Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

Nine-thirty, according to the clock on the cabin wall. That left him over an hour before the day’s clients, six Hemingway wannabe’s referred to him by Tahiti Nights Travel Agency (for the usual fifteen percent), showed up to spend a manly day on the high seas in pursuit of marlin and mahi-mahi. He just hoped nobody threw up on his beautiful, newly stained but not yet polyurethaned teak deck.

“Mornin’, Cap’n Jack, toss me a rope, I’ll tie you up.”

Teoni, waiting for him on the quay, was his one-man crew; reliable, competent, and unfailingly good-humored, even with problem customers-of whom there were many. Cap’n Jack had often wondered what it was about deep-sea fishing that brought out the worst in so many men. In Teoni’s opinion it was the result of the temporary absence of the civilizing influence of women, and Cap’n Jack thought it was as good a theory as any.

A final check of the ice chest (ham and cheese sandwiches, taro chips, beer, bottled water, fruit juice, apples and oranges, Twinkies, chocolate chip cookies), a quick look in at the head to make sure the toilet paper and paper towels were out and that it was generally ship-shape (by the end of the day, it sure wouldn’t be), a few unnecessary instructions to Teoni, and after flipping down his eye patch so as not to disturb squeamish passersby, he was off on his two-block walk to the Tiki Soft Internet Cafe for his morning coffee and a little surfing of the twenty-first-century variety.

Half an hour later, with a chocolate croissant and a heavily creamed and sugared coffee under his belt and a fresh cup on the table in front of him, he had checked and responded to the meager collection of e-mail in his inbox, had ordered two new rod-holders from Pomare Marine, and had opened his Favorites folder to relax for a final few minutes with “Upcountry Doings, Your E-News Update for North Hawaii.”

As usual, there was little in it of concern to him, but reading it was an ingrained habit by now and he scrolled dutifully through it, looking for names and places that rang a bell. He had already hit the PAGE DOWN key to scroll past “Sad News from the North Kohala Coast”-there wasn’t anything on the coast that interested him-when his mind registered a glimpse of the name “Torkelsson” in the body of the article.

Now that interested him.

He scrolled back up the page and read intently, his hand rhythmically stroking his beard, his coffee forgotten.

Sad News from the North Kohala Coast

The body of Dagmar Birget Torkelsson, one of our true pioneers, was discovered yesterday afternoon on the beach near her home at Hulopo’e Beach Estates. Ms. Torkelsson is believed to have died of injuries suffered in a fall. Kona police are investigating the matter.

Dagmar Torkelsson was eighty-two years old. She had lived on the Big Island since arriving from Sweden with her three brothers in the 1950s. Over the next forty years, this remarkable family created and slowly developed the Hoaloha Ranch above Waimea. Now broken up, the Hoaloha at one time represented a cattle empire second only to that of the Parker Ranch.

Ms. Torkelsson is survived by her nieces Hedwig Torkelsson and Inge Nakoa, and by her nephews Axel and Felix Torkelsson.

A private memorial service will be held Friday at the Waimea United Church of Christ, followed by an RSVP reception at the Waimea Community Center for family and close friends. Others wishing to pay their respects to the deceased are cordially invited to a public memorial and reception at the Center on Saturday at two P.M.

The old man finished his coffee, paid ten cents to print the article, put the gold-braided captain’s hat back on his head, and went thoughtfully back to his boat.

Unlike the West Hawaii police station in Kona, the headquarters of HPD-the Honolulu Police Department-are on a busy street in the heart of downtown. There is not a garbage dump or compost heap in sight. The building itself is large, handsome, and imposing: a white, four-story structure with banks of concrete steps leading up to the pillared entrance, thirty-foot palm trees at the corners, and a gleaming red-tiled roof. The lobby buzzes with activity and purpose, as in any big-city police department.

But two floors below the lobby, on Level B-2, where the Scientific Investigation Section-the only police crime lab in the Hawaiian Islands-is quartered, you wouldn’t be aware of any of this. There, white-coated criminalists, in their brightly lit but windowless quarters, go quietly about their work, bent over microscopes, spectrographs, and computer screens.

One such, Benjamin Kaaua, stared fixedly at the screen of his fingerprint-comparator, on which two magnified images were projected side by side. On the left was a print-not a fingerprint, but a greatly enlarged print from the base of the thumb of a left-handed leather glove-lifted from the face of a watch on the wrist of the old woman that had been killed. On the right was an equally enlarged image of a small portion of the same area from one of the four left-handed leather gloves that Fukida had obtained from two of the suspects in the case. The image on the left was steady. The one on the right changed as Kaaua periodically moved the card on the focusing platform below the screen. On the card were twelve tiny photographs of different parts of the glove’s surface. This was the second of three such cards for this glove, and he was now on the last of its twelve images. A similar process on the three cards for the other three gloves had produced nothing. Altogether, he had been on the machine for two hours without a break. The final image on the card didn’t match either, and the card was pulled from under its clip and set to the side.

Before inserting the last one, Kaaua stood up to get the blood flowing to his legs again, stretched, and walked around the table, working his head from side to side and squeezing his eyes shut. Time for a break, really, but with one card to go he was eager to finish up.

What he was doing-what criminalists spent most of their time doing-was applying the First Law of Criminalistics: No two objects in the universe are exactly alike. Even mass-produced objects or things made in a mold, while they might be extremely similar when new, would quickly become different. No two things ever wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever tear, or break, or get used, or rust, or get nicked in exactly the same way.

The leather of any cowhide glove, coming as it did from the skin of an animal, was different from every other cowhide glove that had ever been made or would ever be made. And once it had been used, there would be flexure creases, tension lines, wear-furrows, and scuffs that would make it even more observably unique.

So if this glove was indeed the same one that had left the print at the crime scene, there would be a visible match somewhere on the final card.

In theory.

The original print, the one from the watch face, was unusually clear, barely smudged, not at all the usual fuzzy smear. And Fukida, thanks to the course he’d taken at the FBI Academy, had known enough to look for it, and to realize it might be important when he saw it. He’d done a good job of lifting it, too, using superglue and dye stain. He’d lifted another print from the back of the bench Dagmar Torkelsson had been sitting on, but it was too indistinct for comparison.

Kaaua took his stool again, wrapped his feet around the base, rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, refocused on the final card’s first photo, and caught his breath. To be sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, he increased the magnification all the way up to twenty-seven times, then way down to three so he could look at a wider area. He flicked off the light and hummed happily to himself.