Neil Plakcy - Mahu Vice

Since then, we’d gotten closer. I remembered one of the first conversations we’d had together on personal subjects. We were in my truck on our way back from a case-an old man whose pills had been tampered with by his son. The daughter was a lesbian, and she’d been our primary suspect until her brother had done something dumb that gave him away.

I said I worried that I’d bent over backward to think of the sister as innocent, because I empathized with her. I took a deep breath. “Because I’m gay, too.”

“No shit?” he asked. “That’s cool. My cousin Joey was my best friend growing up-we used to have a hell of a time together. He turned out to be gay.”

“You still in touch with him?”

Ray shrugged, and turned to look out the window. “Joey got it into his head when we were about twenty that he wanted to own an X-rated porno store. He used to say he wanted to sit behind the counter with his pants open, jerking himself off while the customers shopped.”

“Not a pretty picture.” I realized I had been gripping the steering wheel tight, and relaxed a little.

“He did some stupid stuff to raise the money. Started selling drugs, got killed. That was that for Joey.”

“Wow. Must have been tough for you.”

“That’s when I decided to be a cop,” he said, turning back to me. “I mean, I always knew cops growing up, had a few in the family, but I hadn’t been thinking about it for myself till then.”

I still didn’t talk much about my personal life to Ray, but he’d known I’d been burned by a guy in the past, and when I told him about my date with Dr. Phil he’d cheered me on.

We sat down at a rickety table in the malasada shop with a plate of hot, puffy donuts dusted with grainy white sugar and a pair of coffees, some funky Japanese pop music playing in the background. “So you remember I told you about that fire investigator I broke up with a couple of months after you started working at HPD?”

Ray had a mouthful of malasada, so he just nodded.

“And I never would tell you much about him, because he was so closeted? Well, that’s the guy. Mike.”

“You okay to work with him?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t really okay to work with Mike; just the short time we’d spent together had already shown me that there was still a lot of unfinished business between us-half machismo and half sexual tension. But I was going to have to get over it. “Don’t have much choice. He’s the fire department side of this, and I want to figure out who torched the center. My dad built a lot of that place with his own hands. That makes this personal. Plus there’s the boy.”

I told him about getting my hair cut on Saturday, and Jingtao. “You think that’s our victim?” Ray asked.

“Most likely. Hard to ID him, though.”

We finished the malasadas and coffee and walked back across the street, where Mike was making notes on a yellow legal pad, sitting on a folding chair under the tent. Though the wind had picked up, it was still brutally hot, the sunlight glaring off the windshield of a Menehune Water delivery truck parked across the street.

“I’ve still got to walk through the last two businesses,” Mike said, putting down his pad and capping his pen. “Want to walk it with me?”

“Sure.” I noticed that the vodka bottle was gone and wondered if that meant Mike had finished it. But as we walked toward the acupuncture clinic, I couldn’t see any evidence of intoxication. I’d been on road patrol early in my career, and seen a number of roadside sobriety tests given, and I’d seen guys I knew were completely drunk pass with flying colors. So just because Mike didn’t stumble or slur his words didn’t mean he wasn’t plastered.

As we walked, we went over the report from the crime scene techs, who hadn’t been able to find much. There was no evidence that Jingtao had been restrained in any way, no bullet holes in the remaining walls, no spent cartridges. The fire had done a very efficient job of burning what was flammable; what was left held few clues, if any.

We walked through the cell phone store, a scrap heap of mangled metal and plastic. The acupuncture clinic was the last step before we went back to the station, and I was eager to get it over with.

When I walked into the front room where there was a reception desk and a couple of chairs, I felt something was wrong. The place was too empty. Though the fire had begun behind the clinic, the wind had whipped it down the center before it could cause much damage. There had been no decoration on the walls beyond a couple of cheap posters of Chinese sights, and no personal items at all.

“See the stains on the floor tiles?” Mike asked, pointing to the strange outlines on the floor. “We call them ghost marks. They’re produced by dissolution and combustion of tile adhesive.”

While Mike and Ray surveyed the back of the building, analyzing the point of origin, I nosed around the reception area, looking for the stuff I expected to find-insurance forms, appointment books, and so on. Nothing. I found only couple of ballpoint pens, a deck of worn playing cards, and a box of rubber gloves in one of the drawers. Each of the three small treatment rooms was similarly barren-the remains of some built-in cabinetry, a tiny restroom with a single toilet.

“Looks like they pulled out,” Ray said, coming inside to join me. “You said your dad used to own the center, didn’t you? He know the current owners?”

“I’ll ask him. See what he can give us on all the tenants.”

Mike was behind him. “You know whether the center was profitable?”

“Last year, when my dad was sick, we all sat down and talked about money. Back then, the center was owned by a trust-with my parents as the trustees. No mortgage. My dad called it a cash cow, mostly income and little expense. But he’s getting older, and he wanted to sell off the real estate to make things easier for my mom in case anything happened.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t like thinking about the possibility that my dad would pass away. I relied on his quiet strength too much.

“He went to a shopping center convention in Arizona and hooked up with some big mainland company that was looking to expand here in the islands. I think he sold them seven properties in all. He walked away with cash, though I’m not sure what kind of financing they have.”

Ray was snooping around the inside of the acupuncture clinic while Mike was taking notes. “My sense is that the new owners are landlords rather than builders,” I continued, “so the place was worth more to them intact, even after the insurance.”

“Good information. Let me know if your dad knows anything else.” He hesitated for a moment. It felt like there was something charged in the air, and it wasn’t just the smoke. “Tell your folks I said hello.”

There it was. That sense that he had once been part of my life. “I will.”

“I’m going to stick around here for a while,” Mike said. “I’ve got a couple of the guys from the fire last night coming over to walk around some more with me, see what they remember. I need to do some calculations, figure out the fire load.”

“What’s that?” Ray asked, coming back to join us.

“The total amount of fuel that might be involved in a fire. I count up what was here in the building that might have been fuel. I figure out the origin of the fire, then I examine that spot for sources of ignition. Then I evaluate those ignition scenarios to see if they’re capable of creating sufficient heat energy to cause the fuel that was present here to burn.”

“We’ll leave all that stuff to you,” I said. “Science was never my strong point. You’ll call us with whatever you find?”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” Mike said.