Cold Dark Matter

A Morgan O'Brien Mystery

Chapter 3

I’d just managed to drop off to sleep when the cabin attendant bustled by to collect the pillows and blankets. I checked my watch, and she informed me that it was almost 7:00 a.m. local time. Beneath us it was still an endless turquoise blue, but as the nose of the plane dipped to begin the descent I caught my first glimpse ahead of the chain of emerald islands erupting from the sea.

Twenty minutes later when I finally arrived at the airplane’s open door I couldn’t help but stop and gape. I’d left Ottawa in sleet and snow with the temperature hovering below zero. Here, even in the early morning, the waves of heat were so intense that the background behind was a blur of greens.

I took the steps down to the tarmac slowly, trying to take it all in. The airport itself was small with the planes landing out on the tarmac. The buildings resembled a series of attached Polynesian huts right down to the simulated thatch roofs, but there were no walls to enclose the structure, something incomprehensible to my Canadian sensibility. And everywhere around me clumps of palms rattled and swished in the wind. I moved my bag to the other shoulder. There was no doubt about it. If one had to work this was the place to do it.

Detective Donald Benson of the Hawaii County Police Department leaned back in his chair. His legs stretched out so far that his shiny brown loafers poked out from beneath the desk and almost touched my feet. With his hands laced behind his head, he observed me with what appeared to be casual interest, but I suspected was anything but.

“O’Brien, right?” I nodded. “Where’d you say you were from?”

I’d called Benson from the Kona airport on landing just before picking up my rental car. As the lead investigator on Grenier’s death he’d have more useful information than all the astronomers combined, and he’d been surprisingly helpful. Instead of the usual suspicion, stonewalling, and runaround, Benson had told me to come right over. He’d even offered me a cup of coffee. His behavior put me on edge.

I pulled out my passport and my National Council for Science and Technology ID card, identifying me as an investigator. He pulled them over and glanced at them but didn’t look impressed.

“So you investigate what exactly?”

“Research fraud, embezzlement, occasionally murder or manslaughter if it’s related in some way to research.” Then I added carefully, emphasizing theory over practice, “But in those cases I’m there to help the police.”

He tossed my papers on the desk, leaned back again, and ran his hands over the fine bristle of dark hair that barely obscured his scalp. As he lifted his arms the olive T-shirt beneath his pale linen jacket stretched across muscle. “You got law enforcement experience?”

“RCMP.”

His face brightened. I had connections to the brotherhood. “I know a couple of Mounties. Good guys. I met them at a conference in Atlanta a couple years back.”

I leaned forward, pulled a Post-it off his desk, wrote down the names of two officers — one a detective with the local Ottawa police, the other a sergeant with the RCMP — and pushed it across the table.

“Give them a call.” I nodded to the paper. “They’ll tell you I’m legit.”

He picked up the paper and fingered it, obviously trying to decide if he should make the calls before giving me any information. Finally he looked up. “So you understand all this science shit?”

“That’s my job. And if I don’t understand it and it seems relevant, I have contacts who help me out.”

“And this Grenier guy, he was one of yours?”

“We paid his salary.”

He gave a little shrug. “So what’s the problem? People commit suicide all the time. They don’t send in the government troops.”

I’d thought about this, how to explain my presence. Benson was the fastest route to information. With him on my side I wouldn’t have to waste time on preliminaries. He would have done that for me. He could also give me access to sources of information that would otherwise be closed to me as a foreign national, so to make this work I had to cast myself as an asset, not a liability. But how to do that without mentioning the research diaries? If he didn’t know about them I wasn’t about to tip him off. The best route, I reasoned, was a partial truth, which is so much easier to weasel out of than an outright lie if things begin to fall apart.

“Some of Grenier’s data is missing,” I said, keeping my voice neutral, “and it belongs to us.”

He came forward in his chair. “Really. Now why didn’t any of those pointy heads let me in on that?”

So they hadn’t mentioned the diaries. That in itself was interesting. “Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions, or maybe you asked the wrong person. Not everyone would know.”

“Why the interest?”

“His work represents a substantial investment on the part of the Canadian government.”

He’d picked up a pencil and absently tapped the eraser on his blotter while his eyes stayed riveted to mine. “It must, to send you all the way here to get it.”

He was analyzing my every twitch, tick, and squirm, and I was careful to keep my eyes level with his and my hands neatly folded in my lap, but I felt the heat. I needed a diversion. “How solid is your suicide?”

It took a second, then Benson frowned and threw down his pencil. “I hate friggin’ suicides. This one? I’ve got a note, I’ve got no physical evidence to back up anything else, and I’ve got several witnesses saying that Grenier’d been a bit bizarre over the past two weeks. Add to that no motive for murder, not that we could dig up anyway. Let’s just say it’s hard to commit resources on that basis.”

“But the case isn’t closed.”

He sighed, and shook his head. “Unless something else comes up,” he motioned to the pile of folders on his desk, “I’ve got other cases, and the brass wants it shut.”

I smiled to myself. Any self-respecting detective would rather solve a murder than declare a case a suicide. I lowered my voice a couple of tones, giving it seductive edge. “Maybe we can make a deal.”

I could see the corners of his mouth turn up, almost against his will. “And what kind of deal would that be?”

I leaned in a bit and tilted my head down, so I was looking up at him through my lashes. In wolves this would be called a submissive posture, designed to reduce any sense of threat. It usually worked, particularly on men. “You tell me what you’ve got and whatever I find I turn over to you. Consider me the hired help, except you don’t pay a thing.”

He broke out into a smile of brilliant white teeth. “Simple as that, huh?”

I nodded.

He eyed me for a minute, his teeth almost glinting against the tan, then he gave a little nod in my direction. “The Hawaii County Police Department is always happy to help a neighbor.” He leaned forward and reached for the phone. “How are you with pretty pictures?”

“It’s not my first choice of entertainment, but I won’t puke on your floor.”

“Good,” he said, banging in a number, “because Bunny wouldn’t like that.” Then he turned slightly away from me. “Bunny, get me Star Boy’s forensic file to interview 6 please.”

Benson led me down a corridor lined with interview rooms. He was a pleasing sight to follow, tall and nicely muscled, but not overdone, ostentatious. I knew we’d struck a deal, and I also knew that Benson didn’t trust me any more than I did him: a good cop’s instincts. But even with the flow of information censored it would still be better than what I could get working it alone.

The door to interview room 6 was open when we got there. Whoever Bunny was, she was efficient. There was a file on the table and a video player and monitor beside it. Benson sat in one chair, I sat down beside him. He pulled a video from the file, shoved it in the machine. Then he unbuttoned his jacket, crossed his legs, and hit play on the remote. His belt, I noted, matched his shoes.

“No narration,” he said, his eyes on the screen. “But I’ll lead you through it.”

The video began from a small dirt parking area that faced the FrancoCanadian observatory dome. It was a mammoth structure, like a giant golf ball sitting on a squat tee, glistening white against a deep blue sky. Even more imposing than the dome, though, was the terrain around it. The camera panned slowly to the left through a landscape so desolate, so bereft of life, that it could have been an image relayed back to Earth from the Mars lander. We appeared to be standing on an island of red rubble poking through an endless sea of soft white cloud. The camera picked up several more domes in the distance, majestic on their contours of the rock, then the image shuddered and the camera switched direction, this time moving to the right of FrancoCanadian observatory. On a hill just above it sat an even bigger dome, silver, with a rough track connecting the two. The road followed the narrow spine of a ridge, and it dropped on one side into the bowl of the ancient volcano, on the other into the clouds. That image held briefly, then the camera shuddered and jerked, as if the cameraman himself teetered on the edge of the cliff.

“That’s the wind,” said Benson. He glanced over at me. “Hope you brought those Canadian long johns.”

Then he hit fast forward, and the camera moved along into the observatory, picking up details of the entryway and first set of doors. We were now in a small foyer with two doors at its base, one leading to the right, one to the left.

“What time was this?” I asked.

“We got the 911 at around 5:00 a.m. By the time we got up there it was 6:00, and the Ident guys didn’t arrive until 7:00.” He hit the slow button as the camera came through the first set of doors into a narrow corridor. It panned to the left getting a full shot of an in/out board with all the staff members listed. Grenier’s magnet was “out.”

“And that’s how you found it?” I asked.

“No. We pushed it to ‘out’ when we knew he was dead.”

I twisted around. He face was blank and his eyes were studying the screen. Just when I began to wonder if I’d actually heard him correctly, his glance slid from the screen to me; he raised an eyebrow, then went back to the screen. He was jerking my chain. “It tallies with what Aimes, the telescope operator, told us. Grenier left with him but must have returned alone. Since he was alone he didn’t bother moving his magnet.”

I watched carefully as the camera slowly made its way up a tiny, cramped elevator. Benson, too, was leaning forward as if hoping to catch some detail he’d missed.

“Who called in the 911?”

He kept his eyes on the screen. “A guy named Pexa. Native Hawaiian. Good guy. He’s head of maintenance up there. He was at the Astronomy Centre halfway up the mountain getting ready to start his day when he got a call from an astronomer who’d seen the suicide note. Star Boy sent it by e-mail. Can you believe it? So Pexa goes right up and sure enough finds Grenier hanging from the telescope. Fortunately for us he’s a sensible guy, ex-Navy. He didn’t try to get him down, didn’t tamper with the scene, just backed out and called us.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “This is where it gets interesting.”

The camera had arrived at a set of swinging doors labelled “Observing Floor.” They were pushed open by an unseen hand to reveal 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.

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Copyright © Alexandra M. Brett, 2005.
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