“Yeah, but not before the last one caught me,” said Kawika, giving his cuffed hands a shake.
PART EIGHT
HILO
The Discovery anchored off Waikiki, and in or near that place three natives were arrested and charged with having had a part in the killing of the English officers. After an extended inquiry, the three accused men were pronounced guilty and were shot to death with a pistol in the hands of a native executioner in a canoe alongside the Discovery. Vancouver was fully satisfied of their guilt, but there is much testimony indicating rather conclusively that they were innocent and that the guiltiest person of all, a minor chief, wholly escaped punishment.
—Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom (1938)
73Hilo
Terry Tanaka went ahead with his press conference. Kawika’s absence irritated him—he assumed Kawika was in bed with Patience Quinn in South Kohala. Pretty irresponsible, Tanaka thought, especially since she could’ve been a witness, if not a suspect. Anyone but Kawika, Tanaka thought, I would’ve had the guy up on misconduct charges. But there could be no delay of the press conference. The story was out, the media had assembled. Lights and cameras were already set up. Police Chief Haia Kalākalani was here, hands folded beneath his substantial belly and smiling for the photographers. It remained only for Tanaka to step to the microphone.
Tanaka announced that Michael Cushing had been arrested and charged with the murders of Ralph Fortunato and Melanie Munu and the attempted murder of Detective Kawika Wong. Tanaka explained that Cushing had hired a California contract killer named Roger Preston, or Rocco, for all three crimes, and that Rocco had left a confession, which someone—not the police—had extracted before dropping him, fatally, from a helicopter into Cushing’s convertible.
“Has the confession been corroborated?” someone shouted.
“Yes,” Tanaka explained, “the confession has been corroborated in key respects. Melanie Munu’s body was found where Rocco indicated, along with the baseball bat he’d used to kill her. The rifle and ammunition found in his motel room matched those in Kawika’s shooting. Cushing admitted owning the spear that killed Fortunato, and Fortunato’s hands had been tied with a piece of ancient fishing line from Cushing’s home. This, too, fits Rocco’s confession.”
“What about motive?” someone called out. Fortunato and Cushing were defrauding their investors, Tanaka responded. They’d had a falling out. Munu was killed to prevent her exposing the fraud. Detective Wong was targeted because Cushing believed Detective Wong had cracked the case and would soon arrest him.
“Had he cracked the case?”
“No,” Tanaka answered. “Detective Wong had not solved the crime at the time of his shooting, when he was evacuated to the mainland for his own safety. But he would certainly have cracked the case otherwise.”
“Did Rocco’s abductors botch a plan to drop him into Cushing’s car alive?”
“We don’t know,” Tanaka said.
“Who were his abductors?” a reporter asked.
“We don’t know that either,” Tanaka said.
“What’s your best guess?”
“We think,” Tanaka said, “that Rocco may have been abducted by a particular Hawaiian native group—one I won’t name, since we don’t know for sure.” Tanaka knew the news media would figure it out; they had S&R’s press releases.
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe it was cultural self-defense,” Tanaka suggested. “This particular group—sorry, it wouldn’t be right to name it—took offense at Cushing trying to frame ethnic Hawaiians for Fortunato’s murder. Of course, perhaps the group’s motive was different. Some individuals opposing KKL had been getting paid under the table by Fortunato—pretending to fight a developer while secretly conspiring with him in a fraud.”
“So could Rocco’s death have been a revenge killing?” another reporter called out.
“Sure,” said Tanaka. “After all, this particular group, which I’m not naming—well, some members relied on Fortunato for cash. Fortunato’s death cut that off. Maybe it made them angry enough to kill the hit man. Who knows? Unless someone talks, we don’t have much to go on.”
“Is anyone talking?”
“No one from this particular group,” Tanaka said. “They refuse to cooperate with the police.” Then he added, “To me that means they’re lawless.”
Tanaka told the assembled reporters nothing about the Methow Valley or anything related to it. Despite requests from the media, he declined to make the text of Rocco’s confession public. He told Chief Kalākalani he didn’t want the Cushing arrest story complicated by a separate story about a federal prosecutor’s murder on the mainland. The Feds had the confession now.
“Let them deal with that part,” Tanaka told his boss. “It’ll be big news in Washington—both Washingtons, actually.”
74Hilo
So it went. Kawika heard a replay on the radio as he drove through the night, very late, to reach Hilo. For a second time in the case, he got Tanaka out of bed, and for a second time he was worried as he did.
“You’re safe,” Tanaka said coldly on the doorstep, not even letting Kawika inside. “That’s what matters tonight. I don’t care about your love life. See me tomorrow.”
Kawika hadn’t mentioned Kimaio or the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve. He hadn’t had the chance before Tanaka closed the door. Kawika wasn’t sure he would have mentioned them anyway.
By the time Kawika got back in the car, it was far too late to call Carolyn about the missed dinner, much less call Patience, who—despite Tanaka’s assumption—was still on the mainland. And circumstances could not be worse. By confirming horrors Kawika might choose never to divulge—and confirming, too, that Kawika’s phone calls weren’t private—Kimaio had effectively put Kawika’s love life out of its misery. He’d have to change his phone number, at least. But even so, Kimaio and Joe Crane would find a way to keep monitoring him. And the things he couldn’t divulge would make any normal phone conversation impossible anyway.
Just when I’d finally decided, Kawika thought. “Shit,” he said aloud.
75Hilo and Berkeley
Carolyn worried, of course, when Kawika didn’t show up and didn’t call. But she realized she also felt relieved. In truth, she’d half-dreaded seeing him; she wasn’t ready. The relationship wasn’t right, she told herself. She loved
