Eleven-year-olds have a lot to say. Kawika had time to listen. He’d decided to start his suspension by taking Ku‘ulei on a trip in his convertible. First he drove her to Volcanoes National Park so she could see Pele in action. Then he planned to return to Hilo the next day, so she could see a celebrated hula troupe perform. In the car she talked constantly, sometimes just chattering but other times speaking with utmost seriousness.
“Most boys in my class are named Keanu,” she declared at one point.
“Really?” asked Kawika. It wasn’t a name he’d heard in his youth.
“Really,” she assured him. “The teachers decided to call them Keanu M or Keanu L or Keanu K, depending on their last names. But that didn’t work—our class has three Keanu Ks.”
Kawika chuckled. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of K’s in Hawaiian, don’t we?”
“Kawika and Ku‘ulei,” she said brightly.
“Well, yours really is Hawaiian,” he said. “Mine’s just turned into Hawaiian, from David.”
“Who’s David?”
“My uncle,” Kawika replied. “My mom’s brother.”
“Keanu Reeves was named for an uncle too,” Ku‘ulei informed him.
“Hmm. Maybe his uncle’s real name was Dean. You know, K for D.”
“Nope,” she said, shaking her head. “Keanu means ‘cool.’ We learned that in Hawaiian class.”
“‘Cool?’” he asked.
“Yup,” she said. “‘Cool.’ Or maybe ‘cold.’ Ke means ‘the,’ and anu means ‘cold.’ But I just say ‘cool,’ because Keanu Reeves is cool.”
When they reached the town of Volcano, they bought some water. The day was quiet, and with the car top down they heard songbirds—first a few, then dozens. Kawika and Ku‘ulei looked this way and that, searching for a flash of bright plumage in the forest canopy. But the songbirds remained hidden, just as they had in the kīpuka.
Soon Ku‘ulei was skipping along a trail near Kīlauea’s great crater. She tugged Kawika’s hand, forcing him to keep up.
“You know what?” she asked. “Madame Pele is really mean.”
“Because she destroys things?”
“No, because she destroys people. Turns them into plants.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” said Ku‘ulei, obviously happy to explain. “Once there were two lovers, but Pele was jealous. She wanted the man herself. So she chased the lovers along the shore. She was going to kill the woman. The man told the woman, ‘Stay on the beach. I’ll climb up in the mountains, and Pele will follow. You run away.’”
“So what happened?”
“Well, Pele caught the man in the mountains, and she was really angry, so she killed him. Then she turned him into a plant—the mountain naupaka.”
“She did?”
“Yes,” said Ku‘ulei sternly. “She did. Then she ran back down the mountain. She caught the woman on the beach and killed her too. She turned the woman into shore naupaka.”
“You’ve seen them, these plants?” he asked.
“Oh yes. They both have little half flowers. You take a flower from one and a flower from the other, put them together, and they make a whole flower.”
“Keanu,” he joked. He’d already learned that legend from the Mauna Lani’s shoreside interpretive sign—though Ku‘ulei told the story better.
Ku‘ulei punched his arm. “It is cool,” she insisted. “When you join the flowers, the two lovers are together again.”
Kawika was apart from his two lovers. He’d taken Ku‘ulei on the trip partly to gain a respite from them both, to think, to get a grip: “Cool head main ting.” But his cousin’s tale of Pele’s vengeance unsettled him. So after taking their things to the room at Volcano House, Kawika ditched his cousin briefly in the gift shop and made quick calls, two in succession.
“Just checking in,” he said both times, still indecisive, still—he knew—a jerk.
If not worse.
48Hilo
When Tanaka suspended Kawika, both men took it seriously, but neither of them expected Tanaka to manage the case for long. The baton was never really passed. Tanaka focused on immediate tasks: getting a call with Shimazu nailed down, calling Honolulu for police accountants to review KKL’s books, pushing the search for Peter Pukui and Melanie Munu and Jason Hare, and ordering the arrest of the Murphys. He waited a day, then had the Murphys picked up, brought in, and fingerprinted in Hilo.
“Book ’em, Danno,” Tanaka told his sergeant, who’d heard this many times before. The Murphys, accompanied by the lawyer Ted Pohano, were not amused.
It took the Murphys a few hours to make bail. Their criminal lawyer flew in from Honolulu. Pohano was still around. Tanaka made sure to show up for their release.
“You’re upset,” he told them. “Just remember, I could have publicized your arrest, but I didn’t. Think about that.”
The Murphys and their lawyers didn’t speak. They just glowered.
“I come from a family of sugar cane cutters,” Tanaka said. “We worked on your plantations. We’d start at one end of the field and cut all the way to the other. The cane’s high, it’s thick, and there’s all kinds of interesting stuff in there: bottles, old tools, maybe even some bones. But when you’re cutting cane, you don’t stop. Later on, when the work’s done and it’s quitting time—pau hana, Mr. Pohano—that’s when you go back and take a look at what turned up.”
Again, no one responded. They didn’t seem to understand Tanaka’s point.
“Right now, our work is to solve a murder,” Tanaka continued. “Not Peter Pukui’s—we have no reason to believe Peter is dead”—he nodded sharply toward Pohano—“but Fortunato’s.”
Ignoring their lawyers, Tanaka looked sternly at the Murphys. “And as for Fortunato, you were the last people to see him alive. You were his enemies. His Teva was found at your door. He never got his sandals back on; his feet had grass stains and cinders. And he was murdered near your house. The next day, you told people he’d threatened you. Then you fled the scene of the crime. Now you’re all lawyered up and you refuse to answer questions. That’s enough for me—it’s not how innocent people act. It’s how guilty people act, and right now you’re the only people acting that way. That’s why I charged you.”
Mr. Murphy started to say something, but the Honolulu lawyer grabbed his arm. “All that’s purely circumstantial,” the
