Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (3 page)

And then Soliano stood out of the way so that the entire placard was visible. A drawing had been added. The first thing I noticed was that I could read the drawing without tipping my head. Which meant it had been done after the crash, with the trailer on its side.

Walter made a sound, tinny in my earpiece. Astonishment.

It was a crude sketch in black marker. Radiating lines fell from the fan blades, like rain. Like fallout. The lines fell onto a stick figure, who was running. Behind the figure was a skull and crossbones. Over my canned breathing I could hear Scotty mutter, “Goddamn weird-ass game.”

Soliano said, “Our hijacker leaves us a message. The radiation...” He seemed to search for the words. He found them. “Escapes control.”

“Yup,” Scotty said, grim. “That promises a bad nuclear day.”

I
focused, hard, on the scene at hand. “Has anything here been touched?”

Soliano led us around to the front of the truck. “My evidence technicians have processed the scene. Photos, serology, fibers, prints. They recovered bullet casings, nine millimeter. We have established from the entry angle that the weapon was fired through the windshield from here.” He pointed to a patch of ground marked by orange cones. “The soil evidence is untouched. I lack the budget for a full-time geologist.”

Yes, that keeps us in business.

“However, I am most anxious that you see the driver.” Soliano gestured to a ladder leading up to the cab. “The driver is encased in mud.”

Walter eyed the ladder. “Why don’t you take the driver, dear?”

I shifted. Walter doesn’t think he can get up the ladder. I’ve seen him climb far worse than that, but not in bulky hazmat. And not, I calculated, since the strokes.

He opened the field pack. “And why don’t I begin with the tires.”

I selected my tools as if it was, after all, no big deal. But it was. As I crabbed up the ladder I worried it—what if Walter’s field days are numbered?—and then I reached the cab and my worry found a new focus.

I leaned against the bent frame and gazed through the broken windows, sucking in several Darth Vader breaths.

Jesus.

I set out my tools on the side of the cab then shined the flashlight around the interior. There was a garbage dump on the caved-in downhill side. Crumpled brown bags. Grande Starbucks cup. Spilled tool kit. CDs. A paperback. I angled the light; Don Quixote. Son of a gun. Attached to the visor was a credential with the driver’s name, Ryan Beltzman, and next to that a red-lettered sign:
Engage Brain Before Engaging Engine
. I came back, finally, to the driver, around whom I had been peering, who I’d been avoiding.

Ryan Beltzman was still strapped in, slumped rightward. His legs were jammed under the dashboard. Even hanging from the seat belt, he showed the stiffness of early rigor. He was blond, like Scotty, although his hair was longer. The side of his head was dented, like the cab itself. He’d been shot. I couldn’t tell how many bullets it had taken to deconstruct his face. Gunshot wounds are not my field but I’ve seen enough of them at other crime scenes to think that what happened to Beltzman, here, was overkill.

Perp’s a marksman, I thought. With a temper.

I took a big inhale and moved on to the rest of the body.

Beltzman was coated with mud—Soliano got that right. Jeans, T-shirt, back of the head. I picked up my scalpel, clumsy in gloved fingers. I chose a thick skin of mud on the left shoulder and pried a chunk free. Not a pretty piece of work. Probably didn’t matter—this guy had clearly rolled in the mud and I was not going to be finding any neat sequences of deposition. I deposited the mud chunk in a specimen dish. I took two more samples and then something caught my eye, in his shirt pocket. I poked with the scalpel. Mud flaked. It was a joint.

Oh God. The radwaste driver’s a pothead.

I would have liked to get to his shoe soles but I’d have to climb in with him. I did not really care to do that. I climbed down and told Soliano I’d need Beltzman’s shoes and access to the cab to finish my collection when they righted the truck.

My attention turned to Walter. He was squatting at the right front tire, prying mud from the treads. For a long moment I just watched him work, and his balance was fine and his motor skills were fine and I took that in and stored it up against the ladder thing, balancing the scales of doubt and hope.

I moved to the coned area and kneeled for a look. Just eyeballing the soil here—a fine-grained alluvium—I’d have to say it was a poor match to the mud on Beltzman. So where did he pick it up? Once I got the stuff under the scopes I’d do a profile but it helped to consider likely neighborhoods. The most obvious would be a rest stop along his route. So let’s say the hijacker jumps Beltzman at the rest stop, and they wrestle in the mud. And the driver gets away that time, but the hijacker follows and forces the truck off the road here, and Beltzman doesn’t get away this time. I’d want a geophysical map of the land along his route. It was a workable theory, the sort of thing I call an educated guess and Walter calls an onageristic estimate. An onager is a wild ass.

I had no wild-ass guess on what the hijacker had in mind next: the intent in black marker.

Maybe the stick figure knew—runninng for its life. Who wouldn’t try to escape those radiating lines? And who was the poor stick figure supposed to be? Man, woman? Or did the figure stand in for people in general? I shivered. Let’s make it just one person. Let’s make it a him. Let’s wish him godspeed.

“Geologists?” Soliano hovered.

I rose. “I’d like to collect samples up the road.”

Soliano said, “I will lead you.”

S
oliano and I tramped further up the graded road, paralleling the yellow-rope line, leaving Area One behind. When we reached the big flatbed trucks bearing the CTC logo I saw we’d come alongside Area Two—the area we were not going into. Nevertheless, we paused to watch the suited figures at work. The slope gentled here, which was why, I supposed, the casks had come to rest here. I saw only one cask, in the grip of a portable crane. It looked, more or less, like a mammoth tin can.

It should look scarier.

Soliano leaned close. “It pulls on the mind, yes?”

Yes.

We edged around the trucks and continued up the road. We brought out the flashlights because the steeper hillside up ahead was not lighted. This was one of the areas, according to Scotty, that had already been checked and okayed.

Soliano used his flashlight to illuminate a hodgepodge of tire tracks. He pointed out two sets: the smaller vehicle on the tail of the larger vehicle. And then, farther uphill, the road took a hook and the larger tracks veered wildly over the edge. I pictured Ryan Beltzman fighting the wheel, losing. I pictured the tailgating hijacker. I assigned a gender, male. Not that it really mattered.

What mattered was the gleam of intent in his eyes.

His tire tracks continued to a wide spot and turned around. Here, he got out of his vehicle. Three distinct bootie-prints, marked by orange cones, led over the edge. Two had been casted and lifted. I sampled the third, and then the tire tracks. Some telling mineral might have transferred. A long shot. It was the mud on Ryan Beltzman that was going to tell the story, if I could read it.

Soliano, waiting at the road edge, called me over. He’d made a discovery. He pointed his flashlight down where the slope wrinkled into a small ravine. There were more bootie prints, these coming up the slope.

We decided to go down and have a look.

At the ravine, I was mentally comparing the size of the prints to those up on the road, and declaring them a match, when I stumbled and peered at the uneven ground under my own booties and thought, what’s this?

“Hey,” I said.

Soliano aimed his light.

I got a better look now at the stuff on the ground, the bone-white ashy trail that led down the ravine, and then Soliano painted his light along the white trail—downhill to a tangle of scrub brush where a cask was nearly concealed like an overlooked easter egg—and it seemed to me that when this cask was thrown free it must have cracked like an egg upon impact and spilled its contents, rolling downhill until caught by the brush. As the alarm was going off in my head I seized on what Scotty had said—he’d said
beads
, resin beads not ash—but I thought, radwaste gets incinerated too doesn’t it?

Scotty had said, back in the van, that a cask cannot fully shield the radwaste. And if a lead cask can’t stop all the gammas, and the stuff was now under my feet, how much protection did my protective clothing give?

Not enough.

O
ld horror-flick scenes reeled through my brain.

Lab-coated scientists with Einstein hair pouring the wrong flask of purple liquid into the wrong vat. Repentant scientists—the victims usually being scientists who repent too late, or vapid pretty girls—writhing while their skin blisters and their pores ooze purplish blood. Tiny mutant monsters flailing in incubators. Post-apocalyptic landscapes stripped of vegetation—not unlike the landscape I stood in—while legions of giant insects stride across land that has been bequeathed to the quickly adaptable.

I watch too many dumb movies.

Scotty Hemmings bounded up. He had a meter in one hand and a pancake-shaped wand in the other. “Stand still,” he snapped.

I’d been running. Lumbering. I halted. Sweat cascaded down my flanks.

I glanced around. Soliano was coming to a halt nearby. We had nearly reached the road and if someone hadn’t stopped us we would likely have kept going to put another stretch of distance between us and the spill. Suited figures were converging on the area. A figure with binoculars jammed against his face plate was shining a spotlight across the slope to the ravine. Two others, down below, shined lights on the cask in the scrub brush.

I turned back to Scotty. “You said...”

“Hang on a sec.”

Long as you want.

He began at my feet, tracing my boots with the wand.

I stared at his bent hood, my heart hammering.

He shook his head and stood.

“Scotty?”

“Stand straight. Feet apart. Arms out, palms up. Stand still.”

I complied, straining to hear the Geiger counter. Was it crackling? Was it screaming bloody murder?

Scotty skimmed the probe along my body. He did my arms first and then jumped to the top of my head, zigzagging across my face, then switchbacking down my torso. He took his time, agonizingly slow, and he was stone silent and everyone, I noticed, was stone silent. Soliano, a silent statue like me, was being metered by a suit with the RERT logo.

“Turn around,” Scotty told me. “Feet apart. Arms out.”

I turned. Two suited figures were nearby. I identified Hap Miller by the yellow tape on his tank with his last name in black marker. He was monitoring one of the CTC workers—in his health physics capacity, I assumed. Miller spoke, loud enough to break the eerie silence. “Enlighten me, Chung, why you came charging into a contaminated zone before it’s been stabilized?”

The worker extended his middle finger. “Wasn’t roped.”

“You’re living proof,” Miller said, “that Mama Chung slept with a jackass.”

And then all was quiet again. I listened to the voice in my head going over every wrong step until I thought I would scream. I wished Scotty would speak. Anything at all. I turned my head and said, “How’d you get into this business?”

“Stand still.”

I froze.

He was silent for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer, then he did. “Was a lifeguard at San Onofre, beach in front of the nuke plant. Back before it closed. Plant had a spill and RERT showed up. Lifeguards in hazmat. I thought cool job, no sharks.”

“Just rads, huh?”

“Huh.” He said no more so I shut up. I’d gotten used to the hiss of my air and the wheeze of my breathing and I listened to that until he banged me on the shoulder and said, “No worry.”

I turned fully to face him. “So I’m not...?”

“You’re not crapped up.” He was reading his meter. His frown showed through the mask. “But I gotta say this is real weird. We gotta figure this out real fast. I mean, this stuff should be
hot
and you walked right through it and I didn’t get
any
reading off your booties.”

“Scotty!”

We turned. The guy with the binoculars approached, signalling. Scotty took the binocs and for the first time turned his attention to the spill. He yelled, “Shine another spot!” A second spotlight hit the spill, turning the white ashy powder even whiter.

“That’s not resin beads,” Scotty said. “What in hell’s going on here?”

I
stood at the edge of the newly-roped hot zone but in truth I’d already crossed over.

There is a line, in working a case, that separates the professional from the personal and in most cases I’ve worked the personal seeps in here and there. A victim who looks like a guy I dated in high school. A microwave in the kitchen at the scene that is the same make as the microwave in my kitchen. And that’s fine, that familiarity, that human link. That’s fine unless the personal balloons to blot out the professional and gets in the way of doing the job. When I’d stepped in what I thought was the shit fifteen minutes ago the personal had swelled nearly to bursting.

I needed to get back on the safe side of the line. I needed to find out what I’d stepped in. Put a name to that white ashy stuff, objectify it, and get it the hell out of my personal space. And so I waited while the hazmat professionals secured the scene so Walter and I could take our turn.

Hap Miller was out there, taking charge of the CTC dump property in the scrub brush. Miller metered the breached cask and called out “not hot,” shaking his head like he did not believe it.

I had a clear view of the cask. Ashy stuff spilled out near the lid. Looked just like the stuff I’d stepped in earlier, uphill in the ravine. The stuff trailed from the ravine down to the cask, where it had come to rest in the brush. I pictured, again, the radwaste truck tumbling down this hill, shooting out casks. This cask must have been breached upon impact, trailing white ash as it tumbled.