The Fire Thief Read online

  Kali took a deep breath. Walter sounded oddly strained. “Not yet, but it’s still early in the day. What’s up?”

  There was a tense pause on the line. “Well, I hate to drag you away from whatever it is you’re not doing, but we’ve got a body down here on the beach. No positive ID yet, but I’m pretty certain it’s Kekipi Smith, Anna Smith’s eldest son. She made a call last night to say he hadn’t come home, and it looks like he drowned down there off the cliffs near Haleakal National Park, probably sometime late yesterday. Surfboard washed up nearby, so it appeared to be an accident.”

  Kali frowned, tightening her grip on the phone. “Appeared?”

  Walter’s voice was carefully noncommittal. “Well, seemed that way to begin with. But now something’s turned up that doesn’t make any sense.” His voice wavered, but just for a second. “Can you get over here and have a look before we send him off?”

  Kali’s eyes darted back to the sea, just visible through the window. A dull malaise fluttered behind the bones of her chest.

  Walter spoke into her silence. “I’m not feeling good about this. I’ll explain when you get here, but we’re treating it as a suspicious death. There are elements that put it right in your wheelhouse.”

  She closed her eyes and felt a shadow leaping into the darkness.

  “Okay. I’m on my way.”

  She picked up her keys and headed out into the sunlight. Hilo followed, pushing the screen door open with his nose. He jogged close beside her, his long body bumping against her legs. She reached down with one hand, patted his head briefly, already lost in the story she was about to hear.

  CHAPTER 3

  There was a rough clearing at the top of the hill overlooking the beach. Watched by a disappointed Hilo from his spot on the front passenger seat, Kali left her battered, doorless Willy’s Jeep on the sandy ground beneath the trees. She made her way through the damp, heavy grass toward Walter, where he stood next to an elderly fisherman. She recognized the older man instantly: Sam Hekekia, who’d lived on this stretch of coastline for as long as she could remember. She glanced at his face. He looked deeply forlorn, his fishing nets resting in tangled piles on the ground beside his feet.

  It had been Sam’s phone call earlier that morning that had alerted the police to the body, setting in motion the dark events now playing out on the sunlit beach below. Sam stood quietly, holding a dented aluminum travel mug. He lifted it and took a sip of cold coffee as Kali exchanged glances with Walter.

  “Not my idea of the best way to start the day,” Sam said, frowning. He raised a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the sun’s glare, and looked out over the water. “Doubt the fish will come back here for a long while. They’ll see the boy’s spirit and swim away.”

  Walter nodded slowly. Kali could see that he was nearly as dejected as Sam.

  “You’re probably right,” Walter agreed.

  “We’ll do a ceremony, Sam,” said Kali, smiling at him with what she hoped was reassurance. “You’ll see. We’ll make an offering to Kuula. You know that he takes good care of fishermen. He’ll make sure your fish will come back.”

  “Maybe,” said Sam, still looking doubtful. “Maybe when you do the ceremony, you can ask Kuula to tell the fish to bring their friends. My nets are never full these days.”

  He waited quietly on the hill, looking at them expectantly. Kali and Walter said nothing.

  “I watched that young policeman down there putting up tape,” Sam said, gesturing toward the beach, his voice flat. “I know what that means. I watch those television shows, you know.” He cleared his throat, turning toward Kali and Walter with a questioning glance. Still receiving no response, he reached down and gathered his nets, then turned toward the road.

  “Okay. I’m going now. You call me if you need anything.” He stopped, his lined face clearly disappointed. “Not that there’s anything else to say. I walked down to the water, and there he was. Heard nothing, saw nothing, smelled nothing. Just the boy, caught up in the rocks.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” said Walter, his voice solemn. “But if you do think of anything . . .”

  “We’ll talk later, okay?” Kali smiled again.

  Sam nodded, then trudged away, his nets thrown over his shoulder.

  Kali looked pointedly at Walter. He cleared his throat and walked to the head of the steep path. She followed him as he made his way carefully toward the spot below where Hara still waited beside the body.

  “This the only way down?”

  “Yes, for a considerable distance. This is the main path the surfers use.”

  The sound of the waves washing ashore against the rocks was rhythmic, steady as a metronome. Regardless of how peaceful the surroundings seemed, Kali thought to herself, surfing accidents were far more common than the local rental shops ever let on to the tourists. She stepped carefully onto the path. To her mind, it was simply more proof that the water gods didn’t care how young or old you were, or whether you’d lived here your whole life: when they were provoked, whatever the reason, nothing could protect you.

  She surveyed the sea’s deceptive shimmering face. No native Hawaiian took the sea or any part of the environment for granted. The weather patterns in this isolated island chain were unpredictable. Despite the fact that the dim coast of the Big Island could be seen across the channel this morning, the weather and the ocean’s profile for the past several days had been erratic. A storm system had moved through, bringing huge waves and churning the water into wild eddies. Today the far gentler ripples meeting the beach rolled out from a blue-green sea that was uncharacteristically still, offering an uneventful passage for the boats making their way through the wide channel between the islands.

  Walter seemed to sense the direction Kali’s thoughts had taken.

  “The storm brought some big waves, but it didn’t cause as much coastal damage as we all thought it would,” he noted. He grunted, grasping at the shrubs lining the path, as his foot slipped on the sandy surface.

  “I guess that’s something good,” she acknowledged. “Though it certainly brought the surfers out.”

  He nodded. “Of course, that’s the thing about storms. They pass, but you can count on there always being another one.” He looked up at the blue, deceivingly calm sky. “Heavy rain moving in later today, possibly with strong winds. We’ll have tourists driving off the edge of the road or getting caught in riptides.”

  “That’s right,” said Kali, shaking her head. “Go ahead and look at the dark side of everything, Walter. You’re always such a gloomy bastard.”

  They reached the bottom, where the path gave way to a level stretch of sand and patchy grass. Walter turned away from her. Kali knew he’d never waste his time denying the truth. She considered, in his defense, that his original plans for the morning probably had had absolutely nothing to do with fishing a teenage boy from a tidal pool. Instead, they’d likely been focused on making it to the Ranch Restaurant before the last batch of macadamia nut pancakes disappeared down the throats of the tourists who had stayed overnight, choosing to delay the navigational challenges presented by the twisting road that covered the long miles between here and the resorts clustered near the narrow central part of the island.

  A low grumble sounded. Kali raised an eyebrow, and stared questioningly at Walter, her suspicions confirmed. “Was that your stomach?”

  Walter glared, one hand moving involuntarily toward his generous waistline. “Call came before the sun was up. No time to stop for toast and jam,” he said defensively.

  But Kali was already wandering away. Instead of approaching the body, she walked along the waterline, listening to the space. It felt to her as though it had been disrupted, fragmented. An image of the broken plate on her wooden floor flashed through her mind, and she turned abruptly and walked rapidly toward the stretcher. From the beach, the two medics watched her, well aware of her kahu status, offering her the respect of not interfering.

  She moved to the head of the stret
cher. Hara stepped away as she stood next to the body. Her heart cramped, squeezed by a rush of sudden misery. This was no good. Like Walter, she knew who this boy’s family was, and had lived all her life in the same remote community on the island’s edge.

  She turned and scanned the shore in the direction of the current, then looked down at the outline beneath the sheet. She frowned. There was something else lingering in the air, like the faint shadow of residual fear. She closed her eyes. It hovered, still dissipating, never measurable to begin with.

  “There appears to be a man tooth lodged in the flesh around the head injury,” Walter said, walking up beside her. “Inconsistent with the idea of a surfing accident.” He glanced toward Hara. His voice barely registering a grudging pride, he added, “Hara noticed it.”

  Kali lifted enough of the sheet to expose the boy’s face, then walked from one side to the other to study his expression. The hair was pushed away from the jagged cut, and she leaned over, discerning the bright white edge of the shark’s tooth.

  “It was just a couple of weeks ago his picture was in the paper,” she said.

  “Yeah. He won a full scholarship to the University of Hawaii to study marine biology,” said Walter.

  Kali recalled the photograph. He’d looked buoyant, the future stretching out before him. She shook her head, letting go of the thought. She only hoped that wherever Kekipi was now, he’d found a new surfboard and all the big waves he could handle. She considered the possibility that the boy had perhaps become a wave himself, joined for eternity with the vast ocean.

  “Clearly, that’s no bite,” said Walter, interrupting her thoughts. “A shark would have left tear marks. Taken a lot more flesh than that. Remember that girl, surfer from California, got half eaten couple of summers ago?”

  She grimaced. “Yeah. Kind of hard to forget.”

  “Had that silver ankle bracelet, and when old Manny Peebles caught the shark and cut it open, he found the bracelet still there, still on a chunk of ankle. Parents didn’t want it. I think Manny still wears it.”

  Kali glanced sideways at Walter, appalled. “He wears it?”

  “Yeah. Says it brings him luck fishing.”

  “Sounds like he’s not thinking too clearly about what might be on the end of the line.”

  Walter made a face. “I hear that.”

  The rumble of a car came to a stop on the hill above. They turned together and looked up.

  “Sounds like the medical examiner is here,” she said.

  They watched as the stocky figure of a woman appeared at the top of the path and began to head carefully down the slope.

  Neither spoke as she approached. The coroner, Mona “Stitches” Stitchard, was a fifty-eight-year-old ex–family practitioner who managed to not get along with anyone, regardless of whether they happened to be dead or alive. The sarcasm behind the nickname—never used directly to her face—alluded nicely to both her absent sense of humor and her precise sewing of tissue. The fact that she was also a woman working with a predominantly male police force had given weight to the already large chip on her shoulder, and her generally gruff personalisty made her someone that both Kali and Walter preferred to avoid whenever possible.

  “Doctor,” Walter said by way of greeting, carefully avoiding her nickname.

  “Walter,” she said, her voice lacking all warmth. She turned to Kali. “Good morning, Detective. I suppose the fact that you’re here means you think there’s more to this than a drowning, despite the information I was initially given this morning by the good captain Alaka’i.”

  Kali nodded. “Possibly, but I suppose that’s for you to determine.”

  “Didn’t seem like anything more than a surfing accident initially,” said Walter defensively. “Except for a shark’s tooth lodged in his head at the site of the wound.”

  “Interesting.” Stitches lifted the sheet and studied the wound closely. “The impact, whether from rocks or something else, was heavy enough to break the skull bone. Any sign of a weapon?”

  “Not so far,” said Walter.

  She set her medical bag on the sand and turned back to them as though surprised to see they were still there. “You can go,” she said impatiently. “Do what you do. I’ll let you know what my initial findings are.”

  They walked to the trees in front of the area where the body had washed up. Walter made a phone call, arranging for a crime-scene officer to join them, then gave some instructions to Hara.

  Kali knew he was simply delaying the inevitable.

  He came to stand beside her and sighed. “I guess I need to go and see Kekipi’s mother. Unless you . . .”

  “No.” She looked at him. “I’ll see her separately, when she’s had a moment to process what’s happened.”

  “Okay. Probably better. I’ll take Hara.”

  They lingered, watching as the coroner conducted her preliminary assessment. Finally, Stitches gestured to the medics, who walked over, looking relieved. They lifted the stretcher and adjusted their grip, then made their way carefully past Walter and Kali, with Kekipi lying silently between them. Stitches glanced down the beach and gave a brief wave in Kali and Walter’s general direction. She disappeared from view, and the sound of the ambulance and the coroner’s car could be heard as they edged out of the clearing, following the uneven coil of the grassy track leading to the main road.

  From the corner of her eye, Kali saw Walter glance at his watch, and she noted that he seemed to grow more discouraged with each sweep of the second hand. She knew that by the time he’d visited the victim’s family, gotten a firm identification, and dealt with the crime-scene officer’s initial assessment, it would be noon. Or later.

  Walter’s stomach grumbled again, and he sighed.

  Kali tried not to be judgmental. She knew her uncle was a wonderful person—looking at his watch didn’t mean he was heartless or without compassion. It simply meant that he was hungry.

  CHAPTER 4

  The morning was growing old. Kali had been joined by the CSI, who was searching the beach and the path leading down to where the body had washed into the rocks. Hara had returned with a message from Walter, relaying that the trip to see Anna Smith had been emotional, but that Kekipi’s mother had had little to offer in the way of information other than names of friends, including a girlfriend. The staff at the local surf shop Kekipi favored had confirmed that he had been by, and had mentioned to them that he planned to head out later in the day into the waves the storm surge had left behind, but that he had been alone.

  The most useful information so far was a map provided by the manager at the surf shop, marked up with the favored surf haunts on this section of coast. The pathway and the area around it—where the search was taking place—had been confirmed as the most popular access point. Based on tides and currents, the section of beach most likely to have been Kekipi’s intended destination was only a few hundred yards from where his body had been discovered.

  Unfortunately, most of that area was covered in lush grasses, which were about to see heavy rain. The sky had gradually relinquished its azure blue, filling first with swiftly moving clouds and now growing ominously dark. As predicted, the wind had picked up in force. Already, loose branches were being tossed about, and the waves on the beach nearby could be heard crashing against the rocky shoreline.

  By early afternoon, Walter had rejoined her. The crime-scene officer had departed after making it clear that as there was no defined crime scene, the chances were astronomically small that there would be any useful information to contribute.

  Kali was working her way along the steep side of the path. She met Walter and Hara at the top, where the flat ground of the clearing dissolved into thick trees. They walked side by side, rechecking the ground.

  “This seems pretty pointless,” grumbled Walter, ducking as a branch from a coconut palm swept by, narrowly missing his head. Beside him, Hara wasn’t so lucky: the edge of the branch caught his shoulder, and he winced as it struck.


  “You never know, sir,” he said, rubbing the spot. “It’s like you always say. Most killers are usually not paying attention to details. He might have dropped something, which we’ve all missed.”

  “What makes you so sure it’s a he and not a she?” Kali asked.

  Hara glanced at her but made no reply. They had already been at their search for about an hour and had nothing to show for it. In novels and movies, Kali thought, there was always a squadron of fifty eager trained assistants on hand to help out with this kind of search. Instead, they had sundry members of the island’s small police force, who had been assembled on short notice, and none of them had any idea what might have been used as a murder weapon or what it was they should be looking for.

  Her back was starting to hurt when she turned a corner and came out ahead of the others into another clearing. The protected ground beneath a group of palms had plainly been used on multiple occasions as a parking area. She called out to Walter and Hara, and together they studied the crisscross of tire marks, many of which appeared to be from the same set of mismatched truck tires. One tire clearly had a large patch on it a couple of inches from the outer edge. Walter took a series of photos, while Kali and Hara made careful measurements.

  Weary from the search, Walter sat down, his back pressed against the trunk of one of the palms, and sighed. Hara, damp and clearly uncomfortable, waited silently for further direction.

  “Take the cruiser and head back to the station, Hara. I’ll catch a ride with Detective Mhoe.”

  Kali watched as Hara’s figure faded into the shadows cast by the trees. She knelt on the ground next to Walter.

  “Okay, one clearing, obviously being used as a parking lot, but no indication why,” said Walter. “Probably just the surfers, or maybe the local lovers’ lane. The spot where forlorn housewives sneak out and meet their sweethearts.”

  “Or,” said Kali, “someone dealing. This is a nice, secluded spot. Close to the road, but invisible until you turn the corner in the path. Plenty of shade, in case the driver has to wait.”