Two days later Raveneau stood along a guard rail on the Kohala Mountain Road on the Big Island and took in the coastline below and the warm sun and the wind with the smell of lava rock and ocean. Beyond the guard rail the grassy slope fell steeply to a highway. Dark lava outcrops dotted the slope as did stands of trees. He used binoculars working his way across the slope, holding the photo in his left hand.
After scanning all of the ranches, and there weren’t many, he returned to one and then to a narrow dirt track rising from a stand of trees to a house. He could see the roof of the house but the roof was all that showed in the photo. In the photo with the handwritten note, ‘The house, Big Island,’ the photograph was taken from closer in. Someone had walked up the steep slope behind the house, he guessed. But still, it looked like the same roofline and the same metal roof.
He lifted the binoculars from the house and studied the coastline, the long sweep south with its narrow white band of sand. He looked at the coastline in the photo again and now he was almost certain it was the right house. He lowered the binoculars. The blue corrugated metal roof of the house below had faded and rusted. He checked the photo again and though there was no one there to hear him, said, ‘That’s got to be it.’
Raveneau had already checked for record of a mortgage or deed of trust. There was no record of a Jim Frank owning a house on the Big Island, but maybe Frank had rented or leased. He looked down at the highway and then called up the Big Island map on his phone again. He needed to get to the highway below to get to the house. After studying the map he walked back to the car and was getting ready to pull out when he saw he had missed a call from Coe. He called Coe before pulling away.
‘How did the drive go with Drury? I thought I’d have a message from you when I landed.’
‘It’s why I’m calling. Things strung out through the day, but he showed us a machine shop and a building where he delivered the unit of plywood and then picked it up a week later. The tenant moved out last week and we’re looking for him. Tools are gone but it looks like he had what he needed to make the bomb casings. We’ve got metal filings to compare so we’ll know more soon. We’ve got a description of two men and their vehicles. We’ll find them.’
Coe made it sound as if they were following a trail, but to Raveneau it sounded as if they got there too late.
‘Any movement with Khan?’
‘No, it’s ghostly quiet in there. There’s a family of rats we see every night but that’s it. I’ve got one more thing for you. I heard back on the Hawaii photos and some confirming information on Jim Frank. He was Navy during the Vietnam War and flew off a carrier, but I don’t have the aircraft carrier name in front of me. I’ll call or text it to you later. He flew off a carrier and then from one of the forward bases. He had a reputation for taking chances. He got medaled but you probably already have all this.’
He did. His file on Frank doubled every day in the last week, but it was like everything with this case, it still didn’t amount to anything.
‘What’s interesting and why I wanted to catch you this morning is that your expert was right. Two or three of those landscape photos were taken with a very high resolution camera. It either belonged to the US government or a movie maker, a film company. When are you coming back?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Well, have a drink on me somewhere on the island later this afternoon. Thanks again for your help with Drury.’ He sounded cautiously upbeat, adding, ‘We’re farther along than we were a day ago.’
Raveneau got back out of the car after hanging up with Coe. He double-checked the big rock across the highway below he was going to use as a landmark. He checked the house again. It sat on a notch cut into the long-falling slope. Someone must have driven a bulldozer up there and cut a flat pad to build the house on. He wouldn’t see much of the roof from the highway below. He would see the trees where the dirt track came up from and figured there were other ranch buildings down there also. He glanced at the coastline once more. None of the resorts in the distance to the south were in the photo.
Now he drove north toward Hawi. When he got there he picked up a text from Celeste, ‘Remember the Kona.’ She wanted him to pick up samples of a Kona coffee she couldn’t find in the Bay Area. Raveneau didn’t know when he was going to do that or how before flying out tomorrow.
He texted back after going into a little shop to get a coffee to-go. ‘Drinking Kona right now.’
He left Hawi and the road was one lane in either direction and then widened to two. The morning was warming and he could feel the change as he followed an old pickup in the slow lane. He studied the long upslope on his left and as he spotted the landmark rock ahead he slowed even more. Then he was past and knew he’d gone too far. After turning around he pulled over next to a local cop waiting for speeders. Raveneau showed his San Francisco homicide star and explained what he was looking for.
‘Look for aluminum gates,’ the officer said. ‘They open out. You have to close them for cattle and you need to go to the ranch house first. They don’t like people they don’t know on their property.’
‘I’ll introduce myself.’
Five minutes later he found the gates.