“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.