So that was news. Big, fat, ugly news with a hairy mole.
As Steve uttered the words Chin appeared over his shoulder all decked out in his workday finest, jeans and an aloha shirt. Kono thought the top was a little bright, heavy on the 'hey, look at me' colors, but it was cheery and that was a change in Chin that she could live with. It had been sort of a rarity to see Chin Ho smile at all for a cluster of months and he had worn his heart on his sleeves, his chest and his back too. Nothing but taupes, blacks, greys and every shade of blue under the sun day after day; maybe it wasn't exactly art imitating life but his threads had reflected his sorrow. Lately he'd been seeing someone new and while it was good to find that the parenthesis at the corners of his mouth had survived his season of pain, their arrival lead to unfortunate wardrobe trouble as was often the case with men. The harder the straight ones tried, the more prone to seriously regrettable fashion malfunctions they seemed to be.
Kono remembered Malia had done great work toning down the single guy color scheme when she and Chin were together. The memory stuck in her throat, a lump of sadness so thick she could've choked. She swallowed that bitter thought and made a mental note to stop by his place and pick through his closet later in the week. Hell, she got paid on Thursday; maybe she'd leave a few, more subtle replacement items, something in hues not selected from the contents of a Fruity Pebbles box.
The unerringly calm detective gave her a smooth look, his usual crime scene fare, blank face, warm eyes just for his cousin. He greeted Steve and her with an easy slide right into the facts. "Looks like you've got a big one on your line cuz, Hiro Noshimuri. You okay?" Leave it to Chin to call her out on what everyone else was thinking but wouldn't get away with asking.
Her brows lifted a bit in the middle. "Never met'em before tonight. He and Adam weren't exactly close when we were dating."
Danny eyeballed the body from the head where he too now squatted giving a low whistle, "A shave this close, somebody was looking to start a war."
Steve looked up at him with an unhappy, knowing expression, "Yeah. Well, when the Yakuza catch wind of this, someone's gonna get their wish. Alright, we can't do anything else here without Max." He looked up and around, his gaze piercing even in the dim light of the city night. "We're going to need to contain this as much as we can."
Danny piped up, "I hate to burst your bubble but in a hood like this, that was shot before your cold friend here hit the ground. Look around you. Eyes everywhere. In my experience, eyes usually come with mouths and those muddy the waters for us."
There was a moment's pause as everyone considered that.
"Here's what I need," Steve started, "Kono, I want you on the ground. Start here and comb out. We need a weapon if we can find one. Danny, you're on the street with me. We'll cover the mother and the uh, witness. Chin, can you handle HPD? I need to know information is tight on their end."
Chin had been around, on (and off for a time) the local force long before any of his Five-0 teammates had entered the island game. He knew people that needed to be known and those who cleaved to their anonymity. He'd recognized the disembodied face straight away and all that it's brutal circumstance implied. "Already on it. Harry's put a gag on the department until we can notify the family, but uh... maybe it'd be best if Danny and I handled notification on this one," he offered delicately.
"No," Steve and Kono answered in tandem. There was a brief awkward break. Kono hated to feel all their eyes on her (one pair felt heavier than the others) but she was too damned stubborn to cave. "I dated him for a year and half. The least I can do is let him hear it from someone he knows... or knew. I'll go."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Steve hedged moving on before his bullheaded bride could baulk.
She rose to her feet and whipped out her mini-tablet from its home in her waistband at the small of her back. "Let me know when Max's cleared the body and I'll go talk to Adam and Michael. I'm gonna finish the walk-thru, see if our killer left us anything to work with." With that, she turned to begin making her way slowly through the alley.
Chin stopped her, "Killers," he called out." She turned briefly. "This is pretty big work for one person no matter how skilled. Men far enough up the food chain to arrange a face-to-face with Hiro Noshimuri don't travel alone. We're looking for a team."
"Mahalo," she chirped, her expression softening with honest appreciation for his insight. She wasn't exactly a rookie anymore but Chin Ho was never really done training her either.
The Honolulu County Coroner was not a readily imposing man. At five feet, six inches, Max looked up to nearly everyone he met with the singular exception of Detective Williams. He didn't move with Chin or Kono's grace or possess the kind of commanding presence that Steve and Danny shared. What Max had was best described as character and that, he had in spades. Though his slacks were neatly pressed and his shirts always tucked in, though his shoes shined and his ties, when he wore them, hung just so, there was still something kind of frumpy about Bergman, some unique way of moving through his space in the world that made him seem a little off normal. In Kono's opinion, it was this off-beat approach to existence that made him a puff of fresh air in the middle of the stuffy atmosphere of homicide.
Max navigated a labyrinth of numbered yellow Versa-cones lit from within by bright little Evi Lites, which glowed brilliantly in the pitch darkness of the early morning hour. Each lit cone marked a drop or line of blood in his path, leaving little room for scene entry and exit.
Kono was down against the ground, flat on her belly, hair sweeping wide brush marks in the dirt, when Dr. Bergman approached with his case in hand. "Officer McGarrett," he addressed, pronouncing each syllable precisely, "it seems that you have chosen an unfortunate evening on which to wear white."
She was holding a compact, slimline flashlight in her teeth and shimmying deeper and deeper beneath the frame of one of two houses which formed the opening to the neighborhood alley. There were massive rectangular halogen lights on either end of her long body. They were directed beneath the house and she was stretching toward a knife with a gloved hand while trying her damnedest to avoid crawling entirely under the building.
She didn't look up, too close to her goal to be distracted. "Yeah," she huffed, "well, that's what I said, but apparently," her voice showed the strain as she stretched as far as she could to touch the heel of the knife with her fingertips, "I'm the only one of us... thin enough... to fit without damaging," one last wiggle, "the scene. Gotcha!" She plucked the weapon from the earth and the odd, patchy greenery under the structure, and pulled it into the night. A tiny gecko scrambled from the depths and over the officer's calf before disappearing into the alley.
Her face was all triumphant smile as she got to her knees and looked back over her shoulder toward Steve and Danny. "That, is a serious blade bradah. Whaddayou think, six inches? Eight?" She held it gingerly and gave it a twist as she stood and turned to reveal her front side completely covered in red-orange clay dust.
It was their eyes that made her look, the unmatched blues both dropping down to her legs, flaring wide then crinkling in mirth. She glanced down, and made a face. "Awesome," she grumbled then snarked, "I hate you both. Here's your weapon." She dropped the blade into an evidence bag and handed it off to Danny.
Max was first to answer. "I have found that a pre-soak for approximately forty-five minutes in a mixture of one tablespoon of Borax and one cup of purified water to be the best method for removing red clay from my favorite shirts though you may want to consider using one cap of bleach thoroughly blended into two cups water for your white pants. I use a cocktail shaker as it is a perfect device designed for even distribution of liquid contents with varying weight and density, though the size of the standard shaker only allows for mixture of one cup at a time."
The guys were snickering; Steve, behind an index finger sprouting from his balled up hand and crooked over his lips like that helped, and Danny, unabashed, swinging his head off to the side and throwing out a hand like he was presenting the Doctor to a nonexistent crowd and looking around for a reaction or applause.
Max seemed oblivious. "It is also very helpful to allow any damp fabric to dry fully and brush off as much of the soil as possible before soaking. I hang mine on a clothes line and beat them," he demonstrated his technique while he talked, "with a wooden bat for this reason. I have found it most effective..."
The baseball charade did them in. The guys were howling. Even Kono grinned, as she cut the Doctor off, "Thanks for the tip, Max. I was born here though. I know how to get dirt out of my clothes."
"Actually," he replied undeterred, "contrary to common misconception, Hawaii's soil is not technically dirt. It is a clay composite which gains its orange color from the high iron content in volcanic soil and oxidization, which over centuries..."
Chin walked up just as Kono was rolling her eyes and stepping forward to breeze past her chuckling twelve-year-old teammates, "I miss somethin'?"
Max simply stood in place looking like he was in the dark too.
Steve inched in a bit so he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Detective Kelly, the slopes and bulges of his muscular arms swelling where they crossed over his chest. With the laughter fading, he sported one of the only deep grins of the night as he eyed his wife's retreat, ground to crown and back again, with something between respect and a shadow of lust. The Commander leaned into Chin and quipped loudly enough to include her, "I always did have a thing for the dirty ones."
Chin Ho chuckled deep in his throat, dipping his head in a poor attempt at concealment, "Careful. That one's got a serious right cross."
"Yeah?" Steve asked in mock interest, eyes still with the woman, his voice a little raspy like the idea had piqued his interest.
"Oh yeah, brah. Real jawbreaker. Pilikia," Chin joked.
Danny pitched in, "Yeah, you don't want that kind'a trouble man. I hear her cousin's a real asshole. Overprotective."
Kono flipped them off without turning back but on the other side of her retreat the corners of her lips tugged gently north.
Steve McGarrett was not known to anyone for his outstanding affinity with children so it had been a bit of a surprise to most when he'd elected to handle their toddling, wiggling evidence trail in a diaper. What his wife knew was that she and he had talked about this kind of thing before and that he'd taken to heart her observation of Danny's gentle, fatherly approach to children. Danny was honestly great with babies and small kids, so great that it almost made Steve's horrible bedside manner unnoticeable. Almost.
It had taken time to decipher, but over the years Kono had come to believe that Steve's problem with children was, at its core, really the same issue he had with the rest of the world; trust. Kids were, by their very nature, unpredictable. To most of the not-so-type-A's out there this was one of the elements that made them precious but to a man trained by the Navy and Life to be a bit of an obsessive compulsive strategist this was a recipe for some Armageddon-level shit. It was the very definition of his nightmares; something innocent, wholly pure, just ignorant enough to be curious, just mobile enough to do something about it and entirely helpless meandering and snooping about his crime scene or his life. It unraveled him in a way Kono found to be as sad as it was amusing. He was trying to grow though, she could see that, and it made her prouder than any other of his accomplishments.
So the Bromancers were on baby detail, Danny trying to distract their toddler witness with a parade of faces, animal impressions and sounds so the tyke's tiny palm could be photographed and Steve slowly beginning to lose his patience with the irrepressible mother. Chin was doing the door-to-door routine, which wasn't going so well, while Kono worked a street side collection of neighbors too small to be called a crowd. The sudden sounds of a scuffle whipped Chin's head around and sent Kono running to help. By the time she could see what was happening, the emotional mother and Steve were in what had to be the loudest staring contest in history. She was screaming at Steve; reaching for her baby, straining against Danny who seemed to be wrapped around her like a full-body human straight jacket. At Danny's back, McGarrett yelled over her while he stood as a human shield between mother and child, the latter wailing in the arms of a female CSI.
"Stand down or I will arrest you for obstruction of justice! Stand down, you understand me? RetÃrese! Le detendré!" His Spanish wasn't as good as his Mandarin but the Commander's point seemed clear enough.
As she came to the outskirts of the fray the Commander shouted, "Cuff'er, Kono!" With Danny's help, Kono peeled the woman's hands from his body one at a time, twisting them behind the mother's back and locking them into place. Two HPD officers dragged her to the back of a squad car.
"What was that?" Kono asked because apparently no one else was going to.
"CSI Hale here," Steve nodded at the woman holding the crying child just beyond his elbow, "was swabbing the kid's hand for DNA. She pulled a pair of tweezers out of her kit. She was gonna remove what looks like paper stuck to his foot but the mom went nuts. "
The child was screaming bloody murder, which, as it happened, was precisely what he was covered in. Steve was standing with his hands on his hips with one foot slightly forward, which nearly always served as a precursor to an exit. The Commander was in the first stage of a turn when Chin Ho spoke up, "Where'ya goin' brah?"
"Somewhere else," was the terse reply.
"Not with those shirts you're not." Chin's smirk was so pronounced it was audible in his answer. He indicated two faint brown-red smears on the front of McGarrett's shirts. Each stain followed the distinct marks of five short, chubby fingers. "Those're evidence now man."
"Wha..." Steve looked down, pulling at the fabric when he doubted what he could clearly see, "shit. This was my last clean pair." He generally kept backup clothes in his office at HQ, tucked beneath the bench seat of the Silverado and pretty much anywhere else he could get away with. He was sort of prone to messes. On this day however, he had used his backup t-shirt/button down combo before lunch after a foot chase had ended in a grassy tumble. So the clothes on his back had to come off but he was at a loss for a replacement. The world could suffer far greater travesties than a shirtless Steve, at least that's what Kono thought. The merrily strangled look on CSI Hale's face as he stripped away his top layer said she was on-board with that train of thought as well.
Kono was smiling crookedly when she offered him a pass. "Boss, if you wanna head on home we can wrap things up h..." Kono's voice trailed off with the hairpin curve of her thoughts.
Her lips curled into a crooked half-smile and her eyes narrowed. She flashed her index finger at her especially ill tempered husband. "Actually, I think I've got something you can wear in the car. Hang on."
Kono spun on her heel, threw a conspiratory look at Chin and jogged to the Cruze. While she pilfered through the trunk Chin bagged McGarrett's shirts, labeled them and handed them off for the evidence box. Somewhere in the middle of the process he offered Steve as much condolence as he was going to get out of the Five-0 peanut gallery. It came with a mournful expression followed up by, "This grey one was a nice shirt too. You buy this for Kono to see you in or did she buy it for you?" He was grinning like the snacky cat with a mouthful of canary.
His cousin bounded up carrying a wadded up ball of banana yellow cotton t-shirt and a simper. "Evidence can hang onto that one as long as they like. Doris bought it," she explained with a dismissive tilt of her head. It was actually a pretty nice shirt, pricy too. It fit Steve well, she thought, and had she seen it herself, Kono might have picked it up for him. While she didn't like to let her petty show, the Doris shirt was certainly no loss to the daughter-in-law. Besides, she was in the company of family. What was a little snark among ohana?
Kono tossed the awful yellow number to Steve and watched him open it up. Her eyes danced as it unraveled revealing something too tight and a little too short for Steve's long midriff. It wouldn't be a belly shirt but it was going to be a really, really snug fit. Steve flashed her a doubtful face.
"What? Danny left it once when I was giving him and Grace some wave riding pointers." It was her turn to bite back her laughter. "Don't look at me like that brah," she answered Steve's face. "We'll change after we're done here. No big," she shrugged and gave him her back because seriously, she couldn't take anymore. Another second of Steve's sourpuss face and she was going to explode.
She smiled around her parting words, "I'm gonna help with the kid," and left the men standing in her orange dust.
True to her word, she assisted in documenting and clearing the child. CSI Hale did manage to peel that scrap of paper stuck to the baby's bare foot. Tacky and stained through with blood and rusty clay, it was too early to say without some special treatment at the lab but the torn paper appeared to carry Japanese script scrawled in a narrow hand in neat rows. It was too watery for Steve to make out anything when asked. Their best hope was Charlie Fong.
Chin covered the family, reviewing statements and covering the house for stray evidence. Max handled the body and the team finished off their scene as best as they could for the night. An hour or so after Max's departure, Steve threw Danny his keys and headed for home at the helm of the Cruze. Kono had never been so chipper about riding shotgun in the SEAL mobile as she was in her own car, but then she'd never hitched a ride with Big Bird and his very bright, constricting mini shirt either. She didn't say a word about it, but did hum a few bars from Yellow Submarine a time or two before they pulled into their drive.
Her levity was soon replaced with a kind of exhausted mental frustration as she spotted Doris' car in the driveway. She sighed. "What is she doing here right now? I mean, is she listening to HPD scanners now so she'll know when we're gone?" She rolled her eyes as she turned to the Commander, "You do know she's probably in there replacing my birth control with candy or snuffing out the pilot light on the stove, right?"
"We have got to get a better lock... something to keep uninvited CIA operatives out," Steve mused.
Kono only stared blankly ahead at the back of Doris' ride and wondered aloud, "What kind of lock would that be? I mean, we could install retinal scanners, I guess, but it would only cost every penny of your dad's life insurance and leave one of us in an eye patch. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that one would be me."
Sometimes she laughed at her own jokes because she thought they were funny and sometimes it was just because they were so true and there wasn't a damned thing to do about them.