Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant (7 page)

It was obvious where they were leading him, so Wyatt fell farther back, allowing his quarry to reach Danny Royal's house and get settled in. No sense risking detection when it was unnecessary. He pulled into the parking lot of the Kiahuna Poipu Shores and found a spot that afforded him a clear view of the house.

While he waited, he powered up the laptop and plugged in his cell phone modem. He had more research to do.

Danny Royal's house was like a scaled-down version of his restaurant: elegant and colonial, facing the beach, and gently shaded by tall palms. A wide veranda furnished with cushioned rattan furniture surrounded the white one-story house with a vaulted roof.

Steve Sloan and Ben Kealoha stepped up onto the veranda and followed it around to the back of the house, where floor-to-ceiling windows faced the beach. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Kealoha knocked once on the French doors, and when no one came, he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. Steve was surprised, but Kealoha took it in stride.

"Royal went out for a swim. He thought he was coming right back," Kealoha said, handing Steve a pair of gloves from his pocket. "Besides, who carries their keys with them in the ocean?"

"The house is on the beach," Steve said, putting on the gloves. "Anybody could have come in and robbed the place while he was swimming."

"Guess he was a trusting soul," Kealoha said.

They stepped into a spacious living room with a high, open-beam ceiling that was painted white. The house was immaculately clean, every surface gleaming.

"I'm making a mental note to question the cleaning lady," Kealoha said. "And ask her what she charges. Maybe she'd do my place pro bono."

Classical music played softly from hidden speakers, and the rooms were comfortably cool, chilled by the air conditioners that had kept humming through the night.

The furniture was high-end tropical rattan, in keeping with the Hawaiian colonial theme, arranged to offer an optimum view of both the beach and a massive fireplace made of lava rocks.

There were some issues of
Gourmet
,
Architectural Digest
, and other glossy magazines decoratively arranged on the glass-topped coffee table. The walls were adorned with expensive maritime art, including intricate models of ships in glass boxes on the koa-wood bookshelves.

To Steve, the books looked as if they'd been picked out by a decorator for their size and color rather than what they contained.

It was like visiting a Tommy Bahama store without the clothing displays, and about as personal.

"Hello?" Kealoha shouted. "Anybody home?"

"You notice anything unusual about this place?" Steve asked.

"It's like visiting a model home," Kealoha said. "One way out of my price range."

"But even model homes have family photos all over the place, to create some warmth and the illusion that someone lives there," Steve said. "Danny didn't even bother with the illusion."

"He lived here," Kealoha said, finding a leather wallet and a set of keys on the counter.

"Maybe he wasn't someone," Steve said.

Kealoha gave him a look. "Huh?"

"Never mind," Steve said, wandering into the master bedroom while Kealoha thumbed through Danny's wallet. Danny Royal lied to Steve and Mark about his past in New Jersey. After seeing this place, Steve wondered just how much of Danny Royal's life was false.

The master bedroom was as immaculate and impersonal as the rest of the house, except for a stack of puzzle magazines on the bedside table. Steve picked a couple of them up. They were all word games—crosswords, anacrostics, mixigrams, crosscounts, word staircases, and a dozen other kinds of puzzles he'd never heard of. He opened the magazines. The puzzles were either completed or nearly completed in pencil by the same hand.

Steve thought Mark probably had subscriptions to the same magazines. He put the magazines back and strayed over to a desktop computer in the corner. The work area was clean, as if the computer was an art object on display instead of a tool to be used.

He turned on the computer and let it boot up while he continued poking around.

Steve was going through the silk jackets and aloha shirts in the massive walk-in closet when Kealoha came in.

"The guy has a driver's license, a credit card, a gasoline card, a social security card, and that's it," Kealoha said. "My wallet is like a filing cabinet. How 'bout yours?"

"Looks like Danny Royal lived lean," Steve said.

"It isn't possible, bruddah." Kealoha stuck the wallet in an evidence bag and shoved it in his pocket. "Nobody lives this lean."

Steve knocked his knuckle on the floor, gauging the sound. The knocks had a slight hollow quality over a certain patch of floor. He took out a car key and pried it between two slats of wood. They popped up. With some room to maneuver his fingers, a dozen other slats pulled easily, revealing a floor safe.

"Maybe we'll find some answers in there," Steve said. He got up and glanced back in the bedroom. The computer was showing a password screen. "The computer may tell us even more. How long will it take to get your crew in here to open the safe and hack into the computer?"

Kealoha snortled. "What crew? That's major tech stuff. We don't have anybody does that, 'cept my eleven-year-old nephew. He could probably hack that in five seconds, then use it to break into Bill Gates' home computer."

"So what do you do in situations like this?"

"We never have sits like this," Kealoha said. "I gotta call in the big boys with the big toys from HPD."

"When do you think they'll get here?"

Kealoha shrugged. "Tomorrow afternoon, maybe. My luck, it'll be the moment I sit down to lunch."

As if on cue, Kealoha's stomach growled. "I knew we forgot to do something on the way here," he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The S-shaped counter in the tiny saimin noodle shack was so low, Steve had trouble fitting his knees underneath it. Perhaps that was why the handwritten sign on the wall implored customers not to stick gum under the counter—so people wouldn't leave with gooey knees.

The ramshackle restaurant in a warehouse section of Lihue had no tables, so Mark, Steve, and Ben Kealoha sat together at the far end of the crowded counter for a late lunch.

"I eat here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner," Kealoha told them.

"Why?" asked Steve, his question nearly smothered by the loud smack of the screen door snapping shut behind another customer.

"Because this stuff makes chicken soup look like tap water, bruddah," Kealoha said. "But mostly because the cheapest burger on this island is about nine bucks and I don't feel like blowing a day's pay on grub."

"Whatever they're cooking smells wonderful," Mark said, glancing at the menu on the wall. "What do you recommend?"

"The extra large special bowl," Kealoha said. "They empty the fridge into it. It's onolicious."

"Sounds good to me," Mark said.

Kealoha motioned to a waitress and held up three fingers.

A few minutes later, the three men were eagerly devouring their huge bowls of steaming saimin, a hearty combination of salty broth, fresh noodles, vegetables, thin slices of pork, cubes of Spam, and hard-boiled egg made by a sour-faced old Japanese woman they could see sitting on a stool in the kitchen.

After the first delicious mouthful of the wonderful soup, Mark flashed the cook his most winning smile, the one that had reassured countless patients and had been getting him out of all kinds trouble for more than sixty years. The old lady was unimpressed.

He shrugged and went back to enjoying his saimin, surely one of the best dishes he'd ever had. Mark could see why Ben Kealoha was addicted to it.

The three men didn't speak again until they'd consumed their bowls of saimin and each ordered thick slices of home made liliko'i pie, an impossibly light passionfruit chiffon with a whipped cream topping. Between forkfuls of pie, Steve and Kealoha told Mark what they found, or rather didn't find, at Danny Royal's house. If it wasn't for the puzzle magazines, the house looked as though no one actually lived there.

"What you saw in his house fits with what we discovered in the autopsy," Mark said. "Danny Royal was an illusion. He had extensive plastic surgery, a chiseled nose and chin, implants in his cheeks, major orthodonture—the works. The shape and features of his face were radically altered."

"Maybe he had a bad accident," Kealoha said, "and they had to put his face back together."

Mark shook his head. "There was no evidence of that kind of trauma. This was definitely elective surgery. He gave himself an entirely new face. Based on what you saw at the house, I think he created a new identity to go with it. I seriously doubt anything about Danny Royal is what it seems."

"You don't go to those extremes unless you're running from something," Steve said. "Or someone."

"I'll have his wallet and his place dusted for prints," Kealoha said. "Maybe we'll get a hit."

"I have a feeling it's not going to be that easy," Steve said. "At least it never is for me."

"You're in paradise, brah," Kealoha smiled. "Everything is easy here."

"There's another way to go at this," Mark said. "Dr. Aki and I took detailed notes and photos of Danny's face. With your permission, Ben, I'd like to send them to a forensic anthropologist I know in L.A. It will take some time, but I believe she can use the photos and our data to create a three-D computer model of what Danny Royal's face looked like before his plastic surgery."

"Fo' real? Cool!" Kealoha grinned like a child opening Christmas presents. "Go for it, bruddah!"

Wyatt didn't bother following the two detectives when they left Danny Royal's house. He stayed behind in his parked car at the Kiahuna Poipu Shores because he knew all they'd found was what he'd intentionally left behind.

The wallet and house keys.

He'd copied the hard drive on Royal's computer and emptied the floor safe last night, keeping the $50,000 in cash and burning the two false passports he found inside. He sent the money this morning by Priority Mail to one of the many P0 boxes he kept under false names throughout the country. If he ever needed money, there were substantial amounts of cash available within a few hours' reach of most major American cities, and he didn't have to go into a bank or use an ATM to get it.

Wyatt didn't erase Danny Royal's hard drive because he didn't want to raise any questions when somebody eventually showed up to settle Danny's affairs in the wake of his tragic, accidental death. He'd cleaned the safe out because he doubted Danny had told anyone the secrets it contained.

But now things had changed. Wyatt would have to do a much more thorough, and permanent, cleansing tonight.

In the meantime, he had to move forward. There was an urgency to his work now that didn't exist before.

It had taken Wyatt years, and extraordinary patience, to find Danny Royal. But in the end, it was Danny who revealed himself. It always was.

Royal's ex-wife and teenage son had been monitored electronically and visually from day one. Wyatt knew it was only a question of time before Royal contacted his kid again.

It finally happened on the boy's sixteenth birthday. The kid got an e-mail from his dad. The simple message had been cleverly relayed through servers around the world before hitting the kid's AOL mailbox. But Wyatt was able to trace it back to an Internet café in Kauai.

He'd fled to a tropical island. What a cliché. But it only made Wyatt's job easier. Searching for a small island certainly beat trying to find a guy in, say, France.

So Wyatt went to Kauai and hunted. Going to the best restaurants. The nicest stores. The exclusive golf courses and the fanciest resorts. And he watched people.

It was a given that Danny Royal had changed his face and identity. So Wyatt had studied videotapes of Danny Royal to memorize his body language, his gait, the way he used his hands when he spoke. He knew it was only a matter of time, skill, and luck before the paths of the hunter and the hunted would cross.

In the end, it didn't take that long and wasn't very hard.

Danny Royal had altered everything he could about his appearance, but it was the one thing he couldn't alter that gave him away.

His gimp leg.

Once Danny Royal was found, the question became the best way to kill him so that no one would suspect a murder. A shark attack in front of a couple hundred eyewitnesses was a true inspiration. Wyatt supposed he could have come up with something less elaborate, but one did have to find some pleasure in his profession or what was the point of doing it?

Perhaps that had been his mistake.

He couldn't afford any more. Nor could he afford the time and patience it took to find Danny Royal. There were new players involved now, creating a ticking clock.

In a way, he was pleased about it. He found it energizing and somehow less lonely. Playing poker is always more fun than solitaire.

He left his car in the lot, went into the hotel, and took the stairs to Mark Sloan's floor. It limited the number of people who'd see his face.

Breaking into the room was simple. It was a nice ocean-view suite. Nothing fancy, but still expensive. He went through the suitcase, the drawers, and searched all the furniture, careful to leave no visible sign of his presence.

There were a couple of grocery bags full of simple medical supplies and a doctor's bag containing a stethoscope, tongue depressors, an otoscope/ophthalmoscope, rubbing alcohol, ibuprofen tablets, steroid cream, antibiotic ointment, even a few Tootsie Roll suckers.

Mark Sloan was either a throwback to an earlier era, when doctors still made house calls, or was so dedicated to his work he couldn't leave it behind.

All he found that had anything to do with Danny Royal was a stack of souvenir recipe postcards from the restaurant, and they'd been in clear view on the writing table when Wyatt walked in. If Mark Sloan came here with the intention of meeting Royal, nothing in the room revealed it.

It's what Wyatt didn't find that was useful. There were no books to read or magazines to flip through. Not even a Hawaii guidebook, beyond the advertising-laden, throw away crap the hotel left in every room. Wyatt concluded Mark was a man who didn't like distractions and who remained focused on his work, which explained the doctor's bag and the extra medical supplies. Mark couldn't leave the hospital behind, so he brought it with him.