“What about Brad, Dario? Who killed him, and that college kid? Why?”
“I couldn’t stand to see somebody else have what I couldn’t.” He was crying full blast by then. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. I just went crazy.”
“And me? Did you shoot at me when I was out at Pipeline?”
“I’d never shoot you, Kimo. That must have been Mary. I think she knew how much I cared about you and she was jealous.”
I heard another blast of gunfire, but this one wasn’t aimed inside. There was a volley back and forth, and then I heard a voice call out, “Hello the house. Anybody there? Police!”
“Officer on the scene,” I called back. “Scene secured.”
After
Al Kawamoto was the first in the door, his gun held out ahead of him. In short order, he was followed by uniforms who took custody of Dario, and an ambulance crew that took Bishop Clark away, with Terri by his side.
I sat at the table with Ari, and we reconstructed everything that had happened for Al. When we were done, I drove down to Wahiawa General, where Bishop was in critical condition. Terri’s parents had driven up from Honolulu by then, and her father sat holding his older brother’s hand and talking gently to him.
“I’m so sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said to Terri, when we had walked out together. “If I had known there was any danger I never would have let you go to Bishop’s in the first place.”
“You didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Yeah, that’s been the theme of my life lately. Everything happens and I don’t have a clue about it. Hell of a detective, huh?”
“You knew there was a connection between Dario’s store and the deaths of the surfers.”
“I should have figured it out sooner. The first time I heard that Dario had a wife, I knew something was funny. I should have looked at him a lot more closely, but I was afraid I was trying to make him the killer because I was scared of him.”
“You weren’t scared of him,” she said, taking my hand. “What you were scared of is inside of you, but you’re working on that.” »
Bishop’s death was big news because of the family’s prominence. And of course they had to note that there had been another Clark death, just a few weeks before. This time, though, I went to the funeral, with my parents. We sat at the Kawaiahao Church in downtown Honolulu, across from Honolulu Hale. The Clarks were descended from early missionaries to the islands, and had ancestors buried in the graveyard behind the church. After a brief service, Bishop took his place among them.
I was in the news again, as Sampson told reporters that I had been working undercover to bring both Fonsecas to justice. Mary was being held for trial for her drug activities, as well as for the murders of Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora and Ronald Chang. Dario was being held as her accessory for all that, as well as for the murders of Brad Jacobson and Thomas Singer.
I closed up the house at Cane Landing and moved back to my apartment in Waikiki. After a couple of days off, and evaluations by both the department physician and psychiatrist, I drove my battered pickup into downtown Honolulu once more, parked at a meter a block away from the main station, and prepared to start the job I’d thought I was getting all along, as a detective in District 1. I sat in the truck for a minute, though, listening to Keali’i Kaneali’i ask where all the beach boys of Waikiki had gone. This boy, I knew, had gone away, but was back. Secure in that thought, I locked my truck and headed inside.