By the time he got there, a light rain had begun to fall. There wasn’t any wind. The surf was heavy and loud from big swells. Sammy pulled up his hood and bent his face toward the beach, searching for any evidence—a wristwatch, a wallet, a ring—they might have missed before, preoccupied as they’d been with body parts and flesh.
What caused Sammy to look up was a pebble bouncing off his hood. He felt a whap, then saw the pebble skitter among the rocks at his feet. Other pebbles began to bounce nearby. It took Sammy a moment to realize the stones were falling from the cliff. He turned his face skyward, expecting a rockfall and already moving backward, trying to get out of harm’s way. What he saw instead was a body falling toward him—a body falling straight down, right next to the vertical cliff face. Sammy froze, his mouth wide in disbelief. A plummeting stone sliced his chin. He dove behind a boulder and missed seeing the body hit the beach, the actual impact, but he heard the sound—a percussive whoomph like a muffled explosion.
He didn’t hear a scream.
At the hospital in Hilo, Sammy received Tanaka’s undivided attention. They spoke while doctors X-rayed and bandaged injuries from his dive behind the boulder, and even while they stitched up his chin.
“Good work,” Tanaka said, patting Sammy on an arm wrapped in gauze and Ace bandages. Good work, though not Iiko, iiko.
Sammy had provided Tanaka something to go on. “Now we know the murders aren’t over—they’re still happening,” he said to Sammy. “The killers can act by day. Whoever this latest guy is, he’s a haole, unlike the others. And thanks to you, we know he wasn’t conscious when he hit.”
“Wasn’t conscious the whole way down,” Sammy insisted. Sammy had been a paratrooper in the Army. He’d pushed dummies out of planes to test the wind above a drop zone. The victim’s fall had been the lifeless fall of a wind dummy. “I think he was dead, Terry.”
“Dead or unconscious,” Tanaka replied. “It doesn’t matter. The others might have been knocked out too. The point is, this guy changes what we thought. He changes the pattern.”
“Not necessarily,” Sammy observed. “Maybe he isn’t part of the pattern.”
“Copycat, you’re thinking?”
“Maybe,” Sammy replied. “Or maybe he’s just a stray.”
9Puakō
As a little boy in his father’s embrace, Kawika sometimes felt he could drown in flesh. Even now, Jarvis Wong’s huge arms engulfed his son. Kawika’s cousin, eleven-year-old Ku‘ulei, squirmed happily, waiting impatiently for the paternal hug to end. “Kawika, Kawika!” she exclaimed, over and over. She began to jump up and down.
The Wongs had reunited at Jarvis’s house in Puakō, the once-sleepy village where Kawika had spent summers as a boy. Back then, Puakō had been home to artists, beach bums smoking pakalolo—pot—and resort workers like his father. Now the money had begun to show up. Puakō was changing.
Kawika scooped up his cousin, nuzzling her with mock ferocity. She screamed in delight. Ku‘ulei’s mom was Kawika’s aunt, his dad’s unfortunate younger sister, a stoner down in the jungles of Puna on the windward and wet side of the island. Ku‘ulei lived with Jarvis now, attending private school in Waimea. The Mauna Kea Beach Resort, Jarvis’s employer, paid part of her fees through its employees’ scholarship fund, even though technically as a niece she wasn’t eligible.
“You’re working here?” Ku‘ulei asked. “Did something get stolen?”
“Someone got killed,” replied Kawika.
“Ooh,” Ku‘ulei said, turning thoughtful. “A bad person?”
“Bad? I don’t know,” Kawika replied, thinking, Desecration, adultery, who knows what else? “But even bad people shouldn’t be killed, should they?”
“Depends on how bad they are,” she answered sensibly.
Jarvis cooked a dinner of fresh fish outside on an old grate set on cinderblocks. Standing beside his father, a beer in one hand and his cousin tugging on the other, Kawika felt himself at home, yet growing ever more distant from his boyhood summers. The house still reflected Jarvis perfectly: a tin-roofed shack on stilts to keep the sea out when storms carried surf over the lava rock wall that Jarvis and Kawika had built together years before. A hibiscus border grew through cyclone fencing. The driveway was a patch of reddish earth surrounded by an irregular fringe of mongrel grass. Surfboards and fishing rods rested on rusty brackets on the street-facing wall. Kawika winced at the surfboards. He hadn’t surfed on the Kohala coast for a long time. He barely found time to surf near Hilo.
Kawika realized that with South Kohala’s skyrocketing real estate prices, even Jarvis would be tempted to sell his place sometime soon. This house would be torn down, sold to a Mainlander with money and an architect, someone who’d have fun designing a vacation dream house for a tiny oceanfront lot.
“Folks here are selling out,” Kawika said. “I see a fancy new place every time I come.”
“Nice people moving in, though,” said Jarvis optimistically. “Lots of activity. Always an interesting place, Puakō.”
For twenty years—most of Kawika’s life—Jarvis had been head groundskeeper at the Mauna Kea. Jarvis liked tending his trees and tropical plants, riding the tractor mower over familiar terrain; he was a supervisor who worked with his crew. The Mauna Kea indulged him in this and other ways. Smart management, Kawika always thought.
Dinner proved complicated. Ku‘ulei insisted on sitting on Kawika’s lap, as if she were five or six again. “We’re studying the gods in school,” she informed him. “Lono, right now. We’re making leis and ti leaf mats. We’re going to do an offering—poi and poke and stuff. Then we’re going to study Pele.”
“What about Kū?” asked Kawika, his mind on a god who demanded human sacrifice. “You gonna make offerings to Kū?”
“Who’s Kū?” asked Ku‘ulei, turning to Jarvis.
“The god
