by Eric Redman
“Fucking Hawaiians.” Kawika could guess what she meant: “Native Hawaiians, people of Polynesian blood, killed my husband. They did it for a stupid Hawaiian reason. I hate them.”
“You think Hawaiians did it?” he asked. “Which ones?”
“Those temple Hawaiians,” she said. “The ones trying to block KKL. The ones who wanted money.” She looked ready to spit, right there in her own living room.
“Forgive me,” Kawika said. “I’m from Hilo. I heard about Kohala Kea Loa for the first time this morning. I don’t know the temple Hawaiians.”
Corazon Fortunato sighed, composing herself. “Okay,” she said, and began to explain. Kawika took notes: Kohala Kea Loa—proposed new resort and real estate development. Big one. Thousands of acres. Stretches from Waikoloa Village down to Highway 19. All just a lava field today—vast open wasteland. Desolate, dry, remote. What’s planned: a luxury hotel, two golf courses. Shops, health club, tennis courts. Housing, all types: estates, bungalows, townhouses, condos. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment—more likely a billion. Thousands of jobs.
“Ralph runs it,” she said, not surrendering the present tense. “President of the company. Been working on it for three years, since 1999. Getting the permits, the funding, keeping it on schedule. Everything was going great until they found some ruin. Out in the middle of nowhere.”
As she described it, the ruin was just a fallen-down pile of rocks. No one knew about it before. Lava rock on lava rock: not much contrast.
“Guys came from the University,” she went on. “They said it was some human sacrifice thing. That’s when the temple people got involved. They claim they’re Native. They formed this group called HHH. Something-something-Hawaii. They say the rocks were a temple. They say Kamehameha built it, trying to stop a lava flow.”
According to his widow, Fortunato had done everything reasonably possible to accommodate HHH. He offered to pile the lava rocks back up, preserve the site, install interpretive signs, provide public access, handicapped parking—everything. But then, she said, HHH started to play rough.
“They said we couldn’t build at all. They said because of the human sacrifice stuff, the entire site was sacred. We couldn’t touch it. They said it was kapu.”
HHH held protest rallies, she said, outside Fortunato’s office at Waikoloa Village, blocking traffic. Shut down the shops, made people mad. Terrible publicity. “The investors, they’re Japanese,” she said. “They got worried. The politicians and unions got worried. Everyone told Ralph to solve the problem—just fix it.”
She paused, glaring at Kawika. He thought, She just realized I’m a Native Hawaiian. She lowered her eyes, then continued. “HHH told Ralph, ‘Meet us in private.’ They wanted money. Of course. That’s what they wanted all along, just money. They said, ‘It’s a temple, you have to make a sacrifice.’ They said, ‘We can explain it to the gods, we can make them happy.’ They laughed about it.”
“Did your husband pay?” Kawika asked.
“Hell, no,” she replied. “It wasn’t an official site. It wasn’t protected. It was just a pile of rocks, and they didn’t even care about it. They were using it for extortion. So Ralph went to the County and got a permit. Then he bulldozed the whole thing.”
Kawika blinked. “Bulldozed it?” he repeated.
“Damn right,” she snorted. “Told HHH to fuck themselves. He had their extortion thing recorded—had it on tape. He told them, ‘Make a fuss, I’m giving it to the press.’”
“So,” she concluded, exhaling with a long sigh, “that’s why they killed him. Because of that damn pile of rocks.”
Kawika felt uncertain what to say. He’d never interviewed a surviving spouse, and Corazon Fortunato’s red-hot anger didn’t make it easy. He wanted to speed through it, get it over with. He understood the importance of an investigation’s first hours, the potential importance of the victim’s wife. But he wanted to be out the door and chasing more likely suspects.
“Only a few more questions,” he said finally. “Who’s the leader of HHH?”
“Peter Pukui,” she answered. “Supposedly, anyway. Lives in Kawaihae with his girlfriend, Melanie something. She’s the leader as much as he is, I think.”
“Do you have the tape?”
“No, Ralph probably kept it at the office.”
“Your husband’s movements yesterday?”
“Got up, went to work, met with the head of the Japanese investors, came home, went out after dinner. Had another meeting, didn’t say where or who with. Never came back.”
“The head of the Japanese investors?” Kawika asked.
“Mr. Shimazu,” she replied.
“First name?”
“Makoto,” she said. “But he does it old style: Shimazu Makoto.”
“Mr. Shimazu lives here?”
“No, in Tokyo.”
“You know where he’s staying?”
“No, but probably at the Mauna Lani.”
“Any business partner or close associate of your husband’s here in Hawaii?”
“Just Michael Cushing, his Chief Operating Officer, over at the company office in Waikoloa Village.”
“Any enemies you know about?”
“HHH, I told you.”
“No one else?”
“No. No one.”
“Any—sorry to ask—girlfriend?”
“Jesus,” she shouted. “Those Hawaiians did it. Just catch them. Please.”
A baby cried from another room. Corazon Fortunato stood up and moved angrily away, toward the child. She didn’t look back.
Kawika let himself out. “Let’s keep a guard here,” he told Tommy. “And have your Waimea guys find this Peter Pukui, the one she said heads up HHH, and his girlfriend, Melanie, down in Kawaihae. See if they can find Makoto Shimazu too. Right away.” Tommy nodded and pulled out his phone.
From the steps outside Fortunato’s front door, flanked by bright pink bougainvillea, Kawika looked east and south, turning slowly to take in Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualālai. Hualālai was partly veiled in volcanic haze, Kīlauea’s “vog.” But Kawika wasn’t thinking about the Big Island’s volcanoes. He was puzzling over Kohala Kea Loa, a planned Hawaiian luxury resort bearing three of their names: a resort with no beach.
3
Hilo
Captain Tanaka sat waiting outside the office of his boss, Haia Kalākalani, the Chief of Police for Hawaii County. He knew the chief would question his having put Kawika in charge of the Fortunato murder case over in South Kohala, mostly because Kawika remained somewhat unproven after his recent short-lived career on the mainland
Kawika had joined the Seattle Police after graduating from college and the police academy. When armed robbers struck the gambling club of a Chinese tong, the Seattle police chief had assigned the rookie, Detective Wong, because she’d assumed he was Chinese American. Kawika solved the robbery, but not discreetly. Police responded with a “zero tolerance policy” on gambling, raided local clubs, and hustled away Chinese American leaders in handcuffs. The Chinese American community erupted—and blamed Kawika. Faced with a fiasco, the Department gulped, retreated, and blamed Kawika too.
The Seattle police chief said “Too bad,” when she’d fired him. And Kawika had replied, “I’m Hawaiian. We’re used to chiefs sacrificing us.”
An impertinent thing to say, but Tanaka respected Kawika for it. Fortunately, Tanaka knew Kawika’s father, Jarvis Wong—had met him at a fishing club. For years now, they’d shore-fished as a team, the diminutive Japanese American and the outsized Hawaiian, spending long nights together on beaches and rocks, catching small fish for live bait, then setting their lines for hundred-pound giant trevally, known in Hawaii as ulua.
“My boy’s a cop,” Jarvis Wong told Tanaka one night on the beach. “Been on the mainland. Needs a job.”
“Send him to me,” Tanaka had replied.
That was how Kawika returned to the Big Island, the island of his birth, and took a job
at Major Crimes in Hilo. Steamy Hilo: Hilo of the torrential rains, dark-in-a-downpour Hilo. Working-class Hilo: tired Hilo, run-down Hilo. Hilo, until recently Hawaii’s second largest city, but perhaps the city of least appeal to Mainlanders. Tanaka didn’t expect Kawika to stay. Hilo was just a place to gain experience, to start over. Tanaka guessed Kawika would make it to Honolulu in a few years. After that, Chief Wong, Mayor Wong, Governor Wong—who could tell? Iiko, iiko, Tanaka often told him, a Japanese parent praising a child. The kid was dutiful, exceptionally pleasant, trained in the field and at Tanaka’s knee, not just the academy. That would help him in this case. This case might help him in turn.
Kawika’s weak point, Tanaka thought, was his distaste for loose ends. He considered every bit of evidence a clue or a deliberate red herring. In real life, Tanaka had told him, the pieces don’t fit satisfyingly into a completed puzzle. Every case presents scores of facts and observations that simply elude understanding or explanation. The “strays,” as Tanaka called them, just don’t matter. What matters is justice, catching the guy who did it, wrapping up and moving on.
These lessons went hard with Kawika, Tanaka knew. A killer Kawika had chased into the Kā‘u Forest Reserve, a well-known druggie, had been found unconscious and disarmed, his hands cuffed behind him around a young koa tree. Why? Kawika kept sifting and resifting evidence to answer that nagging question, that why. Tanaka understood. In police work, he told Kawika, the fact that something’s true is more important than why it’s true.
Why someone cuffed the guy to a tree didn’t matter, Tanaka had told his young charge. “Maybe another dealer did it. Maybe a jealous husband. Maybe they wanted him to die. Maybe they just wanted you to catch him. Doesn’t matter. He was a killer, and you caught him.” Iiko, iiko: Good boy.
Chief Kalākalani broke Tanaka’s reverie, opening his door and inviting Tanaka into his office. Tanaka stood, shook hands, and pulled his mind back to the present.
“You sure Kawika’s right for this one?” the chief asked when they’d sat down, just as Tanaka had expected. The chief began chewing a malasada from a box Tanaka had brought for the occasion. “I know he’s got balls, that deal down in Kā‘u,” the chief said. “And I understand why Waimea asked for him. But still.”
Tanaka tried not to react defensively. “Well, he didn’t just catch that guy in Kā‘u, chase him into the forest; he solved the case on his own. Plus that other murder down in Puna, the wife killer. And anyway, I’ve got everyone else on Shark Cliff. Looks like there might be a meth war going on.”
The Shark Cliff case had indeed swallowed up Tanaka’s people. It had begun with an intrepid German tourist, a young woman who’d wanted a photograph looking straight down the cliff face at Waipi‘o. She’d secured a safety rope behind her and inched out until her telephoto lens pointed at the beach and breakers a thousand feet below. She saw activity in the surf line: big sharks. She watched through her long lens, realized what they were tearing—a human torso—and called 911. Arriving by boat, Tanaka’s team had found the scattered parts of at least three corpses, maybe more. Only one could be identified, a known drug dealer. Evidently someone had been dropping local druggies off the cliff.
Shark Cliff would be tough to solve. The dead druggies provided few clues, and others wouldn’t talk. Someone needed to bust some live ones, cuff them, push them toward the cliff edge, terrify them, get some answers. Tanaka had men and women suited to that work. Kawika wasn’t one of them. Despite single-handedly catching two killers, the cuffed-to-the-tree guy down in Kā‘u and the wife murderer in Puna, Kawika seemed an innocent, still green and finding his footing, even a bit naive, not yet thirty.
Tanaka knew Kawika wasn’t ready to menace a druggie at the top of Shark Cliff. He was still too squeamish and, more important, still too principled about law enforcement; basically a straight arrow. “Mister Clean” Tanaka called him—not entirely a compliment. But none of that necessarily meant Kawika couldn’t handle this case. Especially with backing from the Waimea police.
“Yeah, Shark Cliff—I get it,” said the portly chief, helping himself to another malasada. “Still, Kawika’s not very experienced. And this case could blow up: a dead haole over there with the rich folks. You think he’s learned? He stumbled pretty bad, back in Seattle.”
“But not really his fault,” Tanaka replied. “It was complicated. They thought he was Chinese American, sent him into Chinatown. Anyway, you know I’ve been training him myself? You’ve seen his fitness reports?”
“Yeah, I get that part too. Good training on the mainland. Lots of ambition and dedication—plus guts,” the chief acknowledged. “Joe College like you and me, so he speaks well.”
Tanaka smiled. “And he really likes being a detective. He just wants to solve crimes. It’s always, ‘Put me in, Coach, put me in!’ He works all the time. Hardly goes surfing anymore. Plus he’s got brains. Truly. Maybe that’s most important. He learns fast.”
The police chief chewed his malasada and, mouth full, nodded approvingly. “So you’re not concerned? About Kawika and this case, I mean?” he asked when he’d swallowed.
“Of course I am,” Tanaka conceded. “An old Hawaiian spear, the victim displayed on that fake heiau—fancy way to kill a guy. Someone sending a message, obviously. Not a very clear one. Maybe the physical evidence will be enough. But maybe Kawika will need to figure out the message.”
“Well, Terry,” the chief concluded, tearing another malasada in two and preparing to pop half in his mouth. “I trust your judgment. But this one’s on you, okay?”
Tanaka understood. One risk was Kawika’s rudimentary knowledge of Hawaiian history and culture. Despite having a Hawaiian father and first name, Kawika didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the songs or symbols. From age eight, when his parents divorced, he had grown up mostly in Seattle, just spending summers with his dad, Jarvis Wong, in Puakō. His mother was haole, his father a quarter Chinese and three-quarters Native Hawaiian at best. With his brownish hair and hazel eyes, Kawika could almost pass for a tourist with a good tan.
Ordinarily, Tanaka thought, the Hawaiian part might not matter. Tanaka himself was a third-generation Japanese American. He didn’t speak Hawaiian and knew more about Japanese temples than Hawaiian ones, yet he could solve an ordinary Big Island murder. But this case just wasn’t ordinary.
Fortunately, Tanaka knew, Kawika had Hawaiian assets, including his father, a lifelong Kohala resident. Jarvis Wong knew Kohala completely: every person, every lava rock, everything Hawaiian. Jarvis could provide a big boost to Kawika—and not for the first time.
Finally, Tanaka reminded himself, there was Kawika’s other Hawaiian asset: his girlfriend, Carolyn Ka‘aukai, a serious student of Hawaiian history and culture and a doctoral candidate at UH Hilo, even planning to write her PhD dissertation in Hawaiian. Carolyn spoke the language, knew the chants. A heiau, a human sacrifice, an old spear through the heart: Carolyn would help Kawika make sense of it.
4
Waimea
Dr. Terrence Smith strode toward Kawika in aloha scrubs: mint-colored hibiscus blossoms and philodendron leaves against a dark green background. He also wore a matching cap, a bushy red moustache, and a broad smile. Together, the scrubs and moustache gave him a jaunty Christmas color look.
“A-lo-HA!” he said, extending his hand. He smelled faintly of chemicals. “You’re the great detective, right?”
Dr. Smith, a surgeon and general practitioner, also served as coroner-on-demand—an oddly jocular one on this occasion, Kawika thought. The Kohala Coast didn’t possess a morgue and didn’t really need one. But sometimes the North Hawai‘i Community Hospital in Waimea was pressed into service.
“Got our friend in the other room,” Smith said. “No write-up yet, of course. But I can show you what ails him.”
Smith led Kawika to an operating room—the coldest room Kawika had ever entered in Hawai‘i. A sheet covered the corpse. The doctor stripped it back, revealing Ralph Fortunat
o to the waist. His torso was neatly slit to the neck, the halves pried apart. He didn’t resemble a dead person; he resembled a slaughtered hog. Kawika almost gagged.
“Normal forty-six-year-old male,” Smith said. “Dead, of course. But otherwise normal. Died around midnight.”
Smith lifted a stainless steel pan with a body part in it: Fortunato’s heart.
“Here’s the problem,” Smith said. “The spear went right through it. Auricles, ventricles: everything’s destroyed.”
“A single blow?” Kawika asked, quickly looking back up at Smith.
“Yup,” Smith said. “Just one blow. But a big blow. And I mean big. Smashed his ribs, went clear through his back, right into the turf. Even took a fair-sized divot. Yes sir, done with emphasis.”
Smith replaced the pan on a stainless-steel counter and re-covered the corpse. He pointed toward a larger pan. “Stomach,” he said. “The last supper. We’ll give you a report, tell you what he ate. There’s alcohol for sure—lots of it. Not a cautious type, apparently. He was risking a DUI. Lucky for him he never made it back to his car, eh?”
Smith walked across the room, picked up the fatal spear, brought it back to Kawika. Kawika slipped on a pair of gloves and took it. Very black, as he’d noticed at the crime scene. Heavy, carved from hard kauila wood. Six feet long. Three somewhat dull wooden barbs behind the tip. “Those three barbs made the extraction rather difficult,” Smith said. “We had to go slow, be careful. He was dead, but we didn’t want to hurt him.” The spear still showed powder where the Waimea police had dusted it for prints.