Death in Hilo, page 16
Chief Ana Carvalho had asked Kawika to come to Hilo, the county seat and center of Big Island law enforcement, so that she could interview him, her former HPD colleague, for her official review of the Fortunato and D. K. Parkes murder investigations. For Kawika, there was no avoiding it.
The chief had said she assumed the two cases—Fortunato and Parkes—were unrelated, apart from Sammy Kā‘ai having suggested that Kawika and Tanaka had committed improprieties in handling both. That was a relief. But Kawika knew the cases weren’t entirely unrelated. And he’d now told his three colleagues, all of whom worked for Ana Carvalho, that the cases were not unrelated, at least as he saw them. He knew all three were unhappy with him; he’d kept secrets from them too long, having confided only in Elle.
Driving over the Saddle Road, which had been a twisting two-lane ribbon of blacktop when he’d lived in Hilo and a gravel track only a few years before, Kawika had intended to concentrate on what to tell Ana. He hoped to keep the Fortunato and Parkes cases separate and his story and Tanaka’s straight. But he found himself distracted by how the Saddle Road had changed.
The road’s undulating and impossibly sharp curves, treacherous in the fog that often blanketed the route, were in the process of being flattened, widened, gently banked, and transformed into a major highway. A sign said the highway would be named for the state’s recently deceased U.S. Senator, Daniel K. Inouye, like practically everything else in Hawai‘i that had been named or renamed since Inouye’s death. He probably found the funds for his own memorial, Kawika thought. “No more naming highways for Kamehameha’s wives,” he muttered aloud, thinking of the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway linking Kona with Kohala—the Queen K, a road he traveled every time he visited the Big Island.
Driving the Saddle Road, unrecognizable now, made Kawika reflect that he hadn’t returned to Hilo in more than a decade, via the Saddle Road or otherwise. As he mused, his cell phone rang. Yvonne Ivanovna.
“You driving, boss?” she asked.
“Yup. What’s up?”
“You’ll want to pull over for this. Trust me.”
So Kawika pulled over. He’d just reached the dry desert of the Humu‘ula Saddle, high on the point of convergence between the two great volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, at nearly seven thousand feet. He rolled down his window. The air was surprisingly cold, and he enjoyed the unusual sensation. He could look up and see snow on the observatory-festooned summit of Mauna Kea.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m parked and all ears.”
“We found Keoni Parkes’s place in Honolulu,” Yvonne said without preliminaries. “It’s a small bungalow on Catherine Street in the Kaimukī neighborhood. And it’s definitely the murder scene. Looks like something out of a horror movie.”
Yvonne explained that the Honolulu police had redoubled their efforts to locate the O‘ahu residence of someone named Keoni Parkes. They’d even checked the Honolulu suburbs and nearby towns. Finally, someone reminded the others that the Hawaiian name Keoni meant John. Then, when Yvonne had stepped away from the Slasher investigation for a few hours, intending to check in with the Keoni Parkes team just briefly, she’d been the one to suggest—when no John or Jack Parkes turned up—that maybe they should try Parker instead of Parkes. And sure enough: in Honolulu, it seemed, Keoni Parkes had called himself John Parker. He’d rented the Catherine Street house under that name.
Once they had his name, the police discovered they also had a week-old missing-person report for John Parker. A man named Jay Goddard had filed it the previous Saturday, when John Parker hadn’t shown up in Honolulu as Goddard had expected on Friday night.
“As you might expect, Jay Goddard is young and gay and handsome like Keoni,” Yvonne related. “He’s an IT manager for a tech firm. He describes himself as John Parker’s partner. Not live-in partner, but more than just a boyfriend. When Parker didn’t show up that Friday night, Jay went over the next morning to check. He couldn’t get in, but he saw John’s car was gone. He filed the missing-person report but worried that maybe John had just dumped him unceremoniously and run off with someone else. So he didn’t do anything to find him after that.”
“He thought his partner might just leave him,” Kawika asked, “without saying a word?”
“Yeah, according to him. And his fingerprints are all over the house, so I think they probably are partners of some sort. He says he and Parker normally spend Friday night at Catherine Street and stroll down to Leonard’s on Saturday morning for a malasada. He says they’re quiet, stay-at-home types. Don’t go out much or party. Jay claims they spend most weekends puttering in the garden and with the houseplants, watch a lot of movies, and Sunday mornings sometimes go to church—not Catholic ones. Right now Jay’s downtown in tears, basically stunned and uncomprehending. He’s being interviewed by the team.”
“Sensitively, I hope? No third degree?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Yvonne said. “He seems too broken by it all to be a suspect. He’s sobbing away, having trouble responding to questioning. Genuine tears, I think.”
Yvonne added that Jay claimed he had no idea his partner had worked for the TMT. He said John Parker had told him he managed cargo for the Port of Hilo. Jay never went to visit because John—Keoni, that is—said he couldn’t bear staying on the Big Island for the weekend.
“We’re looking for the car Jay says Keoni kept at the bungalow,” Yvonne continued. “Jay has an apartment in Kaka‘ako and a car of his own. We’re having both searched. Anyway, I got assigned to bring you up-to-date.”
“Thank you,” Kawika said. “I appreciate it.” So Keoni was leading a double life, Kawika thought. He recalled his father’s observation: A double life will make you miserable. And his own response: It can also make you dead.
“Tell me about the house and the murder scene,” Kawika asked.
Yvonne detailed it for him succinctly, like the skilled professional she was fast becoming. House a small bungalow, with no sign of forced entry. One bedroom, not recently slept in. Another room combining kitchen and dining area. Tiny adjacent living room for about four people. All well-kept, indoors and out. Nicely landscaped with tropical trees and plants. Small backyard with a cascading water feature. Interior decoration mostly very retro—1950s stuff—but also eclectic, with Tiffany lamps. Framed posters of stylized scenes from Palm Springs. Bakelite phones; he had a landline. Succulents for houseplants, all in tasteful vintage pots. Vintage record player, too, with lots of old Hawaiian vinyl—Linda Dela Cruz and Lena Machado—and other women singers, some old, some more recent. Nice aloha shirts and slacks in the closet. Flip-flops and Birkenstocks for slippahs. Well-equipped kitchen, and again, lots of vintage stuff—Mixmaster, percolator, Formica counters. Gardening tools hanging neatly by the back door.
“And then there’s the bathroom?” Kawika guessed.
“Yeah. And then there’s the bathroom.” Kawika imagined he could hear Yvonne shudder. She explained that Keoni had evidently been shot while bound to a chair in the kitchen. The police had found a gag and black plastic zip ties. The .22-caliber pistol, bought on O‘ahu recently and registered to Keoni Parkes, not John Parker—a fake name wouldn’t work for a firearms purchase in Hawai‘i—missing only one bullet from the clip. Pistol lying on the kitchen counter by the sink; ballistics folks had taken it and were checking it now.
After shooting Keoni, she said, the killer had taken his body to the bathroom and dumped it in the tub. “That’s where he cut him up. Right in the tub. As I said, it’s like a scene from a movie. I even wonder if that’s how our killer—an amateur, remember Dr. Yoshida said—got his idea of what to do, from TV and movies. Dr. Yoshida was right about the pruning saw too. It’s lying on the bathroom floor, right next to the tub.”
“Prints?” Kawika asked.
“At first we thought there weren’t any, apart from Keoni’s and Jay’s,” Yvonne responded. She explained that the killer must have worn gloves the whole time, maybe used several pairs during the dismemberment. A careful killer, not needing to wipe many things because apparently he’d touched almost nothing inside the house without gloves.
“But?”
“But I had an idea,” Yvonne said. “There was a box of plastic garbage bags in the bathroom. The killer probably brought them for the body parts—you know, the head and hands.”
“Right.”
“And I figured he wouldn’t have worn gloves when he bought those bags. Not in a grocery or hardware store. And maybe he forgot to wipe the box later. It was just a hunch, but it turned out there are good prints on the box. Almost all one person’s, and not Keoni’s or Jay’s, the fingerprint folks say.”
“Any match?”
“No, unfortunately, no match yet. But if we find a suspect, those prints will come in handy, right?”
“Right.”
“One more thing, Major Wong.”
“You can start calling me Kawika now, Yvonne.”
“All right, I will. Thank you. One more thing, Kawika: Keoni had a laptop there—a personal one. It’s smashed to bits. Right in the kitchen. And it’s missing the hard drive. Forensics folks are trying to see if they can locate its contents in the cloud, but without the IP address, they don’t have much to go on.”
“And for the IP address, they need the missing hard drive?”
“Basically, yeah, since right now they don’t know anything about this laptop otherwise.”
“Can’t they get it from emails Jay has, ones Keoni sent him?”
“We thought of that, but Jay says he and Keoni—John, as Jay knew him—always communicated with text messages and phone calls, never emails. The forensics team says they’ve got other possible ways of getting the IP address, but it could take a while.”
Kawika pondered all this. He could draw the obvious conclusions but decided to see what Yvonne thought first. “So from all that, we’re thinking … what, exactly?” he asked.
She listed her tentative conclusions. Keoni had probably known his killer—an amateur, as Dr. Yoshida had said, and with no criminal record, since there was no record for the prints on the garbage bag box. The killing had been premeditated—the garbage bags, the gloves. Keoni probably opened the door to his killer shortly after arriving in Honolulu, because Jay Goddard had expected to see him that night and the bed in the bungalow hadn’t been slept in. The killer probably knew Keoni owned a pistol, because Keoni wouldn’t have left it out in plain sight. Maybe the killer already knew where Keoni kept it, or maybe he’d extracted that information while Keoni was bound to the kitchen chair.
Further, Yvonne said, the killer was interested in something on Keoni’s laptop—maybe that was even the motive. He could’ve just taken the laptop instead of smashing it to get the hard drive, but perhaps he had his hands full with a body, a severed head in a bag, and Keoni’s two hands, probably in an as-yet-undiscovered bag of their own, all of which the killer disposed of separately, presumably to delay identification of the body. Same reason the body was naked and the clothes were left in the bloody bathroom, unless the killer actually was imitating the Slasher.
The killer was probably in a rush, Yvonne speculated. He had to dump the body while it was still dark, and cutting up the corpse must have taken a good deal of time. The killer might have turned Keoni’s car to his own purposes that night, just as he’d done with Keoni’s pistol and the pruning saw, since the car and all of Keoni’s keys were missing, along with his cell phone.
Finally, she concluded, maybe the killer wasn’t trying to imitate the Slasher when he dumped the body in Kapi‘olani Park. Maybe he picked Kapi‘olani Park because it was convenient. “It’s only a few blocks from Catherine Street,” Yvonne pointed out. “If the killer was short of time, Kapi‘olani Park would be a logical spot to dump it.”
“On the other hand,” Kawika mused, “as Jerry said when we met with Chief Fremont, we’ve released so few details on the Slasher’s victims that maybe all a copycat killer knew was that the Slasher left his victims naked in Kapi‘olani Park.”
“Could be,” she said. “But if the killer came from the Big Island, maybe he just doesn’t know Honolulu very well. He might’ve been flustered, in a rush, and just dumped the body in the nearest place he could be unobserved in the night.”
“Iiko, iiko,” Kawika told her, and he meant it. “But one more thing: Did the killer toss the place? You know, looking for something besides what Keoni had on his laptop?”
“No sign of that,” Yvonne said. “No indication the killer looked for other things. Maybe he didn’t care about anything else.”
“Or maybe he didn’t have time,” Kawika responded. “Do me a favor, Yvonne. Take another detective and go toss the place yourself.”
“Literally?”
“No, not literally. Just look through it very carefully. See what you can find.”
“You have a hunch?”
“More like a hope.”
* * *
Before resuming his drive to Hilo, Kawika called ahead to talk with Tanaka. He reached him between interviews of Jeffrey Mokuli‘i and members of the Warriors, including those Grace ‘Ōpūnui had suggested. Kawika related what Yvonne had just told him.
Tanaka received the information quietly, with a few questions. He didn’t seem in a talkative mood, or maybe he was just rushed—although he didn’t sound rushed. Working with his former protégé hadn’t produced much pleasure for Tanaka, Kawika thought, probably because of Ana Carvalho’s looming investigation and Tanaka’s discomfort with the course Kawika had suggested.
Nonetheless, Tanaka updated Kawika crisply in turn. He’d sent a team to look through Keoni’s house in Waimea. Didn’t expect as dramatic a scene as in Honolulu, of course. He had Tommy Kekoa and another detective interviewing Angel Delos Santos at the Waimea station. “Angel’s nearly hysterical,” Tanaka said. “Swears he didn’t go to Honolulu that weekend. We’re checking with the airlines just the same.”
Tanaka also advised Kawika to look at the Star-Advertiser’s online edition. Tanaka said the paper had named Keoni as the decapitated victim found a week earlier in Kapi‘olani Park, just as Scully had told Kawika they would.
Kawika hung up and used his cell phone to find the story on the internet. Zoë and Scully had written about Keoni’s role at TMT and done a decent job summarizing the heated controversy at whose center his job had placed him. At least one Big Island source had confirmed, they wrote, that police believed Keoni’s death was TMT related.
There it is again, Kawika thought.
The article drew a distinction—the first in public—between Keoni’s murder and the work of the Slasher, even though Keoni’s corpse had been found in Kapi‘olani Park. Good, Kawika thought, willing to give credit for getting that right. The article also stated, correctly, that Honolulu police believed the newest victim—the one found with his driver’s license on his bare torso—was the Slasher’s record-setting sixth, despite being deposited in Ala Moana Beach Park.
So Zoë and Scully were continuing to collaborate on the story. But if Sammy Kā‘ai, a cop on the Big Island, was Zoë’s source for the TMT link to Keoni’s murder, then who, Kawika wondered, was the source for what Honolulu police believed about the Slasher?
24
Hilo
Although Kawika hadn’t seen it in years, the Hilo police station seemed completely familiar to him. The building hadn’t changed much, inside or out. Not even the venetian blinds seemed new, he noted, although they’d been dusted. The office decor had been pleasant in his day, but now the art and minimal upholstery and wall photos had all faded from the sun. The station looked worn and tired. Kawika guessed that Ana Carvalho would not have been pleased by that when she’d arrived from Honolulu to take up her new post.
A young sergeant met Kawika at reception. She told him Tanaka and Ku‘ulei were still out interviewing members of the Warriors. She offered him coffee and ushered him to a large room to await Chief Carvalho. Along the way, Kawika noted that except for the title on Tanaka’s frosted glass door, which stood wide open, Tanaka’s office hadn’t changed either, despite Tanaka’s promotion to major. Kawika spotted the photo of him with Tanaka on one of Tanaka’s shelves. Good, he thought. At least Terry isn’t hiding that.
The sergeant hadn’t needed to show him the way. It was the same room in which Kawika had so often discussed murders with Tanaka—including murders he was about to discuss with Ana Carvalho. He awaited her for quite a long time. When at last she strode into the room, she wasn’t smiling. Kawika rose awkwardly, but instead of shaking hands, she motioned curtly for him to resume his seat. She took a chair across from him. With a thud, she dropped a stack of files on the table along with a yellow legal pad, on which she seemed to have taken many notes.
“Thank you for coming, Major,” she began formally. No preliminaries. No, Aloha, Kawika. No How’s Elle? Nothing about the pregnancy—maybe Elle hadn’t told her yet, despite joking about it. Whatever the explanation, Ana’s lack of warmth worried Kawika. He even wondered if she’d chosen to record their session without telling him. He decided not to ask.
“I had a crappy weekend,” the chief said. “It started with Zoë Akona, that reporter, calling me at home Friday night. How she got my number, she wouldn’t say. She wanted to know—she demanded to know—what steps I’d taken to investigate the allegations of Michael Cushing and our dear departing colleague Sammy Kā‘ai. I told her I wasn’t going to talk with her from home on a Friday night, so she should call me on Monday afternoon—this afternoon—at work.”
“You mean, after you’ve talked with me?”
“Exactly. So in order to prepare, I spent the entire weekend reading these files,” the chief said, thumping them twice with her knuckles as if knocking on a door. “A lot of the case notes are on paper. A lot were never even written up, it seems. Almost no investigatory documents at all in the computer archives.”
