Page 9 of Hidden Falls

That thought made my empty stomach knot. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I’d lost track of time—but clearly, my body hadn’t.

I re-dressed in my old clothes and wound my long, thick hair in one of the fluffy towels. Looking at my face in the mirror wasn’t inspiring. My eyes had circles under them, and my lips were pale. I looked scared and sick.

“But I’m strong. I’m smart. I’m resourceful. I can survive, and be okay,” I told myself aloud. “No matter what happens.”

The words sounded in my mind in Mom’s voice.

Mom believed in me. She’d taught me how to survive a situation like this.

“Done in there?” A voice from the door made me jump; Nice Guy was checking on me.

“Yeah.” I opened the door and pasted a smile on my face. “Just getting cleaned up. Can I have something to eat, please?”

6

Lei handed Marcella an MPD ball cap at the impound lot, a stark parking area with a high chain-link fence topped by razor wire with a manned check-in kiosk. “Hate to wreck your hairdo, but the sun is murder in the impound. Reflects off all the windshields and gets even hotter in there.”

“Thanks.” Marcella put the hat on, then reached into her big leather bag and took out a pair of slip-on athletic shoes and socks. She grinned at Lei. “If I’m gonna wear nice shoes, I have to keep them that way.” She took off her designer flats, slid them into a cloth drawstring bag, then placed it in her fancy satchel.

Lei looked on, mystified. “Why bother with all that?”

Marcella tugged on socks and slid her feet into the tennis shoes. “Let’s chalk it up to having a shoe-aholic for a dad. He keeps me supplied, but he’d kill me for tromping around in a place like this in the wrong footwear.”

“Whatever floats your coconut, girl.” Lei pointed across the lot. “There’s the Prius. They’ve already gone over it for prints—nothing but Malia’s, a few from her family, and one unidentified that showed up a lot that the first responders think is the boyfriend’.”

Marcella followed Lei as she set off across the hot gravel. “She’s got a boyfriend?”

Lei shooed away a small, scruffy native chicken that had somehow got into the area despite the high chain-link fence. The hen ran away squawking. “Yeah. I already ran a quick background on him. The boy’s clean. Seems like another high achiever; both of them go to Paradise Preparatory Academy, Maui’s best private school.” Lei tossed a smile at Marcella over her shoulder. “Anyone with money can go to that school, but that rules us out.”

“Ooh, zinger,” Marcella said. “You can take the public versus private school debate up with Marcus. I’m just going along with him on that decision.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lei really didn’t want to pick a fight with her friend over the education situation in Hawaii, complicated and segregated in various ways as it was. She was a proud supporter of public schools in the Islands, challenged as they were by budget cuts and overcrowding. “I read the report on the car, but I thought we should get a look ourselves. See if anything new pops out at us.”

They reached the older model Prius. Lei tugged a couple of pairs of latex gloves out of her back pocket and handed one to Marcella. “In case you want to touch anything.”

The two approached the driver’s side and peered inside through the shattered glass of the window. A hailstorm of twinkling cubes decorated the interior; there was something chilling about the way it looked, especially when Lei pictured sassy Malia in the driver’s seat, cowering from the attack.

Marcella circled around and opened the passenger door, squatting to look inside. She opened the glove box; an envelope with the car’s paperwork sat inside with a tube of lip gloss, a small bag of trail mix, and a purse-sized canister of pepper spray. “I bet Malia was going for that pepper spray but didn’t have a chance to get it.”

“I bet she was going for this. Her phone.” Lei opened the driver’s side door and reached across the broken glass to the phone, wedged in beside the school backpack lying in the footwell. “Harry checked the phone for Malia’s texts but left it for us to check out. She told me it was here. She was beside herself when she found the car.”

“I’m not surprised,” Marcella said.

“She’s the mom of a teenager. Parenting 101 of teenagers: keep access to their phones under your control,” Lei said. She swiped the screen. “It’s locked. Harry knows the passcode. If I can’t reach her for it, I’ll have the tech guy open it for us and extract the records. Either way he can get us access to what’s inside. Maybe there’s a lead in there.”

Marcella lifted out Malia’s backpack. “We can sort this at the family’s house. Detective Clark can tell us what might be unusual inside it.”

“That will be the next stop after this,” Lei said. “We’ll go to Harry and Peter’s and check her room and talk to them.”

They took a few more moments to search the vehicle. The evidence of a teen girl’s life that they discovered twisted the knot of stress in Lei’s stomach tighter: a dog-earedProfessional Investigatormagazine covered a copy ofSeventeen. A half-eaten granola bar and the remains of a strawberry shake were in the car’s trash. A pair of glittery slip-on sandals, a crumpled beach towel, and a bikini cluttered the back seat.

Lei had come to like Malia very much in the months they’d worked together since the girl’s help had busted a human trafficking ring operating out of Maui. The kid took initiative and was as persistent as a bloodhound in following the scent of trouble. She had a passion for investigation and had confessed to Lei that she wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a detective someday. She’d sworn Lei to secrecy about that goal, and Lei understood why.

Harry wouldn’t like it.

Lei wouldn’t either, should her child want to go into law enforcement. Being a cop was a dangerous job. Too many times it got someone, and sometimes their family, killed.

Hopefully this case wasn’t a situation where that would happen.

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