Fires of Eden

  The caretaker began shaking his head and pointing out the dangers of wandering off the path, but Mr. Clemens merely grinned more broadly under his reddish mustache. “Wonderful,” he said. Then, turning to me, “Miss Stewart, if we are not back by daybreak, please feel free to dispose of my hired horse as you see fit.”

  I sniffed. “You will have to make other arrangements for the disposal of your horse, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “I plan to accompany you gentlemen.”

  “But…but…my dear lady,” began Reverend Haymark, his red face growing even more florid.

  I dismissed his objections with a curt bob of my chin. “Obviously if it is not folly for you gentlemen, it is not folly for a third member of the expedition. If it is folly…well, then, we shall all be fools together.”

  Mr. Clemens reinstalled his cigar and I watched the ember bob up and down. “Quite true, quite true. Miss Stewart will make a fine member of this Expedition of Fools.”

  The Reverend Haymark made blustering sounds, but could not find the words to express his misgivings. So, while the servants bustled to ready a late supper for Master McGuire and the sleepy Mr. Smith, Mr. Clemens, the wheezing minister, and I prepared ourselves for the midnight sojourn into the most spectacular few square miles on our surprising Earth.

  Byron Trumbo and Stephen Ridell Carter were met by their respective security chiefs—Dillon for the Mauna Pele, Briggs for Trumbo—at the Big Hale entrance to the catacombs. The security men were a study in contrasts: Briggs, six feet four, bald, and massive; Dillon, a short, bearded man with impassive eyes and quick hands. Trumbo had hired both of them and used them for widely different purposes.

  “You guys find anything?” said Trumbo.

  Both men shook their heads, but Dillon said, “Mr. Trumbo, we’ve got a problem.”

  They walked down the ramp into the echoing tunnel. “I don’t know why you say that,” said Trumbo. “Unless you include dismembered guests and missing astronomers as a problem.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” said Dillon. When Trumbo turned to glare at him, he went on. “I mean, yes, that’s a problem, but what I mean is…well, that art curator, Kukali, and a couple of guests are up in the administration suite. They say they just saw a dog running around with a hand in its mouth.”

  Trumbo stopped so abruptly that the other three men almost collided with him. “A dog? With a hand? Where?” Pale faces peered at them from the windows of various offices and service installations along the underground concourse.

  Dillon rubbed his beard and smiled slightly. The situation seemed to amuse him. “Over on the jogging path, between the south golf course and the shoreline.”

  “Damn,” breathed Trumbo, lowering his voice so that the conversation would not carry down the echoing corridor. “And you say three of them saw it?”

  “Yep. Dr. Kukali and two of the…”

  “Kukali’s on the staff, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, the art and archaeology curator. He’s the…”

  “He’s the Hawaiian motherfucker who was going to sue us about the petroglyphs and fish ponds,” finished the billionaire. “Shit. I hired him to get him to keep his mouth shut about all that. Now we’ve got to find a way to keep him quiet about this. Did you say that you have them up in the administrative suites?”

  “I was going to bring them down here to my office,” said Dillon, “but what with the problem with Mr. Wills…”

  “Wills?” said Trumbo, seemingly lost in thought. “Who’s…oh, yeah, the astronomer. Steve, we’d better postpone the tour down here until after I speak to Kukali and the guests…”

  The hotel manager shook his head and looked determined. “It’s just another hundred yards, Mr. Trumbo. I really think you should see it. Then I’ll go with you to deal with Mr. Kukali. The curator owes me a favor.”

  Trumbo hissed through his teeth. “All right, show me the fucking office if it’s so fucking important.”

  The blinds were drawn on the small window. The sign above the door said DIRECTOR OF ASTRONOMY. Carter fumbled for a key on the chain. “It was locked when we came looking for Mr. Wills,” said the hotel manager.

  Trumbo nodded. He followed Carter into the small room. He was not prepared for what he found.

  The room was small, no more than twelve feet by fifteen feet, there was no other door—not even a bathroom or closet—and most of the floor space was taken up with the desk, file cabinets, and a large telescope on a tripod. There were a few framed astronomy prints on the white walls. The only sign of disorder was the executive chair behind the desk, which had been tumbled on its side. That and an eight-foot crack in the wall behind the desk, a crevice that ran from floor to ceiling and opened onto darkness. And the blood.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” whispered Trumbo.

  There was blood on the tumbled chair, blood on the white walls, blood across the desk, blood spattered on the papers on the desk, blood sprinkled randomly on the single guest chair opposite the desk, blood thrown in arterial sprays across the astronomy posters, and blood glimmering on the large telescope.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Trumbo said again, and took a step back into the hallway. He looked up and down the dimly lighted tunnel and stepped back into the astronomer’s office. “Have the others seen this?”

  “No,” said Carter. “Except for Ms. Windemere from Accounting, who came down looking for Mr. Wills because they had a lunch date. She was here when Mr. Dillon unlocked the door.”

  That fact sank in for Trumbo. “The door was locked? Something did this to Wills while he was in here behind locked doors?” He stared at the crack in the wall. It did not seem large enough for a man to squeeze through. “Where does that go? What caused it?”

  “We don’t know,” said Dillon, stepping behind the desk, taking a flashlight from his coat pocket, and shining it into the crevice. The rough surface was slick with…something. “You know these grounds are honeycombed with old lava tubes. There might be one back there. The construction crews ran into dozens when they were excavating the service tunnels.”

  Trumbo took another step closer, making sure that he did not step in any of the blood on the floor. He tried not to touch the desk, the chair, anything. “Yeah, but what caused that? I didn’t feel an earthquake.” He turned to Stephen Ridell Carter. “Was there an earthquake?”

  The director was very pale. He looked away from the spattered papers on Mr. Wills’s desk and swallowed. “Ah…well… I called Dr. Hastings at the Volcano Observatory and he informed me that between eight A.M. and two P.M. there were more than twenty seismic events related to the eruptions, but none of them were felt here…not even by other people working in the catacombs…ah, service tunnel.” Carter stared at the crack as if something might ooze out of it. “If this was caused by an earthquake, it was a very, very localized event.”

  “Evidently,” said Trumbo. He looked at Dillon. “Why was the door locked?”

  The security director reached down and lifted a magazine that lay with the various papers on the astronomer’s desk. Blood had sprayed across the open pages, but Trumbo could see the color photograph of a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread. “Great,” said Trumbo. “Our astronomer likes to jack off before lunch.” He looked back at Carter. “Who’s this Ms. Windemere from Accounting? Maybe she came in, found Wills going at it, got jealous, and chopped him up with a meat cleaver or something.”

  The manager only stared. Finally he said, “It seems rather unlikely, sir, Ms. Windemere did come to find Mr. Dillon when Mr. Wills failed to appear at lunchtime. And she did faint when she saw the condition of the room. She is still sedated in the infirmary.”

  “Good,” said Trumbo. “How long can we keep her that way?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” said Carter.

  “We need to keep her quiet too. She can’t go home. Send Dr. Scamahorn to see me. Maybe we can keep her sleeping for the next day or so.”

  Stephen Ridell Carter’s expression conveyed his opinion of such a pl
an.

  Trumbo looked around the room again and beckoned Briggs closer. “What could do this to a man?”

  The hulking security chief shrugged. “Plenty of things, boss. You mentioned a meat cleaver. Plenty of arterial spray when someone gets going with one of those. Axe is good. Even a big knife or automatic weapon—say an Uzi or Mac-ten—would toss around a lot of blood. People always underestimate how much blood we carry around in us.”

  Trumbo nodded.

  “There’s a problem with that, though,” said Dillon, his eyes quick and ferretlike beneath heavy brows.

  “What’s that?” said Trumbo.

  “Meat cleaver, axe, knife, Uzi,” said Dillon. “They all toss around blood, but they all leave bodies behind too. Or at least parts of bodies.” He pointed to the empty room and held up his hands. “Unless our Mr. Wills was dragged through there…” He jerked a thumb toward the jagged crevice behind him.

  “He would had to have been in pieces to get through there,” said Briggs, his voice sounding professionally interested. He produced his own flashlight from a coat pocket, stepped up to the crack, and looked through. “It does look larger back there. Like a tunnel or something.”

  “Get some men down here with sledgehammers,” ordered Trumbo. “Knock that wall down. Briggs, you and Dillon check out whatever’s back there.”

  “Mr. Trumbo,” said Stephen Ridell Carter in his shocked voice. “This is a crime scene. The police will be furious if we disturb it. It is, I believe, against the law to destroy evidence.”

  Trumbo rubbed his forehead. He had a miserable headache. “Steve, we don’t know it’s a crime scene. We don’t know that Wills is dead. He may be in Kona at a topless bar for all we know. All I see is a trashed office and a possibly dangerous crack in the wall. We have to make sure that the wall is structurally sound. Dillon?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I want you and Briggs to knock it down. Personally. We don’t need any other people curious about this.”

  The small, bearded man frowned, but Briggs looked pleased at the thought of knocking down a wall.

  Stephen Ridell Carter started to say something, but just then there was a knock at the door. Briggs opened it.

  Will Bryant was there, looking worried. “Mr. T, can I have a minute?”

  Trumbo stepped out into the corridor rather than invite his assistant in to view the carnage. The air was fresher in the tunnel.

  “We’ve got a problem,” said Bryant.

  Trumbo smiled thinly. “Sato?”

  “No, they’re good. About finished with lunch. We’ll begin the next session in about an hour.”

  “What then?” said Trumbo. “More body parts?”

  Will Bryant shook his head. “Mrs. Trumbo’s jet just landed. I’ve sent a limo to pick her and Koestler up. They reserved a suite here.”

  Trumbo said nothing. He was trying to imagine what kind of thing could have squeezed through that crack in the wall, dismembered a horny astronomer, and pulled the pieces of him out with it when it oozed away. He was wondering if the thing, whatever it was, could be enticed to snatch a New England-bred, cast-iron bitch named Caitlin Sommersby Trumbo.

  “That’s not really the problem,” Bryant was saying.

  Trumbo almost laughed. “No, Will? What is the problem?”

  Will Bryant rarely showed nervousness, but now he smoothed back his long hair in a nervous sweep. “Maya Richardson’s Gulfstream just radioed the tower. They’ll be landing in two hours.”

  Trumbo leaned against the wall. The rough stone was cool and slightly sweaty under his cool and slightly sweaty palm. “That only leaves Bicki. I suppose she’s parachuting in even as we speak.”

  “Deavers called from Lindbergh Field in San Diego,” said his assistant. “Their plane refueled there about an hour ago. Their flight plan has an ETA in Kona at eight thirty-eight, local time.”

  Byron Trumbo nodded and said nothing. He was fighting down the urge to giggle. Carter, Dillon, and Briggs stepped out of the astronomy office, the manager locking the door behind him.

  Trumbo set his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Well, greet Caitlin and that blood-sucking motherfucker Koestler for me, would you, Will? Give them leis, kisses, fruit, the Ali’i Suite on the north end of the Big Hale, the whole nine yards. Tell her I’ll come see her as soon as I talk to the art curator and a couple of guests about a dog and a missing hand.”

  Bryant nodded his understanding. The cortege moved back down the dimly lighted corridor with purposeful strides.

  Eleanor was tired of getting the runaround. Paul, Cordie, and she had asked to see the manager, who had not been available, so they had ended up talking to a bearded little homunculus of a security chief—Mr. Dillon—who had asked them to repeat their story to his assistant, an amiable black man named Fredrickson, while Mr. Dillon himself had run off somewhere. Paul Kukali was also becoming obviously bored with the repetition.

  “Look,” the art curator was saying, “we saw the dog. The dog had a human hand in its jaws. That’s all we know. Shouldn’t you be getting someone out there to find it…and the rest of the corpse?”

  Mr. Fredrickson showed a white grin. “Yes, sir. Don’t worry about that. But let’s just go over this again. Which way did you say the dog ran off?”

  “Into the lava on the ocean side of the jogging path,” said Cordie Stumpf. She glanced at her cheap wristwatch. “And we’ve been telling this story for more than forty-five minutes. Time’s up. I’m gonna get back to my vacation.” Cordie stood up. Mr. Fredrickson stood up. Paul Kukali stood up.

  At that moment, the door to the suite opened and Mr. Dillon returned with a short, aggressive-looking man wearing old shorts and a faded Hawaiian shirt. Eleanor recognized him at once from articles in Time and the Wall Street Journal.

  “Paul!” said Trumbo, stepping forward quickly and pumping the curator’s hand. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you.”

  Paul Kukali returned the handshake with much less enthusiasm than his employer was showing. “Mr. Trumbo, we saw…”

  “I heard, I heard,” said Trumbo, turning toward Cordie and Eleanor. “Terrible. And who are these lovely ladies?” He smiled broadly.

  Cordie Stumpf shifted her weight slightly and folded her arms across her chest. “These lovely ladies are two thirds of the threesome that saw a dog running around your property with someone’s hand in its jaws,” she said. “And if you ask me, it’s a hell of a way to run a resort.”

  Trumbo’s grin stayed in place, but it began to resemble a rictus. “Yes, yes, so Mr. Dillon has told me.” He turned back to the art curator. “Paul, you’re certain it was a human hand? Sometimes a white crab looks very much like…”

  Paul interrupted. “It was a hand. All of us saw it.”

  Trumbo nodded as if weighing new information. He turned back to the women. “Well, ladies, you have my personal apologies for this upsetting incident. We’ll look into it, of course. And I apologize again for any upset or inconvenience this has caused you. We will, of course, pick up any charges for your scheduled stay here at the Mauna Pele, and if there is anything else we can do to make amends for this upsetting occurrence, please tell us and we will act upon it immediately…gratis, of course.” He smiled again.

  “That’s it?” said Cordie.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Trumbo through his smile.

  “That’s it? We tell you that a dog’s runnin’ around the resort with somebody’s mitt in its mouth, and you comp us a room and shoo us off?”

  Byron Trumbo sighed. “Ms…ah?”

  “Stumpf,” said Cordie. “And it’s Mrs.”

  “Mrs. Stumpf. Mr. Dillon and the others whom you’ve spoken to about this are quite bothered by it, of course, and we will find the dog and…whatever else there is to be found. But we believe that we know the cause of this…ah…unfortunate incident.”

  Paul, Cordie, and Eleanor waited. Mr. Fredrickson also seemed to be waiting.

  “Sadly, there rece
ntly was a drowning accident down the coast a few miles,” said Byron Trumbo. “A local gentleman fell overboard and drowned. Parts of his body were recovered, but…ah…the sharks had gotten to him, and the remains were not…ah…intact. It seems probable that this dog…which, by the way, must be a stray, there are no dogs at the Mauna Pele…this stray dog must have found some of these remains along the coast and brought them here. We do deeply apologize for any trauma this has caused.”

  Paul Kukali was frowning. “Are you talking about the drowning of that Samoan boy from Milolii?”

  Trumbo hesitated and looked at Dillon. The security chief nodded.

  Paul Kukali shook his head. “That was three weeks ago. And the boy’s body was found miles north of here. The hand we saw today was a white man’s hand.”

  Security Chief Dillon made a rude noise. “After a body’s been in the water awhile…”

  “I know,” said Paul. “But this hand wasn’t white and bloated. You could see the tan. I don’t think it had been in the water at all. It was a white man’s hand…”

  “I don’t see any reason to disturb the ladies any more,” said Trumbo, nodding in the direction of the two guests. “I’m sure that Mrs. Stumpf and Mrs…ah…”

  “Perry,” said Eleanor. “Ms.”

  “I’m sure that Mrs. Stumpf and Ms. Perry would prefer to get back to their holiday while we discuss this.” Trumbo took two business cards from his billfold and scribbled on them. “Ladies, if you would present these to Larry at the Shipwreck Bar, he will mix you my favorite drink…a secret mix… I call it Pele’s Fire. All compliments of the Mauna Pele, of course.”

  Cordie looked at the card and then looked up at the billionaire. “This is all good stuff, Trumbo, but I got to tell you… I already had everything free. I won one of your Vacation with the Millionaires state contests. Illinois.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Byron Trumbo, smile still frozen in place. “A beautiful state, Illinois. I know one of your senators very well.”

  Cordie’s head jerked up. “Oh, yeah? Which one?”

  “The senior senator,” said the billionaire, as if knowing that this pale, chubby woman would not recognize the name. “Senator Harlen.”