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—surprisingly 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.