We came around the last curve to see the park entrance below us. Eli and Fran Harding rushed forward to embrace their kids, and soon after a rescue chopper airlifted Cole Harding to The Queen’s Medical Center, his sister and his parents going along. Once the Hardings were gone, Lidia Portuondo took charge of Kitty and Jimmy, making sure their wounds were treated and they got some fluids in them.
Sheila White woke up while the paramedics were giving her oxygen, though she refused to say anything. Jeff White stayed with Frank Sit behind a fire engine until and an ambulance had taken her away to check on her concussion and a couple of second-degree burns. Gary Saunders was still coughing, so he went along to get checked out and make sure Sheila remained in custody.
I was drenched in sweat, and the healing burns on my back itched like crazy, but I had to talk to Jeff White before he was taken away for booking. Sampson got a digital tape recorder from his car, and Frank Sit brought White over to the picnic table, standing alertly a few feet back in case White decided to bolt.
Sampson sat next to me as I read White his rights again. He shrugged when I asked if he understood them.
“You have to say something for the tape,” I said.
“I understand,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell us what’s been going on, Jeff,” I said gently.
“Ever since we were kids, Sheila’s been the boss. When we were teenagers, we started, you know, fooling around.”
He looked up at me, and I could see that tears stained his face. “I love her. Just not the way she wants.”
“Must have been tough for you in Texas,” I said. “Hiding.”
He nodded. “That’s why Sheila said we had to leave. When our parents died, we inherited a little money, and we decided to take a vacation together. We came here, and Sheila decided that we should move here, start over in a place where nobody knew us.”
“How’d you come to start your church?” Sampson asked.
“We were looking for a business to start,” Jeff said. “I wanted us to buy a copy shop, but Sheila and I had been lay ministers in our church in Texas, and she thought we should start a church instead.”
I looked over at Sampson. Just a business decision, I guessed.
“Sheila was really upset over the whole gay marriage thing,” Jeff said. He looked down at the rough wood of the picnic table. “I think she knew—about me. And maybe she was worried that I would leave her if I found some guy. She got crazier and crazier, especially with those gay guys next door, and with the rooster down the street. The damned rooster used to wake us up every morning, and Sheila hated that.”
He looked up at me. “She had her routines, you know. She liked everything to be quiet in the morning—I wasn’t even supposed to talk to her. She’d put on her headphones and go for her run, and by the time she got back she liked me to be up and have breakfast on the table.”
I was starting to get a picture of life in the White house, and it only made me pity Jeff even more. “One day she came home from her run and she told me that she’d shot the rooster, and then the homeless man. I didn’t know anything about it until she told me. I mean, I knew the old guy, he was kind of creepy, always spying on what people were doing. He told her he knew about what we were doing in the back yard, and so she didn’t have any choice. She had to shoot him.”
“What made you want to bomb the Marriage Project party?” I asked.
“Sheila saw this show on TV about the bombings in Oklahoma. She got really interested in that sort of thing, started investigating how to make bombs, how to set fires. We practiced on a couple of places—all places she said deserved it.”
“Yeah, small businessmen trying to make a living,” I said.
“I couldn’t do anything. It was like, Sheila said we would do something, and we did it.”
“So you rented a tux and went to the party. You left the bomb in the bathroom?”
“I was so scared. I was sweating like crazy. I was afraid Sheila might not have gotten the fuse right, and it would have blown up on me.”
“Why’d you come to the rally at Waikiki Gateway Park?”
“Sheila was so pissed that it looked like those people were going to get their offices back. She said we had to do something. She was always a great shot with a gun. We used to go out and shoot prairie dogs.”
I just didn’t want to listen to him any more. There would be plenty of time to go over his story in endless detail, but right then, despite the pity I felt for him, I was afraid I might punch him in the gut. His failure to confront his sister, and his sexuality, had led to untold damage, and the deaths of three men: Hiroshi Mura, Wilson Shira, and Charlie Stahl. They’d had nothing in common other than being in the way of Sheila White’s murderous lunacy, and her brother had done nothing to stop her.
I looked at Sampson, and I could see he felt the same way. “Let’s wrap this up,” I said. We finished the formalities for the tape, and then Frank Sit took Jeff White downtown for booking. I know I’d promised him I’d go with him—but that was one promise I didn’t mind breaking.
The fire raged on for another hour to so, until the wind shifted and a band of rain showers blessedly swept down from the tops of the mountains and put out most of the flames.
Lieutenant Sampson, Kitty, Jimmy, my family and I regrouped at Uncle Chin’s house. The gamblers were still there, as if a forest fire hadn’t been raging next to them, as if nothing had gone on all day other than the game.
The paramedics had wanted to take my dad in again for smoke inhalation, especially after his experience at the Marriage Project bombing, but he’d refused, and he did seem to be breathing better, sitting with my mother, Aunt Mei-Mei and Genevieve Pang on picnic benches in the back yard.
An ocean breeze had come up, blowing the smoke from the park fire back up into the Ko’olaus, and the sun had come out. A rainbow stretched high above us.
I kept worrying about Mike, even as we walked through a quick post-mortem on what had happened, making sure no one else was trapped on the mountain.
“So what are we going to do with you, now, son?” Sampson said to Jimmy when we were finished.
“Can he stay here with Mrs. Suk?” I asked, motioning toward where Aunt Mei-Mei sat, Genevieve Pang holding her hand like a dutiful daughter-in-law, even though her own husband was dead, her son in jail.
“She does have custody of him,” Kitty said. “Temporarily, at least.”
Sampson shook his head. “That was invalidated when he ran away.”
“Who says he ran away?” Kitty asked. “He went out for a walk, and Jeff White kidnapped him. That’s not running away.”
“Kitty,” Sampson said, but she stood her ground. He looked from her to Jimmy, who was standing silent. “Why did you run away from the Suks’ house in the first place?” he asked.
Jimmy looked down at the ground and scuffed his feet. “I had to go to the bathroom,” he said finally.
We all looked at him. That didn’t sound like a reason to run away from a good home.
He looked up. “When I got back to the lanai, Mr. Suk was lying there in his chair. He was dead. And I was so scared that it was my fault. I could see he’d been reaching for his pills, and if I’d been there…”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” I said. “I heard it from the medical examiner. Uncle Chin’s heart attack was too much for him, even if he’d gotten a pill.”
The relief was evident on Jimmy’s face. “You’re not going to run away any more, are you?” Sampson asked him.
“No, sir. Kitty and I talked a lot when we were up there. She says the only way I’m going to make my life better is to start trusting some people, and go back to school, and work hard, and become responsible for myself.” He paused. “So can I start with you? Trusting you, I mean?”
Sampson looked at me and I looked back at him. “All right,” he said, after a while. Jimmy got up and hugged him, and then shyly went over to Aunt Mei-Mei, who rose and began to fuss over him.
A paramedic had taped Kitty’s ankle up, and after she and Sampson had said goodbye to everyone, she hobbled away with her dad, leaning on him. I was happy she had him in her life—and equally happy I had my own father and mother, my brothers and their families.
My father asked if I wanted to spend the night at their house, and there was a hopefulness in his eyes that I wanted to respond to. I knew that I would have to make more time for him and my mother in the future, to make sure that they knew how much I loved them before something else bad happened. But I had one more thing I had to do that night. My family was expanding beyond the one I had been born into.
I shook my head and said my good-byes. But instead of heading for home, I drove my truck up St. Louis Drive to Ruth Place, the entrance to Wa’ahila State Park. Along the way I passed a black pickup with red and orange flames painted along the side, parked by the side of the road.
There was one fire truck from the Twenty-Two company left up there, and a couple of cops cleaning up the road block. They left as I went over to the truck.
A single fireman was there, and I asked him if he knew Mike whereabouts. “I’m Detective Kanapa’aka. I’ve been working with him on this case.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” he said. “Let me see if I can raise Mike on the radio.”
I stood there in the damp, smoky air waiting for a response from Mike. “Yeah, he’s just up the road,” the fireman said, pointing uphill. “He’s on his way down.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t realize until then how scared I had been. Scared for the safety of the innocent people on the mountain, Eli and Fran Harding and their kids, Kitty Sampson and Jimmy Ah Wong; for the houses in St. Louis Heights, homes of my parents and their friends and neighbors. For my brothers, out on the trails of the mountain with fire on one side and two crazy killers on the other. For myself. And for Mike.
I was on the other side of what my family must have felt about me, what the husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and family had to feel about my fellow officers every day. I wondered if this was what it was going to be like for both of us, each knowing that the other could be in danger at any time. Just the pain of being separated, of not having him close, was tough enough. I wondered how people dealt with it.
And then he was there, coming out of a stand of trees in his yellow fire suit, the helmet pushed back from his face, his curly black hair slicked down with perspiration, a smudge of soot on his right cheek. I remembered how I had seen him the night of the bombing, how I’d wanted to clean his cheek that night but had restrained myself.
I wasn’t holding back any more.