Fire and Vengeance

by Robert McCaw

  The second Star article described Francine Na‘auao as a close friend of Cheryl Makela, who owned a big part of the residential development surrounding the school. Since Makela approved the zoning for the school, it was guilt by association. The story went on to allege Na‘auao signed a $1,100,000 change order, funding the concrete barriers erected to hide the volcanic fumarole. Seeking to rebut the charges, the DOE released a statement saying the project architect recommended the change order for environmental improvements. The press carried the DOE statement, but it did little to curb the fury. Journalists had chosen their target and would attack until they’d hounded Na‘auao out of office.

  While Na‘auao may have thought it couldn’t get worse, the third and last installment reported that the DOE had lost, or more likely destroyed, important KonaWili files, including the official copy of the change order. Unnamed sources described trash bags full of shredded paper on the executive floor. In the face of these allegations, the department’s assurance it knew of no document destruction fell on deaf ears. The public wanted a summary execution, and the Star Advertiser, happy to oblige, printed a scathing editorial, calling upon Na‘auao to resign.

  The newspapers exposés, particularly the Star Advertiser’s editorial, forced Governor Māhoe to respond. Koa watched the TV coverage of Māhoe’s statement. The governor again expressed his dismay at the KonaWili disaster and reiterated his condolences to those who’d lost loved ones. He then addressed allegations of misconduct at the DOE. “The Hawai‘i police are conducting a comprehensive investigation. The investigators are following every lead and will leave no stone unturned.”

  Looking squarely into the camera, he continued, “Based on a no-holds-barred investigation by the criminal authorities, those responsible for this disaster will be brought to justice. And if any member of my administration is guilty of malfeasance, or even neglect, they will be gone from public service.”

  Pausing slightly and appearing to appraise his audience, Māhoe made a plea for patience. “Unfortunately, malicious rumors attributed to unnamed sources and isolated facts taken out of context have created a distorted picture. That is not fair to those in public service nor to the good citizens of this great state. Accordingly, I ask citizens to be patient and await the outcome of the criminal investigation. The authorities will deal harshly with any and all wrongdoers, but we will be fair-minded and act on established facts, not irresponsible and incomplete disclosures by unnamed and disgruntled publicity seekers.”

  Māhoe gave a strong speech, but Koa thought the governor should have fired, or at least suspended, Francine Na‘auao. Her agency authorized a school to be built atop a volcanic vent. That was fact. Her agency approved a bizarre change order. That was fact. Her agency lost vital and relevant records. That was fact. Fourteen children and two teachers had died.

  The warden of the federal reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma, had given Harry S. Truman, Koa’s favorite president, a desk placard, reading: “The buck stops here.” To Koa, Truman’s wisdom seemed apt—the buck should stop on Na‘auao desk. Na‘auao had to have some powerful hold over the governor for him to have expended so much political capital for her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AFTER HIS SISTER reported that Ikaika hadn’t reawakened from surgery, Koa called her almost every hour. Again and again, the news was the same—Ikaika hadn’t recovered consciousness. Then slowly, late in the afternoon of the second day, the tide began to turn. First, Ikaika moved his hands, then he opened his eyes, and most encouragingly, began to respond to voices. Initial tests showed his reactions to be slow, but normal. The news got better and better. Five hours later they moved him out of the ICU. Ikaika had survived the surgery. Now they’d have to see how much of the old Ikaika the surgeons had excised along with the tumor.

  Koa had no leads on Leffler’s whereabouts. He shared the bad news with Zeigler, only to get an even more distressing report. Leffler had stolen more than twenty handguns, M16A2 assault rifles, and most troubling of all, a DesertTech SRS A-1 military sniper rifle. They’d recovered only a small portion of his arsenal. Leffler might have sold the other weapons, but Koa feared he faced a heavily armed fugitive.

  Koa asked Sergeant Basa to assign officers to guard both Cheryl Makela and Tomi Watanabe, the next two names on Leffler’s hit list. He knew he’d have to talk to each of them but needed to make sure Leffler didn’t get to them first.

  He took Leffler’s jungle combat boots to Cap Roberts to see if he could match them to the prints found outside the Witherspoon residence. Cap took an impression from one boot, photographed it, and put it side by side with the photo of the wet footprints outside Witherspoon’s house.

  “As you can see,” Cap explained, “they match. Made by Wellco, a style called hot weather gen II jungle boots. It’s a military boot.”

  “Great,” Koa said, “your match reduces the pool of suspects to about twenty thousand soldiers stationed in Hawai‘i.”

  “Hold on.” Cap picked up Leffler’s left boot and held it upside down. A deep notch cut through the ribbing at the base of the heal. “That’s field damage; the boots didn’t come that way.” Cap pointed to a matching gap on a picture of the impression from the sidewalk. “That match gives us a near positive identification and puts Leffler at the Witherspoon house on the morning of the killing.”

  “Better than that,” Koa said, “it puts him there between four and six that morning.”

  Cap looked puzzled. “How’d you get the time frame?”

  “It didn’t rain that night. The puddle on the walkway came from the automatic watering system—clock activated in the front yard at four o’clock every fifth day.”

  “Nice.”

  Koa wanted more. “Yeah, but we don’t have anything other than the hit list to tie Leffler to the Boyle murder.”

  “Not so sure about that,” Cap said. “Remember those dirt marks on the sheets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s lava dust.”

  Koa responded with a frown. “The whole island’s made of lava.”

  “Yeah, but not all lava is the same. I sent samples to the police crime lab in Honolulu. They used a microspectrophotometer. It measures the technical qualities of color. They also checked the chemical composition.”

  “Micro-whatever. That’s a mouthful. So?”

  “There’s explosive residue mixed in with the lava dust.”

  “Like might be found up at the Pōhakuloa Army Training Area?” Koa asked.

  “You got it. I had one of my boys take a run-up to the Army firing range.”

  A touch of excitement crept into Koa’s voice. “You got a match?”

  “Yeah, I got a match, a near-perfect match.”

  Koa slapped the technician on the back. “I owe you a six-pack of Bikini Blonde Ale.”

  Cap’s grin rewarded Koa.

  They got much the same result when they compared Leffler’s fingerprints, lifted off the hit list with the partial fingerprint found on one of the shell casings. Cap had created two separate images at a resolution of five hundred pixels per inch—one of the partial print from the casing and the other from Leffler’s actual print.

  “There are,” Cap explained, “three levels of print comparison—patterns, minutia points, and pore/ridge contours. The FBI IAFIS system uses only patterns and minutia points. With that system, I get an 80 percent likelihood of a match on these two prints.”

  Koa groaned. “A defense lawyer will have a field day with a four-out-of-five chance.”

  “Right,” Cap responded, changing the screen to show two more detailed images of the same prints. “But if I compare images at one thousand pixels per inch, I can compare pores and ridge contours, yielding many more matching points. I put the likelihood Leffler left the partial print on the casings to 99.8 percent.”

  Koa let out a deep breath. “That’s more like it.”

  “In essence,” Cap concluded, “there’s only one chance in five thousand someone else left
the print on the casing.”

  Koa bettered those odds. “Yeah, but combining the fingerprint and the damaged bootprint with the circumstantial evidence like his access to the military weapons, the sale of a similar weapon to Bane, his girlfriend’s testimony putting him alone in Hilo just before the shooting, and the list with Boyle’s and Witherspoon’s names crossed off, I like our chances of a first-degree murder conviction.”

  Although they didn’t have him in custody, they’d identified the killer. Forty thousand dollars in crisp new hundreds said someone had hired him. Koa now wanted to know who. He guessed Leffler wouldn’t be talking anytime soon, so his only leads were the picture of Leffler and Tomi Watanabe at the Monarch bar and the forty thousand dollars. The picture wasn’t proof Watanabe hired Leffler, and his name on the hit list made it unlikely, but the mayor’s press aide still had some serious explaining to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN KOA RETURNED to his office, he found Sally Medea waiting for him. His hopes of finding Witherspoon’s secret soared at the sight of her. “You figure out what Arthur hid?”

  “No, but I’ve been thinking. No matter which way I look at it, I keep coming back to a rose window. The rose windows of medieval churches captivated Arthur. He visited the great cathedrals in Europe and marveled at their rose windows. He drew dozens of architectural plans for rose windows.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. What do rose windows have to do with anything? Are there any buildings with rose windows in Hilo?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s what troubles me. There’s no building with a cathedral-like rose window in Hilo or anywhere on the Big Island. Yet, I just know if Arthur hid something, it’d be near a rose window. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Keep trying,” he encouraged her.

  “Are you making any progress in finding Arthur’s killer?”

  “Yeah. An Army sergeant named Leffler pulled the trigger, but he’s a hired killer. I’m still trying to figure out who hired him.”

  “The man who arranged Arthur’s death deserves to die,” she said with a vehemence that surprised Koa.

  “Hawai‘i doesn’t have the death penalty, but he’ll go to prison for life.”

  “That’s not good enough. Premeditated murderers should get the Biblical treatment—An eye for an eye.”

  Koa knew the death penalty affected mostly the poor with bad lawyers, and that wasn’t right, but still, murder for hire deserved more than life in prison.

  He thought about Sally after she left. She must have been deeply in love with Arthur Witherspoon, and he with her. Yet Witherspoon hadn’t shared his deepest secrets with her. She hadn’t participated in designing the KonaWili school. She knew nothing of the extra concrete and little about his conversations with Boyle or Gommes. Nor did she know where he’d hidden his secret. Rose windows, she’d said, but there were no rose windows on the Big Island. After puzzling on it for a while, he set it aside.

  His sister called from Honolulu. Ikaika, now fully conscious, seemed to be doing well. “He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him. He’s actually glad to have us around,” Alana reported.

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “He wants to see you. He asks about you all the time. When are you coming?”

  Koa felt yanked in conflicting directions. The chief was still away, and the case had heated up with a host of new leads. Having discovered Makela’s name on Leffler’s hit list, he needed to re-interview her. He had to confront Watanabe. They had to track down Leffler and investigate Na‘auao’s hold over the governor. Yet, he felt an urgency to get to Honolulu and spend time with his brother. He’d been the one to arrest Ikaika, saving his life in the process. That event had momentarily renewed a troubled connection with his estranged brother at least until Ikaika blamed him for his subsequent parole revocation.

  And now Ikaika might have a new lease on life, maybe even a new attitude toward his family. Koa also had to explore Walker McKenzie’s offer to arrange access to medical experts. Perhaps having been an instrument of Ikaika’s incarceration, he could help set him free again. Was he dreaming? Probably so.

  “Koa, are you there?”

  His sister’s voice broke his reverie. “I need to make some calls, then I’ll come see Ikaika. I’ll call you with the details.”

  “Come soon, Koa.”

  Koa left police headquarters and walked to a block of 1920s storefronts not far from the county offices. Climbing the rickety steps to Alexia Sheppard’s office. He found her in her sun-streaked, plant-filled office working at her laptop. He sat down in one of the easy chairs opposite her desk and waited for her to look up. An attractive woman in her late thirties with luxurious long black hair, tied back in a loose ponytail, she was the daughter of one of Hilo’s most well-known lawyers and philanthropists. Her father had set her up in a law practice before his death, and she’d made a name for herself with a powerful courtroom presence and a magical way of connecting with juries. Koa knew many a male opponent who had underestimated her skill only to pay the price.

  Concentration lined her round face and furrows wrinkled her forehead as she worked her way through some legal problem. He spent the time watching Alibi, her big black cat, cleaning himself atop a pile of books on the shelf next to her desk. Alexia and Alibi were inseparable, and some judges even allowed the black beast into their courtrooms.

  “Hello.” Her voice—one of her most treasured assets—floated like the soothing timbre of a fine-tuned musical instrument.

  “Got a few minutes to talk about your least favorite recidivist client?” She’d represented his youngest brother through his many court appearances, all at Koa’s expense.

  “Ikaika?”

  “Yes.” He told her about Ikaika’s seizure, tumor, and surgery. Then he laid out Walker McKenzie’s idea about building a case for parole.

  She looked dubious. “It’s never been done here in Hawai‘i, at least not to my knowledge.”

  “Does that mean it can’t be done?”

  “Well, when he’s served the minimum term set by the parole board, he’s entitled to a parole hearing. We could present the health issue then, but it would require medical experts. I’ve got no idea how the parole board would react. It’s uncharted territory in violent felony cases.”

  “Remind me about Ikaika’s minimum term.”

  “Because of his extensive criminal record, the board set his minimum at six years. He’s served two, so he’s eligible in another four.”

  Koa felt discouraged. “He has to wait four more years before he gets a chance at parole?”

  “That would be the standard approach, but the board reviews inmates at administrative hearings from time to time and has the power to reduce a prisoner’s minimum sentence. I’ve heard of it, but it’s never happened in any of my cases, and it would be an uphill battle in your brother’s situation.”

  “But it’s possible? There’s a chance?” he asked.

  “Sure, there’s a legal basis in the regulations.”

  “What would I have to do to get this process started?”

  “You’d have to line up medical experts, and they’d have to be prepared to deal with his entire criminal history, including his juvenile record.”

  “I have his juvenile record.”

  “But you’re not supposed to have it, and it would be a crime for you to disclose it to anyone else without Ikaika’s written permission,” she warned.

  “Okay, so I’ll get his permission.”

  “You’ll need his permission to disclose his medical records, too.”

  “Can you prepare the forms?”

  “Sure, but don’t get your hopes up. This is not going to be easy.”

  On the way down the stairs from her office, Koa called Walker McKenzie, who had arranged for two renowned neurosurgeons to examine Ikaika. Having fulfilled his part of the bargain, McKenzie was hot to tape an interview with Koa. They arranged to meet in Honolulu after Koa’s session with the doctors
. He feared McKenzie’s Koa Kāne human interest story would irrevocably change his life, but his loyalty to his disloyal brother left him no choice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE TUG OF war between duty and family troubled Koa on the flight to Honolulu. He remembered the first time he’d stood on the rocks above the ocean dared by a friend to make his first high dive. He was about to take a greater plunge into the unknown pool of public notoriety. The thought of personal publicity didn’t sit well, but he could hear his ancestors calling. Then his mother’s voice rang in his ears—“You must forgive the pain Ikaika has caused, and find a way to help him … to put your family back together … for my sake … for your ancestors. That too I know in my nu‘au.” His wayward, black-sheep brother needed him, and he could not deny the obligation.

  Memories from Ikaika’s troubled life flickered in a continuous loop. The recollection of a treasured fishing rod was among the most disturbing. Koa had been fifteen when Uncle Pau, a friend of his father, had given Koa a fiberglass fishing rod with a genuine reel. The three of them, Koa, his father, and Uncle Pau, fished from a wa‘a, a canoe outside one of the reefs just east of Laupāhoehoe Point. Koa remembered the trips as a magical time, with Uncle Pau regaling them with stories of King Kamehameha’s visits to Laupāhoehoe, a regular stopping point since ancient times on the well-traveled canoe route from Hāwī to Hilo.