Chapter One
Seven years since
their breakup, Jolene Kualoha spotted Danker Donahue, ambling from the parking
lot toward the store. She recognized him by his height and long gait. Wind from
the north ruffled his hair and brought a bone-biting chill to her heart. Nuts, here
he was, ducking his head to miss the bell overhead. It tinkled, and a strange
twisting sensation hit her in the stomach.
This happened at
the Kalua-Kona Food Emporium on a Sunday morning in July. She stared from where
she stood near the avocados. His dangerous edge drew her in, but she turned her
back to him. Her body reverberated like when her cellphone was on vibrate in
her pocket. Stunned with minor electric shock, she froze. Maybe he wouldn’t see her. Wouldn’t recognize the back of her head or the
once familiar shape of her ass.
Was someone
waiting for him in the parking lot? Someone like Louella, the baby’s momma
who’d summoned him for an immediate DNA test? For a split second,
she craned her head around but didn’t see her with him.
She and Danker
were a couple when the test confirmed his fatherhood. Her
heart ached at the memory. Love hurt, but that wasn’t all. Loneliness hurt.
Losing someone hurt. Decision-making hurt when you force yourself to do the
right thing.
She’d pulled away,
giving him space to work on his previous relationship for the sake of their
child. The most shameful thing a woman can do is take parents away from a baby,
and this began her year of stubborn steadfastness.
I
did the breakup rituals. Got the dramatic haircut. Engraved a piece of jewelry
he got me with a new message. Deleted the photos that made me cry.
To have been his
woman was like living where the air flowered with jasmine, and the weather day
after day was flawless, but the forecast was a hurricane.
Older didn’t mean
wiser. All this time she’d dreaded running into him, sometimes dressing in
expectation of it. If she did see him again, she wanted to look good. Today she
looked like crap, but what did it matter? His reason for being on the Big
Island had nothing to do with her, not in a personal way. Tomorrow they’d meet
at the FBI field office to collaborate on a serial kidnapping case. She’d wear
a sleeveless linen dress, open-toed pumps, and bring the accordion file full of
notes and newspaper clippings she’d gathered.
The perpetrator targeted wealthy Hawaiians with social capital, the
kind of people seen on television or featured in newspapers when they donated
money to charities. The latest missing person, Pua Iona, owned Iona Hawaiian
Rugs and was an acquaintance of hers. Not that they shared the same social
strata, but they’d volunteered together at an artisans’ market to boost
Hawaiian crafts. After Pua went missing and fit the criminal’s
modus operandi, Mayor Billy Kim, frustrated with police progress, contacted Jolene’s former boss from California, FBI
Agent Gary Guhleman, cowboyish in dress but wise in judgement.
Guhleman didn’t
need to tell her Hawaiians resisted outside intrusions. “You know everyone,”
he’d said. “Witnesses will share what they know.” The agent and his wife had
retired, rather semi-retired, here in Kona. Soon after she and Guhleman had
spoken, he called in Danker Donahue to consult. “You remember him, right?”
“Gosh, let me
think.” She and Danker went hot and heavy after the Long Beach case that ended
with the arrest of mobster Seamus McGinn.
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