift.” Putting on an expression of exaggerated annoyance, she shook a finger at him. “Don’t tell me you’re bringing someone in, Cal. Please, just don’t tell me that.”

“Relax, Jo,” Olani told her. “All’s quiet out there. I just stopped by to find out what happened to the boy they brought in this morning. Kioki Santoya.”

Jo-Nell’s eyes lost their sparkle. “Isn’t it terrible? I just feel so sorry for his mother.”

“Have they finished the autopsy on him yet?” Olani pressed.

Still shaking her head in sympathy for Alice Santoya’s loss, Jo-Nell scanned a schedule. “Laura Hatcher was on it,” she said. Picking up a phone, she spoke for a moment, then waved Cal through the doors leading to the examining rooms. “She’ll meet you in a couple of minutes. First door on your left.”

Five minutes later Laura Hatcher came in. No more than five feet one inch tall, she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-three pounds, and looked to Cal Olani to be about twelve years old. Except that he’d dealt with her many times before, and knew that behind that incredibly slender and innocent-looking facade was the tough mind of a very well-trained pathologist.

“So what about Kioki Santoya?” Cal asked. “Any idea what killed him?”

Laura Hatcher flipped open a metal-covered clipboard she was carrying, riffled through a few sheets, then found what she was looking for. “Well, I can tell you what didn’t happen,” she said. “Nothing much in the way of external trauma at all — a few minor abrasions on his left palm, and a deep cut on his right one.”

“I saw that. Looked more like the kind of cut you’d get from a piece of broken glass than a knife wound.”

Laura Hatcher nodded. “No argument there. And it wasn’t nearly bad enough for him to have bled to death through it.”

“How about alcohol?” the policeman suggested. “The way some of the kids drink these days—”

“I thought of that right away. Nothing.”

“So what are you saying? He just died? Kids that age don’t have heart attacks, do they?”

“Actually, it’s not impossible, but in this case there wasn’t any evidence of it. The only thing that looked even slightly abnormal was his lungs, but until I get some results back from the lab, I won’t even know if that’s what killed him.” She spread her hands helplessly. “I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t tell you much right now. It could have been a virus — one of these new bugs that have been cropping up lately — tout he doesn’t seem to have manifested any symptoms of illness prior to death. His mother says he was fine.”

“But you can’t be sure of that, either.” Olani sighed, knowing the caveat the doctor was certain to add.

Hatcher nodded her agreement. “Sorry. I wish I could be more help.” She glanced down at her notes. “Do the names Rick Pieper, Josh Malani, and Jeff Kina mean anything to you?”

“There’ve been a couple problems with the Kina kid. He’s big, and has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to haoles. And Josh Malani tries to act tough, but it’s mostly for show. Why?”

“According to Alice Santoya, her son was out with those three boys last night. He left a message saying he was going to a movie with them. Depending on what comes back from the lab, someone might want to talk to them.”

Cal Olani wrote the three names in his notebook. Maybe he’d just drop by the school and have a talk with those boys.

Ten minutes after Cal Olani finished his conversation with Laura Hatcher, a man stepped into the small room that served as the hospital’s morgue. Making certain no one had seen him come in, he locked the door, then opened the drawer containing the remains of Kioki Santoya. Having to deal with dead people was the worst part of being an orderly. Elvis Dinkins had never really minded the rest of the job — emptying bedpans and changing linen didn’t bother him.

Even sick people didn’t bother him.

But dead people …

Despite his revulsion at having to deal with the corpse — or maybe because of it — Elvis Dinkins’s eyes fixed on Kioki Santoya’s face. The boy’s eyes were open, and his face looked bloated. His mouth was open, too, and it looked to Elvis like the kid’s tongue was all swollen up. His stomach churned as he saw the place where Dr. Hatcher had cut away a slice of it to send to the lab.

As he pulled on the surgical gloves he’d swiped from the scrub room, Elvis wondered if maybe he should take a slice of the tongue, too. But that would mean actually reaching into the dead boy’s mouth, and Elvis wasn’t sure he could do that.

It was going to be bad enough just taking pieces of tissue from the wound that Dr. Hatcher had cut when she’d opened the kid up to do the autopsy. Elvis shuddered. The sight of blood did tend to make him feel sick.

In fact, it made him feel sick enough that he was thinking about looking around for another job.

Maybe one working for Takeo Yoshihara, who he’d heard paid a lot better than anyone else on Maui.

And that, at least indirectly, was why he was in the morgue today.

A few days after he started working at the hospital, he’d been cleaning up one of the rooms when a doctor came in. Although Elvis Dinkins had been at the hospital less than a week, he’d already known who this doctor was.

Stephen Jameson. Personal physician to Takeo Yoshihara.

Someone to pay attention to.

Therefore, Elvis Dinkins had listened carefully when Dr. Jameson suggested that if he ever came across anything in the hospital that seemed unusual, he would appreciate it if Elvis would let him know.

At the time, of course, Elvis hadn’t really known what might be considered unusual in a hospital. He’d waited, keeping a sharp lookout, but nothing “unusual” had come his way. Until now.

A teenage kid who’d died for some reason that even Dr. Hatcher hadn’t been able to figure out — now that was something else again! It was just lucky for him he’d been in the emergency room a few minutes ago when Sergeant Olani came in.

He’d hung around in the hall while the cop talked to Hatcher, and then clocked out at the end of the shift, right after Jo-Nell Sims. Except instead of leaving, he’d waited until Dr. Hatcher left, then printed out a copy of the autopsy report she’d done. For a minute he’d thought maybe that was all he would give Dr. Jameson, but then he remembered the doctor talking about how the lungs looked funny. That was when he’d decided to collect a sample of the kid’s lungs, too.

Now, though, as he stared at the loose stitches Dr. Hatcher had used to close the huge Y-shaped cut she’d made to gain access to the interior of Kioki Santoya’s body, he wondered if he could actually do it. His hands were starting to shake, and he hadn’t even cut the thread.

Gripping the handle of the scalpel he’d picked up in the operating room, Elvis Dinkins steeled himself and bent closer.

One by one he sliced through the stitches, until the corpse’s torso was gaping open.

Elvis Dinkins gazed down at the jumbled organs that had been packed back into the body after the autopsy was completed. His stomach churned again, and he had to struggle to keep from throwing up right there. But as he sank the scalpel deep into the tissue of the left lung, he told himself it wasn’t much different from cutting up the liver his mother used to fry with onions.

His nausea eased a little.

A few seconds later he had hacked a piece of the lung out and dropped it into one of the plastic specimen jars he’d found in the same cabinet as the scalpel. Of course, he had no idea what Jameson might find in the sample, but he thought it might be important.

Really important.

And if it was …

As he slipped out of the hospital, Elvis Dinkins was already dreaming about the future. Maybe after he got a job working for Takeo Yoshihara, he’d find a new apartment.

Hell, if he was lucky, the contents of the plastic bag might change his whole life!

The thought that they might also end his life never entered Elvis Dinkins’s mind.