Bones of Hilo

by Eric Redman

  A mystery writer, Kawika mused, might choose to write:

  Wrapped in her Japanese bathrobe, a beautiful young tourist stepped out of her condominium to observe the sunrise, stretched her arms, and then saw on the championship tee, built to resemble an ancient Hawaiian temple, what appeared to be a body, and sticking out of it, a spear.

  Or:

  Wrapped in her yukata, a beautiful young kama‘āina haole stepped out on her lanai to see the sunrise touch the distant summit of Haleakalā, and then saw on the championship tee, built to resemble a heiau, what appeared to be another haole, dead, with an ihe plunged into his chest.

  It would depend on what audience the author intended. What audience had the killer intended? Why the ancient spear and the heiau? The olonā-fiber cord? The puzzle fretted him. But at the moment the beautiful haole herself—and his faithlessness to Carolyn, his long-time girlfriend—fretted him more.

  He’d just been unfaithful for the first time. Before Carolyn he’d hooked up with women in the Hilo dating scene, but nothing serious. The start of his relationship with Carolyn had nearly overlapped with the end of another. But Carolyn had soon become different.

  The relationship was serious; it had been going on for two years. Carolyn knew Jarvis, and she’d even met Kawika’s mother and stepdad. True, she’d declined to move in with him—she wanted to finish her PhD dissertation, not get distracted by domesticity; the PhD was hard enough, and writing it in Hawaiian made it harder. And after her PhD, she was thinking of leaving the Big Island to do land restoration work on the barren island of Kaho‘olawe. So their future wasn’t clear, and they’d never said in so many words that they were exclusive. But that flimsy fact didn’t give Kawika much comfort; exclusivity had certainly been understood.

  Making things worse, an eyewitness to the murder, someone indispensable to the investigation, had discovered Kawika and Patience making love—or starting to. Kawika wondered how long his secret could last. He could easily imagine the truth coming out, what the consequences might be. Yet he still had a murder investigation he needed to focus on. He didn’t know what—or who—he wanted now, except to find the killer.

  He’d been thinking for an hour when, wrapped in her yukata, the beautiful young haole came up behind him—silently, on bare feet—and opened the robe, taking his head in her hands and pressing it against her breasts. He could smell their lovemaking on her skin.

  “Come back to bed,” she said. “I want to hear you calling me P again.”

  “P,” he protested, gently nuzzling her. “I’ve really gotta go. I have to get back to Hilo. And I’ve gotta stop in Waimea on the way.”

  “C’mon!” she laughed, pulling him from his chair, tugging him toward the bedroom. “Just four minutes!” she insisted. “Four minutes! You can spare four minutes!”

  “Four minutes?” he asked incredulously.

  “Doctor Ruth says any woman can satisfy a man in three minutes,” she said firmly. “And as we’ve already demonstrated, you can satisfy me in one.”

  17

  Waimea

  Only three days had passed since Dr. Terrence Smith, in green aloha scrubs and red moustache, first strode down the shiny, waxed linoleum corridor of North Hawai‘i Community Hospital toward Kawika. This time Dr. Smith did not look jaunty.

  “You look grim,” Kawika said.

  “This is grim business,” Smith replied.

  “Did you know them, the Malos?”

  “Everyone knows everyone here.”

  “So I’ve heard. Were they friends? Your patients?”

  “No.”

  “So tell me what you found.”

  “Wanna go inside, take a look?” Smith asked. He lowered his chin and looked steadily at Kawika from above his glasses.

  Kawika hesitated.

  “Didn’t think so,” Smith said. “Well, there’s no need. It’s an old story: boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy shoots girl three times in the chest.”

  “Anything unusual in the autopsies?”

  “Like what? Kai Malo drunk or drugged up? No. But he didn’t shoot her in the face. Couldn’t bring himself to do it. Which could indicate he really loved her.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Yeah, something. I’ll write it up. I found lacerations in Joan’s rectal tissue. Took some samples, ran some tests. Turns out she’d had forceful anal intercourse. Very recently.”

  “Forcible?”

  “No, forceful. Meaning, no lubrication. Except saliva maybe. Torn tissues. Could have been assault, could have been consensual. No way to tell.”

  “Consensual? With no lubrication?”

  Smith shrugged. “It happens,” he said. “Anyway, what we got on the swab was sperm. No lubricants.”

  “Whose sperm?”

  “Good question,” Smith said. “We’ve got tissue here from Fortunato and Kai Malo. We can’t run DNA tests here; we have to send things out. Costs a few hundred bucks a pop.”

  “What can you tell me now? Anything?”

  “Yeah, one thing: Fortunato didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know?” As soon as he asked, Kawika wondered if he’d just missed something, but Smith didn’t pause.

  “Did a biopsy on the lacerated tissue,” Smith went on. “Looking for little guys called neutrophils. That’s how we date lacerations. Blood starts clotting at once, but tissue doesn’t respond to injury in the first twelve hours. Then neutrophils start showing up. After twenty-four hours, the first neutrophils begin to deteriorate.

  “We found neutrophils, all right, but no deteriorated ones,” Smith continued. “So the tissue was probably torn more than twelve hours but less than twenty-four hours before she died. Almost certainly the day before, not earlier.”

  “And by then Fortunato was already dead,” Kawika said.

  “By then I’d already handed you his heart in a pan. What about Kai? He a possibility?”

  “Maybe. Could have happened that morning, I guess.”

  “Well,” the doctor continued, “if it happened that same morning, we wouldn’t have found neutrophils. And we might have found some semen, not just sperm. But the seminal fluid was already gone—absorbed, eliminated. So maybe the night before? Shall we run Kai’s DNA, just to check?”

  “Yeah,” replied Kawika. “And let’s run Ralph’s, too, while we’re at it. Take the guesswork out of those neutrophils of yours.”

  “There’s no guesswork, Detective. It wasn’t Ralph. He didn’t do it.”

  “Maybe, but I have trouble believing it wasn’t him.”

  “I said he didn’t do it. I didn’t say he wasn’t responsible.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kawika asked, uneasily.

  “Put it this way,” Smith replied. “Ralph didn’t shoot Joan, did he? But you’d agree he was responsible for her death?”

  Smith looked straight into Kawika’s eyes. A challenge? An invitation? Kawika couldn’t tell. “Doctor,” Kawika said, trying to assert his authority, “if there’s something else you know about Fortunato, I need you to tell me.”

  “Sometimes I think I don’t know shit,” Smith said, turning away. He raised his arm to shoulder height, extended his thumb and little finger in the shaka sign, and waggled his hand slowly.

  “Hang loose, brah,” he said. He walked down the corridor, then through a particular door into a particular room: the room of grim business.

  Kawika didn’t follow. He didn’t want to see Joan Malo again. Not that way.

  18

  Hilo

  Detective Sammy Kā‘ai, more experienced than Kawika, was also less squeamish. And Sammy was in charge of the Shark Cliff case. So, soon after his painful visit to the Waipi‘o beach, Sammy struggled out of bed and drove, still heavily bandaged and stiff, straight to the morgue in Hilo.

  “We don’t take walk-ins,” said Dr. Elaine Ko, the medical examiner, looking him over.

  “Very funny,” said Sammy, showing his badge. “I’m here to see that haole.�
��

  “You mean Humpty Dumpty,” she said. “The guy we can’t put together again. All the king’s horses couldn’t even scrape him off the rocks.”

  “But you told Captain Tanaka the guy’s got tattoos. Just show me those.”

  “My pleasure,” she replied, leading Sammy into Hilo’s room of grim business.

  She showed Sammy the corpse’s arms. One sported a tattoo of an anchor, the other an ancient Hawaiian fishhook, complete with tattooed fish line. Sammy saw even more.

  “You were holding out on us,” Sammy said, leaning over the dead flesh.

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Ko asked. “I gave you the identifying information.”

  “What about this?” Sammy asked, pointing to the wrist of one arm, then the wrist of the other. “Someone removed something here, didn’t they?”

  Frowning, Dr. Ko lifted one of the lifeless limbs. She studied it closely, even using a magnifying glass. Then she studied the other. Finally she looked up at Sammy.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Someone removed a pair of handcuffs.”

  PART TWO

  HILO

  The bones of Hilo are broken

  By the blows of the rain.

  —Nathaniel Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (1909)

  19

  University of Hawai‘i at Hilo

  “I’m not saying HHH didn’t do it,” Carolyn emphasized. “I’m just saying whoever did it is culturally illiterate.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kawika said. “I should have let you finish. Try me again.”

  “Okay,” she said, adding a quick smile, turning to meet his gaze. “But let’s get a drink first.” The day was hot and their clothes stuck to them. Carolyn poured herself chilled guava juice from the University’s woodshop cooler. Kawika chose a beer.

  Carolyn had paused her sanding of the slender surfboard she’d carved from a single piece of koa wood and been fussing to perfect for months. She’d designed it as an exact replica of the historic surfboard of Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani—a very thin board with no fins, the type almost no one could ride anymore, even though in the late nineteenth century the teenaged Ka‘iulani had mastered it. Kawika looked at it appreciatively from the workbench where they sat.

  “You don’t finish that thing, we’ll never get to take it out together,” Kawika teased. “But you are making it a thing of beauty.”

  “It was beautiful to begin with,” Carolyn sighed. “I just copied her design. A hundred years since she died. Maybe I’ll have it done for the bicentennial, yeah?”

  “Along with your dissertation, right?”

  Carolyn poked him but laughed. “She’s easier to channel through a piece of koa than she is to write about, that’s for sure. At least I’ve finally finished my research. But writing a dissertation is hard, especially in Hawaiian. We have a lot of words for some things and no words for others.”

  “At least no one else knows enough Hawaiian to grade it,” Kawika quipped.

  “Ha-ha. I wish.”

  She smiled and turned in her seat, and for the second time picked up one of the photographs he’d brought. Gliding a finger across it, she said. “First, this so-called heiau isn’t just inauthentic—it isn’t a heiau at all. A heiau has straight walls, not curved ones. A heiau’s filled with packed soil. This has grass on top. Someone might argue this isn’t the heiau, it’s the lele, the altar. That would fit with finding the body on it. But the altar would generally be entirely of stone. It would stand on the heiau, surrounded by structures. Here, the tee itself is the only structure, and nothing’s standing on it.”

  “I think it’s supposed to resemble a heiau,” Kawika said. “Not be one, just resemble one.”

  “The resemblance is pretty faint,” Carolyn responded. “To me, it’s just a structure on a golf course. It’s tasteful, because this is the resort’s signature hole, right? But it’s just a filled-in retaining wall built with lava rock.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Got it.”

  “Next,” she continued, “it wasn’t customary to kill the victim on the altar. The victim was killed somewhere else. In battle, maybe. Remember Kamehameha sacrificing his cousin? They killed him on the beach. Killing wasn’t the sacrifice. ‘Sacrifice’ isn’t even the right word. ‘Offering’ would be better. The victim’s body was offered on the altar as food. Kū wanted something to eat. Some priests, the kahuna, believed Kū preferred the body cooked, but he didn’t care how the victim died.”

  “Kū didn’t require a spear through the heart?”

  “He sure didn’t. And that’s the last thing. That spear. It’s really old, Kawika. It’s valuable. I bet you’re going to be able to trace it.”

  “We’re trying,” he said. “Got calls in to the museums, all the dealers.”

  “Good,” she said. “But that’s not the main thing. It’s an ihe, Kawika—a javelin. A combat weapon. No kahuna would use it to make an offering. The old Hawaiians kept a pretty strict separation of priests and chiefs. Don’t forget, the kahuna worshiped Captain Cook; they thought he was Lono. But the chiefs didn’t—they killed him.”

  “So why did priests make sacrifices to a war god?”

  “Well, everyone worked for the king. The priests made offerings to Kū so the chiefs could bring the king a great victory. But the priests did it on their terms.”

  “And the javelin doesn’t fit?”

  “None of it fits,” she replied. “The victim was murdered on the spot, with a javelin, and the spot itself isn’t a temple and it’s not an altar. As I said, it’s culturally illiterate.”

  “Thank you,” Kawika said. “But still, someone killed this guy with an old Hawaiian spear—a hard weapon to find. The victim was developing a resort, and they killed him in a resort. And they did it on—I don’t know, a spot—that looks like some sort of ancient Hawaiian something. Not an easy place to kill someone. Hard to get to. Hard to get away from. Risky.”

  “So you’re saying …?”

  “Someone wanted to make a statement, not just kill him. And not all killers are literate, much less culturally literate. The HHH folks? They’re probably not scholars. They’re activists.”

  “Well,” said Carolyn, “I’m just saying, if HHH did kill him, they’re culturally illiterate. And why would they kill him at a resort anyway? Why not kill him at Kawaihae, at the Pu‘ukoholā Heiau? That would be more authentic. Safer too.”

  “Carolyn,” he replied, “if we’d found him there, right where they hold their meetings, not a mile from Peter Pukui’s house, who would we suspect?”

  Carolyn thought for a moment. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” she said. “You think HHH took the trouble to kill Fortunato with a spear, on a golf course, in a resort, so that you wouldn’t suspect them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just throw him off a cliff?”

  Not a bad question, Kawika thought.

  20

  Hilo

  “How you feel depends on what you’re thinking.”

  Kawika’s mother had taught him that as a boy. He remembered it on the road downtown after seeing Carolyn at the University. Because Kawika felt maytagged.

  Maytagged: dumped hard by a big wave, tumbled helplessly beneath the surface, thrown forward and over and spun sideways, astonished that the tumult isn’t temporary, doesn’t end, just keeps going. It’s like being churned inside a giant machine, a Maytag washer, long enough to think about it, long enough to get scared.

  Kawika knew why he felt maytagged: he was thinking about too much at once. About Carolyn, whom he’d just visited but to whom he hadn’t confessed—not yet. About Patience; about his night and morning with her; about the mess he’d created. About the murdered Joan Malo. About Fortunato, a murder victim he couldn’t help disliking strongly, unprofessional though that might be. About whoever killed the man—Peter Pukui? Someone else?

  A few days earlier Kawika’s life had felt integrated and un
perturbed. Now it felt kaleidoscopic. A young woman’s death—not at his hands, but fairly laid at his feet. Another woman in her other woman’s bed, a stranger really, a temptation he should’ve resisted. And because of that, the sudden upheaval of his settled Big Island existence, just when he’d finally fitted in again, at home in his skin and his own land, with his own Hawaiian girlfriend. Now everything seemed spilled, stomach-turning, in full turmoil. Maytagged.

  He shook his head, decided to think about something else. He thought about seeing Tanaka and began to feel better.

  Tanaka had just returned from the morgue when Kawika reached the station.

  “We found cuff marks on the latest Shark Cliff guy,” Tanaka said, “but no cuffs.” Clapping Kawika on the shoulder, Tanaka changed subjects. “So, ready to talk?”

  Kawika wanted to talk about the cuff marks, but Tanaka had already changed focus. “I’ve had enough Shark Cliff for today,” he said. “Let’s tackle your new novel, Murder at the Mauna Lani.”

  They sequestered themselves in a meeting room with a large whiteboard. “Couple of things first,” Tanaka said. “Waimea cops called. They found Fortunato’s car at the Beach Club at Mauna Lani.”

  “Interesting,” Kawika said. “That’s not too far from where he died—a quarter mile at most. Could have walked that distance barefoot. Might explain the grass stains and cinders on his feet.”

  “Also,” Tanaka continued, “one of the FBI guys who investigated Fortunato on the mainland? A guy named Frank Kimaio. He retired here, lives up on Kohala Mountain Road. The agent in Seattle, we were on the phone, I was asking about Fortunato’s earlier resort thing in Washington, and he kinda threw that in there.”

  “Great, let’s have Tommy talk to this Mr. Kimaio,” Kawika said. “We get done here, we can call Tommy.”

  “Speaking of calls,” Tanaka said, “you got one too. From Patience Quinn.”