Fire and Vengeance Read online

  The previous year, Ikaika, on parole after a burglary conviction, got himself mixed up in a child sex ring. After a complicated investigation, Koa ultimately arrested his brother but fought against parole revocation—to no avail. Hardy Moyan, his brother’s parole officer, despised Ikaika, telling the parole commissioners that he was “a mean, nasty bastard with no moral code, a violent streak, and an uncontrolled temper.” Ikaika’s involvement in the sex ring hadn’t helped. He wound up sentenced to a minimum of four more years behind bars. Worse yet, Hawai‘i had contracted with a corporate prison company to house its convicts in Arizona.

  Looking at Ikaika, Koa thought of a split screen. On the left half, Koa saw his handsome baby brother cradled in his mother’s arms, waiving some household object and cooing with delight. On the right-hand side, he saw Ikaika, his knuckles bruised and face bloodied with a malicious snarl, after beating some classmate to a pulp. Koa couldn’t reconcile the two halves of the screen nor comprehend the tortured route that led from one to the other.

  Ikaika refused to acknowledge that Koa had fought to keep his brother out of prison. Instead, Ikaika blamed Koa for all his problems, and Koa wasn’t going to convince him otherwise, so Koa changed the subject. “How was the trip back here from Arizona?”

  “A goddamn joyride, sittin’ in the last fuckin’ row in cuffs with the motherfuckin’ tourists starin’ at me. Just like one of ’em paradise posters.”

  Koa had promised himself not to rise to his brother’s bait, but Ikaika’s self-pity rubbed his nerves raw. Koa displayed self-restraint when he was on the job, but when it came to family, he found it difficult to control his emotions. He wanted to say, “You’ve got only yourself to blame, little brother,” but instead asked, “When are you scheduled to testify?” His brother had been blackmailed into helping a criminal gang prostitute runaway children and had been returned to the Big Island to testify at the trial of one of the gang’s leaders.

  “No ask me. They don’t tell me shit.”

  That, Koa thought, had the ring of truth. “I asked, ’cause Māmā’s coming in to see you.”

  At the mention of his mother, Ikaika’s face softened, and his whole body relaxed like someone had pulled a plug letting the tension drain out. Māmā, something of a mystic, had defended and protected Ikaika no matter how outrageous his conduct, and she alone had the ability to reach through his convict shell to his core.

  “When?” Ikaika asked.

  “Your sister is driving her in from Laupāhoehoe as we speak.”

  Ikaika, who’d been pacing the room like a caged animal, slumped into the chair across the table from Koa.

  Koa, responding to the change in demeanor, softened his tone. “So, pehea, how are you doing, little brother?”

  “Shitty. Being locked in a cage ain’t a fuckin’ picnic. Every damn day is the same. Time don’t move much.”

  “At least you look fit.”

  “Yeah, well, workin’ out is as good as it gets in da slammah, an’ you gotta bulk up or else the other cons screw you over.”

  Koa understood how that worked. “You want something to eat? Something different than prison crap. There’s a Mickey Dee’s down the block. I could get you a burger and fries.”

  “Sure. A triple cheeseburger, an’ maybe you could score a couple lines of snow. Be good to get high.”

  Koa just shook his head. Why, he wondered, did he bother? Leaving to get the food, a sense of sadness rushed over him. Something had happened to Ikaika growing up and prison had turned him ever more bitter and violent. Koa had seen it in other criminals, but witnessing it in his own family depressed him.

  When he returned with the food, his sister, Alana, was standing outside the interrogation room, looking distressed. In physical appearance, Koa’s baby sister took after their mother, short of stature with a roundish face, flawless golden-brown skin, long black hair, and inquisitive black eyes. She lived with their mother, worked as a part-time social worker, and shared her mother’s passion for native medicine. Unlike their mother, she couldn’t tolerate Ikaika, largely because of the pain he caused Māmā. After taking a drag on her cigarette, she said, “Māmā’s inside with Ikaika.”

  “You’re not going to visit him?”

  She scowled. “Spend time with my bastard brother. No way. The cops should never have brought him back here. Māmā’s going to be upset for weeks.”

  Koa understood. Ikaika’s violent behavior had ripped fissures like earthquakes in his family. Mauloa, Koa’s middle brother, had given up on Ikaika and hadn’t visited him in years. His sister, Alana, spoke to Ikaika only when it couldn’t be avoided. As the oldest Kāne male, Koa tried to maintain a relationship, but every effort ended in acrimony. He’d once talked his fisherman friend, Hook Hao, into giving Ikaika a job on Hook’s commercial fishing vessel, the Ka‘upu, the albatross.

  “So, you like me be one swab on a stinkin’ boat?” Ikaika had mocked.

  “It pays okay and Hook’s good to his people,” Koa responded.

  The job had lasted four days before Hook fired Ikaika for assaulting another crewman. Somehow, that, too, was Koa’s fault.

  When Koa entered the interrogation room, he found Ikaika sitting beside his mother. She had her hand on his arm, while he pleaded with her. “… It’s hard, Māmā. It’s hard being in a cell.” In a deeper, sharper voice, he turned on Koa, hate blazing in his eyes. “And my big-shot brother does nothing to get me out.”

  Koa had seen and heard it all before. For Ikaika, truth was not the truth. Something in his psyche required him to blame Koa for every tragedy that befell him.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, Māpuana knew her youngest son’s nature. “‘A‘ole, my keiki, it is not Koa’s fault you are in jail. It is the result of your own actions.” Only Māpuana could speak the truth without provoking Ikaika, but her words still went unheeded.

  Koa pushed the McDonald’s bag across the table, and Ikaika ate like he’d been starved half his life. When he finished the triple cheeseburger and three orders of fries, Māpuana produced a container of haupia, and Ikaika wolfed down a dozen of the sweet coconut cream custard squares. Koa knew only Māpuana’s presence prevented Ikaika from complaining about the absence of the cocaine he’d requested. Although the thought dishonored his sense of family, Koa secretly felt glad that Ikaika would soon testify and be on a plane back to Arizona.

  When he returned to the command center, a news report on a TV caught Koa’s eye, and he stopped to watch. A short woman with brown hair and tears in her eyes stood on the street with the KonaWili school in the distant background. Firemen still pumped water onto the south end of the building and clouds of steam and yellow smoke still billowed upward.

  The banner across the bottom of the screen read: “Mica Osbourne, missing child’s mother.” The woman, her hair frazzled and her face contorted with grief, barely controlled herself. “They should never have built a school on top of a volcanic fault. They killed my baby girl. The government killed my baby girl, and they can’t even find her body.” The image shifted to a picture of her child, a beautiful little girl with bright black eyes and dark hair in pigtails, tied with pink bows.

  Images of the dead and injured kids flashed through Koa’s head. For a moment, he was back inside the classroom, nauseated by the smell of sulfur dioxide and choking on the yellow smoke. Once again, he held the little girl he’d rescued. And the little boy. He saw the dead kids lying in the pouring rain, so real he might have reached out to touch them. The slideshow from hell. He’d seen horrible sights in Afghanistan and Somalia, visions he’d suppressed only after a thousand sleepless nights, but he’d never forget the night just past.

  As a detective, Koa worked to create a bond with the victims of the crimes he investigated. He retraced their paths, walked in their shoes, breathed the air they breathed, and tried to think the way they thought. It fostered his empathy, powered his pursuit of justice, and made him a good detective. His empathy for the KonaWili kids needed
no battery, no jump starter. Their innocence powered his fury at the adults who’d put them in harm’s way.

  And it had been foreseeable. The super-thick concrete meant the builders knew of the risk, and they couldn’t have acted alone. Planners, architects, and inspectors must have visited the site. They must have seen the concrete and asked questions. Koa couldn’t imagine what would possess a whole cadre of professionals to put schoolkids at risk. It wasn’t negligence, not with those concrete walls. It was deliberate. Greed motivated people to take extraordinary risks, but he couldn’t imagine a conspiracy of avarice reckless enough to endanger a school full of children. Some more sinister evil lurked behind the KonaWili disaster. And the faces of those poor kids would haunt him long after he cornered the culprits.

  The image of Mica Osbourne’s little girl stuck in Koa’s mind. He tried to imagine a parent’s grief at the loss of a child. How would he feel if it were his child? Maybe a child he’d have with Nālani, his girlfriend. The idea was too awful to contemplate.

  He and Nālani had been living together for three years, and, after he’d suffered several failed romances, she brought him profound joy. Still, there were strains in their relationship. Both had been working crazy hours. He’d had a series of tough cases, and Pele’s eruptions at the summit and in Puna had doubled Nālani’s normal workload as a national park ranger. They hadn’t had a weekend off in over two months, but their last break had been spectacular. They’d driven to Hōlualoa to celebrate tūtū’s eightieth birthday.

  Nālani’s grandmother had raised nineteen children and knew more about parenting than Dr. Spock. As all too often happens among poor Hawaiian children, Nālani came into the world as the illegitimate daughter of a seventeen-year-old meth addict and an older lowlife who disappeared into the prison system. Tūtū saved Nālani and taught her to excel in school, college, graduate school, and as a biology researcher before she returned to the Big Island. Koa had first seen her at a fundraiser and been smitten.

  Fourteen of tūtū’s charges came to honor their surrogate mother’s eightieth. Nālani wasn’t surprised that her younger half-sister, who lived on Maui and had been in and out of drug programs, wasn’t there. The party had been a lovefest with ‘ahi poke, kālua pork, poi, fish laulau, squid lū‘au, and a dozen haole dishes. Tūtū had more energy than most of her “children” and spent time with each of them individually, learning about their lives and dispensing wisdom. If there were saints in heaven, Koa figured tūtū would ultimately claim her place.

  On the drive back to Volcano, Koa had asked Nālani about her private conversation with tūtū. Nālani put him off and that only made him more curious. They were nearly back to their little cottage before Nālani said, “She told me not to let you get away.”

  “She’s a wahine akamai, a brilliant woman,” he quipped, and they both burst out laughing.

  Recollections of their last outing reminded Koa that they hadn’t talked in many hours. He’d texted her a couple of times during his long afternoon and endless night at KonaWili, but there hadn’t been time to talk. He called. “Good morning, my ipo,” he greeted her with his favorite Hawaiian endearment.

  “God, you sound exhausted. Are you okay?”

  “One of the longest and most painful nights of my life.”

  “It’s as bad as they say on TV?”

  “Worse. I can’t get the images of those kids out of my head. And it didn’t have to happen.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath. “What do you mean?”

  He told her about the concrete.

  “My God, Koa, they killed those kids.”

  “Yeah. The builder killed those kids and he didn’t act alone.”

  “I’m so sorry, Koa.” She paused and a long silence followed. “Where are you?”

  “Back at headquarters.” He told her about his visit with Ikaika, describing the hostility in Ikaika’s eyes. She, like Alana, wanted little to do with Ikaika, who resented her place in Koa’s life and missed no opportunity to express his dislike.

  “Pilikia ho‘i kau a lohe mai,” she said. Serious trouble indeed.

  Little did he know how serious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THAT THE BUILDERS concealed a volcanic vent beneath an elementary school profoundly shocked Koa. He needed to warn the mayor and the governor before word leaked, triggering a political frenzy. Every parent of a school-aged child would clamor for heads to roll. But before sounding the alarm, Koa wanted to confront Hank Boyle, owner of Boyle Construction, shown on the plans as the general contractor for the KonaWili school. Boyle must have abandoned the original plans in favor of the massive walls, flooring, and fire door sealing off the classroom at the south end of the building. Koa needed to know why.

  When Koa wanted the lowdown on someone, he turned to Detective Piki. Piki, the most junior of his detectives, looked younger than his age, especially with his crew cut, and bubbled with energy and enthusiasm—in Koa’s experience, too much enthusiasm. Still, Piki displayed hacker-level skill at mining information from public and law enforcement databases. After some digging, Piki found a picture and generated a profile of the sixty-four-year-old contractor.

  Boyle’s father had raked in a fortune from land development in the 1950s and ’60s before starting Boyle Construction to build homes in subdivisions he’d created. A classic double dip. Hank Boyle inherited the business and parlayed Boyle Construction into one of the largest government contractors in the state. A major contributor to Democratic political candidates, he lived in a mansion outside the tiny, historic mountainside community of Hōlualoa, south of Kona. Ironically, not too far from Nālani’s tūtū.

  Koa and Piki took Route 180 south past coffee farms, funky little art galleries, and Hōlualoa’s historic, pink Kona Hotel, infamous for its bathroom perched all by itself at the end of a long, elevated walkway overlooking Kona and the Pacific. They turned onto a private road, climbed the side of Mauna Loa volcano to a stately white colonial mansion, and parked next to a pickup truck emblazoned with the Boyle Construction logo. Six wide steps led to a portico graced with white columns. Piki rang the bell but got no response.

  Music blared from inside the house—a radio or perhaps a television—but a second and then a third ring brought no response. Koa walked along the porch peering through the windows. Lights blazed inside, and at first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then the view through the second window to the left of the front door stopped him cold. He’d get no answers from Hank Boyle, whose lifeless body dangled at the end of an electrical cord.

  They broke the door down and rushed into the house. Boyle hung like a crippled puppet in the center of a small office. Koa checked for a pulse, but Boyle would never again need medical help. Koa then stopped to study the scene. His own criminal experience informed his penetrating eye. Having staged a fake suicide and fooled the cops, he was uniquely qualified to spot the inconsistencies in a crime scene, compulsively suspicious, and paranoid about being misled. And recently, he’d begun snapping cell phone pictures. Ronnie Woo, the police photographer, would shoot the official pictures, but Koa liked having his own pics.

  He worked the process in phases. His first impression of a crime scene frequently proved critical, and he’d learned to let his mind absorb every detail. He searched for telltale signs, inconsistencies, something out of place, anything that didn’t belong, what should have been present but wasn’t. Later, he would reassess his early impressions in light of crime scene photos, forensics, witness statements, and any other evidence. Finally, when he had a suspect, he’d repeat the process, making sure the pixels came together to form a coherent picture.

  Koa slowly cataloged the scene in his mind—an old wooden desk, a straight-back chair, file cabinets, bookcases, and a floor lamp. An empty glass. A half-empty bottle of Glenlivet single malt whiskey on the desk. A section of brown electrical cord sliced from a floor lamp, leaving neatly chopped ends. Koa looked around for a cutting tool but saw none. Odd. The chair—s
urprisingly still upright—stood where a man hanging himself might have kicked it away. Koa looked from the chair to the body and back again.

  Boyle—matching the picture Piki had turned up—hung on a brown electrical cord from a twisted ceiling fixture, his neck stretched and body naked, save for a pair of boxer shorts. His arms hung limply at his sides with fingers straight and nails undamaged. He hadn’t tried to save himself, an oddity in hanging cases. Unlike most hangings where the victim dies gasping for air, Boyle’s mouth remained closed. Petechiae—tiny red blotches—covered his face.

  Suicide held tenth place as a cause of death in the U.S. People aged forty-five to sixty-four accounted for the majority of suicide victims, and men killed themselves four times more often than women. Firearms led suffocation, mostly by hanging, as the most common method. Suicidal men often mustered their courage with alcohol. And Boyle certainly had a motive to do himself in. He’d built an elementary school over a volcanic vent, triggering the deaths of fourteen children and four teachers. To a less perceptive cop, the scene showed all the earmarks of an open and shut suicide.

  To the man who’d successfully faked Hazzard’s suicide, the discrepancies in the Boyle hanging radiated like a heat lamp—the body hung too high off the floor. A man standing on a chair to hang himself inevitably ends up with his feet dangling below the height of the chair seat. Boyle’s feet hung a good two inches above the height of the chair seat. Humans harbored a powerful instinct to live, and most suicides made a last-ditch attempt to save themselves, but Boyle’s straight fingers and unbroken fingernails meant he’d made no effort to tear the electrical wire from his neck. And while Koa knew red pinpoints of petechiae commonly appeared in hanging suicides, there shouldn’t be any on the face. In a full-suspension hanging, the noose tightens above the victim’s heart. Blood pressure in the head drops and gravity drains the blood down from the face. Petechiae might be present elsewhere on the body, but not on the face. Koa had little doubt Boyle had been unconscious, maybe even dead, before someone staged a fake suicide.