Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

brave, and very foolish, to have boarded that ship and examined it so carefully. Now she suffers from an emotional reaction, and if there was poison or infection aboard that vessel…”
    “What would you have done, Lieutenant?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Under the circumstances. What would you have done? I need to know. It’s part of my education to learn from you.”
    “Yes. I would have done the same, of course,”
    Handel started to say something. Perhaps he was going to say, “There you go,” or “You see,” or something along those lines. But he said nothing. Takamura’s relationship with his wife was a puzzle to Scott Handel. Mrs. Takamura made her husband a bento lunch almost every day. The lieutenant would sit at his desk and open up the small wooden box. He would examine the artfully arranged and very lovely morsels of sushi and rice cake with care. Then he would remove the chopsticks and eat with relish, sighing loudly from time to time. Mrs. Takamura seemed dutiful and subservient and fragile. On the other hand, Mrs. Takamura seemed to tell Lieutenant Takamura what to do almost every day. And Lieutenant Takamura seemed to take her advice seriously, and follow her orders.
    It was very confusing. Scott Handel had somewhat stereotypical ideas about the proper relationship between a Japanese man and his wife. It was a relationship very different from that of an American man and his wife. He knew, of course, that neither Cobb Takamura nor Kimiko Takamura was born in Japan. They were as American as pizza. That is, they were Americans of Japanese Ancestry, or AJAs. Handel even knew that Cobb Takamura was a Sansei, since his grandfather had immigrated to Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, while Kimiko was a generation closer to Japan.
    Scott Handel recognized Cobb was worried about his wife. “She’ll be fine,” he repeated.
    Cobb smiled at him. “Of course. But something killed all those people. It didn’t look like murder. There were no signs of foul play, as they say on television, but you never know. Something killed them.” His voice trailed off into a thoughtful, distant look, out the window again at the declining sun and the dazzling emerald green flanks of Waialeale. Silence fell on the office. Yet small sounds grew loud: the squeak of a chair, a sharp inhalation of breath, a soft mutter from Scott Handel’s stomach. If there had been an old wind-up clock in the room, they might have listened to the ticking, but there was no wind-up clock.
    Handel had his feet propped against the filing cabinet, his head back against the wall, and Cobb was leaning back in his chair looking out the window when the door banged open and Chazz Koenig rumbled in. He was large and gray and bristling. The abruptness brought Handel’s chair down hard.
    “This had better be good,” Chazz said. He dropped into the only other chair in the room with a heavy sigh. The chair creaked under his bulk.
    Cobb turned mildly. “Oh, I think perhaps it is,” he said. “You look moderately fit. Fatherhood agrees with you?” This had the intonation of a ritual question, often repeated.
    Chazz scratched at his beard. “Orli is pretty cute. Sometimes she even sleeps through the night. Patria is grouchy about sixty-five percent of the time. She’s cranky about her research, wants to investigate Polynesian family structure and can’t because she has to nurse, an activity I suspect she secretly enjoys, though she would never let on. Why did you bring me back here?”
    “Kimiko stopped off at Kalalono Bay last evening. She says she likes to take a swim. In fact, I believe she sits under a tree. A large ship floated into the bay. There were seven dead persons aboard, and no live ones.”
    Chazz nodded, sucking on his lower lip. “I see. I presume they were not attacked by pirates boarding to steal a thousand pounds of Colombian cocaine, leaving them riddled with bullet holes. You would not have called me back here for something so