He tried to imagine the sequence of events. Boyle undresses and goes to bed in his boxers. He’s restless, throws off the pillow, gets up, leaves the sheets tangled, goes downstairs, pours himself a farewell drink, and hangs himself. A plausible scenario. A killer, he knew, might have staged such a sequence, but only as an illusion.
More likely, he thought, the killer snuck into the bedroom, suffocated the sleeping Boyle with a pillow, tossed the pillow aside, and carried the dead man down to his study to be strung up. The killer had turned the lights and TV on to give the impression Boyle had been awake. He wondered if they’d find Boyle’s fingerprints on the Glenlivet bottle. Koa called downstairs to his team, telling them to treat the bedroom as a secondary crime scene.
Turning down a hallway, he studied Boyle’s framed memorabilia. A UH sheepskin, a fraternity certificate, and decades-old pictures. Like Koa, Boyle attended the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus in Honolulu. He’d graduated in 1975, long before Koa, but unlike Koa, Boyle belonged to one of the few UH fraternities. He’d been a Tau Kappa Epsilon frat boy. Studying the photos on the wall next to the certificates, Koa spotted a youthful Boyle in picture after picture with his fraternity brothers. Koa thought he recognized one or two besides Boyle, but the young faces and long hair made it hard to be sure.
A TKE fraternity connection, Koa thought, made sense. Only a tiny percentage of twenty thousand students at the UH Mānoa campus joined social fraternities, but for those who did, the frats offered a well-known route to political and economic power in the state. Three governors, both U.S. senators, dozens of state legislators, and hundreds of the state’s business elite wore TKE pins. Boyle had started polishing his political connections as a freshman in college.
In the bathroom, Koa opened the medicine cabinet. Prescription medicines often yielded up clues, and Koa discovered a full-scale pharmacy—more than forty orange and green pill bottles. Boyle’s prescription drugs spoke volumes. Half-empty bottles of Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Paxil, Tofranil, Anafranil, and Marplan told the tale of a man suffering from depression and anxiety. From the variety of drugs and the dates on the labels, Boyle obviously suffered from a severe and long-standing disorder. For all his wealth, Koa realized, Hank Boyle had been an unhappy man. Koa made a note of the doctor’s name—Dr. Teddy Patrone with a Kona telephone number.
Nothing else upstairs shed light on Boyle’s murder, so Koa went back to check on the Honolulu ME and the crime scene team. He found Georgina, one of the crime scene techs, using a portable vacuum with a special filter box to collect trace evidence. He waved to her. A short, slight woman with prematurely gray hair, she was compulsively thorough with a wicked sense of humor. To escape the noise of the vacuum, he led Anne Ka‘au, the ME, into the hallway to ask what she thought of the scene.
“It’s not a suicide. Body temperature, lividity, and degree of rigor mortis put the TOD at about four o’clock this morning. It’s pretty hard to string up a conscious, able-bodied man, so he was probably unconscious, or more likely, already dead. I didn’t find any wounds or needle marks, so I’d guess the killer suffocated him. That would explain the petechiae on the face.”
Koa smiled inwardly, pleased she’d agreed with his own conclusions and thrilled to be working with a real ME. Georgina finished vacuuming so Koa stepped back into Boyle’s study and gave her an inquiring look.
“Boyle wiped his fingerprints off the whiskey bottle and the glass, so we wouldn’t know who did it,” she said with a grin.
Koa, an old hand at crime scene humor, rewarded her with a chuckle. It served as further confirmation Boyle hadn’t killed himself. “What else?”
“He also hid the tool he used to cut the electrical cord. It’s not here and Chip hasn’t found it anywhere else in the house.”
At that moment, Chip Baxter, the other crime scene tech, came down from upstairs. A big man with a round face and a thick shock of black hair, he was Georgina’s opposite in almost every way, except he, too, loved crime scene jokes. “Body fluids on the discarded pillow—a good deal more than you’d normally find—and what looks like lava particles on the sheet. Funny, ’cause I went through Boyle’s closet. If the man had dirty shoes, he tossed them before he snuffed his own lights.”
Koa wanted something to tie a perp to the crime scene. “You recover any suspicious prints or anything with the perp’s DNA?”
“Nada,” Georgina responded. “It’s too clean. The killer must have worn gloves and a stocking, or something over his head. Otherwise, there’d be loose hairs, especially given the time he spent setting up the phony hanging.”
An amateur had staged the fake suicide, cutting the electrical cord without leaving the cutting tool, wiping his prints off the liquor glass, and hanging the body too high. The smudges on the bed probably came from the killer’s shoes.
Koa focused on the big picture. With Boyle’s murder, he still needed someone who knew what went down on the school construction site. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t pretty, and Boyle had almost certainly died to keep it secret.
Late in the afternoon, CNN’s Walker McKenzie called wanting an update on the case. Koa began to put him off when the TV journalist shocked him. “I hear the contractor committed suicide.”
McKenzie enjoyed incredible sources. Koa hated dealing with the press, but McKenzie was a pro, and it made no sense to alienate him, especially over something soon to be in the papers. “I can confirm we found him hanged.”
“A suicide or just staged that way?”
Koa paused, thinking how to play it. It might be useful, he concluded, to let the killer know he hadn’t fooled the police. “We’re calling it a suspicious death, at least until we conclude our investigation.”
“Thanks, Detective.”
After the reporter hung up, Koa wondered what he’d set in motion. Boyle, he felt sure, died because of KonaWili. The death had been faked to look like a suicide to deceive the police. A news story reporting that the police regarded the death as suspicious would make the killer nervous. Nervous killers make mistakes. At least he hoped this killer would screw up.
Later that night, Koa had second thoughts, not about his conversation with Walker McKenzie, but about the crime scene itself. That Boyle’s death hadn’t been a suicide had been obvious to him and to Anne Ka‘au. He’d known almost immediately and so had Anne. Could the killer, he wondered, have been so sloppy, so incompetent?
Hanging the body too high, taking the tool used to cut the electrical cord, wiping prints from the liquor bottle and the glass—maybe the killer panicked—but other aspects of the scene reflected thought. The killer left no fingerprints, no trace evidence, no DNA. If the killer smothered Boyle in bed, then the killer likely turned on the television and the downstairs lights. It was almost as though the killer deliberately staged the suicide to make it look phony.
Why would the killer do that? Maybe to send a message. But what message? And to whom?
CHAPTER SIX
KOA ASSEMBLED HIS brain trust—Basa, Piki, and Zeke Brown, the Hawai‘i County prosecutor. Zeke, a Tom Hanks look-alike with a decade and a half less wear, held one of the most powerful positions on the Big Island. He sat behind his huge wooden desk with his trademark black buffalo hide Lucchese boots on one of the pull-out extensions. A sports jacket hung behind the door for serious court work, but as usual, Zeke wore jeans and a paniolo shirt. He had an easy, friendly way with voters, who didn’t seem to mind his frequent profanity. The others in the room saw nothing friendly in his piercing black eyes when Koa described the concrete structures under the school and the faked suicide of its builder.