Page 36 of Talk Story

Two officers brought up a stubby black battering ram and swung it once, hard, into the steel door below the hasp and lock.

The boom of it came through my phone’s speaker like a gunshot. All three of us flinched.

The door gave way after another strike, buckling inward off one hinge. Another couple of swings and it caved entirely, clanging onto a concrete floor.

The camera was moving, the team flowing through the breach with flashlights cutting the dim interior gloom. “Police! Police! Hands where we can see them!”

The view swept across the inside of the warehouse. No humans appeared to be present. Even at fish-eye angle, through a phone, I knew what I was seeing.

Construction equipment, first—a small excavator with a hydraulic breaker, what you’d use to bust up rock; coils of chain; pallets of orange survey stakes; a generator the size of a chest freezer. And then, against the far wall, under a sheet of milky plastic, a row of pale gray rectangular slabs propped upright and crated at the base.

The petroglyphs.

Pearl made a sharp, involuntary sound.

Lei’s cam moved closer, her flashlight beam sliding across the nearest panel. She tossed up the plastic. There they were—a warrior figure with a spear raised overhead, a row of dots, the unmistakable forked sweep of an ‘Iwa wing carved into the volcanic rock. Cut clean out of the cave wall with tool marks still lighter at the edges, exactly matching the depressions we’d seen.

“They’re there,” I breathed. “We found them.”

“Oh, crap,” Pua whispered. “It’s really real. Everything we thought.” She pressed manicured fingers to her mouth. “Part of me didn’t really believe Victor was capable of this.”

Pearl said nothing. She was motionless, her dark eyes fixed on the screen. A single tear tracked through the powder on her wrinkled cheek. She made no move to wipe it away.

An officer’s voice called out, “Clear left!” and another answered, “Clear right!” The team was working the cavernous space in a grid. Lei’s view tracked along the back wall, past the panels, toward a partition that walled off a corner of the warehouse into an interior office. A cheap hollow core door, shut, caught in her beam.

Underneath it: a thin yellow line of light.

“Somebody’s in there,” Pua’s voice was high with tension.

Lei had seen the illumination too. On-screen, her gloved hand came up making a signal, then two fingers pointing at the door. The team reassembled around it—one officer to either side of the frame, one holding the door cannon, the others with weapons up, Lei behind.

She rapped the door with her knuckles. “Maui Police. If you’re in there, come out with your hands visible. Now.”

A beat. Two.

“Take it,” Lei said.

The officer hit the hollow door with the cannon, and it splintered around the latch and flew inward. The cam surged forward into a small, cluttered office—a metal desk, a dead potted plant, a wall calendar two months out of date. Flashlight beams converged on the gap in the knee-well beneath the desk, where a pair of expensive loafers and a hunched shape had folded themselves into a space far too small for any dignity.

“Out. Hands up. Let me see your hands,” Lei snapped.

A man sidled out from under the desk on his knees, palms spread, blinking into the lights. Even at the bad angle and through the grit on Lei’s lens, I knew that face: heavier than the last time I’d seen it, jowls gone soft, salon tan a little gray around the edges—but unmistakable.

“That’s David Santos,” I said aloud. Beside me, Pearl drew a slow breath through her nose like a woman smelling something she abhorred.

“You remember him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course,” I said. The last time David Santos had moved against Pearl, it had been with poison. She had nearly died on her own lanai.

On-screen, Lei’s voice had dropped into the calm register she used when the situation had tipped entirely in her favor. “David Santos. You’re under arrest. Your parole is hereby revoked.” She recited the Miranda warning cleanly, the way she’d done it a thousand times—the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, each phrase landing with the weight of an anchor hitting the water. “Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

Santos got to his feet, slow, with his hands being cuffed behind his back. “I understand,” he said. He glanced around the office at the officers, at the crated panels visible through the broken door, at the excavator with its rock cutter. Something in him seemed to sag. He spoke in the flat voice of a man cutting his losses: “If I’m going down, Victor Chang is going down too. I want to make a deal.”

“Mr. Santos⁠—”

“And I want a lawyer,” he said. “That’s it. I want my lawyer, I want a deal, and I’m not saying another word until my attorney is present.”

“That’s your right,” Lei said—to the room, to her team, and a little to the three of us watching.