PART ONE
SHARK CLIFF AND SOUTH KOHALA 2002
The end of that wind,
The end of this wind,
Join and cause a whirlwind.
—Fragment of a chant from E. Smith, C. Handy, K. P. Emory, E. H. Bryan, P. H. Buck, et al., Ancient Hawaiian Civilization (1933)
1Waipi‘o and South Kohala
Detective Kawika Wong landed by boat and spent the day with Hilo Major Crimes picking body parts off the rocky beach and cliff face far below the Waipi‘o Lookout. Kawika’s boss, Captain Terry Tanaka, and Kawika’s older colleague Detective Sammy Kā‘ai seemed almost unperturbed, as if picking up body parts were somehow routine. But Kawika wasn’t feeling well.
Maybe it was the sharks. Not just the thought of sharks—the imagined vision of them tearing the broken victims—but actually seeing the sharks, a whole school of them lolling sluggishly at the surface just outside the surf line, rousing themselves at the sound of the police boat like cats at the clink of a bowl. Kawika, repulsed, had struck at one with the body retrieval hook. Then they’d scattered.
Maybe it was the boat itself, unsettled on the sea, unsettling Kawika’s stomach as he tried to watch the waves and the beach and the looming cliff face all at once, his eye not able to avoid—his eye in fact searching for—the bits of human flesh scattered here and there on waves and beach and cliff alike.
Or maybe it was imagining the fall, Kawika’s sense of what it must be like to be thrown from a cliff, to plummet a thousand feet through darkness, accelerating, the wind tearing unheard screams from the throat—those tumbling last seconds, all too easily imported into Kawika’s dreams.
Whatever it was, the next morning it woke Kawika before first light and sent him hurtling to the bathroom, uncertain at first whether to sit on the toilet or kneel before it. He stayed there a long time. Kawika lived alone. His girlfriend, Carolyn, hadn’t joined him this night, so Kawika had no bedmate to disturb by bolting from bed. But neither had he a bedmate to calm him, to banish those sharks.
Later, as the sun rose and faced Hilo, Kawika sat with his cup of coffee and faced it back. He rubbed the night’s poor sleep from his eyes and tried to settle himself. He often did this before work, especially these past few months, ever since the silent skies right after 9/11 had left every Islander with a sudden sense of Hawai‘i’s isolation and vulnerability.
When the phone rang, Kawika was shaving, leaning forward at the bathroom sink of his small rental house and thinking about those tiger sharks just outside the surf line, waiting at the foot of the cliff. He welcomed the interruption. Grabbing a towel, he wiped shaving cream from his face and picked up the phone.
“Pack your toothbrush,” said Captain Tanaka. “You’re headed to South Kohala. Woman found a dead guy at the Mauna Lani resort this morning. Someone killed him on a golf course with an old Hawaiian spear, ancient maybe. The division chief in Waimea asked for you by name. They want a ‘real Hawaiian’ to take the lead, he said, because of that old spear and some other evidence, cultural stuff. And someone from over here, objective, because of some local controversy there, something about Native Hawaiians and developers.”
“A real Hawaiian?” Kawika replied. “That’s a bit of a stretch, Terry. You know what happened in Seattle, that time the chief thought I was Chinese American. It’s risky, picking people by their names.”
“I know,” Tanaka said, “but he wants you over there, and you’re smart. You’ll figure it out. So I gotta pull you off the Shark Cliff case.”
“After one day, boss? I was just getting my stomach back.”
Tanaka arranged the Major Crimes helicopter to fly Kawika to the scene. As the chopper rose over the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the great volcanoes of the Big Island, and as the leafy rainforest and tree ferns gave way to the dry expanse of barren Kohala, Kawika thought, It began as a simple homicide investigation—or so he imagined. Kawika read murder mysteries. He always had. During a case he’d often wonder how a mystery writer might present it, how a fictional detective might approach it, what the book’s first line might be.
He reached the Mauna Lani just after eight AM, landing on a fairway by the ocean. A Waimea cop lifted the yellow tape, and Kawika ducked under it. He crossed the lawn to an elevated oceanside tee box built of lava rock and resembling an ancient Hawaiian heiau, or temple. Kawika climbed the steps, then stopped. The victim—a middle-aged haole, or white person—well-dressed but barefoot, lay in a pool of bloody grass. Kawika saw the thin wooden stake protruding from the dead man’s chest. A Hawaiian spear, all right.
Kawika could guess what someone intended him to see: an ancient human sacrifice.
“Any of you know him?” Kawika asked the Waimea cops. All four shook their heads. With a nod, he turned the crime scene back to them. Before squatting down to watch their work more closely, he flipped open his cell phone and called Tanaka.
Two hours later, evidence gathered and body removed, Kawika stood alone on the championship tee box. It provided a breathtaking view of the sea beyond the Kohala shoreline bound in black lava rock and beyond the vivid green of the golf course. Just below him, spray from the surf added saltiness to the pungent marine air. Play continued on the South Course, with a spare hole at the clubhouse placed into service. The fifteenth hole—the Mauna Lani’s signature hole, an over-the-water par 3 featured in all the resort’s advertising—remained off limits. Curious golfers, slowing their carts as they detoured around it, could see Kawika on the tee box, looking up and down the coast, then back at the resort, then out to sea.
Turning away from the view,
