Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (25 page)

Kea Simmons lay on his back in the golden, large-grained coral sand of the beach, deep gouge marks showing where he’d been dragged up from the foamy aqua waterline. Doing a quick visual, Lei couldn’t see any sign of injury. The young man’s eyes were shut, always a mercy. His wet hair, strands of blond and brown, tangled to muscled shoulders. His body was magnificent, wide shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, and sun-bronzed as a surf god.

Which he was.

Even Lei, who didn’t follow surfing closely, knew Kea Simmons was Maui’s rising surf star and had been looking good to take the prestigious Triple Crown of Surfing this year, with two of the three Oahu events in the contest already won.

Now he lay on the sand in front of her, dead as a piece of driftwood.

Lei felt a clench in the area of her heart. She’d never gotten used to the waste of a young person’s death, and she hoped she never did. Staring down at the handsome face reminded her again of how much she herself had lost in this past year—and it was too much to think about now. The familiar yawning hole of grief sucked at her.

One of the paramedics stood up from where he was organizing his lifesaving equipment and Lei turned to him. “What can you tell me?”

“Got the call from the lifeguard tower.” The paramedic pointed to the bright yellow, two-story metal structure at the end of the beach. “Said they had a drowning. Didn’t know it was Kea Simmons until I got here. Lifeguards brought him in from the surf lineup.”

Two lifeguards were standing, hands on hips, their heads close together as they talked, their faces somber. Lei caught the eye of the taller of the two, a muscular Hawaiian wearing red lifeguard shorts. She gestured for him to come talk. He and his partner, younger and slighter, came across the beach.

When Lei had their attention she said, “I’m going to need to interview each of you. I’ve called the medical examiner, Dr. Gregory, and he should be here any minute to examine the body.”

The Hawaiian lifeguard nodded. He extended his hand to shake hers. “I’m Sam Koele. I saw the surfers waving for help in the lineup and went out. Two of them were holding Kea up. Soon as I signaled my partner, he joined me in the water and we got him in to the beach as fast as we could. Started CPR, but he was never responsive.”

Dr. Gregory the ME pushed through the crowd, which had swelled as the news of the surf star’s death spread via “coconut wireless” gossip. Pono had his hands full trying to nail down witnesses, Lei saw, as the crowd ebbed and flowed.

“Just a minute.” Lei pulled her radio off her belt and called for reinforcements to help their team grab anyone who might be a viable witness. The portly ME, whom she knew from various cases, was wearing one of his trademark aloha shirts. This one was decorated with surfing Santas for December. He waved to Lei with a gloved hand as he signed in with the patrol officer on the log.

“These are the paramedics who tried to revive the victim for you to talk to,” Lei told the doctor as he approached. Dr. Gregory, usually talkative and good-humored, had sobered at the size of the crowd and the celebrity of the victim. He nodded and with his assistant, Tanaka, knelt in the sand beside the body to begin their assessment.

“Can you help me identify the rescuers who were helping Kea in the lineup?” Lei asked, turning back to Sam Koele.

“Sure. I thought you’d need to take statements once we saw Kea wasn’t reviving, so I asked them to wait on the steps.” He gestured to where two surfers sat on the metal stairs of the lifeguard tower. Lei had missed them with the lifeguards standing in front.

“Thanks. I’ll talk with them next. Did you know the victim?”

“I did. Great kid.” The lifeguard blinked his eyes hard and Lei could see moisture in them. “Always friendly and down-to-earth. He’s been surfing here for years.”

“Tell me what you saw when you first approached him in the water.”

“Well, I was using ol’ Kelly here.” Sam pointed to a huge white surfboard with a red cross on it. “This is our rescue board. We use it as our primary rescue device at this beach with all the surf we deal with here.”

“Kelly?”

“After Kelly Slater. Best all-around surfer in the world.” Sam’s teeth flashed in a brief smile as they both looked at the cumbersome board propped against the metal stairs of the tower.

Lei set her hands on her hips as she swiveled to take in the whole scene. Ho`okipa Beach Park was a crescent moon of beach tucked inside rugged, black-boulder-strewn bluffs. Fifty to a hundred yards from shore, she could see three different areas where surfers clustered in the water around breaking waves.

She and Stevens had been beginner surfers for some time now, so she knew the riders were gathered around wave peaks that broke regularly in a certain spot, a predictable point where surfers could “line up” with a geographic marker of some kind on the beach and be positioned to take off. A good deal of the skill of surfing was being in the right place at the right time to get an optimal position on a wave, and that was rarely accidental.

“Which peak was he at?”

Sam pointed. “Over there.”

Lei looked. He’d been at the Point, the first of the peaky areas. Today the surf was pretty big, coming in at around six feet in wave face height from trough to crest of the wave. Even as Lei looked, a surfer took off, making the drop and pulling up to position himself for a tube ride, where water covered him and he was able to travel inside the wave—and then Lei saw another rider drop in on him, spoiling the ride by blocking his passage.

The wave closed over the first rider and Lei saw him disappear, wiping out. She frowned, watching the surfer who’d stolen the ride, on a green board, pump his way down the wave as it broke and finally kick out at the end.

“Did you see that?” Lei asked Sam. Getting caught inside a barrel, hitting another surfer’s board or the bottom, even tangling with one’s own board in a wipeout were all common hazards that could cause death—but it would be highly unusual for a surfer of Kea’s ability to drown in such relatively minor water conditions.

“Yeah. There’s been a lot of bad manners in the water lately,” Sam said. “I’ve had to break up quite a few beefs on the beach.” Even as they watched, the first surfer who’d lost the wave was yelling, pumping his board through the water toward the surfer who’d stuffed him in the barrel. He smacked the water and cursed when he reached the other surfer. The drop-in surfer shrugged and moved off.

“So tell me what you saw when you got to Kea and his rescuers,” Lei went on.

“They were holding him on the front of one of their boards. Both of them had rescued him and said they’d found him face down, floating. They said they saw Kea take off on a wave and they were watching him because they were paddling back out. Then another surfer dropped in on him, and both of them wiped out. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to them. But the other surfer paddled away, and Kea’s board came back up without him.”

“Where’s that other surfer?” Lei focused on Sam’s face. She saw something in his weathered brown features—a tightening of the lips, a narrowing of eyes bracketed by fans of wrinkles from squinting into the dazzle of sea and sun.

“They said they didn’t know. He paddled back out, and by the time they got Kea up and out of the impact zone where the waves were breaking, they couldn’t see him anymore.”

“So he’s not that guy that just snaked somebody again?” Lei asked. The aggressive surfer they’d been watching had just dropped in on another rider.

“No, but dat buggah goin’ get in scraps when he come in,” Sam said, lapsing into pidgin, frowning. “Okay if I call him out of the water?”

“Yeah. That’s dangerous, what he’s doing. I want to see if he’s the guy Kea tangled with.”

Sam jogged to the lifeguard tower, said something to the surfers, retrieved a bullhorn and an air horn, and climbed the steps of the tower. He blew the air horn and everyone on the beach jumped.

“Surfer on the green board, exit the water,” he bellowed into the megaphone. Lei started at the loudness of the bullhorn. She turned to look out at the man who’d been violating surfing etiquette and was surprised to see that, instead of exiting the water as he’d been ordered, the man was paddling downwind toward the next break as fast as his arms would propel him.

Sam repeated his direction.

“Stupid,” Lei said to Pono, who’d materialized at her side. “Where the hell does he think he’s going?”

“Out to sea, looks like.”

Sam returned, his dark eyes flashing with irritation. “Want me to catch him on the Jet Ski?”

“Yeah. Bring the fool in,” she said. “Where does he think he can get away on a surf board?”

Lei walked toward the lifeguard tower and the two men who had rescued the victim as Sam and his partner ran back and drove a quad with a Jet Ski already trailered on the back, across the beach. Sam’s partner turned the quad and backed the vehicle down into the shifting sand, lapped by surf as Sam guided the ‘ski off the trailer and into the water.

Sam then jumped aboard, flipping down a floating rubber tow mat, and throttled the engine, turning the craft to zoom across the choppy inside of the bay toward the fleeing surfer. The surfer had made it all the way past the last Ho`okipa break.

Backup patrol officers had arrived, and Pono was organizing them to canvass the crowd. Dr. Tanaka and Dr. Gregory had erected a privacy shield, a pop-up metallic-looking tent, over the body to screen out the sun and prying eyes as they did undignified things to what remained of Kea Simmons.

Lei refocused her attention on the two rescuers. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

Lieutenant Michael Stevens sometimes wished he wasn’t so good at his job. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have been given new duties. Stevens rubbed a knot of tightness between his brows. He’d got the unwelcome news that, due to budget cuts, his little station out in Haiku was being reabsorbed into bigger Kahului Station. He was keeping his rank, but he’d been reassigned by Captain C.J. Omura to be the head-training officer for new detectives.

Stevens sighed as he set his station’s expenditure report down. Glancing out the door of his office, he could already see his men packing up—at least he wouldn’t have to work on budget reports anymore, and he got a raise. But he didn’t like the idea of not having his own active cases.

He took one of a stack of cardboard boxes he’d picked up behind Foodland and began cleaning out his desk.

“Boss.” Detective Joshua Ferreira, closest thing he had to a partner, knocked on the doorframe. “Want I should get some guys to bring their trucks to move all this furniture?”

“I have to check with the captain, see how much of it is already down at Kahului and how much we’re going to have moved into the state storage facility,” Stevens said. “Thanks for reminding me.” He picked up the phone and rang through to Omura’s office.

“Yes.” Omura always sounded clipped and in a hurry. It kept calls short and made her more efficient, he realized, but he never looked forward to calling her.

“Hey, Captain. What do we do with the furniture here? Are you putting all the men in with other details, or will we have our own corner in the building?”

“In with the rest. You can tell them their reassignments,” Omura said. She rattled off the six men’s names and their new assignments. “Just take your personal things out of the building. We’ll have to squeeze you guys into the existing space, and we’ll have the Building Division move the Haiku furniture into the big storage facility.”

“Okay,” Stevens said. “What about where you’re putting me?”

“You’re going to share an office with the recruiter and new officer trainer, Eric Tadeo. I told him you’re coming.”

“Great,” Stevens muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, great. Whatever works for the department,” Stevens said louder, with false cheer.

“Good.” Omura hung up with a click.

He sighed again and stood up. Ferreira was still waiting in the doorway. “We’re all being reassigned and the stuff goes into storage,” Stevens said. “I have everyone’s assignments. Tell the guys to come in.”

He continued to gather up and sort the files in his desk drawer, his mind going as it often did to the big bust on the Big Island he and his wife, Lei, had brought down three months ago. Their house had burned down as collateral damage of that case, and Lei had lost their first child four months into the pregnancy.

The new house they were building, a simple three bedroom in concrete block, was almost finished. He couldn’t wait to be done with spending every non-working moment laboring on the house. The insurance hadn’t paid out enough to rebuild, so they’d had to rely on the help of friends and co-workers, which didn’t make for speedy construction.

Stevens felt like he’d been slogging through molasses ever since that Big Island case. Every day seemed to take superhuman effort to get through, and he wondered if he could be suffering some sort of depression or if it was just grief over the fire and losing their baby. It seemed to him that they’d both been operating on autopilot. The only person that really made them smile was his son, Kiet. Kiet, at seven months, was happy and active, always crawling to grab something and put it in his mouth, jade-colored eyes sparkling with curiosity and humor.

Stevens’s station closing down hadn’t helped his mood. He wasn’t looking forward to developing a training program that didn’t yet exist, when he wasn’t enthusiastic about the changes or sure they would work.

In the past, candidates for detective studied, passed the test, and then worked closely for six months with a “mentor partner” until they were ready to take their own cases. It was a time-tested process. Now the dictate had come down from central on Oahu that they needed to have procedural standardization to reduce variability in case write-ups and other errors that had plagued departments statewide.

Stevens finished his sorting and looked up as his small team filed into his office.

“Hey guys. I have Omura’s new assignments for you.” He read off their names and new assignments, allowing the groans and teasing that erupted at some of the assignments. “Just pack your personal stuff. Department furnishings are going into storage.”

The group was returning to the main room, grumbling side conversations going on that Stevens pretended not to hear, when Brandon Mahoe, one of his trainees now doing a turn at the watch desk, knocked on the doorjamb.