CHAPTER 58

An hour later we were back in my villa, Jansen and I standing around the kitchen, arms folded, biting our nails, while Iryna and the sketch artist worked together in my bedroom.

“So, what’s with the painkillers?” he said.

“Got stabbed in the abdomen last year.”

“Wanna tell me about it?”

I shook my head, motioned to the paperback on the counter. “Read the book.”

Jansen picked Sherry Beagan’s book up off the counter and started flipping through it, settled on the photographs in the middle. “She’s beautiful,” he said, pointing to a picture of Erin Simms in her wedding dress.

“Was.”

Jansen turned the pages again and again until he reached the final photograph—the picture of me in a soaked-through suit, sunglasses covering my eyes, a Panama Jack hat atop my head, standing, covered from head to toe in blood, on the beach abutting the lagoon outside the Kupulupulu Beach Resort.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“So, with the pills, what are you doing, doctor-shopping?”

I gave him a look as though I might kill him right there in my kitchen. “What?”

“You know, going from doctor to doctor to get multiple prescriptions.”

“Are you on the job, Jansen?”

“Always.”

I took the book out of his hands and tossed it back onto the counter. “Buy your own copy.”

“You think what I do is a joke, don’t you, Counselor?”

“Not always. When you take down a Mexican cartel trafficking black tar heroin, I’m all for it. When you raid a meth lab that might blow up at any second, you have my utmost respect. But when you take down a farmer with a marijuana field on the Big Island and try to put him away for life, I think you’re wasting taxpayer money and being naïve and an all-around son of a bitch.”

We remained silent after that. Waiting for Iryna Kupchenko and the sketch artist to exit my bedroom with a usable depiction of our one common enemy, the man known as Orlando Masonet.

*   *   *

“It’s not going well,” the sketch artist announced a half hour later. She set several stray sheets from her sketch pad onto the kitchen counter and spread them out. “She’s confused. And her command of the English language isn’t helping.”

“Shit,” Jansen said, pounding his fist down on the counter. Everything on the counter shook, all the piles of papers and folders I’d accumulated the past few months that weren’t directly being used in the trial. A few items fluttered to the hardwood floor.

I swallowed hard, suddenly thirsty and desperate for a few pills. My cell phone buzzed and I picked it up without looking at the caller ID.

“Trial is adjourned for the day,” Jake said. “I put Guffman on the stand, and he didn’t budge, not even an inch, not even when I entered the Facebook photo into evidence. He insists he’s never once seen that car.”

“You didn’t get anything from him?” I said, suddenly angry at myself for wasting the day here in Ko Olina and not being in the courtroom to question Guffman myself.

“I got Guffman to admit that someone else may have parked in front of his house if they knew he wasn’t home. That’s it.”

As I was telling Jake what had transpired on this side of the island, Iryna Kupchenko stepped out of my bedroom, crying.

“I’ve got to go,” I told Jake. “I’ve got to get to work on my closing argument.”

“All right, son. I think maybe you need to visit Turi, too. Prepare him for the likely verdict and inform him about the appeals process.”

I dropped the phone onto the floor and buried my face in my hands. My eyes still felt raw from the pepper spray. My stomach ached, a combination of nerves and withdrawal. I was one closing statement away from losing this trial. Which meant that the man who once saved my life would be going away for the rest of his, thanks to my shortcomings. And on the inside, Turi’s life expectancy wouldn’t be long at all. Knowing what he knew, there was no way Masonet could allow him to live. Turi Ahina would be murdered at Halawa just as Brandon Glenn was murdered at Rikers Island.

“This, it is him,” I suddenly heard Iryna say from behind me.

Jansen stepped around the kitchen counter as I turned and saw Iryna leaning over some papers that had fallen to the floor.

In her hands was a brightly colored brochure.“This, it is him. I swear it.”

Jansen took the brochure out of her hands and studied the photograph she’d been pointing at. “Who is this guy?”

I looked over Jansen’s shoulder, my heart pounding hard in my chest. The brochure was Audra’s—media material for the towering new condominium building being constructed in Kakaako.

Water Landings—your private oasis in the center of it all.

“That’s a property developer,” I said to Jansen. “The most prolific in all of the Hawaiian Islands.” I grabbed the brochure from him and stared at the rich, familiar bloated face. “His name is Thomas S. Duran.”

“Duran?”

“The governor calls him Tommy,” I said.