Down Mexico Way
I surfed all day Friday, then returned to The Next Wave with my laptop to use their internet connections. I sent a quick email to Harry about the waves, and then a check-in message to Terri, who had just lost her husband a few weeks before. I felt bad that I had left town when she or her young son Danny might need me.
I wrote to my parents, too, a quick note about the surf and how the North Shore had changed in the past ten years. I sent Lieutenant Sampson a longer message about surf bags, rifles, and talking to surfers.
I sat back and thought about the case. If the only thing that connected the three victims was surfing, then maybe if I learned more about them as surfers, I’d find a clue. The dossier I’d been given didn’t have much detail, but I found that by searching for all three names online, I could find out which events they had competed in and what their results were. The only pad I could buy at The Next Wave was one in the shape of an aloha shirt, but with that and a surfboard-shaped pen, I began making notes. Soon there were shirt-shaped pieces of paper piling up, and I built a matrix, looking for any events where they might all have been entered.
Pratt was the best surfer of the three. He was twenty-five, and had been surfing competitively since he was a teenager on the Jersey shore. He’d placed in the top ten in a number of contests, including Mexpipe in Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
Lucie Zamora had also competed at Mexpipe, though she hadn’t placed anywhere near the top. And way at the bottom of the men’s list I found Ronald Chang’s name.
Interesting, I thought, sitting back. All three had been at Mexpipe. Was it just a coincidence, or a real connection? I couldn’t know for a while if it meant anything. I jumped over to email, and sent a message to my brother Lui, asking if he could dig up any video footage of the Mexpipe championship. I told him I was interested in studying form, but I thought perhaps I could see one or more of the murder victims there.
I printed out a list of the top 100 finishers at Mexpipe; hopefully a couple would be around the North Shore, and I could ask them some questions. I also spent some time on the competition web site, learning about the races and the atmosphere surrounding them.
The three dead surfers had been at very different places in the surf hierarchy. Pratt was at the top, a real competitor. Lucie Zamora was struggling to make it out of the pack. Ronald Chang was a weekend surfer who would probably never have finished in the money.
Where did I fit, on that scale? I had to put myself somewhere between Lucie Zamora and Ronald Chang, though without Lucie’s obvious drive and determination. I had some natural ability as a surfer, and I’d been doing it nearly all my life. But to be the best at anything, you have to pour yourself into it, heart and soul. Dario Fonseca had shown me that I couldn’t do that, not while I was hiding my sexuality. I guessed I ought to be grateful for that, but gratitude was a hard emotion to feel around him.
I saw him pass by a couple of times while I worked at the computer. I don’t know why, but I tried to look busy each time, so that he wouldn’t stop and chat. I wasn’t comfortable with him, and I didn’t want to give him another opportunity to proposition me.
I found one interesting piece of information about Mike Pratt that I hadn’t seen in his dossier. He rowed with the outrigger team that practiced in Waimea Bay. Cross-referencing them, I discovered that they practiced every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, and competed in single, double and six-man races. That worked for me; I could stop by the next day.
By then it was late and I was hungry. I stopped for dinner at a bar called the Surfrider, where I had a beer and a burger. Neither were that good. The waitress seemed to recognize me, and so did a guy who was about twenty years too old for me, wearing a Heineken T-shirt that was too tight. He came up to me as I was finishing dinner and asked me, in a low voice, if I wanted to go home with him. I politely declined.
Saturday morning, I awoke to the NOAA’s surf report in my drab, dingy room at Hibiscus House, confused at first as to where I was and what I was doing. Then as my body’s aches and pains began to catalog themselves, I remembered.
I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom, considering what had brought me there, and all the unfinished business I had left behind in Honolulu. For a minute, I wanted to chuck the whole North Shore business and go back to Lieutenant Sampson’s office, tell him to get someone else to solve this case, give me back my gun and my shield and put me to work in District 1.
But I didn’t. Instead, I looked at the case files again and again, memorizing every detail of the three dead surfers. Then I headed down to Hale’iwa Beach Park, to where the North Shore Canoe Club practiced, across the street from Jameson’s by the Sea. There were already a few people there by the time I arrived, and while we waited I helped bring out the canoes.
The light was bright and harsh, glinting in shards off the placid water. Almost everyone knew everyone else. I introduced myself as Kimo and we began stretching exercises as the sun moved up over the hills behind us. A fit, blonde woman named Melody introduced herself to me and asked if I’d ever paddled before.
“Yup, in Honolulu. For a while when I was a kid, we belonged to this native Hawaiian club after school, where we practiced speaking Hawaiian. We made leis out of kukui nuts, we surfed, we learned to paddle. A little hula, too, but don’t ask me to dance for you.”
She laughed. “I won’t.” She sized me up. “You want to try the back of the canoe?”
“Sure.” I knew that’s where they put the biggest and strongest guys. I joined a team of six in pushing an outrigger into the water, and then we all jumped in and started paddling out to sea.
I sat in the fifth seat, behind a slim Hawaiian guy with incredible biceps and triceps, and in front of a stocky haole guy. I noticed that his right leg, from the knee down, was prosthetic, but he was able to move around easily on it, and use his awesome upper body strength in the outrigger. Whenever I lost the rhythm of the oars, I felt his jabbing me in the back. I never heard him whoop or yell as the others did when we crested the wave. He approached his rowing as if he were on work-release from prison, with a grim determination that sapped some of my fun.
We got a good workout, paddling out beyond the surf, then turning around, catching a wave, and paddling like hell to catch it. We did some quick races as well, and then returned to the beach. The Hawaiian guy introduced himself to me as we dragged the canoe back up on the sand. “I’m Tepano. You rowed before?”
“When I was a kid. How about you, you been doing this for a long time?”
“Couple of years. It’s a great workout.” The rest of the team streamed off around us, leaving me walking up toward the parking lot with Tepano. “Everybody’s pretty friendly, too.”
“That guy behind me didn’t seem so friendly,” I said, referring to the haole with the prosthetic leg.
“Rich? He’s okay. He just doesn’t like surfers.”
The sun was fully up, and there was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Some awful surfboard incident in his childhood?”
Tepano laughed. “Not exactly.” His face got serious then. “He was a pretty good surfer, once. Then the Army sent him to Bosnia and his leg got blown off. That prosthetic is state of the art, but he can’t feel a board under him, so he could never surf again. Made him a little bitter.”