“We found neutrophils, all right, but no deteriorated ones,” Smith continued. “So the tissue was probably torn more than twelve hours but less than twenty-four hours before she died. Almost certainly the day before, not earlier.”
“And by then Fortunato was already dead,” Kawika said.
“By then I’d already handed you his heart in a pan. What about Kai? He a possibility?”
“Maybe. Could have happened that morning, I guess.”
“Well,” the doctor continued, “if it happened that same morning, we wouldn’t have found neutrophils. And we might have found some semen, not just sperm. But the seminal fluid was already gone—absorbed, eliminated. So maybe the night before? Shall we run Kai’s DNA, just to check?”
“Yeah,” replied Kawika. “And let’s run Ralph’s, too, while we’re at it. Take the guesswork out of those neutrophils of yours.”
“There’s no guesswork, Detective. It wasn’t Ralph. He didn’t do it.”
“Maybe, but I have trouble believing it wasn’t him.”
“I said he didn’t do it. I didn’t say he wasn’t responsible.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kawika asked, uneasily.
“Put it this way,” Smith replied. “Ralph didn’t shoot Joan, did he? But you’d agree he was responsible for her death?”
Smith looked straight into Kawika’s eyes. A challenge? An invitation? Kawika couldn’t tell. “Doctor,” Kawika said, trying to assert his authority, “if there’s something else you know about Fortunato, I need you to tell me.”
“Sometimes I think I don’t know shit,” Smith said, turning away. He raised his arm to shoulder height, extended his thumb and little finger in the shaka sign, and waggled his hand slowly.
“Hang loose, brah,” he said. He walked down the corridor, then through a particular door into a particular room: the room of grim business.
Kawika didn’t follow. He didn’t want to see Joan Malo again. Not that way.
18Hilo
Detective Sammy Kā‘ai, more experienced than Kawika, was also less squeamish. And Sammy was in charge of the Shark Cliff case. So, soon after his painful visit to the Waipi‘o beach, Sammy struggled out of bed and drove, still heavily bandaged and stiff, straight to the morgue in Hilo.
“We don’t take walk-ins,” said Dr. Elaine Ko, the medical examiner, looking him over.
“Very funny,” said Sammy, showing his badge. “I’m here to see that haole.”
“You mean Humpty Dumpty,” she said. “The guy we can’t put together again. All the king’s horses couldn’t even scrape him off the rocks.”
“But you told Captain Tanaka the guy’s got tattoos. Just show me those.”
“My pleasure,” she replied, leading Sammy into Hilo’s room of grim business.
She showed Sammy the corpse’s arms. One sported a tattoo of an anchor, the other an ancient Hawaiian fishhook, complete with tattooed fish line. Sammy saw even more.
“You were holding out on us,” Sammy said, leaning over the dead flesh.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Ko asked. “I gave you the identifying information.”
“What about this?” Sammy asked, pointing to the wrist of one arm, then the wrist of the other. “Someone removed something here, didn’t they?”
Frowning, Dr. Ko lifted one of the lifeless limbs. She studied it closely, even using a magnifying glass. Then she studied the other. Finally she looked up at Sammy.
“You’re right,” she said. “Someone removed a pair of handcuffs.”
PART TWO
HILO
The bones of Hilo are broken
By the blows of the rain.
—Nathaniel Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (1909)
19University of Hawai‘i at Hilo
“I’m not saying HHH didn’t do it,” Carolyn emphasized. “I’m just saying whoever did it is culturally illiterate.”
“I’m sorry,” Kawika said. “I should have let you finish. Try me again.”
“Okay,” she said, adding a quick smile, turning to meet his gaze. “But let’s get a drink first.” The day was hot and their clothes stuck to them. Carolyn poured herself chilled guava juice from the University’s woodshop cooler. Kawika chose a beer.
Carolyn had paused her sanding of the slender surfboard she’d carved from a single piece of koa wood and been fussing to perfect for months. She’d designed it as an exact replica of the historic surfboard of Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani—a very thin board with no fins, the type almost no one could ride anymore, even though in the late nineteenth century the teenaged Ka‘iulani had mastered it. Kawika looked at it appreciatively from the workbench where they sat.
“You don’t finish that thing, we’ll never get to take it out together,” Kawika teased. “But you are making it a thing of beauty.”
“It was beautiful to begin with,” Carolyn sighed. “I just copied her design. A hundred years since she died. Maybe I’ll have it done for the bicentennial, yeah?”
“Along with your dissertation, right?”
Carolyn poked him but laughed. “She’s easier to channel through a piece of koa than she is to write about, that’s for sure. At least I’ve finally finished my research. But writing a dissertation is hard, especially in Hawaiian. We have a lot of words for some things and no words for others.”
“At least no one else knows enough Hawaiian to grade it,” Kawika quipped.
“Ha-ha. I wish.”
She smiled and turned in her seat, and for the second time picked up one of the photographs he’d brought. Gliding a finger across it, she said. “First, this so-called heiau isn’t just inauthentic—it isn’t a heiau at all. A heiau has straight walls, not curved ones. A heiau’s filled with packed soil. This has grass on top. Someone might argue this isn’t the heiau, it’s the lele, the altar. That would fit with finding the body on it. But the altar would generally be entirely of stone. It would stand on the heiau, surrounded by structures. Here, the tee itself is the only structure, and nothing’s standing on it.”
“I think it’s supposed to resemble a heiau,” Kawika said. “Not be one, just resemble one.”
“The resemblance is pretty faint,” Carolyn responded. “To me, it’s just a structure on a golf course. It’s tasteful, because this is the resort’s signature hole, right? But it’s just a filled-in retaining wall built with lava rock.”
“Okay,” he said.
