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not know that the Vietnamese boat people of the late seventies were nearly all ethnic Chinese, descendants of a great diaspora eight hundred years earlier. Though they had lived in Vietnam for eight centuries, they had
not intermarried and had retained their ethnic and cultural identity. The Chinese have a strong sense of family and a great appreciation of education, and they became entrenched in the arts, in medicine, in the bureaucracies. And they were sorely hated by the Vietnamese. The feeling was mutual. Chinese do not like outsiders. Chawlie deals with me only because I have a commodity he can acquire nowhere else: absolute trust.
    I could have given the woman the money to take to Chawlie, but I wanted no one to know I kept that kind of cash aboard. I don’t trust anyone that much. I’d see him at midnight and make a show of going to the bank before. But nearly everything I owned was on this boat, ready to leave in a moment’s notice.
    The stack of photocopied files lay on the lounge table demanding my immediate attention. I made a pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain as the sun rose over Makalapa Hill, and started working.
    So how do you find a murderer? Police will tell you nearly every homicide is the result of a dispute between people who knew each other. Lately Hawaii has experienced more of the random violence that is engendered in the squalor of the big mainland cities—serial killings and drive-by shootings—strangers killing strangers. This didn’t feel like that kind of killing. There hadn’t been anything in the newspapers about a local serial killer and it may not have been random. The chances were good the killer’s name was contained in the file, or that there was a lead to the man who did it.
    I found the medical examiner’s report. There was semen in the vagina, type AB positive, not the rarest of blood types, but not common either. It is less rare in Asians. There was evidence of bruising of the external genitalia, but that didn’t mean anything either. Pubic hairs combed from the body were found to be ovoid in shape and therefore Asian. There were ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, tight enough to have broken the skin. Lacerations on the buttocks, elbows and upper back,
with splinters of Wolmonized Douglas Fir embedded in the flesh, was evidence the victim had been tied to a cross-brace formed like a giant X. One page showed a detailed drawing of such a construction. The depth of the strangulation cord, up to a half inch deep into her flesh, told how she died. It was an ugly picture. A young, vital woman used up and thrown away, decades of bright future squandered. And for what?
    There is never an answer to that question. Never a satisfying answer, anyway. Too often, it comes back simply: Because.
    I put the medical examiner’s report aside. I quickly sorted through the copies of photographs that went with it. They did not make me want to linger. A blood-darkened face with the jutting black tongue gave no hint of the beauty that must have been there. I shuddered, imagining what kind of horrors these pictures must have given MacGruder had he seen them. He had bounced this nightmarish thing on his lap when it was a golden-haired pixie with big blue eyes; had been there when the tot cut her first tooth; had looked on in awe when she spoke her first word. And now this. I hoped he had been shielded from these photographs. They were enough to make a man stop believing in a god but not enough to make a man stop believing in the devil.
    I turned the photographs over. They could tell me nothing now.
    I read through all of the detectives’ narratives. There was a faint whiff of a suspicion of narcotics somewhere in the investigation, but nothing definite. I went back to the forensic file.
    Examination of the knots was inconclusive. The knots used on her hands and arms were square knots, different from the ones on her ankles. Those were granny knots, indicating that