5 Murder at Volcano House
Read 5 Murder at Volcano House Online
Authors: Chip Hughes
Other Surfing Detective Books
by Chip Hughes
MURDER ON MOLOKA‘I
WIPEOUT! & HANGING TEN IN PARIS
KULA
S
LATE
R
IDGE
P
RESS
P.O. Box 1886
Kailua, HI 96734
ISBN: 0982944446
ISBN-13: 9780982944448
First Edition, 2014
© 2014 Chip Hughes. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Slate Ridge Press.
In the time-honored tradition of fiction writing, the author has taken artistic liberties in the depiction of certain sights, facilities, and geographic features. The hotel of the book’s title is not intended to be the Volcano House of today. The hotel was shuttered when the story was written and on-site research was conducted a decade earlier when flames of the old hotel’s famous fireplace still flickered. And, of course, characters that populate the story are products of imagination rather than actual persons.
Cover photo: Alan Cressler, Halema‘uma‘u Crater
“Even from a mile away I can see the smoke—a massive column spiraling into the sunset sky.”
Acknowledgements
Many thanks once again to my wife, collaborator, and inspiration, Charlene, and to brilliant and extraordinarily generous Honolulu private detective Stu Hilt.
Mahalo
to Sher Glass, President, Volcano Community Association; to Doug Crispin, National Park Service ranger and long-ago CSU-Chico house-mate; to John Broward, Emergency Operations Coordinator and Eruption Crew Supervisor, Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park; to Christine Matthews, consummate mystery editor and Secretary, Private Eye Writers of America; and to Doug Corleone, whose fast-moving narratives I’ve tried to emulate. For editorial suggestions and proofreading, I’m grateful to Nathan Avallone, Les Peetz, Laurie Tomchak, and Lorna Hershinow. Finally, special thanks to Alan Cressler for the cover photo of Halema‘uma‘u Crater.
Holmes: “There is a realm in which the most acute and most experienced of detectives is helpless.”
Watson: “You mean that the thing is supernatural?”
—
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, Arthur Conan Doyle
one
It’s Friday afternoon in late March—one of those mild and calm days in Honolulu when coconut palms outside my office above Fujiyama’s Flower Leis barely whisper in the slack trade winds. I’m about to close up shop and paddle out to Pops in Waikīkī.
My phone rings.
Maile?
No such luck. Caller ID says: T
OMMY
W
OO
. Attorney-at-law, jazz pianist, jokester, and friend.
“Howzit, Tommy?” I answer.
“Hey, Kai,” he says, “how do you get a lawyer out of a banyan tree?”
“If I knew, Tommy, you’d tell me anyway.” There’s no stopping him.
Tommy is quiet for a moment. Then he says: “Cut the rope.”
“That’s it?”
I ask.
What a mistake. A barrage of blue ones follow.
When the jokes finally end I say, “What can I do for you, Tommy?”
“I’ve got a customer for you.”
“A paying customer?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “And she needs your services now.”
“Now? As in immediately? I’m on my way out the door.”
“You don’t need to start until Monday. But she wants to see you today—to make arrangements.”
“Arrangements for what?”
“She’ll explain. She’s here in my office. Well, she just stepped out when I called you. She wants me to come with her.”
There goes surfing!
“How soon can you get here?” I glance at the clock on my desk. It’s already four. I want to be in the water in twenty minutes.
“Give us fifteen,” Tommy says.
“It’s got to be a short meeting, Tommy. I have to be somewhere at four thirty.”
“I’ll bet you do,” he says. He knows my ways.
“Who is the woman?” I ignore his sarcasm. “She a client of yours?”
“Never met her before. She lives on Kāua‘i. But I recognized her and you will too. I did some work for her husband a long time ago—before she married him. Anyway, that’s how she found me. Being married to him, she’s got money. And the case will take you to a neighbor island. ‘S
URFING
D
ETECTIVE
: C
ONFIDENTIAL
I
NVESTIGATIONS
—A
LL
I
SLANDS
,’ like your card says. Eh, Kai?”
“A case on Kāua‘i?”
“No, on the Big Island.”
Now I’m really confused, so I simply say, “I’m already working a case—that Pali Highway crash.”
“Tragic,” Tommy says, revealing his softer side. “I feel for those girls’ parents.”
“Me too. Actually, I’m waiting on some things and can spare a day or two. But that’s all.”
“Perfect,” Tommy says. “A few days are all you’ll need. I’ll bring her over.”
two
While I wait for Tommy and the mystery woman whose name he assures me I’ll recognize, I dial Maile’s home number. Maile probably won’t pick up, so I work out a message for her in my head. I’ve given up calling her cell phone. I guess trust is one of those things that’s easy to lose and hard to recover.
Her home phone rings and then her machine kicks in. “Hi, this is Maile Barnes, tracer of missing pets. How can I help?”
“Maile, it’s Kai.” I start to spew out my rehearsed message: “I wondered if you wanted me to take Kula surfing again. It’s been a while and I haven’t heard from you—I mean, Kula hasn’t been in the water—unless . . .” I’m wandering, so I try to get back on course. “Well, I can take him Sunday . . . Uh, just let me know. Call me, text me, email me. Whatevahs.”
I had a crush on Maile in high school. When I was off to college, she married someone else, became a K9 cop, and then, suddenly, a young widow. She quit the force and started a pet detective agency.
Recently Maile helped me on a case. We hit it off like a house on fire. She warned me never to cheat on her, since she’d been burned before. I didn’t, exactly. But my explanations
have fallen on deaf ears. Now she won’t speak to me—except about Kula. Kula is the golden retriever she helped me rescue for one of my former clients. She’s fostering the dog, since my client is unavoidably detained. He’s spending the rest of his life in jail.
I gaze out my office window onto Maunakea Street’s
lei
shops, dim sum parlors, fish markets, vegetable stalls, and art galleries, whiff the sweet odors and reeks wafting up, and wonder why I‘m so stuck on Maile. Is it because the spunky ex-cop and I are so much alike—that old-fashioned romantic notion of soul mates? Or because I’m still haunted by her soft curves and jasmine-scented sheets?
I don’t come up with an answer before there’s a knock at the door. Tommy steps in, adjusts his tortoiseshell glasses, sweeps back a lock of silver hair, and gestures to the woman next to him. “Kai Cooke, meet Donnie Ransom.”
I draw a blank on her name. But I do vaguely recognize her face. When Tommy announces—“Miss Hawai‘i finalist”—I know why.
“My name was Lam then,” she says. “Not Ransom. That was twenty years ago.”
It’s coming back to me now. Donnie Lam was not just a finalist, but first runner-up. Though she missed the crown by a sliver back then, she strides into my office with the grace and elegance of a reigning beauty queen. Her hair is long, lustrous and black; her eyes sparkle like agates in the sun. She wears more mascara and brighter red lipstick than I’d say is necessary for a daytime meeting with an attorney, but they make her eyes and smile all the more vivid.
Tommy says: “She has a job for you.”
I expect to hear what sort of job, but she seems more interested in the locale.
“On the Big Island,” Mrs. Ransom says, “at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park.” Leaving Tommy standing, she takes the one extra chair in my office. “We’ll put you up at the Volcano House, all expenses paid.”
“The Volcano House?” I say. “There’s nothing like sleeping on the edge of an active crater.”
Tommy smiles and so does Mrs. Ransom. I look at her more closely. She has that harmonious blend of Hawaiian, Asian and
haole
, or Caucasian, we call local girl. There are only a few visible hints of the two decades that have passed since she almost became Miss Hawai‘i: faint lines around her eyes and mouth, and a little fullness in her neck and figure.
“Like I told Tommy, Mrs. Ransom, I’m working another case at the moment and can spare only a few days.”
“Please call me Donnie,” she says. “And don’t worry, we’ll have you back on O‘ahu by Tuesday evening. Wednesday morning, at the very latest.”
“That might work,” I say.
“I’m so glad.” Her youthful complexion glows against her black silk dress. Tommy, also in black, as usual, looks rumpled by comparison.
“Now just what is it exactly you’d like me to do?” I ask.
She perks up. “I want you to come with my husband and me to the Volcano House. To—sort of—chaperone him.”
“That’s it?”
Did I miss something?
“Let me explain. My husband is Rex Ransom. You may have heard his name. Rex was founder and CEO of Ransom Geothermal, a drilling operation on the Big Island in the Wao Kele O Puna rain-forest. Rex pulled out of there years ago and sold the company.”
“I remember him,” I say. But I don’t like what I remember. I’ve got nothing against geothermal energy—and other alternatives to burning foreign oil—but what this man did was something else.
“Rex and I are going to the Big Island for the funeral of his former corporate attorney, Stan Nagahara. Stan died recently in the national park and his service will take place at the military camp chapel there. He’s the second from Rex’s company to die there in as many years. Stan’s death was no accident. Neither was Karl Krofton’s two years ago. They were both killed by Pele.”