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open and fine for us to take it, and tomorrow morning it will be gone as an option. We’ll turn anything we find over to the detectives. What are you so scared of? Extra work?”
    “Shut up. I just know Stevens and Ito won’t like it.”
    “So what? We’re helping them. If we find anything, we’ll give it to them, let them take the credit.”
    “It’s a miracle we found the crime scene. Now, we’re investigating. It’s not our kuleana , our responsibility.”
    “I don’t know about you, but I care about catching a killer. I care about what happened to those girls, and if you like the stepdad for it, that’s a valid hunch. We’re just looking for another miracle.”
    Pono subsided, moodily adjusting his side mirror.
    “What’s the baby up to these days?” she asked, to distract him.
    “You don’t really care.”
    She didn’t, so she shut up and drove.
    It didn’t take long to get to the middle-class neighborhood where Kelly had lived. They rolled quietly along the street, lit tastefully by carriage-lamp streetlights. Lei passed the house, a modest ranch. The black plastic trash cans sat on the curb.
    “They’re out there. What do you think?” Lei tried to suppress the excitement in her voice.
    “Since when did you listen to what I think? Let’s just get this over with. Cruise back by, we’ll dump the trash into the crime-scene bags,” Pono said, his mouth tight.
    The backseat held a box of heavy-duty transparent garbage bags from emptying the junked cars. Pono pulled on latex gloves as she turned the corner again and drove slowly toward the house. She pulled up and put the car in park, as Pono leapt out and headed for the first can. She was still pulling on latex gloves when he dumped the contents of the can into one of the plastic bags.
    A dog began barking from inside the house as she helped him with the second can, holding the thick transparent plastic open so the garbage, fortunately already bagged, tumbled in.
    “Shut up, goddamnit!” someone yelled at the dog, as they emptied the third one, threw the bags into the backseat, and jumped back in the cruiser. Lei put it in gear and they quietly picked up speed.
    Pono sighed, leaning back and closing his eyes, rubbing his lips hard with his right hand.
    “That imaginary cigarette taste pretty good?”
    “You have no idea,” he said, his eyes still closed.
    “Let’s pull over, have a quick look,” Lei said. Her hands were actually itching to rip into the bags.
    “No way. Pollute the chain of evidence? What if there is something there, you want to be able to give it to Stevens, don’t you?”
    That shut her up.
    It only took a few more minutes to pull into the station, haul the bags in past the startled night watch officer and back to the evidence room. They logged the three bags in and locked the room.
    “That’s not going to smell so good tomorrow morning,” Pono said.
    “We could go through them now.”
    He just narrowed his eyes at her, gave her back a whack that made her stagger forward toward the door.
    “Okay, okay. Tomorrow then.”
    * * *
    He’d opened the Orchids file again. He couldn’t resist looking at his handiwork, savoring the sequence, the tragic beauty of the girls in the water. He played with the key ring, smoothing the girls’ hair through his fingers.
    The newspaper article was such a wonderful contrast. He picked up the paper with its grainy, obligatory shot of twin white-shrouded gurneys, and in the background the tense-looking female officer who’d found the bodies. He read the snippet aloud.
    “Officer Leilani Texeira and her partner Pono Kaihale were first on the scene of a possible double homicide at Mohuli`i Park.” He tapped her face with its aureole of curly brown hair. “Officer Texeira. You look like you’d photograph well.”

Chapter 7
    Sam was at the watch desk again when she got to the station the next morning.
    “Hey, do you know a seven-letter word for ‘outrageous female pop star’?”