Fire and Vengeance

by Robert McCaw

  Piki, who’d been on the phone calling for a crime scene team, peered into the office from behind Koa. “Looks like a classic suicide by hanging.”

  Although tremendously energetic, Piki too often jumped to quick conclusions. Koa tried, without much success, to slow him down, but he ran like a battery-operated toy with only one speed. “It’s not,” Koa responded. “Don’t go in that room or touch the body until we get a crime scene team in here.” Always conscious of training his detectives, Koa turned to face his younger colleague. “Now stand here and figure out why it’s not a suicide.”

  Slowly, Piki took in the scene. “It doesn’t look like he tried to save himself,” the young detective said hesitantly.

  “What else?” Koa demanded.

  “He’s awful high off the floor.”

  “Now you’re thinking,” Koa rewarded his young colleague.

  First, the discovery of the strange concrete structures under the school building and now the murder of its general contractor left Koa with a mess on his hands—an understatement by any measure. The lack of a competent medical examiner to confirm his suspicions only made matters worse. Hawai‘i County employed no qualified ME. Shizuo Hiro, a seventy-eight-year-old Japanese obstetrician, doubled as the county coroner. Appointed only because of his status as a mayoral crony, Shizuo played poker with the mayor’s gang, losing large sums on absurd bets. A millstone around Koa’s neck, he impeded every criminal investigation requiring even semi-sophisticated medical analysis. Koa couldn’t imagine relying on Shizuo in such a high-stakes crime with national publicity.

  If Chief Lannua were on-island, he’d tell Koa, as he had so often in the past, to suck it up and deal with Shizuo. But the chief wasn’t around, so Koa, having reached his limit with the incompetent quack, took matters into his own hands. He called Mayor Tanaka, explained the discovery of the construction anomalies at the school, and stunned the mayor by reporting the murder of Hank Boyle.

  “I’m going to call the governor’s office and ask him to assign the Honolulu ME to this investigation,” Koa announced.

  “Shizuo can handle it. Besides, I don’t like asking Māhoe for help,” the mayor responded.

  “No, Shizuo can’t handle it,” Koa said. “He’ll screw it up and embarrass both you and the governor. You got the national press all over this disaster, and it’s only going to get worse with Boyle’s murder. You really want CNN’s Walker McKenzie interviewing Shizuo?”

  That stopped the mayor. An uncomfortably long pause followed before Tanaka replied, “Damnit.” Another pause. “Okay, Detective. But I’ll call the damn governor.”

  While Koa waited for the Honolulu ME to arrive, the crime scene team went over the Boyle mansion like watchmakers. Piki canvassed neighbors. Ronnie Woo, a young Chinese photographer who wielded his Nikon like a weapon, photographed the scene, using a yardstick to show Boyle’s feet were twenty-three inches off the floor. The seat of the chair stood barely twenty inches high. Diminutive Georgina Pau and hulking Chip Baxter, evidence technicians, affectionately known to police insiders as Mini and Maxi, dusted for prints and searched for bloodstains and other evidence.

  Having endured years of Shizuo’s incompetent forensics, Koa had mastered a few tricks of the ME’s trade. He carried a digital thermometer and took the hanging man’s temperature. Guessing the air-conditioned room temperature to be in the mid-seventies—substantially less than normal body temperature—Koa applied the old forensic standard: a corpse cools at the rate of about 1.5 degrees an hour. With a body temperature of 89 degrees, Koa figured Boyle had been dead about six hours. His estimate seemed consistent with the stiffening of the corpse. He put the time of death at roughly four in the morning or seventeen hours after the first news reports of the KonaWili school disaster. Despite his seat-of-the-pants medical exam, Koa left the body hanging so the Honolulu ME could make her own assessment.

  Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Koa opened the nearest file cabinet. He found the files organized into categories—residential, commercial, and government—with the governmental grouping further subdivided by building type. In the section for school buildings, he found a gap where the KonaWili file should have been. And if the empty space didn’t arouse suspicions enough, a loose label in the bottom of the drawer for “KonaWili School” confirmed a missing file. Its absence solidified the connection between Boyle’s death and the KonaWili school disaster.

  “Looks like he had some help.”

  Koa turned toward the doorway at the sound of a woman’s voice. Anne Ka‘au, the fiftyish Honolulu medical examiner, stared intently at the corpse. Dressed in jeans and a light blue blouse, Ka‘au had a long angular face with inquisitive black eyes behind wire-rim glasses.

  “You sure got here quickly,” he said.

  “I was already on-island, visiting my daughter.” Ka‘au had a nationwide reputation as a top-flight professional, lecturing regularly at leading university forensics programs. Koa watched her register every aspect of the scene like a walking digital camera. He wasn’t surprised she shared his initial impression of the crime scene.

  “Mahalo for leaving the scene intact for me,” she said, extracting a camera from her kit and taking her own photographs. Then she checked temperature and lividity. When they cut the body down, she examined every centimeter of the deceased’s skin, including the inside of his mouth and between his toes, as well as the electrical cord, closely observing its cut ends and knots.

  While she worked, she questioned Koa. “The governor told me this phony suicide might be connected to the KonaWili disaster but didn’t give me any details. What’s the deal?”

  Koa explained the strange concrete structures in the school and ID’d Boyle as the general contractor. Then he told her about the missing file.

  “My God,” she exclaimed, “they must have uncovered the volcanic vent during construction and tried to cover it up. They put those poor kids at risk. That’s criminal.”

  “Dead on,” he agreed.

  Leaving her to work her forensic magic, Koa toured Boyle’s mansion. Autographed photographs of NFL football players dotted the forty-foot living room. A commercial kitchen, a huge wood-paneled dining room, a small movie theater, a billiard room with a professional pool table, a library, three bathrooms, and Boyle’s office occupied the first floor. The luxurious house showed that Boyle had raked in a fortune as a contractor. Why, Koa wondered, would such a wealthy man risk it all by hiding a deadly threat under a grade school?

  Boyle apparently lived alone. Koa found no signs of a spouse or other companion. Oddly, the lights blazed all over the ground floor, and the sixty-inch television in the living room flickered with an old movie rerun. A violent explosion on the big screen caught Koa’s eye, and he stopped to watch part of Krakatoa, East of Java, before switching the TV off. Had, he wondered, Boyle really been watching a volcano movie?

  Upstairs, he found Boyle’s bedroom. Once again, he sensed something out of place and stopped to examine the scene. Boyle’s clothes—a pair of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt—lay discarded on a chair in the corner of the room. Boyle’s flip-flops lay on the floor half under the chair. A tangled top sheet covered only part of the unmade bed. One pillow remained on the bed while another lay discarded on the floor. As he peered at the bed, Koa saw two faint, but distinct, reddish-brown smudges. From dirty shoes, maybe? Smudges, he wondered, left by an assailant kneeling on the bed?

  He tried to imagine the sequence of events. Boyle undresses and goes to bed in his boxers. He’s restless, throws off the pillow, gets up, leaves the sheets tangled, goes downstairs, pours himself a farewell drink, and hangs himself. A plausible scenario. A killer, he knew, might have staged such a sequence, but only as an illusion.

  More likely, he thought, the killer snuck into the bedroom, suffocated the sleeping Boyle with a pillow, tossed the pillow aside, and carried the dead man down to his study to be strung up. The killer had turned the lights and TV on to give the impression Boyle had been awake. H
e wondered if they’d find Boyle’s fingerprints on the Glenlivet bottle. Koa called downstairs to his team, telling them to treat the bedroom as a secondary crime scene.

  Turning down a hallway, he studied Boyle’s framed memorabilia. A UH sheepskin, a fraternity certificate, and decades-old pictures. Like Koa, Boyle attended the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus in Honolulu. He’d graduated in 1975, long before Koa, but unlike Koa, Boyle belonged to one of the few UH fraternities. He’d been a Tau Kappa Epsilon frat boy. Studying the photos on the wall next to the certificates, Koa spotted a youthful Boyle in picture after picture with his fraternity brothers. Koa thought he recognized one or two besides Boyle, but the young faces and long hair made it hard to be sure.

  A TKE fraternity connection, Koa thought, made sense. Only a tiny percentage of twenty thousand students at the UH Mānoa campus joined social fraternities, but for those who did, the frats offered a well-known route to political and economic power in the state. Three governors, both U.S. senators, dozens of state legislators, and hundreds of the state’s business elite wore TKE pins. Boyle had started polishing his political connections as a freshman in college.

  In the bathroom, Koa opened the medicine cabinet. Prescription medicines often yielded up clues, and Koa discovered a full-scale pharmacy—more than forty orange and green pill bottles. Boyle’s prescription drugs spoke volumes. Half-empty bottles of Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Paxil, Tofranil, Anafranil, and Marplan told the tale of a man suffering from depression and anxiety. From the variety of drugs and the dates on the labels, Boyle obviously suffered from a severe and long-standing disorder. For all his wealth, Koa realized, Hank Boyle had been an unhappy man. Koa made a note of the doctor’s name—Dr. Teddy Patrone with a Kona telephone number.

  Nothing else upstairs shed light on Boyle’s murder, so Koa went back to check on the Honolulu ME and the crime scene team. He found Georgina, one of the crime scene techs, using a portable vacuum with a special filter box to collect trace evidence. He waved to her. A short, slight woman with prematurely gray hair, she was compulsively thorough with a wicked sense of humor. To escape the noise of the vacuum, he led Anne Ka‘au, the ME, into the hallway to ask what she thought of the scene.

  “It’s not a suicide. Body temperature, lividity, and degree of rigor mortis put the TOD at about four o’clock this morning. It’s pretty hard to string up a conscious, able-bodied man, so he was probably unconscious, or more likely, already dead. I didn’t find any wounds or needle marks, so I’d guess the killer suffocated him. That would explain the petechiae on the face.”

  Koa smiled inwardly, pleased she’d agreed with his own conclusions and thrilled to be working with a real ME. Georgina finished vacuuming so Koa stepped back into Boyle’s study and gave her an inquiring look.

  “Boyle wiped his fingerprints off the whiskey bottle and the glass, so we wouldn’t know who did it,” she said with a grin.

  Koa, an old hand at crime scene humor, rewarded her with a chuckle. It served as further confirmation Boyle hadn’t killed himself. “What else?”

  “He also hid the tool he used to cut the electrical cord. It’s not here and Chip hasn’t found it anywhere else in the house.”

  At that moment, Chip Baxter, the other crime scene tech, came down from upstairs. A big man with a round face and a thick shock of black hair, he was Georgina’s opposite in almost every way, except he, too, loved crime scene jokes. “Body fluids on the discarded pillow—a good deal more than you’d normally find—and what looks like lava particles on the sheet. Funny, ’cause I went through Boyle’s closet. If the man had dirty shoes, he tossed them before he snuffed his own lights.”

  Koa wanted something to tie a perp to the crime scene. “You recover any suspicious prints or anything with the perp’s DNA?”

  “Nada,” Georgina responded. “It’s too clean. The killer must have worn gloves and a stocking, or something over his head. Otherwise, there’d be loose hairs, especially given the time he spent setting up the phony hanging.”

  An amateur had staged the fake suicide, cutting the electrical cord without leaving the cutting tool, wiping his prints off the liquor glass, and hanging the body too high. The smudges on the bed probably came from the killer’s shoes.

  Koa focused on the big picture. With Boyle’s murder, he still needed someone who knew what went down on the school construction site. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t pretty, and Boyle had almost certainly died to keep it secret.

  Late in the afternoon, CNN’s Walker McKenzie called wanting an update on the case. Koa began to put him off when the TV journalist shocked him. “I hear the contractor committed suicide.”

  McKenzie enjoyed incredible sources. Koa hated dealing with the press, but McKenzie was a pro, and it made no sense to alienate him, especially over something soon to be in the papers. “I can confirm we found him hanged.”

  “A suicide or just staged that way?”

  Koa paused, thinking how to play it. It might be useful, he concluded, to let the killer know he hadn’t fooled the police. “We’re calling it a suspicious death, at least until we conclude our investigation.”

  “Thanks, Detective.”

  After the reporter hung up, Koa wondered what he’d set in motion. Boyle, he felt sure, died because of KonaWili. The death had been faked to look like a suicide to deceive the police. A news story reporting that the police regarded the death as suspicious would make the killer nervous. Nervous killers make mistakes. At least he hoped this killer would screw up.

  Later that night, Koa had second thoughts, not about his conversation with Walker McKenzie, but about the crime scene itself. That Boyle’s death hadn’t been a suicide had been obvious to him and to Anne Ka‘au. He’d known almost immediately and so had Anne. Could the killer, he wondered, have been so sloppy, so incompetent?

  Hanging the body too high, taking the tool used to cut the electrical cord, wiping prints from the liquor bottle and the glass—maybe the killer panicked—but other aspects of the scene reflected thought. The killer left no fingerprints, no trace evidence, no DNA. If the killer smothered Boyle in bed, then the killer likely turned on the television and the downstairs lights. It was almost as though the killer deliberately staged the suicide to make it look phony.

  Why would the killer do that? Maybe to send a message. But what message? And to whom?

  CHAPTER SIX

  KOA ASSEMBLED HIS brain trust—Basa, Piki, and Zeke Brown, the Hawai‘i County prosecutor. Zeke, a Tom Hanks look-alike with a decade and a half less wear, held one of the most powerful positions on the Big Island. He sat behind his huge wooden desk with his trademark black buffalo hide Lucchese boots on one of the pull-out extensions. A sports jacket hung behind the door for serious court work, but as usual, Zeke wore jeans and a paniolo shirt. He had an easy, friendly way with voters, who didn’t seem to mind his frequent profanity. The others in the room saw nothing friendly in his piercing black eyes when Koa described the concrete structures under the school and the faked suicide of its builder.

  “You’re telling me the builder knew about a volcanic vent and nevertheless built the school?” Zeke asked in his abnormally loud voice.

  “There’s no other explanation for the fire door and the six-foot-thick walls,” Koa responded. “And a lot of people besides the builder had to know, including the architect and the building inspectors.”

  “Christ, that’s reckless endangerment and adds up to murder.” Zeke pounded his desk, which had absorbed numerous blows over his six terms as county prosecutor.

  “And somebody killed Boyle to keep him from talking,” Koa continued.

  “Makes me want to check out Samantha’s school,” Basa, who had two children, Samantha and Jason, in Hilo schools, added.

  Koa, no stranger to Basa’s family, knew both Samantha and Jason and saw the concern in Basa’s eyes. “You and every other parent,” he said.

  “In a way,” Piki said, “it’s worse than Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Parkl
and.” He referred to three of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. “I mean, in those cases, disturbed kids killed their classmates. Here the people who were supposed to protect kids put them in mortal danger.”

  Zeke steered the meeting back to its purpose. “So how do we proceed?”

  “We need,” Koa laid out his plan, “to learn everything we can about the KonaWili school—who owned the land, who selected and approved the site, who designed the school, who besides Boyle built it, who served as a watchdog during construction, and who inspected the final building. We need to understand the players, their backgrounds, their motivations, and the ugly choices they made.”

  “What should I do?” Piki, ever eager, asked.

  “Piki, you hit the internet. Get everything you can on the school and everyone involved in siting, planning, and building it. Basa, you go collect all the county planning, inspection, and other public records.”

  “And I’ll,” Zeke said, “trace the ownership and get the property records.”

  “Great. We’ll meet back here this afternoon,” Koa said.

  On the way down the hall, Piki, his eyes wide, turned to Koa. “Are those real Lucchese boots … I mean, like John Wayne real?”

  Koa laughed. “Yeah, there’s nothing phony about Zeke.”

  After completing their searches, they had twenty-five names spanning four key areas. First, the present and former owners of the school property. Second, the land planning officials who zoned the site. Third, the DOE officials who authorized and accepted the completed school. And finally, the construction group, consisting of architects, contractors, and subcontractors.

  Zeke addressed the property issues. “The land around the KonaWili school originally belonged to one of Hawai‘i’s original big five landowners, who then sold it off to two ranchers. In the 1960s during one of Hawai‘i’s cyclical land development booms, the ranchers sold the property to the Paradise Land Company, but Paradise failed to develop it. In 2004, Paradise sold several thousand acres to Hualālai Hui, a partnership planning to build hundreds of homes, a recreation center, and a shopping plaza.”