Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

She kept one ancient bone fragment for comparison and carbon-14 dating later.

While she conducted this process, Jim worked on getting all their gear back to the chopper pad. He was pretty much finished when he found her at the Spout with the net filled with returnable bones. He helped her out over the ledge with her burden and together they lifted the net and allowed the bones to return to the outgoing waters via the Spout. Standing there, Jessica could imagine the ancients worshipping this place as sacred.

Each roaring plume of the geyser was an angry godlike outburst, a counterpoint to her quiet thoughts.

Several of the thigh bones and long bones of the arm and hand got caught up in the netting and refused to return to the sea so easily. Jim fished them from the net and one by one tossed these final fragments back into the sea. The entire time they both were drenched by the incoming tide as it flew into the funnel of the Spout and cascaded up and over them. Before it was over, they were soaking wet. They returned to the most likely usable bones from their cache and replaced them in the net. Jim carried these up along the winding trail with Jessica following.

“ I'll give you the background on the missing Maui women… kids really, all the medical papers, see if you can match any of the dental charts with the two skulls we've got.”

“ It should prove interesting,” she said from behind, watching her footing as they went, seeing now just how awfully treacherous both the terrain and the pukas hereabouts were. One hole in particular looked like the mouth of an enormous serpent just asleep below the earth, waiting patiently for a passerby to careen down into its gut. The bottom was mere darkness. She dared stare too long into this natural abyss, feeling a dizzying disorientation wash over her. Maybe she'd gone too long without a bite to eat, she thought, regaining her composure.

After the chopper's arrival, they flew on to Kahului, where they disembarked with all that belonged to them. A rental car awaited them at the airport, the bones carefully concealed in its trunk as quickly as possible to arouse no one's concern. While still on the helicopter, Jim had radioed authorities in Maui about the find and the likelihood it might prove connected with the Kowona case. He'd made arrangements for a field operative based on Maui to meet them at the airport and see personally to the careful boxing and transporting of the evidence to Lau's labs back on Oahu while Jessica drew up instructions for Lau to go along with the bones. Working with local authorities on Maui, Parry warned that Kowona could be somewhere on their island. Patrols were stepped up, everyone put on alert, and a surveillance team was sent out to monitor the area around the Spout for any sign of a man dumping any sort of strange parcels into the ocean there.

Lopaka Kowona, Jim was assured by one patrol officer, would not slip through the hands of the authorities on Maui as he had with those “fools” on Oahu.

“ That hurt,” Jim said to her when the transmission ended.

From the airport they drove to their next destination, a quaint cow town like something out of a movie set in the deserts around L.A., she thought. But even though there were hitching posts along the main street and horses tied to the posts, there were also Ford, Chevy and Dodge pickup trucks sporting gun racks and rifles through cab windows.

There were hardware stores, feed stores, millinery stores, grills, bars and taverns-she counted four within the two-block length of the little town of Makawao, where a banner proclaimed the date for the upcoming rodeo, to be held on July 4th, long since come and gone though the tattered banner waved on.

Everyone walking the concrete walks and onto the boarded steps of establishments here had chaps and boots, it seemed, and the cowboys were of every size, shape and ancestry.

“ What the hell is this?” she asked.

“ Kowona's home for a long time. He worked the Omaopio Ranch just outside of town here, same as Ewelo the Paniolo. People here will know Kowona, and maybe they'll talk.”

“ Let's do it, then. You want to canvass together or make a split?”

“ Together. We might be less threatening that way.”

“ Or more.”

“ Just follow my lead.” They got out of the car and instantly the locals pegged them as not the usual touristy couple. In fact, Jessica fit right in with her tomboy appearance, in two-day-old jeans, her hair stringy from the early morning dive, bruises showing on her arm as if her man had given her a good and deserved smacking around. She couldn't help but feel self-conscious, and it didn't help having the locals stare at them as if they were wearing horns. She wasn't wearing a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle or boots, and she didn't know how to square-dance, nor did she know the achy-breaky line dance. Over the saloon door a notice for tonight's dance was posted.

Parry, trying to fit in, actually sauntered to the bar, leaving her to traipse after in the best Western tradition, following her man like a heifer in heat. She wasn't sure she liked the role, even for a little bit.

“ Looking for some information,” Parry said to the man behind the bar.

“ Tourist booth is on down the road 'bout twelve miles when you come to-”

He flashed his badge. “I'm no tourist, Slim, and I know the island. I want to speak to you about a girl named Merelina.”

“ Merelina?”

“ Merelina Wailano, disappeared around here two and a half years ago, last in a line of seven young women on the island to disappear that season of the winds.”

The bartender breathed in deeply. “We know Lopaka Kowona's up on charges-”

“ He's not up on charges, mister. He's wanted and he's a fugitive. We charge him after we catch him.”

“ Well, either way, we heered 'bout all this, but nobody to my knowledge has seen that ol' boy 'round these parts.” The man behind the bar was white with a near black Hawaiian tan.

“ Get this, Slim. I want you to tell me what you hear. We know the creep's on the island, and if I find out he's been helped out here, this whole cowboy town of yours is going to be in deep shit. There'll be so much federal in here, you boys won't have much of any fun anymore playing shoot-ups and breaking nudity and gambling laws, not to mention drug laws.”

“ You sure as hell don't want that,” added Jessica, “do you?”

Several men who'd been seated at a nearby table, looking on and listening carefully to Parry's threats, began first to mumble among themselves, and then two of them kicked their way over in their crocodile boots.

“ We're with the Omaopio,” said one of the men in a deep, resonant voice. His ballcap sporting an emblem of a P within a circle. “Hain't no killing sonofabitch gonna dare set foot on the Circle P.”

The other, nodding, added, “We don't none of us hold with what this monster done to those women, and Lopaka'll know our feelings.”

“ He knows us boys.”

“ He knows we ever get hold of him here, we'd likely lynch the sonofabitch even b'fore you boys-and ladies”-he stopped to tip his hat-”could do a damn thing 'bout it.”

“ So you're saying he's not welcome here?” asked Jessica.

Parry leaned in toward the first man and conspiratorially said, “He's got no one here, not even family he'd turn to?”

“ Not at the Omaopio,” said the first cowboy.

“ And not in Makawao,” added the bartender as he wiped at the bar. “People here hate the son of a bitch. Brought nothing but shame on his hometown, so far's we're concerned. Like David Koresh in Texas and Jeffrey Dahmer in Wisconsin. I reckon if he was seen on the streets here, he'd be shot down like a dog, don't you, Hiram?” Hiram, a stocky Samoan cowboy who'd remained at the table, drinking sofdy from his less-than-foamy Kona beer, grunted and said, “This ain't his home no way. He come first from Molokai. I figah if anybody going take dat brah in, it be deah.”