Figuring Leffler was too smart to risk returning to his girlfriend’s place, Koa executed the warrant. Koa and Bane, flanking either side of the door, knocked loudly and announced themselves as police officers. Linda Huang opened the door. A small woman with long black hair and tiny eyes, she offered no resistance while the two detectives combed through the one-bedroom rental. Bane searched the living room and tiny kitchen. Koa headed for the bedroom closet where he found a pair of jungle combat boots and a large safe.
Leading Linda Huang into the bedroom, he pointed to the safe. “Can you open it?”
“Bù.” She spread her arms, palms upward, and shrugged.
Again, he pointed to the safe. “Who installed it?”
“Him put,” she responded.
“Leffler?”
“Shi.”
Koa called Benny Kuhio, his go-to lock and key man. While he waited for Benny, Koa called an interpreter to help him question Linda Huang. She told them she’d met Leffler at the Monarch, and they’d been living off and on together for the past month. A week after he moved in, Leffler installed the safe in her apartment, but never gave her access. She confirmed Leffler had been with her the night before the Witherspoon shooting, but left at 4:30 a.m.—just an hour before Witherspoon had been killed less than a mile and a half away. And, he’d been wearing jungle combat boots. “Him always wear boots,” she told the interpreter in Chinese.
Just when they’d finished interviewing Linda Huang, Sergeant Basa called with bad news. Leffler had disappeared like the Hawaiian mists. They agreed to distribute Leffler’s picture to the entire force. Koa also asked Basa to alert the airlines and post lookouts at each of the island’s three commercial airports.
Benny drilled the safe three times to get it open. Koa put on plastic gloves before removing eight packages wrapped in oilcloth; each held a stolen 9 mm Beretta M9A1 handgun bearing U.S. military markings, but none had visible serial numbers. The police would hold the weapons until they could capture and try Leffler, but Jerry Zeigler would eventually get the Army’s property back
Next Koa removed a thick envelope containing four bundles of U.S. currency—crisp new hundred-dollar bills banded in straps with mustard-colored bands. Koa knew from previous bank robbery cases the mustard-colored bands meant ten thousand dollar bundles. Where, he wondered, had Leffler gotten forty thousand dollars? A payoff for killing Arthur Witherspoon?
The picture from Zeigler’s slide show flashed into his mind: Leffler sitting in the corner of the Monarch with Tomi Watanabe. Maybe Watanabe had hired Leffler to kill Witherspoon. But why? Watanabe played no part in the county planning process and had nothing to do with public schools. Could, Koa wondered, the mayor’s spin doctor have been a secret partner in the Hualālai Hui?
The last item in the safe—a piece of paper folded in thirds, like a letter—shot Koa’s Watanabe theory to hell. He unfolded the top third of the paper to find four names. The first two names—Hank Boyle and Arthur Witherspoon had been lined through. Koa felt a rush—he’d found Leffler’s hit list. The third name was Cheryl Makela. The fourth name—Tomi Watanabe—was a shocker, but it seemed to let Watanabe out as a suspect.
As he focused on the name, Koa noticed two question marks and the word “confirm” following Watanabe’s name. Was Watanabe a target or not?
Koa then unfolded the rest of the paper, revealing a fifth name—one that hit him like a rogue wave—Detective Koa Kāne. He, himself, was on Leffler’s hit list! Someone desperately wanted to stop the investigation of the KonaWili school disaster. But who would plan to kill the contractor, the architect, the planning director, the mayor’s press aide, and the investigating detective? And what awful secret were they hiding?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MICA OSBOURNE’S FACE filled half the TV screen. Her daughter’s picture—a darling little girl in a pink dress with a pink ribbon in her hair and a teddy bear in her arms—appeared opposite. The grieving mother’s red eyes and haggard appearance haunted viewers. Koa couldn’t imagine the depth of her despair. “The Education Department is supposed to protect our children. Instead, they took my beautiful daughter, my beautiful little angel. How could they …” Her voice broke … “How could they build a school over a volcanic vent?” The picture changed to an aerial view of the wrecked school with the roof ripped off, the walls collapsed, and clouds of steam and noxious gas billowing upward in a mushroom cloud.
The TV switched back to the original mother-daughter split screen, and Mica Osbourne resumed speaking. “They’ve known about volcanic risks on Hualālai for decades, yet the DOE put an elementary school on top of it. They murdered my daughter, my beautiful baby daughter. We as parents—as the people of Hawai‘i—must hold them accountable … accountable!”
Mica Osbourne’s tortured face disappeared, and the announcer reported Mica Osbourne, together with other parents, had filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Department of Education, its senior leadership, and everyone else involved in the planning and construction of the school. Koa saw Mica Osbourne as a powerful spokesperson for the parents of school-age children throughout the state. The death of her child transformed this ordinary mother into the face of tragedy. Powered by her anguish, public outrage reached a crescendo. Parents called for inspections of their local schools. The state legislators fell all over themselves talking about the importance of school safety. All the while, the rising wave of public anger grew stronger.
Every day the newspapers carried more complaints about unsafe conditions in public schools. On Kaua‘i, a survey reported 10 percent of the school-age population afraid to attend classes for fear of violence. The roof of Waimea High School on Kaua‘i leaked allowing black mold to grow in its classrooms. A salmonella outbreak hit students at Maui High School due to unsanitary conditions in its cafeteria. Administrators let racial tensions at Kealakehe High School on the Big Island escalate to the point of open warfare. Students described Cooper High School on O‘ahu as a “cinderblock oven” without air conditioning. Teachers, students, and their parents blamed every fault in every school building on the State Department of Education.
No one felt the fire of public condemnation more than Francine Na‘auao, the head of the DOE. The Honolulu Star Advertiser and other newspapers questioned Na‘auao’s leadership. She’d been in the job for more than a decade, and like any administrator with a giant workload—the DOE oversaw two hundred ninety-one schools with nearly one hundred eighty thousand students—she’d accumulated a long list of enemies. They had their pahi hahau, their knives, out.
Unnamed sources alleged Na‘auao spent more time on personal investments than running the department while others leaked more dirt. The department had fallen more than a year behind on school safety inspections with the Honolulu Fire Department citing one school three times for the same fire code violation. The press reported Na‘auao’s spending of more than twenty thousand dollars in taxpayer money on a lavish outing for the top officials in the DOE. The allegations went on and on.
While public pressure escalated exponentially, politicians did what they always do; they formed a committee: a special investigating group with a broad mandate to “investigate the KonaWili disaster and all other reported safety problems within the state’s public schools.” Letters and emails poured into the committee’s offices, and soon its members faced months of legwork and public hearings.