The hunters group, too, lost interest once KKL was dead. It was rough country, that land, and never had much game to speak of.
Kawika continued to work for Tanaka, but he never had to menace a druggie at Shark Cliff. The great Shark Cliff development was that Sammy Kā‘ai managed to solve the case—most of it—and rescue Peter Pukui at the same time, thanks to help from an alert Waimea cop. The night after Tanaka’s press conference, the cop stopped a car traveling without lights on the dead end road from Honoka‘a to the Waipi‘o Lookout. The driver and his two passengers couldn’t explain why the fourth man in the car, the terrified one on the floor, eyes wide in the beam of the officer’s flashlight, was bound and gagged, with his mouth taped shut for good measure.
The fourth man was Peter Pukui. Fortunately, the Waimea officer had approached the driver’s window with his gun drawn; there was no resistance. He ordered the three young men to lie face down on the pavement, disarmed and cuffed them, and radioed for backup.
Sammy Kā‘ai got to take the Hilo Major Crimes helicopter this time. Once again, Sammy wrapped Peter Pukui in a blanket to keep him from going into shock. Then Sammy joined the Waimea cop in standing over the prone young men. With police pistols pointed at their nineteen-year-old heads, in quavering voices the three admitted being heroin dealers, Peter Pukui’s suppliers and kidnappers, the ones who’d brought cash to Hilo for Peter’s bail. Finally, still lying on the road, and even after receiving their Miranda warnings, they also confessed to being the Shark Cliff murderers.
By that point they were all in tears, shaking with sobs. One had urinated all over himself. “The notorious crybaby killers,” Sammy said with contempt. “Pathetic.”
At the station, where Sammy separated them, the leader of the three turned out to be the bad penny grand-nephew of the granny who’d fled the lava flow threatening Pāhoa. He’d been smart enough to change plates on granny’s car, but not lucky enough to get Peter Pukui all the way to Waipi‘o Lookout without being stopped. He admitted they’d been holding Peter captive in Honoka‘a, waiting for Melanie Munu to arrive with money extorted from Michael Cushing. But then they’d watched Tanaka’s press conference on television and learned Melanie was dead, her body exhumed at Waiki‘i Ranch. At that point they had decided just to toss Peter off the cliff.
The earlier Shark Cliff victims, the killer said, weren’t meth war casualties, just druggies he and his buddies thought knew Peter, and from whom they’d tried to learn his hiding place. They’d finally been told by another druggie—the one Sammy had turned loose when Peter had climbed up out of Waipi‘o Valley—that the Hilo cops had Peter in custody. That’s why they showed up in Hilo to assure Peter’s release on bail.
Even at the station, though, the three Shark Cliff killers vehemently insisted they knew nothing about the other victim, the one Sammy had dubbed the Handcuffed Haole. To Sammy, the Shark Cliff investigation seemed incomplete as a result.
Eventually, the Handcuffed Haole turned out to be a man named D. K. Parkes, a for-hire boat captain who’d sometimes skippered the Mahi Mia for Thomas Gray out of Kawaihae Harbor. Sammy patiently established this, working from the man’s anchor and fishhook tattoos and finally showing the flyer around Kawaihae. But that was as far as Sammy could get with the Handcuffed Haole. He’d discovered the man’s identity, but not the motive for his killing. No one who knew him thought D. K. Parkes was a druggie.
Kawika, on the other hand, asked Corazon Fortunato about Parkes, once his identity became known and Kawika had a photo of him to show her. She confirmed that her husband had sometimes fished on Mahi Mia with Thomas Gray and this Mr. Parkes. Kawika then had no doubt who’d killed Parkes: someone who killed killers. Someone who’d killed Fortunato and the Duct Tape Mummy. Someone who’d gone to the blackboard to spell the word banana and hadn’t known when to stop.
So Kawika identified D. K. Parkes as Fortunato’s probable accomplice in the Thomas Gray murder—and the third victim of Kimaio’s vigilante justice. But Kawika didn’t report his discovery officially or tell Sammy. Instead he just told Tanaka quietly, “For Shark Cliff, this D. K. Parkes, the Handcuffed Haole, is a stray—just what Sammy first suspected. He helped murder someone, but that case is unrelated to Shark Cliff. And in that other case, the killer’s dead too. Trust me.” Tanaka, seemingly incurious, did precisely that, somewhat to Kawika’s surprise. It was as if Tanaka already knew.
Soon, Kawika recognized, Tanaka would begin hinting that the time had come for Kawika to advance his career in Honolulu. So Kawika flew to Honolulu for a day, ostensibly to check out a job but really to question Cushing before he was transferred to Walla Walla. “What happened between you and Joan Malo?” he asked. “The night before she died, I mean.” With his lawyer present, Cushing was eager to talk. He insisted his story would prove someone else had murdered Fortunato.
“That night, I was completely freaked out,” Cushing said. “Someone had just killed Ralph in the exact spot and with the exact type of weapon I’d planned. But it wasn’t Rocco, and I still had in storage the ihe I was going to give him; it was an untraceable one. Yet whoever did it stole my ihe, the historic one, to kill Fortunato in order to frame me, and somehow they knew my plan.”
“You thought Joan Malo knew your plan?”
“I had no idea,” Cushing said. “Maybe she’d somehow
