I do not own Hawaii Five-0 or any characters. No copyright infringement intended.
Notes: watch out ... the saber toothed bunny got loose!
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
"Bit of tough luck there, Doc." The drunken statement was made by the one pilot who actually had heard about Franklin Ray's arrest. His dramatically slurred whisper was overly loud and Ray wished the drunk would simply keel off the bar stool into a sloppy heap. "So ... did you do it? Did you kill those girls?"
Sitting shoulder to shoulder in the small executive club lounge, Ray casually sipped his scotch. The place was relatively empty for the time of day and he'd been ignored until Cappie Jenkens staggered in from a bender. In Cappie's mind, the only way to fix his aching head was to stay in a self-inflicted stupor. But with his slurred remarks, Ray felt his bubble of time condensing again.
"Don't you have a job, Cappie?" Smoothly changing the topic, Ray refused to look at the slovenly pilot who repeatedly was bumping into his shoulder with an off-balance shuffle. Behind the bar, the news report was flickering quietly along. The bottom ticker announced his fugitive status and he smirked because there wasn't a single person in the hanger - now private executive club lounge - currently looking at the television. No one ever did. However, the bumbling of Cappie Jenkins was already a risk. Bending over to extend his reach, Ray snagged the remote and changed the channel to the first sports event he could find.
"Soccer." Cappie slurred the word with a long s-sound, leaning rudely into Ray as he pointed up at the TV. With the attention span of a gang, he'd forgotten his earlier question about jail and murders. "Didn't fancy you for a soccer man, Doc."
"You didn't answer my question." Pushing hard against the drunken man to sit him upright, Ray fisted a portion of the dirty white shirt. Bleary eyes proved that Cappie was clueless and Ray repeated himself. "Do you not have a job today, Cappie? Who and where are you flying?"
Cappie was a private for-hire pilot with an interesting reputation for drink and danger. Everyone knew him and used him at one time or another whether they wanted to admit it or not. The man was a wildcard, taking on any variety of jobs regardless of charter or cargo because he could be bought for just about any amount of money or trade. Despite his shortcomings ... which were many ... he was fairly reliable.
"Cappie. You are an absolute mess." Looking at him now and breathing in the unfortunate stench, Ray shook his head in utter disgust. "Who the hell would want to hire you?" He said it nastily, yet Cappie burst out laughing.
"Masterston Corporation." Lurching unsteadily in his seat, Cappie smiled broadly while pointing towards the clock. It was midafternoon, winds were light and it was a beautiful day which was perfect for flying. "Easy cargo drop to the Big Island ... they're loading me up now. I'm due to leave in an hour."
"What's the cargo?" Ray asked, now intrigued at a new possibility of a decently sized baby-step. He sniffed mockingly once more when Cappie shrugged.
"I dunno. Probably some sort of technical component mumbo-jumbo crap. They got some big-wig meeting tomorrow at their HQ." Cappie rocked in place when his feet missed the bottom rung of the bar stool and Ray shoved him back into place once more. "Empty leg on the way back, but Masterston is paying a hefty stipend, so what do I care."
Cappie might not have cared but Franklin Ray certainly did and he suddenly smiled. "You're a mess, Cappie, and you're going to lose this big ticket. You're going to need help just managing the pre-flight check and as your luck would have it ... I have business to conduct on the Big Island."
The drunken pilot blinked but couldn't quite clear the haze of too much beer from his eyes. His tongue was heavy and on some level even Cappie knew Ray was right. He needed the money and he couldn't risk his license, a fact which was becoming clearer by each passing second as a sharp pain flashed through his abdomen. Too much drink and an excess of spicy Thai food were both doing him in and Doctor Franklin Ray had his own reputation as a fine pilot. Still, Cappie meant to give Ray a hard time. Instead it came out as a hopeful confirmation. "You volunteering ... to be my ... co-pilot?"
Ray snorted after tossing two twenty dollar bills on the counter to clear both their tabs. "Come on, my new friend. Let's get this show on the road. Shall we?"
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If Danny hadn't been able to answer Steve's earlier question, he certainly didn't know what to say as Kono summarized the team's recent in-depth discussion with Riku Bhandari. Danny had fallen into an exhausted sleep, leaving his friends worried and concerned as he dealt with an emotional backlash. Doctor Ramirez was convinced the reaction was purely normal and even expected. His admonished need for a long period of rest which would allow Danny to get properly back on his feet was taken in stride, though the worry remained.
He had slept for the majority of the afternoon, waking to Kono's calming presence and an explanation that Steve and Chin had both gone to HPD to convene with them about their fugitive.
"Atlantic City? What was the girl's name again?" Danny had been listening patiently to the fairly unrevealing information. Bhandari had answered each question thrown at him from his own hospital bed with a lawyer in attendance. Now, he was going in for surgery to remove necrotizing tissue from his arm. The bite had indeed festered and surrounding tissues required advanced medical intervention. It was something Danny had escaped and he was quite selfishly glad for that. But Kono had shared something of interest related to the East coast killings and he'd been taken with an odd feeling of dread.
"Hannah. She was the first victim Bhandari can remember and the reason he chose not to ever know of their names or where they came from again." Kono was reading off her notes with her feet perched on an upper rung of her chair. It brought her knees up high as she used them to balance her tablet. "He said that she was very young, extremely naive and very much alone."
Hannah had been the first, perfect target. Her kidnapping and death had bothered Bhandari yet he had stayed with his rich employer to continually aide in his horrific acts time and again. Danny inwardly winced for a faint memory of a cold case which even pre-dated the fortuitous meeting of his now ex-wife. "Where did he find her?"
"An Atlantic City casino. There was some private affair held in an executive board room which Franklin Ray was invited to attend. This Hannah was hired as a cocktail waitress or something like that." Kono finally looked up as Danny's focus became more evident. Deep in thought, his good arm was flung over his eyes and he was fisting his fingers repeatedly as a nervous tick. "She's not one of the five. If she's really the first Ray murdered, then she hasn't been missed and was never found."
The conversation with Bhandari had been more than disturbing after he revealed that the killing spree had extended for a longer period of time. In fact, for the five recovered bodies, at least six more women had been abducted and killed in the sickly conducted experiments.
"What's wrong?" Kono's question was almost too cautious but she could see that Danny was suddenly up to something. "He ... he, uh said that he dropped her in a landfill. I don't think we'll be able to find her after all of this time." It was an abysmally sad story and Kono didn't know what to do as Danny once more stopped responding. She had no idea he was forcing his brain to go back more than ten years to a case when he first became a detective in Newark.
"Her name was Hannah and she was missed ... she was missed very much; I remember that at least." Danny was hiding under his arm and talking blindly to the ceiling. He remembered a faint color photograph which her distraught parents had handed over to the police. Blonde, blue-eyed with an effervescent personality; she met Ray's newly budding profile. They had searched for Hannah for more than a year with absolutely no luck. It was as if the earth had swallowed her whole never to be seen again. If what Kono related from Bhandari was true and if the link was sound, then he'd found her or at least could lay her to rest as unhappy as that might be.
"She was a college kid and pulling a summer job at the casinos. Her parents didn't like it at all but Hannah wanted to major in hotel management. AC was the perfect place for her to get immersed." He was talking to himself and slowly convincing himself that Bhandari's 'Hannah' had also been his. Feeling sicker by the minute, Danny let his arm slide down to the bed in order to stare at the ceiling tiles. Besides it being one of his very first cases, her name had been unique and Danny had never fully forgotten.
"I want my old files from archives ... can you get them for me? I don't remember the last name ... started with an 'M' I think and would have been the summer of 2000."
Kono's feet dropped to the floor in shock. "You know her?"
"Maybe." Completely distracted, Danny breathed the word out almost too quietly for her to hear. "Stranger things have happened."
"Oh, Danny." Suddenly feeling as sad as he, Kono struggled to her feet. "I'll get whatever you need. I'll start making calls to your old precinct and get the files to our office."
"Could be just a coincidence and it's a long-shot. I doubt we could even prove anything after all this time." But he already knew better as his stomach clenched into a painful knot. It was a link, another chance for a family's peace, and so it might not be so very obscure after all. The old case was something Danny hadn't quite ever been able to forget because he'd been made to shelve it. He'd been forced to move on and take on fresher cases in lieu of a more appropriate closure. He had been forced to walk away from a grieving family and it was a part of the job he detested. But now so many years later, he had another chance because if anyone might be able to at least identify Hannah from an old photograph, it was Riku Bhandari.
~ to be continued ~