My beat partner Walker and I began to figure out who the major players were on Lanai, and we stirred the pot by bringing the drug epidemic to light. We spent most of our time on Lanai trying to make a case against Pete Cordiello, one of the biggest drug dealers on the island. We made a lot of drug-related arrests. Because it was such a small place, we were always arresting someone’s son, someone’s husband, or someone’s nephew, so of course there was retaliation from the community. On Lanai, you really live with the people you’re working with. You’ll arrest them for DUI on a Saturday night and see them at the grocery store on Tuesday morning.
Shortly after we initiated investigation into Cordiello, we were called to a party for noise disturbance. The party was at the community center in Lanai, but it had spilled out onto the lawn, and Walker and I found ourselves walking into a mob of people. It was dark, loud, and very crowded, but we were complacent about our approach—there was rarely trouble in Lanai. We asked around about the organizers of the party, but before we got any further, I saw Walker get tackled by three guys.
“Stop resisting!” I yelled. I lunged forward toward the guys while someone grabbed me from behind. I suppose they thought it would only take one guy to restrain the female cop, but they were wrong. I got my elbows into the guy so he would release me and then cuffed him quickly.
“Stop resisting!” I yelled again. “Stop resisting!” Two guys listened, but the last guy was still going at Walker. By this time people at the party were yelling at him to stop. One guy kept shouting, “Nuff! Nuff!” meaning stop. Everybody else was running. The guy was still fighting Walker hard, so I tased him and he fell to the ground.
Meanwhile, I was yelling “ten-fourteen” into my lapel mike—officer down—and gave our location. The dispatcher could hear us on the radio calling for help, but there was no one to help us. Walker and I were the only two officers on duty.
“I’m having a heart attack!” the tased guy complained. “You’re killing me, bitch.”
We arrested the tased guy and hauled him into the station. We were pissed, but we were also scared. For a short period of time, I thought I might not make it out alive.
The worst part was that my sergeant didn’t press charges on the guys who jumped us. He brought them into the station for a talking-to and then let them go. Sergeant Ruben had been on Lanai for eleven years, and it seemed to me he had learned to turn a blind eye to what was going on.
After Walker and I got jumped at the party, I started to feel afraid. I wanted to do my job, but I knew there would be repercussions every time I did.
About a week later, I came home to find my apartment ransacked. As soon as I opened the door I could see that everything was all over the floor. Mo came running toward me—he acted like a puppy when he was afraid—and I started to look around. Nothing seemed to be gone, but every piece of furniture was turned over, every drawer dumped out. What were they looking for?
I immediately called the station and told them what had happened.
“Now will you believe me?” I asked Ruben when I got him on the phone. “They’re targeting me. Someone’s targeting me, and I’m sure it’s Cordiello or one of his goons.”
I expected him to make light of it, like he usually did, but this time he seemed to take me seriously.
“Tell you what, Alli,” Ruben said. “I know you’ve got two bedrooms there. Usually we put two officers in the place, but we figured since you were a female you wanted your privacy.” I listened to his condescending chauvinism. “Why don’t we put a male officer in there with you so that you’re not scared.”
“I’m not scared,” I said, furious, thinking, Have you seen my dog? “I just want to get this asshole into jail.”
Nonetheless, Ruben put one of my beat partners, Steve, into the apartment with me. MPD owned these apartments and rotated officers through them. Most officers never stayed on Lanai more than their allotted time, but Steve liked it and stayed on Lanai, which was rare. He didn’t want to go back and work on Maui because the others iced him out often. Even though he was an intelligent guy, some of the cops on Maui considered him a broke. He wasn’t a ripper, but he worked hard and did very good job with his investigations. He just wasn’t proactive. There were suspicions from the other guys that he was gay, and I suppose that’s the real reason they iced him out.
Steve was a great guy and we got along very well. He liked to tease me about Mo. I had started cooking elaborate meals for Mo to entice him to eat—steak, potatoes, chicken—and Steve would come in and say, “Smells good. What’s for dinner?”
“Sorry,” I would answer. “This is for Mo. You’re on your own.”
I ended up feeling better having Steve there, though I wouldn’t tell that to Ruben. I didn’t want him to think I was some helpless female who needed a guy to protect her.
Ruben left me alone until a couple of weeks later, when he sent me out on a statutory rape case.
“I need a female to investigate this,” he said. “You know, to be sensitive to this young girl. Her uncle came in and filed a report. Says his fifteen-year-old niece is giving consensual sex to her twenty-four-year-old boyfriend.”
“Where are the parents?”
Ruben shook his head. “No father. Mom’s an ice addict. This Uncle Max has custody. Seems like a good guy, loves her to death.”
“Filipina?” I asked, and Ruben nodded. In the Filipino community, it’s not that unusual for older men to date much younger girls, but in Hawaii it was illegal for anyone under sixteen to have sex with someone more than five years older. Ruben ordered me to take Lea’s statement.
I headed out to the address he gave me, feeling uneasy. Sex crimes weren’t really my thing. I was good with narcotics but didn’t have a lot of training in sex cases, and none involving minors.
I didn’t know it at the time, but from the very beginning, I shouldn’t have been investigating this case. I had not been trained to deal with juvenile sex cases, which require special handling and a delicate investigative style. We had a sex crime unit that came from Maui to deal specifically with juveniles, but in this case, Ruben seemed to want to handle it directly. I felt uncomfortable taking charge of this investigation, but I had no choice. According to department policy, when the sergeant asks me to do something, I have to follow his orders.
A man in his thirties answered the door. “Come in, come in, I’m Uncle Max,” he said. He was gracious and welcoming, especially under the circumstances. He had a beautiful, pearly smile, and so did the girl, Lea, who came to the door when her uncle called her.
“Hi, Lea,” I said. “I’m Alli. I’m here to ask you a few questions.”
Lea’s eyes darted to Uncle Max. He patted her on the shoulder and said, “I’ll leave you two to talk.” It was clear her uncle adored her and wanted the best for her.
Lea seemed nervous, but I tried to put her at ease. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “You’re not in trouble. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just need to get some information from you.”
We sat on the lanai outside, and I started asking questions about Chris, her boyfriend. “What’s he like?” I asked. “Is he a special guy to you?”
She smiled that smile and ran her fingers through her hair. She had beautiful long Hawaiian hair. “Yes,” she said. “He’s my boo. He’s a really great guy.”
“Does he treat you well? Make you happy?”
“Yeah, he treats me so nice. No drugs, only weed. I couldn’t live without him.”
I asked her where she had met him and when, and she talked to me as if I was her girlfriend. She seemed to trust me and answered every single one of my questions. She was a lovely, sweet girl, Lea, a child in so many ways, and I was proud of how easy it was to make my case.
I got a full statement from Lea and ended up charging her boyfriend with more than twenty charges of sexual assault. She was very much in love with him, and when I arrested him she was devastated. A few days later he was able to make bond, and her uncle immedi
ately filed a restraining order against him.
The next day Uncle Max called me. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew in my gut something was wrong.
He told me, “She’s gone.”
“Lea?”
“She’s gone. No note, her phone’s off, I can’t reach her.”
I drove out to see the boyfriend Chris’s family, but they wouldn’t cooperate. They kept telling me it was my fault.
Two days later, we found Lea and Chris in a field a half mile behind the Lanai police station, a rifle beside them. A double suicide. They left a long letter, very angry with the police department, very upset with their families for turning them in.
Their deaths rocked the community. Nothing like this had ever happened on Lanai.
I had sensed all along that there was something missing in the case, but I didn’t have the experience to know exactly how it was supposed to go. Meanwhile, the Maui detectives started asking questions and began to investigate us for dereliction of duty. I didn’t have the qualifications necessary to deal with a juvenile case, and I should never have been put on it. I got reprimanded, and I don’t know what action, if any, was taken against Sergeant Ruben.
I couldn’t help thinking that if the juvenile detectives had interviewed Lea, things might have gone very differently. Maybe she and Chris would still be alive.
Watching the devastation to Lea’s family threw me back to my own high school years and to something I still held secret more than ten years later.
When I was fifteen, I had tried to kill myself too.
5
Suddenly I couldn’t stand being in Lanai anymore.
I sat at the tiny kitchen table in the Lanai apartment, pretending to eat a bowl of cereal though I had no appetite, trying to decide what to do. I had two days off, and for the first time since joining the force, I was thinking of taking them. Normally I would spend the day catching up on reports and trying to work on my case against Cordiello. Today I had no appetite for work. Since Steve was working all weekend, Mo and I were alone.
I felt shaken and physically ill when I thought about what had happened to Lea. I had had tunnel vision; I just wanted the confession so I could make the arrest. I had forgotten this was someone’s life. Now, that life was over, and I felt guilty for any part I may have played in that.
I couldn’t get Lea out of my mind, and sitting in the station five hundred yards from where we found her body wasn’t going to help the situation.
Lea. Her incandescent smile. The innocent, trusting way she told me everything about her boyfriend, as if I were her older sister, her best friend. Someone on her side, when she hadn’t had many people on her side in her life.
She was a kid! Just turned fifteen. She couldn’t possibly have known what she was doing. Ending her life, devastating her family.
I got up from the table and poured my untouched cereal into the garbage.
I had once been that kid, a kid in a relationship that wasn’t good for me. A kid intent on killing herself, and I had almost succeeded.
It had happened more then ten years before, when I was a freshman in high school, fourteen years old, locked in a way too intense relationship with Josh.
Shortly after I turned fifteen, I got pregnant. I didn’t want to think about it for even a minute, so as soon as we could, Josh and I went to get an abortion. Our only choice was a Planned Parenthood office with picketers outside. Baby killer, an old lady yelled at me. Couldn’t she see I was practically a baby myself?
My mom was the most caring, supportive mother in the world, but I was too ashamed to tell her about the abortion. I could have told my sister, who was in college. They would have helped me and come with me, but I felt if I didn’t tell them, it wasn’t really happening. I never told anyone but Josh.
Afterward, my life felt like a complete wreck. There was the abortion, all my guilt, and the exhaustion of keeping it secret. There was Josh, who was controlling and abusive. There was my father, living somewhere in town with his secretary but refusing to give us his address. My mother, back on the bottle as her method of coping. And my sister away at college, happy to be away from our mess of a family. I had even lost soccer—kicked off the team because of my shit grades.
I had nothing left, and all I wanted to do was die.
I sneaked out in my mom’s minivan one night, but instead of meeting Josh like I usually did, I drove all over the city—past Josh’s house, past the high school, past my grandparents’ house. I knew exactly what I was doing: I was saying good-bye to my life.
I headed to Tijeras Canyon, not far from where my uncle lived. I found the perfect cliff. Getting the speed up to ninety miles per hour, I unclipped my seat belt and took my eyes off the odometer. I felt relaxed and ready as I watched the cliff approach. I kept my foot on the gas, and the last thing I remembered was the side of the mountain.
I woke up in a helicopter. With fractured ribs and a ruptured spleen, blood oozing down my face from a head wound, I was disappointed that I was still alive. It turned out that taking off my seat belt had saved my life. If I had been wearing it, the engine that ended up in the front seat would have crushed me.
“Were you trying to kill yourself?” a voice asked. I couldn’t even see who was asking the question. Still, my lie was automatic.
It was an accident, I was just driving too fast.
The Albuquerque police suspected a suicide attempt. There were no skid marks on the road, no evidence that I had tried to stop or swerve. I continued to lie. When I told my parents it was an accident, they believed me. My father did, anyway, but my mother suspected the truth. She never said so, but I could tell by her actions—moving me to a different high school, working with Josh’s parents to break us up—that she was trying to fix the situation without actually talking about it.
In order to keep up with my lie, I pretended I felt lucky to be alive. I actually started to do well in school, and subsequently my life began to improve. Instead of dealing with the feelings that had led me to that cliff, I lied away their very existence.
To this day, I had told no one the truth about that suicide attempt. Or the pregnancy that preceded it.
It was easy now to blame it all on teenage drama, family angst, but what I felt then was real. That hopelessness, that despair—what would have happened if I had succeeded that night? What would my mother, sister, and grandparents have done if they had lost me?
These questions made me shaky. Normally I was tough. Guys on the force would be crying their eyes out over a body we found or some brutal domestic case, and I would be calm as could be. Cold, even. But Lea was stirring up a part of me even my coldness couldn’t cover.
I wondered: somewhere deep inside me, was I still that girl? I carried a firearm now and made arrests, but had I really changed? I had thought that throwing myself into work would make my life complete, but suddenly I felt as lonely and scared as I had felt that day in Tijeras Canyon.
I needed to go for a run to clear my head. I threw on a T-shirt and some running shorts and was starting to do leg stretches when my phone beeped.
Keawe.
Beep, beep.
Keawe again.
I had done nothing but ignore his calls for months, but today without even thinking I picked up the phone.
“Hey,” I said.
“So you’re finally talking to me again,” he said. I could almost hear him smiling. No sarcasm at all in his voice.
“Maybe,” I said lightly. “Today, anyway.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” he said.
I put the phone on speaker and continued to stretch, pushing away Mo, who was getting excited about a run. A small slice of light from the window cut across the room.
“I heard about your case,” Keawe was saying. “The girl. I’m sorry.”
“It was horrible,” I said. “She was barely fifteen years old.”
“It’s not your fault, Alli,” Keawe said. “You were doing your job. The chief said you’re proving
yourself as a ripper.”
“A lot of good that’s doing me,” I said. “I did exactly what Ruben told me to do, but it wasn’t right. We weren’t following procedure. There’s going to be an investigation.” My voice cracked on that last word, and I was embarrassed.
“If there’s an investigation,” Keawe said, “Ruben will get the rap for it. Broke-ass.”
I sat on the floor and drew my knees to my chin. “I don’t care about that,” I said. “I just care that there are two people dead because of me.” Secretly, though, I was pleased at Keawe’s compliment. Since joining the department I’d been working my ass off, putting in insane overtime, taking the senior officers’ cases, keeping myself in top physical shape so I could fight if I had to, all the while learning how to defuse situations to make fighting the last resort. At MPD, you were either a ripper—a hardworking go-getter everyone could count on—or a broke. Ruben was a broke: a lazy, unreliable oaf who could make a volatile situation worse.
“Those kids aren’t dead because of you, babe,” Keawe was saying. “No one said this line of work was full of happy endings. We should talk about it more. What are you doing today?”
“Working?” I said.
“Bullshit. You’ve got the day off.”
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