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going to be a beautiful day. “Some awful surfboard incident in his childhood?”
     
    Tepano laughed. “Not exactly.” His face got serious then. “He was a pretty good surfer, once. Then the Army sent him to Bosnia and his leg got blown off. That prosthetic is state of the art, but he can’t feel a board under him, so he could never surf again. Made him a little bitter.”
     
    “I guess.” I could only imagine how I’d feel if I couldn’t surf any more.
     
    “Plus he has this job, security guard for this crazy old guy who owns a stretch of beach. He’s always chasing surfers away.”
     
    “I’ll keep my distance.”
     
    “Probably a good idea.” He gave me a shaka, the Hawaiian two-fingered salute, and said, “Hope to see you here again some time.”
     
    “You probably will.” As I was walking the last bit to my truck, Melody was walking past with another woman, Mary, who was, like Melody, in her late twenties or early thirties, and very fit. Mary’s skin was tanned dark, and her glossy black hair was pulled into a long ponytail.
     
    Melody asked me, “You going to be around for a while? We could use some strength on our B team.”
     
    “A few weeks,” I said. “I can’t commit to anything, but I’d like to drop by practice again some time, if that’s okay?”
     
    “Sure.”
     
    Mary said, “Gotta go, Mel. See you later,” and kissed Melody on the mouth. It seemed like a pretty intimate gesture to me, and I noticed that Mary wore a yellow gold wedding band. I wondered if they were lesbian partners, but Melody did not wear a band at all.
     
    As Mary walked away, Melody turned back to me. “What brought you out today?”
     
    I shrugged. “I’ve been surfing the last couple of weeks, saw your poster.” I decided to take a gamble. “I remembered that a surfer I knew recommended you. Jersey guy named Mike Pratt?”
     
    Melody’s face fell. “I guess you didn’t hear. Mike died about a month or two ago.”
     
    “No!” I said. “Surfing?”
     
    “You could say that. He was on his board at Pipeline, and somebody shot him. Dead by the time he washed up on the shore.”
     
    Tears began forming at the corners of Melody’s eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”
     
    “Yeah, I guess. He was on our A team for a while. Really strong guy. You probably saw, we’re like a family here. Mike’s death hit us all pretty hard.”
     
    “They catch the guy who did it?”
     
    She shook her head. “Not a clue. The police came around, but they didn’t know anything.”
     
    “I’m surprised anybody would even talk to them,” I said. “Surfers and cops don’t usually get along.”
     
    “If they’d known the right questions to ask, we might have talked,” Melody said. She looked at me strangely. “Hey, do I recognize you?”
     
    “Kimo Kanapa’aka,” I said. “Formerly of the Honolulu PD.”
     
    “Oh, my God, I read about you. That is so totally unfair, what they did to you.” I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. “Say, maybe you could look into what happened to Mike. I could make some introductions here for you.”
     
    “I don’t know. The police aren’t exactly eager to hear from me—or my lawyer—these days.”
     
    “But you could show them. Find out what happened to Mike, prove you should be a detective again.”
     
    I knew the friends and family of victims were eager to see murderers caught and punished, but I’d never seen this side before, this view that the police were clueless and needed the help of someone outside the force to solve crimes.
     
    “You think people here know something the police don’t?”
     
    “I’m sure of it,” Melody said. “You got time for a cup of coffee?”
     
     
     
     
     

Conversations
     
    Melody and I met a few minutes later at the Kope Bean, a little coffee shop in a strip center on the Kam Highway. A lot of surfers were getting a caffeine fix before hitting the waves, and a bunch of