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didn’t learn anything more about either shooting—man or chicken. Sometimes it goes like that. I didn’t like to think that this murder would add to my string of unsolved cases, but without a break it probably would.
    The next morning, I was adding notes on the evening’s canvass to those I’d already written when Sampson appeared at my desk. “Seen the paper this morning?” he asked, dropping the local section in front of me. It was opened to an article headlined “Makiki Tragedy Continues.”
    “Twenty years ago this month, Patricia Mura was brutally slain, her body dumped on the slopes of Diamond Head. Her killer is still at large. Yesterday morning, her father, Hiroshi Mura, was just as brutally murdered, a single bullet fired into his brain at close range.”
    “How’d the press get that information?” I asked Sampson. “I haven’t released anything.”
    “Read on,” Sampson said.
    The article went on to imply that the murders of Mura and his daughter, twenty years apart, were somehow connected. The heart-wrenching story detailed his tragic fall into mental illness, beginning with the death of his wife, continuing with Patty’s drug use and arrests for prostitution.
    To make things worse, though, the article’s author, a reporter named Greg Oshiro who was generally critical of the HPD, brought up the rash of unsolved homicides, ending with a generalized indictment of the department for decades of ineptitude.
    It was the kind of article that made me angry. Honolulu police officers risked their lives every day to protect and serve with aloha, as our logo promised, and there was a wall right downstairs with dozens of names of officers who had died in the line of duty. I believe that the press should be able to criticize us, especially if we’re not doing our jobs well—but reporters like that were simply out to grab headlines rather than engage in a debate over police procedures.
    “The chief’s already been on to me,” Sampson said. “He wants to see some progress in this case. Have you looked up the information on the daughter’s murder?”
    I looked at Sampson. “You think it’s connected?”
    “I don’t think. That’s your job.”
    “I’ll get the file,” I said. He retreated to his office, and I finished my notes on Mura’s murder, then printed them up and stuck them in the case file. I spent most of the rest of the day digging up what little information there was on Patricia Mura’s arrests, her time in juvenile hall, the times she had run away, and her murder.
    The crime scene guys had pulled fingerprints off the belt that had been used to bind her hands, though there had been no match at the time. I took the card and went downstairs to the Special Investigations Section and found Thanh Nguyen, a fingerprint tech I knew who worked downstairs in the Records and Identification Division. His division was responsible for serving warrants, firearms registration and permits, handling of evidence, fingerprinting and identification. He was a Vietnamese guy in his early sixties, and word around the building was that he’d been in the South Vietnamese army, escaping on one of the last planes out of Saigon.
    “Can you run these through the system for me?” I asked.
    He looked at the tenprint card I handed him. “You on a cold case?”
    I shrugged. “You see the paper today? This girl was the daughter of my the homeless man shot yesterday in Makiki. The Advertiser dug it up, so I figured I’d rule out any connection.”
    Thanh nodded. “Come on. I’ll see what I can do. We must have over 200,000 sets of prints in the system by now. Maybe you’ll get lucky.” He was a short, skinny guy, and I was struck by his general resemblance to Hiroshi Mura. Maybe he could help me bring some measure of peace to Mura’s restless spirit.
    The card was old and a little faded, but Thanh sat at the AFIS console and scanned it in. While I watched, the computer marked the minutiae points—the things