Death of a Messenger

by Robert McCaw

  “Any problems with the younger staff, or with anyone, for that matter?”

  “No. Keneke had no enemies. I never heard him down on anybody, except Harper … and Gunter after their falling-out.”

  Koa paused momentarily to check his notepad of questions. “Tell me about Keneke’s interest in Kaho‘olawe.”

  Soo Lin smiled for the first time that morning. “You might say that Keneke inherited his interest. You know his grandfather violated Navy regulations by trespassing on Kaho‘olawe to dramatize his religious and environmental beliefs.”

  “Yes, we know that Keneke’s grandfather was part of the Kaho‘olawe Nine.”

  “Did you know that Keneke also planned an expedition to Kaho‘olawe?”

  “No!” Koa couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. “What attraction did Kaho‘olawe hold for him?”

  “Keneke had this theory that ancient Tahitian toolmakers, searching for new sources of stone, brought adze-making technology to Hawai‘i, initially to Kaho‘olawe. He hoped to find links between stone quarries on Tahiti, Kaho‘olawe, and Mauna Kea. Tying it all together—the South Pacific, Kaho‘olawe, and Mauna Kea—that was his holy grail. That’s why he wanted to dig at Pu‘u Moiwi.”

  The connection hit Koa like a tire iron. Keneke and Kaho‘olawe. Hook Hao’s son, Reggie, and Kaho‘olawe. Aikue ‘Ōpua and Kaho‘olawe. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He needed to talk to the Maui police and interview Reggie, especially since ‘Ōpua wouldn’t talk to him about Kaho‘olawe.

  “Did he actually go exploring on Kaho‘olawe?”

  “I urged him not to go. I was afraid of the bombs, but I don’t know whether he actually went.”

  “When are you returning to California?” Koa asked as he prepared to end the interview.

  “Not for a while.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Kimo has graciously allowed me to stay in Keneke’s house in Honoka‘a, and I talked to my professors at UC. That’s where I did my graduate work in astronomy. They’ve arranged for me to work at Alice for a while.”

  “I don’t like it,” Koa burst out, unable to contain his concern. “We don’t know who killed Keneke or why. You shouldn’t be walking in his footsteps until we’ve caught his killer.”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you, Detective. When I got to Cerro Tololo and checked my e-mail, I had a message from Keneke. He said he was sending me something important that I should safeguard. Nothing more, just that I should safeguard what he was sending. Then when I got back from Cerro Tololo, I found a package from Keneke, mailed on January 19. It contained data, digital pictures made with the Alice telescopes, but no note or other explanation. I think the data has something to do with Keneke’s death, and I’m going to find out how. I owe him that.”

  This woman was one revelation after another. “Tell me about the data.”

  “It’s detailed analyses of images of star clusters. By itself, the data is unremarkable, except that there is a duplicate of each image—well, almost a duplicate. There are slight differences in each pair of images that I don’t yet understand. I need to get up to the Alice Observatories to replicate Keneke’s observations.”

  Koa saw her jaw harden and a look of determination fill her bright eyes. He could tell that he wouldn’t be able to dissuade her, and he had no legal basis to stop her. He settled for what he could do.

  “You should keep in touch with me. Let me know if anything, anything at all, makes you feel threatened. And come by my office in the morning. We’ll give you an emergency beacon. The police communications center will monitor the frequency twenty-four hours a day. Once you activate it, we’ll be able to locate you and hear whatever happens around you. Okay?”

  “Thanks, Koa.” She rose from her seat. “I’m tougher than you think.”

  After she left, Koa stretched out on the conference room floor to rest his neck, replaying parts of the interview and shuffling the deck of suspects. Charlie Harper, the pervert, and Gunter Nelson, the resentful loser, remained strong suspects, although he still needed to find out what had happened between Gunter and Keneke. He made a mental note to see what Detective Piki had learned from the telephone records of the observatory people.

  But it was the Kaho‘olawe connection that most intrigued him. Reggie Hao, Aikue ‘Ōpua, some felon who had taken the Fifth, the prince, and now Keneke were all connected to an illegal hunt for artifacts on an abandoned Navy bombing range. One of them was now in a coma and another dead. Contacting the Maui police moved to the top of his agenda.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  KOA HAD OFTEN visited Nālani at the Alice administrative center, but their plans for a trip to the summit kept getting postponed. Koa’s work had never taken him to the remote 14,000-foot mountaintop some fifty miles from the nearest town. Thus, despite all his years on the Big Island, Koa had never been to the summit of Mauna Kea.

  The afternoon of the Soo Lin interview, he finally drove up the mountain. Rounding a bend two-thirds of the way up the mountain, he came upon the gray stone buildings of the Onizuka visitors’ center and dormitory complex. Koa turned into the parking lot for the dormitory complex. He’d called ahead and upon entering the main building, he found Gunter Nelson standing in the doorway waiting for him.

  “Welcome to the mountain, Detective. I see you survived the medieval circus down at the hotel,” Gunter said. He wore a checkered flannel shirt that made Koa wish he himself had dressed more warmly for the cold air at 9,000 feet.

  “Yes,” Koa said, trying to ignore Gunter’s bitterness. “Nālani and I had a rather good time.”

  “I understand you want to go up to the observatory.”

  “Yes,” Koa responded, “but first, I’d like to find out what was served for dinner up here on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the week of January 19.”

  “Sure. Let’s go talk to Lucrezia.”

  “Lucrezia? The food’s that bad?” Koa asked.

  “Worse.” They walked down a few steps into and across the cafeteria, past the daily menu scrawled on a blackboard, and through a swinging door to get to the small but well-equipped kitchen. A grotesquely overweight man of Polynesian ancestry, standing before a counter chopping carrots, told them that Graham Gravel, the regular cook, was vacationing on the mainland. To Koa’s disappointment, they learned Gravel kept the menu schedule in his head, and had left no contact number. They’d have to await his return to find out what he’d served for dinner on those key nights.

  Unsatisfied, Koa turned to Gunter. “Will you see if you can find a phone number? Maybe his employment records show family he’s visiting.”

  “Sure, what’s next?”

  “I’d like to see where Keneke kept his possessions before we go to the top.”

  They had to break the padlock on Keneke’s locker yet went unrewarded for the effort. They found no computer and nothing else of interest to the investigation.

  The two men climbed into Koa’s Explorer for the trip to the summit. From the dormitory complex, an uneven, rutted gravel road cut back and forth in a series of long switchbacks up the side of the mountain. They passed through a band of clouds, and nearly all vegetation disappeared. Large and small cinder cones abounded. The big Ford engine protested both the grade and the increasingly thin air.

  “Tell me about Keneke Nakano,” Koa asked casually.

  “A wonderful young man. Keneke had depth. Lots of astronomers never learn the mythology of the heavens, but Keneke knew the Greek and Roman legends. Like Johannes Vermeer’s Geographer.”

  “Vermeer’s Geographer?”

  “A seventeenth-century Dutch painter from Delft. Painted a picture of an early geographer, kind of a symbol of a renaissance man … that was Keneke.”

  Gunter obviously loved the sound of his own voice, and Koa was happy to encourage him. Verbose suspects made his job easier. “Sounds like you knew him pretty well.”

  “We were professional colleagues. I spent some off-hours with h
im. There’s not much to do here except talk. Keneke did much of the talking, a real minnesinger.”

  “Minnesinger?”

  “A bard, a minstrel, a troubadour, a storyteller in the oral tradition. A Polynesian Tannhäuser, a lyric poet of the Pacific.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, sometimes after dinner we’d sit in the cafeteria. Keneke would start rubbing his pōhaku ‘aumakua and after a couple of minutes, it was like he’d entered a different world.”

  “Did you say pōhaku ‘aumakua … his stone god?”

  “Yeah, he wore a tiny carved stone on a string around his neck. Said it had belonged to his grandfather. Called it his pōhaku ‘aumakua. I never saw him without it.”

  “And he told stories?”

  “In six or seven months, I must’ve heard Keneke tell fifty stories. Stories about stonecutters, the mythical Hawaiian Menehune, Kamehameha’s battles to consolidate the islands, the exploits of the god Maui. I don’t know where they came from or how he memorized them all, but he had an unlimited capacity for story talk.”

  “Did tools—hammerstones or adzes—often have a role in his stories?” Koa asked.

  Gunter pulled at the long gray-white strands of his beard, and then patted the thicket back into place as he mulled over the question. “Yes, come to think of it. In many of Keneke’s tales real or imaginary tools empowered the actors. He used to say the same thing about Alice. That the telescope created its creators, imbuing them with Herculean qualities.”

  “Like Director Masters?”

  The brightness in Gunter’s eyes dimmed. “Yeah. I suppose that’s an example.”

  Koa didn’t want to stop the easy flow. “When did you last see Keneke?”

  “Gee, that’s tough. Let me think. It must have been about two weeks ago. We had dinner. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I saw him.”

  “What date or day of the week?”

  Gunter produced a pocket calendar and thumbed through the pages to the week of January 19. “Must have been Tuesday, January 20. That’s the only night that week that I ate up here. Thursday evenings I teach an advanced astronomy course at UH in Honolulu. I wasn’t on the mountain again until Friday, January 23.”

  “Where did you spend the rest of that Tuesday evening?”

  “In my room here.”

  As they drove up the winding gravel road toward the summit, the Explorer hit a rough patch and bounced. Koa gritted his teeth and braced his neck against the headrest, but Gunter didn’t seem to notice.

  “Where did Keneke go after the two of you finished dinner Tuesday night?” Koa asked.

  “He had machine time on Alice to work out some software wrinkles. Astronomers never miss their time slots,” he pointed out. “It’s just not done. Telescope time is precious.”

  “Software wrinkles. I don’t understand.”

  “Masters had Keneke testing software for an experimental adaptive optics technique. Not real astronomy, just one of Masters’ pet projects. Mathematically, analytically, it was whiz-kid stuff. Our existing adaptive optics cancels out a lot of the distortion caused by the earth’s atmosphere, but Masters wanted to do better. That was Keneke’s big project—to give the Alice telescopes new eyeglasses, enabling them to see just as well as the Hubble Space Telescope.”

  “That’s funny. Masters said he doubted Keneke’s intellectual prowess.”

  “Masters believes he’s the smartest guy in the universe. No one else comes close,” Gunter responded disparagingly.

  “Did you see Keneke go up to the summit?”

  “No, but his picture, along with the entry time, will be on the security tape. Everybody goes in and out past a security camera. It’s motion activated so the tapes last for weeks.”

  That would be useful, but Koa still had more questions before their ride up the mountain ended. “What about fights, enemies, and disputes? Keneke involved in anything like that?”

  “Nothing. Keneke charmed everybody. He had a gift for winning people over.”

  “How about your relationship with him?”

  “We got along great. Like I told you, Keneke was a Polynesian renaissance man—witty, educated, entertaining. He had a wide range of interests—astronomy, history, literature, geology … a genuinely diversified intellect.”

  “Any rough spots in your relationship with Keneke?”

  “None. Like I said, we got along great.”

  He’s lying, Koa thought as his suspicions came to a boil, comparing Gunter’s glib assurances with what he’d heard from Nālani and Soo Lin. What was the man hiding? “Did you and Keneke work together on any archaeological projects?”

  That made Gunter sit upright, jerking the carriage of Koa’s own seat. “Uh, no. What makes you ask?”

  “I thought you and Keneke went exploring out at Pōhakuloa.”

  “That would be pretty dangerous. It’s a live-fire area.”

  He wasn’t answering the question. “Did the two of you go exploring anywhere in the saddle despite the danger?”

  “Nope, never.”

  Another lie. Soo Lin had said that Keneke and Gunter had spent a lot of time in the saddle. Gunter wouldn’t own up to an interest in archaeology or any falling-out with Keneke. Koa needed to understand why.

  As the Explorer passed over a small rise, they saw several telescopes. “And there’s what you drove up here to see,” Gunter announced.

  Pretty awesome, Koa thought, as he got his first view of the Alice telescopes. The two sparkling white domes stood so close together that they seemed to embrace. From their common base, each of the 125-foot-wide domes rose nearly a hundred feet high. Although their width-to-height ratio gave them a slightly fattened, squat aspect, it enhanced rather than marred their peculiar beauty.

  As they approached over the barren volcanic soil, the distance between the domes seemed to increase. The huge shutters and exterior catwalks became more prominent. The catwalks rose and angled, rose and angled, following the contour of the dome to tiny platforms mounted on either side of the great shutter. “Anybody ever climb to the top of the dome?”

  “Sure. I’ve even climbed up there once. The height isn’t too bad unless you suffer from acrophobia. The real problem is the oxygen level. We’re at 14,000 feet, and above 12,000 feet the air is dangerously thin. There’s a serious risk of high-altitude pulmonary edema. Children and pregnant women aren’t even allowed up here.”

  “Am I going to be okay?” Koa asked.

  “Most people are fine if they move slowly, but don’t go running around. Let me know if you get nauseous. That’s the first sign.”

  They parked the vehicle, stepped out into the freezing air, and approached the giant white domes, looming like bloated igloos above them. Gunter led them through a door with a glass window into the service building. As they passed into a small anteroom, Koa noted the opposing video cameras watching everyone who entered or departed. Alerted by Gunter’s reference to motion detectors, he spotted a pair of infrared sensors. “These sensors activate the cameras?”

  “Right. The opposing sensors are designed to detect any motion in the anteroom, but as a failsafe, a light beam shines between the sensors. If the motion detectors don’t trigger the cameras, a person breaking the light beam starts the videotape.”

  Koa was impressed. He should have such aids in all his cases. “Pretty neat. The video recorder has a date and time function?”

  “Right—the date, time, and camera are electronically recorded, along with the image. We use security tapes with a prerecorded background track. Makes tampering impossible. We got the specs on the system. I can get you a copy.”

  “Great. I’d appreciate that.”

  From the anteroom, they entered Alice I’s office-workshop wing, passing a machine shop, an office, and a computer room. As they strolled down the corridor, Cepheid turned the corner and stutter-stepped toward them. “Good afternoon, earthlings,” the robot intoned.

  “Good afternoon, Cepheid,” Koa re
sponded.

  “I see you’ve met Thurston Masters’ second son.” Gunter’s voice took on a disparaging tone.

  “His second son?”

  “Like I told you, Masters is a technician, a software engineer, an optics guy, not a real astronomer. He loves robotics and that thing …”—he pointed to Cepheid—“is a robotic test platform. In some ways this whole telescope is one big computerized robot. Computers and robotics control the shape of the mirrors; computers and robotics adjust the mirrors thousands of times a minute to eliminate most of the earth’s atmospheric distortions. Computers and robotics allow astronomers to operate the telescopes from anywhere in the world.”

  “Yeah, Nālani explained that astronomers don’t actually have to come to the summit.”

  “And many of them don’t.”

  “I had quite a conversation with Cepheid yesterday while I was waiting to chat with Masters.” Koa noticed a short, curly wire, like a car phone antenna, protruding from the top of the robot. It had to be radio controlled. He wondered how close the transmitter had to be.

  “Don’t sell that contraption short. Its computer brain ranks as one of the most advanced artificial intelligence platforms in the world. Masters even had Keneke working to program Cepheid to tell right from wrong … to give it a conscience.”

  “Really? How could that possibly work?”

  “Well, Detective, have you ever read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot?”

  “No.”

  “Asimov’s robot followed three simple laws: First, a robot must never injure a human. Second, a robot must obey humans, except if doing so would violate the first law. Third, the robot must protect itself unless doing so violates either of the first two laws. Those simple principles form the basis of an ethical system that could be reduced to computer code.”

  Koa was still shaking his head over Gunter’s description of Cepheid as they entered the telescope control room, located just outside the space reserved for the telescope. A long glass window overlooked the interior of the dome, giving Koa his first glimpse of the world’s largest optical telescope.