Elysium Tide Read online

  “You’re a brilliant surgeon. Playing dense doesn’t suit you.”

  “But it’s fine for Barbara?”

  “There,” Nigel said, pointing at him. “That’s the problem. Your mouth.” He dropped into his chair. “Really, Peter. You don’t have to say every odd thing that comes into your head. And you’re always so dark. On your theater recordings, for instance, you often introduce your colleagues as accomplices.”

  Peter looked out the window toward Greenwich. Nigel had quite the view. He gave his boss the slightest shrug. “So?”

  Nigel spread his hands. “It’s a term for murderers.”

  “A bit of gallows humor. Nothing more.”

  “Then why do I never see you laugh?” Nigel sat back and sighed. “Your negativity is not healthy. I’ve let it go in the past, but today you became a liability.”

  For the first time in the conversation, Peter met his boss’s gaze. “A liability? For kicking Barbara out of the theater after she nearly killed a child?”

  “Barbara was not the only one to lodge a complaint—or rather, she nearly wasn’t. The Firths spoke to me about you.”

  “Who on earth are the Firths?”

  “Michael’s parents, you numbskull.” Nigel shook his head. “Perhaps you really aren’t playing dense. Gwen Firth, Peter. She’s the woman who slapped you across the face fifteen minutes ago. And an hour ago, you pushed a probe into her child’s brain. The least you could do is learn her name.” He stood and paced before his nine-foot-tall windows. “The father”—he glanced over his shoulder—“Harry Firth, told me he’s grateful you saved their son, but he believes you are, quote, ‘a menace to your patients and your colleagues.’ He demanded the hospital put you under administrative review.”

  Peter finally sat in the chair. No patient or patient’s family member had ever complained about him—not to his knowledge. Had Nigel prompted them? Was this some kind of vendetta? He had his suspicions. “Neither of the Firths work for the NIH, Nigel. Of that, I’m certain. So, how did Mr. Firth know about the administrative review process?”

  “How should I know? The internet?”

  Peter frowned. “And you said . . . ?”

  “I reminded him once more that you were the one who identified the tumor in the first place and subsequently saved Michael’s life.” Nigel stopped his pacing at the center of the picture window—a polar bear in a suit, framed by gray sky and urban London. “And then I assured him I would deal with you.”

  Deal with you. That didn’t sound promising. “What’s it to be? The gallows at Tyburn? Drawn and quartered in the Old Palace Yard? Or worse yet, community service?”

  Nigel’s usual bear-with-a-honey-pot expression turned as grave as Peter had ever seen it.

  “Hawaii, Peter. I’m sending you to Maui, and there’s no way you’re going to weasel out of it this time.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  THE ELYSIUM GRAND RESORT

  WAILEA, MAUI

  LISA KEALOHA CLIMBED the metal steps from the general admission bleachers to the VIP platform, reading faces as she went. While the spectators watched the blue-green water off the resort’s beach, Lisa watched them. She hadn’t seen any threats so far—just one kid having an allergy attack, which had been enough to clear a small space in the benches around him.

  A horn sounded behind her, and she heard the splash of a competitor hitting the water. At the edges of her vision, the twin giant screens bracketing the crowd showed a freediver shooting through a series of wickets and hoops, propelled by a monofin. A tethered underwater camera drone chased her deeper and deeper as the course led her farther offshore.

  Lisa reached the top of the steps and turned her attention to a tanned individual in a pink polo and white Bermudas. He was seated with the resort owner, Harry Alcott, and his wife at one of several white tables. Jack Carlisle. Maui’s newest VIP. The chief had directed her captain to have someone check on him. As the senior detective on site, Lisa had drawn the short straw. “Good morning, Mr. Carlisle.” She scanned the faces on the green lawn behind the platform as she spoke. “Enjoying the show?”

  “Immensely,” he said, sinking his Dallas drawl into the center of the word. “The Hawaiian Freediving Association has something fresh and new here, far more exciting than the last five decades of holding your breath and going up and down a rope. I’m happy to be a sponsor.”

  “And I’m sure they’re grateful for your investment. The whole island is.”

  That earned her a chagrined smile. “Not the whole island. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”

  An overstated point. Mr. Carlisle had received threatening social media messages and comments after purchasing more than thirty thousand acres of defunct sugarcane fields at the foot of the West Maui Volcano and stretching into the island’s central valley. But Carlisle could take care of himself, as evidenced by the two bulky locals posted barely three paces from his table.

  He offered her a chair opposite his guests. “Care to join us? Your chief told me his forces arrived on-site before sunup. By now, you must be starving. And ever since I bought my villa here at Mr. Alcott’s new resort”—he gave a token nod to the white-haired man seated next to him—“the staff won’t stop bringing me food.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but no. As you said, I need to focus on my reason for being here.” A different reason than babysitting you, she didn’t say. “Any new threats?”

  “Read the comments on our Ono Beef Instagram feed and see for yourself.”

  Not worth her time. Mostly idle chatter and overstatement from the armchair warriors of Maui’s environmental scene. “The evidence team is monitoring all your social media. They’ll call me if necessary. What I meant was, have you received anything specific—phone calls, emails, direct confrontations at your hotel—anything to make me think a crazed detractor might take a shot at you?”

  “Take a shot at me? Oh, dear. Now you do have me worried.” The flatness of his expression told her just the opposite. This guy was in no danger. And bodyguards aside, he himself didn’t seem to believe he was in danger.

  Lisa made a note to have the captain thank the chief for wasting her time when she had bigger concerns. “Enjoy the show, Mr. Carlisle. And give the chief my regards.” She walked to the back of the platform, making sure she was out of Carlisle’s earshot, and raised a radio to her lips. “Patrol, you find my boy yet?”

  “Been asking around. Nothing yet, Sis.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Call me Detective at work, Officer Kealoha.” From the elevated platform, she saw her brother right where she expected to find him, at the Hula Dog truck picking some free snacks—grindz as the locals called them. “Don’t make me tell you again.” She switched to an accent she had left dormant for a long time. “Now put down da kine grindz and keep lookin’.”

  “Sure, sure, Detective. I give you a shout if I see Koa, ya? Patrol, out.”

  She held her position and searched the beach crowd crammed against a rope line thirty feet from the water—a collective living, pulsating organism, growing by the minute as more pushed in to see the local favorite Kelly Alana. Finding her target among all that movement was no easy task.

  Show your face for me, Koa. I just want to talk. No arrests today, unless you do something dumb.

  The post-calamity tourism boom had brought business and jobs back to Hawaii. It had also brought gangs from San Francisco and Los Angeles, causing an uptick in crime on the islands, with Maui experiencing a huge spike in auto theft. Those thefts had brought Lisa back.

  It had been a strange homecoming, given her past. As a teen, she’d had a less-than-friendly relationship with the Maui PD. After six years away, five in the LAPD, she’d been invited by the Maui Investigative Services Bureau to head up their Criminal Investigative Division’s GTF—their gang task force.

  Kelly’s slot is coming up, Koa. You’re not going to miss your cousin’s dive, are you?

  There. She saw him
at the north end of the rope line, hiding among the taller tourists. He had his eyes down, but the buzz cut and tattoos were just as she remembered.

  “Patrol, I’ve got eyes on our boy. North end, at the rope. Get there, but don’t show yourself.”

  Don’t show yourself. What a thing to say to Pika. Trying to hide one of her oversize brothers in a crowd was like trying to hide a mako shark in a school of mackerel. And Pika was the smaller of the two.

  After three weeks on the island, Lisa had to make some headway—to score a win for her captain so he could justify her presence to the chief. More than that, she wanted to show those who’d come up in the local department that she deserved this job, especially those who’d known her when she was a kid on the wrong side of the badge.

  Lisa needed an in with the local criminal element. And she’d grown up with the perfect candidate—Koa Alana, the cousin that Kelly Alana saw more as a brother. She always had, even though he’d dragged both Kelly and Lisa into a lot of trouble over the years.

  Lisa stayed close to the rope on her approach, minimizing Koa’s view angle, but he’d always had sharp eyes. He saw her coming. “Hey, Sistah. I heard you back. Didn’ believe it ’til now.”

  “Don’t run, Koa.”

  “You see me runnin’? I don’t care if you some big, scary LA cop now. I don’t care where you been.”

  Funny, because he did look scared. Lisa had overtaken him in height after ninth grade, but Koa had always seemed bigger than her. Until now. She lifted the rope to let him through, and he came, glancing back at the tourists with a smile like he was some kind of celebrity.

  “So you haven’t been ducking me?” Lisa asked. “That’s weird, because I’ve been asking around for three solid weeks.”

  “Then you must not be too good at your job, eh, Sistah? ’Cause I been around the whole time.”

  Her brother came up from behind, a head taller than the rest of the crowd.

  If Koa saw him, he didn’t show it. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout you lookin’ for me. You wanna talk, jus’ call.” He shrugged. “No big ting.”

  “Yeah. Right. What’ve you been up to since I left? Any new friends?”

  Koa kicked the sand with a bare toe and gave her a laugh. “Wow. You serious? Jumpin’ straight to ‘Turn snitch for me, Koa.’ Too bad for you. I ain’t like that. I keep true to my ʻohana, not like you an’ that big dumb whale standin’ behind me.”

  So, he had seen Pika. Good old Koa. Eyes in the back of his head. Years ago, those eyes had saved Lisa and others from spending their nights in Maui’s youth detention center. But Lisa didn’t remember that time of her life with fondness, not anymore. “Okay, Koa. My bad. How about a favor for a friend from your hanabata days? Events like this one have been pulling in a lot of activity—pickpockets, auto theft. It’s making the tourists squeamish. Nobody wants that, not even you. Point me to something going down today. You can puff up all you want, but I know you’ve got rivals on the island now, maybe one or two big ones. I can take them down. Help me help you.”

  “Can’t help you. Especially not today. I ain’t here for dat, an’ you know it.”

  “You’re here for your cousin. Yeah, I know. Ever wish you’d taken a different path? Applied yourself? Ever wish you’d been more like her?”

  Koa let out a huff and shifted his eyes to the water. “Yeah, right. A different path. You don’t know nothin’.” A slow smile spread across his lips—pride. “An’, Sistah, ain’t nobody like Kelly.”

  A booming announcement nearly drowned out the last of Koa’s words. “Ladies and gentlemen, turn your eyes to the launch and greet Maui’s own Kelly Alana!”

  The crowd erupted in cheers as a slender Hawaiian native waved to them, seated on the rear deck of a cruiser. She lowered herself into the water and took a long breath through pursed lips. At the end of the breath, she raised her shoulders, then vanished under the surface.

  All eyes moved to the big screens as the underwater camera drone took over. It seemed barely able to keep pace with the powerful mermaid strokes of her monofin. Kelly—this girl Lisa had babysat, carried in her arms not too many years before—dove almost straight down fifteen meters to pass through a green PVC wicket fixed to the seabed, then level through a hoop and into a slow descent through a curving hallway of suspended diamonds. The last of these included two upright bars, forcing her to turn sideways and cease her kicks to escape.

  The curving hallway brought Kelly to Wailea’s 150-meter dropoff, where she turned straight down again to follow a traditional freediving line.

  “How long?” Koa asked, unwilling or unable to take his eyes from the screen.

  Lisa shielded her eyes to check the running clock mounted on the launch. “Two minutes, twenty-four seconds. With all that exertion, her lungs must be bursting by now.”

  “Kelly don’t even notice. She got the spirit of the honu, like our ancestors.”

  “You sure they weren’t dolphins? Sea turtles never looked that fast.”

  Kelly ripped a plastic tag from the weight at the bottom of the line and headed straight for the surface. Her score would be a combination of her time and the depth achieved in the final portion.

  “Three minutes, nine seconds,” Lisa said, anticipating Koa’s question.

  He didn’t answer her, speaking instead to his cousin as she and her camera drone raced toward a rippling sky. “You got this, Sistah. Fly.”

  A few heartbeats later, Kelly burst through the surface and waved her tag at the judges. She showed them an okay sign to prove she hadn’t gone hypoxic. The clock stopped. The announcer shouted into his microphone. “Three minutes and sixteen seconds. A new HFA women’s record! Ladies and gentlemen, your hometown girl, Kelly—”

  A series of sharp pops drew Lisa’s attention to her left. One end of the bleachers collapsed. The spectators screamed.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  THE ELYSIUM GRAND

  LIFEGUARDS, BROUGHT IN TO WATCH over the athletes, now turned and raced toward the injured spectators. The crowd at the rope bumped and jostled each other to get away from the unknown danger, taking even big Pika with them.

  Lisa grabbed Koa’s arm. “What did you do?”

  “Nothin’. I told you, I’m only here for Kelly.”

  Above the noise of the frightened crowd, Lisa heard windows smashing. Car alarms blared. In a lot between the Grand and the neighboring resort, a trio of thugs hopped into high-end vehicles.

  “Really, Koa? You’d risk killing these people for a diversion?” She let him go and ran. “Pika, cuff him!”

  Koa called after her. “Lisa, that ain’t my crew, I swear!”

  Lisa had about fourteen seconds to close the distance—the average time it took to clone a key fob from a luxury car’s diagnostic port. She pounded out twenty yards on the sand, hemmed in by the crowd, eating up most of that window.

  The thieves were already on the move by the time she reached solid ground. She wished one of them had chosen to steal her Toyota 4Runner, parked in the same lot. That would’ve made her life so much easier. But most auto thieves knew how to spot an unmarked cop unit. Lisa had known how, back in the day. With only a few paces to go, she punched her remote start. Seconds later, she tore out of the lot, grill lights flashing. “Don’t forget to breathe, Lisa. Don’t forget to breathe.”

  The LAPD had taught her to use that mantra to remind a partner to keep calm during a high-speed chase. But Maui didn’t have LA’s budget. The island’s detectives didn’t have partners. She rode solo, so she had to recite the mantra to herself. “Breathe,” she said again after the pause that followed the technique’s four-count inhale, and then she used a long exhale to slow her heartbeat.

  The moment Lisa’s radio connected to the net, she heard chatter. “—white with a red stripe. And a black Benz. I didn’t get a good look at the other one.”

  “Charlie 1-6-5 is on Pi’ilani, en route to intercept.”

  “1-7-6 is on Kupulau, e
n route as well.”

  “Multiple injuries at the Grand. Send another ambulance. Rumors of shots fired.”

  Lisa cut in. “Break, break. This is Union 2-6, I’m directly behind the 10-80, heading north on Wailea Alanui. I have visual on a silver Corvette and the black Benz. I can’t tell the make of the white one—maybe a Porsche—but you can’t miss the red stripe down the center. Get air support moving, and we can wrap this up.”

  She knew the mistake she’d made the moment she released the mic switch, but dispatch gave her no opportunity to recover.

  “No air support here, 2-6. You ain’t in LA no more.”

  No kidding. Lisa didn’t bother responding. “Charlie 165, can you get to Okolani and stop traffic?”

  “On it, 2-6.”

  Stealing a car on an island in broad daylight. Not the best plan. The thieves had only one viable route out of Wailea—Pi’ilani Highway. The other option was the beach road next to the resorts, but that would almost certainly get them trapped behind a fleet of golf carts or a busload of tourists, and they would know that.

  As predicted, the stolen vehicles turned north on Okolani, giving Lisa a better look at the white car. A Porsche, as she thought. Flashing red-and-blue lights visible through the monkeypod trees ahead told her 165 had reached the intersection, maybe 176 too. She slowed. No need to risk her teammates’ lives by forcing these jokers into a crash. Where could they go?

  The Porsche had an answer for her. Leading the pack, its driver broke left, caught the curb at an angle, and smashed through a chain-link gate into a long green park. The Benz and the Corvette followed, fishtailing on the grass. Unbelievable.

  Lisa hesitated only a moment before pressing her gas pedal to the floor and cranking the wheel. If the Corvette could handle it, her police-issue 4Runner should have no problem. She bounced over the curb.

  Handle it? Yes. Comfortable? Oh, no. The jump to the grass nearly smashed her head into the Toyota’s ceiling.