Hey. I don't think there's even a way to apologize for being gone so long, and I don't blame anyone who's abandoned reading this because of that. :I The truth is, sometimes I just get away from the fanfiction world. I work on average 40-50 hrs a week, have a busy family and well before I know it, months have gone by and I haven't touched a keyboard. I swore to myself when I started writing stories longer than one shots that I would never become one of those writers because I hate them too. But.. here I am :( So anyway.. I hope anyone who is still with me will enjoy this chapter. I have a considerable amount of this on my computer, but the idea of getting posted chapters caught up with writing scares me because then I have to have the time (and head space) to write before I can post. And I don't want to be like that. A lot of good that'd done me, I realize. I'm also a serious perfectionist, so the more I post, the more minor details I've committed to and therefore can't change before posting. But all that being said. here goes nothing. Lol. I will do my best to update! And I'm also working on my other Five 0 stories at the same time, hopefully updates will come there too. :)


"You're back pretty quickly from talking to the Koga guy Kono. What happened?" Chin asked as they walked into the bullpen.

"I got some stuff out of him, but that's not as important as finding Mary right now." The concern was clear on Kono's face. She knew her boss well.

"Yeah." Steve agreed. "Chin, what'd you get?"

"Hawaiian Airlines Flight 212 landed at Honolulu International Airport yesterday afternoon at two o'clock." He wasted no time in replying. "There were 282 passengers on board. 72 of them booked into first class under the group name Vincent Philips." He explained.

"Okay, that's how the band got here. We already knew that." Steve's tone was starting to get a little testy. "You're supposed to be finding Mary, Chin."

The expression on his friend's face was all Steve needed though, to realize that they were one in the same. "Wait. Let me guess," he started. "Seventy one band and crew members and one Mary Ann McGarrett."

"Yeah." Chin nodded.

"Um, without sounding too critical here," Danny piped up, "you already went through this flight looking for our vic, right? So how come you didn't recognize Mary?"

"In the interest of time, I only looked closely at the men." He explained. "I only spotted Dr. Billings because she was the very first person to board. I realized after the first few people that it would save time if I only looked at the men because I was looking for Hall primarily." He gave Steve a sad look, feeling bad.

"Nah," Steve immediately dismissed it. "It wouldn't make any sense for you to suspect she'd be on the same plane as these guys. You couldn't have known that Mary would be involved with something like this."

"Hey," Danny also spoke up, recognizing his partner's tone. "You don't get to do that, okay?"

"Do what?" Steve asked, letting out a deflated sigh. Having his partner see the subtleties of what he said only reminded Steve just how lucky he was to have a friend as close as Danny had become to him.

"Act like you should've seen this coming." He continued. "You are many things my friend, but you are not a fortune teller, so give yourself a break, please. You know Mary is her own person, and really likes to take her own path. So there's no way you could've prevented her from getting involved in this. So don't do that." Steve didn't say anything in reply, but Danny knew he'd gotten his point across. "Okay, let's focus, please." Danny turned to Chin. "Anything else?"

"Yeah," he nodded. "Look at this." He put a hotel registry up on the monitors. It showed all the rooms booked by Philips, including the one with Mary listed as the guest. "We've got them on camera checking in, so I'm going to call the hotel and see if they've heard or seen anything."

"What did Philips' background get us?" Steve asked, hoping for something to use as leverage when they went back into the interrogation room.

"Not much," Kono explained, with a slight deflation in her voice. "So far I haven't been able to find anything suspicious other than the money going in and out, anyway.

"Fantastic. The guy's perfect, apparently." Danny rolled his eyes.

"I did learn some interesting information about Hall, though." She began. "When I spoke to Hall's boss at Koga, Sam Koga, he said Hall was a friend of the family. Apparently he started working for them when he was fifteen and was one of their best employees. When their family learned he was sick, they started paying him the full pension plan he would've been paid had he worked for them for fifty years."

"So that explains the large amounts of money going in." Danny put together. "Shame it's all going back out, though. Anything else, Kono?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "He also told me about an altercation Hall had with someone a few days ago. He was unknown to Koga."

"Sounds like a person of interest to me. " Steve replied. "But if he was unknown, I assume that means we don't have a name?"

"No name, but I'm still digging." She tried to sound positive.

Steve took a deep breath. "Okay, keep me posted." Kono nodded in compliance as she turned and walked towards her office.

"Chin." Steve turned to him next. "Was Mary with Philips and his crew when they checked in?" he asked.

Chin hesitated for a second before replying with a simple "Yeah."

Before Chin had even finished the word, Steve was tearing back out of the bull pen towards the interrogation room.

He threw the door open and stormed to within an inch of their suspect's face. "What are you doing with my sister?! You son of a-"

"Steve!" Danny stormed up to him, stopping a few feet from him.

"What?!" He answered with the same force and volume that his partner had used. His eyes remained locked on Vincent Philips though. He actually rattled Philips a little bit with his incredibly forceful tone directed merely inches from the man's face.

"Can I see you over here for a minute before you rip the vocal chords out of his throat, preferably?" he motioned towards the door.

Steve still kept his best death stare on their suspect. "When I come back, you are going to talk, you understand me?"

The man didn't say a word, but Steve knew he'd begun to crack him. He just wasn't sure he had enough time to get him to break all the way.

"What the hell are you doing?!" The shorter man asked. He knew that Steve was pretty worried about Mary, and no one could blame him for that. But he also knew there were many more angles of this case they needed to keep working on, so letting this guy get under Steve's skin was not the best idea at the moment.

He continued before Steve could say anything. "I get it, okay. You're worried about Mary. But you have to remember that-"

"That what, Danny?" he stood with his hands on his hips in an aggravated state.

Danny sighed, wanting to choose his words very carefully. "Listen, Steve. If anyone understands being worried about a family member involved with the wrong people as much as you do, it's me, okay? Can we agree on that?"

Steve sighed this time, understanding what his partner was getting at. "Yeah, I know. I just can't shake the feeling that this guy is behind all this, or at the very least an accomplice. And then, thinking about Mary being involved, I just.." he trailed off for a second before focusing like a laser once again. "We gotta get this guy, and we gotta do it soon." He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and pulled it out to look at it.

"We will, we'll get him, we just have to stay smart about it, please try to remember that." Danny reminded him.

"Well, Chin and Kono can help with that." He said looking back to his partner after looking at his phone. "Not only did they I.D. Brian Hall, but they also found some interesting information about Dr. Billings." He instantly looked through the small window at Vincent Philips.

Knowing what Steve was thinking, Danny spoke up. "I know you want to have this guy hung right here and now, probably by his big British teeth or something, but let's leave this guy for now and go see what Chin and Kono have upstairs, please? Like you said, he's not going to give us anything. And you beating the crap out of him right now, while it would undoubtedly be enjoyable, will probably not help us."

An expression of defeat quietly swept Steve's face as he nodded and they silently headed back towards the elevator.

"So is Hall our victim?" he asked hoping for some helpful information as they entered the bullpen.

He motioned towards the interrogation room. " "Yeah," Chin replied. "Max was finally able to give the positive I.D. by the dental records. But get this. It turns out, Hall's cancer was benign. He'd been seeing an oncologist once a week for almost six months, and taking an extreme amount of chemo drugs. But his cancer was not even close to life threatening. The amount of money he was paying Billings' though," Chin shook his head. "More money than I've seen in my whole life."

"Okay, now I really want to know about this doctor." Steve stated. "What'd we get on her?"

"I ran her financials, and aside from having very expensive tastes in cars and property, I found that the exact same amounts that were taken out of Hall's account were placed into Dr. Billing's personal account each time on the same day as his withdrawals." Kono reported. "And there's this."

"Wait, let me get this straight," Steve rubbed his face for a second. "Brian Hall was paying Dr. Christina Billings large amounts of money, presumably under the table, to give him extremely strong drugs for the cancer he thought was killing him. Only, he wasn't dying?"

Chin nodded. "According to Max, Hall was probably healthier than most of us, even with a benign tumor."

"Wow that is very clever." Danny commented. "He's unknowingly paying her to kill him." As he finished talking, he took his ringing phone out of his pocket and took a few steps away from the table to answer it.

"Yeah. And that begs the question, why did she want to kill him?" Steve asked.

Kono sighed. "Unfortunately, that's the missing piece.

"Here's a thought." Chin piped in. "Whatever her motive was, did she grow impatient waiting for the drugs to kill him?"

"But what did she have to do with the lights and the concert in general for that matter?" Steve asked, not feeling any less defeated.

Well, this might help." Kono swiped her fingers across the smart table sending a list of incoming and outgoing phone calls onto the monitors in front of them.

"Whoa." Danny took in the information in front of him. "So Dr. Billings is the one who reported the body to HPD."

"That doesn't make any sense." Steve shook his head. "Why poison him with a drug that's extremely easily traced back to you? And then call in the crime? There's no way she'd be stupid enough to do all that." The twists in this case were starting to really eat away at Steve and it was very visible on his face.

"If she expected him to die naturally" Kono made air quotations with the word naturally. "Then no one would be the wiser, right? No one who suspect her of murder then."

"I guess that's similar to the theory of killing someone with no family or anything?" Danny added. "If no one misses them, and the body is hidden then did any murder occur? Or in this case, if it looks like he died of natural causes, why would you have any suspects?"

"Mm," Chin agreed. "A murderous version of the 'if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it really fall' scenario."

"Exactly." Danny nodded as his phone vibrated once more. "Oh I'm gonna take this my office, sorry guys." He looked at his partner, but Steve was still so deep in thought he didn't even look up.

No one left at the smart table spoke for a minute or so after Danny left the group. They were all processing the vicious cycle nature of the case.

Steve was the first to break the silence. With a grunt, he starting walking away from the smart table. "I'm going back to talk to Philips, so keep me updated on anything you find." He looked over at Danny's office to see he was still on the phone. He begrudgingly headed downstairs alone.

"Man, this is hard on him." Kono was the first to comment when their boss was out of earshot.

"Let's just hope this source of Danny's comes through with a lead on Mary." Chin let out a breath he'd been holding in since seeing that familiar face on the security tape.