“Good.” Mainland guys, wrote Tanaka. “Anyone else?”
“Who’re we missing?”
“Michael Cushing?” Tanaka suggested. “Sometimes the number-two guy offs the number one.”
Kawika smiled and shook his head. “Talk about someone who didn’t have to act innocent,” he told Tanaka. “You should’ve seen him with Tommy and me that day, Terry. The guy was scared he’d be next—scared shitless.” Tanaka frowned—at the word shitless, Kawika realized. “Sorry, Terry,” he said. “How about ‘The guy was quaking in his slippas?’”
Tanaka smiled and moved on. “Well, what about Ms. Quinn?” he asked. The woman who found the body.”
That startled Kawika. He tried to imagine Patience as a diabolical killer, someone whose every action since he’d met her could suggest a guilty person trying to act innocent. Someone who was toying with the police, with him. It seemed crazy. Could it fit? He had to think for a moment. Finally he said, “Everyone else has some kind of motive. What would her motive be?”
Tanaka smiled. “Good,” he said. “Iiko, iiko. Still, does she have an alibi?”
“Probably the same alibi everyone has for a murder at midnight,” Kawika replied. “Asleep in bed.”
“Then see if she might have had a motive,” Tanaka suggested. “She’s a writer. Who knows? Maybe she wants to write real-life murder mysteries, has to start out with real murders.”
“Ah, Terry, c’mon. She wasn’t acting when I told her the victim was Fortunato. She was really shocked, almost fell over. Not scared, like Cushing, but genuinely shocked.”
Tanaka shrugged and smiled slightly. “I’ve gotta go work on Shark Cliff,” he said. “And by the way, there’s nothing on the dead haole yet, the handcuffed guy. Nothing about the cuffs either. They didn’t leave distinctive marks, not like those on Fortunato.”
“Hmm. Maybe no connection,” Kawika said. “Well, go ahead then. I’ve got this under control, I think. This helped a lot.”
“You feeling confident?” Tanaka inquired.
“Yeah,” Kawika answered. “Generally.”
Tanaka laughed, seemingly proud of the protégé who’d become his colleague. “Iiko, iiko,” he said, for the third and final time.
26Hilo
“You know Fortunato’s been murdered?” Kawika looked across the desk at Bingo Palapala, the county official who’d granted the bulldozing permit.
“Yeah. I heard.”
“You hear how he died?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty bad, eh?”
“We all gotta die.”
“It’s possible he died because of the permit you granted. I want to know why you gave it to him.”
“He brought us the right report. No reason not to give him the permit.”
“You give lots of permits to bulldoze old heiau? Ones built by Kamehameha?”
“Have you read the report?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” Bingo Palapala vanished. When he returned, he slapped a half-inch-thick document on the desk. “Here,” he said.
“What’s it say?”
“Read it yourself.”
“How about a quick summary?”
“Okay, mister. First, this wasn’t a heiau.”
“What? Not a heiau?”
“It was probably just a boundary marker.”
“Boundary marker for what?”
“For an old land division, an ahupua‘a. Maybe a boundary marker, or maybe an ahu, an altar where people put their tax money. Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t significant and it was already destroyed. Nothing but a pile of rocks.”
“Wait a minute,” Kawika said. “The University team said it was a heiau Kamehameha built for Pele, to stop a lava flow. Vancouver’s men saw the human sacrifices. They wrote about it in their journals.”
“Mister, you and the University don’t know shit,” Bingo Palapala said. “No one made human sacrifices to Pele. They made them to Kū. Kū was the god of war, see? Pele was the goddess of fire. So stick with washing people’s shirts, Mr. Wong. Now get out of here.”
“Not so fast.” Kawika brushed off the racist slur; with Wong as a surname, he’d heard it before.
“Yes, mister—so fast. Go read the report. KKL’s on lava from Mauna Loa. Mauna Loa never threatened any Kohala fishponds in Kamehameha’s time. That came later—forty years later. Kamehameha was dead. Guess what died with Kamehameha, mister? The old religion. Heiaus. Human sacrifice. Got the picture now?”
“You’re saying the English never saw a lava flow that threatened his fishponds?”
“Maybe the English saw a lava flow; who gives a shit? It would’ve been the 1801 lava flow. That one came from Hualalai, not Mauna Loa, and it hit the ocean in Kona, not Kohala. You’ve seen it yourself, mister. The airport’s built on it.”
“So you’re saying …?”
“Whatever the English saw, it had zilch to do with this broken-down piece of shit on KKL’s land. There was nothing to save and no reason to save it. Now get the fuck out of here.”
Kawika got the fuck out of there. The menace from Palapala clung to him like sulfurous steam from a fumarole. He went to his office, adrenaline pumping, skimmed the report, and called Tanaka in the field.
“Terry, the County guy’s scary. But he’s got some cover. The private archeology report says whatever Fortunato bulldozed wasn’t even a heiau. It might’ve just been an old boundary marker.”
“You’re kidding. Not a heiau?”
“Nope, if that report’s right. I’ve got an idea, though. Remember after S&R yesterday, Carolyn said destroying an archaeological site could be a federal crime? Maybe it’s not a heiau, but even an ancient boundary marker is still an archeological site.”
“Not a crime if he had permits.”
“Yeah, but what if he got the permits by fraud, like S&R says? Then there could be a federal investigation, right?”
“Where you going with this?” Tanaka asked. “We’ve got our own investigation.”
“The Feds have better tools.”
“Which tools?”
“Plus the Feds investigated this before, when Fortunato blew up that Indian site,” Kawika went on. “So I’m thinking when I see Frank Kimaio, our retired FBI guy up on Kohala Mountain, I’ll pick his brain about how the FBI ran their investigation, what exactly they did. Maybe they can learn things we can’t.”
“Which tools?” Tanaka repeated.
“Well, wiretaps for a start.”
“Just a start, Kawika?”
“Yeah, Terry. And the Feds can use a grand jury too.”
He hung up, thinking about the pile of rocks, the bulldozer, and what Patience had
