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.Twenty years dropped and I could see her as she had been as a little girl.“I’m going to use you, John Caine.You might not like it, but I’m going to use you.”“A guy could get used to it,” I said, wondering what she had in mind.23You might think you’re doing something creative here, Mr.Caine, but you are nothing but an interloper.This is strictly a matter for law enforcement.You don’t belong in this.” Kate’s boss, Captain Dale Yoshida, loomed over me as well as he could.He was a thin, nervous nisei in a dark blue suit, white shirt and black knit tie.He was barely five feet tall.His cigarette-roughened, movie-tough’s voice made him seem taller than he really was.He reminded me of a Japanese version of Humphrey Bogart.I slumped in Kate’s leather chair, dressed in freshly washed khakis and a black and green Aloha shirt she’d purchased for me.I was still barefoot.“You wanna give us a statement or be held as a material witness? What’s it gonna be?”“Neither,” I said.“Let me go over it one more time.”“Forget that.We’re not taking any suggestions from you.What do you do for a living? Private detective?”I nodded.“Most of my work is executive protection and asset recovery.” Asset recovery was a fancy name for retrieving stolen property.Because of the volume, that made up the bulk of my income.I liked the way the buzzwords sounded as they rolled off my tongue.“Whatever.Tell me again how you got messed up in this?”“I’m doing inquiries for Admiral Winston MacGruder, the father of the murdered girl.The trail led me to Thompson.” Well okay, it wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but this wasn’t a priest I was talking to.Yoshida glared at Kate, who was sitting on her couch, her legs curled underneath her body.Her posture and her poise were utterly feminine.Her face betrayed nothing.“This clown licensed?”“Yes.And he’s known to HPD and DEA.Talk to Lieutenant Kahanamoku.He checked him out.According to DEA and Kimo he’s loose, but he’s straight.”Yoshida grunted and turned back to me.“You claim you saw a videotape of a girl being raped and murdered by two Japanese nationals.You subsequently identified the victim in the movie as Carolyn Hammel.And you claim the owner of the motor vessel Pele then murdered his receptionist, a girl named Jasmine, whom we both know works for Chawlie Choy, by feeding her to the sharks.And you claim that he threw you into the sea, right after that attack, and you managed to fight off the sharks and swim ten miles to shore in the middle of the night.You expect me to believe all that?”“That’s what happened.”“But you won’t give us a formal statement.”“No, sir.”Yoshida looked through his notes.“You claimed that you were fired on while you were in the water.With automatic weapons.Oh, and I like this.They handcuffed you and strapped a heavy weight belt on you before they threw you in.And you escaped.Who’re you, Houdini?”“I got lucky.”“Yeah.” He let the silence continue for a few heartbeats to underscore his disbelief, his eyes never leaving mine.“You claim they fired on you while you were in the water and one of the rounds struck you in the leg.You returned fire.You admit to firing a forty-four-caliber round from this”—Yoshida held up my UM-1—“into the bottom of the hull, driving off the boat.”“That’s correct.”“You admit to all that.”“Yes, sir.”“You admit to an act of piracy on the high seas, a federal crime.Is that how you want me to charge you?”I said nothing.I couldn’t tell if Captain Yoshida was serious or if he were testing me.I decided he was too smart to actually believe what he was saying.“Let me go over this part again.You admit to giving information to Thompson, this alleged criminal, about a man in his organization, one Garrick Choy.And this man subsequently was found tortured and shot to death in a cane field near Waipahu.You claim that this information was given to you by the man’s father, who knew what you were going to do with the information.Is that right?”“It isn’t right, but it’s what happened.”“This isn’t the time for humor, Mr.Caine.Is what I said accurate? Did the father of this boy intentionally set him up for murder through you, as unwilling or as unwitting as you claim to have been?”“At the time, Garrick Choy was being held by some of Chawlie’s people at his home.Garrick escaped and ran straight to Thompson.We didn’t know until after it happened.”“You know for a fact that he escaped on his own? Without help? Or was he set free?”I shook my head.“I have some ideas on the subject, but you wouldn’t be interested.”“It sounds pretty fucking far-fetched to me,” said Yoshida.Except it was the truth.I was grateful that Yoshida had keyed on the facts I’d presented in the order I’d presented them.He’d stayed away from Mary MacGruder, whose involvement in the torture films was known to Kate.And I was gratified that Kate had not told Yoshida about Thompson’s blackmail approach to the admiral, or MacGruder’s apparent failure to report it.MacGruder may have known who murdered his daughter when he hired Souza.“What about this Jeep that’s been impounded over at Young Street? It was left with its motor running and the keys in the ignition in the middle of an intersection.It’s registered to you [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]