A/N: Hey everyone! So this chapter is long and is going to seem like a lot of filler but it's important filler. I hope you like it. The next chapter is going to be all about the action and whump!
Chapter 9: All About Family
The ride to the McGarrett house was made in an awkward sort of silence. Duke drove the cruiser he'd obtained and was followed by another vehicle - unmarked - that carried four other officers. With McGarrett missing in action and Doris riding shotgun, the extra officers were for intimidation and protection. Doris was mostly silent with her arms crossed over her chest and a scowl plastered on her face. She didn't like taking orders, she was a lone wolf, but this wasn't her case - or maybe it was.
Duke could tell that she was plotting something. If anything, Steve was in for a very long, angry, talk when he was found. At the worst, Doris was going to have something to hold against her son - there was a lot she was holding against him already. If the case really did have ties to Wo Fat, this could get even more complicated for Doris and her cover in Hawaii.
The scanner in the car crackled with the voices of the emergency dispatchers - fire, paramedics, police - but no on in the car payed much attention to it. It was just noise to fill the uncomfortable silence between the two people who had, at one time, been acquainted because of Jack McGarrett. Now that the truth about Doris was out, the tension between her and the men and women who worked with her, now dead, husband - and who knew that she was indeed alive and had faked her own death - was thick enough to stand on, let alone have them trust her as far as they could toss her. Truth be told, it was an awkward situation all around for the member of HPD who had been blinded by her past lies - especially those who were close to Jack McGarrett and knew about his personal pursuits.
"So, Sergeant, what can you tell me, as someone on the outside of Five-O looking in on this case. What was the first one all about and what was Wo Fat's involvement?" Doris asked out of the blue. She never turned to look at him, nor did she pull her eyes off the road that was stretched out before them.
Duke shrugged. "From what I understand, Wo Fat was the reason McMahon escaped from prison in the first place but he didn't show up during the case or ever make any secondary attempts against Steve and Danny until later. I honestly thought it was part of the excuse. The case was all about McMahon and his sister. Maybe Wo Fat is opportunistic and took a chance with McMahon, but he underestimated Danny and Steve. Or maybe someone else had the idea - connected Wo Fat to Danny and Steve and then they went in search of him for help. I think it was just one of those moments of curiosity. What would happen if I let this man loose? What do have to lose by it? If he gets rid of Steve McGarrett for me, all the better." Duke explained.
"In the time since has Wo Fat taken credit for it?"
Duke shook his head. "Not that I know of, but then again, as you said I'm just looking in. I don't know everything that is going on in that office."
"Why don't I believe that? You seem to be among the trusted hierarchy of the organization. Steve trusts you."
"They respect me and my position, and the fact that I worked with Jack. I am trusted. I'm their elder, and so I'm respected." Duke responded and at the mention of her deceased husband, and his work, Doris fell silent once more and Duke was thankful.
They arrived in front of the McGarrett house and found it heavily guarded by members of SEAL team nine. Doris shook her head at the sight of the uniformed men and walked on ahead of Duke as they exited their vehicle and Duke hung back to meet up with the other officers that had arrived with them.
Doris found Charlie Fong and his partner by asking through the group that had been working inside the house. Charlie was at the waters edge with Ruby, who was documenting Charlie's every move.
"Fong?" Doris called as she approached.
"Yes?" Charlie asked as he looked up from his work and saw the woman he'd never met but had heard plenty about.
"Doris McGarrett, give me a run down on this case." Doris ordered.
"All I know is what I've found here. Some blood. Signs of a struggle. The dragging of bodies off in that direction." He said as he pointed toward the water and then around to the neighbours yard. "My boss is working to paint a bigger picture of this whole thing." he added and pointed to a woman who was currently speaking to Duke and his men.
Doris huffed, turned on her heals and walked away,
"Who was that?" Ruby Tilus, Charlie's partner, asked.
"Steve's mom."
"Oh..." Ruby said her eyes wide. "So that's the super spy. I'm glad Mona is going to deal with her."
"Steve told me not to tell his mom anything - especially not about his house or the crime scene from his father's death."
Ruby nodded and got back to work. "Glad I wasn't on that case."
Doris moved and stood uncomfortably close to Duke Lukela who was carrying on his own conversation with Mona Blainson - forensics detective, supervisor of the HPD crime scene specialists, and medical doctor. Doris cleared her throat to make her presence known, and to make everyone else feel even more uncomfortable.
"Mona, this is Doris McGarrett." Duke stated as he rolled his eyes at the forensic specialist before him.
"Ah, the mother, I presume?" Mona asked as she reached out to shake Doris's hand. "I assure you, we will do everything we can to find your son."
"Damn right you will. Now tell me everything you've found here." Doris demanded impatiently.
"With all due respect, ma'am, you're a little too close to this case. We can't give out that kind of information at this time." Mona stated and straightened herself up to her full height - which wasn't much but she wasn't going to let this new woman push her around especially within her own domain. Mona was highly revered by her colleagues, and liked by everyone at HPD. She did her job, and she did it very well, and no undead mother was going to change that.
"We're making an exception for Doris." Duke stated before the super spy could flip her lid. "She's officially working with Five-O for this case." he added. "So tell her what you know about her son's disappearance. She may be one of the only people that hasn't been monitored by the McMahon's and so she may be able to help those of us who were mentioned in the letter." Mona nodded her understanding of Duke's code to be discreet and started over as Duke moved away from the two women and over to Charlie and Ruby - by way of his officers who had reconvened in the middle of the yard to keep away from Doris McGarrett.
"So?" Duke asked in a hushed voice.
"So, for a navy SEAL you would think he'd have a better security system." Charlie whispered as he stood.
"I think after this he will." Duke said with a nod. "So nothing more was taken. No one but our suspect have been here. There's been no sign of Wo Fat, or anyone affiliated with him?"
"As far as we can tell." Charlie answered. "We did scoop some footage of a van off of the street surveillance and I plan to work that angle as soon as I can get to the bull pen and run down the case with Toast and Catherine, but if I had to guess, I'd say this has nothing to do with Wo Fat. Not this time - if it ever was."
"I'll let them know, but they're probably already on it. Once I leave with Doris you can move back inside and make sure nothing else is out of place. The woman knows something went on between Wo Fat and Steve the last time this case came up and she knows about the Champ Box because of connections that we've made to the suspects that we currently have in custody."
"That's not good." Charlie sighed and Duke shook his head. "Should I be really worried? I mean I was mentioned in the letter, so were you..."
"We have extra cover her for you. The SEALs are out front. I'm sure when you're ready to come into the office, or go back to your lab, you'll be cover. Have you ever had such elite body guards in your life?" Duke asked to lighten Charlie's mood.
Charlie shook his head and laughed, "never though I would need bodyguards."
"Yeah, I was supposed to be one of those guys doing the protecting." Duke sighed. "Now I have an entourage and a Doris."
"You don't sound very happy about it."
"I'm not. Until we get something to go on, in this case, Doris is the third wheel and I think she knows it. So she's trying to be Steve, for Five-O right now, and I get to play chaperone. I've got to head out to the airport because Lori Weston is arriving shortly. It's busy work for Doris. We're her pick-up."
"It sounds like you're on baby-sitting duty." Charlie stated with a wink.
"When Five-O is involved, when am I not?" Duke asked, chuckled and then turned and headed back toward the gathering of his men.
5-0
"What have you found, Kono?" Chin asked as his cousin exited her office shaking her head - her tablet in hand - as she moved toward the smart system, and Toast and Catherine moved way from it.
"Discrepancies and a few too many coincidences." Kono answered. "Gladys has quite the history. Three marriages, three tragic deaths and a good long life on these islands. Her two sons, Jeremy and Walter, were born out of wedlock and adopted by Professor Kole Kalani when Gladys - then Gloria - married him twenty-five years before his death. He was the only father those two boys ever knew, and from what I can tell, they never knew their uncle either, not until recent years. The boys were very young at the time of the marriage and Professor Kalani was working out of a university in New York State. That's where Gladys and the Professor met but he was just a guest lecturer at the time."
"What about the first two husbands?"
"Well, that's where things get mighty suspicious." Kono confessed. "It's a long story but I got my hands on almost all of it. Daniel and Gladys McMahon were born in 1948. It was a leap year and they were born ten and a half minutes apart. Daniel came first, on February 28th at 11:54 PM, and Gladys arrived on February 29th at 12:07 AM."
"You've managed to get that far back?" Chin asked and Kono nodded.
"I've got copies of their birth certificates and all their academic records. Both children showed signs of their advanced intellect early on, but Gladys was pushed into academics while her brother studied harder and in secret. They started school together and excelled together for most of their publicly funded education. In 1964, at the age of 15, Gladys was accepted into an advanced studies program at Oxford University and she left home at a very young age. Her brother stayed, finished school and went to work in the candy show - as far as his father was concerned. We know that wasn't the end of that. Gladys, on the other hand, returned to the USA in 1969 at the age of 20 with a Doctorate of Anthropology and her first husband. She'd changed her name to Gloria the year she turned 18 and the following term she enter into her PHD program, and met Erold Smith. He was six years her senior and an archeologist and geologist finishing his third specialist degree in anthropology. He was very smart and that's probably what made him attractive to Gladys. He died a year later when he was bitten by a black mamba in Australia while studying the indigenous peoples of that country. Gladys was there as well."
"Is it just bad luck or do I see a pattern with husbands dying in the wild?" Chin asked skeptically. "Is anthropology really that dangerous?"
"yes and no," Kono stated, "but that's not the only suspicious bit. There was a highly publicized academic battler of whits going on between Doctor Stevenson - McMahon's academic alias - and his sisters husband. The battle ended with a retraction of Doctor Smith's work in highly notable journals because McMahon proved Smith was completely wrong in his interpretations of the ancient cultures of the british isles - from whence Smith was from. And, two month after starting a fresh in a new country, and with a different cultural peoples, Smith died as a result of the snake bite and Stevenson printed an article, with the help of his sister, on the Australian sub-cultures, not six months later. If that wasn't enough, McMahon himself was in Australia at the time of his brother-in-laws death to lecture at a school there. Gladys was a widow at the age of 21 and her brother had a thing for proving other people wrong."
"And so perished husband number one." Chin smirked and Kono nodded. "Good story, Kono, but what else have you got?"
"Husband number two, George Allan Parkes, wasn't an academic in the same sense as Gladys and her brother, but was a park ranger and conversationalist from Northern Ontario."
"A Canadian?" Chin asked. "She likes to stay in the common wealth but not within her own country?"
"It would seem so. He was one of the men who guided a few exhibitions up to Hudson's bay for Gladys and another group of anthropologists. They were studying the aboriginal people of Northern Canada and their continued cultural connections to their ancestors. Gladys was now 25 and looking to start a family. She was distancing herself from her brother by this time, or maybe it was just a break, and the park ranger caught her eye. After two more exhibitions up to the north, in 1976 and 1977, she returned home for her father's funeral with a new Canadian husband and the prospects of a new life in Canada. But in the summer of 1977, while on vacation in Alaska, Ranger Parkes was mauled by a grizzly bear and died in hospital two days later. They had been on a fishing trip and Gladys witnessed the whole thing." Kono stated and swiped the new paper article up onto the screen.
"And where was her brother this time?" Chin asked. "What did he have against this husband?"
Kono shrugged. "It seemed like he was fine with this brother-in-law. McMahon had an alibi, albeit a terrible one. The Wonka Killer's first murder - or rather one of the many, and the latest one, that was linked to the McMahon case, by Danny and the Newark Police Department, happened in the summer of 1977 in the state of New Jersey. That is where it all began."
"Danny was likely only a year old then."
"Just one year old. Danny was born in the summer of 1976. It seemed like Gladys had accepted her fate late in 1977. She lived close to home, after her second husbands death, worked for a few museums and universities helping with her brother's research while he ran the candy store and perfected all of his killings. There weren't many in those first years, or maybe there were and Danny didn't make the connections, but it seemed like things had settled into a way of understanding each other. Gladys's job would be to support her brother's academic facade while he went on killing, even though their father was now dead and Daniel didn't need to stay in the candy shop. It became just his hunting ground."
"It's said that twins have a connection to one another that no one can really understand, but this seems a little harsh." Chin commented with a shake of his head. "It's almost like Stockholm Syndrome only self inflicted."
"I agree, but in 1985 and 1986, at the age of 35 and 36, Gladys gave birth to Walter first and Jeremy second. There are no fathers names on the birth certificates for the boys but again Gladys started to distance herself from her brother. Maybe she started to see the monster in him. Perhaps she feared for their safety growing up with a pedophile for an uncle. She took a job at a university in New York, moved her boys across the river, and met Doctor Kole Kalani who was a guest lecturer. They married quickly and in secret and moved to Hawaii - or rather Kalani returned to Hawaii bringing his wife and her children with him - in 1988."
"So she's been in Hawaii for years?" Chin asked skeptically.
"The internet has worked wonders to shrink this planet we live on, Chin. From what I can tell, Gladys did make frequent trips back and forth to the mainland but the boys never went. The last documented trips I could find were in 1992 when her mother passed away and again in 2003 when her brother was arrested and she was with him through his trial - her husband stayed at home with the boys. She is usually listed in the footnotes for Stevenson's published works as a research assistant - up until his death. So she did work with him for a long time - they kept in touch - but she rarely left the islands. Maybe it really was to protect her young children. Maybe she really was distancing herself personally from her brother while keeping him only as an academic colleague."
"So husband number three died in a sink hole, after 25 years of marriage and Gladys was injured in the incident as well. Is that a coincidence, or did she actually love this man?" Chin asked.
"If there was one that I could get behind it's the marriage to Kalani. He was a good father to her children. They stayed together for a long time. From what I've been able to gather they were happy but they had one rule, and that was that neither would work for the other. Gladys stuck to her own research and sending information and working for her brother, and Kalani was a professor at the University of Hawaii and was well loved. They did a lot together, outside of the academic realm, the boys went to school here, she was a member of the PTA, the Professor coached soccer and little league baseball for the boys, and both boy went to college here - thanks to their step father - and he was mourned deeply by his family. Literally she seemed happy with him. Maybe the sink hole really was karma and maybe that's what triggered her turn back to her brother. Trauma, such as that, can change a person drastically."
"But she let her brother kill her youngest son." Chin stated.
"She never questioned her brother, from what I can tell, so many parts of her just didn't think that he would go after Jeremy because he wasn't his usual prey. He was too old by the time his uncle was freed from prison and came to Hawaii, and if he was really here to clear up every loose end, then wouldn't he go after Walter as well? I think Jeremy's killing was a complete surprise to Gladys as well, but I think the person she always turned to in times of trouble had always been her brother. Maybe she just couldn't blame him, even though he was the killer. We didn't really give her a chance to deal with that or him. Maybe this is her way of dealing."
"Walter is alive and still in Halawa, isn't he?" Chin asked after a long moment of contemplation.
"Yes, he's still there. Maybe we need to do a little more research into Walter. Maybe we need to check his visitor logs. Maybe we need to have a chat with Walter ourselves." Kono stated. "He's all that his mother has left on this island."
"Maybe he can tell us about his uncle, his mother, and give us insight into that first meeting with his murdering uncle who'd been in prison for most of his life." Chin said with a nod of his head.
"From what I've been able to gather, Kalani worked and lived with his wife happily for years. Danny didn't come into the McMahon case until a little over 12 years ago - and caught McMahon in two. McMahon had been killing for years before that and then Danny got in his head and caught him." Kono said as she started to pace.
"And then 8 years later Wo Fat gets McMahon out of prison to go after Danny and Steve. Who made that connection?" Chin asked.
"I can't say for certain but Gladys had to deal with Five-O much more then we care to think of. Walter Kalani got himself into trouble after his father was killed - maybe even before - and that case was covered by us. He's now in prison because we caught him and it's not like Five-O isn't really well know on this island. I'm sure she knew the detective who caught her brother in New Jersey because she was on that case and when she found out about her sons turn to crime she would have known that we would get involved because of the nature of his crimes. Imagine her surprise when that same Jersey detective that arrested and incarcerated her brother, showed up on this island and was assigned to a task-force that would ultimately spell the capture and incarceration of her son. I think Gladys has always been been the one with eyes on Danny, and as a result, the rest of us."
"Ho'opana'i"
"We thought, all along, that this revenge was for her brother, but I'll bet my badge this is really all about Gladys McMahon." Kono stated as she stopped pacing and turned on her cousin. "She followed Danny's career. Ultimately, he's the one that took her brother away. She knew the ins and outs of our cases and she knew who to go to, to get her brother out of prison and give him the opportunity to enact his revenge."
"Kono, are you saying that the mastermind, this whole time, even before Danny was buried alive, was Gladys McMahon?"
"Yes."
5-0
"Dammit!" Danny cursed into the darkness as Steve heard a clanging sound coming from his partner's direction.
"You all right?" Steve called - his knuckles were warn and bleeding from the number of times he'd hit them against the metal box in his attempts to free the radio from it's case, but he had not let his pain be known, he was too busy listening for Danny.
"Stupid question." Danny called back and his frustration was as thick as oil. "I just dropped my tools. I'll be fine, but I'm not all right."
"Oh so scrap pieces of debris that were once just trash in your eyes are now tools?" Steve asked mockingly trying desperately not to let his partner fall into the dark pit of despair that they were both standing on the edge of.
"Sometimes you've just got to make due. Can't remember where I heard that - maybe it was Oprah." Danny retorted.
"Or maybe it was a really smart, handsome, best friend, Navy SEAL."
"No, it was totally Oprah."
Steve couldn't help but laugh and though he couldn't see it through the darkness, Danny cracked a smile as well.
"Holy shit!" Danny cried to stop Steve's laughing.
"What is it?" Steve asked - serious once more and almost jumping out of his skin.
"I picked the lock!" Danny stated and there was hope and excitement as the lock hit the ground and the chain holding the gate sounded like rushing water as it fell away from the bars.
