“George, old buddy,” Sean said. He had something under his arm. A clipboard and some papers. He was smiling at me. He appeared to have been waiting for me to come out of Mitch’s office.

“Sean,” I said. I was prepared to walk past him, but he put out a hand.

“You’re the only one I haven’t got yet,” he said.

“For what?”

He untucked the clipboard and held it in front of him as if it was self-explanatory. He had now smiled at me for longer than he had done so in all the time we had been in the office together. “The Pan-Mass Challenge. It’s a bike race across the state. Well, not a race, exactly. One hundred and ten miles one day, ninety the next. Sturbridge to P’town, and I’m doing the whole thing. Got to get four grand in sponsors. You in?”

“You want me to sponsor your bike ride?”

All I had to say was that I was doing the ride myself, but I didn’t. I looked down the hallway instead, hoping someone else would come along and demand my attention.

“Well, not you by yourself. I’ve got every prosecutor in the office to put up a hundred bucks.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone except Mitch. Got Cunningham and O’Connor, though. I just haven’t seen you around for a few days. That’s why I’m getting to you last.”

“You got Barbara Belbonnet?”

“Sure. It’s for a good cause, George. Children’s cancer fund.” He was beginning to falter in his bonhomie, as if he had known all along that I wasn’t going to do what everyone else had done.

I signed the form he held out to me. Pledged $100. I was now into the ride for $2,600.

1

.

KAUAI, July 2008

FLYING FROM BOSTON TO HAWAII CAN BE A VERY LONG JOURNEY if you don’t like the person you are with. Especially if that person is you.

Things did not improve once I arrived. Perhaps I thought it would be like Bermuda: hop on a motor scooter and cruise the entire island in an hour.

The airport was small, one story, and there seemed to be a dearth of walls, but there were plenty of people, and while most were in tropical clothing, virtually everyone was too intent on finding someone or someplace to help out a stranger who apparently thought he had landed in some Polynesian Mayberry.

It took me more than an hour to rent a car because I had not thought to reserve one, being under the illusion that I was going to take a taxi into town. “Which town?” the first cabdriver asked in response to my question, and I knew I was in trouble.

I told him I was staying in Princeville.

He shook his head as if there was something wrong with me. “Long way, man. Cheaper to rent da car than take da cab.”

So I did.

At least the hotel was nice, and it had a concierge named Ki’anna, a dark-hued, zaftig young woman with waist-length black hair, who assured me she knew everything that was worth knowing about the island. One thing she didn’t know was the whereabouts of a man named Howard Landry. She did the logical thing and looked him up in the phone book. No Howard Landry was listed. She went to her computer and found no reference to Howard Landry there. I would have despaired except I was beyond that point. I just stood in the open-air lobby and wondered what I was going to do next.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. I had the option of walking a quarter-mile down to the beach, which, from where the hotel was, perched on top of a cliff, did not look as nice as a Hawaiian beach was supposed to look, or going to the pool and having a waiter bring me drinks.

I went to my room, changed into a bathing suit, and walked back to the pool, which had various arms and inlets and vaguely Asian-style pedestrian bridges and which dominated the grounds. I dove in, swam a half-dozen laps without disturbing the water for the wild children and passive adults who were using the pool for everything but swimming, then climbed out and dropped onto a lounge chair. I was in Hawaii and someone else was paying for it. I should relax, take my time. I didn’t have to do everything in an afternoon.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Barbara Belbonnet in those long-legged, incredibly tight jeans. It did not work. My eyes would not stay closed. And the noise around me was cacophonous. Kids, swarms of them, were trying to climb on inflatable floats, an activity that seemed to require shrill yelling that cut out only when their heads went underwater. I heard parents laughing as they hung on to the edge of the pool, holding exotic drinks with straws and umbrellas and chunks of fruit impaled on little plastic swords. Everyone seemed happy but me.

I ordered a mai tai, hoping it would make me feel better. The glass came filled with ice and the drink disappeared in a matter of seconds. I ordered a Primo beer because I figured the bartender couldn’t water that, and I kept right on ordering them. I was on my fourth and thinking about Barbara without employing half as much effort as before when Ki’anna the concierge appeared at my side with a lovely smile.

“I found your guy,” she said, the smile growing even lovelier. “Whyn’t you tell me you looking for Cap’n Howie?”

2

.

THE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE was no longer where Ki’anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she assured me. She had gone to school with some of the island’s policemen and she would make some calls.

It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island, about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once. Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.

The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.

A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pass, a living quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and a minute later a shirtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.

“Aloha,” he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.

I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap’n Howie, just to make sure.

“Some call me that.”

“You also known as Detective Landry?”

The man’s eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.

I went right to the point. “Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here.”

I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, “You wanna rent a condo?” There was just a bit of hope in the question.

“No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago.”

The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders. He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was sparse and blown about at various angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. “Got telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to fly all the way here just to talk to me.”