by Toby Neal
Jones had escaped the chair. He put his hands on his hips. “I rented that van two weeks ago! And I was at work yesterday. You can ask anybody!”
“We will,” Lei said. “Name and address of your workplace, please?”
Jones gave it, and she noted it down. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
Back on the road, Kamuela rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Not our man,” he said.
“I agree, but I’ll check this alibi while you drive.” Lei punched the next address into the GPS. Then she called the dive shop and verified that yes, August Jones had been working the retail end of the shop yesterday. “Does August surf?” she asked on a hunch.
“Sure he does. You can’t work on the North Shore of Oahu and not surf!” the manager exclaimed.
Lei smiled at Kamuela as she hung up. “Scratch August Jones. On to Freddie Arenas. He lives in Kahuku.”
“That little town is out past the Seven Mile Miracle, so we should probably stop at the Torque team house first.”
“The Seven Mile Miracle?”
“Nickname for this stretch of North Shore coast with all the surf breaks.”
“I lived on Oahu a year and a half and never heard that,” Lei said, propping her feet on the dash as they finally left the outskirts of the city. Wide-open farmland, former sugarcane and pineapple fields, opened up before them as they drove through the middle of the island.
“How many times did you get out to the surf zone when you lived here?” Kamuela drove casually, arm outstretched, hand draped over the steering wheel.
“Not enough. I was a total workaholic. I think Marcella and I went out to Sunset Beach one time in the summer to lie out and work on our tans.”
“No cases out that way?”
“No. And I hope I can get home tonight, but in case I can’t, I better call your fiancée and see if I can spend the night.”
“I’m sure you’re welcome.”
Lei phoned Marcella and left a message asking to spend the night at her friend’s apartment. More than likely they wouldn’t get through everything today. “Just left a message. So you guys are good?”
“Stressed out with the wedding stuff, but that’ll settle down after we get hitched. What about you guys? How’s the house coming along?”
Lei updated him as they wound down from a higher elevation toward the small town of Haleiwa, where the famous coast began. The road narrowed to two lanes, growing windy and picturesque, lush with tropical foliage and studded with coconut palms. They crested a rise, and the ocean, folding in on itself in corduroy-like lines, generated enough mist from breaking waves to give a gauzy texture to the air.
“It’s firing!” Kamuela exclaimed, and Lei felt the elemental excitement of the thundering surf give her a jolt of exultation. She’d come late to surfing and still hesitated to even call herself a surfer—but she’d done it enough to know there was nothing quite like the physical excitement of paddling out, punching her board through the walls of approaching waves, finding just the right spot to take off, and then the all-out effort of takeoff followed by the breathless drop, the turn into the curve of the wave, the wall of water pure moving energy beside her, the tuck to try to make it under the falling lip…and the washing-machine ragdolling underwater when she didn’t make any of the steps she tried—which was most of the time.
It didn’t matter. There was simply nothing like it to take away stress and flush every pore with excitement. And this bit of coast was every surfer’s fantasy—on steroids.
She bounced in her seat. “We have to look at the surf. Orient ourselves.”
Kamuela grinned at her. “Want to go out for a quick session?”
“Oh my God, it’s way too big for me. You know I only started a couple years ago at Waikiki.”
“We can go to one of the inside bowls.”
Lei’s heart pounded with fright and excitement. “Is there a beginner spot here? I’m not kidding.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“One thing I learned pretty quickly in the ocean—no one can really help you when you’re surfing.”
“And the biggest danger is panic,” Kamuela added. They passed the turnoff to Haleiwa, the little beach town providing restaurants and amenities to the area. “Most of the contests are over already, so that’s good. It’s less crowded.”
“Still looks full.” Waimea Bay’s parking lot was jam-packed with cars and trucks piled high with surfboards.
“You’re used to Maui. You folks don’t know the meaning of the word.”
They drove on slowly, with Kamuela identifying the individual spots for her. “This is Ali`i Beach Park. Got a lot of groms surfing on the inside here. It’s the mellowest spot for us to stop.”
Lei took in the crowded beach park. The waves on the inside still looked big to her. “You know, Marcus, we should work. Let’s come by here on the way back and check it then. I just feel bad taking that kind of fun break on the county’s dime.”
“Girl’s gotta grow a conscience, huh? Don’t you think you put in enough overtime?”
“I know I do, but I came all this way to check out these surfers, and I just won’t be able to enjoy myself until we get that out of the way.”
“Slave driver.” Kamuela drove them on, pointing out the parks and breaks all along until they came to Ehukai Park. “This is Pipeline. Let’s get a look at the scene.”
They turned into the crowded beach park, and Kamuela pulled up behind one of the lifeguard vehicles, setting his police placard out on the dash. They got out and walked across the bunchy grass, past a billboard advertising the latest Triple Crown event with Torque’s sponsorship emblazoned all over the giant poster trimmed in nailed-up palm fronds.
Lei sucked in a breath of awe as they approached the expanse of beach. The Pipeline break was so close to shore that Lei could see the huge, hollow wave exploding in both a right-and left-breaking expanse of gloriously bright aqua water, expending itself in surging foamy drifts across great yellow rafts of sandy beach.
Something about it called to her, as if the blood in her veins was the same consistency as that surging ocean.
The lifeguard tower was well-manned, a great sturdy yellow steel structure, and Lei spotted the many Danger signs along the beach, marked with red flags. She wondered how any tourists could be ignorant enough of the raw power of the ocean to go out into the pounding surf.
But the surfers at the break showed no such lack of confidence, jockeying for position across the heaving, glassy surface and taking off in almost synchronized form, pulling deep and working maneuvers that she’d only dreamed of in her own efforts.
A swath of spectators, everything from tourist families in lurid aloha shirts to bikini-clad beach babes, filled the sand directly in front of the break. Photographers with huge lenses and tripods peppered the crowd, and an atmosphere of excitement lent a carnival feeling.
Lei and Kamuela drew adjacent to the tower, and Kamuela lifted a hand and went to “talk story” with one of the lifeguards as Lei took in the scene.
From all reports, Makoa Simmons had been a regular here, well respected in the lineup, and had even frequently pulled off aerial maneuvers at this heavy barrel. Lei squelched the arrow of grief she felt. Regrets don’t find killers. Police work does.
Kamuela gestured her over to the tower. She shook hands with Eddie Nanaio, one of the lifeguards. “Yeah, I knew Makoa Simmons. Great kid. He was out here almost every day. Got more than his share of waves, too.”
“Know anyone who had it in for him? Tried to snake waves from him, like that?” Lei asked, digging her spiral notebook out of her back pocket.
Nanaio narrowed sharp brown eyes in a weather-beaten face. Mirrored Oakleys turned backward gripped his thick neck. “Makoa had rivals, that’s for sure. Bryan Oulaki was the main guy who went head-to-head with him. They both rode for Torque, and Bryan, he didn’t think a Maui guy should be getting so much ink and publicity. He trash-talked Makoa, and they dropped
in on each other a lot, but personally, I think that was all part of the PR Torque used to get YouTube views of their shootouts and like that. I saw those guys talking story plenty times at the team house, all mellow-kine.” As Nanaio talked, his pidgin thickened.
“Shootouts?” Lei wasn’t sure of the term.
“Heats against each other. Torque even featured a short film with the two of them trying to outdo each other during a free-surf session—it played up the competition and bad blood, but again, when they were off camera, they seemed fine with each other.”
“Thanks. That’s good information,” Lei said. Kamuela fist-bumped the lifeguard, and he ascended the steps again, binoculars back up to his dark warrior’s face.
“Whatever lifeguards get paid, I don’t think it’s enough,” Lei said as they walked back to Kamuela’s truck.
“You got that right. They save lives and risk their own every day. Let’s find that team house.”
They followed the GPS prompt along the narrow, sandy frontage road winding between stands of coconut palms and wind-battered beach naupaka running parallel to the main highway. Older homes, weathered by the constant salty air, hunkered beneath wind-battered kamani and ironwood trees.
The GPS steered them down a sandy driveway, ruts worn deep and patched unevenly with gravel. They turned at the address, painted on a piece of driftwood, and Kamuela was hard-pressed to find a parking place in the narrow backyard clogged with trucks and every sort of surfmobile, all of them sporting racks and stickers of every color and style.
Kamuela finally parallel parked behind several other vehicles. “We’ll just have to move it if someone needs to leave.”
“Who are all these people?”
“Well, could be anybody associated with the company, really. Houses are rented for the surf season, which usually runs from November to March, by the company. They invite their top-tier riders to live in them, and they get interns or groms to come clean and do the yards or whatever, earning a place to crash. Usually there’s some sort of company rep living in, too, keeping things from getting too out of hand.”
“Out of hand? What do you mean?”
“Partying. Chicks. Drugs.”
“Oh.” Lei opened her door and straightened her jacket. “From what I’ve been hearing, that wasn’t Makoa Simmons’s lifestyle.”
Kamuela shut his door and beeped the truck locked. “Yeah. A lot of the riders are serious athletes and the body is a temple, yada, yada. But in any late-teens, early-twenties group of young males, there are always a few who don’t feel really alive unless they’re pushing all the limits. Not just surfing.”
They walked up the sandy walkway trimmed in coconuts to a front door with a big oval Torque logo mounted on it. Kamuela rang the bell, causing the sound of a gong to echo inside the house.
A few minutes later, he rang again.
They heard the padding of bare feet, and a blond teen in yellow Torque board shorts, no shirt, opened the door. His hair was a mass of sun-bleached, salty-looking tufts, and his body was deeply tanned, making hazel eyes look even greener under the thatch of hair.
“What’s up?”
“Detective Kamuela and Sergeant Texeira. We need to speak to whoever’s managing the house.”
“This about Makoa?” The kid blinked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get Pete. Come in.” The kid gestured them in, and looking around at the copious amounts of sand on the floor, Lei decided to leave her shoes on.
They followed the kid down a tiled hall, past a staircase rising to upper floors, and into a front room. Salt spray misted the windows, but Lei could see a lanai crowded with chairs, a weedy lawn in front of the house, and between the framework of a pair of palms, the aqua of pounding surf.
“Pete, these cops are here about Makoa Simmons.” The grom introduced them to a man Lei assessed as mid-thirties, Caucasian, five ten and a hundred fifty pounds, blue eyes, buzz-cut blond hair, wearing a Torque team shirt in black.
The man stood up from his deck chair, setting aside a laptop he’d been typing on. Lei noticed a row of cell phones on the deck beside him. “Hey. We’ve been expecting some sort of visit since we heard about the tragedy. Pete Cantor—I’m the Torque team manager on site.”
Lei shook his hand and introduced herself. “I’m the investigator working the case from Maui. And I’m sorry to tell you if you haven’t heard already, but Makoa’s death was no accident.”
Pete Cantor’s face paled under his tan. “No shit?” he said faintly. “I heard that, but I didn’t want to believe it. Bad enough he’s dead. Unreal someone would take him out deliberately!”
“That’s why we’re here. A suspect rented a van on Maui and deliberately drowned him in the lineup at Ho`okipa.” Lei took the artist’s sketch out of her backpack and handed it to him. “Know anyone who looks like this?”
Pete frowned down at the rendering, and the paper shook in his hands. “This is kind of a generic face. Could be any of a half-dozen local guys that come and go from the house. We kind of have a revolving door here.”
“Well, we need to search Makoa’s room and get a list from you of anyone you think that could be. Can you point me to his room?” Lei asked, eager to see if she could get his computer and collect the hate mail Shayla had alluded to.
Pete’s cheekbones flushed. “Bryan Oulaki’s already moved into his room. We boxed up his stuff, though. It’s in the garage.”
Lei stared at the team manager a long moment. She could feel Kamuela beside her doing the same. Pete held up his hands in apology and protest.
“We thought it was an accident, okay? And the front room, the master bedroom, is a major perk for the top-ranking rider. Which, after Makoa, is Bryan.”
“Shit, man. The kid’s not even cold on the slab,” Kamuela said from beside Lei in his dark-edged voice, and Lei was glad he did.
“Let me take you up there. It will make more sense when I do.” Pete led them up sand-speckled wooden stairs to a second-story master bedroom that dominated the front of the house. A king-sized bed took up the center of the room. Stacks of boards lined a wall, and a bathroom at the back completed the decor, but the view through sliding glass doors fronting a deck looked directly into the Pipeline lineup.
A row of shirtless, tanned, chiseled-looking surfers in webbed deck chairs hooted and commented loudly on the action, beers in their hands.
Pete slid the door open. “Hey, guys. These are some cops here about Makoa.”
Immediately, silence fell. Lei stuffed down the intimidation she felt at looking at the row of famous faces she recognized from ads and write-ups in the surf magazines. Makoa should be sitting here, and one of these guys might have had something to do with why he isn’t.
“Sergeant Texeira, Detective Kamuela,” Lei said, as they flashed ID. “We’re going to want to take statements from each of you, beginning with whichever of you is Bryan Oulaki.”
The young man closest to Lei set his beer aside in a cup holder on the folding chair and stood.
“I’m Bryan.” He was around five ten, with black buzz-cut hair. A tribal-style tattoo of interlocking triangles circled muscled shoulders, dipping down across a tanned chest and continuing around his back. Dark brown eyes and the shadow of a beginning goatee completed a description that could easily match the sketch she’d taken back from Pete Cantor.
Lei’s heart rate spiked as she shook the young man’s hand. “I’d appreciate your time answering a few questions. Privately.”
“Sure.”
Lei didn’t think she was imagining the uneasy set to Bryan Oulaki’s mouth. He reached down and grabbed up the black Torque team shirt hanging over the back of his chair and shrugged into it. “Right this way.”
Kamuela followed her back into the bedroom and slid the glass door shut behind them, closing Pete and the other surfers out on the deck. Lei liked the way he was letting her take the lead but seemed to know when to provide a seamless backup.
“Ther
e’s an office we can use to talk back here.” Oulaki led them down the hall to a carpeted office. One wall was lined with computers networked with blue cables. Awards and trophies cluttered a shelf that ran the length of the room, and a back window overlooked the crowded parking lot.
Kamuela closed the office door as Oulaki pulled three rolling chairs from the length of computer desk. Lei and Kamuela took seats facing Oulaki. Lei took out her phone and set it on the edge of the round conference table against one wall.
“Mind if I record this? Saves time and hassles later.” Lei smiled, trying for reassuring, but she’d been told her smile in interviews wasn’t the kind that lent itself well to “good cop.”
Oulaki stiffened up even more, brown face going immobile, arms crossed defensively on his muscular chest. “Whatever.”
“Relax, man. We’re just trying to get a feel for Makoa’s life here in the house,” Kamuela said. Lei knew the other surfers would have heard by now from Pete Cantor that Makoa Simmons’s death was a homicide, but she hoped they’d been able to isolate Oulaki before he heard that news.
“Tell us about your relationship with Makoa,” she said.
“What does this have to do with me?” Oulaki said, frowning. “He was on Maui and drowned. Why are you getting all up in my grill?”
“And why are you so defensive?” Lei rapped out. “I see you wasted no time moving into his room.”
“That was Pete. Said I earned the perk,” Oulaki said, voice low and eyes cast down. Lei believed him about that, at least.
“Just tell us about your relationship with Makoa Simmons. We’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors about it,” Kamuela repeated.
“We were good, man.” Oulaki looked up, made eye contact with Kamuela, who was doing well with the default “good cop” role. “All that rivalry jazz, that was just to get publicity to raise both our profiles. Pete came up with the idea last season, and we have been playing it up. It worked too. That YouTube video of our free-surf session got more than a million hits worldwide.”
“So there was no actual bad feeling between you two?” Lei asked. “Come on, now. I was hearing about it over on Maui, from people close to Makoa.”