Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

“ For one, he's worried shitless that the girl's relatives are going to come after him, you know, the way we have, and if they do, they're not likely to be so gentle.”

“ What else?”

“ Just a lot of crap, Jim.”

Tony's guessing games sometimes annoyed Parry, who stared hard across at his subordinate now.

Gagliano finally said, “His pride.”

“ His pride? What the hell do we give a shit about this punk's pride?”

“ Nothing, just that you know… he goes to bed with her again-”

“ Again?”

“ After he'd learned she was tooting, after he'd had time to cool off.”

“ You don't think he's angry enough over this to kill her?”

“ Getting ahead of yourself, Jimbo. No, now he's had time to think, and he's asking himself how he really feels, down and deep, you see. Maybe it'd be kinky and fun to sleep with a dirtied, soiled dove, and Linda's a perfect way for him to find out. She takes on a whole new dimension since she's become a prostitute, more rounded, more complex, more interesting to his hapa Japa brain. Know what I mean?” Parry followed Tony's reasoning. “It's risky. She's taking risks with AIDS and all, and now he's taking risks.”

“ He gets a hard-on he didn't expect, a rush to jog his safe, little world.”

“ I see.”

“ Only, he doesn't want anyone to know that he's got back together with her, not on the outside, anyway. Still, her parents aren't completely blind, and it seems every kid at the college knows who's on and who's off who, just the same as they know who's on drugs, who's selling, and who's tooting whatever down at Waikiki.”

“ So when did Georgie last see her alive?”

“ Just a few days ago. Friends saw them together.”

“ Then maybe he did her.”

Tony frowned. “Don't think so, Chief.”

“ Why not?”

He continued shaking his head. “No stomach for it. He's Mr. Clean, like I said; Hawaii goes preppy.”

“ So that clears him?”

“ That and a lie detector, yeah, in my book.”

“ Lie detectors aren't foolproof. Anybody know we've questioned the kid?”

“ Not a soul. The test was done in an out-of-the-way fashion, strictly hit and run. I did the test myself working out of the case. Convinced Krueger to turn over the machine to me.”

“ Good… good,” replied Parry, popping a mint. “Keep it that way.”

“ I'm telling you, Chief, another go at this kid's a waste of time. And it could expose him to some ugly feelings in the community.”

“ Maybe, but I've got to ask him a few questions. After we're finished with the Kahalas, you can run me over there.”

“ Waste of time.”

“ Maybe, but perhaps I can shake loose something from the kid.”

“ Something I missed?”

“ Something you weren't aware of.”

“ Swears he knew nothing about how she was living in between the time he dumped her and last saw her.”

'Ted Bundy swore a lot of 'truths' too. Come on, Tony, the kid freakin' lied to you about the timing.”

Gagliano shrugged. “Whatever you want, Boss.”

“ What I want is some answers. So far, we got shit, Tony.”

“ What about the doctor lady? She come up with anything?”

Parry brought his agent up on the news from the lab. It was enough to light Tony's eyes up. “Then those kanaka cops were on to something. Too bad they failed to follow proper procedure.”

“ They were good men, Gag.”

“ First thing they ought've done was call in the damned plate. Had they done that, we'd have their killer, the Trade Winds Killer, locked away for life right now.”

“ Maybe there was a good reason they didn't call it in immediately. Plate might've been obscured.”

“ So they inspect the car instead?”

“ Yeah, like that and-”

“- and they find blood on the interior, maybe the girl's clothes, but before they can make another move, they're under fire.”

“ Like sniper fire from the brush. Never saw it coming.”

Both the FBI men had served in Viet Nam and both understood how sudden death could strike.

The time in and out with the Kahalas to inform them of the positive I.D. made on Linda's torn limb, making it a certainty that their daughter was at peace with her Maker, was a mere twelve minutes, but it seemed like an hour. The mother crumpled under the weight of the news, supported only by her husband, who also slid to the floor. In their dark house of mourning, the couple reminded Parry of the twisted, sad figure in Picasso's Blue Guitarist.

The FBI men left a card and quickly disappeared, leaving the grieving parents to themselves.

“ Get me to this Oniiwah kid,” Parry said in an acerbic voice.

Gagliano knew the tone and what it meant. He said nothing as he and Parry, boarding Tony's car together, drove for the University of Hawaii. After a few miles, Tony said, “The kid lives in the dorm. We may not catch him. Could be out at a pizza joint, a dance, a party, a rat's-ass gala, anything.”

'Tonight, Tony.”

“ We'll find him…”

Just then the usual clatter and clutter of the police ban radio in Tony's unit caught their attention, the dispatcher calling on a city squad car to investigate a disturbance on Paani near Kapiolani

Boulevard. It was coincidentally the same street on which the Kahalas lived and where Parry had left his car.

Each of the men looked at one another. “What do you think, Jim?”

“ Dispatch gave it a 10-6. Couldn't be anything too big. Let's push on for the college.”

As they did so, Parry thought of Linda Kahala's small, tight-knit community, thought of her hanging out on the corner at the drugstore where she and other children bought their crackseeds and Coca-Colas, thought about her walking the few blocks to Iolani School as a child, about her later catching the bus for Kapiolani Community College, which she'd attended for two years before going on to the university. She'd seemed a determined young woman with a plan. Parry had to know what had happened to end that plan.

They were now entering the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, its peaceful, serene setting at the base of the mountains where the lush, green blanket of the Honolulu Watershed Forest Preserve marked its boundary, making it appear a place where nothing bad in the world could ever happen. For the FBI men such a fantasy world did not exist; they knew that no matter the place, so long as there were people, evil was very much in attendance.

They located George Oniiwah, pudgy and smug, squatting in a rat's nest called Paniolo's, a cave into which the patron had to climb down and in, sheltered from any street light or noise. From the sign outside it was ostensibly a bar and grill that existed just off campus as a place for students to get a pizza and a beer, to shoot some pool and hang out. To Parry's trained eye it was much more than this.

Oniiwah sat in the gloom far to the rear and close to the pounding jukebox, which was blaring out the most recent death- metal tune, an ear-shattering mix of high-tech guitar, screams about sex with corpses and a pretty fair drum section. The lyrics would make any maniac proud.

Everyone in the place had marked the FBI men as exactly what they were the moment they'd entered the dark entrance to this lair: cops. Still, George feigned indifference and simply continued to sip his Hawaiian homeboy brew, a beer called Kona, with a girl at his side and another couple across from him.

An amorphous spirit floated about the place, going in and out of what little light was afforded by a Schlitz beer sign, cigarette smoke that'd been trapped there forever. Paniolo's, or Cowboy's, was outwardly a typical Hawaiian watering hole, its patrons' faces all dark-skinned and leathery. Tony knew a little bit about the owner, who had been a Hawaiian cowboy for years over on the island of Maui, working with free-range-fed cattle and horses there until he got tired of eating dirt. Before establishing himself here, he had been arrested on drug-trafficking, but he'd not served time due to technicalities brought about by an improperly obtained search-and-seizure warrant with probable-cause violations and violations against his civil rights. Since then, his lawyer, a man looking for places to invest, had set him up with the tavern.