Fire and Vengeance

by Robert McCaw

  “I’ll call luna wahine,” she responded.

  “Fine,” he responded. “Get your supervisor on the phone. Let me talk to her.” Five minutes later, he ushered the docent out and placed a closed sign on the door.

  He went back to the star in the center of the intricately fashioned mosaic seal. “How do I get the plug out?”

  Sally consulted the drawings. “I think it’s wedged or glued in. You’ll have to pry it out.”

  Koa used his pocket knife around the edges of the small circle, working the blade into the nearly invisible circular crack. He worked the blade around once and then a second time until he saw the outline of the plug and dug the knife blade deeper. Slowly, a millimeter at a time, he pried the center of the star up until it popped loose. Using the flashlight app on his smartphone, he peered into the eight-inch round hole in the center of the great seal. The light reflected off the dial of a combination lock.

  “Shit, there’s a combination lock. I’ll have to get a locksmith in here.”

  “Wait,” Sally responded. After a moment, she said, “Try 12 … 12 … 12.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the mathematical formula for the great rose window at the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Chartres. The circular window surrounds a twelve-pointed star with Christ in the center. Twelve roundels display the Elders of the Apocalypse in an inner ring and twelve half-roundels show the dead emerging from their tombs with the angels blowing trumpets to summon them to the last judgment.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Yes, really, and if Arthur was here, he’d quote Fredrik Macody Lund, one of the great historians of cathedral architecture: Sacred architecture is not, as our time chooses to see it, a ‘free’ art, developed from ‘feeling’ and ‘sentiment,’ but it is an art strictly tied by and developed from the laws of geometry. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m betting it will work. Give it a try.”

  Koa spun the dial and stopped at “12.” Then back around past “12” to “12.” And, finally, back to “12.” He heard a click and pulled the tiny safe open. He’d opened Arthur Witherspoon’s hiding place, where he found a single sheet of paper. He drew it out, unfolded it, and started reading:

  “May the Lord forgive me for I have sinned.”

  Sally gasped, but Koa kept reading:

  “It has haunted me all my life, what we did that night, the six of us.”

  Koa stopped reading and looked up at Sally Medea. The six of us? Mary Jane Kinnon and the four frat boys made five. Who was the other person?

  He continued reading:

  “I was high. We all were. The girls were naked, swapping partners, competing for the best climax, each goading the other on. Mary Jane was so beautiful, so sexy, so wild. He choked her. She was gasping, begging for it, playing a deadly game. And then she wasn’t breathing. Frannie tried to revive her, but she was gone.

  “We should have gone to the police, but we didn’t. Howard fixed the whole thing, the fake suicide, the lies, the false witnesses. He got Frannie to lie. He paid Babylips and that little Japanese bartender to say we were all at the KitKat. I should never have gone along. The worst mistake of my life. I was scared. We all were.

  “Howard screamed at us. He wouldn’t let some slut ruin his life. He had money and knew how to fix it, how to set up the alibi, how to get to the coroner, how to make everyone believe Mary Jane committed suicide. Poor Mary Jane. I didn’t believe it would work, but it did.

  “One lie begets another and another and another. After that night, Howard owned us. We became his puppets, richly rewarded pawns in his dirty deals, locked into a lifelong trap. We faked Mary Jane’s suicide, and I so often contemplated my own, my escape. But I’m too much a coward. No matter. It will come to a bad end, a terrible tragedy, of that I am sure.”

  “Arthur Witherspoon”

  Koa thought he’d heard the whole story from Konane Kahaka, the old Honolulu cop. He’d agreed with the old detective’s educated guesses about MJK’s death, but Konane had ferreted out only part of the story. There’d been six people at the orgy in Mary Jane’s room, not five. And Mary Jane hadn’t been the only woman. Both Frannie and Mary Jane had been engaged in sex—“each goading the other on.”

  “Frannie … Frannie.” Koa turned the name over in his mind. If Frannie had been in MJK’s room that night, and Frannie Kapule had approached Konane Kahaka, claiming MJK was depressed and suicidal, logic suggested the Frannie in the room was, in fact, Frannie Kapule. Because she’d been a participant in the faked suicide, she’d have had a motive to try to influence the police and the coroner to call the death a suicide. And Gommes, who was orchestrating the cover-up, would have wanted to keep the number of participants to a minimum.

  But another Frannie played a central role in the KonaWili case. Although Koa knew her as Francine Na‘auao, Makela referred to Francine Na‘auao as Frannie. Was it possible that Frannie Na‘auao and Frannie Kapule were one and the same person? Francine Na‘auao was married. Maybe she’d been born Francine Kapule. Koa grabbed his cell and called Piki. The young detective answered on the second ring, and Koa explained what he wanted.

  It didn’t take long. Piki called back in less than ten minutes. Koa had guessed right. Francine Na‘auao and Frannie Kapule were one and the same. Francine Na‘auao had been in MJK’s room the night she died. Christ. The whole KonaWili cast of characters had been in Mary Jane’s room—Gommes, Witherspoon, Boyle, and Na‘auao, plus another man, the mysterious Abercrombie. And one of those men had strangled Mary Jane Kinnon. Which one?

  Witherspoon’s secret confession shed light on KonaWili. It explained why Gommes could exercise such power over the participants in the KonaWili disaster. In Witherspoon’s words, “he owned us. We became his puppets.” Still, Gommes must have pushed too hard. Witherspoon had spent a lifetime hiding his UH connection. Easy to see how he would have balked at covering up the death of schoolchildren at KonaWili, especially when the daughter of one of his closest friends died there.

  Boyle, too, must have harbored a deep sense of guilt. According to his partner, he had suffered from depression since his days at UH, and Dr. Patrone had been treating him with anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medicines for forty years. After KonaWili, all the pills in the world wouldn’t have been enough to salve his conscience.

  Boyle or Witherspoon—maybe both of them—must have threatened to blow the lid off the conspiracy. And Leffler had killed them. But who’d ordered Leffler to pull the trigger? Gommes? That made no sense. A sniper—it had to be Leffler—tried to kill Gommes, missed, and instead killed Dante, his Rottweiler. Leffler’s master must be Abercrombie, whoever he was?

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE IDENTITY OF the one called Abercrombie haunted Koa. They knew little—only that Abercrombie hung out with the TKE crowd in 1975 and presented a phony driver’s license to Detective Konane, who remembered him having fiery red hair. Makela and Watanabe never met him and described him as a red-haired man only because Gommes told them to do so.

  Piki went through the records of every student member of TKE in 1975. He found no one with fiery red hair. Piki then expanded the search to TKE members from 1971 through 1976 on the theory Abercrombie might have been a pledge in 1975 or a graduate who still hung with his fraternity pals. Piki found several redheads, but according to Konane none of them had masqueraded as Abercrombie.

  Piki took a pile of UH yearbooks up to Konane’s house where the two of them spent two days going through the class picture of every undergraduate from 1971 through 1976. Still no Abercrombie. In frustration, one night when Nālani worked late at a national park function, Koa visited the Hilo Public Library and gathered up the UH yearbooks from the shelves. He couldn’t imagine what he’d find after Piki and Konane had been through all the individual pictures, but he had to try.

  He flipped through the pages covering student government. He skipped the black and white pictures, focusing on those in color, but found no red-haired man. He moved on
to athletics. Nothing. Music groups. Nothing. The school newspaper. Nothing. Then he hit the drama department.

  Scanning pictures of theatrical production, his eye hit upon a student with red hair. Koa hadn’t been in the drama department, but he’d attended UH plays during his four years there. Judging from the stage, this show hadn’t made the main stage of the Kennedy Theater. It looked like a late-night student production in the university’s black box space.

  He studied the red-haired actor. Was it possible that, in addition to a phony driver’s license, Abercrombie wore a disguise? That could explain why Detective Konane Kahaka hadn’t been able to identify Abercrombie among the TKE members. The photomontage identified the production as The Red-Headed League but failed to identify the actors.

  Koa recognized The Red-Headed League as one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories. After becoming a detective, Koa had read every Sherlock Holmes story he could find and remembered Jabez Wilson, a flaming redheaded pawnbroker. Two crooks had concocted a menial, but well-paying, job for Jabez Wilson at the phony redheaded league in order to get him out of his pawnbroker’s shop. While Jabez was away, the perps tunneled from Wilson’s shop into a nearby bank to rob its vault. The story came to symbolize the proposition that things are not what they seem. That, Koa thought, was no joke.

  The mysterious Abercrombie might have worn the wig to the police station in 1975 without undue risk of discovery. Now, Koa had his own Sherlock Holmes mystery—who was the Jabez Wilson wannabe who called himself Abercrombie?

  He sent Piki back to Honolulu to search the drama department archives. The young detective spent two more days away from Robyn to no avail. The 1970s records of the UH Mānoa drama department had gone up in smoke in a 1980s fire, and no one could remember The Red-Headed League, let alone who had acted in it. Another dead end.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  THERE HAD TO be a way to identify Abercrombie. Of the original six people in MJK’s room forty years before, Koa knew the identity of the three who were dead and two who were alive. He’d have to pry the identity of the last man from Na‘auao or Gommes. But how?

  Hard as steel nails, Gommes would be a tough man to break. Koa doubted he’d flinch even in the face of an indictment. And if it came to a trial, it would be his word against Makela’s. Koa had little doubt Gommes’s lawyers would make mincemeat of her. If Watanabe also testified against Gommes, he, too, would be a weak witness. Gommes’s lawyers would have a field day with his long history of blatant lies to the press. Jurors would quickly see Watanabe’s “truth” as more fiction than reality.

  That left Na‘auao. Koa had interviewed her in vain, but now they had Makela’s story, her tapes of conversations with Na‘auao, and the fact that Na‘auao had been in MJK’s room the night of her death. Koa spent hours listening to the Makela-Na‘auao tapes, only to find them opaque and confusing. When Makela offered Na‘auao a financial interest in the KonaWili development, Na‘auao told her to arrange a land “swap” for a parcel owned by GRQ Partners. Zeke had yet to trace the ownership of GRQ, which according to Makela stood for “get rich quick.” But even if Zeke could prove Na‘auao owned all or part of the entity, it wouldn’t be enough. He’d also have to prove the land swap a sham. Only then would he be able to make a bribery case stick. Koa wanted a faster way.

  If Makela could entice Na‘auao to a meeting, she might be able to provoke an admission—recorded if Makela wore a wire. Seeking to set up such a meeting, Zeke and Koa brought Makela in and explained what they wanted her to do. “We want you to call Na‘auao and set up a meeting. Tell her you need to see her. You have information vital to her well-being, which you can’t discuss on the phone. Tell her to meet you at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Tomorrow afternoon at three. We’ll be listening and recording the call.”

  Both reluctant and nervous, Makela asked, “And if she balks?”

  “Tell her it has to do with Mary Jane Kinnon,” Koa instructed.

  “Oh, God, that’s the coed who hanged herself, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  “I have to do this to stay out of jail?” Makela asked.

  “Yes, it was part of your immunity deal,” Zeke responded.

  Makela sat composing herself for several minutes before she picked up the phone and dialed Na‘auao’s home number. A voice on the other ended answered “Aloha” on the second ring.

  “Aloha, Frannie, it’s Cheryl,” Makela began.

  “Cheryl, I haven’t heard from you in ages.” Na‘auao’s voice sounded cool. Koa wondered if she was already distancing herself from Makela.

  “It hasn’t been so long, Frannie. We need to meet. I have something you need to hear.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea with everything that’s … that’s going on.”

  “It’s pretty important. You’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

  “You’ll have to give me more if you want to meet,” Na‘auao responded.

  “It’s about Mary Jane Kinnon.”

  There was a long silence on the other end before Na‘auao responded with a single word—“Where?”

  “The Honolulu Academy of Arts at—”

  “No,” Na‘auao interrupted. “Someplace outdoors, where we can take a private walk together.” Na‘auao paused. “The Punchbowl cemetery, at the top of the steps. Tomorrow at three.”

  Makela looked at Koa. He didn’t much like the meeting place. It was too big and open. Monitoring the conversation would be hard, but at least Na‘auao had agreed to a meeting. He nodded to Makela.

  “Okay, see you there,” Makela responded, and the line went dead.

  The tenor of the call worried Koa. Na‘auao sounded suspicious even before Makela mentioned Mary Jane Kinnon, and the coed’s name would spook the DOE chief. Koa worried she might not show for the meeting, and even if she did show up, she’d be wary. She might even check Makela for a wire.

  The location of the meeting presented nearly insurmountable problems. The cemetery covered more than a hundred acres in a windswept crater above Honolulu. Its winding paths would enable Na‘auao to walk in unpredictable directions through wide-open spaces where it would be almost impossible for Koa to stay close and still remain undetected—especially since Na‘auao might recognize him. Worse, if the trade winds kicked up, the wind noise would likely make it impossible to hear their conversation. He’d need luck even with sophisticated surveillance equipment. Fortunately, with the meeting in Honolulu, Koa knew where to get help.

  Years before, Koa had caught Joe Po engaged in illegal electronic surveillance, but Koa had given the former CIA electronics spook a break because his spying had helped break up a Ponzi scheme. A bad act for a good cause. Thereafter, Joe had helped Koa on a number of police operations. Identifying Joe as an odd guy was a bit like calling a platypus an unusual duck. Forty years old, Joe weighed 300 pounds, wore mismatched clothes, and exhibited a teenager’s enthusiasm for Spider-Man, Han Solo, and James Bond. Weird and nostalgic, Joe knew his electronic spy gear and suffered an unfilled passion to play cops and robbers. He nearly always agreed to help the police and waived his usual fee. Koa called him and he agreed to help.

  “Describe your informant, male or female, body type, and hair,” Po said after Koa explained his predicament. When Koa described Makela’s thick white hair, Po proposed just the ticket.

  Koa, Piki, and Makela flew to Honolulu, rented a car, and drove to Spyland, Po’s electronics shop. It took Po nearly an hour to fit tiny microphones, a recorder, and a transmitter into Makela’s thick mane of white hair, but when he finished even her hairdresser couldn’t have spotted his handwork.

  “What if it’s windy and my hair blows?” Makela asked nervously.

  “Not to worry, My Lady,” Po responded. “The Russian KGB couldn’t find this little techno-marvel in a typhoon. It’s got microphones the size of pinheads, and we’ll have to cut some hair to get the equipment out when we’re done.”

&n
bsp; “How do I turn it on?”

  “Y’all don’t. It’s remote-controlled. Y’all just got to be your charming self. Forget the tech stuff. Y’all are wearin’ genius-level equipment. Nobody’s gonna find it no matter what happens. Uncle Po guarantees it.”

  “Okay, I’ll try,” she responded and snapped her head around, tossing her hair the way she’d done after removing her riding helmet the first time Koa visited her horse farm. It might have been a natural gesture or a small act of defiance. Koa couldn’t tell.

  “Koa controls the whole shebang with this.” Po held up a small point-and-shoot camera. Turning to Koa, he said, “This here button activates the receiver-recorder. And this here dial adjusts the volume transmitted to your earpiece. The recorder in My Lady’s hair records everything transmitted and the phony camera records everything received. That way, there’s a backup.”

  He handed the camera to Koa and fitted him with a tiny, nearly invisible, flesh-colored earpiece. “Go ahead. Test the little sucker.” Koa pressed the button while Po and Makela chatted and walked into the next room and back. It worked like a charm.

  “Amazing!” Koa said as he weighed the little camera in his hand. “I don’t suppose this gizmo takes pictures, does it?” Koa joked.

  “Oh, it takes pictures,” Po responded. “They just ain’t very good.” He shrugged. “Technology has its limits.”

  Koa didn’t care about pictures. When Joe had first explained the equipment, Koa had focused on a different technological limitation—the transmitter’s short range. Because of its extreme miniaturization, Po’s gadget broadcast only about three hundred yards. Yet, the roughly circular cemetery extended over more than eight hundred yards with winding paths across wide-open spaces where any observer would be visible. Koa suspected Na‘auao had chosen the Punchbowl for exactly that reason and wondered if she’d held other clandestine meetings there.