by Toby Neal
Kamuela gestured her over to the tower. She shook hands with Eddie Nanaio, one of the lifeguards. “Yeah, I knew Makoa Simmons. Great kid. He was out here almost every day. Got more than his share of waves, too.”
“Know anyone who had it in for him? Tried to snake waves from him, like that?” Lei asked, digging her spiral notebook out of her back pocket.
Nanaio narrowed sharp brown eyes in a weather-beaten face. Mirrored Oakleys turned backward gripped his thick neck. “Makoa had rivals, that’s for sure. Bryan Oulaki was the main guy who went head-to-head with him. They both rode for Torque, and Bryan, he didn’t think a Maui guy should be getting so much ink and publicity. He trash-talked Makoa, and they dropped in on each other a lot, but personally, I think that was all part of the PR Torque used to get YouTube views of their shootouts and like that. I saw those guys talking story plenty times at the team house, all mellow-kine.” As Nanaio talked, his pidgin thickened.
“Shootouts?” Lei wasn’t sure of the term.
“Heats against each other. Torque even featured a short film with the two of them trying to outdo each other during a free-surf session—it played up the competition and bad blood, but again, when they were off camera, they seemed fine with each other.”
“Thanks. That’s good information,” Lei said. Kamuela fist-bumped the lifeguard, and he ascended the steps again, binoculars back up to his dark warrior’s face.
“Whatever lifeguards get paid, I don’t think it’s enough,” Lei said as they walked back to Kamuela’s truck.
“You got that right. They save lives and risk their own every day. Let’s find that team house.”
They followed the GPS prompt along the narrow, sandy frontage road winding between stands of coconut palms and wind-battered beach naupaka running parallel to the main highway. Older homes, weathered by the constant salty air, hunkered beneath wind-battered kamani and ironwood trees.
The GPS steered them down a sandy driveway, ruts worn deep and patched unevenly with gravel. They turned at the address, painted on a piece of driftwood, and Kamuela was hard-pressed to find a parking place in the narrow backyard clogged with trucks and every sort of surfmobile, all of them sporting racks and stickers of every color and style.
Kamuela finally parallel parked behind several other vehicles. “We’ll just have to move it if someone needs to leave.”
“Who are all these people?”
“Well, could be anybody associated with the company, really. Houses are rented for the surf season, which usually runs from November to March, by the company. They invite their top-tier riders to live in them, and they get interns or groms to come clean and do the yards or whatever, earning a place to crash. Usually there’s some sort of company rep living in, too, keeping things from getting too out of hand.”
“Out of hand? What do you mean?”
“Partying. Chicks. Drugs.”
“Oh.” Lei opened her door and straightened her jacket. “From what I’ve been hearing, that wasn’t Makoa Simmons’s lifestyle.”
Kamuela shut his door and beeped the truck locked. “Yeah. A lot of the riders are serious athletes and the body is a temple, yada, yada. But in any late-teens, early-twenties group of young males, there are always a few who don’t feel really alive unless they’re pushing all the limits. Not just surfing.”
They walked up the sandy walkway trimmed in coconuts to a front door with a big oval Torque logo mounted on it. Kamuela rang the bell, causing the sound of a gong to echo inside the house.
A few minutes later, he rang again.
They heard the padding of bare feet, and a blond teen in yellow Torque board shorts, no shirt, opened the door. His hair was a mass of sun-bleached, salty-looking tufts, and his body was deeply tanned, making hazel eyes look even greener under the thatch of hair.
“What’s up?”
“Detective Kamuela and Sergeant Texeira. We need to speak to whoever’s managing the house.”
“This about Makoa?” The kid blinked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get Pete. Come in.” The kid gestured them in, and looking around at the copious amounts of sand on the floor, Lei decided to leave her shoes on.
They followed the kid down a tiled hall, past a staircase rising to upper floors, and into a front room. Salt spray misted the windows, but Lei could see a lanai crowded with chairs, a weedy lawn in front of the house, and between the framework of a pair of palms, the aqua of pounding surf.
“Pete, these cops are here about Makoa Simmons.” The grom introduced them to a man Lei assessed as mid-thirties, Caucasian, five ten and a hundred fifty pounds, blue eyes, buzz-cut blond hair, wearing a Torque team shirt in black.
The man stood up from his deck chair, setting aside a laptop he’d been typing on. Lei noticed a row of cell phones on the deck beside him. “Hey. We’ve been expecting some sort of visit since we heard about the tragedy. Pete Cantor—I’m the Torque team manager on site.”
Lei shook his hand and introduced herself. “I’m the investigator working the case from Maui. And I’m sorry to tell you if you haven’t heard already, but Makoa’s death was no accident.”
Pete Cantor’s face paled under his tan. “No shit?” he said faintly. “I heard that, but I didn’t want to believe it. Bad enough he’s dead. Unreal someone would take him out deliberately!”
“That’s why we’re here. A suspect rented a van on Maui and deliberately drowned him in the lineup at Ho`okipa.” Lei took the artist’s sketch out of her backpack and handed it to him. “Know anyone who looks like this?”
Pete frowned down at the rendering, and the paper shook in his hands. “This is kind of a generic face. Could be any of a half-dozen local guys that come and go from the house. We kind of have a revolving door here.”
“Well, we need to search Makoa’s room and get a list from you of anyone you think that could be. Can you point me to his room?” Lei asked, eager to see if she could get his computer and collect the hate mail Shayla had alluded to.
Pete’s cheekbones flushed. “Bryan Oulaki’s already moved into his room. We boxed up his stuff, though. It’s in the garage.”
Lei stared at the team manager a long moment. She could feel Kamuela beside her doing the same. Pete held up his hands in apology and protest.
“We thought it was an accident, okay? And the front room, the master bedroom, is a major perk for the top-ranking rider. Which, after Makoa, is Bryan.”
“Shit, man. The kid’s not even cold on the slab,” Kamuela said from beside Lei in his dark-edged voice, and Lei was glad he did.
“Let me take you up there. It will make more sense when I do.” Pete led them up sand-speckled wooden stairs to a second-story master bedroom that dominated the front of the house. A king-sized bed took up the center of the room. Stacks of boards lined a wall, and a bathroom at the back completed the decor, but the view through sliding glass doors fronting a deck looked directly into the Pipeline lineup.
A row of shirtless, tanned, chiseled-looking surfers in webbed deck chairs hooted and commented loudly on the action, beers in their hands.
Pete slid the door open. “Hey, guys. These are some cops here about Makoa.”
Immediately, silence fell. Lei stuffed down the intimidation she felt at looking at the row of famous faces she recognized from ads and write-ups in the surf magazines. Makoa should be sitting here, and one of these guys might have had something to do with why he isn’t.
“Sergeant Texeira, Detective Kamuela,” Lei said, as they flashed ID. “We’re going to want to take statements from each of you, beginning with whichever of you is Bryan Oulaki.”
The young man closest to Lei set his beer aside in a cup holder on the folding chair and stood.
“I’m Bryan.” He was around five ten, with black buzz-cut hair. A tribal-style t
attoo of interlocking triangles circled muscled shoulders, dipping down across a tanned chest and continuing around his back. Dark brown eyes and the shadow of a beginning goatee completed a description that could easily match the sketch she’d taken back from Pete Cantor.
Lei’s heart rate spiked as she shook the young man’s hand. “I’d appreciate your time answering a few questions. Privately.”
“Sure.”
Lei didn’t think she was imagining the uneasy set to Bryan Oulaki’s mouth. He reached down and grabbed up the black Torque team shirt hanging over the back of his chair and shrugged into it. “Right this way.”
Kamuela followed her back into the bedroom and slid the glass door shut behind them, closing Pete and the other surfers out on the deck. Lei liked the way he was letting her take the lead but seemed to know when to provide a seamless backup.
“There’s an office we can use to talk back here.” Oulaki led them down the hall to a carpeted office. One wall was lined with computers networked with blue cables. Awards and trophies cluttered a shelf that ran the length of the room, and a back window overlooked the crowded parking lot.
Kamuela closed the office door as Oulaki pulled three rolling chairs from the length of computer desk. Lei and Kamuela took seats facing Oulaki. Lei took out her phone and set it on the edge of the round conference table against one wall.
“Mind if I record this? Saves time and hassles later.” Lei smiled, trying for reassuring, but she’d been told her smile in interviews wasn’t the kind that lent itself well to “good cop.”
Oulaki stiffened up even more, brown face going immobile, arms crossed defensively on his muscular chest. “Whatever.”
“Relax, man. We’re just trying to get a feel for Makoa’s life here in the house,” Kamuela said. Lei knew the other surfers would have heard by now from Pete Cantor that Makoa Simmons’s death was a homicide, but she hoped they’d been able to isolate Oulaki before he heard that news.
“Tell us about your relationship with Makoa,” she said.
“What does this have to do with me?” Oulaki said, frowning. “He was on Maui and drowned. Why are you getting all up in my grill?”
“And why are you so defensive?” Lei rapped out. “I see you wasted no time moving into his room.”
“That was Pete. Said I earned the perk,” Oulaki said, voice low and eyes cast down. Lei believed him about that, at least.
“Just tell us about your relationship with Makoa Simmons. We’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors about it,” Kamuela repeated.
“We were good, man.” Oulaki looked up, made eye contact with Kamuela, who was doing well with the default “good cop” role. “All that rivalry jazz, that was just to get publicity to raise both our profiles. Pete came up with the idea last season, and we have been playing it up. It worked too. That YouTube video of our free-surf session got more than a million hits worldwide.”
“So there was no actual bad feeling between you two?” Lei asked. “Come on, now. I was hearing about it over on Maui, from people close to Makoa.”
“Okay, yeah, once we got into the competition thing, we worked it. I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t think Makoa deserved all the buzz he was getting. I’m North Shore born and raised, been surfing Pipe since I was thirteen, and here he comes, Mr. Haole Prep School Maui, acting like he’s all that.” Lei could see by the young man’s tense shoulders and flared nostrils that the resentment was real. “But we never had a problem anywhere but in the water. It was all just for the cameras.”
“Sounds like you had motive.” Lei gestured toward the front room they’d just left. “With Makoa gone, that sweet view’s all yours, not to mention Torque’s top billing.”
“Hey, I never wished nothing on the guy.” A hint of pidgin had crept into Oulaki’s sullen voice. “Except that he would go back to Maui.”
“Maybe you helped him stay there,” Lei said, leaning forward to pin the young man with her cop stare. She slid the sketch out of the folder toward him. “This a picture of you?”
Oulaki’s black brows snapped together as he took the sketch. “Why are you asking? Makoa clocked his head on his board and drowned.”
“How’d you hear that?”
“I don’t know—that’s what I heard. What makes sense.” Oulaki looked flustered, frowning and moving restlessly on his chair as he gazed at the sketch. The gold earring in his ear caught a stray sunbeam. He could have so easily changed his appearance: shaved, worn a black rash guard to cover up those distinctive tats, taken out the earring, which she remembered seeing in most publicity photos. When Oulaki got back to Oahu, he could have buzzed off the longish hair in the sketch. In another surf break on a different island, he wouldn’t have been readily recognizable.
“Makoa was murdered. Someone dropped in on him and held him under.” She delivered her words as smoothly as sliding a knife between Oulaki’s ribs.
Oulaki looked up directly at Lei. Color ebbed from beneath his tan, leaving him jaundiced. “This isn’t me.”
He thrust the sketch back at Lei. She didn’t take it, and it fluttered to the ground and lay on the floor, looking up at them accusingly. Things devolved from there into a mute stare down between Lei, arms folded, and Oulaki, equally closed off.
Finally Kamuela said, “We need an alibi. Where were you day before yesterday?”
“I went to visit family in Honolulu.”
“So you weren’t out here at the team house?” Lei said.
“No. I have family in Mililani. I saw them. Spent a couple of nights at a friend’s house, too. He can verify I was there.”
“We’ll need that information,” Kamuela said, and took down the contact names.
Lei tried not to react when she heard his friend’s last name was Tadeo. Hoping her voice was neutral, she said, “We have a Maui family by that name.”
“It’s common enough.” Oulaki eyed her sullenly. “Are we done now?”
“For the moment,” Lei said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
After the surfer left, Lei got up and shut the door. “I like him for it.”
“I kind of do, too—though if his alibi checks out, we aren’t going to be able to do much unless your team can find some trace that ties him to the body. We don’t have his fingerprints in the van.”
“He isn’t dumb. He could have found a way around that, and the van was filthy and full of trace from a dozen possible contributors. Unfortunately, we already know the body was clean. Let’s just get names, contact info, and alibi statements from the rest of the guys here, and then get out to that van driver Freddie Arenas’s address in Kahuku. Let’s take all of Makoa’s boxes, and I can go through them carefully elsewhere.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Chapter 9
Lei held the pile of threat letters and printed-out e-mails Pete Cantor had given her as Kamuela navigated out of the crowded driveway at the Torque team house. Glancing down at the pile in a manila envelope, Lei frowned.
“I don’t think Cantor would have given these to me if I hadn’t known to ask for them.”
“Seemed like that to me, too. He didn’t like us hassling Bryan Oulaki,” Kamuela said. The team manager had stormed in after Bryan left, blustering and defensive. But between the two of them they soon had him groveling as he handed over the collection of threat letters and Makoa’s boxes of possessions, stored in the garage.
“Well, if Oulaki’s Torque’s anointed successor, I can see that. But withholding the letters shows he suspects someone, someone who may be in that house. I think I should go back and reinterview Cantor later. Maybe bring him into the station, intimidate him a bit.”
“Let’s see about this Arenas guy in Kahuku first.” Kamuela finally got the truck turned around. He pointed to a coconut tree in the team house’s yard. A surfboard emblazoned with Makoa�
��s name was propped against it, surrounded by flowers, cards, and other offerings. “It was good to hear they’re doing a paddle out for Makoa.”
“Yeah. That helped me not bite Cantor’s head off for how he threw Makoa out of the master bedroom so fast,” Lei said. The paddle out was scheduled for the next day. The informal ceremony that had sprung up among the surfing community was a way to give honor to their fallen. Surfers paddled their boards out into the ocean, made a circle, and said prayers, told stories, sang songs about the one lost. Plumeria flowers and leis were tossed into the circle at the end, and waves were surfed to honor the dead. Lei had seen flowers from these ceremonies washed up on the beaches, and they never failed to give her a bittersweet pang.
“No one else popped for me besides Oulaki. What did you think?” Lei asked.
“Agree.” Kamuela gave a terse nod as he navigated the narrow frontage road and got back onto busy two-lane Kamehameha Highway.
They’d taken statements of whereabouts during the time of Makoa’s murder from all the surfers in the house and had taken prints and hair samples as well in case they got lucky with some trace. Lei hadn’t enjoyed the stony stares and attitudes some of the riders showed, but there hadn’t been anything more definite to go on.
Now they headed out past Sunset Beach, a wide swath of yellow sand alongside the highway. Lei rubbernecked across Kamuela’s broad chest to get a look at the surf at the famous beach, where the wave break was visible from the road. “We don’t have anything like this on Maui.”
“Yeah, but you have Jaws.” Kamuela named the break famous for huge twenty-to-fifty-foot surf off the rocky coast north of Paia on Maui.
“It’s not really accessible like this is. Jaws is a real project to find, out in the pineapple fields. You need a car with four-wheel drive and mud tires just to get to the overlook. No wonder North Shore Oahu’s such a tourist attraction.” Lei could actually feel spray from the pounding surf curling her hair into even tighter ringlets as Sunset’s waves detonated off the beach.
