Death in Hilo, page 21
“Honor thy father.” I did that. Dad paid with his life for his part in it. But that didn’t eliminate my sin. I’ve tried to pay with good works. Service to others. Kindness. Community. Science. Doesn’t erase the sin. Doesn’t wash me clean.
“I was young.” But not a boy. Already in college. Hid out in a Scottish university afterwards. Junior year abroad from sin. I knew what was going on before I turned the key in the ignition. I was reluctant and I was scared but I went ahead and did it.
Need to confide in someone. Confide privately without confessing to cops. Haven’t found that someone:
Can’t confide in ADS. Way too Catholic. I’d get the same as from a priest: confess thy sin, throw thyself on God’s mercy, do penance, be absolved. Hocus-pocus.
JG’s too sweet and unimaginative. Likes to putter and bake and garden. Such a gentle soul. My confiding would destroy him.
I’m unfaithful in searching for a confidant. Making it worse.
I could be faithful to someone if I could confide in him. I don’t know such a man.
I could be faithful to someone if I didn’t need to confide, because I’d done it already.
Need to find someone else to confide in. Who?
Kawika read back over the words—and saw what he’d never even considered before. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place with such force it nearly clanged aloud: Keoni had driven the getaway boat. He’d motored out to the Mahi Mia to pick up his father and Fortunato after they’d murdered Thomas Gray. He “knew what was going on” before he turned the key in the boat’s ignition, just as he’d written. He’d spent fourteen years agonizing over his guilt, trying to make it go away, hoping that confiding in someone would produce some sort of getaway boat from sin.
Holy shit, Kawika thought.
It was Saturday night. Who should he call? Tanaka? He should be told. Yvonne? She was working on Keoni’s case, but she hadn’t put the pieces together from the journal, knowing little if anything about D. K. Parkes or Thomas Gray or even Fortunato. Should he call Ana Carvalho and supplement the fateful interview he’d had with her on Monday? To what end, though? How would she react to learning that Keoni, not just his father and Fortunato, had helped murder Thomas Gray?
Kawika decided to call Tanaka. But as he started to act, Kawika remembered he hadn’t reached Elle. He wanted to speak with her first of all; he needed her just then. Again, however, he got Elle’s voice mailbox instead of Elle.
So Kawika dialed Ku‘ulei. “Hey, Cuz, did Elle forget to turn her phone on after dinner?” he asked when she answered.
“Kawika,” Ku‘ulei responded, worry in her voice, “We were supposed to meet at the restaurant. Elle never showed up. I kept calling, but I couldn’t reach her. So I came back to my place, in case for some reason she came straight here instead. But she’s not here, Kawika. I called Auntie Kailani in Puakō and asked her to go next door and check; she says Elle’s not there and neither is the car. I was just about to call you. Do you know if she went someplace else? Or maybe got stuck with Jarvis for some reason—I know she took him to the Saturday market. But she was going to spend the night here with me if Ana Carvalho agreed to see her tomorrow.”
Kawika tried the location tracking feature of Elle’s cell phone, without result. He called Jarvis’s care center in Waikoloa Village, but the staff told him Elle had left after her morning outing with his father. He called Ana Carvalho next, much as he hated to, but she hadn’t heard from Elle either. He could tell that Ana immediately began to share his concern.
He couldn’t think of any other Big Island friend Elle might have visited—surely not her new acquaintance Patience? He didn’t want to call Patience, didn’t even know how to reach her, but he called the gatehouse at the Mauna Kea Beach Resort and learned that Patience had already locked up her house and returned to the mainland two days earlier. The guard told him Elle hadn’t passed that way either.
Kawika’s perplexity gave way to worry. This wasn’t like Elle. Something was definitely wrong.
Finally, Kawika called Tanaka, reaching him at home. “Elle’s missing,” he blurted out, and explained the situation, trying to control his voice and his rising alarm.
Tanaka was silent for a long moment, as if trying to solve the puzzle. “Let me call Ana,” he then said, taking charge. “I’ll call you back right after I talk to her. We’ll turn the island upside down if we have to, Kawika. Starting right now, tonight. We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”
Yet Kawika could hardly avoid worrying. And it was too late to get to the Big Island. The last flights to Hilo and to Kona had already left.
* * *
Tanaka called Kawika back within minutes. “Let’s make this quick,” Tanaka said. “I need to get everyone out in the field. Just tell me anyplace on the Big Island you think she might possibly be. Anyplace she might have gone on her way to Hilo. Apart from the highways themselves, that is—we’ll check the Saddle Road, the Queen K, the Belt Road. Waimea and Hilo too. But what about other destinations, stopping points, favorite places she liked? She might’ve gotten out of the car, taken a walk, maybe fallen, Kawika. Sprained an ankle or broken her leg or something. Lost her phone over a ledge. If we find the parked car, we’ll find Elle.”
Kawika struggled to think where Elle might have stopped en route to Hilo. The South Kohala resorts. Laupahoehoe, a spiritual place of solemn remembrance and reflection where a teacher and twenty-five students had been lost to a tidal wave. The major waterfalls—Rainbow, Kahūnā, Kulaniapia. The botanical gardens or the bioreserve. Tanaka wrote them all down.
“Okay,” Tanaka said, before ringing off. “We’ll check those. Call me if you think of more. Catch the first flight in the morning, okay? And Kawika—get some sleep if you can. Could be a long day tomorrow.” If we don’t find her tonight didn’t need to be spoken.
Kawika moaned at the thought of sleep; there’d be no sleep for him this night. But he couldn’t sit still either. He needed to get outdoors, to walk; to think of any other place on the Big Island that Elle might be. It was inexplicable, her being missing; completely baffling.
Kawika left the condo, crossed the street, and found himself walking through Ala Moana Beach Park toward Waikīkī. He strode purposefully, not aimlessly, yet without consciously realizing where he was headed. He crossed the bridge over the Ala Wai Canal and began making his way through the nighttime tourists crowding the sidewalks of Waikīkī, sometimes bumping into people in his distraction. The garish lights and raucous noise of Waikīkī made him wince. But he kept walking, aware of his destination only once he’d reached it.
Kawika had come to Kapaemahu—the Wizard Stones. He hadn’t seen them in years, never even noticed them while driving through Waikīkī in his police cruiser. He’d visited them only once, with Ku‘ulei, back when she was studying Hawaiian history and culture at UH Mānoa. The incongruity of these ancient sacred boulders, separated physically from the mass of tourists by an iron guardrail but culturally by a gulf of Hawaiian understanding and belief impossible to cross, struck Kawika all at once. Suddenly he felt the Hawaiian part of himself—or at least a yearning to feel it. Not quite the same thing.
He bought a fragrant lei of plumeria blossoms from a nearby street vendor. Ignoring the tourists, most of whom ignored him too, Kawika leaned across the guardrail and gently tossed the lei like a quoit onto the tallest stone, just as Ku‘ulei had done so long ago. Then, just as Ku‘ulei had also done, Kawika raised his hands, thumbs pressed to fingers, tilted his face to the heavens, and earnestly offered a soundless prayer for Elle’s safety. But Ku‘ulei, with her prayer, had been looking up into a clear blue sky on a sunny day. Kawika was staring into a moonless night, and the glare of Waikīkī obscured the very stars.
PART FOUR
Women often accompanied their husbands, carrying water and food to refresh them and attending to their wounds. Some bore weapons and fought side by side with their men. When their husbands were killed they were almost certain to be killed also.
—E. Smith et al.
Ancient Hawaiian Civilization (1933)
31
Hilo
Elle’s disappearance prompted an abrupt change in the disposition of the Big Island’s police resources: Major Tanaka, at the command of Chief Ana Carvalho, immediately threw every cop and other potentially useful county employee into the effort to find Elle da Silva. Ana agreed with Tanaka that the situation just seemed wrong, and ominously so. “This takes priority over everything else,” she ordered without hesitation, momentarily putting aside her anger with Tanaka and Kawika. “I want you to run it personally, Terry.” The search mattered more right now—much more.
Tanaka called in everyone who could possibly help, including Ku‘ulei and Tommy Kekoa and his colleagues in Waimea. The quest began Saturday evening, immediately after Kawika’s call to Tanaka. Tommy was the first to reach the Puakō house, confirming what the neighbor had told Ku‘ulei earlier: the house was empty and the car was gone.
The police knew every moment might count, but apart from Kawika’s list, they had almost nothing to go on. They could only put out bulletins and advisories and conduct routine search procedures, albeit rapidly and en masse—“Flood the zone,” Tanaka instructed them. There was no pretense that this was a routine police response to a missing-person report.
Somehow Elle had disappeared between Waikoloa Village, where she’d left Jarvis after the Saturday market, and Hilo, where she’d intended to join Ku‘ulei for dinner. The police could find no trace of her car, not at any logical place she might have stopped and not along the Saddle Road or on any other route. They actually hoped she might have had an accident and now be trapped, still alive, in some sort of roadside wreck down an embankment obscured by vegetation. It was a long shot, and not a pleasant one. But everything else was a long shot too. They would recheck all those roads carefully in daylight.
Tanaka tried at once to extract Elle’s phone records from her carrier. But despite the urgency, the phone company rebuffed him. It was the weekend, they explained. He’d need a warrant, they said, and since her particular phone company was based on the mainland, he’d need to get the warrant from a court over there. And once he got the warrant, which would take time, that piece of paper would join a stack of others the company was doing its best to work through.
“So how long before we get the records?” Tanaka demanded.
“Two, maybe three weeks,” the company representative said. “Could be a month.”
“That’s ridiculous. Can’t you speed it up?”
“Only if it’s a murder case,” came the unruffled reply. “Or a missing child, maybe.”
“Well, this could be a murder case.”
“Could be isn’t good enough, I’m afraid. Every missing-person case could be a murder case, and there are thousands of missing-person cases. You need a corpse.”
“Let me emphasize,” Tanaka insisted, trying to control his temper. “We’re not asking for the phone records of a suspect. We’re looking for a victim.”
“Sorry. Our customers need to know we’ll protect their privacy no matter what.”
“You’re not protecting your customer right now,” Tanaka said. “You’re protecting someone who may have murdered your customer.”
“That’s always the risk, isn’t it?” came the reply. “With privacy and confidentiality, I mean.”
Tanaka hung up in disgust, then sent a text message to the county’s lawyers. He included all the necessary information about Elle’s phone, and added, “Please do everything possible to get Ms. da Silva’s call and text records ASAP.”
Midnight approached, yet Tanaka’s phone rang. “Found anything?” Ana Carvalho asked.
“Nothing,” Tanaka replied. “Not a trace.”
* * *
Having slept little, Kawika rose in the night and caught the 5:45 AM flight from Honolulu. He landed in Kona at six thirty, just as the sun appeared over Hualālai. He’d reserved a rental car at the airport and drove straight to the house in Puakō, certain he’d find some clue to Elle’s whereabouts that others had missed. But there was nothing: nothing unusual, nothing out of place. Had she packed an overnight bag for her trip to Hilo? Kawika couldn’t tell whether any of her Puakō clothes or cosmetics were missing, but she might have packed a bag for the weekend before leaving Honolulu. He found nothing in the cottage to suggest Elle had departed in any unusual way or for any unusual purpose.
Kawika made a cup of instant coffee, then sat down to think. He knew Tanaka’s teams would search every spot Kawika had suggested she might logically stop, and every logical highway route. But what about illogical routes, illogical stops?
Elle must have had time on her hands between returning Jarvis to his care center and her dinner date with Ku‘ulei in Hilo. She could get to Hilo in ninety minutes, so she might have had six or even eight hours to fill. What might she have done in that time? They’d all just assumed that after leaving Jarvis, she would have returned to Puakō and busied herself there or in the neighborhood before setting off for Hilo. But what if she hadn’t?
It occurred to Kawika that in the years he and Elle had visited the Big Island together, they’d never driven farther south than Kailua on that side of the island, and even then only for a single trip when they’d been refurbishing the Puakō house. He’d often told her his own inflexible rule: Never drive south of the Kailua-Kona airport. The traffic, the stoplights, the congestion of tourists and tourism, the sprawling development, the strip malls and plastic and neon lights, all of which he accepted in Honolulu, contrasted too painfully with South Kohala’s austere beauty and majestic views. “We have the illusion of paradise up here,” he’d said. “You drive to Kailua, you shatter it.”
But Kawika knew there was a lot of the Big Island worth seeing south of Kailua. And now he wondered whether Elle might have decided to do that, driving the long way around the island to reach Hilo. He checked his watch: seven thirty AM. Not too early to call Tanaka on the morning of a search.
“Terry,” he asked, “do you have anyone looking in Kona or Ka‘ū, or at the volcanoes or in Puna?”
“No,” Tanaka answered. “We figured she’d go through Waimea on the Belt Road or take Waikoloa Village Road to get to the Saddle Road. So we’re not searching south of that. You thinking she might have taken the long way?”
“That just occurred to me,” Kawika answered. “She might’ve gone that way; she had a lot of time between the Saturday market and dinner in Hilo. You have enough people to search down there?”
“Gosh, Kawika, we hardly have enough people to search this end of the island. You know what I always say: the Big Island is a big island. Bigger than all the others combined. We’re focusing on everything between Puakō and Hilo, the normal routes. That’s a lot of territory.”
“I’ll drive the other way, then,” Kawika said. “Just in case I spot her car somewhere in Kailua or at a sightseeing spot. I’ll see you in Hilo when I get there. Call me if you learn anything first.”
“You too,” Tanaka replied.
Kawika drove south and checked first in Kailua, until he got discouraged. It was pointless; he couldn’t drive down every street. There were too many, and all were stoppered with traffic. He checked the likely places he could think of, then got back on the highway and continued south.
He stopped next at the trailhead for the Captain Cook memorial at Kealakekua Bay, in case she’d decided to hike out to visit the white obelisk marking the spot of Cook’s death at the hands of Hawaiians in 1779. It was a sort of pilgrimage that writers and historians sometimes took. Elle, who strove for verisimilitude in her writing, might have wanted to see it, to stand on the beach where Cook had died, get the feel of the place as a locale for one of her books. But Elle’s car wasn’t at the trailhead.
He drove next to City of Refuge, the restored ceremonial complex where ancient Hawaiians who’d broken the kapu and been condemned to death could, if they could reach it in time, be absolved by a powerful kahuna, or priest, and allowed to go forth freely. Keoni, in his quest for absolution, might have come here himself, Kawika thought. Yet Kawika knew that Elle, who’d never been south of Kailua, had never visited this sacred place in the past. Might she have chosen this time to do so? He was desperate to find her here, or somewhere, and quickly. But in the crowded parking lot beyond the entry sign—displaying Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau in large raised letters, Hawaiian for “Refuge of Hōnaunau”—Kawika couldn’t find Elle’s car. He slammed his hand against the steering wheel and headed back to the highway.
Now Kawika was beginning to panic. He tried to calm himself, knowing he should and must. But by now Elle hadn’t been seen or heard from in twenty-four hours. Even if she’d suffered a mishap, tumbled off a trail and broken a leg as Tanaka had suggested—even if she’d lost her phone when she fell and couldn’t regain it—she’d been out in the elements for a day and a night. She could be dying of thirst or exposure.
Worse, what if she’d been abducted? If he or Tanaka’s team found her car but not Elle herself, abduction would be a frightening possibility. But what if she’d been abducted in her car? Then their chances of finding her would plummet even further; she and the car and her abductors could be anywhere. The Big Island is a big island: Kawika couldn’t help dwelling on Tanaka’s oft-repeated saying.
Thinking hard now, he tried to imagine any other place on this route—short of the rim of Kīlauea Volcano itself—where Elle might have parked, gotten out to explore or take a selfie, and possibly tumbled from a trail or a ledge and injured herself badly enough to be unable to attract help or get back to her car. Only one place came to mind: Ka Lae, known as South Point, the desolate tip of the island, the southernmost point in the United States and a tourist stop for that reason.
