McGarrett's Errand of Mercy, Part 2
McGarrett turned the pages of the case file roughly. This was surely the tenth time he'd read through it. There was nothing new to learn from it. He flapped it closed and rubbed his temples. His head hurt. He leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie.
Chin and Ben had gone home about an hour ago. In the quiet outside his door, McGarrett could still hear the clatter of Danno's typewriter.
McGarrett pulled his sweater on and stepped out on the lanai outside his office. Another beautiful night. This was the reason he'd fallen in love with the islands as a young naval intelligence officer. When Lloyd Deford had asked him to join Hawaii Five-O when the governor had formed the unit in 1959, McGarrett had jumped at the chance.
The plain-spoken Lloyd Deford had assembled a team of "top cops" around him: Steve McGarrett; Ted Hada, World War II veteran and star HPD detective; and JuJu Kala'oka, Stanford graduate and an expert in the newly emerging fields of forensic science and criminology. By the time of the Schoolyard Stalker case, Deford had been profiled in Life magazine and was even being mentioned as a possible successor to J. Edgar Hoover.
McGarrett watched the clouds move over the moon, remembering. The Schoolyard Stalker case had faded from the headlines, if not from the hearts of the investigators, by the time it all came crashing down for Deford and Five-O. In Hawaii, as for the rest of America, drugs had gone from back alleys to big business. By 1967, a territorial war had broken out in the streets of Honolulu, with a gangster or dealer turning up dead often enough that the governor made stopping the drug traffic Five-O's top priority.
Deford had a great appreciation for McGarrett's creative, flamboyant side. Together, they hatched a plan to nail the Goulet brothers, a pair of ruthless young Mainlanders who had moved into the speed trade big-time that spring. Undercover work was fairly routine for McGarrett in those days, before his elevation to head of Five-O made him familiar to every criminal in the islands. This time, McGarrett, lean and hard-faced and a well-trained sharpshooter to boot, went undercover as a hitman in from the mainland, looking for a big job that would net him plenty of coin and a passage to Hong Kong.
With unsparing hindsight, he reflected that maybe he had enjoyed it too much. Maybe it wasn't possible for a cop always to be kind, but if he ever starts to take pleasure in being cruel . . .
McGarrett approached the Goulet brothers with his plan to eliminate their rivals. He immersed himself in the case for several weeks, meeting with Deford only occasionally and at odd times to avoid blowing his cover, or so he thought. It was the longest and most complex undercover role he'd ever attempted, and he frankly relished the chance to step out of Deford's shadow to develop this case on his own.
McGarrett hated low-lifes, and the Goulet brothers were both crazy and cold-blooded enough to qualify. Still, for a cop, undercover work offered temptations. McGarrett had learned that the dark rush of undercover work could become a dangerous addiction in itself. Sometimes, he actually found himself thinking about ways to take out the Goulets' enemies and counting his cash from the Asian heroin he could bring back from Hong Kong with his payoff. McGarrett was relieved when the brothers finally bit. He haggled with them tortuously over his price, giving Deford the chance to set up the bust.
The day of the bust, McGarrett's nerves were taut, but he felt confident in the setup. Deford wired him for sound, and Chin Ho was in the sound truck, getting it all on tape. When McGarrett walked into the house, he knew what he needed to do to get the conviction, and played out the conversation just as he and Deford had discussed, making sure that the brothers clearly solicited the hit, and that the money plainly changed hands. He was intensely alert. He felt the sweat pricking the back of his neck. He knew that Deford, JuJu, and Ted were surrounding the house, and braced himself for them to kick in the door.
"The rest of it at the airport when the job is done," McGarrett reminded the brothers as he checked through a briefcase of cash.
Christie Goulet smiled suddenly. He said, "I think perhaps you should get the rest now, my friend--shall I call you McGarrett?" It took McGarrett a fraction of a second to realize with horror that somehow, some way, he had blown his cover. This was an ambush. He was a dead man.
McGarrett screamed, "Chin! Call it off!" just as Deford yelled "Police!" on the other side of the door.
He had replayed the images over and over again in his mind. The door flew open, Ted Hada jumped through it, and his head flew apart, a pink and red spray arching to the ceiling and across the room as the hot-tempered old veteran fell flat to the floor. Kala'oka, charging through the back door like a bull, was thrown back with tremendous force by a spray of bullets, the big man falling disjointedly down the wall in a rose-red bloom of blood. One of the Goulet brothers shrieked, "The great Hawaii Five-O!" And Deford, incredibly, getting off a shot before he fell to his knees, then onto his right side, jerking and twitching in the doorway.
The thunder of the gunfire gave way to utter stillness. Then McGarrett heard somebody bleating with pain. He realized that it was him. He was writhing on the floor on his stomach, gut-shot, trying to crawl through his own slick blood. He could see Deford shaking all over, his rough-hewn face contorting reflexively. He was about ten feet away. It was too far. Deford was dying. McGarrett flopped over on his back. He was drowning in a warm ocean, and everything went red and then black.
***
McGarrett glanced gratefully at Jenny as she brought in some strong black coffee. Despite the late night, he had asked Danno, Chin, and Ben to assemble again early Saturday morning for a briefing by Dr. Marian Phillips, the UH criminal psychologist. Casual dress was their only concession to the weekend. As usual, Dr. Phillips managed to look both sporty and motherly despite her grim profession.
"Dr. Phillips, let's get started. Anything you can tell us that might help give us an avenue to pursue would be very, very, helpful," McGarrett said.
"There are several key characteristics of these murders," Dr. Phillips told them. "First is the element of ritual. You say that the latest killing uses exactly the same MO as the murders ten years ago. That indicates that the killing ritual and post-mortem mutilations are very important to the killer, that they hold some special significance."
McGarrett leaned forward in his chair as she continued: "Second, the degree of rage inflicted on victims this young tells me that the killer's anger has to be directed at himself. We can postulate that the killer was involved in a deeply shameful, traumatic event as a very young child. To try to exorcise that humiliation and fear, the killer seeks out the most innocent children, those that remind him of himself at the age of victimization."
Chin looked skeptically at Ben. McGarrett said, "Are you saying the killer is suicidal?"
"In a way," Dr. Phillips said. "But instead of directing the rage inward, he displaces it on to the children."
Danno was thoughtful. "If the killer identifies with the victims, how do we know the killer isn't a woman?"
"We don't, Danny," Dr. Phillips said, "though statistically these crimes of extreme violence are usually committed by men. Women rarely kill children except their own. It could explain why the children aren't sexually assaulted, which we might expect in a crime of this nature. Other explanations are that the killer could be impotent, or--and this is my guess--the killer may think that he's protecting the victims by killing them."
"Protecting them?" McGarrett exclaimed.
"Think about it, Steve. The message: help me. He's trying to communicate with the authorities--you--on behalf of himself and the victim. Two intensely hurt children are calling to the parent for help--the victim, and the killer. But the events driving this person are so shameful that he can't allow himself to be caught."
McGarrett sighed deeply and looked around the table. "Is there anything else you can tell us that might help?"
"Yes, there is," Dr. Phillips said. "I disagree with the conclusions of the 1965 psychological profile. I believe our killer is someone in a position of trust. His access to the children is easy and his appearance in the neighborhoods is unremarkable. Add that to what we already know, that the killer is ritualistic, perhaps, driven by guilt. This is someone who knows right from wrong. This is not a scorned outsider. I'm betting this is someone with a reputation and a stake in society."
***
Danno contemplated a large-scale map of Honolulu on the far side of McGarrett's office. Carefully, he marked in grease pencil the locations of the last sighting of each victim of the Schoolyard Stalker and the location where each body was discovered. There had to be a pattern, some part of the ritual that Dr. Phillips had talked about.
McGarrett stood at the window. He rubbed the back of his neck and narrowed his eyes at the traffic. He rhythmically opened and closed the blinds over and over. What was he missing?
Danno walked over and sat in the chair across from McGarrett's desk. "Something's been eating on me, Steve."
"It's been a long day, Danno. Go home." The sun's angle was low in the sky.
"Humor me," Danno said. McGarrett turned around and raised his eyebrows at Danno, nodding for him to go ahead. Danno deliberated for a moment, then said: "This may be out of line, but maybe you're trying too hard to put yourself into Deford's head."
With effort, McGarrett suppressed a flare of temper. "What are you talking about, Danno?"
"Just this, Steve," Danno said. "You've been concentrating on trying to reconstruct the case based on the evidence from 10 years ago. And beating yourself up because you're missing something."
McGarrett sat down in his chair, feeling harassed. "Is it that obvious?"
"You're human," Danno said. "And maybe I'm paranoid." Danno picked up the case file. "I've been thinking about what Dr. Phillips said--that the Stalker could be someone with a reputation, someone fairly well-connected. Suppose Deford got a lead on someone like that. That would be pretty sensitive information. What would he have done?"
"For the sake of pure supposition, Danno," McGarrett replied, and contemplated the problem. "It won't wash. Deford was meticulous about his record-keeping. If he had a lead on someone, even if he wasn't ready to share it yet, he would have noted it in the case file."
McGarrett rubbed his face with his palms, then took the file and opened it at random. Almost every page was annotated in Deford's precise script. "Danno, Lloyd was obsessed with the case. He tormented himself over it. Even after we'd run out of leads, he kept the file in his office. Every so often, you'd see him going over it."
"Who else was still working on the case? Anybody in HPD?" Danno asked.
McGarrett sighed and tossed the file down on his desk. "Nobody, Danno. I thought the killer must be dead. I thought, where could a monster like this hide? Obviously, I was dead wrong. But if you're thinking that Deford knew who the killer was, it's wishful thinking. If Lloyd had solved this case, nothing could have made him back off."
"Unless he found out too late. Unless he couldn't follow up on it! Steve, I've been thinking that maybe we are missing something--literally." Danno flipped open the inside front cover of the case file, with its pages of forms listing the date the file was opened and every date it was updated thereafter. "Ever since we got this file back the other day, I thought some of these dates were odd, but at first I figured it was just some clerical detail. Now I'm not so sure. Look at these dates, Steve. Deford's last entry, November 1967--right before he was shot. Then, a stamp showing it was archived at HPD in January 1968."
McGarrett took the file back from Danno. His eyes scanned down the form, narrowing in thought. "After everybody in Five-O was dead or out of commission," he said. "No transfer request for the file. No signature. No authorization to close the case. Just a stamp--archived, HPD, 1968."
"Granted that HPD took over Five-O's case load until the governor appointed you and recreated Five-O," Danno said. " Still, Steve, Five-O must have had dozens of on-going cases. Deford was the only one still working the Stalker case, and the only one who still thought it could be solved. So my questions are, who transferred the file? And what did Deford enter in the file--more than two years after the last murder and a week before he was shot?"
Danno noticed McGarrett's face flush with fury. Quickly, he continued: "It could mean nothing, Steve. But if Dr. Phillip's theory means anything, you've got to wonder if someone in high places took the opportunity to tamper with the file and then deep-six it in the HPD archives, where they figured it would never surface again."
McGarrett smacked the file down on his desk. He felt a surge of fresh, punishing guilt. "Damn it, Danno! This is my fault! These files and this case were my responsibility!" He took a ragged breath.
Danno gave him a moment, then said quietly: "Suppose we're right, Steve, and someone did get rid of Deford's case notes and bury the file. The question is why--what was in the file that was so dangerous?"
With effort, McGarrett shook off the self-pity. He knew from experience that it carried a high price. Right now, with this case, he couldn't afford it."There are only two people in the world who know the answer to that, Danno," McGarrett said. "Whoever tampered with the file--and Lloyd Deford."