“Kawika!” she said, jabbing him playfully. “You think everyone in HHH has lots of Polynesian blood? Where’ve you been, Kawika? We’ve got, what, about two dozen Polynesian Hawaiians on the whole Big Island?”
“More than that; don’t exaggerate.”
“Okay,” she conceded, “maybe three dozen.”
“P,” he protested.
“Kawika,” she insisted, “the old Hawaiians are gone. We’re all Hawaiians now—you, me, even Jason Hare. It’s not old Hawaiians or even just Native Hawaiians who organize things like HHH. It’s Hawaiians, Kawika. Hawaiians.”
“You’re a Hawaiian?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes, Kawika,” she insisted. “I’m a kama‘āina Hawaiian. I just happen to be from San Francisco.”
Kawika considered her point of view. She stirred against him. “Well then—aloha,” he said, not accepting what she’d said, but kissing her, rolling her slowly onto her back.
“Aloha,” she murmured in reply.
“Aloha ‘oe,” she added somewhat later. Kawika understood what she meant; it wasn’t farewell. They both smiled.
When Kawika next woke, it was nearly morning. Patience slept soundly. He rose quietly, slipped on his shorts, and crept out to the lanai. Except for the waves, the night remained silent. Kawika started thinking about how to write his first report on the murder of Fortunato.
A mystery writer, Kawika mused, might choose to write:
Wrapped in her Japanese bathrobe, a beautiful young tourist stepped out of her condominium to observe the sunrise, stretched her arms, and then saw on the championship tee, built to resemble an ancient Hawaiian temple, what appeared to be a body, and sticking out of it, a spear.
Or:
Wrapped in her yukata, a beautiful young kama‘āina haole stepped out on her lanai to see the sunrise touch the distant summit of Haleakalā, and then saw on the championship tee, built to resemble a heiau, what appeared to be another haole, dead, with an ihe plunged into his chest.
It would depend on what audience the author intended. What audience had the killer intended? Why the ancient spear and the heiau? The olonā-fiber cord? The puzzle fretted him. But at the moment the beautiful haole herself—and his faithlessness to Carolyn, his long-time girlfriend—fretted him more.
He’d just been unfaithful for the first time. Before Carolyn he’d hooked up with women in the Hilo dating scene, but nothing serious. The start of his relationship with Carolyn had nearly overlapped with the end of another. But Carolyn had soon become different.
The relationship was serious; it had been going on for two years. Carolyn knew Jarvis, and she’d even met Kawika’s mother and stepdad. True, she’d declined to move in with him—she wanted to finish her PhD dissertation, not get distracted by domesticity; the PhD was hard enough, and writing it in Hawaiian made it harder. And after her PhD, she was thinking of leaving the Big Island to do land restoration work on the barren island of Kaho‘olawe. So their future wasn’t clear, and they’d never said in so many words that they were exclusive. But that flimsy fact didn’t give Kawika much comfort; exclusivity had certainly been understood.
Making things worse, an eyewitness to the murder, someone indispensable to the investigation, had discovered Kawika and Patience making love—or starting to. Kawika wondered how long his secret could last. He could easily imagine the truth coming out, what the consequences might be. Yet he still had a murder investigation he needed to focus on. He didn’t know what—or who—he wanted now, except to find the killer.
He’d been thinking for an hour when, wrapped in her yukata, the beautiful young haole came up behind him—silently, on bare feet—and opened the robe, taking his head in her hands and pressing it against her breasts. He could smell their lovemaking on her skin.
“Come back to bed,” she said. “I want to hear you calling me P again.”
“P,” he protested, gently nuzzling her. “I’ve really gotta go. I have to get back to Hilo. And I’ve gotta stop in Waimea on the way.”
“C’mon!” she laughed, pulling him from his chair, tugging him toward the bedroom. “Just four minutes!” she insisted. “Four minutes! You can spare four minutes!”
“Four minutes?” he asked incredulously.
“Doctor Ruth says any woman can satisfy a man in three minutes,” she said firmly. “And as we’ve already demonstrated, you can satisfy me in one.”
17Waimea
Only three days had passed since Dr. Terrence Smith, in green aloha scrubs and red moustache, first strode down the shiny, waxed linoleum corridor of North Hawai‘i Community Hospital toward Kawika. This time Dr. Smith did not look jaunty.
“You look grim,” Kawika said.
“This is grim business,” Smith replied.
“Did you know them, the Malos?”
“Everyone knows everyone here.”
“So I’ve heard. Were they friends? Your patients?”
“No.”
“So tell me what you found.”
“Wanna go inside, take a look?” Smith asked. He lowered his chin and looked steadily at Kawika from above his glasses.
Kawika hesitated.
“Didn’t think so,” Smith said. “Well, there’s no need. It’s an old story: boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy shoots girl three times in the chest.”
“Anything unusual in the autopsies?”
“Like what? Kai Malo drunk or drugged up? No. But he didn’t shoot her in the face. Couldn’t bring himself to do it. Which could indicate he really loved her.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yeah, something. I’ll write it up. I found lacerations in Joan’s rectal tissue. Took some samples, ran some tests. Turns out she’d had forceful anal intercourse. Very recently.”
“Forcible?”
“No, forceful. Meaning, no lubrication. Except saliva maybe. Torn tissues. Could have been assault, could have been consensual. No way to tell.”
“Consensual? With no lubrication?”
Smith shrugged. “It happens,” he said. “Anyway, what we got on the swab was sperm. No lubricants.”
“Whose sperm?”
“Good question,” Smith said. “We’ve got tissue here from Fortunato and Kai Malo. We can’t run DNA tests here; we have to send things out. Costs a few hundred bucks a pop.”
“What can you tell me now? Anything?”
“Yeah, one thing: Fortunato didn’t do it.”
“How do you know?” As soon as he asked, Kawika wondered if he’d just missed something, but Smith didn’t pause.
“Did a biopsy on the lacerated tissue,” Smith went on. “Looking for little guys called neutrophils. That’s how we date lacerations. Blood starts clotting at once, but tissue doesn’t
