The Fire Thief

Book 1: Dark Paradise Mystery

by Debra Bokur

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Under a promising morning sky, police captain Walter Alaka'i makes a tragic discovery: the body of a teenage surfer bobbing among the lava rocks of Maui's southeastern shore. It appears to be an ill-fated accident, but closer inspection reveals something far more sinister than the results of a savage wave gone wrong. Now that Alaka'i is looking at a homicide, he solicits the help of his niece, Detective Kali Mahoe.

The granddaughter of one of Hawaii's most respected spiritual leaders, and on the transcendent path to becoming a kahu herself, Kali sees evidence of a strange ritual murder. The suspicion is reinforced by a rash of sightings of a noppera-bo—a faceless and malicious spirit many believe to be more than superstition. When a grisly sacrifice is left on the doorstep of a local, and another body washes ashore, Kali fears that the deadly secret ceremonies on Maui are just beginning.

To uncover a motive and find the killer, Kali leans on her skills at logic and detection. But she must also draw on her own personal history with the uncanny legends of the islands. Now, as the skies above Maui grow darker, and as she balances reason and superstition, Kali can only wonder: Who'll be the next to die? And who—or what—is she even on the trail of?

Release date: May 26, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 189

Sample

Police captain Walter Alaka’i struggled for footing in the warm, waist-deep water. In front of him, revealed by the morning light, the body of seventeen-year-old Kekipi Smith bobbed back and forth with the current, no longer encumbered by the constraints of will or desire. The deep gash in his skull had long since ceased to bleed, washed clean by lonely hours spent drifting along the ragged beach beneath the last shard of February moon. The boy’s eyes were half open, as though he were struggling, out of politeness, to stay awake.

Walter braced himself as a wave crashed in, then drew away, tugged by the invisible force of the tide. The naupaka blossoms in the dense coastal bushes caught his eye—fresh, gentle, wrenchingly out of place this morning. He backed carefully toward the dense mangrove roots behind him in the shallow cove of water that had pooled between the scissory lava rocks along Maui’s southeastern shore. With his right hand, he grasped one of Kekipi’s ankles, and did his best to keep the body from jolting against the rocks and gnarled labyrinth of twisted tree roots as each incoming wave lifted it and pushed it forward.

There was a thud, thud, thud of running footsteps beating against the heavy sand along the shore, followed by a soft splash as Officer David Hara slid into the water behind him. Hara averted his eyes from the face staring up from the sea to the cloudless sky, and Walter noted how he kept just out of reach of the floating arm that stirred with the moving current.

“Reinforcements here?”

Hara nodded. “Coming down the hill now, sir, with the stretcher. Photographer’s with them, but the coroner says she’s about a half hour out if she gets on the road before the tourists. She said to go ahead and pull him out when we’re through, since it’s an accident.” He hesitated. “And that old fisherman who called it in is waiting for you at the top of the hill path.”

“Okay. Tell him to stay put until I’ve had a chance to talk to him. Surfboard’s just past the entrance to the cove, washed up in some kiawe roots,” said Walter. “I’ll stay here with the body. Be sure they get photos of the board.”

The tip of an orange surfboard jutted from a clump of thick brush about fifty feet away. Walter’s eyes locked on the board, and he calculated the facts at hand. The entire scene clearly implied the savage results of a wave gone wrong—an innocent surfing expedition turned fatal. Walter shook his head. It was not the first surfing death he’d seen over the years, and he was fully aware that it was unlikely to be the last.

He braced for the next wave as Hara scrambled past him, using the snarl of roots and branches to pull himself onto higher ground. The current from the receding wave tugged at the body. From the shore, there was the sound of movement, then voices. The branches were pushed aside, and hands reached out. Walter kept his hold on one ankle as the police photographer recorded the morning’s unfortunate discovery, not letting go until the medics had taken over and had hauled both the sodden body and Walter from the sea.

The sky above was regrettably blue, given the events occurring below. The boy was wearing swim trunks, and his brown, tanned torso and feet were bare. Walter watched, dejected, as the slender remains were maneuvered onto a stretcher waiting on a patch of thick grass, then covered over with a thin sheet.

Along the water’s edge, the police photographer moved away from the spot where the surfboard had been jammed. He paused briefly as he passed Walter. “All yours, brah.”

Walter grumbled. He looked back to where Hara was waiting next to the stretcher, then to the spot where the medics stood. They had walked away, down the beach, and Walter was aware that they were deliberately avoiding making eye contact with him. “You expect me to pull that damn thing out of the water?”

The photographer shrugged. “Not like you’re going to get any wetter, you know? Give the rest of us a break.”

Walter sighed. It was true. There wasn’t a dry inch of him to be found. He edged himself back into the sea, then took a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface and came up with the board resting on one shoulder. He struggled over the sharp rocks, scraping his arms and legs, his bulky frame not designed for this much physical activity, especially not this early in the day.

He carried the board to where Hara stood, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. Walter ignored him, doing his best not to be bothered by Hara’s persistent discomfort in his presence. Every junior officer who had ever worked for him had exhibited the same nervous response, and though Hara had been under Walter’s supervision for nearly four months, he was clearly not going to be an exception.

No practical experience, but clearly eager to learn, thought Walter. Maybe too eager. At twenty-three, Hara was an absolute pain in the ass. And, in Walter’s estimation, he was far too good-looking to be a cop. Wherever he went, it seemed that a small parade of women magically appeared in his wake. Walter had just enough sense of self to admit that he found this to be more exasperating than anything else.

“Captain, there’s something . . . well, something you should take a look at in here. What I mean is, sir, I think you might want to—”

Walter held up an impatient hand. “What is it, Hara?”

“The body, sir.”

Walter sighed. “Just spit it out, please.”

“Well,” Hara began, confused. “The head wound . . .”

Walter walked past him without saying anything more.

The body lay silent, the legs slightly splayed out, permanently stilled. Hara moved to the top of the stretcher, then pulled the sheet aside and pointed to the wound. “Looks like the bone around the cut is crushed, sir.”

Walter frowned. He stared in silence, considering the inference. “And? He hit those lava rocks and split his skull open with the impact of coming off the board, most likely.”

“Except for this, sir.” Hara stepped to the side, pointed at the gash. Walter bent closer and peered at the wound. There was something there, embedded in the edge—something shiny and white caught in the flesh.

Walter glanced at the medics, now standing at the edge of the water engaged in conversation, their sensitivity dulled through necessity and long years of recovering drowning victims. He pulled a pair of wet gloves from deep in his back pocket and slipped them on.

“Flashlight,” he said, his voice terse.

Hara fumbled at his belt and removed a small, powerful penlight.

“Angle it right here . . . no, more to the left.”

Walter studied the uneven opening in the skin, probing gently at the edges, speaking to himself. Hara stood beside him, still fidgeting.

Walter shook his head in confusion. “Well, I’ll be damned. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a man tooth.”

“That’s what I thought, too, sir. But what’s a shark’s tooth doing in his head? That wound isn’t a bite. If he cracked his head open on the lava rocks while he was surfing, why would there be a tooth in the flesh? And wouldn’t a shark have, well, eaten some of him? Wasn’t—”

Walter held up his hand again, muting a vexed Hara. “Calm down, Hara.” Walter peered off toward the distant haze of horizon. “That’s all true, but it makes no sense.”

Hara took a deep breath, then gestured to the surfboard lying nearby. “And the surf leash is still connected to the board but not fastened to his ankle.”

Frowning, Walter squinted more closely at the wound. Were his powers of observation slipping? Hara had made a good point about the surf leash, not that Walter saw any good reason to acknowledge it immediately. The fact that the leash’s Velcro collar hadn’t been secured around the boy’s ankle was odd, as the cost of surfboards made leashes a practical necessity for recovering one after a fall. If he was correct about his unofficial identification of the body as local surfer Kekipi Smith, he knew that the family included five children and that a good surfboard had likely been a luxury.

Something stirred in Walter, and his voice lost its edge of sternness. “Right, then,” he said. “Something here isn’t adding up.” He turned to Hara and nodded. “Good observation, Hara. Time for Detective Mhoe to get her tattooed-warrior ass over here. Let me have your cell phone. Mine’s over there on the beach somewhere. You can look for it while I’m talking.”

Hara handed over his phone and stepped toward the edge of land that fell away to the cove where the body had been found. Walter punched in his niece’s familiar number, beginning the climb up the steep path leading from the sea to the parking area above. She needed to see the body in the full context of its surroundings, before it was taken away, while the boy’s ‘uhane, or spirit, was still lingering in the place where he had died.

“And tape off this area,” Walter yelled after Hara’s retreating back. “We might have a crime scene on our hands.”

Detective Kali Mhoe stretched her fingers down as far as possible, her lean, muscled legs wrapped around the thick lower branch of the old mango tree in her yard in the small village of Nu’u, near Hana. She could almost touch the ground with the tips of her middle fingers, where the ends of her long ebony hair mingled with the thick grass at the tree’s base. From her upside-down position, the horizon was reversed, and she watched as a bug labored through the green blades toward the edge of ocean-sky.

Kali had spent a lot of time in this tree when she was a child, dreaming of the day when she’d be tall enough to reach the ground, and being warned by her grandmother from the front porch that not only was tree climbing unladylike, but it was also a guarantee of broken bones. She smiled to herself. Her thirty-fifth birthday had just passed, and she’d yet to break anything.

Being outside, hanging from the tree, was far preferable to being indoors, sitting at the wooden kitchen table, which doubled as her desk. She’d been up for hours, and things were not progressing well with the presentation she’d been working on, which was to be given in conjunction with an adult night course the following spring at the University of Hawaii’s Maui College. Besides her detective status with the Maui Police Department, she held a degree in cultural anthropology and was a recognized specialist in the cultural and spiritual traditions of Hawaii—a unique insight and perspective that often proved useful in her role as a detective.

Her grandmother, the renowned author and historian Pualani Pali, had left her this house and, by extension, the mango tree. It was also Pualani who had identified Kali as her community’s next kahu, a spiritual leadership role traditionally handed down from grandparent to grandchild, which had been revealed to the older kahu by subtle signs that included Kali’s natural interest in plants, her rapport with animals, and her dreams and visions, which were often layered. Pualani had confirmed Kali as her family’s next kahu when she was five years old, after Kali had insisted that a sea turtle had warned her of a coming tsunami, which had indeed arrived soon after, with deadly flooding.

She pulled herself upright, grasping an upper branch, and dropped gracefully to the ground. The movement caused her dog, Hilo—the enormous offspring of a Weimaraner and a Great Dane—to raise his head briefly from his stretched-out position in a patch of sunshine.

The water beyond the lawn was tinged with grayish green. Bobbing gently on its surface was an old fishing boat badly in need of a new coat of paint. The name Gingerfish could just be made out along the length of the stern, and Kali felt a familiar sense of relief to see the boat still at anchor where she’d left it. Walter had purchased it from a friend moving to the mainland, and Kali had offered to let him keep it at the rickety dock at the edge of her property. Walter spent a great deal of his free time aboard in a comfortable deck chair, plucking away at a vintage ukulele, while she continued to point out the need to replace the aging anchor chain. So far, the only measurable progress was the amount of rust that had accumulated along its length.

The dog trotted beside her as she walked across the lawn to the cluster of papaya trees that separated her three-acre property from the neighbor’s yard. She reached for a ripe fruit, then twisted it slightly until it came loose in her hand. There was a hlau partially obscured by the papaya trees’ branches. The small shelter, with its roof of dried palm fronds, offered minimal protection to the unfinished canoe resting on sawhorses beneath it, caught forever in its half-carved form, unlikely ever to be completed.

Kali looked away from it, afraid of stirring up the memories it carried of her late fiancé, Mike Shirai. She took the papaya inside, placed it on the kitchen counter, then opened the refrigerator door and gazed idly inside. There was some rice and shrimp from yesterday’s dinner and a bowl of limp sliced pineapple that should have already been eaten.

The papaya, she decided, would have to do for breakfast. While coffee brewed, she cut open the fruit. The soft orange-hued interior was filled with dark seeds that ran the length of its center, and she scraped these from their nest. The juice trickled onto the counter as she placed the halves on a plate.

Plate in one hand and coffee mug in the other, she passsed the kitchen table where her computer hummed and pushed open the screen door. She made her way out onto the lanai, which ran along the front and one side of the small house. The sky was growing lighter as the morning progressed. She walked softly along the wide porch and settled into the threadbare cushions on a wooden deck chair, her legs tucked beneath her, then scooped up the sweet flesh of the papaya fruit with a spoon.

The sea spread out before her. The calls of gulls and the wash of waves against the shore were usually soothing, but this morning the sounds failed to relieve the sense of restlessness that troubled her. She hadn’t slept well, having woken during the dark early hours that had yet to give birth to the dawn. Something was out of balance, and she knew it as surely as she knew the cloudless morning sky would be filled with rain clouds before evening arrived. Just as she had felt the approaching tsunami when she was five years old.

Kali sighed, adjusting her legs beneath her on the cushion. She had just eaten the last of the papaya when her phone rang, harsh and intrusive. Still holding the plate, she went inside and located the phone on the small table next to her sofa. As she lifted the phone, it slipped between her fingers, skittered across the wooden floor, and landed between a ceremonial drum and a spear gifted to her years before by a visiting New Zealand elder. She bent over, careful to avoid knocking over the spear, and retrieved the phone. As she pressed the button to accept the call, the plate fell from her other hand and broke into pieces as it struck the floor. She looked around the small room uneasily.

The voice on the other end of the phone was familiar—the deep, resonant tones of her uncle, Walter. “Aloha, Kali. You okay? Sounds like you’re throwing things around.”

Kali took a deep breath. Walter sounded oddly strained. “Not yet, but it’s still early in the day. What’s up?”

There was a tense pause on the line. “Well, I hate to drag you away from whatever it is you’re not doing, but we’ve got a body down here on the beach. No positive ID yet, but I’m pretty certain it’s Kekipi Smith, Anna Smith’s eldest son. She made a call last night to say he hadn’t come home, and it looks like he drowned down there off the cliffs near Haleakal National Park, probably sometime late yesterday. Surfboard washed up nearby, so it appeared to be an accident.”

Kali frowned, tightening her grip on the phone. “Appeared?”

Walter’s voice was carefully noncommittal. “Well, seemed that way to begin with. But now something’s turned up that doesn’t make any sense.” His voice wavered, but just for a second. “Can you get over here and have a look before we send him off?”

Kali’s eyes darted back to the sea, just visible through the window. A dull malaise fluttered behind the bones of her chest.

Walter spoke into her silence. “I’m not feeling good about this. I’ll explain when you get here, but we’re treating it as a suspicious death. There are elements that put it right in your wheelhouse.”

She closed her eyes and felt a shadow leaping into the darkness.

“Okay. I’m on my way.”

She picked up her keys and headed out into the sunlight. Hilo followed, pushing the screen door open with his nose. He jogged close beside her, his long body bumping against her legs. She reached down with one hand, patted his head briefly, already lost in the story she was about to hear.

There was a rough clearing at the top of the hill overlooking the beach. Watched by a disappointed Hilo from his spot on the front passenger seat, Kali left her battered, doorless Willy’s Jeep on the sandy ground beneath the trees. She made her way through the damp, heavy grass toward Walter, where he stood next to an elderly fisherman. She recognized the older man instantly: Sam Hekekia, who’d lived on this stretch of coastline for as long as she could remember. She glanced at his face. He looked deeply forlorn, his fishing nets resting in tangled piles on the ground beside his feet.

It had been Sam’s phone call earlier that morning that had alerted the police to the body, setting in motion the dark events now playing out on the sunlit beach below. Sam stood quietly, holding a dented aluminum travel mug. He lifted it and took a sip of cold coffee as Kali exchanged glances with Walter.

“Not my idea of the best way to start the day,” Sam said, frowning. He raised a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the sun’s glare, and looked out over the water. “Doubt the fish will come back here for a long while. They’ll see the boy’s spirit and swim away.”

Walter nodded slowly. Kali could see that he was nearly as dejected as Sam.

“You’re probably right,” Walter agreed.

“We’ll do a ceremony, Sam,” said Kali, smiling at him with what she hoped was reassurance. “You’ll see. We’ll make an offering to Kuula. You know that he takes good care of fishermen. He’ll make sure your fish will come back.”

“Maybe,” said Sam, still looking doubtful. “Maybe when you do the ceremony, you can ask Kuula to tell the fish to bring their friends. My nets are never full these days.”

He waited quietly on the hill, looking at them expectantly. Kali and Walter said nothing.

“I watched that young policeman down there putting up tape,” Sam said, gesturing toward the beach, his voice flat. “I know what that means. I watch those television shows, you know.” He cleared his throat, turning toward Kali and Walter with a questioning glance. Still receiving no response, he reached down and gathered his nets, then turned toward the road.

“Okay. I’m going now. You call me if you need anything.” He stopped, his lined face clearly disappointed. “Not that there’s anything else to say. I walked down to the water, and there he was. Heard nothing, saw nothing, smelled nothing. Just the boy, caught up in the rocks.”

“Thank you, Sam,” said Walter, his voice solemn. “But if you do think of anything . . .”

“We’ll talk later, okay?” Kali smiled again.

Sam nodded, then trudged away, his nets thrown over his shoulder.

Kali looked poi. . .