Piki, who’d been on the phone calling for a crime scene team, peered into the office from behind Koa. “Looks like a classic suicide by hanging.”
Although tremendously energetic, Piki too often jumped to quick conclusions. Koa tried, without much success, to slow him down, but he ran like a battery-operated toy with only one speed. “It’s not,” Koa responded. “Don’t go in that room or touch the body until we get a crime scene team in here.” Always conscious of training his detectives, Koa turned to face his younger colleague. “Now stand here and figure out why it’s not a suicide.”
Slowly, Piki took in the scene. “It doesn’t look like he tried to save himself,” the young detective said hesitantly.
“What else?” Koa demanded.
“He’s awful high off the floor.”
“Now you’re thinking,” Koa rewarded his young colleague.
First, the discovery of the strange concrete structures under the school building and now the murder of its general contractor left Koa with a mess on his hands—an understatement by any measure. The lack of a competent medical examiner to confirm his suspicions only made matters worse. Hawai‘i County employed no qualified ME. Shizuo Hiro, a seventy-eight-year-old Japanese obstetrician, doubled as the county coroner. Appointed only because of his status as a mayoral crony, Shizuo played poker with the mayor’s gang, losing large sums on absurd bets. A millstone around Koa’s neck, he impeded every criminal investigation requiring even semi-sophisticated medical analysis. Koa couldn’t imagine relying on Shizuo in such a high-stakes crime with national publicity.
If Chief Lannua were on-island, he’d tell Koa, as he had so often in the past, to suck it up and deal with Shizuo. But the chief wasn’t around, so Koa, having reached his limit with the incompetent quack, took matters into his own hands. He called Mayor Tanaka, explained the discovery of the construction anomalies at the school, and stunned the mayor by reporting the murder of Hank Boyle.
“I’m going to call the governor’s office and ask him to assign the Honolulu ME to this investigation,” Koa announced.
“Shizuo can handle it. Besides, I don’t like asking Māhoe for help,” the mayor responded.
“No, Shizuo can’t handle it,” Koa said. “He’ll screw it up and embarrass both you and the governor. You got the national press all over this disaster, and it’s only going to get worse with Boyle’s murder. You really want CNN’s Walker McKenzie interviewing Shizuo?”
That stopped the mayor. An uncomfortably long pause followed before Tanaka replied, “Damnit.” Another pause. “Okay, Detective. But I’ll call the damn governor.”
While Koa waited for the Honolulu ME to arrive, the crime scene team went over the Boyle mansion like watchmakers. Piki canvassed neighbors. Ronnie Woo, a young Chinese photographer who wielded his Nikon like a weapon, photographed the scene, using a yardstick to show Boyle’s feet were twenty-three inches off the floor. The seat of the chair stood barely twenty inches high. Diminutive Georgina Pau and hulking Chip Baxter, evidence technicians, affectionately known to police insiders as Mini and Maxi, dusted for prints and searched for bloodstains and other evidence.
Having endured years of Shizuo’s incompetent forensics, Koa had mastered a few tricks of the ME’s trade. He carried a digital thermometer and took the hanging man’s temperature. Guessing the air-conditioned room temperature to be in the mid-seventies—substantially less than normal body temperature—Koa applied the old forensic standard: a corpse cools at the rate of about 1.5 degrees an hour. With a body temperature of 89 degrees, Koa figured Boyle had been dead about six hours. His estimate seemed consistent with the stiffening of the corpse. He put the time of death at roughly four in the morning or seventeen hours after the first news reports of the KonaWili school disaster. Despite his seat-of-the-pants medical exam, Koa left the body hanging so the Honolulu ME could make her own assessment.
Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Koa opened the nearest file cabinet. He found the files organized into categories—residential, commercial, and government—with the governmental grouping further subdivided by building type. In the section for school buildings, he found a gap where the KonaWili file should have been. And if the empty space didn’t arouse suspicions enough, a loose label in the bottom of the drawer for “KonaWili School” confirmed a missing file. Its absence solidified the connection between Boyle’s death and the KonaWili school disaster.
“Looks like he had some help.”
Koa turned toward the doorway at the sound of a woman’s voice. Anne Ka‘au, the fiftyish Honolulu medical examiner, stared intently at the corpse. Dressed in jeans and a light blue blouse, Ka‘au had a long angular face with inquisitive black eyes behind wire-rim glasses.
“You sure got here quickly,” he said.
“I was already on-island, visiting my daughter.” Ka‘au had a nationwide reputation as a top-flight professional, lecturing regularly at leading university forensics programs. Koa watched her register every aspect of the scene like a walking digital camera. He wasn’t surprised she shared his initial impression of the crime scene.
“Mahalo for leaving the scene intact for me,” she said, extracting a camera from her kit and taking her own photographs. Then she checked temperature and lividity. When they cut the body down, she examined every centimeter of the deceased’s skin, including the inside of his mouth and between his toes, as well as the electrical cord, closely observing its cut ends and knots.
While she worked, she questioned Koa. “The governor told me this phony suicide might be connected to the KonaWili disaster but didn’t give me any details. What’s the deal?”
Koa explained the strange concrete structures in the school and ID’d Boyle as the general contractor. Then he told her about the missing file.
“My God,” she exclaimed, “they must have uncovered the volcanic vent during construction and tried to cover it up. They put those poor kids at risk. That’s criminal.”
“Dead on,” he agreed.
Leaving her to work her forensic magic, Koa toured Boyle’s mansion. Autographed photographs of NFL football players dotted the forty-foot living room. A commercial kitchen, a huge wood-paneled dining room, a small movie theater, a billiard room with a professional pool table, a library, three bathrooms, and Boyle’s office occupied the first floor. The luxurious house showed that Boyle had raked in a fortune as a contractor. Why, Koa wondered, would such a wealthy man risk it all by hiding a deadly threat under a grade school?
Boyle apparently lived alone. Koa found no signs of a spouse or other companion. Oddly, the lights blazed all over the ground floor, and the sixty-inch television in the living room flickered with an old movie rerun. A violent explosion on the big screen caught Koa’s eye, and he stopped to watch part of Krakatoa, East of Java, before switching the TV off. Had, he wondered, Boyle really been watching a volcano movie?
Upstairs, he found Boyle’s bedroom. Once again, he sensed something out of place and stopped to examine the scene. Boyle’s clothes—a pair of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt—lay discarded on a chair in the corner of the room. Boyle’s flip-flops lay on the floor half under the chair. A tangled top sheet covered only part of the unmade bed. One pillow remained on the bed while another lay discarded on the floor. As he peered at the bed, Koa saw two faint, but distinct, reddish-brown smudges. From dirty shoes, maybe? Smudges, he wondered, left by an assailant kneeling on the bed?