He drove fast, hiked fast, and reached the tree quickly. Soon, Kimaio stepped out of the shadows, moving silently over ground thick with twigs and fragrant leaves. Kawika realized Jimmy Jack must have taught him that trick, although Kimaio looked so reed thin he might have been weightless. He pointed a handgun at Kawika and dangled a pair of handcuffs.
“Let’s put the cuffs in front,” Kimaio said. “More comfortable.”
“Don’t need cuffs. I’m not armed.”
“No. But you’re young and healthy.” Kimaio coughed. “And very dutiful.” He threw the cuffs at the base of the tree. Kawika hesitated. “I will shoot,” Kimaio warned. Kawika walked to the tree, sat with his arms and legs around the narrow trunk, and cuffed his own wrists.
“Okay,” Kimaio said. “Who should start?”
“Who has the most to say?” replied Kawika.
“Fair point,” said Kimaio, nodding. “Then I’ll go first. I wonder what you must think of me.”
“That matters to you?”
“Oh yes. And to you, I might add.”
Kawika took a deep breath. “I think you’re a good man,” he said. “A good man who made a bad mistake.”
“Not as good a man as you, then?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Kawika replied. “That’s how I think of myself too.”
“Yeah, you’re cheating on two women. But you never killed anyone?”
“My mistakes did.”
“Nothing premeditated, though?”
“No.”
“You know why I did it, right?”
“Yes, I know.”
“But you wonder how I justified it?”
“I have to warn you: I’m going to be a tough sell.”
Kimaio rubbed his eyes, as if very tired. “Sorry about Rocco shooting you,” he said, changing direction. “I couldn’t control everything. Despite what you think, we didn’t tap every phone on the island.”
“Or bug every room?”
“Or bug every room.” Kimaio reached into a knapsack. “Water?” he asked. This time Kawika refused, though he was thirsty and even cuffed he could have drunk from the bottle Kimaio offered, the tree was so slender. “We didn’t have Rocco’s phone,” Kimaio continued. “We had Cushing’s by then, but he must’ve used another line the first time he called Rocco about you. Rocco was headed to Hilo when we picked up Cushing calling him again. We had to scramble to get there in time.”
You didn’t get there in time for the first three shots, Kawika thought.
“That why you didn’t save Melanie Munu?” Kawika asked. “Because you couldn’t get there in time?”
“Yeah. Like I said, we didn’t have every phone on the island. We didn’t have Rocco, and we didn’t have Melanie. Rocco killed her before we could find him.”
Kawika didn’t respond.
“Okay,” said Kimaio. “You are a tough sell. But just to recap: we couldn’t control everything, all right?”
If you can’t control everything, Kawika thought, maybe you shouldn’t play God.
“Point number two: I didn’t set out to kill Ralph Fortunato. I set out to catch him. I devoted years to that. But I ran out of time. I didn’t have long to live. And Ralph didn’t either.”
Kimaio must have noticed Kawika’s questioning look.
“We tapped Ralph’s phones,” Kimaio explained. “We didn’t have Cushing’s at first, but he used Ralph’s office phone to call Rocco in California. That’s when Cushing hired him to kill Ralph.”
“You could have reported it,” Kawika said. “You heard Cushing hire a hit man.”
“Yes, could have saved Ralph from Rocco. But what an unhappy ending—me dead, Ralph alive and free.”
“You could have charged Fortunato himself. You had evidence from the tap. Cushing told Rocco that Fortunato bragged about having hired him to kill Steve Kellogg, right?”
“Yeah, but Cushing didn’t mention Steve Kellogg when he called Rocco,” Kimaio said. “Probably never knew his name. And Rocco didn’t kill Kellogg. He was in jail. Finally—”
“Wait—go back. You could’ve had the FBI bust Rocco back in California, worked your way up from there.”
“Let me finish. Finally, as I was about to say, the tap was illegal. We couldn’t use anything from it, directly or indirectly. Fruit of the poison tree and all that.”
“Because your court order had expired?”
“Only good for one year,” Kimaio said. “We tried for an extension. Couldn’t get it. This was nearly year four.”
“And for the other taps and bugs and cell phone monitoring, you had no court order at all, did you?”
Kimaio smiled. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “We were like little boys who went up to the blackboard to spell the word ‘banana’ and didn’t know when to stop.”
“You tapped and bugged everyone—spied on all of us—with no authority at all?”
Kimaio shrugged. Kawika couldn’t stop himself from shaking his head. He wondered, If you weren’t going to save Fortunato, why didn’t you just let Rocco kill him? But he knew the answer, thanks to Edgar Allan Poe.
“You told Fortunato who you were, before you killed him?”
“He knew me from Fawn Ridge,” Kimaio said. “I didn’t tell him I was dying. I told him Cushing had hired Rocco to kill him. I said it was more fitting for me to do it.”
“You didn’t act alone.”
“I killed him myself. No one else. I wouldn’t have let anyone else.”
“But you had help.”
“Not in killing him.”
“Who’s ‘we’ then? The little boys who went up to the blackboard?”
“You know who ‘we’ is.”
“You, your phone company buddy Joe Crane, and I’m guessing Jason Hare? At least you three.”
Kimaio waited, as if to see if Kawika would add more names. But Kawika switched to a different thought.
“Joe Crane ran your wiretaps? Installed your bugs?”
“We flew together in Nam. I joined the FBI. Joe went CIA.”
“So later he worked for the phone company? First in Washington, then here?”
“That’s how you do wiretaps. A guy works for the phone company.”
“But not bugs?”
“No, not bugs or other surveillance. That’s dark work.”
“Dark work Joe learned in the CIA?”
“Had to learn somewhere,” said Kimaio.
“And Jason Hare? Another Vietnam buddy?”
“Nope. Didn’t know him there. Recruited him here.”
“Based on Agent Orange?”
“Hardly. He was a grunt on the ground, a guy who got sprayed. Joe and I did the spraying, got exposed that way. Joe’s okay though.”
“You flew together?”
“Yeah, choppers. Most Agent Orange got dropped from planes. Not all.”
“Choppers,” repeated Kawika. “You boosted the chopper and the van
