hatesparadise | Honolulu, HI - Monday Afternoon

Honolulu, HI - Monday Afternoon

One overpriced portal after Steve got his phone call from Chin and they were both back on the big island, heading through traffic to get to the hotel associated with the uniform found on their victim. Which was the less active part of the investigation to let Steve and Danny sort of settle back into it after the whole... liver thing.

Perfectly fine. Nothing could go wrong.

"We get anything from the M.E. yet?" Danny asked, trying to see if traffic would move anytime soon. He'd been spoiled with Baltimore, honestly.

[for the partner! nfb obvs]

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"Speak of the devil," Steve said as the phone rang. He put it on speaker. "Go ahead, Eric."

A voice with an even thicker Jersey accent than Danny's filled the car. "Okay, so this thingie pulled out of the victim's mouth is hand-carved, made of walrus ivory."

Steve frowned. "Sale of walrus ivory's heavily regulated now, so that's either an old pre-ban piece or black market, right? Or a legally purchased native Alaskan carving."

Why anyone would stuff a piece of ivory into a dead guy's mouth was a separate question that he was still turning in his mind.

"I'm still running tests to determine the exact age," Eric said. Which was professional enough to make Danny proud of his idiot nephew there.

Even if he was still rolling his eyes and muttering, "Thingie." under his breath.

"All right," Steve said, nodding. "Any idea what it could be?"

Other than a thingie, of course.

"Besides ugly?" Eric asked with a very undignified snort. "Could be folk art. Still working on that, too."

"What about the bag we found around the victim's head?" Danny asked, flipping through the report to check that detail again.

"Looks like the same dry cleaner plastic used by every dry cleaner in the country," was Eric's unhelpful summary.

Steve pressed his lips together as he squeezed the Camaro into a spot that it only just fit into, but it cleared them from the traffic on this block.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Yeah!" Eric said excitedly. "What about the new M.E.?" Oh no, Danny could feel the stress headache coming. "I mean, is it just me or is she kind of like the female Max Bergman? But way hotter, you know what I mean?"

"Okay, that's enough," Danny said. "You're being inappropriate."

They were in a professional environment here!

"We've gotta go," Steve agreed, but Eric kept on talking. "Oh, come on, morgue girl's kind of cute, right? She's got that sexified island thing and a brain."

Steve mouthed "sexified island thing," at Danny as Eric continued. "Noelani. Means heavenly mist. Parents got that one right. Plus, a little birdie told me she just got out of a relationship and is very single."

Danny was already reaching over to end the call without a goodbye.

"I apologize."

For his idiot relative.

"Blood relative," Steve said, drawing the words out as they drove down the street.

"Yeah," Danny sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Renting your place while we're in Maryland," Steve added.

"Yeah," Danny said like it pained him immensely.

"Huh," Steve said eloquently.

"We could always send him back to New Jersey. Where he can offend different people."

Even if having someone at his old place until the lease was up was nice. Nice-ish. It was still Eric, after all.

Steve chuckled. "Maybe." He reached into the console and shook out his mid-day dose of anti-rejection meds and dry swallowed them. "Okay. Let's figure out why our John Doe had a uniform for the Palekaiko Resort and Spa and two different room keys at his house."

Danny watched him do that before nodding. "Hopefully there'll be more than a cryptic piece of ivory."

"Right," Steve said, pulling into the hotel's driveway and parking in the loading area behind Chin's sports car. "We'll take the 12th floor room," he said, tossing the key to Chin, "and you and Kono take the one on 21."

Which left Danny and Steve getting off the elevator before Chin and Kono, looking around for the room in question. "You good?"

It'd been a while since they'd been on a real case. Not since... well, the plane crash.

"I'm good," Steve replied, but that would've been his reply if he'd been bleeding out in the hallway, too. He checked the room number and rapped at the door in front of them. "Mr. and Mrs. Goodman? This is Commander Steve McGarrett with the Five-0 task force."

Steve always assumed tourists knew what Five-0 was. "Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, you mind if we come in and ask you a few questions?"

No one was coming to the door.

Danny shot him a look before carefully trying the key to get them through the door. "Signs of a struggle," he murmured, pulling his firearm just in case.

"Hello?" Steve called out, stepping away from the doorway, past the bathroom and into the main area. There were two people sitting in easy chairs facing the television, which was showing an welcome message in extremely perky in that fake, staged way,from the new governor of Hawai'i. She declared that all visitors to Hawai'i were 'ohana, which was going to be very bad news, because these visitors hadn't moved at all.

Well, it was good that they knew each other well enough to separate in order to approach the from opposite sides to find... two corpses. Both of which missing their eyes.

"Shit," Danny breathed.

Oh, Steve had regrets about eating at all today. His phone rang. "Yeah, Chin?"

His lips thinned as he listened. "We have two dead bodies here, too."

"Right," he said, hanging up. "So our victim was a tourist murderer. Wonderful."

Danny patted him on the arm before digging out gloves for them from Steve's pockets. Since this was officially a crime scene now. "Enjoy explaining that to the new governor."

Steve was, in fact, not enjoying explaining this to the new governor, a short Asian woman who he might not have voted for if he knew how much she enjoyed yelling.

"Lab found traces of all four victims' blood on his clothing. It doesn't appear that either of the couples knew each other," he concluded. "There were no valuables missing at either of the crime scenes. So far, everything's pointing towards this being serial."

But the serial killer was dead, so that had to be a point in his favor, right? If she ignored how they didn't know he existed until his body was dumped into Five-0 headquarters?

"So this guy murders four people within days of each other at the same hotel, then turns up dead? What's going on here, Commander?" the governor demanded.

Steve pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Yep, he'd voted for her because she was smart.

"We're not sure," he admitted. "Could be a vigilante, maybe this guy had a partner who turned on him, we just...we don't know yet."

"We have to keep this from the press," she concluded. "We need to keep what happened here from the press. If people think they can't be safe in their hotel rooms, we jeopardize the one thing this island relies on the most. You have my full support, Commander, but do your job and make sure this doesn't happen again."

Steve interpreted that as "your ass is toast if this happens again," and so he nodded. "Better get back to the team, then. It was nice to meet you."

It hadn't been that nice, but dead bodies weren't great first impressions. He pulled his phone out of his pocket as he jogged towards the car. "Tell me we have something," he begged Danny.

"We've got video," Danny said with the tone of someone who did not enjoy knowing anything about said videos. "They recovered a cell from Hein's home and turns out, not only did he film the murders, but he emailed the video to someone."

Steve grunted. "Wonderful," he said. "Since you didn't say to whom, I'm guessing we don't know yet?"

"Hein used a secure e-mail provider to send the files." That sounded like a direct quote from Chin. Because it very much was. "So all that junk's encrypted or whatever. But there weren't just the two videos. There was a third. Chin and Kono are on their way to check it out."

"Fuck," Steve said because he wasn't on prime-time television. "The governor doesn't want any more dead tourists."

"Our prime suspect is dead. But who murdered him..."

Steve sighed. "That's the problem, yeah."

Up ahead of there, Grover was shouting. And not just in the usual grumpy sort of way.

"Whoa, what's going on now?" Danny asked.

"You two missed out on another body," Kono said, leaning in to whisper, "In his car."

"How'd it get in his car?" Steve asked.

How'd the other one get into headquarters, Steven?

"Chin's pulling CCTV, but nothing so far," Kono said as Grover continued to talk about how his car was not a crime scene.

"We'll... check with the M.E. for what they've gotten off it," Danny suggested as Chin gave them a disapproving look for abandoning him.

"Don't hit on her or let Eric hit on her," Steve said. "I'll be back in fifteen minutes. I'm grabbing dinner for everyone."

Danny just shot him an unimpressed look before taking off with Kono to check on their newest victim. "David Larsen," he repeated. "We got an address?"

"A place in Manoa," Kono chimed in. "I'll send a local and go check it out."

"You gonna rescue Chin?" he asked, grinning once he saw her expression.

"Nah, he's working on cracking that encryption." Such a loving cousin, her. "Tell Steve to save my food!"

Edited 2025-09-17 13:37 (UTC)

No one got hot dinner because the uniform in Manoa found eight more bodies in the basement and Steve had to tapdance through a press conference as the story about a serial killer aiming at tourists hit the national news and cratered Hawaiian tourism.

They'd only been home for four hours!

"Danny?" he called as he finally got back to headquarters with very sad, very cold pizza. "I have to head back out to get screamed at by the governor again."

Danny pressed his fingers into his eyes and nodded at that. 4 hours and they were neck deep in multiple serial killers. Fun.

"Yeah," he agreed. "This one took pictures that he was sharin' with someone else too."

Which was a link. But until they could figure out the who, that's all they had.

"We live the island for ten minutes and a serial killer group chat pops up?" Steve grumbled.

"And the second guy's victims were local," Steve said, reading an email off of his phone. "Not that that'll make tourists show up with 24/7 coverage on Fox and CNN."

Danny offered over a preliminary report for him to take with him. "Don't leave the governor waiting, babe. We'll eat when you get back."

"Yay," Steve said, completely unenthused. "See if Jerry has anything now that we have two of those weird pieces of ivory, okay? I'll be back in a half hour."

God willing.

"On it," Danny promised, standing up to crack his back after being hunched over for the report.

Steve came back into the office an hour and a half later. "She is expecting miracles," he said.

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Honolulu, HI - Monday Afternoon

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