“But Terry,” Kawika asked, “have we gone from thinking it’s okay if the right guy gets caught to thinking it’s okay if the right guy gets killed?”
“Kawika,” replied Tanaka evenly, “in this case the right guy was caught. You forget—he hired Rocco.”
Kawika met Tanaka’s gaze. It was softer than a stare but not nearly as paternal as it had been once. “I owe you a lot, Terry,” Kawika finally said. “I owe you just about everything. I do appreciate your watching my back, protecting me. Believe me. I really do. Thank you.”
Tanaka nodded in acknowledgment, then brushed his palms together quickly, as if ridding them of crumbs. “So, you ready to get back to work?” he asked. Kawika recognized it as a test. A pause followed—but not a long one. Kawika had already made up his mind.
“If you want me to,” he replied, trying to sound game. “More than that, I’m even ready to scare a druggie for you out at Shark Cliff.”
Tanaka didn’t laugh, but he smiled. The smile wasn’t warm, yet it was the first smile Kawika had seen from Tanaka in a long time.
“I think you can help,” Tanaka said, getting up to leave. “And yes, I want you to.”
He didn’t add, Iiko, iiko.
Epilogue
“I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing.”
—Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929)
Michael Cushing pleaded guilty to killing Fortunato. The prosecutors insisted, and they already had him for Melanie’s murder and the attempt on Kawika, using Rocco. It wasn’t worth the sentencing risk to reject the plea bargain and go to trial, his lawyers told him. He began serving time on O‘ahu, but after threats from Hawaiian inmates, the authorities isolated him and made plans to transfer him to Walla Walla.
Carolyn, too, went to Washington once she received her PhD. She couldn’t get to Kaho‘olawe for restoration work—nothing had really started yet—and the rest of Hawai‘i just depressed her. She met Jimmy Jack in the Methow Valley, having contacted him through Kawika. She took a job with the Bureau of Land Management as a specialist in rangeland management and native species restoration. On weekends she worked with Jimmy and helped him apply for grant money. Together they made advances in biological methods of dry land weed control, discovering, for example, at what growth stage Russian knapweed seems particularly palatable to Angora goats. Madeline John taught Carolyn to ride on a horse named Monte, and sometimes Carolyn helped Madeline trap cats.
Of course, Madeline told her about Patience, but by then it didn’t matter. Carolyn had ended her relationship with Kawika, and Kawika had summoned up sufficient character to tell her the truth about his faithlessness, or much of it. “Well,” she said, “we were always better friends than lovers,” but unlike friends, Carolyn and Kawika didn’t stay in touch. She did travel to Washington, DC, each year on behalf of Kaho‘olawe restoration groups, working with Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation to get more funding. But she didn’t go home, not even to Maui.
One day Carolyn and Jimmy rode across Jimmy’s property to check the progress of some parasitic Dalmatian toadflax beetle grubs they’d planted as an experiment. Unexpectedly, Jimmy pulled up his Appaloosa and turned to Carolyn, who gently reined Monte to a halt.
“By the way,” Jimmy said. “This is where he did it. On this ridge, right here—this spot.” He spread his arms, offering the entire view.
“Who?” Carolyn asked. “Did what?”
“Your detective friend. This is where he figured out who killed that scumbag Fortunato. And he figured it out from my phone number—partly anyway.” Jimmy shook his head and smiled appreciatively, then leaned out from his horse and spat. “For all the good it did him,” he added.
Carolyn felt confused; she’d understood from the official story that Rocco had killed Fortunato, and that Kawika hadn’t figured it out. Yet here was a spot where Kawika had stood, marked as precisely by Jimmy’s spit as if by a stone cairn on the trail to the kīpuka. So Carolyn turned, accepting Jimmy’s offer and taking in the entire view, the same panorama of snowbound peaks Kawika must have seen. Jimmy heard Carolyn’s sharp intake of breath, as if without warning some god of love had given his deeply buried spear a twist.
Kiku Takahashi, the assistant curator at the Kohala Historical Museum, eventually checked and found that the museum’s absent four-barbed ihe had not been loaned to the Bishop Museum. Kawika, meanwhile, grew to suspect that the unidentified spear above Cushing’s door might belong to a collection accessible to Dr. Terrence Smith. Kawika waited for a day when Smith was at Kohala Historical as a volunteer, then took the javelin there and handed it to Takahashi in Smith’s presence.
“You missing this?” Kawika asked.
“That’s it!” she cried. “That’s the one! Where did you find it?”
Kawika explained in a few sentences. “Thank you, thank you!” she said. “Oops, I mean mahalo nui.”
“Glad to help,” Kawika told her. To Smith he said, “Walk me to my car.” Smith complied. “If I dusted that spear for prints, I’d find yours, wouldn’t I?” Kawika asked. He was still cataloguing the ways this particular blackboard boy had helped his dying patient.
“Detective,” Smith replied with a smile, “on the day I first met you, we both already knew not to handle an ihe without gloves.”
That taunt reminded Kawika—as if he needed a reminder—that despite struggling with indecision, he’d finally made a decision of great consequence. Stubbornly, he’d stuck with it. He’d let Kimaio go. He could have exposed him, blown the whistle,
