“Yeah, like rotten eggs and matches … burned matches.”
Rotten eggs smells meant hydrogen sulfide and a burned match smell meant sulfur dioxide. “And the ground—rocks or clay?”
“Some rocks, but much red and brown clay.”
Koa had the clincher. Pele’s hydrogen sulfide fumes ultimately became sulfuric acid breaking down lava rocks into clay of distinctive red and brown iron oxides. Sulfur, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, and iron oxides—all Pele’s trademarks. Tony Pwalú had found a volcanic vent while preparing the KonaWili site. Now Koa needed to know why the discovery hadn’t stopped the project. It was one thing to build an elementary school atop a fault on a volcano dormant for two hundred years. It was quite another to build the same school over a known volcanic vent—one actively producing sulfur gases.
“What did you do?”
“I tell Hank.”
Koa leaned even closer to Tony, and their eyes locked. “And what did Hank Boyle do?”
Tony hesitated, and Koa thought he might clam up, but Tony wanted to tell his story before he died. “Hank showed the lady.”
What woman had visited the construction site? Someone from the DOE? “What lady?” Koa demanded.
Tony shook his head and spoke so softly Koa could barely hear. “Some … lady from Honolulu.”
Koa wondered if this dying man knew more. “Then what happened?”
Tony raised a bony hand to his neck to finger his crucifix. “Hank tell me. I keep secret, I get big bonus.”
“And you got a bonus?”
Tony spread his emaciated arms. “Bonus buy this farm.”
“And what did Hank Boyle do?”
“He build school.”
Stark as a super moon in a cloudless night sky, Tony had discovered the vent, and Boyle had charged ahead oblivious to the risk. Tony Pwalú must have seen the condemnation in Koa’s eyes. He reacted by looking down at his emaciated hands now folded in his lap and said almost inaudibly, “I sinned. I sorry.”
“Not as sorry as the parents of those children,” Koa said.
When Tony looked up, the man fought back tears. “It was Pele’s revenge.”
“Pele’s revenge?” Koa asked.
“My … my grandson, he died at KonaWili.” The old man choked and barely got the words out.
Maybe, Koa thought, there were worse things than dying of cancer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AN URGENT CALL blasted over the police radio as Koa and Basa drove along the rain-slick Māmalahoa Highway past the KonaWili property toward Hilo. An unruly crowd of angry parents demonstrating near the KonaWili school had busted through the police cordon. Patrolmen, desperate for reinforcements, fought to regain control.
Crowd control wasn’t Koa’s job, but the school remained a crime scene. The building had killed, and Koa didn’t want it to claim any more lives. He spun the car around, flipped on the emergency lights, and headed for the crippled structure.
Basa grabbed the radio to marshal more police units, only to find most units in Kona, more than seven miles away in heavy traffic. “It’s up to us,” Basa warned Koa. “We’re seven to ten minutes ahead of most other units.” Koa pushed the accelerator to the floor.
At the school, Koa’s heart rate spiked. Conditions had worsened since the first night. Although the rain had slackened, the steel roof at the south end of the building had curled upward like the lid of an open sardine can, and chunks of the front wall lay scattered. An eerie rumbling like a runaway freight train filled the air. Thick yellowish gas billowed into the sky. Hundreds of angry demonstrators already through the thin police cordon moved up the hill toward the crippled building. Half a dozen policemen, hopelessly outnumbered, struggled to restrain the demonstrators, while desperate parents, crazed by the loss of their children, goaded the crowd forward. TV cameras recorded the chaos.
Pele’s unearthly rumblings failed to drown out the chanting of the crowd—“We want answers … we want answers.” The demonstrators fell silent for several beats before continuing: “The DOE killed our keiki … The DOE killed our keiki.” Then the chants repeated.
Koa and Basa raced up behind the crowd. Signaling to another police car to follow, Koa cut off the road, bumped over the curb, and swung across rough ground around the crowd before heading straight into the gap between the demonstrators and the smoking hulk of the broken school. He stopped—emergency lights flashing—and the second cop car did likewise, creating a barricade between the crowd and the school.
Koa, bullhorn in hand, and Basa faced the crowd, their backs to their vehicles and the school beyond. The patrolmen from the other car joined them. Waiting for the next pause in the chanting, Koa triggered the bullhorn—“You’ll get answers. You’ll get answers, but everyone needs to move back. Move back. It’s dangerous.” The crowd quieted and stopped moving. Koa repeated his message, and the demonstrators retreated a couple of steps. Then someone yelled, “We want answers now!” and the crowd surged forward as it took up the new chant, “We want answers now! We want answers now!”
“Shotguns?” a cop from the other car asked.
“No!” Basa yelled. “Just stand tall.” Koa continued to face the crowd with the bullhorn. “This is no way to mourn your children,” his amplified voice barreled over the crowd. “There’s a volcanic vent under this building. It’s dangerous! Move back! Move back! We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
A woman in the front row of the crowd stared at him with tears streaming down her face. Koa recognized Mica Osbourne’s face from TV as the mother of the missing child. “Please, Mrs. Osbourne,” he boomed over the hailer, returning her stare and hoping his use of her name would reinforce his message. “Please move back. Don’t let anyone else get hurt.”
He locked eyes with the grieving mother for a long moment before repeating his plea. “This is no way to honor your children.” The stalemate lasted several more seconds before Mica Osbourne turned, pushing back through the crowd. Slowly, others began to follow. Koa breathed a sigh of relief.
At that moment, an explosion ripped through the shell of the school. A wave of debris hit the vehicles behind him and showered those in the closest row of demonstrators. One man fell to the ground. Screams shot through the crowd as the group turned en masse and ran. The vehicles shielded the cops from serious injury. They had saved the demonstrators.
Koa’s cell phone rang while he and Basa drove back to Hilo. He looked at the screen and recognized the number, county prosecutor Zeke Brown. He answered, and Zeke spoke slowly and softly, a rarity for the prosecutor. “Koa, your brother, Ikaika, collapsed in the Hilo lockup.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s alive but unconscious. The medics put him on an air ambulance to Queen’s Medical in Honolulu.”
“What happened?”
“The doctors say it’s some kind of seizure.”
“Jesus.” The news stunned Koa. He’d been sitting in the interrogation room with Ikaika less than twenty-four hours ago, and his brutal, foulmouthed brother had been healthy. Hell, he’d been weight-lifting in the joint and developed the physique of a professional bodybuilder. “How’d it happen?” Koa asked.