by Robert McCaw
He’d seen a model at the Alice headquarters, but nothing about the tiny replica prepared him for the enormous size of the telescope. The wing-like platforms that had extended no more than two inches from either side of the model were two stories above the observatory building floor and stretched farther than the wings of a Boeing 727. While the crisscrossed cage of metal girders in the model couldn’t have held a mouse, the cage of this telescope extended over forty feet across and soared more than ninety feet upward toward the crest of the dome.
“God, it’s gigantic.”
Gunter smiled. “Not an uncommon reaction. Let me introduce …” Koa reluctantly tore his eyes away from the twelve-story telescope to focus on a pug-nosed blonde woman in her late twenties. “Polly Safer, one of our technicians. Polly, this is Chief Detective Koa Kāne of the Hawai‘i County police.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Gunter turned to the woman standing next to Polly. “And, of course, you know Soo Lin Hun, visiting from our mother ship at the University of California.” Soo Lin looked different in jeans and a long-sleeve woolen shirt beneath a down-filled vest.
“Polly, give Detective Kāne the VIP briefing, the short, nontechnical version.”
Polly smiled and launched into a smooth tour-guide spiel, explaining the computer keyboards, monitors, and printers through which astronomers received the data collected by the telescope.
When Polly finished, Gunter led Koa into the icy-cold dome. They rode a small elevator cage up through two levels of steel decking to emerge on a platform level with the huge gimbals the telescope pivoted on.
“The dome weighs about seven hundred tons and rotates along with the telescope,” Gunter explained. “The telescope pivots up and down on these gimbals.” He pointed to the massive bearings that supported the telescope in its yoke. “By rotating and pivoting, the telescope can be pointed toward any part of the sky.”
As Gunter pointed out the components, Koa gradually made sense of the forest of pipes and bars. He recognized the huge open-framed hexagonal cylinder of the telescope with its unique segmented mirror. “Thirty-six segments of Schott Zerodur glass make up the primary mirror, which has an aggregate diameter of 10.95 meters.”
“Why is it so cold in here? Doesn’t the heat work?” Koa asked, shivering.
Gunter laughed. “There is no heat. In fact, our air-exchange system replaces the entire volume of air in the dome with outside air every five minutes. We do that to keep the temperature of the telescope equal to the outside temperature. Otherwise, when we opened the shutter at night to observe, the temperature difference would distort our observations. Besides, all the astronomers work in the heated control room.”
“A side of beef would freeze in here,” Koa persisted.
“That’s true. Most nights the temperature dips well below freezing.” Gunter pointed upward toward the secondary mirror hanging high in the center of the open frame. “We call that secondary mirror a ‘rubber’ mirror. Actuators driven by our adaptive optics computers deform that mirror to compensate for the effects of atmospheric turbulence. It focuses the light gathered by the primary mirror back through the aperture in the center of the primary mirror to various detectors.”
“You mean, nobody actually looks through the telescope?” Koa asked.
“That’s right. We use detectors, frequently charge-coupled devices. They’re sophisticated and expensive variations of the chips in video cameras. And they’re thousands of times more sensitive to light than the human eye, particularly at this altitude where asphyxia, or oxygen deprivation, diminishes the eye’s ability to discern light.”
“How much did this thing cost?” Koa asked.
“If you have to ask, you can’t afford one,” Gunter chuckled, before adding, “about a hundred million, more if you count the adaptive optics enhancements and the detectors.”
Koa was starting to shiver involuntarily.
“Seen enough?” Gunter asked.
“I don’t know about that, but I’m plenty cold enough.”
“I assume that you want to see the security video.”
“Yes, for the night of January 20. That would be helpful.”
Gunter took Koa and Soo Lin through the workshop-office area into a small office with a television monitor, where everyone except Koa settled into several chairs. The chairs didn’t have much back support, so he stood against the wall.
“If you’ll come with me, Detective, you can watch me extract the videotape.”
Koa followed Gunter into a medium-sized computer room containing rows of computer cabinets. Gunter opened a large gray box mounted on the wall, revealing a control panel and a video recorder. Gunter pushed a button and an aluminized tape cassette ejected from a slot.
“Doesn’t that disable the system?”
“No, there’s another tape in Alice II that continues to run. In addition, a non-erasable ejection character is embedded on the tape so that you can always tell if a tape has been ejected.” Gunter took a blank tape from a cabinet and inserted it into the slot before closing the door.
They returned to the office with the tape cassette, which Gunter inserted into a video player. After rewinding and viewing several sections, he located the security camera recordings from the evening of January 20. Each segment of tape contained four pictures, one in each quadrant, split down the center by a quarter-inch white band containing red numbers in sequence.
“The tape records four cameras?” Koa asked.
“Yes, the two security cameras at the entry door for Alice I feed the right-hand pictures; similar cameras in the entry area of Alice II feed the left side of the screen. The white band makes the tapes virtually tamper-proof.”
The first picture on the right-hand side, in surprisingly clear color, showed Polly Safer entering the observatory at 17:34:56, shaking out her blonde hair and disappearing through the second door. “Polly must have been the duty technician on January 20. Our rules require a duty technician on site whenever anyone operates the telescope. The duty technician is responsible to make sure nothing gets damaged and to shut the observatory down in case of weather problems or electrical difficulties.”
“How often does the weather shut you down?” Koa asked.
“Not too often. More in the winter, less often in the summer.”
“Usually snow?”
“No, it’s usually wind. Sometimes the jet stream drops down and we get gale-force winds across the mountaintop. We shut down when the winds exceed forty-five knots. That happens a fair amount in the winter. Also, two or three times a year we get enough snow to make the roads impassable, and in the mid-eighties, a blizzard closed off the whole mountain for fourteen days.”
“Jesus, I’d hate to be up here in a blizzard.”
The next figure at 18:44:19 was a young man with a crest of thick black hair and an easy smile on his roundish face. Gunter punched the stop button and the figure froze in mid-step. “That’s Keneke.”
Soo Lin gasped, and Koa turned toward her. She appeared shaken. “I’m okay. His sudden appearance just surprised me, that’s all.”
“Play the whole segment,” Koa directed. Gunter pushed a button, and they watched Keneke enter the building, pull off his brown mittens, stuff them in the pocket of his parka, and head through the interior door. Near the end of the segment, one of the cameras caught a decent close-up of Keneke’s face. Gunter once again pressed stop, capturing the portrait. Deep, wide forehead; large, clear black eyes that seemed to twinkle even in the inadvertent picture. Flared nose, rounded brown cheeks, thick smiling lips fading into dimples, neat porcelain-white teeth, and a heavy, wrinkled chin. A Hawaiian face—jovial, but not overly handsome.
“Looks like a fellow without a care in the world.”
“Keneke was like that. Nearly always happy, like he was retelling one of his stories in his own mind,” Gunter responded. As he spoke, Koa watched Gunter’s face, looking for some kind of tell, but read nothing, except maybe a sense of loss in the man’s sa
d eyes.
Koa turned to Soo Lin. “See anything unusual?”
She shook her head. When she spoke, it was in a choked, halting whisper. “There’s … there’s nothing unusual. He was always so … so happy.” She lowered her face into her cupped hands and rested on the table. After a few moments she lifted her head, revealing a sheen of tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think this would … would be so hard.”
“Want to stop and come back to it later?”
“No.”
“Replay the segment three or four times,” Koa instructed. As Gunter worked the remote control, they watched Keneke enter the facility. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time Koa concentrated on the fleeting glimpse of Keneke’s animated face he’d previously known only as the bloodied, one-eyed pulp in the Pōhakuloa lava tube. The picture reinforced his determination to find Keneke’s sadistic killer. The left side of the television screen came alive. Over white digits displaying 18:51:50, three male figures, one in a sweater and two in jackets, filed through the entry door and anteroom of Alice II. Koa recognized Director Masters. “Who are the two men with Masters?”
“That’s Rick Cooper and Gil Gaylord. Gaylord’s a tech—a really sweet guy. He works a lot with schoolkids, trying to get them interested in astronomy. He must have been the duty technician for Alice II that night. Rick Cooper is one of our longtime staff astronomers. Been here at least four years. Works a lot with Masters, kind of his protégé.”
“I’d like to have Sergeant Basa talk to Gaylord and Cooper.”
“Okay. He can meet them at the dormitory complex or we’ll send them down to Hilo.”
When the next picture appeared on the television monitor, the white digits read thirty-four minutes after midnight, and Cooper exited Alice II. “That’s probably just a break. Most astronomers get a little stir-crazy and take a stretch outside during the night.” And sure enough, twelve minutes later Cooper reentered Alice II.
At 01:12:10, Keneke walked across the right side of the monitor, leaving Alice I. “That’s probably Keneke’s break. It was a regular thing with him. He went out to eyeball the huihui hōkū for a few minutes.”
“Huihui hōkū?” Soo Lin asked.
“A flock of stars. What we call constellations. Keneke knew dozens of Hawaiian star stories.”
But Gunter was wrong. Keneke didn’t return to the observatory. The next pictures showed Polly Safer exiting the building at 02:17:47 and reentering at 02:20:14.
“Polly is not supposed to leave the facility,” Gunter said, annoyed. “That’s against policy.”
Then the security tape showed Polly leaving Alice I at 06:45:17, followed a few minutes later by footage of Gaylord, Cooper, and Director Masters leaving Alice II at 06:55:39. They rewound the tape and checked again, but they’d made no mistake. Keneke had left the observatory at 1:12 a.m. on January 21 and hadn’t returned.
“Why would he leave at that hour? Would his observing time have been over?” Koa asked.
Gunter shook his head. “It’s unlike him or any other astronomer to walk out like that. I can’t explain it.”
“Play the 1:12 a.m. segment again.” As Gunter rewound the tape and replayed the segment, Koa watched closely, trying to glean some clue from Keneke’s movements or the expression on his face. “Do you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing, except he wasn’t wearing his mittens.”
“Probably still had them in his pocket.”
“Soo Lin, you see anything odd?”
“Nothing. He seems to be stepping out for a break. Keneke loved the night sky. He once said he’d never spent a whole night inside an observatory without getting outside to see the stars, and he hoped he never would.”
“But he didn’t go back. That’s the last time he appears on the security tape,” Koa said.
“I just don’t understand.” Soo Lin let out a deep sigh. “Can I see both segments again?”
“Sure. Gunter, can you run them again, please?”
As they watched the first segment, Soo Lin burst out, “Stop!” Gunter stopped the tape. “Can you back up a couple of frames?” Soo Lin stood up and headed toward the television monitor. The picture flickered as Gunter slowly reversed the tape. “There.” The picture froze, not on Keneke’s happy face, but on a full-body shot when Keneke was about two steps inside the first entry door. Soo Lin pointed at the bottom of Keneke’s parka, where a black triangle extended below the hem of his jacket. “That’s his computer bag.”
“You’re right. It looks like his computer bag,” Gunter agreed.
“Now play the exit tape,” Soo Lin requested. Gunter replayed the exit scene, stopping it several times for them to study the pictures. “I don’t think he took his computer out with him,” she concluded.
“But he wouldn’t have taken the computer on a break,” Gunter responded.
“Exactly,” Soo Lin agreed. “But he would have taken his computer if he was leaving the mountain. It’s like he took a break and never came back. Something isn’t right.”
“Well, if he had the computer when he came in and not when he left, it should be here,” Koa reasoned. “And if he was just taking a break, Polly must have been surprised when he didn’t come back.” Koa turned to Gunter. “Can you ask Polly to come down?”
“Sure.” Gunter picked up a telephone and spoke into it. “She’ll be right down. You want to take the tape?”
“Yes, I do,” Koa replied, taking the cassette from Gunter.
Koa thought about what he’d just seen. On the surface, it looked like Keneke had simply walked away from his job. Yet Soo Lin had identified a critical discrepancy. Why hadn’t he taken his computer? And what had happened to it?
“How would Keneke have gotten up here from the dormitory complex that night?” Koa asked.
“He always drove. He loved his 4x4, called it his big black canoe,” Gunter responded.
“And you never saw him again?”
“Nope. Not after Keneke got up from the dinner table Tuesday night.”
When Polly arrived, Koa excused Gunter. “Polly, you were the duty technician on Tuesday, January 20, right?”
“Yes.” She drew the word out, reflecting a hesitancy that put Koa on alert.
“And Keneke had observing time on the telescope that night?”
Beneath blonde bangs, she had large blue eyes, a small nose, and narrow lips. “Well, not exactly.” She paused. “Keneke was working on adaptive optics software. He was testing some new programs.”
“Okay, but he was up here with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he have his computer?”
The question seemed to take her by surprise. “Gee, I assume so. I mean he always had his computer with him. He must have had it that night.”
“Do you remember seeing his computer?”
“He must—”
“Don’t speculate. Tell me only what you actually remember.”
She paused, and then spread her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “Gee, I can’t say for sure that I saw his computer that night.”
“Do you know where we can find his computer?”
“I have no idea. It’s not up here.” Again, she hesitated. “Someone would have found it by now.”
“Could it have been stolen?”
She looked quizzical. “From up here? I don’t think we’ve ever had a theft up here.”
“Are you aware that Keneke took a break that night?”
Her eyes went wide, taking on a deer-in-the-head-lights quality. “Yes.” She paused. “He always took a break, but … but …” she stumbled, “he didn’t come back.”
“What did you do?”
Polly looked apprehensive. “Can this be between us, Detective?”
Koa suddenly understood her predicament. She was afraid she’d be punished for violating the observatory rules. “I’ll treat it as confidential, if I can.”
“Thank you.” She became a bit more sure of herself. “The duty technician i
s never supposed to leave the building. It’s a cardinal rule. But I was concerned about Keneke. He left sometime after midnight, and he didn’t come back. It was awhile before I realized that he hadn’t. I went out to check on him. I looked for his black canoe—I’m sorry, his SUV. It was gone, so I knew that he’d driven off the mountain. It was odd. Not at all like Keneke.”
For Koa, this information only deepened the mystery. Keneke had unexpectedly left the observatory a little after 1:10 a.m. About six hours later he had called the Alice headquarters to say he planned to return to the mainland and then made plane reservations. He apparently drove to the airport but never checked in for the flight. Was he running from something—something that caught up with him at the airport? What had caused him to flee the observatory?
“Polly, did anything else unusual happen that night?”
She thought for a moment. “No. Nothing struck me as odd.”
“Did Keneke get any phone calls or have words with anyone?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
After allowing Polly to return to her work, Koa sat mulling over the strange sequence of events from that night.
As Koa left the room, he ran into Director Masters and Nālani. “Detective,” Masters began, “can I have a word with you and Nālani?” They stepped back into the same room where Koa had been with Polly, and Masters closed the door. “I want to apologize to you and especially Nālani on behalf of the Alice Observatories and the Foundation.”
“Apologize? Why?” Koa asked.
“Polly Safer tried to tender her resignation this morning.”
Nālani’s hand flew to her mouth.
“At first,” the director continued, “she wouldn’t tell me why, but then it came out that Charlie Harper has been harassing her with sexually suggestive comments and worse. This afternoon I talked to some of our other women employees.” Masters looked at Nālani. “I understand he tried something inappropriate with you and you slapped him. I’m sorry you didn’t knock his teeth out. Anyway, I have spoken to Mr. Harper in terms he won’t soon forget. He’s on probation, and quite frankly he’ll be gone as soon as we find a qualified replacement. It won’t happen again, and you have my sincerest apology.”