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A heavy March wind battered the bedroom window as I awoke to filtered light and a wet snout pressed against my cheek.
I groaned and wiped the slobber away. “Can’t you go back to sleep, you lousy dog?” I grumbled, though I knew it was a lost cause. Once Roby was awake, our eager golden retriever could not settle again.
Beside me, my partner Mike slept uninterrupted. Roby’s adoption had been his idea, after the heroic dog had alerted his previous family to a fire in their home. His non-stop barking had allowed them all to survive unscathed, and when they couldn’t take the dog with them, Mike, the fire investigator on the scene, had taken Roby in.
Within a week of his adoption, Roby was mine as much as Mike’s, and we shared his feeding and walking, reveling equally in his love and kisses. There was no reason to rouse my partner when I was already awake, so I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt that read I want to be the person my dog thinks I am.
I stepped into a pair of rubber Crocs and followed Roby out to the kitchen, where I grabbed a couple of Foodland bags and pocketed a single key to the front door. Then I hooked his leash and we walked outside.
The wind buffeted us as we walked up Aiea Heights Drive toward Keaiwa Heiau State Recreation Area, a nature preserve at the head of the street. I kept my head down as Roby pulled eagerly forward, stopping occasionally to sniff and pee.
Suddenly, he alerted and sprang forward. I had to clamp down on the leash to hold him back as a midnight-black feral pig burst out from behind a spiky hedge. The pig, about fifty pounds of muscle and snarl, rushed up the hill back to the forest as I struggled to keep Roby from chasing him.
Feral pigs were consistent destructive grazers in the forest, churning up soil and destroying young plants. They were herbivores, so I believed the pig that crossed our path was more scared than vicious, but I was still shaken by the encounter, and I turned Roby around and headed back downhill.
The shock had turned to wonder by the time we made it back home. What little I had seen of the animal had been majestic, a reminder that we shared our island with creatures wild as well as domestic.
As we walked in, I heard my cell phone ring, almost simultaneously with Mike’s.
Mike was a fire investigator, and I was a homicide detective. He walked into burning buildings, and I chased bad guys who carried knives and guns. We had been through a lot together—falling in love, a tortured breakup, getting back together and learning to trust one another. Pile on coming-out issues, alcohol problems, sex addiction, family drama and the stress of two demanding jobs.
We were alike in many ways, and different in others. We were both strong, alpha males dedicated to our careers and to taking care of those less fortunate. We had similar looks and builds, though Mike was a few inches taller than I was, and his body was hairier, thanks to the Italian heritage of his father. I was part native Hawaiian, part Japanese and part haole, or white. We both had the slight epicanthic fold that marked our Asian heritages—his from his Korean mother.
A few months before, we had customized our ringtones, so that we’d know whose phone was ringing, and whether the caller was family, friend, or work.
The one I’d chosen for the police dispatcher was a snippet of the theme song for Hawaii Five-O—the original series. Mike was the only fire department investigator for his district, so he was always on call, and the tone he had chosen for his office was a piece of the classic Doors song Light My Fire. When I heard both phones ringing in tandem, I knew we were in for trouble.
Mike and I both scrambled for our phones. Roby and his leash got tangled between us as we spoke to our respective departments, reaching for pen and paper to write down what we needed to know. We finished at about the same time.
“Warehouse fire, right?” I asked him.
“Off of Lagoon Drive near the airport?”
I nodded. “I’ll feed Roby while you take a shower. Ray and I can’t do anything until your guys clear the scene anyway.”
Ray Donne was my detective partner. While I poured dry food in a bowl for Roby and topped it with a dollop of canned pumpkin, to keep him regular, I dialed Ray’s cell.
He answered groggily.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Vinnie kept you up all night.”
“You must be a detective,” he said. His wife Julie had given birth to a son six months before, and little Vinnie still wasn’t sleeping through the night. “You know anything more than I do about this body in the warehouse?”
“Nope. Mike and I both got called at the same time. You want to meet out there in about an hour? They should be finished with the overhaul by then.”
“I love it when you throw those fire terms around. Since Julie and I only talk about formula, diapers and baby poop these days, remind me what that is.”
“Once they think the fire’s out, they send some guys in to search for any remaining cinders, anything that could catch again. Mike supervises that; if they don’t do it right, they could remove evidence he needs.”
Mike left the house a few minutes later. I ate my breakfast, brushed Roby’s teeth and refilled his water bowl. After a quick shower I was on my way down to Lagoon Drive, a long curving street between the airport and Ke’ehi Lagoon.
The gale-force wind of earlier that morning had died down to a cool breeze, and I rolled up the flaps on my Jeep for the drive down to the airport. Despite its name, which implied an unspoiled tropical atoll, Lagoon Drive was littered with abandoned warehouses, used car operations and small import-export businesses. A dozen sharp-edged wind turbines roosted along the roof line of a building at the far end of the drive like hungry vultures.
A herd of fire department vehicles clustered ahead of me—three fire engines, a ladder truck, and a couple of SUVs driven by higher brass. The strobing lights were enough to give you an epileptic fit. Officers from two squad cars directed traffic away from the area.
I parked my Jeep beside a barbed-wire fence as a plane took off from the reef runway, shaking the air. The ground was barren and sandy; even weeds seemed to have a hard time living in the desolate landscape. In the other direction I saw a vast expanse of shimmering water and the dark green sentinel of Diamond Head in the distance.
I saw Mike in his yellow fire suit and waved at him. He walked over, shrugging off the oilskin hood. “Two story wood-frame building,” he said. “Went up like kindling, especially after the run of dry weather we’ve had lately.”
“Arson?”
“Too early to tell. No obvious incendiary devices. I’ll have to analyze the fire load and the spread pattern before I can make a determination. But you know that already.”
“It’s always nice to hear you explain it one more time. How about the body?”
“How about it?”
“You know what I mean.”
“First responders saw a body of an older male on the floor of the building when they entered. He burned to a crisp before they could extinguish the flames, though. I don’t know how much you’ll get out of the ME.”
“What a great start to the morning. Neither of us have much to work with.”
“I’ve got to get back inside. I’ll talk to you later.”
He turned and walked back toward what remained of the building. The air was heavy with ash, smoke and the distinctive smell of charred human flesh. I pulled out my digital camera and started taking pictures while I waited for Ray to show up.
A couple of abandoned warehouses, wood-framed with sheet metal exteriors, sat in the area around the burned building. One brick godown still held the original owner’s name and the date 1884 engraved over the lintel, though all its windows were boarded up.
A steady stream of cars passed, going to the few remaining open businesses. Ray pulled up as I was finishing a series of shots, and I related what Mike had told me.
Ray was thirty-four, two years younger than I was, and at five-ten, three inches shorter. His hair was a sandy brown while mine was black, and he was one hundred percent Italian. But despite those differences, he was my brother from another mother. We got each other, and we worked well as a team.
I had a tendency to bull forward when I had an idea or a goal, with a single-minded focus. I was willing to skirt around procedures if I thought the end justified the means.
Ray was patient, mindful of the rules, better able sometimes to see the bigger picture. We argued and sniped at each other, but we also joked around and supported each other through whatever came our way.
The ME’s team arrived to take away what remained of the body, collecting bones and shreds of fabric. Ray and I stood nearby, our upper lips coated with VapoRub to dampen the smell. One of the techs held up a piece of metal that looked like a futuristic ray gun—a round ball attached to a curved shaft pierced with holes.
“You may be in luck,” he said. “You know what this is?” We both shook our heads. “An artificial hip. See this ball here? That’s the joint. The serial number has been damaged in the fire, but I’ll bet with some advanced imaging you could get enough out of it to initiate a trace.”
Every device implanted into our bodies, like artificial joints, pacemakers and so on, has a serial number, which can be traced to the manufacturer, the doctor who implanted the device, the hospital where it was done, down to the person who received it. If we found a body without any identification and had no missing persons reports to match it to, we could use the appliance to identify the victim.
After the ME’s team left, I called dispatch and discovered that the fire had been reported by a pilot on an early morning flight into Honolulu International Airport. So there wasn’t some hapless 911 caller to interview.
The smell started to get to us, so Ray and I began canvassing the few businesses in the area. Everyone we spoke to said that they had arrived to work after seven a.m., when the fire department was already on the scene. We ended up back at the fire as the last engine pulled away. The SUVs and the ladder company were gone, but Mike’s truck was still there, as well as a single squad car. The site had been blocked off with crime scene tape.
I pulled up next to Ray. “I’ll talk to Mike. Why don’t you go back to headquarters and see what you can dig up about the building?”
“Will do.” He drove away, and I walked over to where Mike was speaking with the uniformed officer.
“Learn anything more that could be useful?” I asked Mike, as the uniform walked back to his squad car. He’d be stationed there to watch the site for the rest of his shift, and we’d have to keep coverage until we were sure we had retrieved all the available evidence.
Mike looked at his notes. “Found a couple of cigarette butts near the where the victim was. He could have been smoking, and accidentally set the fire.”
“What was the fuel?”
Living with Mike, and working cases with him, I’d learned a lot about fire. You need three elements to start a fire—oxygen, heat, and fuel. It was called the fire triangle. There would have been a lot of oxygen inside the big building, and the heat could have come from a cigarette, a match or a lighter.
“Looks like there were boxes of paper files stored inside. Once the fire caught them, the whole place went up fast.” Mike’s first and primary job was to determine the origin of the fire, which he’d do by tracing patterns made by the flames moving away from the site of ignition. “It looks like as soon as some of those boxes caught, the fire climbed upward to the roof, then spread down the walls.”
He promised to call if he found anything interesting, and we kissed goodbye.
Even a year before, that kind of public display of affection would have freaked Mike out. He still felt that his sexual orientation was his own business, not something to parade about, but he’d gotten more comfortable in his own skin the longer he’d been out of the closet.
I took one last walk around the property, hoping for inspiration from the victim’s restless spirit. I got nothing, though. The ground was damp and the air stunk of ash and burned flesh. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement.
I looked more closely in that direction, toward a row of warehouses, with the old brick one on the end. Nothing.
But I kept staring, and a moment later I saw movement again—a young man with dark hair in a ponytail, wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue nylon shorts. He looked familiar and I started toward him.
He was walking quickly, darting around the warehouses, and I sped up. I saw him again, in profile, and this time I was sure I knew him. “Dakota!” I called. “Hold on. I want to talk to you.”
Dakota was a mainland transplant, a haole kid from somewhere in the flyover states who had moved to Hawai’i with his mother a year before, and started coming to the gay teen youth group I mentored at a church in Waikiki. I had no idea what he was doing in this deserted area so early in the morning, but I wanted to find out.
Dakota picked up his pace, and I ran after him. But he had nearly twenty years on me, a head start, and what appeared to be an intimate knowledge of the warehouse area. I lost sight of him after a few hundred yards. I pulled up, my heart racing, and called one last time. “I just want to talk, Dakota,” I called.
A jet took off from Honolulu International and the noise was so loud I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps as I walked back to my Jeep. What was he doing out there? Did he have some connection to the warehouse fire, and the death of the man with the artificial hip?
I went over the possibilities as I drove slowly around the warehouse neighborhood, hoping to spot Dakota again. Suppose the victim was a pedophile who had met Dakota for sex out there? The kids from my group were a mixed bag. The lucky few were still living at home, with parents who understood and supported them. Others hid their sexuality from families they knew would disapprove, or who would withdraw financial support.
Still others had run away from home, living on the street or crashing with friends when they could. A few turned tricks for cash. I tried to be whatever they needed—talking to them about safe sex and condom use, about self-defense and emotional empowerment. Our sessions were a free-form mix of basic martial arts, lecture, question and answer, and just talking.
I circled around three times without seeing Dakota. But I couldn’t shake the fear that somehow he had been involved in the arson and the death, and that worried me even more than a case normally did.