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Chapter One
Honolulu police officer Katrina Ogden, K.O., sat slumped at her desk, chin in hand, dispiritedly surveying the four foot high stack of paper in the corner. The Sergeant’s Exam study materials. She had started to study. Several times. It just seemed like something always interrupted her. She did take some of it home to work on late at night after her 3 to 11 P.M. shift in Evidence. That was the problem--late at night. With the best of intentions, she sat at her dining room table, stiff and uncomfortable, bright light glaring on to the pages. It did no good. She drifted off to sleep and woke hours later with a crick in her neck and no idea of what she’d read.
The exam, designed by a clerk test preparer at the city and county level, not a cop, was nearly impossible to study for. It could encompass anything and everything from union rules to police standards and conduct. It was a “crapshoot,” as others gone before had told K.O.
K.O. sighed, rubbed her face and ran her fingers through her short, red hair. This wasn’t getting anything done, much less studying for the exam. She told herself she’d finish checking the forms stacked on her desk against the evidence submitted, then she’d crack the penal code book. Again.
As the head of Evidence on her shift, one of her tasks was to make sure evidence logged in, was actually what and where it was said to be. She picked up the log on her way to the Evidence room in the main office.
She unlocked the door and stepped inside the cavernous room. Metal shelves lined the walls up to the ceiling, and more rows divided the room into narrow aisles--a bizarre warehouse of people’s lives torn apart by crime.
The room was further divided by types of crime and evidence. Separate sections for weapons, homicide, drugs. Larger pieces of evidence, such as cars, were in a different, roomier location.
She passed by the boogie board with the large, jagged semi-circular bite missing. During her first tour of the evidence locker, she’d asked why this obvious, but sinister-looking item was included. It was considered evidence in a Missing Persons case, because a body had never been recovered. Every time she passed it, she thought, “Duh. He’s going to be missing for a long time.”
She walked among the shelves, matching tag numbers to items, trying not to absorb the thousands of objects, some bloodied and mangled, others more innocuous looking, that represented unsolved crimes. It saddened her to think that so many cases would never be closed, meaning that all those families touched by them would have no closure. In self-defense, she shut them all out, those small voices asking for help, and briskly moved through the shadowy room.
Seven A.M. found Donna Costello, Chief Death Investigator for the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office, crawling like a snake down a tunnel barely higher than she was.
Investigator-in-training Ben “Tiny” Sugano scooted parallel several feet away. Honolulu PD waited outside for the verdict. Two hours earlier, HPD had received a call reporting a body in a cave, discovered by a couple of teenaged boys.
A death investigator was called to the scene of every death, often before the police. The M.E.’s office, in the form of a death investigator, usually determined if detectives should be summoned. HPD on the Leeward side had beaten her here since Makaha was nearly an hour’s drive west from her office.
By the time Donna and Tiny had arrived, HPD had already sent a reluctant officer in to confirm that there was, in fact, a body. A skeleton to be precise. Upon Donna and Tiny’s arrival, the ‘body’ had escalated to become the victim of a sex crime because the shaken officer thought he had seen remnants of panties and some kind of bludgeon. He had not remained in the cave.
Donna pushed a flashlight ahead of her and scraped forward using her fingers and toes, feeling her jeans and tee shirt catch unpleasantly on the rough surface.
Donna Costello, a haole from the Mainland, had been on the job two years--a long time, particularly for females in the field. A co-worker had committed suicide a few months ago, and even now, she pushed it aside, refusing to deal with it.
At the M.E.’s office, it had been a slow week in terms of bodies. A couple of homeless, a domestic death in Palama, and an infant with congenital birth defects.
Tiny stopped and his flashlight beam dipped. “I can’t go any farther. It’s too small. My knees is killin’ me.” Sweat poured off them in the confined space. Donna could see it dripping off his nose to form a dark blot on the tan dirt, even as she felt it run from under her own arms and off her ribs. The air was close and unmoving. The cloying smell of the dirt itself was filled with what she was sure were droppings from various creatures. She shivered. Give her a dead human body any day over a bunch of rats or bugs. Perhaps that discomfort was what had given way to her eccentric hobby of ‘insect death scenes,’ as she termed them. Some measure of control over creepy crawlies. She took dead insects, the large, Hawaiian flying roaches were particularly good, and formed intricate crime scenes, complete with mini props and police tape.
“Come on, Tiny. Suck it in, brah, you can make it.” Donna grunted and shoved herself forward a few inches. “I can see the larger cave. Look.” She flashed her light over the walls of a roomy cavern.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you say.” Tiny pushed, and with a scraping sound, slithered down a slight slope into the main cave. Donna followed, her light bouncing off the walls and floor to illuminate what she knew to be a piece of bone. She approached the bundle of dried human bones, desiccated, chipped and cracked. They had been in the cave a long time. With its remnants of ti leaves and other signs, Donna knew the cave was no crime scene, but a sacred, ancient Hawaiian burial site. The “panties” were a ragged pile of tattered kapa cloth, the “bludgeon,” a worn-smooth, lava poi-pounder. An intimidating potential weapon to be sure, but this one had been used for nothing more sinister than pounding taro root into poi--the staple food of the ancient Hawaiian people.
Donna sighed. The cave would remain untouched, except for a blessing ceremony that was performed any time a sacred place was defiled.
The confined space, the draining adrenaline that accompanied each new potential crime scene, and the musty, guano-laden air were getting to her. Donna beckoned to Tiny and they began their painstaking exit from the cave.
Neither of them saw the second body--only days old--that had been forced into a shadow-filled niche.
From Pemberley Press Order from any bookstore or fine independent, or Amazon.com Distributed by IPG 1-800-888-4741 Also available as an E Book from Writer’s Exchange |
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Excerpt from K.O.'d in the Rift |
