After I told my mother that at my boss’s request, I was taking a few weeks off from duty at the Honolulu PD until an appropriate job opened up for me, she asked, “Do you remember Ikaika Kahale?”

I cocked my head, running through the filing cabinet in my brain. “Big kid, from Hawaiian school?” I asked, when his name registered.

She nodded. “Noelani Kahale belongs to the quilting circle I joined last year. Ikaika is her oldest son. He had some problems when he was young. Such a troublemaker. His poor mother.” She leaned forward. “He got into drugs, you know.”

While she spoke, my brain had been busy assembling the information I knew about Ikaika Kahale. O’ahu is a small rock, and everyone with island heritage is connected somehow to nearly everyone else. I hadn’t seen Ikaika since we were kids, learning how to twine maile leaves into leis and tie the knots that held outrigger canoes together.

I had been lucky to go to Punahou, an exclusive private high school, and then on to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I had majored in English and surfing—mostly surfing, if I was being honest.

Ikaika had dropped out of McKinley High, been arrested for a bunch of drug-related crimes, and then moved to the mainland. That was where my knowledge of him stopped.

“What’s he up to these days?” I asked.

“He married a lovely Portagee girl, and they have an adorable little boy.” Portagee was Hawaiian pidgin for someone of Portuguese descent, though the term was a loose one since we were all a mix of something by then.

My mother smiled. “Noelani shows pictures of them all the time. We even made a special quilt when the baby was born.”

“That’s nice. What else is new?”

“I’m not finished,” she said. “You shouldn’t hurry your mother when she wants to talk story.”

I held up my hands. “Sorry. Talk on.”

“He had some bad times before he came home. But he’s a different boy now. Noelani swears it.” She leaned forward. “Which is why I can’t believe he killed the man they say he did.”

“He killed someone?”

She shook her head. “You don’t listen, Kimo. I can’t believe he did that.” She picked up the quilting square she was working on and peered at the needle. Satisfied with the thread there, she began making tiny, neat stitches.

“Mom, I’m dying here,” I said. “You know you want to tell me all about Ikaika. So spill the beans.”

“I would never spill beans. They are too difficult to pick up, and one always rolls beneath the refrigerator.” She smiled in a pixyish way that I was sure had enchanted my father fifty years before. “Ikaika was not a bad boy, but he got in with a bad crowd,” she began. “By the time he was in high school he was taking drugs and stealing from his mother to pay for them.”

She shook her head, and I settled in for a long story.

“Then he learned how to steal cars. Do you know how many cars are stolen on O’ahu every year?”

“Close to four thousand.”

She looked at me in surprise.

“I’m a cop, remember?”

“All three of my boys were always good students,” she said. “You used to come home from Punahou full of information.”

She sewed serenely. “He went to the prison in Halawa for a year but all that did was teach him how to be a better criminal.” She looked up. “Or at least that’s what Noelani says. She encouraged him to move to California because she thought he could start over fresh there, away from all the bad people he knew.”

“Unfortunately there are bad people everywhere,” I said.

My mother finished a line of stitches and held it up to inspect. It looked perfect to me, but she pulled out a little device with a bright blue handle and a wicked-looking blade on the end, and ripped out the last three stitches. She made a tiny knot on the back side of the panel and began again.

“After a while, they sent him to San Quentin,” my mother continued, when she was ready. “Do you know they teach hula there? In the prison?”

“I did not know that,” I said. “Is there a kumu hula on death row?”

A kumu hula was a master teacher in the art of Hawaiian dance. I had studied with a couple of them when I was much younger.

She frowned at me. “A kumu hula comes in from San Francisco to teach, twice a week,” she said. “Ikaika began to study with him and it turned his life around.”

“Or so his mother says.”

My mother nodded. “Do not discount the benefits of our culture. When was the last time you danced?”

“Probably the last time you did,” I said snippily, though I remembered pretty clearly the time. Mike and I had been dating for a few years by the time one of his college friends staged a Honolulu destination wedding with his fiancé. All Mike’s buddies were coming for the event, and he decided to come out to them in a spectacular way, by dancing a welcome hula for the bridal party.

“You do not know everything about my life,” my mother said serenely, as she continued to sew. “I joined a hula halau three months ago, and I practice with them twice a week.” She looked up and smiled. “These old bones still remember the steps I learned as a girl.”

“How come you didn’t tell me?”

“You are busy. We talk what, once a week? You expect me to jam my whole life into ten minutes, when all I want is to hear about you and Mike and the keikis?”

I frowned. Guilty as charged, your honor. At least if I wasn’t working, I could spend more time with my mother. “Can I come watch a practice?”

“Oh, no. But we will be performing in a festival in Kapiolani Park next month. Lots of wonderful halaus. You can bring the keikis, make a picnic.”

“We’ll do that. But go back to Ikaika, studying hula in San Quentin. What happened next?”

“Eventually he was released, and he came back to Honolulu. Like I told you, he married and had a baby boy. He was working as a bouncer at a bar in Waimanalo. There was a fight, and a man was killed. But Ikaika swore to his mother that he didn’t do it.”

“Of course he would tell his mother that,” I said gently.

My mother looked up. “Would you lie about something that important to me?”

My heart skipped a beat. I had lied to my parents for years about my sexuality, pretending to be straight because I couldn’t see a way to be gay and be the person my parents wanted me to be.

I phrased my thoughts carefully. “If Ikaika loves his mother, he doesn’t want to disappoint her.”

“Will you do something for me, Kimo?”

“Whatever you want, Mom.”

“Speak to Noelani Kahale yourself. And if you believe her, see what you can do to help. As a favor from one mother to another.”

3: CRAZY

There was no way I could refuse my mother’s request, especially as I didn’t have the excuse of work. Even so, all the way from Waikiki back to my home in Aiea Heights, I mentally kicked myself. I had no business interfering in a police investigation. I hadn’t seen Ikaika Kahale since we were eight or nine years old, and what I knew of him wasn’t promising.

I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and Googled Ikaika’s name. Sure enough, he was the one accused of the murder of officer Brian Yang, at the Surf City Crazy Bar in Waimanalo.

I knew the place. It had been a landmark for decades, a favorite of bikers and surfers. For a few years, around the time I was coming out, it had hosted gay events on Tuesday nights, when the bar was normally deadest.

When my partner Mike came home, we sat down to eat, I said, “I went by my mother’s after I talked to you.”

“And? How is she?”

“She’s fine. Did you know she joined a senior citizen’s hula halau?”

“I didn’t. Good for her.”

“She asked me to do her a favor,” I said, as I speared some lettuce and chicken, with a juicy half-tomato hanging from the end of my fork. “The son of a friend of hers was arrested and she wants me to look into the case.”

“How can you do that, if you’re not on active duty?”

“I still have a brain and a badge,” I said drily. I explained the basics of Ikaika’s case to him, without mentioning my own experience at the Surf City Crazy Bar.

“Absolutely not,” he said, when I was finished. “You’re not the investigating detective. You have no need to go poking around in someone else’s case. And you know you’d hate it if someone else nosed into one of yours.”

“But she asked.”

“If she asked you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge would you do it?”

“I have never even been to Brooklyn. Now you’re channeling your father.”

Mike’s dad was Italian-American, born and raised on Long Island, where Mike had lived until he was seven years old.

“Yeah, because my father always warned me about doing stupid stuff.”

“There’s nothing stupid about gathering a few facts and reassuring my mother that the wheels of justice are working.”

He finished his salad, banging his fork against the china bowl so hard that I was afraid he might shatter it.

“You do what you want,” he said. “You always do.”

He put his bowl and fork in the sink and grabbed Roby’s leash. “Come on, boy, let’s go for a walk.”

“I just took him,” I protested.

The traitorous dog jumped up and down in eagerness. “I’ll clean up,” I said.

4: BRIAN YANG

While Mike was out with Roby, I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and did more research on Ikaika Kahale and his case. He had been working at the bar one evening when a fight started between a pair of customers. He stepped in to break it up, and one of the men turned on him.

He alleged that the man, later identified as HPD officer Brian Yang, pulled a knife on him. Ikaika hit Yang with an uppercut that knocked him to the floor. On his way down, Yang banged his head on the edge of a bar stool, and suffered a deep cut to his neck. He hit the floor hard, and suffered a spinal injury that killed him almost immediately.

In my experience, a situation like that resulted in a charge of assault in the third degree, and the accidental nature of the death usually led to a plea bargain, with the result being a petty misdemeanor with a sentence of a year or less in jail, or probation, and a small fine.

In Ikaika’s case, though, he had been charged with manslaughter, a death resulting from “an intentional act done without malice or premeditation” and “while in the heat of passion or on sudden provocation.” The district attorney cited Ikaika’s criminal record, and the fact that no knife was found anywhere in the area of the fight.

There was one more mitigating factor: the dead man was a cop.

Most people believe that cops will do anything to protect, or avenge, one of their own. I knew from my own experience, though, that wasn’t always the case. When I came out of the closet, other cops, men and women I had worked with and known for years, turned their back on me.

I moved from coverage of the incident to research on Brian Yang, the officer killed in the incident. I was surprised to find nothing about him other than the most basic details. According to his online obituary, he was thirty-five years old, married to Bella Yang, with two children. He had graduated from Radford High, out near the airport, and held an associate’s degree from Honolulu Community College, and then gone on to Ke Kula Maka’i, the Honolulu Police Academy, where I had also done my time. He lived in Waipahu, on the far side of Pearl Harbor.

That was it. Nothing about his posting, or his years on the force.

I checked the Honolulu Star–Advertiser, and couldn’t find anything about him other than a single mention in the article about his death at the Surf City Crazy Bar. Usually the death of a police officer results in a spate of articles, from the investigation to the officer’s funeral, but it was as if a void had swallowed Brian Yang as soon as he hit the bar floor.

Or the department had squashed any coverage.

I logged into the HPD intranet and searched for Brian Yang. No mentions.

It wasn’t surprising that he was no longer listed in the employee directory; after all, he was dead. But the intranet also housed copies of every press release ever issued, and my name featured in a few of them, as I was promoted to sergeant, assigned to a detective slot, posted on a temporary assignment to the FBI. There wasn’t a single mention of Brian Yang; it was as if he’d never worked for HPD.

His name wasn’t even listed on the page devoted to officers who died in the line of duty, and that was the most surprising. No HPD employee I knew wanted his or her name to appear on that list, but everyone I knew expected to be there if anything happened.

Mike and Roby came back in as I was staring at the laptop screen. “Sorry I got angry at you,” Mike said. He unhooked Roby’s leash, and the golden bounded over to his water bowl, where he slurped noisily.

Mike sat down across from me. “I worried about you all the time you were at the FBI,” he said. “I thought you’d come back to HPD and move into an administrative job, like I have, and neither of us would be in danger anymore.”

I shook my head. “You know that’s not me, sweetheart. I’d hate to be a paper-pusher.” I held my hands up. “I know your job is more than that, and I’m glad you found something you enjoy. You’re a great teacher and you have so much fire investigation knowledge to pass on. I’m not made that way.”

“So you say. You have a visibility at HPD, and you could leverage that to help others. If you wanted to, you could even work your way up to chief.”

Roby came over and drooled on my thigh, and I petted him. “That doesn’t explain why you were so upset earlier.”

“Because I know you. Once you get your teeth into a case, you don’t stop. I was trying to shut down your interest in this guy’s arrest quickly.” He smiled. “Didn’t work, did it?”

I shook my head. “I did some research, and there’s something hinky going on.”

He sat back in his chair. “Tell me.”

I explained the basics of the incident, and the way that Brian Yang seemed to have disappeared after his death.

“You think the department is covering something up?”

“I don’t know. And what was Yang doing at the Crazy Bar anyway? It’s on the other side of the island from his house.”

“They used to have gay nights, didn’t they?”

“You knew about those?”

“I was closeted, I wasn’t stupid,” Mike said. “Do they still do that?”

“Haven’t checked the bar rags for years,” I said. “Let me see.”

I did a quick search. “Not as far as I can tell. Straight all the way right now.”

“Meeting a woman there?”

“There’s no mention of a woman in the single newspaper article I found. But that’s a possibility. And that could be why HPD hushed it up. Didn’t want to embarrass the widow.”

I frowned. “But that doesn’t explain why the DA is going for manslaughter instead of assault. Ikaika was doing his job, breaking up a bar fight. He had no intention of causing Yang permanent harm.”

“Is there anybody you can ask? Lieutenant Sampson?”

“I’d rather nose around on my own for a while. If there’s something strange going on with HPD, I don’t want to raise any red flags.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Unless I want to tell my mother I’m not doing anything, I guess I’ll go talk to Ikaika Kahale.”

It wasn’t hard to find him. All I had to do was call my mother, and she called his mother, and I had an appointment to see him the next day. He lived on Hawaiian homestead land, in a neighborhood called Papakolea, up near the Punchbowl cemetery.

I fed Roby his dinner early and walked him around the neighborhood, then got into my Jeep and onto the highway.

Though it had been sunny when I started out, as I turned onto the Pali Highway a fine mist accumulated on my windshield, turning quickly to a steady light rain. Within a few minutes it was pouring, torrents of water cascading down roads and ravines, and even the street-side entrepreneurs had run for shelter.

O’ahu is an island of microclimates. Because of the mountains and the ocean and all the space between, it can be sunny in Salt Lake and miserable at Makapu’u Point. Fortunately, as I climbed the mountain, the rain dissipated, and the sun came out.

We called the area around the slopes of Mount Tantalus “Punchbowl,” the name of the national military cemetery built in 1948 to commemorate the soldiers and sailors who died at Pearl Harbor. There are now over thirty-three thousand graves there. Papakolea was Hawaiian Homestead Land, an area reserved for those who could show at least fifty-percent descent from the original islanders. For many years, it had been a kind of living grave for Hawaiian people, the way reservations on the mainland were for Native Americans.

The narrow streets clustered around the slopes of Puowaina Crater, overgrown with banana, bougainvillea and hibiscus. There were lots of places for illicit entrepreneurs to hide from da kine police, and I wondered if that was the reason why Ikaika Kahale lived there.

The address he had given me was a single-story house with a silver tin roof. I parked on the steep driveway, setting the parking brake to be safe, and climbed out. The front door opened and a heavyset Hawaiian man stepped out, holding a baseball bat.