Death of a Messenger

by Robert McCaw

  “No, sir.” The little Japanese doctor stiffened, like a peacock. “I’m the county physician. This is my job.”

  “Shizuo, we’re on a military reservation. Lieutenant Zeigler and I are jointly in charge of this investigation.” Koa assumed that Shizuo didn’t know that the Army only rented the Pōhakuloa Training Area and that the state of Hawai‘i retained criminal jurisdiction. Such details were beneath the good doctor’s notice. “Zeigler checked with his superiors, and we’ve agreed on this approach. It’s going to be a joint autopsy.”

  “No, sir. You have no … no authority to agree.”

  The nice approach wasn’t working; luckily, Koa had no problem taking a stiffer line. “Calm down, Shizuo. Without an agreement, the Army will take charge of the autopsy. This way, we—you’ll—still have a principal role.”

  Shizuo reflected upon Koa’s words before giving a curt nod.

  “Where is this Army doctor?” Shizuo looked around at the military personnel, searching for medical corps insignia.

  “He’s on O‘ahu, at the Army Central Identification Laboratory. He’s going to participate by videophone.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Koa signaled to Zeigler, who approached carrying a headset and trailing wire from a small communications van. He handed the headset to Shizuo. “It’s a secure two-way channel. You can talk to Dr. Cater just like he was standing next to you.”

  Shizuo glared at the military police officer before grabbing the headset and fitting it in place. Koa stepped back and motioned Zeigler to do likewise. While Shizuo spoke to Dr. Cater, Koa whispered, “You warned him?”

  Zeigler nodded.

  Several minutes later, Shizuo turned with rigid precision to face Zeigler. “You have the video communications ready, Lieutenant?” Shizuo uttered the last word with such distaste that Koa bit his lip to stifle a response, but the insult had no perceivable effect on Zeigler. A thin skin wasn’t an asset in either the military or the police.

  “We’ll be ready for you in five minutes.”

  “We will need lights too, Lieutenant.” Again, disdain dripped from Shizuo’s voice.

  “We’ve already set up arc lights, Doctor.”

  Shizuo removed the headset and thrust it at Lieutenant Zeigler. “Inform me when everything is ready.” He strutted toward the jeep to retrieve his medical kit.

  Koa said sotto voce, “That was inexcusable. I apologize.”

  “Don’t. The Army probably killed his relatives during the war. At least, I hope so.”

  The two men shared a brief smile.

  Koa assembled all the military and police personnel. “Here’s the routine,” he said. “Everybody will wear masks. The body is badly decomposed … the smell is god-awful.” Koa pointed to Ron Woo, the pencil-thin police photographer. “I’ll go in first with Ron. He’ll get pictures. By then Lieutenant Zeigler should have the telecommunications hookup ready and the medical types can do their thing. When they’re done, the crime scene team goes in. Everybody understand?” Koa paused, and when those around him nodded, he added, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  Basa already had the ordnance techs sweeping for unexploded duds. They discussed manpower needs with Zeigler, and Koa asked Basa to take command of the search operation. “Tell ’em to be careful,” Koa warned. “We’ve already got one body. We don’t need another one.”

  Shizuo passed out surgical masks, and the military police illuminated generator-powered arc lamps. Once light flooded the underground cavern, Ron Woo and Koa donned masks and entered the cave. Bright flashes bounced off the walls of the ancient lava tube, giving a kind of strobe-light effect to the scene. Woo photographed the body from every angle, then calmly turned his camera on the stone implement, the stone chips, and the ancient fire ring. Koa always marveled that Ron could photograph the most grotesque of crime scenes without the slightest trace of revulsion.

  By the time Koa and the photographer finished, Zeigler’s MPs had strung coaxial video cabling from the communications van to a video camera in the cave. Shizuo entered the lava tube, wearing both a mask and a communications headset.

  “Okay, Doc, you’re the executive producer. Just tell me where to point the camera,” the video technician announced.

  Shizuo glared at the technician, who’d dared to call him Doc, and Koa thought the Japanese physician might blow a gasket. Then the baby doctor got control of himself. “First, pan the whole corpse so Dr. Cater can see the body in situ. Then point the camera where I point my left index finger. My left index finger.” Shizuo held up his finger. “Understand, soldier?”

  “Yes, sir.” The technician slowly recorded the scene for the forensic pathologist two hundred miles away.

  Shizuo spoke softly into his microphone, using clinical words to describe the corpse—blunt force trauma … lacerations. Koa moved away, giving the doctor room to work, so he heard only intermittent snatches. Shizuo examined the corpse, using his left index finger to direct the video camera at the legs, the trunk, the slashes across the chest, the battered hands, the mauled face, the empty eye socket, and the remaining eye.

  The presence of men in white surgical masks, bright arc lamps, Shizuo’s bag of medical instruments, wires trailing from Shizuo’s headset, and the video camera all seemed like some desperate attempt to pump life back into the naked corpse spread-eagled on the floor of the rocky cavern. Koa had a momentary thought of Frankenstein at work in the bowels of his castle.

  Shizuo inserted a thermometer, measuring the rectal temperature of the corpse. Using thick needles affixed to syringes, the physician drew a variety of body fluids, including blood and spinal fluid. When he dispassionately pierced the victim’s remaining eyeball, Koa walked outside to check on the progress of the search.

  When the old doctor finished, Lieutenant Zeigler’s troops placed the victim into a black plastic body bag. Three soldiers carried the dead man to the military ambulance. The APC’s engine roared, belching black diesel smoke into the breeze as it carried the corpse off toward the morgue in Hilo.

  Koa joined the county physician. The old man had a wilted look, and Koa wondered whether the strain of the exam or injury to his authority had sapped him. “Well, Shizuo, what can you tell me?”

  The little man straightened, but his military snap had vanished. He shook his head. “All this technology.” He spat the word with nearly as much venom as he previously applied to the lieutenant. “Video cameras. Spectrometry. Vitreous fluid. Insects. That Army doctor wants samples of the larvae growing in the corpse. Bugs, for God’s sake. It is not the way to do a medical examination.”

  “Shizuo, the crime scene is inside the PTA. We have to work with the military.”

  “He’s flying over now. Wants to work through the night. Through the night!” Shizuo exclaimed. He shook his head. “What’s the rush? It’s a corpse. It’ll still be a corpse in the morning.”

  Koa kept his face impassive, but inside he congratulated himself for bringing a competent medical examiner into the picture. Shizuo’s complaining only strengthened his conviction that the baby doctor couldn’t handle the case.

  “Give me the preliminaries, Doctor.”

  “Well, there’s not much. The body’s been there for days. No way to establish time of death. Definitely male. Adult. Between twenty and forty-five, but probably closer to thirty. Deliberate effort to conceal the victim’s identity—dental X-rays will be useless. Looks like a ritual killing … got to be some kind of whacko thing.”

  Koa had already figured that out for himself. “When will you have more?”

  “A couple of days. The Army doctor wants tests. Fancy stuff I’ve never heard of, and that’ll take time. The samples have to go to O‘ahu. Waste of time and money, and you don’t get quick results.” Shizuo turned on his heel and walked away as Lieutenant Zeigler approached.

  “Learn anything new from your doctor?” The mocking tone in Zeigler’s voice matched the smirk on his face.

  “Not a goddamn thing. He
’s the only quack I know of who can commit malpractice on a corpse.”

  “I had a word with Colonel Cater before he disconnected. He’s not impressed with your baby doctor either,” said Zeigler.

  “Why am I not surprised? Did he have any idea about the time of death?”

  “No, not from the scene, but he’s running a test that might fix the time. He expressed surprise at the lack of blood. Did you notice?”

  “Yeah, what do you make of it?”

  “Killed elsewhere and moved here?” Koa nodded.

  “Possible, even likely.”

  By the time the crime scene team finished, the sun hung just above the western horizon, gold rims adorned scattered pink clouds, and the pu‘us, or cinder cone hills, cast fantastic elongated shadows. The ground search had gone slowly, and they couldn’t continue in the dark. Koa asked everyone to reconvene at dawn, and Zeigler assigned several soldiers to secure the site.

  Koa and Basa borrowed an office from the military police and set to work. Koa asked Basa to arrange for clerks at headquarters to assemble all local missing-persons reports for the past month and to send inquiries to police on the other islands. “Get every case file on a ritual killing during the past thirty years,” Koa directed. He yawned. “I’m beat and I’m going to stay over in the barracks here. You want me to have Zeigler get you a room?”

  “Yeah. That’s a good idea. It’s already way too late to see the kids.” Basa was a devoted family man, who doted on his ten-year-old daughter, Samantha, and his seven-year-old son, Jason, both of whom were already learning to paddle outrigger canoes. He’d brought both kids, dressed as miniature police officers, to headquarters a number of times, and they called Koa “uncle,” as was the Hawaiian custom in addressing esteemed elders. “You know tomorrow’s Saturday. You’re gonna miss your workout with the canoe team. That’s the second week in a row. An old man like you has to work out regularly or he loses a step or two.”

  Koa winced, feeling a need to massage his neck and upper arm but not giving in. He didn’t like the idea of aging, let alone losing a step. “Yeah, yeah. I’m only reaching my prime. Let me point out that my team didn’t huli two weeks ago,” he said, making a flip-flop gesture with his hand. Basa’s racing canoe had capsized in the ocean.

  “Oh, Jesus, do you have to bring that up? Anybody can get rolled by a freak wave.”

  “And the ocean isn’t full of freak waves?”

  Basa started to retort, then stopped. Koa wondered if the sergeant had somehow spotted his pain and was pulling his punches out of respect. Of course, it made sense. He had been moving gingerly all day, and Basa had proven himself quite observant.

  Koa slipped into the next room, closed the door, and stretched out on the floor with his hands above his head, the one position guaranteed to provide relief for the throbbing in his neck, shoulder, and arm. The doctor had shown him his MRI, pointing out the calcified spinal deposits pinching the nerve that controlled his right arm. The specialist had been definitive about the need for surgery before the muscles in Koa’s arm began to atrophy and he lost the use of it altogether. But what if the surgery failed, and he woke up crippled, or maybe not at all? That thought had made him lose a lot of sleep lately.

  He thought about the fire ring and the stone chips at the back of the cave. Another detective might have dismissed them as irrelevant, but Koa’s personal criminal experience made him paranoid that he might miss something. The fire ring and stone chips might lead nowhere, but he’d take that risk.

  After a while, he got up and called the state archaeologist in Honolulu, only to find that the man was away on vacation. Thwarted in following official channels, he wondered if his live-in girlfriend, Nālani, might know an archaeologist. She worked as a technician at the Alice Observatories—home of the world’s largest optical telescope, located atop Mauna Kea—and was plugged into the island’s scientific community. Feeling guilty for not having checked in with her earlier, he called.

  “Aloha, ipo.” He knew she liked the Hawaiian term of endearment.

  “Where are you?”

  Koa winced at the reserve in her voice. “I’ve had a tough afternoon. Sorry I didn’t call earlier. I’m up at Pōhakuloa. We got a mutilated corpse inside the live-fire area. Looks like some kind of ritual killing. I don’t want to gross you out, but it’s bad, not as bad as what I saw in Somalia, but close.”

  “Jesus, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, nothing a night’s sleep won’t cure. But I’ve got to stay up here tonight. Zeigler’s got a place for me. Listen, we found some kind of stone tool next to the body in a lava tube. There’s an old fire ring and a bunch of little stone chips. You know anything about ancient caves in the saddle area?”

  “Not really. Archaeology isn’t my field.”

  “I tried the state archaeologist, but he’s on the mainland vacationing. Do you know an archaeologist? Somebody I could talk to?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Sure.” Nālani’s voice brightened. “I know just the guy … met him up on the mountain when he was working out at the stone quarries. He’s an expert. Jimmy Hikorea, that’s his name. You want me to call him for you?”

  “That would be great. Have him call me here no matter how late.”

  “Don’t be put off. He’s as sharp as a razor,” Nālani warned.

  After a day spent with Shizuo, Koa was a model of patience. “Okay. I’m forewarned.”

  Nālani lingered in his mind’s eye after he put down the phone—Nālani in that outrageous bikini at the Green Sand Beach, Nālani with the wind tangling her hair on the Kīlauea Iki Trail in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, sleepy-eyed, half-naked Nālani waking up in the morning. He wondered how he could be so lucky and worried that his job—and now his damaged neck—were straining their relationship. Although he had eight years on her, he didn’t feel old when he was with her. Yet he wasn’t sure how she felt deep inside about living with a forty-plus year-old cop. Insecurity was a funny thing … it hit you hardest when you had something to lose.

  He was tired and knew he was letting his fear of spinal surgery get to him. Basa’s remark about losing a step hadn’t helped. He was going to have to face the inevitable. Hell, he’d faced tougher obstacles in the service. Ranger training had been no picnic, nor had putting buddies into medevac choppers, but at least then he’d had some measure of control. Maybe that’s what bothered him most about going under the knife—his life would be in some stranger’s hands.

  It was after midnight when his phone rang. “Koa Kāne here.”

  “Hi. It’s Jimmy Hikorea. Nālani asked me to call. Said you had some kind of archaeological find.”

  The voice had a squeaky quality, and Koa pictured an emaciated academic on the other end of the line. What had Nālani said? Don’t be put off. Had she been referring to his voice?

  “Well, I’m really not sure. We’re investigating a homicide in a lava tube in the Pōhakuloa Training Area. We found some kind of stone tool, an old fire ring, and some stone chips. We need some expert help to understand if the site might be connected to the homicide.”

  “Ahhh … the stone tool, is it wedge-shaped, like the head of a small hoe?”

  Koa found the man’s patronizing voice irritating. The man’s tone must have prompted Nālani’s warning. “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Sounds like you stumbled on a cave used by the ancient stone workers who transported preforms from the Mauna Kea quarry.”

  “Preforms? What’s a preform?”

  “You’ve never had any training in archaeology, have you?”

  Koa felt bone weary and in no mood to tolerate an arrogant academic with a shrill voice. “No, I’m just a dumb cop.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. A preform is a partially shaped cutting tool, usually an adze head. A kind of blank without its final edge.” Despite the apology, Jimmy’s high-pitched voice hadn’t lost its pedantic quality. Koa had to force himself into the role of student.
<
br />   “Tell me about this quarry.”

  “There’s a bunch of old quarry sites on the upper flank of Mauna Kea. Stone workers mined a dense rock called hawaiite for adzes and other implements. They carried their preforms, half-finished stone tools, down the southern slope of the volcano and into the saddle area. That area was a kind of crossroads.”

  Now Koa got more interested. He, like so many other island natives, had great pride in his people’s history. “Are there caves used by the stone workers in the saddle area?”

  “People doing archaeological survey work for the Army found two or three small lava cave shelters in the Humu‘ula Saddle. Sounds to me like you’ve found another one. You want me to come out in the morning and take a look?”

  “I’d appreciate it, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “Come as early as you can. Look for the military police on the Saddle Road near the eastern end of the PTA. Ask for Lieutenant Zeigler if you have a problem.”

  “Great. I’ll be there … ummm … by mid-morning.”

  When Koa finally collapsed on a borrowed Army bunk, he was slow to find the peace of sleep. The mutilated face with the blackened eye socket haunted his dreams, coming at him out of the shadowy darkness of the lava tube. Over and over, the mangled face advanced and receded, back and forth, coming closer and closer in his mind’s eye until the face came alive. With its good eye gleaming and its mouth contorting, it uttered a long, silent scream.

  Then the dream began again with the brutalized face approaching from inky blackness. The face bright, sharp in contrast to the surrounding void. Closer. Closer. The good eye shining. The empty socket large and black, like a hole straight through the head. The dream repeated itself until Koa could feel the heat of the corpse’s breath upon his face. The torn lips moved, exposing stumps of jagged, broken teeth.

  Desperate to speak, the disfigured face mouthed a single word: Kōkua! The word echoed in Koa’s mind. Help … the poor bastard was screaming for help.