He could be totally off base with this. Steve McGarrett could be on the complete opposite side of the Kahana Preserves from Danny Williams, could be too far away from the man to hear him being tortured to death as a command performance for Kono.

Somehow he didn't think so. He knew this territory, had gone through it over and over again as a kid. He knew where the kids tended to hang, knew where the drug deals went down, even knew the spots where college kids took their high school jail bait. There wasn't one inch of the preserves that he hadn't traipsed through.

That, however, was more than ten years ago and a lot could have happened in ten long years. It was enough time for a few groves of trees to get themselves blown over by typhoons, and another grove to grow into a spot where a grove had never been before. Paths could have been altered, and so could some of the streams that offered moisture to the tropical flora all around him.

It wasn't all that different. Steve's gut was shrieking 'this is it! This is it!' at him and urging his feet to greater speed.

He trotted down the trail, letting his ears do the work of searching for clues.

Kono stared at the computer read out. It had been just as easy to input all the five names she'd gathered as one, and she did so more so that she could say with absolute honesty that she was being thorough rather than any expectation that certain names would be suspect.

Emerson's popped up first, and she tabbed the keys that would open the file, frowning. First usually meant that the computer had found something.

Yeah. It did. Emerson's account at the National Hawaiian Bank showed three deposits of twenty thousand dollars each. Total: sixty thousand dollars, all in the past four days. What was going on?

Another file: Jones. It also showed large sums of money getting transferred within the account, only an hour ago.

Last: Detroit. Nothing. There was nothing, as if the man didn't exist, and that in itself was suspicious.

Three suspects. Three suspects, and only an hour available for investigation before she needed to stand up in front of a judge to say, "Peter Hanolo told Detective Danny Williams to kill me." One hour and two minutes until some slimeball of an attorney, representing Hanolo, would respond, "Your Honor, my client never said that."

Hanolo would walk. And Danny Williams would be dead.

Hey! I'm alive!

'Alive', however, was a somewhat slippery definition. Maybe 'breathing' would be a better description because 'alive' suggested more of an ability to interact with the world and that was definitely something that Danny Williams was not up to.

He looked at his surroundings and reconsidered his last thought. Maybe he wasn't up to it, but he'd better get himself up and running if he wanted to remain in one piece. There were a couple of bodies lying twisted in the wreckage of the jeep, and by the looks of them, they weren't going to be a threat to anyone ever again. People with their necks in that particular angle tended not to live very long. There were three more, though, that had gotten themselves tossed off the falling jeep before major damage could be done. They weren't moving very fast, but their rib cages were expanding and contracting and one of them was starting to lift himself up on one unsteady hand. Of Cutler there was no sign.

Three of them. One of him, and the good thing about his condition was that his feet were intact. His feet wouldn't work very fast, but 'slow' was better than 'stick around and die'. Danny hauled himself up into something resembling an upright position and shuffled off into the brush.

There was no particular reason why Steve should follow up on that indistinct crash, but his feet refused to take any other path. There could be a hundred different explanations for the bang that echoed distantly, including a head-on collision from a couple of beach-going cars aiming for the same spot on the Kamehameha Highway. There was a fork in the path, one aiming south and one headed east, and he chose the eastern route toward the interior of the preserves—and the noise.

His ears told him a lot about where he was: the song birds scolding him from above, the bees humming as they went about their business of pollinating the islands. There were the grunts from a group of feral hogs, and Steve recognized the tunnels in the brush made by the imported menace that were rapidly growing in numbers and in nuisance value. He ignored most of the noise as background, knowing that if his partner and Hanolo's men were anywhere close, he wouldn't be hearing so much from the fauna. It meant that he needed to hustle.

Steve moved on, his gait a fast trot, his eyes scanning the brush for signs of recent activity. Above all, he listened.

Chin looked at the time stamp in the lower right corner of the computer screen. It was coming perilously close to the time when Kono would need to leave for the courthouse. No matter what answers they didn't have, that could not be missed.

The afternoon sun was trying to enter the darkened interior of Hawaii Five-O central command and failing, its progress impeded by the shaded windows. Nevertheless, Chin could tell even before he'd looked at computer screen that it was getting late.

"You're making progress, right?" Kono's voice showed her nerves.

"Yes," he lied, then did a double-take: the computer had just turned his lie into a truth. The results on Emerson had popped in as he was talking. Hurriedly, Chin opened up the document.

He breathed a sigh of relief; the large transfers of money that had occurred over the past few days were all related to investments that Emerson was putting away for retirement, and Chin had just traced them back to the original instruments. All legal, all intelligent economic moves for a man approaching retirement, and all leading to the welcome conclusion that Ralph 'Emerson' Waldo was not the person who had surreptitiously wiped the tape clean of Hanolo's crime. "Emerson's clean," he reported. "His stuff checks out. One down."

"Two to go." Kono refused to be reassured. "I'm pulling in the records on Ebony Jones, and there isn't very much. Nothing on those big transactions."

Chin accepted that. "How about that Detroit guy?"

"Absolutely nothing. I haven't even been able to locate a checking account. Doesn't do direct deposit. He probably lives paycheck to paycheck, spending it as soon as it hits his pocket."

Chin began to hit a sequence of buttons. Staying here was not an option; Kono couldn't be late for Hanolo's hearing. Without her testimony, the D.A. had nothing, and Hanolo would walk. It wouldn't matter if they could prove that either Jones or the Detroit guy had wiped the tape, and it wouldn't matter even if they could pull Danny Williams out of the preserves afterward because Hanolo would have had his hearing and would have beaten the system. If Kono spoke and gave witness, they had a fifty-fifty chance of persuading the judge to hold Hanolo over for trial. Conviction would be a matter for another day, but they'd deal with that later. After they got Danny back.

By then, it could be a trial for murder.

Chin refused to consider that possibility. A few more keystrokes, and he'd be ready to go.

Kono watched him. "What are you doing?"

"We've still got two suspects who could have wiped the tape," Chin answered her, "and this computer is our best bet to figure out which one it is." He indicated the small and slender computer tablet beside him. "I'm going to try to remote in, from the court room. I'll be working the computer through this while we wait for your testimony, tracking down those money trails." He looked up. "You can do this, cuz?"

Kono looked away.

Chin made it a statement this time. "You can do this, cuz."

"Yeah." It could have sounded more positive. "Chin…"

"Yeah. I know." Chin wrapped up his tablet. "Let's go."

So how many times was this that he'd fallen? Good thing the ground was soft. Danny Williams would have had his nose broken several times over.

Oh, wait. It already was broken, courtesy of Cutler's fist. Or maybe it was one of the other guys? Not that it made much difference. Still hurt like hell.

So where the hell was he? By the looks of it, one of the various preserves on the Island. Hadn't a clue which one, just that it was pretty big. Or maybe it just seemed that way, because he hadn't come across any roads since he'd caused Cutler's jeep to fall off the cliff, taking Cutler and all of Hanolo's men with it. Of course, it took one of Steve McGarrett's men with it, too, but that was kind of the point.

He wasn't dead, yet. Mixed blessing: Danny Williams was alive—that was the good part—but still in this tropical, palm tree-ridden, coconut-soaked version of a national park with a minimum of three thugs on his tail like white on rice.

Danny grabbed a slender tree, hoisting himself back onto his feet, wondering just how many times he could fall before the rest of him decided that enough was enough and getting up one more time was out of the question. Not this time; his feet were once again underneath him, his head high above the ground and swaying.

Maybe he'd lost the bastards? He really didn't know. He didn't see how; he'd left a trail a mile wide that even a seven year old cub scout from the city could follow.

What was that noise? Danny picked up his head, certain that the grunting sounds hadn't come from himself.

Crap. There they were, a bunch of feral hogs. Was 'bunch' the right term, or should it be 'herd' like a bunch of cows? Maybe some other term? Steve McGarrett would know, just like he seemed to know everything else about this pile of volcanic ash in the middle of the Pacific. Big mothers, too; every one of the hogs looked to out-weigh Danny himself. And they had piglets with them. Hoglets. Babies. Whatever—it was an invitation for Mama Hog to come over and stomp Hawaii Five-O's token haole into even more of a pile of bloody rags than Hanolo's people did.

"It's okay. I'm not really here." Danny's mouth decided to work. The words didn't sound particularly clear, but that wasn't something he had control over. "Just backing away, here. Not intruding on anything."

The largest boar didn't seemed convinced. He, she, or it lowered its head menacingly. It pawed the ground.

"Shit." Running wasn't going to help. That thing could out-run him even if all of his body parts were in good operating condition. That left climbing a tree.

Could feral hogs jump? Danny had a funny feeling that he was about to find out.

The engine to the jeep was still warm, suggesting that the crash had occurred not too long ago. There were two bodies, too, both dead. Steve didn't need to feel for a pulse to verify that, not with the twisted angle to each neck, but he did anyway, just so he could put it into his later report. The bodies were likewise warm, adding to the evidence that the crash had been recent.

Steve took a moment to peer into the interior of the ruined vehicle. No bodies were left inside. If this had been a normal accident scene, Steve would have assumed that the two dead bodies outside had failed to use normal safety precautions such as seatbelts, and had gotten tossed out of the jeep when it went over the cliff edge above.

Not this time. There was a dark stain in the back seat, and a coil of rope looped around one of the seat struts with more of the dark stain. Steve feared he knew what that stain was from: blood.

"Hang on a minute." Chin ignored Kono's frantic hiss in his ear. "Yeah. Got it. Ebony Jones is clean."

"She is?" Kono tried to lean over to see the data for herself on Chin's small tablet. "Damn. I was so sure…"

"Large sums of money, all paid to the University of Hawaii. Damn," Chin breathed, "does it really cost that much to go to school? Even part time?"

"You don't want to know what my loans are like, cuz," Kono assured him bitterly. "Okay, she's clean. Damn," she repeated, looking around their surroundings as if the answer was there if only she was smart enough to recognize it.

It wasn't, Chin reflected bitterly, not if the mole was any kind of intelligent. No, whoever had wiped the tape clean was probably long gone by now, would have packed up his or her belongings and fled right after doing the deed. There wasn't a snowball's chance in Mt. Kilauea's fiery lava that the perpetrator was here in this courthouse. Chin, too, allowed his eyes to scurry over the small crowd in the courtroom gallery. There were a few reporters toward the back, notebooks in hand. There was not one but two artists, one in each corner, drawing sketches of the defendant and his expensive lawyer, hoping to sell the pictures to the local news outlet. Peter Hanolo wasn't as big as a state official going down, but he was big enough to create a local stir.

Three big mothers, all in the back row, all sitting with their arms crossed over muscled chests. That was not good; they were likely more of Hanolo's men, come to see that their boss walked out of the courtroom with an apology from the State of Hawaii. The three wouldn't be armed—this was, after all, a courthouse with all kinds of electronic monitors to prevent weapons from entering—but from the size of them, Chin didn't want this proceeding to devolve into a fistfight.

Neither did the bailiff, a tall and lanky dude with a shaved head who looked like he could normally control any problems for His Honor. Normally; that was the key word. The three bozos in back looked to be the bailiff's size and then some. Chin was pleased to see the bailiff on the wall phone to the side of the courtroom, speaking swiftly into the mouthpiece. Chin could imagine what was being said:

"Hey, Joe, you want to send down a couple more guys? I may have a Situation."

"Yeah? That's what you said the last time, Mikey."

"Right, and nothing happened because you listened to me. You gonna listen now? I got Mr. Big Shot Hanolo for a hearing."

Sigh. "You got it, Mikey. I'll send down Victor and Tiny as soon as they finish with Judge Kamealoha."

"Tell 'em to hurry it up. We're about to start."

The bailiff turned away from the phone in time to intone, "All rise for the Honorable Judge Hardaway."

Chin grabbed his tablet awkwardly, struggling to stand in the narrow seat—and watched as a stray finger disconnected the computer link to the massive computer in Five-O Headquarters.

Damn…

Okay, so jumping wasn't one of the feral hog's best talents. That worked in Danny's favor, currently clutching the thick branch of a tree that wasn't nearly tall enough for his comfort. Hogs couldn't jump, and couldn't leap high enough to gouge out a chunk of flesh from Danny's leg with those ferocious tusks. The hog tried, and failed. The rest of its herd stood back and cheered it on, grunting and snorting.

Unfortunately, the hog compensated for its lack of leaping talent by demonstrating an exceptional capability at pushing the tree over, pulling the roots out of the ground. The tree tilted. Danny hung on desperately, wondering what he should do. Jump? They'd run him down in no time flat. Leap to another nearby tree? Not in this life time; the nearest tree larger than a sapling was three yards away. Not reachable even if he was intact.

Vicious, ugly thing. Short and chunky. Bristly hair running thinly over its back with spikes that looked sharp enough to slice through roasted ham.

Ram the tree; the trunk tilted. Danny yelled, the noise shocked out of him. Did it really matter if Cutler and his thugs found him? He was a dead man either way.