5
An Ewa-bound streetcar approached, its eave decorated with a holiday garland of LED lights made to look like luminous green fern leaves and glowing red poinsettia blossoms, bright in the winter darkness. Despite the hour, despite the season, the air remained warm, and thick with a humidity that used to belong only to the muggiest days of summer.
The car came to a silent stop. Ava stepped aboard, scanning the other riders: two families and a young couple. Out of habit, she stood on the running board, her elbow hooked around a pole, leaving the bench seats of the open-air car for additional passengers.
Several more, all burdened with carry-on luggage, boarded at the next stop. Their anxious chatter made it clear they’d cut their vacations short and were on their way to the airport, having made the smart decision to get out before the storm.
No one waited at the stop after that, so they rolled through it. But a crowd milled outside the Hotel Taipingyang—enough that the streetcar reached capacity.
Ava found herself sharing the running board with a grinning blond carrying a small backpack over his shoulder. His slender frame, along with the smell of cigarette smoke, clued her that he was European. When he spoke, his accent confirmed this guess. “So we get a police escort now?” he asked, an eyebrow raised. “Should we expect trouble?”
“Trouble in paradise?” she asked, mirroring his teasing expression. “No. This just saves me a walk.”
She looked away, out to the disappointed faces of a group of evacuating tourists queued at the next stop as the fully loaded streetcar rolled past them.
Trouble would come. Not right away. But within twelve hours, if the hurricane continued on its predicted path, people would start to panic. Right now, those with the means and the will to do so could still buy a seat out. But the gamblers would wait, riding out their bets against the storm’s predicted track until it was too late. When the airport closed, reality would set in. Ava had seen it all before.
The streetcar moved slowly but steadily down the center of the Kalakaua pedestrian mall. No one got off. Every couple of minutes an eastbound streetcar, wearing its own holiday garland, slipped quietly by, occupied by only a few uniformed resort staff heading in for the early shift.
Between Duke’s Lane and Lewers Street, old Kalakaua Avenue had been re-routed, so that it curved to meet what used to be Kalia Road. The streetcar wound past Fort DeRussy Park and on to Ala Moana Boulevard, continuing west to the Ala Wai Canal Bridge.
The bridge marked the end of Waikīkī, and of the Kahanamoku Coastal Authority’s jurisdiction. At its western end, a double line of movable steel bollards formed a barrier to keep general traffic from entering the pedestrian mall. The streetcar swerved, moving onto the single track that passed through the barrier. Then it swerved again as the track doubled on the other side. The route continued down the center of Ala Moana Boulevard, now with vehicular traffic on either side—a mix of autonomous taxis, delivery vans, and the rare private car. Makai of the boulevard stood the massive concrete fortification of the Ala Moana Seawall. The concrete labyrinth of the old shopping center sprawled on the mauka side, a ghost town now.
The streetcar picked up speed, hurrying on until it reached Harbor Station, alongside Aloha Tower—the end of the line. As the car came to a smooth stop, Ava jumped down from the running board, relieved to escape the reek of stale cigarette smoke.
A sculpted white-canvas roof soared over the station, aglow at this hour with artificial light. Three black-uniformed officers from the Honolulu Police Department directed the streetcar’s worried passengers toward an escalator that would take them to the elevated train to the airport. Their luggage would be delivered by cargo van, already checked through to their final destinations.
Ava nodded to an older officer she’d known when she’d been with HPD. Then she headed outside to the taxi station. Her apartment was just across the street, in one of the few refurbished towers of old downtown, but she wasn’t ready to go home yet. Tablet in hand, she submitted her identity and a destination to the taxi app.
The queue was short. In less than a minute, the app assigned her to a rideshare with a young mother and her two small children. Five and six years old, Ava guessed. Born since Nolo. They hugged their Fantastic Space Force backpacks, looking sleepy until they noticed Ava. Then their eyes went wide.
Ava smiled at them. “Good morning,” she said, as their mom hoisted a large suitcase into the cargo area. As the back hatch closed, Mom herded the kids into the rear seat, admonishing them, “Seat belts on.” When the kids were secure, she joined Ava up front. HADAFA identified her as Anuhea Golden, twenty-nine, no criminal record.
As the autonomous taxi pulled away from the curb, she evaluated Ava with narrowed eyes. “That’s a Coastal Authority uniform, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I thought so, but I’ve never been to the strip.” A slight, satisfied smile, as her gaze shifted to the road ahead. “Too late now.”
Right.
Resentment was an indulgence that didn’t cost anything—and Ava understood it. It had been hard in the early years to see so much foreign investment poured into the construction of a luxury resort when the island’s people had lost everything. They’d been living in tents pitched in fields that cycled between dust bowls and bogs of sticky mud depending on the weather. The iron-rich soil had left a red stain on everything, and on everyone.
But none of that changed the fact that Waikīkī and the Kahanamoku Coastal Park functioned as an economic engine, bringing much-needed outside money to the island.
“Don’t give up yet,” Ava said coolly. “You might still have a chance to visit. The coastal park was engineered with Nolo in mind.”
The artificial shoreline was a façade designed to persuade wealthy vacationers that paradise still existed. But it wasn’t just decorative. The esplanade, the lagoons, the dunes, the beach, even the artificial reefs—all served as layers of protection against sea-level rise and the storm surge of hurricanes. And along the Ala Wai canal, mechanical flood walls had been installed to prevent an overflow of rainwater into Waikīkī. The refurbished hotels had been strengthened too, and outfitted with hurricane-rated window glass.
But would it be enough?
Ava closed her eyes, remembering the way the concrete fortress of the Honolulu Police Station had vibrated with the force of Nolo’s killing wind, with the floodwater in the street outside already waist high.
“Do you live in Q-12?” the woman asked.
Ava caught her breath, drawn back from that dark place by the sharp question.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you there.” Unmistakable suspicion in her voice.
“I’m going to see someone,” Ava said in a well-practiced soothing tone.
“It’s not your jurisdiction.” A quiet challenge, an unflinching gaze.
Was Anuhea Golden a separatist, despite her innocuous profile? Probably. And why not? A future under Chinese control was frightening, but the feckless and financially strapped federal government had left the island in ruins. With friends like these, secession looked good.
“You’re right,” Ava agreed. “It’s not my jurisdiction. I’m just going to talk to someone.”
Ava needed to hear Ben Kanaele’s story, before he heard what had happened to Robert Bell.
A minute or two of silence slipped by as the taxi passed through a wasteland of empty lots and still-shattered office towers. As they neared the freeway, the woman turned to check on her kids in the back. Ava looked, too. They were already asleep.
“I’m taking them to stay with my parents,” Anuhea said, gentle-voiced now, as if regretting her earlier hostility. “They live in a Chinese dome house in Q-12. We’ll be safe there.”
Ava nodded. “It’s a good plan. The dome houses were designed for this.”
“My husband will come after his shift.” A slight frown as she looked at Ava. “He thinks Huko will do enough damage to convince the Chinese to walk away . . . but I think it’ll take more than that. A lot more.”
A simple declaration, yet Ava shivered, a sense of foreboding rising within her as goosebumps prickled her skin.
Stay focused!
She reached to turn down the air-conditioning. “Your husband sounds like an optimist . . . but I think you’re right.”
◇
The taxi accelerated along a ramp to the rebuilt freeway, easily merging into a sparse flow before gliding across the concrete expanse to the girded autonomous-only lane. Once behind the safety of the low wall, its headlights switched off and it accelerated to eighty, speeding past old, unreclaimed neighborhoods trapped in the limbo of court battles over liability and ownership, with only the occasional LED light testifying to a sparse occupation.
As the taxi climbed to the island’s central plain, the broken neighborhoods gave way to solar farms mixed with agricultural land. Here and there, small farm trucks, defined by the bright beams of their headlights, moved along narrow dirt roads between the fields.
Entrepreneur farmers had taken over abandoned agribusiness lands, supplementing their basic income with fruit and vegetable crops, fish and shrimp ponds, poultry farms, or electricity production. Islands of amber lights marked the two hundred-odd villages of Chinese-provided housing.
After a couple more minutes, the taxi ducked through a gap in the autonomous lane’s girding wall, then slid across the empty freeway to an off-ramp. From there, it was a short ride to Village Q-12—in total, a sixteen-minute commute from Harbor Station.
Five shift workers in airport uniforms waited at the taxi stop. They greeted Anuhea and her children by name, gave Ava a suspicious look-over, and then climbed into the cab, which carried them swiftly away.
Dawn glowed in the eastern sky as Ava waved goodbye to the kids. They scampered off to their grandparents’ home, leaving Anuhea to contend with the suitcase. “Take care,” Ava told her.
Anuhea nodded. “You too.” Narrowed eyes and a teasing smile. “And keep your rich tourists out of trouble.” She followed after her children, who had already disappeared down a side street.
Ava walked toward the opposite end of the village, following a guideline projected by her smart glasses.
The villages were all laid out in a similar way, each with five hundred homes, set out in precise rows, and sharing the same design: small, single-story, and with a covered front porch. The setting harkened back to plantation days a century gone, when immigrant laborers were housed in regimented “camps.” But the old single-wall wood construction used in those days had been left to history.
Round “Chinese dome homes” populated the new villages. Built to survive, their vertical walls and domed roofs comprised a single monolithic concrete form. Firmly anchored to a concrete base, they were predicted to endure the winds of a Cat 5 hurricane with little to no damage. And on the high central plain, away from both mountains and streams, the homes would be safe from catastrophic landslides and floods.
Every village had its own water tank, and a multi-staged green sewage-treatment system. Photovoltaic panels tiled all the roofs. With shared battery storage and backup generators, each village was energy independent.
In another echo of plantation days, the generous yards were mostly devoted to food production. Vegetable and taro gardens vied for space with young breadfruit trees, mangos, lychee, papaya, a range of citrus, and ubiquitous chicken coops. The severe food shortages following Nolo had taught a harsh lesson. Never again, was the mantra, and most homes stocked packaged food to last a year.
The houses had gone up almost overnight, constructed in coordination with the state government. The carbon debt incurred by the concrete construction was being offset by reforestation projects in the foothills of the island’s two mountain ranges.
As Ava made her way to Ben Kanaele’s home, she suffered the suspicious gazes of village residents heading toward the taxi station, and others taking down Christmas decorations ahead of the storm. But no one questioned her, and the barking dogs all stayed in their yards.
After a few blocks, her smart glasses highlighted a house half hidden behind a front yard dominated by banana trees. She followed the walkway toward the front door. Before she reached it, the door opened. A young man—beautiful, but not Ben—looked out at her with a doubtful expression. Maybe a little worried.
Well, who wouldn’t be worried, if a cop out of her district showed up at the door?
HADAFA highlighted the young man and whispered. Keoki Jones. Age twenty-four. Village maintenance apprentice. Social rating +8.
A nice kid, going nowhere.
“Good morning,” Ava called softly, as she walked up two steps to the concrete lanai furnished with a little table and two white plastic chairs. “My apologies for the early hour, but I need to talk to Ben.”
“Ben’s asleep.” Keoki Jones stood in the partly opened door, blocking her view inside. “And anyway, you work for the Chinese. Don’t you?”
His tone made it an accusation. She kept her hands loose at her sides, her expression carefully neutral as she corrected him. “I work for the Coastal Authority. Now go wake up Ben. With the storm incoming, I need to do follow-up on an investigation while I still can.”
Keoki Jones still held out, arguing with a soft pidgin inflection. “You know he works nights. He got home not even three hours ago—”
“I know where he works,” she interrupted, dropping the soft approach. “I know his schedule. And if you want him to have a job after this storm, then you will wake him up and let him know he needs to talk to me.”
Not a threat she would normally make or typically be able to carry out, but a word to Shao Hua about a non-cooperative potential witness would surely get results. Keoki Jones must have sensed her resolve because his resistance collapsed.
“Try wait,” he murmured and withdrew, closing the door behind him.
Ava put on a stern expression and stared into the lens of the security camera until, less than two minutes later, the door opened to reveal Ben, tousled and red-eyed, dressed only in shorts, the hard, rectangular outline of a phone in his right pocket. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. “Officer Arnett,” he said, clearly confused. “What’s up? What’s gone wrong?”
She gestured at the chairs. “Can we sit? Talk for a couple of minutes?”
“Sure.” He sank into the nearest chair, watching her pensively.
She sat down too, let him endure a few seconds of silence, and then told him, “Your name came up in an investigation. Do you remember meeting a woman, a Chinese national, named Ye Xiaoxiao?”
A nervous side eye toward the door. “I meet a lot of Chinese women.”
“Do you make dates with them?”
That brought him fully awake. He straightened up, his red-rimmed eyes widening. “No. Hell no. I flirt with them, sure. They like it and they leave bigger tips. But the hotel I work for doesn’t allow fraternizing. I could be fired. So whoever told you—”
Ava held up a hand, interrupting his denial. “She gave you her number. You texted her.”
“I didn’t.”
“I saw the messages, Ben.”
“I didn’t text her!”
His hand dropped against the outline of the phone in his pocket, but his worried gaze watched her.
“Texting isn’t a crime, Ben. I just need to know.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Let’s look at your phone.”
He pulled it out. The device recognized him and the screen brightened. He stared at it for a few seconds before murmuring, “Text message history.” The screen refreshed. Ava could not see what it displayed, but she saw the slight widening of his eyes.
“Shit,” he whispered. “Someone must have been fucking with my phone . . . but that’s bullshit. It’s not possible.” He looked up at Ava. “I swear, I did not send these messages. Hell—” He held the phone out to her. “You can look at the timestamps. I was still working the bar when those messages went out.”
Ava took the phone. Scrolled. Saw the same sequence of messages Ye Xiaoxiao had shown her.
“My phone goes into a locker during work hours. I can’t get to it until I clock out. Ask my boss. He’ll tell you.”
“Can he get to it?” Ava asked.
Ben shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. My phone won’t unlock for anyone else.”
Ava scrolled further through his message history, studying his contacts, using her smart glasses to record what she saw. Queries, hellos, alerts. HADAFA identified them all as being from his circle of friends. Then it flagged a second cluster of flirtatious messages. Ava recognized the name of the recipient as the young Chinese woman who had been the target of the second EP4. She scrolled faster, looking for the date the first EP4 had entered the park. There. A third set of messages, setting up a late night romantic encounter.
She looked up at Ben. Despite the evidence on his phone, HADAFA did not flag him as a potential perpetrator.
“Someone’s fucking with your phone,” she agreed. “Any ideas?”
He shook his head frantically. “No. Who could do that?”
Good question. Who could send messages from a phone without touching it?
She turned the phone over. The brand was Chinese. Maybe a surveillance backdoor coded into the OS?
“What’s this all about, anyway?” Ben asked. “Don’t tell me something happened to that woman.”
“Someone set her up. Sent her out into the dunes. She thought she was meeting you.”
“Jesus, is she all right?”
“Do you have any idea who would want—”
“No.” A forceful denial, followed immediately by a look of reconsideration.
“What is it, Ben?”
“You gotta understand, I hear all kinds of shit and bullshit standing behind that bar. A couple times I heard guys, tourists, talking about some dark-side social media called The Predator Network. Sick stuff, where guys could post locations of vulnerable women. I thought it was probably a joke.”
“It probably was, to them.”
Just another one-step-removed thrill: call a SWAT team in on an innocent household; goad a social media mob into attack over the least transgression; set a woman up for third-party rape. A troll’s game, its reward a sick sense of power.
Ava handed Ben his phone. “You might want to get a new number, and a new device,” she advised.
◇
By the time Ava returned to the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower, the sun had risen, its fierce glare darkening her smart glasses and casting long shadows between the towers. Just like at the streetcar’s prior stops, a small crowd pushed forward: anxious and angry tourists laden with backpacks and small suitcases, all determined to board, even though the streetcar was Diamond Head-bound.
A transit official had been assigned to ride the car. He held up a hand, palm out, and in a kindly voice, he advised them, “You can get on now, but you’ll have to get off at the end of the line and queue up again.”
“At least we’ll get a car that way,” a large middle-aged man declared. “While we were waiting on the other side, three of ’em, completely empty, rolled past without stopping.”
The official nodded, his polite expression holding steady. “We’re distributing cars along the line, to minimize wait times for everyone. An empty car will be at this stop in . . .” He turned his forearm to check the screen of his bracelet. “Eight and a half minutes. There’s no need to worry. We’ll get everyone out.”
Ava had listened to him recite this explanation, with different wait times, each time the streetcar had stopped on the way in. She admired his patience.
“No panic so far?” she’d asked him, after the first stop.
“Not yet. But give it time.”
Once again, he succeeded in convincing the disgruntled to move to the Ewa-bound track. “Take care,” Ava called to him as she stepped down.
The official nodded. “We’ll get through this.”
As Ava entered the hotel grounds, she passed more departing vacationers with carry-on luggage in tow. Her uniform earned her their curious stares, and polite nods. Avoiding the lobby, she walked through the grounds to the esplanade and KCA Security’s restricted entrance.
The gate recognized her and opened. She crossed the ramp to the deck. The ready room’s glass doors slid aside and she entered. No one was there. Day shift had already started, and all but three motorcycles had been checked out.
Later today, Ivan would put out a call for all hands to report to work. Ava needed to sleep before then, but she had two tasks to complete first.
Ivan must have been tracking her, because he was waiting when the elevator doors opened. “How’d your interview go?”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she answered. “Ben denies sending any texts. Claims no one could have sent them. I need to make a phone call to his supervisor, to confirm that.”
“My office,” he said.
Lights were on in the administrative area, with three desks already occupied, their inhabitants staring at screens with sincere expressions as they engaged in video calls, their soft murmurs clearly intended to soothe the nervous:
The airlines are cooperating . . .
Assure them there’s still plenty of time to get out . . .
If you need an officer on scene, use the emergency line . . .
The system spliced in a white background behind each agent and muted extraneous noise, screening all office activities from the caller.
Ava resisted the delicious scent of coffee as she walked with Ivan across the room, knowing that if she drank any now, sleep would be impossible. They entered his office. He closed the door.
HADAFA had already retrieved the supervisor’s personal phone number. It put the call through—voice only—and woke him up.
“Sure,” he said on speaker, agreeing with Ben’s story. “Corporate regs. Employee devices get secured behind a time lock. To open a unit early, supervisor and employee have to be present—and you know how it’s been. The strip’s packed. Protestors, journalists, diplomats, on top of the usual throng of tourists. We’ve been too damn busy for days to let anyone off early.”
Ava thanked him and ended the call.
“So you’re thinking Ben Kanaele is not our man,” Ivan said.
Ava leaned back in her chair. “Probably not, but he is involved. Not knowingly, maybe. But something’s there.” She stood. “I’m going to have HADAFA go over security video from his bar—”
She broke off at a soft knock on the office door. Turned to see Akasha through the glass. Ava crooked two fingers signaling her to come in. “What have you got?”
A slight flush warmed Akasha’s dark skin, testifying to the rising heat outside. “Confirmation of Robert Bell’s social profile. Dude was not popular. I talked to most of his neighbors. No one was upset to learn he wasn’t coming home again. One woman was ready to throw a party, but most were just relieved. Like his record said, he was a creep, a troublemaker, a misogynist—and no one would admit to knowing what he did for fun. If he had any friends, they were online. CSU is still going over his house, but they aren’t optimistic. All his gear is highly encrypted, probably inaccessible.”
Ava nodded. “We’ll need to focus on Ben Kanaele instead—”
“But not today,” Ivan interrupted. “I’m putting the case on hold. We’ll take it up again on the other side. Right now, I want both of you to go home. Get some sleep—because you’re going to have a twenty-four hour shift when you come back.”