Cold Dark Matter. Alex Brett
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a vestibule painted flat black and another set of doors. These swung open onto a concrete floor. The camera stopped dead and began a slow and careful pan of the vast open space. It was like a cave, dim and lifeless, with unfamiliar shapes looming in the shadows. I moved forward to get a better look. "What's all that stuff?"
"Equipment. There's junk everywhere. You can't move without tripping over a cable or some piece of crap." I felt Benson turn and look at me. "You ever been up there? You know why there's no narration on this tape?" I shook my head. "Because the Ident guy didn't have the breath to walk, talk, and carry the camera all at the same time. It's a friggin' nightmare. There's not enough oxygen to keep you thinking straight, and it's so goddamned cold you start to shiver ten minutes after arriving. So I ask this Pexa to turn up the heat. I mean, how the hell are we supposed to work? And you know what he tells me? No can do. There is no heat. And the friggin' floor's refrigerated. No joke. Something about heat rising up and affecting their whatever." He shook his head. "It's a nightmare." Then he pointed again with the remote. "Here comes your boy."
The camera had arrived at a huge cylindrical mass suspended from the floor. I knew from the pictures in the file that this was the base of the telescope, and within that cylinder lay several tons of mirror, the pride of the observatory. The image climbed slowly upward, moving over a lattice of metal struts constructed around the mirror. At the top end of this open tube a large black box sat suspended in the centre, and below this hung Yves Grenier, lifeless as a sack of grain. The camera continued upward. Benson tapped the screen with the corner of the remote. "The lift is there."
I could see the vague shadow of a box in the peak of the dome. I leaned forward, trying to peer through the darkness. "If somebody else was with him —"
"We have no evidence of that."
"But if somebody was, could they get the lift back in position?"
"Easy. It can be controlled from inside or from the ground."
"And you dusted inside?"
He rolled his eyes then shook his head. "You think we're hicks? Everything and everywhere. We're still doing eliminations."
The camera now moved slowly down from the peak following the cable back to Grenier's body. When it got there Benson hit pause, letting the gruesome image hang in the middle of the screen. He turned to me. "It's real easy to fall up there. You walk up three steps and in that thin atmosphere your head starts to spin. If it hadn't been for the note I would have said death by misadventure. Still, I don't like the feel of it."
"There are no other leads?"
He clicked the machine back on and the camera continued its slow descent along the struts of the telescopes, down across its base, and around the floor once again. Then the image disappeared into a flat blue screen.
Benson laid the remote on the table and turned to face me. He adjusted his pant leg, maintaining the perfect crease. "I've shown you mine, now you show me yours."
"What about the ligature?"
"Inconclusive."
"No wife or girlfriend?"
"Not that we could find."
I paused and thought it over. "You could have a bad case of researcher envy."
He tilted his head with interest. "Go on."
I gave a shrug. "I'm not saying that's what happened, just that it's a possibility." I opened up my briefcase and extracted all the reprints Duncan had given me and thumped them onto the desk. "Yves Grenier was both talented and prolific. Maybe somebody didn't like that. Maybe someone thought he was stealing their ideas or trespassing on their research domain. Maybe someone needed to eliminate the competition for a big grant. Who knows. It's a cutthroat business."
"None of my witnesses mentioned anything like that."
"Because if they did the investigation might veer too close to home. You might even disrupt their work."
His eyes narrowed. "I'll follow up on it."
That's what I was hoping he'd say. This red herring would keep him busy for at least a few days. "If you want I can get you some names," I said helpfully. "Astronomers who would be in direct competition with Grenier for money or telescope time. We've got a librarian on staff who specializes in that kind of database search. Then we can cross-check and see who was in Hawaii at the time of Grenier's death."
He considered my proposal for a moment then nodded. "I'd appreciate that, and in the meantime I'll follow up the old-fashioned way." That meant interviews and cross-checking statements.
"That'll work. Two independent methods. Let's see if we come up with the same information."
Benson ejected the video and put it back in the accordion file. "You got a cellphone?" I pulled a business card from my pocket and passed it to him. He read it and dropped it into his breast pocket. "And I do have to ask, are you armed?"
"No. But I have a credit card. I'll just go down to 7-11 and get a Glock if I feel the urge to kill."
"You and every other tourist. This place isn't safe for Hawaiians anymore."
I began loading the reprints back in my briefcase. I kept my voice casual for the next question. "Can I check out Grenier's house?"
He raised his eyebrow and gave a slight smile. "That's off limits."
I nodded and snapped my briefcase shut. "Have your crime scene guys gone through it?"
"What do you think?"
"Find anything interesting?"
He held the door of the interview room open for me. "Should they have?"
I gave him a wry smile to let him know I understood the game. "Only you would know, Benson."
At the front door I took his hand. He gave mine a sharp squeeze.
"Stay in touch."
It was an order, not a request.
I stepped outside into an oven of burning sun and searing heat without even a breath of wind to rattle the palms. I crossed to my vehicle quickly — a silver Toyota SUV — opened the door, and slid in. The heat was suffocating, and it took me a moment to find my keys, get the engine running, and jam the air conditioner on high. When I finally looked up I caught sight of Benson back at his office window, watching me leave. As I pulled out of the parking spot I saw him turn away and lift the phone. By the time I left the lot he was deep in conversation.
chapter four
The office building spread across the ground like low, grey lichen, insinuating itself into the folds of the land. High above, a heavy mist poured over the cliffs and settled into the valley, making it hard to see where the building ended and the atmosphere began. In fact, I would have missed it altogether had it not been for the impressive sign at the base of the drive, "The FrancoCanadian Telescope/Le Télescope FrancoCanadien," in red and white.
If the observatory dome was the heart of operation, then this building was surely the brain. Within these offices astronomers managed the complex night-to-night operation of the telescope, engineers built new instruments for it, and computer scientists developed the software needed to eke out and analyze every photon of light that touched that mirror. If I was looking for answers this is where they'd be.
From Benson's office I'd taken the only road that leads into the island's interior, a narrow highway that follows a ridge right up into the mountains. It rose through a landscape of arid, long-grass meadows cut every few miles by rivers of solid lava, obsidian black and devoid of vegetation. Some of the flows looked like roiling rivers of tar with surfaces as smooth and taut as skin. Others were vast plains of angry pinnacles, razor sharp and glistening in the heat of the sun. As I climbed, though, the sky paled from blue to grey, and I could feel the temperature drop. I switched off the air conditioning and started the heat. By the time I reached the telescope offices in the village of Waimea the countryside was shrouded in fog and curtains of rain