Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

“ Ahonui!” shouted the old man.

“ That he has infinite patience.”

“ He's a stalker,” she agreed, “and he knew those he killed, and it's possible they were cannibalized to some degree.”

“ Says he eats by using cutting blades and sometimes tears with teeth, and that he eats under taboo, yet he eats freely, ignoring taboo, without observing them.”

The old man muttered in his native tongue.

“ What else is he saying?” Jessica asked.

“ Either that Great Uncle wants a present of cooked taro in ti-leaf bundles, or that you face a difficult problem, a mystery.”

“ He's got that right.”

“ Aka' ula… akiu ala kai…” continued the old man in a monotone.

“ He is speaking now of you,” said Kaniola.

She exchanged a look with Joe Kaniola, who said, “You search for answers, seek, probe, a medical person, but what you seek is a red shadow like the sunset. You can not touch it though you see it before you.”

“… alaula ala'ula… aloalo. 'ale'ale ho'i alelo.”

“ He says a canoe will take you to a flaming road in a land filled with hibiscus where no one will know your tongue-a land of kings.”

Was he describing the Rainbow Tower where I'm staying? Jessica wondered, surprised at her own jaded and suspicious nature. Still, she'd become captivated by the old man's “second sight,” predictions and native charms such as they were.

Kaniola listened intently for his great-granduncle's next words. There was a long silence and the old man looked faint, about to give in to his fatigue when he bellowed out yet another stream of words.

“ 'Au ho'au. Doctor… 'auamo, 'au'a.”

Kaniola was reluctant to translate, but Jessica insisted he do so.

“ He asks you a direct question, about your cane.” Kaniola indicated the cane at her side.

“ What about it?” She feared he was asking after it as an offering, a gift for his services. She hadn't seen a basket to toss folding money into.

“ He says you are a strong swimmer in the sea, that you need no handle or staff or stem, that it is a burden to you, but you are stingy and won't part with it.”

She gripped her cane tighter and asked Kaniola to ask the old man one question.

“ Yes?”

“ Ask him how many times will the red shadow kill?”

“ Ehia. Great Uncle, ehiaV

“ 'Ehiku,” came the quick answer.

“ Don't tell me,” she said, raising a hand, “seven?”

Kaniola nodded. The old man said, “ 'Ehu, 'eho kino, nuinui kino.”

“ What's that?”

“ He says all the bodies are below the spray, stacked like stone markers, many, many bodies.”

“ How many years has the killer stalked victims?”

“ 'Ehiku.”

“ Seven again.”

The old man then told a tale of a chief whose son was bom with many problems, from asthma to diseases that left the child crippled and deformed. The child looked like an old man who'd had a stroke. The chief adopted a foster child, a well-formed child, and had this child take the place of his only male child. With the new child in place, the chief brooded and feared that the evil-looking, obviously cursed son would infect his new son. When the sickly boy grew ill in a new bout of suffering, the chief drunkenly took hold of him and carried him out in a storm into the forest, where he destroyed the child, using a ceremonial blade. Later, telling his people that the boy had wandered away and had been mangled by the beasts of the forests, he had the body taken to the village dump, claiming it to be cursed, and had it burned in a ceremony to defeat the devils that plagued his royal house. The bones were cast into the sea, an act of disdain, an ignominious end for a Hawaiian soul. He did so before the eyes of his adopted child.

Over the years, as the adopted child grew, it became more and more apparent that while this well child did not show any physical signs of disease, he was morally and spiritually crippled in ways unapparent until one looked into his cold blue eyes.

Kaniola added, almost as an afterthought, “This child was banished from the life of the commune when his father discovered that he had killed a girl child younger than himself.”

Jessica now stared from Joe to the old man, who was slowly climbing from his trance state.

“ Are you saying that our killer is this same child? Or is this a quaint Hawaiian parable?”

“ I cannot say,” replied Kaniola. “I have heard this tale in many guises. It is possible it may be just a parable, as you say.”

She asked the old man outright, and Kaniola put it to him in Hawaiian.

“ It is truth at least in one eye,” whispered the old man in English.

Whose eye? she wondered. His or the killer's?

“ This child… today he is a ho 'o-haole ia as his people say, and they banished him.”

“ A ho 'a-what?”

“ He apes the white people, became Americanized by the white schools and books,” said Joe, “kina like me, hey, Great Uncle?”

“ I don't suppose you have a name for this boy?” she asked.

“ Lo-paka.” The old man spewed the name with spittle.

“ Lopaka?”

“ That is how it come to me, yes.”

“ It is what you Americans and English call Robert,” said Kaniola.

“ He once on Maui lived… cowpuncher,” said Lomelea. Here was another clue that Terri Reno's Robert and Ewelo were connected. Joe pursued this. He spoke to his great-granduncle for a moment in native Hawaiian, leading him toward Ewelo, Jessica recognizing only the name.

“ Paniolo, yes… yes,” replied the old man unmistakably, “cowboy… cowboy…”

Joe frowned and now asked the old man if there was anything else he might want to add.

The old man, by now extremely weary, shook his head, pulled himself from the lotus position he'd assumed and, with Joe's help, found his hammock. Jessica knew that much of what the old man had said about the killer might easily have been surmised from Kaniola or other sources, yet there was something genuine about Lomelea. And could it be purely coincidental that Terri Reno's strange admirer had called him self Robert? It was information Parry had withheld from the press release.

Jessica went to the old man and extended her cane to him, his eyes lighting up in response. He rubbed the silver handle between his hands appreciatively and pointed to his wall. He had already selected a place of prominence to display the gift.

Mid-morning, the same day

It is at times like this that Lopaka Kowona feels most closely to Kelia again. Again he has her where he can control her; again he has total domination over her. He can do anything to her body; he can even make love to her body again now, if he so chooses.

Waking from the best sleep he'd had since the last Kelia, he stares up at her remains, her eyes staring vacantly back at him, her flesh crisscrossed with blood rivulets, the surface of her creamy skin looking now as if it had been turned inside out. Silently her weight tugs against the restraints and the rack sags; even in death, she fights her fate, she wants down.

He wants to see her come down now, too. Down and out of here, in fact. But how? His car is useless, and if he has it towed and repaired, the bullet hole in the gas pan could easily be a beacon to police after last night's near capture. He needs to know what's going on outside.

He switches on the TV in hope of finding out any information, but he has missed all the news broadcasts. It's mid-morning.

He flicks off the TV set and tries the radio. He switches from station to station for any information. He gives up, leaving on KBHT, Hawaii's hottest rock station, the D.J. spinning “Give Me That Or Time Rock 'n' Roll.”