Zero Break (17 page)

He looked from me to Ray, and then back at me again. I could see he was struggling to keep his voice calm. “I didn’t kill Zoë. Hell, I haven’t even been in a fight since junior high. But Anna had a temper. I saw her and Zoë argue sometimes. If you’re looking for a personal motive, Anna’s the one with the most to gain.”

Nice, I thought. Throw your wife under the bus.

But then, there was the possibility that Anna Yang, Zoë’s life partner for nearly seven years, had turned around and killed her. That was even worse than throwing suspicion on someone.

Greg asked a couple of questions about Zoë’s death, but I had to tell him that we couldn’t say much as long as he was a possible suspect. He didn’t like that, but he knew the way things worked.

Ray and I stayed in the interview room after he left. “What do you think?” I asked.

“I think you shook him up,” he said. “Beyond that, I don’t know. A week ago, if you’d asked me if Greg Oshiro could kill somebody, I’d have laughed. But parenting is a powerful thing, especially if he thought those girls were in danger.”

“Taking them to the mainland’s not putting them in danger.”

“Taking them to the mainland with an ex-con, though?” Ray said. “You love your nephews and nieces. How’d you feel if one of your brothers died, and your sister-in-law was dating some guy with a rap sheet?”

“Crazy.” I nodded. But crazy enough to kill? I didn’t know that. But how many of us would?

SCHOOL DAYS

We gave up at the end of our shift. I was in a bad mood, and knew that if I didn’t do something to shake myself up, I’d make Mike miserable too. So I went home, took Roby for a quick walk, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and threw my short board into the back of the Jeep.

I drove down to Makapu’u Point, parked alongside the road, and pulled on my rash guard. The wind was calm and the swell direction was just right for a good point break to the left. It was about an hour before dark, and the early evening sky was flecked with clouds and painted in a hundred different shades of blue, so many different ones that there weren’t names for half of them.

I nodded to a couple of other surfers, then plunged into the cool water and duck dived through the incoming waves. I sat on my board and felt myself finally relaxing.

When I was single and lived in Waikiki, I surfed nearly every day. It was as important to me as breathing. But love does strange things to you. It became more important to me to live with Mike up in Aiea Heights than it was to be able to walk to the beach. As a result, I didn’t get into the water as much as I wanted.

Sitting there on my board, I tried to empty my brain of Zoë Greenfield’s murder, and all the questions about kids that had come up in its wake. Surfing is great for that; you have to focus on the waves, the wind, and the other surfers, and there isn’t room for anything else.

I caught a strong wave, jumped onto my board, and immediately turned to ride the lip. I kept my balance, did a bottom turn, and rode the wave into the shore. Not a world class ride, but it felt great.

I kept on surfing for an hour, until my muscles had that old familiar ache and my brain felt clear. When I got back up to my car, I found Mike had called my cell. “Where are you?” he asked, when I called back.

“Makapu’u Point. I had to surf for a while.”

“What are we doing for dinner?”

I said I’d pick up a pizza on my way home. “I’ll walk the dog,” he said.

We finished the call with mutual promises of love. And by the time I got home, pizza in hand, I was feeling relaxed and happy.

That all changed the next morning.

Ray and I went back to Chinatown, asking around the neighborhood for Anna Yang without much success. It was about 9:30 when the radio crackled. “All available units,” the dispatcher said. “Student with a gun at Chinatown Christian Academy.” She read off the street address. “Approach with extreme caution.”

We were only about five blocks away. While I looked for a parking spot, Ray unholstered his gun and popped the magazine, making sure he had ammunition.

I was carrying mine in a belt holster, and I pulled it out and handed it to him, grip first. “Check mine, will you?”

“Don’t suppose you have a vest, do you?” Ray asked, sliding the magazine out.

I shook my head. “Who knew we’d need them?”

I snagged a parking spot on River Street, about two blocks from the school, and we took off, both of us fastening our radios to our shoulders. By the time we got there, cop cars were arriving from every direction, and the scene was controlled chaos. We checked in with a lieutenant who was managing the situation, and he said there was a kid holed up in the cafeteria with a gun. We were told to stay close and wait for instructions. Then I saw Lieutenant Sampson’s daughter, Kitty, who had become a uniformed officer a few months before, and headed toward her.

“Howzit, Kitty?” I asked. “You know anything about what’s going on?”

I first met Kitty when she was a senior at UH. Since then, she’d graduated, gone through the police academy, and finished her probationary period.

“Just that there’s a kid holed up inside, and there’s been some shooting.”

“You know what kind of gun he has?” Ray asked.

She shrugged. “Just got here myself.”

We heard a series of rapid-fire bursts that sounded like they’d come from a semi-automatic shotgun. We all looked toward the source of the sound, a single-story building at the back of the school grounds. The shots were followed almost immediately by screaming and crying.

The one-story building had a flat roof and a series of louvered windows, and looked out on a small patch of worn grass shaded by a big kukui tree. The three of us ducked down and made our way toward the end of the building, where I could see a couple of other cops hunkered down.

“Where’s the SWAT team when you need them?” Ray asked as we reached the other cops.

“On their way,” one said. “ETA ten minutes.”

A cop named Gary Saunders, whom I’d known for years, came hurrying across from the main building, accompanied by a short, rotund man in a clerical collar. “Reverend Hannaford is the principal of the school,” Gary said. “My daughter goes to school here and she’s inside.”

Another cop asked, “Who’s the kid?”

“His name is Randy Tsutsui,” Hannaford said. “He’s fifteen. Discipline problem. His father committed suicide about a year ago, and since then he’s been acting out. He’s been suspended twice already for insubordination, mouthing off to teachers, and bullying younger kids. I called his mother and she’s on her way.”

There was another staccato burst of gunfire. “I don’t think we have ten minutes,” I said.

A dark-haired girl in a plaid skirt and white blouse came running out of the building, tears streaming down her face. She was about ten; she was followed by a blonde girl a few years older, dressed the same way, who was crying, too. Only she was bleeding as well.

Ray and I looked at each other and nodded. We took off toward the two girls, who were perhaps ten feet from the building by then. I grabbed the older girl, Ray the younger, and we carried them onward. I didn’t even think about the kid inside, or the possibility that he would be shooting at us through all those louvered windows. I just knew that we had to get those girls out of the way as soon as possible.

The older girl was Laura Mercado, the younger one Janice Chee. A pair of EMTs raced up as soon as we had the girls safe and started checking them out. I stood there and held Laura’s hand, as the EMT examined her arm, where a bullet had grazed her. He spoke quietly and with authority, and between that and my hand-holding Laura stopped crying.

Ray didn’t have as much luck with Janice. She was crying so much, and so loud, that the EMT working on her had to give her a sedative in order to get her calm enough so she could be bandaged.

I sat cross-legged on the skimpy grass, holding Laura’s hand. “Mrs. Nguyen heard someone shooting,” she said between hiccups. “She went out in the hall to see what was going on.”

She sniffled, and blew her nose. “But as soon as she went out we heard more shooting. Janice and I like Mrs. Nguyen a lot so we went to look outside. Mrs. Nguyen was lying on the floor and there was a lot blood.”

Around us I heard other cop cars arriving and lots of confused orders being given over the radio as the brass tried to figure out what was going on and coordinate everyone. The rotating blue lights of a dozen cop cars bounced off the school windows in crazy patterns.

Laura nodded toward the other little girl. “Janice was scared and started crying so I took her hand and we ran down the hall. Randy kept shooting at us.”

“Did you see what kind of gun he had?”

“Shotgun, but one that goes really fast. My dad has one but he says we can never touch it.”

I keyed the mike on my radio and relayed the news. The school building was almost ominously quiet—no shooting, but no crying or screaming either.

Gary Saunders came over. “Do you know Penny Saunders?” he asked, kneeling next to Laura.

She nodded. “She’s in my class with Mrs. Nyugen. She’s inside.”

The look on Gary’s face was one I hope I never see again.

A lieutenant from the hostage negotiation team stepped out of the crowd, holding a loudspeaker in his hand. “Randy Tsutsui!” he called. “This is Lieutenant Starrett from HPD. Put down your weapon and come outside.”

There was no response from inside the building. Starrett had just raised the megaphone again when a tall, gawky girl with blonde hair stepped out the door. “Penny!” Saunders called.

She held up her hand. “Randy wants to come out,” she said, in a quavering voice.

She turned back and opened the door, and a teenager in a blood-spattered T-shirt and pair of camouflage pants stepped out, with his hands up. There was no gun in sight.

In what I thought was admirable restraint, Gary Saunders walked slowly across the twenty feet that separated us from the door.

“It’s okay, Randy. That’s my dad,” Penny said to the boy.

Carefully, Gary unhooked the handcuffs from his belt and held them up. Randy looked down at the pavement as Gary hooked the cuffs on him. He motioned his daughter over to us, and took Randy toward his squad car.

Within a minute the building was swarming with cops and EMTs. A cop emerged a moment later holding a semi-automatic shotgun, and he was followed quickly by a series of stretchers, carrying kids in blood-stained clothes.

It seemed like every ambulance on the island was there, and once they’d quieted down both girls were bundled up and taken to the Queen’s Medical Center.

My old partner from Waikiki, Akoni Hapa’ele, came by as we were waving goodbye to the girls. He’s a big guy, built like my brother Haoa, tall and broad. I could see from his face that he was shaken up by what he’d seen. “You know what happened in there?” I asked.

“Sad story,” Akoni said. “The kid’s father used to go shooting wild pigs in the hills. Last year he killed himself with that shotgun. The kid cleaned it up and held onto it. He started having problems in school after that, and he had it in for two of his teachers. He went to the English teacher’s classroom first, walked inside and shot him. Then he went down the hall to the math teacher’s and shot her in the hallway. A couple of kids from her class ran away, but the rest were stuck in the classroom with him. Gary Saunders’ daughter talked him into giving up.”

“How many kids got hurt?” Ray asked.

“A half-dozen.” Akoni had always said he didn’t want kids—he called them hostages to fortune. But his wife Mealoha had given him a son the year before, and I had seen him transformed when he was around the baby, into a combination of fierce and gentle. “One of the boys has a chest wound, but the others are just banged up.” He shook his head. “It boggles the mind.”

I agreed with him. We walked over to the main school building, where a makeshift triage area had been set up. Kitty, Lidia Portuondo, and a few other female cops were in one of the classrooms, trying to calm down a bunch of kids who had not been hurt.

Ray and I stayed around the school most of the day, helping with crowd control and matching up kids with frantic parents. It was hot in the bright sun, and there was little shade or breeze. The worst part was the having to tell a young mother, in a faded t-shirt and jeans, that her daughter’s name was on the list of those taken to the hospital. Her mouth gaped open and her whole body sagged. Ray and I had to help her over to Lidia, who volunteered to drive her there.

By the time we left, I was soaked in sweat, my hair plastered down to my scalp. Laura Mercado’s blood had dried on my aloha shirt, I smelled like a visit to the morgue, and I felt bone-weary. I dropped Ray back at headquarters to pick up his car, and drove home on autopilot.

Roby came bouncing up to me as I opened the door, and I sank to the flagstone in front of the doorway and hugged him for a long time. We were sitting there, him licking my face, when Mike pulled up in the driveway. “Don’t tell me you were at that school shooting,” he said, jumping out of the car. “You look like you’ve been through Hell.”

Roby abandoned me for a minute to welcome Mike home, then rushed back to me. I nodded. “I feel like it. Remember we were talking about maybe having kids some day? Not on your life.”