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way,” he said. “You got company.”
    He hooked the other chair over with his foot and pulled a pair of latex gloves on from the box on the table. His cell phone bleeped, and he tersely told his partner to “keep at it” and that he was following a new lead.
    Lei kept her head down, her hands carefully digging, as that bubble of excitement tightened her chest. A new lead! Maybe there was something off about the stepdad after all.
    A few minutes went by. Still nothing of interest.
    “Kinda sad. All her schoolwork,” Stevens said, dropping a handful of crumpled, stained papers into the discard can.
    “I know.”
    “So I know you want to move up. What are you doing to make detective?”
    “Putting in the time, getting experience. I’ve been taking criminology classes at UH, working on my bachelor’s in Criminal Justice.”
    “Well, you gotta be a team player,” he said, shaking out a soggy coffee filter. “Tell people everything you’re thinking.”
    “Like you’d listen to me.”
    “You found the bodies, the crime scene. Not bad. Not afraid to take initiative. Also not bad.”
    She blushed and hated it. She reached down into the last few bits at the bottom, and her hand wrapped around the hard steel circumference of an empty propane can.
    “What do you think?” She held it up.
    “There were a couple of those at the campsite, so I think you better try not to smear any fingerprints,” he said, snapping open an evidence bag. She dropped the canister into the bag and he sealed it, filling out a label.
    She was galvanized now, carefully sifting every bit at the bottom. He helped her open the next bag of trash. This one yielded some bondage porn magazines, which he wordlessly bagged. The last sack was mostly full of the dead girl’s clothes.
    “Doesn’t this seem odd to you?” asked Lei, holding up a little spaghetti-string top. “I mean, dead less than a week and they throw her clothes out in the trash?”
    “Not really. Most people give them to Goodwill or something, but I’ve seen people burn everything just to have it gone forever . . . grief takes people different ways.” Stevens had gone out and gotten a camera, and he bent over, photographing the items they had spread on the floor.
    “What’s missing from this picture?” he frowned. They had laid the clothes out in neat rows.
    “Her underwear,” Lei said. Goosebumps erupted all over and she rubbed her arms, her gut clenching. “Wow, that AC unit really got going.” She squinched her eyes shut against a memory of Kelly’s naked body sunk into the mud.
    “You look like you’ve had enough,” he said, cocking his head to look at her. “Jeremy’s coming anyway.”
    “I’m fine.” She gazed blindly at the ruffled yellow skirt at her feet.
    “Well, thanks for following your hunch. Call me on my cell with any more you have and I promise I’ll listen.”
    “Okay.” She picked up one of the discarded bags of trash and fumbled open the door handle.
    “Hey,” he said. She stopped, looking back. “Good job.”
    “Thanks.”
    Lei pushed through the steel door.
    “I don’t see enough bags of trash going out.” Sherlyn looked up from her keyboard.
    “Detective Stevens is finishing up some things in there and will dispose of them,” she replied, swinging the bag up to her shoulder. Lei chucked the bag of trash including the gloves, and after a brief wash turned on her computer.
    While it booted up, she fished Stevens’ card out of her pocket. She slid the card into her desk drawer, shut it, then opened it again and put the card back into her pocket. She called Pono at home and briefed him on the case, then went on her assigned patrol route, still mulling over the encounter with Stevens.
    Not her type. Still, those blue eyes were hard to forget. She wondered at the swings of emotion she felt around him, what they meant. She fingered the card in her pocket, trying not to remember Haunani’s face, trying to make her boring patrol