The Seattle police chief said “Too bad,” when she’d fired him. And Kawika had replied, “I’m Hawaiian. We’re used to chiefs sacrificing us.”
An impertinent thing to say, but Tanaka respected Kawika for it. Fortunately, Tanaka knew Kawika’s father, Jarvis Wong—had met him at a fishing club. For years now, they’d shore-fished as a team, the diminutive Japanese American and the outsized Hawaiian, spending long nights together on beaches and rocks, catching small fish for live bait, then setting their lines for hundred-pound giant trevally, known in Hawaii as ulua.
“My boy’s a cop,” Jarvis Wong told Tanaka one night on the beach. “Been on the mainland. Needs a job.”
“Send him to me,” Tanaka had replied.
That was how Kawika returned to the Big Island, the island of his birth, and took a job at Major Crimes in Hilo. Steamy Hilo: Hilo of the torrential rains, dark-in-a-downpour Hilo. Working-class Hilo: tired Hilo, run-down Hilo. Hilo, until recently Hawaii’s second largest city, but perhaps the city of least appeal to Mainlanders. Tanaka didn’t expect Kawika to stay. Hilo was just a place to gain experience, to start over. Tanaka guessed Kawika would make it to Honolulu in a few years. After that, Chief Wong, Mayor Wong, Governor Wong—who could tell? Iiko, iiko, Tanaka often told him, a Japanese parent praising a child. The kid was dutiful, exceptionally pleasant, trained in the field and at Tanaka’s knee, not just the academy. That would help him in this case. This case might help him in turn.
Kawika’s weak point, Tanaka thought, was his distaste for loose ends. He considered every bit of evidence a clue or a deliberate red herring. In real life, Tanaka had told him, the pieces don’t fit satisfyingly into a completed puzzle. Every case presents scores of facts and observations that simply elude understanding or explanation. The “strays,” as Tanaka called them, just don’t matter. What matters is justice, catching the guy who did it, wrapping up and moving on.
These lessons went hard with Kawika, Tanaka knew. A killer Kawika had chased into the Kā‘u Forest Reserve, a well-known druggie, had been found unconscious and disarmed, his hands cuffed behind him around a young koa tree. Why? Kawika kept sifting and resifting evidence to answer that nagging question, that why. Tanaka understood. In police work, he told Kawika, the fact that something’s true is more important than why it’s true.
Why someone cuffed the guy to a tree didn’t matter, Tanaka had told his young charge. “Maybe another dealer did it. Maybe a jealous husband. Maybe they wanted him to die. Maybe they just wanted you to catch him. Doesn’t matter. He was a killer, and you caught him.” Iiko, iiko: Good boy.
Chief Kalākalani broke Tanaka’s reverie, opening his door and inviting Tanaka into his office. Tanaka stood, shook hands, and pulled his mind back to the present.
“You sure Kawika’s right for this one?” the chief asked when they’d sat down, just as Tanaka had expected. The chief began chewing a malasada from a box Tanaka had brought for the occasion. “I know he’s got balls, that deal down in Kā‘u,” the chief said. “And I understand why Waimea asked for him. But still.”
Tanaka tried not to react defensively. “Well, he didn’t just catch that guy in Kā‘u, chase him into the forest; he solved the case on his own. Plus that other murder down in Puna, the wife killer. And anyway, I’ve got everyone else on Shark Cliff. Looks like there might be a meth war going on.”
The Shark Cliff case had indeed swallowed up Tanaka’s people. It had begun with an intrepid German tourist, a young woman who’d wanted a photograph looking straight down the cliff face at Waipi‘o. She’d secured a safety rope behind her and inched out until her telephoto lens pointed at the beach and breakers a thousand feet below. She saw activity in the surf line: big sharks. She watched through her long lens, realized what they were tearing—a human torso—and called 911. Arriving by boat, Tanaka’s team had found the scattered parts of at least three corpses, maybe more. Only one could be identified, a known drug dealer. Evidently someone had been dropping local druggies off the cliff.
Shark Cliff would be tough to solve. The dead druggies provided few clues, and others wouldn’t talk. Someone needed to bust some live ones, cuff them, push them toward the cliff edge, terrify them, get some answers. Tanaka had men and women suited to that work. Kawika wasn’t one of them. Despite single-handedly catching two killers, the cuffed-to-the-tree guy down in Kā‘u and the wife murderer in Puna, Kawika seemed an innocent, still green and finding his footing, even a bit naive, not yet thirty.
Tanaka knew Kawika wasn’t ready to menace a druggie at the top of Shark Cliff. He was still too squeamish and, more important, still too principled about law enforcement; basically a straight arrow. “Mister Clean” Tanaka called him—not entirely a compliment. But none of that necessarily meant Kawika couldn’t handle this case. Especially with backing from the Waimea police.
“Yeah, Shark Cliff—I get it,” said the portly chief, helping himself to another malasada. “Still, Kawika’s not very experienced. And this case could blow up: a dead haole over there with the rich folks. You think he’s learned? He stumbled pretty bad, back in Seattle.”
“But not really his fault,” Tanaka replied. “It was complicated. They thought he was Chinese American, sent him into Chinatown. Anyway, you know I’ve been training him myself? You’ve seen his fitness reports?”
“Yeah, I get that part too. Good training on the
