“Good morning, Danny,” Steve McGarrett said, giving his partner a gentle wakeup kiss.

“Mm. Good morning, Steve,” Danny Williams answered, looking up at him with a sleepy smile. “What time is it?”

“Just early enough if we hurry,” Steve replied, kissing him again. “Come on, let’s hit the shower.”

In the shower Steve shampooed his hair, then worked on lathering Danny with soap, running his hands over Danny’s muscular shoulders, then down his chest and around to his back, while Danny returned the favor. Steve closed the distance between them and kissed him, their already-erect cocks brushing against each other.

“Ah....” Danny moaned, as Steve reached to take him in one soapy hand, sliding up and down on his rock-hard shaft. He reached for Steve in turn, and they stood beneath the warm cascade of water, moving in unison towards a mutual climax.

“Danny!” Steve groaned as he came, followed soon after by his partner. They stood embracing for a few precious moments, then quickly cleaned up and stepped out of the shower to get ready for work.

“We’re going to have to hurry if we don’t want to be late,” Danny said, looking at the kitchen clock.

“Want to make us some sandwiches for our lunch while I fix breakfast?” Steve asked. “I think there’s some leftover chicken in the bottom drawer.”

“Mustard, no mayo, right?” Danny asked.

“Yeah, thanks.”

They sat down to a breakfast of fresh fruit, coffee, and juice.

“With you feeding me breakfast and me making sure you eat lunch, I’m surprised we haven’t both gained ten pounds,” Danny observed.

“Mm. Must be all the exercise we get,” Steve said with a suggestive smile.

Danny blushed.

They kissed at the door before heading for the elevator. “See you at the office,” Steve told Danny, turning off for the parking garage, Danny continuing to where he had discreetly parked his car on the street around the corner.

It was a long day at Five-O. A photographer had been found shot to death. He had apparently been a very prolific creator of pornography, but even so, some of the deposits in his bank account were suspiciously large.

McGarrett sighed, rubbing his eyes. It was after nine. I wish I could have had dinner with Danny at home instead of a cardboard carton of saimin at my desk. Ah, well, goes with the job....

“Danno, why don’t you go back to your place and get some rest. You and Kono can tackle the pornography tomorrow. I’m going to go over these bank statements tonight, see if I can find a pattern.”

“Goodnight, Steve. Don’t stay here all night,” his second-in-command admonished him.

“I won’t. Goodnight, Danny,” McGarrett wished him with a tired smile.

The telephone rang.

McGarrett reached over and turned on the bedside lamp, then picked up the receiver, looking sleepily at the clock. 1 AM.

“McGarrett,” he said, holding the receiver to his ear as he lay under the covers, unwilling to surrender completely to the interruption.

“Steve?” said the voice at the other end of the phone.

“Yes, who is this?”

“You don’t remember my voice? I’m hurt.”

The fog in McGarrett’s brain was clearing. “Eric?”

“You do remember me.” The voice said smugly.

“Eric, it’s one in the morning. Why are you calling me?” Steve asked in some exasperation.

“I just....I saw your name in the newspaper....” Eric said uncertainly.

“Are you in some sort of trouble?”

“No, no, of course not!” he said quickly.

“Are you drunk?”

“No. Do I sound drunk?”

“No, but then what do you want?” McGarrett demanded.

“I...I don’t know, but....”

“Well, if there’s nothing I can help you with, I’ll say goodnight,” Steve said briskly.

“Goodnight, Steve....”

That was odd, McGarrett thought, reaching to replace the receiver. It must be ten years, and he suddenly calls me for no reason? Well, no point in losing sleep over it. As he drifted back into unconsciousness, his last thought was, I’m glad Danny isn’t here tonight...explaining Eric in bed in the middle of the night could be awkward.

Danny and Kono pushed the cart loaded with big cardboard boxes between them, steering it into an empty conference room.

“I can’t believe we have to inventory all this sick stuff,” Kono complained. “What are we, the vice squad, now?”

“We suspect he was a blackmailer, and now he’s been murdered. That makes it our problem, whether we like it, or not,” Danny reminded him, lifting boxes onto the room’s central table.

Kono sighed, eyeing the boxes with disfavor. “Why couldn’t it be our job to look at pictures of naked wahine, instead?”

“Here, I’ll start on this box, you take that one,” Williams told him, sitting down at the table. “Sort by subject and keep an eye out for anyone you recognize. Someone with a reputation to preserve would be a better blackmail target.”

They started in on their respective boxes. The dead pornographer had apparently specialized in men. I’m glad they’re not boys. This could be a lot creepier, Danny thought.

The first envelope Danny flipped through held pictures of a muscular man posing in a bodybuilder’s outfit with weights. He made a note of the contents and paperclipped it to the front, then set it aside.

The next showed a younger man posed artistically on a couch in Hollywood’s idea of what a Greek god might wear, then in just his sandals and gold-painted laurel wreath. Danny clipped a note to the envelope.

The next had pictures of two men together, one dark-haired, the other fair. They were posed on a lanai overlooking the ocean. Danny flipped past shots of them looking at each other longingly, then holding their stiff cocks in their own hands. Next standing closer, holding each other’s cocks. Then the dark-haired man kneeling in front of the blond, apparently giving him a blow job. Now the blond returning the favor. Now the dark-haired man had come, showering the blonde’s face and chest with drops of liquid which the photographer had, with surprising artistry, caught sparkling in the sun.

Wow, that’s explicit! God, tell me this isn’t turning me on. It doesn’t help that from the back that guy’s hair reminds me a bit of Steve’s. Don’t think of that. Next picture, Danny thought. The blond was bent over with his hands on the low lanai railing. He looked back at the other man, who knelt behind him, reaching around to stroke his cock. In the next picture... Do people do that? Next picture. I guess I technically knew about that, but...I’ve never actually seen...never really thought about the mechanics of it....

He flipped to the next picture, and the next. Their expressions...surely that must hurt? But they both certainly seem to be enjoying themselves...Oh, God! Danny bolted from the room.

McGarrett entered the conference room and walked over to the table where his detectives had set up their work area. “Find anything yet, Kono?” he asked the big Hawaiian sitting at the table flipping through stacks of prints with a disgruntled expression.

“Just a whole lot of disgusting pictures,” Kono told him, looking up from his task. “I guess whatever Danny was looking through made him sick—he ran out of here a minute ago, said something about the washroom.”

McGarrett picked up the sheaf of pictures Danny had dropped on the table and flipped through them. Very explicit. I see they’re...oh, no. Has Danny ever really considered the...further possibilities...of sex between men? I hoped to introduce him to this gradually, gently, and now he’s suddenly come face-to-face with it in some pervert’s collection, and it made him sick. Beautiful.

Steve sighed, and wrote a note, clipping it to the envelope. “I suppose I may as well take a turn,” he said, tossing the envelope onto the “done” stack. “Go ahead and take a break, Kono.”

“Thanks, boss. This stuff is making me lose my appetite!” Kono left the room with alacrity.

McGarrett sat down in Danny’s place and took up the task of looking through the prints.

This envelope had pictures of a tall, thin man masturbating. Note, paperclip.

The next held pictures of a threesome in front of a fake fireplace. I’m glad Danny didn’t see this one, Steve thought, raising his eyebrows. Note, paperclip.

A man in a cowboy outfit, wearing chaps but no pants, wielding a rope. Note, paperclip.

The photos in the next showed a lithe but well-muscled man maybe five years younger than Steve. He had wavy blond hair under a yacht captain’s cap, handsome, finely-chiseled features, and was posing in the cabin of a luxury yacht wearing nothing but the hat and a huge erection.

Unnoticed by his boss, Danny had sheepishly sidled back into the room. At Steve’s sharp intake of breath he stepped to look at the picture in McGarrett’s hand.

He certainly looks like a model. Or Apollo. Is he Steve’s type? We may both be blondes, but I know I don’t look like that, Danny thought.

“Admiring the boat?” he asked Steve, somewhat acidly.

“What?” McGarrett looked up, startled. “No. I...I....” He glanced away, not meeting Danny’s eyes. “I have to...make some phone calls,” he said, hurriedly standing up. “You carry on here, Danno.” He strode from the room.

He took that envelope with him.... Danny observed.

An hour later, Kono came into the conference room where Danny was still working at sorting through the boxes of pictures. “The boss sent me to fetch you. We got a new case, bruddah!”

Danny rode with McGarrett to the building where Brian Howard had been found dead in his rented luxury condo. I wish I could ask him about that photo. Or maybe I don’t.... he thought.

On the twelfth floor they entered the Howard condo. It was lavishly furnished and had a beautiful ocean view, but the scent of blood hung heavily on the air. The dead man was lying on the floor near the open lanai doors in a pool of blood.

“Three gunshots to the chest,” the HPD officer on the scene told them. “The wife came home from shopping and found him like this. The medical examiner thinks he’s been dead about two hours, give or take.”

“Where is the wife?” McGarrett asked.

“In the bedroom, with Duke and her son.”

In the bedroom they found an elegantly-coiffed platinum blonde woman wearing an expensively casual flowered dress. She sitting in a chair sobbing artistically into a lacy handkerchief. “Who would want to do this to Brian?” she wailed, giving McGarrett an appealing look from under the lashes of her big blue eyes. A muscular young man in his twenties stood at her side, his hand on her shoulder.

“That’s what we’re here to find out, Mrs. Howard,” he told her, pulling another chair up in front of hers and sitting down. “Now, what time did you last see your husband alive?”

“This morning, at breakfast. Then I went out for the day, and I just got back half an hour ago, and found...oh!” she gave a sob.

“Do you know what your husband’s plans were for the day?” McGarrett asked gently.

“I’m not exactly sure. I think he had some sort of meetings.”

“Does he have a secretary here in Hawaii?”

“No, he likes to pretend we’re on vacation. As if he knew the meaning of the word!” she said indignantly.

“How did he keep track of his appointments?”

“Oh, he had this little book, he couldn’t be without it. Men always have to be so busy, to convince themselves they’re important, don’t they, Mr. McGarrett?”

Steve turned to Danny, standing behind his chair. “Danno, see if HPD has found that book.”

Danny went back into the living room. “Did you find any sort of appointment book on the body?” he asked the officer watching the forensic team do their work.

“Yes, it’s here,” he said, crossing the room to a desk where a number of small personal items had been arranged. “We haven’t fingerprinted it yet.”

Danny carefully turned the pages with his pen. He copied down the information for that day’s date and returned to the bedroom to report to McGarrett.

“Steve, it looks like he had two appointments today. In the morning he met an M. Stoltz, Consolidated Electronics, and at two-thirty it just says “Kealani”.

“Mrs. Howard, do either of those ring a bell?” McGarrett asked her.

“My husband owns Consolidated Electronics. And...and Kealani is his yacht,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.

“Do you know why he would have written down that name? Would he have been meeting someone there?”

“Probably the captain,” she said. “He doesn’t sail her himself, of course. He was taking some friends out fishing tomorrow.”

“Do you happen to have the captain’s name?”

“I think his card’s around here somewhere.” She went to a small desk and sorted through the contents of a drawer. She extracted a card and handed it to McGarrett, who raised his eyebrows, then put it in his pocket.

“Now, Mr. Howard,” McGarrett began to the young man.

“My name’s Harrison. I’m her son by a previous marriage.”

“Mr. Harrison. How did you spend today?”

“At the beach with my friends. We went surfing, talked to some girls....”

“Can these friends vouch for you the whole afternoon?”

“Well, sure, I guess. I mean, we weren’t together every second, but we were all on the same beach...”

“OK, give me their names.”

Back at Five-O headquarters, McGarrett assigned tasks. “Chin, when Che gets done with that appointment book, check out everything in it back at least a month, when the Howards arrived in Hawaii. Kono, check Mrs. Howard’s alibi. She says she went to the beauty parlor and then shopping. See if people can vouch for her the whole time, or if she could have come home and shot her husband. Then work on the son. Do the friends alibi him for the whole time, and would they lie for him? Danno, go talk to Stoltz at Consolidated Electronics.”