Death in Paradise Read online

  It was about 3:30 a.m. when Jin Tanaka sent ten men ashore in the Sashimi Maru’s motor launch. They had ten five-gallon gas cans and a box of flares. The yakuza didn’t blow things up. They specialized in extortion, prostitution and smuggling guns from Hawaii to Japan. Burning down Lau’s villa at the Ming was not something they would do without serious provocation, but the Triads had attempted to kill two of the granddaughters of Eizō Tanaka. The yakuza would make them pay the price for their transgression.

  Jin Tanaka told his guys where to find Lau’s villa on the grounds and made it clear that they weren’t to burn any part of the Ming where guests stayed. The yakuza would kill when they had to, but killing innocent people like tourists was not good for business and would bring the feds in force. Killing the leader of the Triads in Hawaii would most likely only bring a local response, and it would be lukewarm at best. Tanaka had men on the payroll throughout the state government, including the Kona PD, and would be able to control the investigation, as he had in the past.

  By 4:15 a.m., Jin Tanaka could see the glow of Lau’s villa engulfed in flames. Jin smoked a cigarette topside of the Sashimi Maru while he watched the villa burn to the ground through his binoculars. “Good riddance,” he said.

  As the group of Japanese thugs headed back toward the motor launch at the beach, they came across a wild goat that had been munching grass on the golf course. They killed it and threw it in the resort’s swimming pool as a message to the Triads that they’d best plan to leave Hawaii.

  When the fire department arrived on scene at the Ming, Lau’s villa was destroyed. There was nothing left to save. But Tanaka didn’t know Lau wasn’t there. He had stayed in one of the resort’s guest rooms because he feared retaliation from the yakuza–and rightly so.

  * * *

  The yakuza had a spy who worked at the Ming that Tanaka had been checking in with, during his visits to take Kainoa to the beach. Jin liked taking Kainoa to the beach, but his weekly visits to the Big Island were about a lot more than just being a good uncle. Figuring out what the Triads were up to had been his number one goal for the past six months. China White fentanyl was what they were up to, besides trying to get gambling legalized and take over Aloha Village.

  The yakuza had known the Triads had been shipping fentanyl to the Big Island and hadn’t cared–until now. They had been planning to rip off the drugs for some time and decided this would be the perfect time to kill two birds with one stone. Lance Ishikawa waited with the murder wagon to take five of the ten men, sent ashore, to the Triads’ body shop to steal the drugs while the other five burned down Mr. Lau’s villa at the Ming.

  Jin Tanaka’s inside man at the Ming frequently saw exotic high-end European cars being shipped to the resort in a container from Hong Kong every month. Jin figured the Triads hid drugs in the vehicles; sending them in containers made it almost impossible for drug-sniffing dogs to catch them.

  Once the car arrived, Mr. Lau would have Woo Ching take the vehicle to a body shop the Triads owned, in the old industrial area, to have it dismantled and painted. Afterward, the cars would be shipped to the mainland and sold at auction. Financially, it made little sense. The vehicles cost more in Hong Kong than they did in the US, and it cost more to ship them to Hawaii—unless they were carried two or three kilos of China White hidden inside them.

  Tanaka had no desire to go into the business of selling dope. Hookers, guns, and extortion were okay, but drugs were taboo to the yakuza. The way he saw it, this was free money. He would dump the fentanyl at a discount to move it fast and donate some of the proceeds to a drug rehab center on the island.

  35

  Lanai

  Sam and Jessica sat on the lanai, having their morning coffee, when Jessica’s phone rang. She looked at the screen to see who was calling so early and saw it was Uncle Jack and knew it would be important.

  “Just a heads-up—the cops will come to see you soon.”

  “Why?”

  “They got called to the Ming a few days ago about a dead Chinese golfer. He was found in the back of their limousine at the airport, deader than a door nail. They think it was a professional hit, from the intelligence I’ve got. The limo driver told the cops a wild story about being abducted and then waking up back in the limousine later with the dead guy in the backseat. My source says at first the cops weren’t buying it, but then there was a witness who corroborated his story, saying he saw the limo driver get stuffed back into the car from a van that parked right next to it.”

  “Why does the Kona PD want to talk to me?”

  “My source says Lau told them you would do anything to disrupt his business and might somehow be connected to the murder and burning down his villa.”

  Jessica’s forehead wrinkled. “Figures. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “I guess he thinks if he can’t kill you, he’ll try to get you locked up. Oh, one last thing. Be careful.”

  “Something I ought to know?” Jessica asked.

  “That’s all I can say right now.” Uncle Jack was quick to hang up the phone.

  I hate it when he pulls that secret agent crap on me, she thought. After she sat the phone down she caught a glimpse of something moving under the table near her foot. She jumped up from her chair and stomped on a centipede a half a dozen times to make sure it was dead. It had slithered out of a hole between the rocks in the staircase that led to the lanai.

  Sam couldn’t see what had prompted her to jump up because the table was between the two of them and blocked his view of the prehistoric-looking creature that was approximately six inches long and had what looked like a thousand legs.

  “Take that,” Jessica said as she ground what remained of the centipede’s head into the wood flooring of the lanai.

  Sam peered over the edge of the table.

  “Yup, you killed the crap out of him.” And they both laughed.

  “Literally,” she replied.

  “Feel better?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  * * *

  When Detective Gomes showed up at Aloha Village, Sam and Jessica were on stand-up paddle boards in the middle of the bay fronting the resort. Jessica had been trying to lose the ten pounds she’d gained.

  That was the thing about being back in Hawaii—potato mac and two scoops of rice always came with the plate lunch, and a zillion carbs to boot. Until her thirties, she could eat anything and not gain an ounce. After forty, just looking at a chocolate cake seemed to equal gaining five pounds. The last couple of weeks since her father’s death, she’d been hitting the chocolate cake hard.

  Coffee, booze, cigarettes, and donuts used to be Jessica’s four major food groups; now she was just down to sugar. It was a reasonable compromise in her mind. Besides, unlike booze, nobody ever got arrested for eating cake.

  Detective Gomes never met a malasada he didn’t like. He sat down at the Castaway Bar, that overlooked the bay, and helped himself to a box of the tasty Portuguese treats the resort had put out that morning for guests. He ate the whole box while he waited for Sam and Jessica to paddle back in. At three hundred and thirty pounds, and gaining, Gomes’s motto was “Eat until you’re tired, not until you’re full.”

  Jessica didn’t recognize Gomes from her early days on the force, but he remembered her, and the allegations made against her years earlier. He didn’t care one way or the other about Jessica being a dirty cop, but he doubted she’d had anything to do with the murder of the golf pro.

  “Ms. Kealoha, if you have a few minutes, I’d like a word.” He introduced himself and handed her his card. She glanced at his name on it.

  “How can I help you, Detective Gomes?”

  “Can you account for your whereabouts the day before yesterday?”

  Sam interjected, “She was with me.”

  “And you are?” Gomes asked.

  “I’m Sam Stewart. We were here all day, lying on the beach and snorkeling. Plenty of the staff here at the resort saw us.”

  Gomes looked dow
n at his notebook and nodded as he wrote down Sam’s name.

  “I think this should do it,” Gomes said. And that was it. He grabbed one more malasada, from a new box on the bar, and ate it on the way back to his car. Sam and Jessica never heard another word from him.

  36

  Kidnapped

  The Kona PD had looked for Woo Ching for nearly a week and had come up empty. Jessica was tired of waiting. It would be up to her and Sam to bring him to justice.

  Jessica was sure they had a spy at Aloha Village who fed info to Lau. How else would the Triads have known she was on her way to the bank to deposit a check, to save the Village, the day Woo Ching tried to kill them? It was clear someone had tipped them off and Jessica decided she would use the mole to set a trap for Woo Ching. What she and Sam didn’t know was that Woo Ching had set a trap of his own–that would preempt their plan.

  * * *

  Besides working part-time for her dad at the Village, Jasmine was a massage therapist. She had a side business at the resort that she had operated the past couple of years, so she could raise money to go to college to become a veterinarian.

  She was a busy girl. That was the thing about Mike Murphy’s daughters—they were all hard workers and always tried to get ahead financially.

  Jasmine was in her office doing paperwork when her cell phone rang. “Aloha, this is Jasmine.”

  “Howzit, I got your name from a friend who highly recommended you for a massage, would this afternoon would be good if you have the time,” the man said.

  She looked at her calendar for a moment, it was going to be tough to fit him in, but she needed the money and said, “How about two o’clock? If that works for you, meet me at the cabana on the beach here at Aloha Village.”

  “That’s perfect,” the man replied.

  Between the resort’s guests, and word of mouth, Jasmine didn’t need to advertise for business. But she always asked who had referred the new client so she could send them a thank-you card for the referral.

  Woo Ching had used a common Japanese surname when Jasmine had asked him who referred him. She had two clients with that same name and thought she would figure out which one it was when she met her new client at two p.m.

  Sam’s security team had a photo of Woo Ching and had been warned to be on the lookout for him. But unknown to anyone–Woo Ching was a master of disguise. He put on a wig and a fake beard, and when he showed up for the two o’clock massage, he looked like a harmless old man. Nobody recognized him, and he had booked under a phony name. He knew Sam’s security team was in the Village and that he would have to trick Jasmine into walking him to his car in the parking lot, where he would drug and abduct her.

  As Jasmine kneaded the muscles in her new client’s neck she said,

  “It was great timing when you called, I had a last-minute cancellation that opened up a slot for you. Otherwise, I would have been short of money for my veterinarian school tuition on the mainland that I’m saving for.”

  Woo Ching tuned in on that as the weakness he would exploit to get her to walk out to his car.

  “You’re going to be an animal doctor? You should come look at my poi dog puppy I just got, he’s in the car and something’s not right with him. Since you love animals, maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with him.”

  Jasmine had been volunteering at the animal clinic in town for the last year and had learned a lot, so she thought it wouldn’t hurt to look at his dog and possibly recommend he bring it in to the animal hospital she worked at.

  After the massage, Jasmine and what appeared to be an old man strolled to the parking lot arm in arm, and when security offered to escort them, she waved them off. “No need.”

  * * *

  Hours later, Jasmine woke up groggy and with a headache from the drug-induced state she had been in. She laid on a concrete floor in the fetal position in a room that was only eight feet wide by eight feet long, with plywood walls and a low plywood ceiling. The roof wasn’t even high enough to allow her to stand up inside the box. Woo Ching had padlocked her inside the makeshift prison at a warehouse in the old industrial area. The only thing she remembered was leaning in the window of the old man’s car to look at the dog. As soon as she’d leaned in, Woo Ching had pulled a rag, soaked in chloroform, out of his pocket and smothered her face with it.

  The warehouse belonged to Lau. It was in a row of them he owned, located at the very end of the road behind a locked gate.

  Jasmine screamed for help for hours, but it wasn’t coming. Woo Ching had set up a camera in the room and kept her under surveillance with an app on his phone that had a two-way speaker built-in.

  “You’re wasting your time. No one can hear you. You’re inside a building that is soundproof, and there is no one around,” the voice said to Jasmine through a speaker mounted on the ceiling of the box, in which she was being held prisoner.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Please, let me out of here,” she cried.

  “I want your sister. And you’re the bait,” the voice answered.

  Jasmine quit crying. “You know she’ll kill you for this, right?”

  There was no reply from the voice on the other end of the speaker.

  Woo Ching had taken Jasmine’s phone when she was unconscious and found Jessica’s phone number in it, he then had thrown the phone out the window on the way to the warehouse. He knew Jessica would check the phone records to see the cell tower location of the last ping from Jasmine’s phone to get an idea where she might be.

  * * *

  The next day, Woo Ching called Jessica from a burner phone, but since she didn’t recognize the number, she let it go to voicemail.

  Momi was the front desk clerk at Aloha Village that day and when the phone rang, she answered it like she always had. “Aloha, this is–.” The man on the other end of the line interrupted her, “Shut up and listen. You tell Jessica Kealoha I’m holding Jasmine and if she doesn’t follow my directions I’m going to kill her little sister.”

  The man’s voice sent shivers down Momi’s spine as she listened to what he said. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell her. Please don’t hurt Jasmine!” Momi cried.

  Minutes later she called Jessica, “Slow down Momi, take a breath, I can barely understand you,” Jessica said. As Momi cried, she repeated exactly what the man said.

  “He said to tell you to check your voicemail, and if you ever want to see her again, you better answer your phone the next time he calls.” Jessica felt a pang of fear in her gut as she asked Momi about Jasmine’s schedule before she’d disappeared.

  “She had a massage client yesterday at two p.m., and nobody has seen her since that time. But she had a college class afterward, so no one thought anything about it,” Momi said.

  Sam sat on the lanai, and worked on a proposal for the Hawaii ferry, when he heard Jessica on the phone inside the bungalow. He could tell from her side of the conversation, and the tone of her voice, that something was very wrong. After Jessica hung up, he set his laptop down on the table, went inside and asked her, “What happened?”

  “Jasmine has been kidnapped! I’m going to go find the man responsible for this.”

  “We,” Sam interjected.

  “Okay, we have to go look for her.” Jessica grabbed her thigh holster off the kitchen counter and slipped it over her right leg under her sundress, then stuffed the nine-millimeter pistol in it that Uncle Jack had loaned her.

  In LA, she always wore jeans and carried a backup gun in an ankle holster at work. She almost felt naked without it and mumbled something to that effect, and Sam heard it.

  “Not a problem. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Sam went to his bungalow, where his security team had set up shop, and returned with two Glock 19s and a couple of extra magazines of ammo. “This should be enough, don’t you think?” He handed Jessica one of the Glocks and an extra clip with fifteen rounds in it.

  She grabbed her small backpack, put the gun inside, slung it over her shoulder and said, “Let’s
go.”

  Jessica fired up the 426 Hemi engine in her father’s ’69 Road Runner and backed it out of the garage. She then got out of the car while the engine warmed up, which was necessary for that cold-blooded beast. The look on her face worried Sam.

  “This is too dangerous,” she said. “You don’t need to come with me. Besides, if something happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to cope with it again.”

  “Again?” Sam asked.

  “My first husband and I were on a stakeout one night,” Jessica started, and then her phone rang.

  “This is Jessica Kealoha,” she answered quickly.

  “Your sister will die if you don’t do what I tell you,” the voice on the other end said in broken English.

  “Okay, what do you want?”

  Sam could tell the rumble of the big Hemi engine was making it hard to hear, so he shut it down while Jessica was on the phone.

  “We want our merchandise back,” the caller said.

  “I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “The yakuza ripped us off–is what I’m talking about.”

  It became crystal-clear to Jessica right at that moment what had happened. She needed no further explanation.

  “If I can get your drugs back, you’ll let my sister go?”

  “That’s the deal, lady. There will be a cigarette boat at VV buoy at six p.m tonight. Show up with our ten kilos, and we’ll release your sister after the drop. If you bring Five-O with you, your sister is dead.” And the phone went dead.