Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (13 page)

He steered me back to the walkway. In the shade it was borderline cooler. I straightened up. He let me go.

There were eight rooms along this side of the building.

The girl sat against the wall of the corner room next to mine. There was the same black feathered hair I remembered, and her face was still in shadow. She wore cutoff jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. She hugged her legs. Her arms and legs were lean and brown. She had big puppy feet, brown toes curling over the ends of her sandals.

Hap bowed. “Miss Alien, might I introduce Miss Cassie Oldfield, whose poor desiccated carcass you found. Whose life you nobly saved.”

She tipped up her head.

Her face was childishly round. It hadn’t thinned out like the rest of her. Her eyes were black under straight black brows. Her mouth was wide and curvy. She’s going to get prettier, I thought.

I cleared my throat. “I want to tell you how enormously grateful I am.”

She did not respond.

I began to feel alien, myself. “I don’t even know where it was you found us. On the saltpan somewhere but...”

“Devil’s Golf Course,” Hap offered.

I said, “Good name.”

She spoke. “Bad name.”

I did not know what to say, so I asked, “What’s your name?”

She stared at me.

Hap stepped in again. “How old is youse, Miss Alien?”

I thought she’d ignore him, or give him a number in Klingon years, but she said “fourteen” in her girlish voice and then pointedly looked beyond me to the black and blue sky.

Hap leaned in close to me and whispered, “Kids is scary.”

T
he air conditioning blasted in Walter’s suite.

Scotty Hemmings and Milt Ballinger were iced side by side on a wicker loveseat. Hector Soliano, in a deep winged chair, sipped iced tea. Hap Miller leaned against the stone fireplace.

The team was reassembled. But I had to wonder, now, did we all share the same goal?

I recalled what Hap said about Ballinger leaving the talc mine early, and I pictured the cocky little man cutting engine wires, slashing water jugs, ripping my purse. Maybe. But Ballinger reveled in his position as dump manager, the small-town boy who made good, the rockstar who came up with the CTC dump motto—Closing the Circle of the Atom. So why would he join forces with Roy Jardine and jeopardize all that? He wouldn’t, I thought. Unless he was pushed.

Scotty, with his dimpled grin and surfer hair, was so upfront about his lifeguard ethics. But Scotty had little tolerance for anybody he thought didn’t measure up, who joked about serious matters. Like Hap. Maybe Scotty’s disdain was for dump workers, in general. But then he wouldn’t join forces with Jardine, would he?

Soliano, I couldn’t see as anything but dedicated to his job. He was the foreigner who became a top cop in the heart of America’s law enforcement community. So driven he’d barely stop to eat. And he didn’t know an alpha particle from a gamma ray before this job.

Hap did, though. Hap with his barbs about radiation dose and turbo-frisking. But Hap didn’t joke about the victims—not about my brother, anyway. I just couldn’t see him misusing the tripleX resins, even to make some point about Homer Simpson incompetence.

Bottom line, I just couldn’t tie any of these people to Roy Jardine.

So I went to Walter, the team member who mattered to me.

Walter stretched on a turquoise chaise, wearing a robe that matched mine. He took hold of my unbandaged hand, his papery skin cold. I scrutinized him. His eyes were inflamed. His color was off. If we’d been alone I would have asked some technical question that required a clear and present mind. Or maybe just, what day is this? Actually, I had to think about that one myself. Wednesday.

He said, “You look better than one would expect.”

I had to smile. He was his normal self.

“Hey,” Scotty said. “You guys gave us some major worry.”

“Hell of a thing,” Ballinger said.

I warmed to the sympathy, and took the winged chair beside Soliano’s. These were the good seats, in front of the table. There were buttery pastries, tall sandwiches, a coffee urn, pitchers of iced liquids. Breakfast? Lunch? I checked my watch; nine-thirty. Brunch. There was the lemonade I’d been craving but first I craved water. I poured, slowly, so as not to spill a drop, and drank down half the glass. I took a sandwich, faint with desire. I bit through strata of bread and turkey and ham and cheese and sweet ripe tomato. Nobody else was eating. Hap opened his sketchpad. I wondered whose hands he was going to draw. Mine, maybe. Tomato juice dripped down my wrist. I fought the urge to lick it.

Soliano said, when my mouth was empty, “If you are able...?”

“I’m able. Bring in Chickie.”

“When we locate her. We investigate any and all leads. We run the prints from your vehicle but it appears the perp wore gloves.”

Of course she did. He did.

Soliano continued, “We still have the Department of Energy’s aerial team out searching. I am told they have some ‘real neat toys’ that will ‘sniff out’ any nuclide of interest down on the ground.”

I said, “Unless it’s in a mine.”

Scotty spoke. “Then we’re blind.”

“Geologists,” Soliano said, “how long to replace your lost soil map?”

Walter rubbed his face. “Half a day. At the least.”

“You will feel equal to the task? We either wait for you to...” He let it die.

Or we get someone who doesn’t get stranded in the desert and lose their map. Soliano was wondering how long it would take to locate another geologist or two and chopper them here and bring them up to speed. Well, there is no other geologist as formidable as Walter Shaws. As for me, I learned something out there in the desert. Fear lasts only so long. I met Walter’s gaze. Old man in a bathrobe, hair mussed, face mottled, eyebrows lifting: you with me? I nodded; let’s nail her. Him. Them. I turned to Soliano. “We’re good, Hector.”

Soliano steepled his fingers and tipped them to me. “Then let us move on. We have a development. CTC opened an email early this morning, from Mr. Jardine. It was routed through a resender in Bulgaria. Hence, untraceable. He demands ten million—wire transfer to an account in the Cayman Islands.”

Ballinger snorted. “Knothead’s dreaming.”

Soliano regarded Ballinger. “CTC shares your opinion.”

“Knothead give a deadline?”

“Friday, noon.”

“Or what?”

“He threatens contamination.”

“Jesus,” Scotty burst in, “of what?”

“Of
the priceless
,” Soliano said. “Whatever this is.”

Walter said, “Life.”

“Yeah,” Scotty said, “couple resin casks could ruin somebody’s day.”

Whose day, I wondered? My thoughts switched from possible partners to possible targets. Jardine conceivably bore a lot of grudges—against Hap, Ballinger, the guys in the break room, CTC honchos, and perhaps even Chickie. So he wanted his revenge in dollars? The threat to contaminate something, or someone, was certainly alarming enough.

But still, the two missing casks bugged me. Jardine went to the considerable trouble of running the swap two times. Two chances of getting caught. Why not cut the risk in half? Surely, one cask of tripleX salsa would suffice.

No, this scenario was wrong. Something was off. But I couldn’t see what. I was still fuzzy-headed, weak. I took another bite of sandwich. The tomato slipped out. The ham slid on the cheese, where the tomato had been. I stared. A word formed in my fuzzy brain: unconformity. In geology, it’s a place between two strata where there’s a missing piece in the record of time. Where the deposition of rock-forming muds or silts was interrupted, or the rock was eroded away. I’d used that image on the West Side Road, trying to figure what was wrong with our fender soil map. I’d seen its opposite on the saltpan—rings of salt, layer after layer, unbroken. We’d been trying to patch together the fender-soil layers to make rings of salt—unbroken layers, a complete map. But we couldn’t. Our map had unconformities. Missing pieces. Cuts in the road. I suddenly thought I understood. My stomach dropped like I’d just taken a tumble into that abyss. I set down my sandwich. “Hey.”

They’d all been talking. Speculating. They’d gone on without me. Now, they stopped.

I said, “I think we got it wrong. About the missing casks.”

Soliano’s face sharpened. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we didn’t get the chance to separate all the layers of the fender soils. Every trip Jardine took he’d accumulate a layer, but it wouldn’t be complete. Pick up mud here and not there, because it was raining here and not there. And on other trips it’s dry as toast and nothing clings to the fenders.”

“Why numerous trips? Only two casks are missed. This does not fit.”

I glanced at Walter. Walter lifted a hand to me. My theory. Or was this a wild-ass guess? Either way, I ran with it. “It fits if you look at it another way. He makes numerous swaps—but he doesn’t need to steal a new cask every time.”

Soliano frowned. “He steals two casks. This is what he needs?”

“No. All he needs is one.”

Soliano’s frown deepened.

“Just try this on. He steals two empty casks from the dump. Let’s say he puts one aside for some reason—call it the Spare Cask.” I took a water glass from the table and set it aside, on the floor. “Let’s call the other empty cask he steals the Swap Cask.” I picked up another glass. “So he takes this Swap Cask to the talc mine and fills it.” I reached for the salt shaker.

Walter smiled. “May I?” He unscrewed the top from the shaker and passed it to me.

“Thanks.” I poured the salt into my glass. “Then when Ryan Beltzman comes with the radwaste truck, they make their swap. The Swap Cask, now containing talc,” I held up my glass of salt, “for a resin cask from Beltzman’s radwaste shipment.”

Walter was already filling a glass with pepper.

We swapped glasses.

I continued. “So now Beltzman, with the Swap Cask full of talc in his truck, continues on to the dump. Where the cask gets buried.”

Walter set his glass of salt on the table and covered it with a napkin.

God, I loved this man. “Meanwhile, the resin cask,” I held up my glass of pepper, “awaits Jardine in the offroader’s trailer. So Jardine now drives his rig to his depot. A mine, let’s say.” That place we’re going to find when we build ourselves a new map.

Soliano was nodding.

“But instead of storing the resin cask at his depot, Jardine dumps out the beads.” I grabbed the nearest thing at hand, a wastebasket, and dumped in the pepper.

Hap chuckled.

I held up my now-empty glass. “Now Jardine has an empty cask. And he can take it back to the talc mine and fill it with talc.” Walter already had another salt shaker open. I poured the contents into my glass. “And this now becomes the Swap Cask for the next exchange, when Beltzman next comes with a shipment of hot resin casks.”

“Ongoing?” Soliano said. “This is what you mean?”

That’s what I meant. “Talc for resins, talc for resins, and so on and so on.”

Scotty sat forward. “And he dumps the resins, at the depot, every time?”

“Yeah, he’d have to.”

“Into what?”

“Good question.” Where, in the depot mine, is he stockpiling those resin beads? Not in a wastebasket, that’s for sure. It would overflow.

“Christ,” Scotty said, white, “then all the beads are uncasked.”

There was a long silence, in which shouts from the pool filled the vacuum. No one moved. No one recapped the salt and pepper shakers. No one touched the wastebasket containing stockpiled pepper. It might as well have held resin beads.

“And so,” Soliano finally said, “his ongoing swap comes to an end Monday night. This means the resin cask in the talc mine—which Mr. Jardine came to fetch—that is the last cask exchanged?”

“It’d have to be.”

“How long do you theorize this swap has been running?”

I looked to Ballinger. “How long has the dump been taking the hot resins?”

Ballinger’s face took on a sickly hue.

“Well,” Hap said, “we get resins from reactor cleanups, spent fuel pools, messes at legacy sites.” He whistled. “Boy could’ve stockpiled one hell of a shitload of stuff.”

“And what,” Soliano asked, “could he contaminate with such a quantity?”

“A shitload of the priceless.”

“A shitload,” Scotty said. “How the hell much is a shitload? How the hell is my team supposed to handle that? This is unbelievable. You guys let this clown steal this stuff for God know’s how long and it’s out there. Jesus Christ.” He ran his hands through his hair. “And don’t forget the Spare Cask. Why’d he steal that one? What’s that for?”

I shrugged. Good question.

“Let me have a go at it,” Walter said. “Let us say, on one of his swaps, he does not empty the resin beads into his stockpile. He sets that resin cask aside. For a rainy day.” Walter selected an unopened pepper shaker, and set it aside. “Then, to keep the swap going, he will need a new empty cask. So he steals another—the second cask missing from the dump.” Walter picked up the empty glass I’d set on the floor. “The Spare Cask, which now becomes the cask used for the ongoing swap. And the swap continues.”

“So he’s got his shitload of loose resins in the depot,” Scotty said, “
and
he’s got this rainy-day resin cask somewhere? Jesus H. Christ.”

“Well what’s the friggin rainy-day cask
for
?” Ballinger asked.

“What is
any
of it for?” Soliano snapped. “Find it. Before it matters.” He checked his watch. “We have fifty hours until his deadline.”

W
alter said, “Cassie, there’s something else.”

With an effort, I nodded. What the hell else could there be?

“A message was sent, about finding our car.”

“Backpackers. Hap told me.”

Hap looked up from his sketchbook. “Told her what the message said.”

“The wording is irrelevant,” Soliano said. “The provenance is telling. It was a text message, routed through a resender in Bulgaria.”

It took me longer than it should have. “Jardine?” I went cold. “But why?”

“The message means that he knew about, or carried out, the attack. Presumably his purpose was to interrupt your work, steal your samples. That achieved,” Soliano shrugged, “perhaps he did not wish to accrue another murder charge.”