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Ray and I jumped up. He told the judge’s secretary we’d be back for the subpoena, and we took off at a run. “Can you get out the back door?” I asked Greg as we went.
“The back yard is fenced and the only way out leads past the front door.”
I thought fast. I didn’t think Gardiner would go into Greg’s house with a gun in hand; he’d sound Greg out first, try to discover what Greg had. “You have a neighbor you can call to come take the girls?” I said. “At least get them out of there.”
The bell rang again in the background, as Ray and I left the court building and ran toward the Jeep. “Yeah, there’s a stay-at-home mom next door. I’ll try and leave Gardiner here and take the girls over to her house.”
“Smart thinking. Ray and I will be there as soon as we can.”
Ray was already on his phone calling dispatch to request a SWAT team. “What’s his address?” he asked me as we got to the Jeep.
“Call me back if you can and leave your phone on,” I said to Greg. I hung up and handed the cell to Ray so he could read the contact information, and I gunned the Jeep out of the parking lot and onto the street. I made it to the Likelike Highway easily, and Ray put the flashing light up on the roof. I began darting and weaving around slower traffic on the broad, four-lane divided highway, blowing my horn at clueless tourists and making tight swings of the steering wheel to get around them.
The mountains rose up to our left, and the land dropped off steeply to the right. It was a dangerous place to have an accident, but fortunately the traffic was light enough so that we made good progress. We passed a broken-down station wagon on the right shoulder, boxes, garbage bags and suitcases lined up behind it as a young woman in a high-waisted baby doll dress and rubber slippers stood beside two chickens, all of them watching a man work on the engine.
We curved into the entrance of the Wilson Tunnel and the darkness closed around us. Ray grabbed the door handle as I swerved yet again with too little maneuvering room. “Why hasn’t Greg called me back?” I asked. “I want to know what’s going on up there.”
“Focus on getting us there in one piece,” Ray said, as light blossomed ahead of us and we came to the tunnel exit. A broad vista of the Windward Shore opened up to our right, and Ray’s cell rang.
“SWAT’s on their way,” he told me after he finished the call.
It was a gorgeous, picture-postcard kind of day. The sky was clear and light blue, and the mountains to our left were verdant green, with bits of gray rock showing the island’s spine. The land leveled out around us, and we passed Kaneohe District Park and a line of cars waiting to turn in at Windward Community College.
I slowed as we approached Haiku Road, and Ray took down the flashing light. The SWAT team wasn’t there yet, but as we cruised past Greg’s house I saw a black Mercedes sedan parked in front. I drove to the end of the street, turned around, and parked. “What do you think?” I asked. “We call Greg? Or we do some recon?”
“Recon,” Ray said. “Let’s wait to make the call until we know what’s going on.”
Both Ray and I kept a pair of bullet-proof vests in our vehicles: one HPD issued, one we’d each bought just to be safe. We strapped ourselves in and began walking toward the house. Adrenaline was rushing through my veins as I worried about Greg and the two little girls. I didn’t want to add them to the statistics for this case.
The houses were close together and there wasn’t enough room to get around the side of the house without someone noticing. The house to the right had a lot of kiddie debris in the front yard—a Big Wheels, plastic bucket and shovel, and a couple of headless Barbie dolls. “That must be the stay-at-home mom,” I said. “I’ll go in there and look through her windows.”
“I’ll go around the other way.” Ray held out his hand in a shaka to me. “Be safe.”
I returned the gesture. “You too.”
I walked up to the front door and knocked. A harried-looking young woman with lank blonde hair answered, holding a drooling girl on her hip. “Yes?”
I showed her my ID. “I’m worried about something going on next door,” I said. “May I come inside and take a look through your windows?”
“Going on?” she said. “What?”
“I don’t want to worry you,” I said. “Could be nothing at all. May I?”
She stepped aside. A slightly older boy sat on the carpet in the middle of the living room, taking apart a plastic dump truck. “Who are you?” he asked me.
“A friend of your next-door neighbor.” I walked through the living room to the kitchen, which looked out toward Greg’s house.
The homes were mirror images of each other, so I found myself looking through the window at Greg’s kitchen. By leaning forward I could see through the kitchen to part of Greg’s living room. I couldn’t see him or Andre Gardiner, because a big body-builder with his back to me blocked the view. That had to be Takvor Soralian.
My phone buzzed with an incoming text. GO in chair, AG stand, Ray wrote.
I texted back, Taki back 2 me. U C a gun?
No bt sure there is 1.
I turned to the mother. “Take your kids and go into a back bedroom. Stay there until I tell you it’s all right to come out.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just do it, please.”
I went out the front door. The SWAT van pulled up at the end of the street and I ran down to talk to the commander, a gruff Nisei named Yamashita. I briefed him on the situation as Ray came up behind us. “The big Japanese guy, Greg Oshiro, is a newspaper reporter. He’s in there with his two little girls,” I said. “The older haole is a business executive named Andre Gardiner; we think the bodybuilder is his muscle, a guy named Takvor Soralian.”
“Who’s in charge?” Yamashita asked. “Gardiner?”
I nodded. “Gardiner’s late father committed a murder about fifty years ago, and Gardiner’s been trying to cover it up, killing everyone who knew about it.”
“But you don’t know what he wants in this situation?”
“Nope.”
“Then that’s the first thing we need to identify. In most hostage situations, the captor doesn’t want the hostages per se. There’s a target, who can provide what the captor wants, whether it’s money, a safe exit, or performance of a specific task. The hostages are bargaining chips. We can’t negotiate until we know what this guy wants.”
“We don’t actually know that Greg and his daughters are hostages,” I said.
“Then why did you call us out?”
I didn’t know what to say. It had been a knee-jerk reaction to call in the SWAT team, but perhaps we had overplayed our hand, and all it would take was somebody talking to Gardiner.
I looked at Ray. “I guess it’s time to call Greg and see how things are going inside.”
Yamashita and his men stayed out of direct sight of the house, and I called Greg’s cell. “Come on, Greg, pick up,” I said, tapping my foot nervously.
He caught the call after five rings, just as I was thinking it was going to voice mail. “Hello?”
“Greg, it’s Kimo. Are you and the girls all right?” I turned the phone so that Ray and Yamashita could hear.
“Sorry, I can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of an interview. Let me have one of my girls get back to you.”
“Are the girls in the back bedroom?”
“That’s correct. But I’m on deadline here—I’ve got a gun to my head to get this story finished.”
“Literally?”
“Listen, my interviewee is getting nervous so...”
I heard a man’s voice say, “Give me that phone.” And then he was addressing me. “Who is this?”
“Mr. Gardiner? This is Detective Kanapa’aka from HPD. What brings you to Mr. Oshiro’s house today?”
Yamashita started making stretching motions to me, then turned to his team.
“Do you think I’m stupid, detective?”
“No, sir. I think you’re very upset about something. I’d like to help you if I can.”
He barked a harsh laugh. “It’s too late for that.” He ended the call.
The SWAT team fanned out. Two guys ran up to the stay-at-home mom’s door, while another two circled around the other side of the house.
“I’m going up there,” I said. “I think I can get him to talk to me.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Yamashita said. “I’m getting my men in place. As soon as we have a clear shot we’ll end this.”
“There’s a civilian and two little girls in there. If I can short circuit a problem I need to try.”
“Kimo...” Ray began, but I was already walking toward the house.
I went right up to the front door and tried the knob. It was unlocked, and I turned it slowly and quietly. But as soon as the door opened, Takvor Soralian pivoted and trained his handgun on me.
I put my hands up. “I just want to talk to Mr. Gardiner.” I took a step into the living room. “Mr. Gardiner? You’re worried about your father, aren’t you? His reputation?”
Andre Gardiner turned to face me, though he kept his own handgun pointed at Greg, who was sitting on his sofa. The girls were nowhere in sight.
“My father? My father was a prick. And he’s been dead for years. I couldn’t care less about him.”
“Why bring this all up now?” I asked. “Did Alexander Fields threaten you? Was he going to expose your father for what he did?”
Gardiner sneered. “He wanted to purify his soul. Fucking asshole. His soul was so dark it’d frighten Satan. He was going to tell everyone what I’d done. And even though it was fifty years ago, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
I looked at him. “You killed Senator LeJeune?”
“I thought I was doing what my father wanted,” Gardiner said. “He got so angry when he talked about this mainland asshole who was screwing up all his plans. He said things would be so much easier if something would happen to the guy.”
“You were only what, sixteen?” I asked. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew all right. I’d been going out hunting with my father and some of his friends for years. I was a better shot than he was. He arranged a meeting with the Senator at our house, one last try to convince him to change his mind. I heard them arguing, and I knew the Senator was never going to agree.”
It was hot in the house, and sweat was dripping down Greg’s face. I felt it beginning to pool under my arms and drip down my back. “What did you do?”
“I got my gun from my room and I walked out into the living room. I kept it behind my back, and my father said, ‘Son, let me introduce you to Senator LeJeune.’ He was sitting in an easy chair by the door to our lanai, and I walked up, put the gun to his forehead, and fired.”
I couldn’t imagine doing something like that when I was sixteen. There had to be something seriously wrong with Andre Gardiner’s wiring.
“Wow. What did your father do?”
“He started yelling at me! Do you believe that? I had just done him a massive favor, and all he wanted to do was yell at me for making a mess. ‘Just like always, I’m cleaning up after you,’ he said. Then he locked me in my room. It wasn’t until I saw the papers the next day that I figured out what he had done.”
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. Takvor Soralian did the same thing. He still had his gun pointed at me, but he was watching Gardiner.
“That’s why you had problems at Punahou your senior year,” I said. “You were upset. I can understand that. I killed a man a couple of years ago, so I know what that’s like.”
“That didn’t bother me. It was the way my asshole father treated me that made me crazy. Like I was some kind of criminal. Made me go to see psychiatrists, sent me to fucking Oregon for college instead of UH with my friends.”
Fathers and sons, I thought. We never seem to get that part right. I thought my own father had done a good job of raising us, but I had my own resentments, and I know my brothers did, too.
“Even so, Mr. Gardiner. There’s no physical evidence anymore. It would have been his word against yours.”
He shrugged. “Well, I’ve confessed now. So that means I’m going down. Might as well take a couple of you bastards with me.”
He took his gun off Greg Oshiro and aimed at me. I heard the deafening blast reverberate in the small house and took a deep breath.