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surfers and who might have killed them.
     
    Occasionally when I surfed, I’d run into my cousin Ben, who was about ten years younger than I was.  He was doing what I’d done at his age, trying to see if he could make it as a professional surfer. My mother is the oldest of five daughters, and Ben’s mom was my Aunt Pua, the youngest. Pua was a hippie, far from my prim and proper mother. She was an aromatherapist at a posh resort in Hawai‘i Kai, and had been married and divorced three times.
     
    Because of the age difference between us, and the attitude difference between our mothers, we didn’t know each other that well, but we recognized each other and made small talk about the family and the surf. He was a Pipeline expert, making it his home base, and I learned a few tricks from talking with him.
     
    Some people seemed to know who I was, and sometimes they wanted to talk. A haole guy with Rasta hair and tattered board shorts wanted to know if I knew a good attorney—I didn’t. A middle-aged Japanese lady waiting with me to buy bottled water asked me if I knew where her son could get information about AIDS. I told her about an agency in Honolulu.
     
    Nobody seemed aware that three surfers had been killed, and though I dropped names with everyone I met, I got no reactions to Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora or Ronald Chang. I could see why the original detectives hadn’t made much progress, and started to doubt whether I could learn anything they hadn’t.
     
    When I returned to Hibiscus House, I called Lieutenant Sampson to let him know I was settled in, and pass on my idea on how the shooter had brought the rifle to the beach. Then I called my parents, just to check in. They were full of well-meaning suggestions for my future. “You could come work with me,” my father said. “I could do big projects again, if I have you to help me. No more malasada shops.” The malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut, and of late my father had been building tiny shops to sell them around the island.
     
    “Al, let the boy alone,” my mother said. “He should go back to school, get a graduate degree and become something—an architect, a businessman, a lawyer.”
     
    “Pah, back to school,” my father said. “Why go back to school when he can learn everything he needs from his father?”
     
    “I’m not making any decisions for a while.” I had already heard that my brother Lui was sure he could find me a job of some kind at KVOL, if I wanted it. My brother Haoa wanted me to join him in the landscape business. My sisters-in-law and my friends all had their own ideas.
     
    And I had to lie to each and every one of them, telling them all I was still figuring out what I wanted, that I was enjoying just surfing every day. More lies than I had ever wanted to tell. And telling them kept getting harder and harder for me, and would only keep getting harder until I could come home with a solved case.
     
     
     
     
     

The Next Wave
     
    By the end of my second full day of surfing, I was beat. I collapsed on the beach, catching my breath and massaging my calves, when a haole girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen stuck her board in the sand and sat down next to me and said hi. She was wearing a neon yellow bikini, and had her sandy blonde hair pulled up into a pony tail with a matching ribbon. Her skin was the deep bronze of someone who spends a lot of time on the water.
     
    “Hi,” I said back. I’d seen her surfing; she was pretty damn good.
     
    “You’re that guy who used to be a cop, aren’t you?” she asked.
     
    “Guilty as charged. Kimo.” I held out my hand.
     
    “Trish,” she said, shaking it. “I saw you on the news.”
     
    “My fifteen minutes of fame.”
     
    She nodded toward the water. “Your form’s pretty good for somebody who hasn’t surfed for a long time.”
     
    “I’ve been surfing since I was a kid, The last few years, though, not too much. Mornings, before work.