Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (7 page)

That place was talc country.

A
n hour later the team was ready to go.

There was a hard moment when Walter made to get behind the wheel of our borrowed Blazer. Doctor orders say he does not drive until another six months without another transient ischemic attack. I said, low, “I’ll drive.” Walter, jaw set, detoured to the passenger side.

Resupplied, ill-fed, cranky, we hit the road.

Our convoy backtracked on highway 95 past the dump, past the crash site, then continued another forty miles of straight asphalt through stunning high desert to the roadstop town of Lathrop Wells. There, we turned due south onto highway 373. We followed that baked desert road across the state line—373 becoming 127—back into California through mud hills and eroded buttes and a couple of cinder-block towns.

We were taking the same route the radwaste truck had traveled, in reverse. A route that, right here, cut between two of the richest talc deposits in eastern California.

Which might explain why the perp used talc to fill the dummy casks. There was a huge supply to choose from.

Walter and I had seven mines on our list, which I’d downloaded from the California Division of Mines. Seven mines that tap into schistose rock and produce a talc high in the mineral tremolite—seven candidates to produce the talc to match our evidence.

I wanted to find the source mine, more than I wanted a cold lemonade or a long hot bath, and I wanted those a great deal.

I
said, “Let’s go this way.”

Walter, Soliano, Ballinger, Miller, and Scotty turned their heads in unison to look beyond the sandy wash to the spiky sand-plastered hills.

Our convoy was parked on the shoulder of highway 127. It was time to make a choice. Time to leave the asphalt.

Soliano said, “You prefer to turn right?”

It was, actually, a tossup. There were likely deposits to the right of highway 127, and to the left. Either way was going to take us on primitive roads.

“Yup,” I said, “let’s go right.”

“Why?” Miller lowered his aviator shades and gazed at me. “Why does a geologist decide to turn right?”

On a hunch. On consideration of the geography as well as the geology. On a look at the starred attractions on the Auto Club map in the Sheriff’s Blazer, a reminder of what’s where. From Beatty to here, for over seventy miles, our route—the radwaste driver’s route—bordered a place that had attracted its share of schemers.

“To the right,” I jerked a thumb, “is Death Valley.”

I
t was hot.

August-in-the-desert triple-digit hot.

Moisture from last night’s rain was gone and the soil and the scrub brush and my skin were sucked dry.

I yanked the water bottle from its sling and sipped. My summer field wear was made to foil heat and sun—quick-dry nylon pants and shirt, ventilated desert boots, polarized UVP shades, a Sahara hat that shaded my neck—and still I baked. Walter, ahead of me on the sandy trail, had sweated through his quick-dry shirt. Soliano looked astonishingly crisp in his khakis; he’d bought a straw cowboy hat in Beatty. Scotty was dying in black jeans and a black Australian bush hat—stylish as hell but hot, I guessed, as hazmat. Ballinger wilted in polyester and a baseball cap. Miller had switched his shorts for flaming orange parachute pants. Bart Simpson stayed. Miller’s redhead skin was shaded by a huge sombrero, which looked like it came from the wall of a Mexican restaurant.

We’d turned right off highway 127 onto a dirt road then bumped across a salt-encrusted delta up into the Ibex Hills. Striped in sedimentary layers like a tabby cat, the hills showed blazes of pure white.

It was a short steep hike up a sandy trail to the mine entrance. The hillside was littered with old timbers and the ruins of a long chute. White tailings spilled down the slope.

I envisioned the perp with a shovel.

Walter and I divided our labor. He sampled the soil, looking for a match to the radwaste driver’s coating: the place he had rolled in the mud. I went for the mine, looking for the mother lode: a match to our tremolite talc.

Scotty preceded me into the tunnel, metering for gases or gammas. When he reappeared and raised a thumb, I headed inside to grab an unweathered dishful of talc.

W
e were hotter, wearier, grumpier, and the shadows were longer. Thunderclouds had gathered. The convoy, visible down below, was parked in a flood plain. I kept an eye on the cloud-to-blue-sky ratio. I knew how fast summer storms could brew up.

Mine number four on our list was a ragged mouth rimmed with snow-white crystals shining like teeth.

Easier access to this mine than the first two, should that count with the perp.

Scotty trudged in, trudged out, thumbs-up.

A decaying sign post guarded the entrance, warning:
Tresspassers Will Be Prosecuted
. A bullseye target completed the thought.

I went inside and shined my light.

A tall straight tunnel shot into white depths. A pepperminty smell stung my nose. The ceiling moved. I shifted my beam and it caught splintery timbers hung with pale furred bodies. Leathery wings flared. I let the beam plummet, revealing piles of guano on broken ore tracks.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, “I leave you alone and you leave me alone.”

The ceiling settled down and I turned my attention to the walls. A slash of very dark rock caught my eye—diabase, a much older intruder than the bats. The diabase, eons ago, had plunged into the carbonate rock, ripping out oxides and replacing them with magnesium and silicon, and thus rudely metamorphosed the carbonate rock into talc.

I plucked a white crumb and slid it between thumb and forefinger. It flaked apart, like filo dough.

I liked it.

I took five samples near the entrance. Scotty had only metered the main tunnel; there were offshoots right and left and likely down. I was no more likely to charge deeper into this mine than I was to start tap dancing, and it wasn’t the bats that deterred me.

Outside, Soliano watched while I set up my little field lab. I did a quick hand-lens study then moved to the spectrophotometer. It was a cousin of the meter I’d used at the dump, the meter that so interested Roy Jardine. This one would impress him more because it’ll tell me not only what I have, it’ll tell the concentration. Talcs differed according to the parent rock from which they formed and the minerals that grew alongside—like tremolite.

It will tell me if I’ve found the source.

I mixed my sample with a pillow of indicator compound then inserted it into the SP. I recorded the numbers that came up on the window. I repeated the process with my evidence talc. Same numbers came up.

I sat back to savor it. This was what I dreamed of, when I dreamed of work, which was more often than was probably healthy. The moment of capture, the moment when I’d grab hold of a piece of the earth and give it an identity. A name, a set of vital statistics, and—the holy grail of forensic geology—an address. I tracked you down, pal. I know where you hang. You’re mine.

I told Soliano, “We’re here.”

He produced his cell phone. While he talked, demanding every piece of data recorded on the Serendipity Talc Mine, I opened my water bottle and drank long and deep. Not cold lemonade but it would do.

S
cotty went down to the RERT vans and returned with two team members, the three of them dressed out. They paused at the mine entrance to set their facepieces and breathers, then lumbered in.

I saw Walter come out of a van and start up the hill.

Hap Miller sat down beside me. He lifted his sombrero and poured water over his head. His hair darkened to hematite, a match to the red bandana tied around his hat. “Hot enough for you, Buttercup?”

“Buttercup?”

“Nickname I picked out for you. Now, you ask why I’d name a brunet with gray eyes after a yellow flower?”

I bit. “Okay, why?”

“It’s due to the egg yolk you dripped on your shirt.”

It took all the will I possessed not to look down.

“And please do call me by
my
nickname. Hap, short for Happy. Happy to look out for your well-being, ma’am.”

For all his joking, he didn’t strike me as particularly happy. Well, I didn’t strike me as a yellow flower, either. “Thanks,” I said, “Hap.”

Walter topped the trail and made a beeline for us. I studied his face. Red, but so’s everyone else’s. Streaming sweat, but sweat’s good—he’s hydrated. I said, “Where are you going?”

He tried to speak, then lifted the little ice chest. It had come with the Blazer; we were putting it to work.

“Beer?” Hap said.

“Soil samples,” I said. “Sorry.”

“No problemo. At least I got snacks.” Hap unshouldered his day pack and pulled out a bag of chips.

Walter joined us and Hap offered the chips. They were greenish-brown.

“Seaweed,” Hap said. “Taste like Doritos only they’re good for you. Full of alginic acid, which binds itself with any strontium-90 we mayhap pick up in the course of our travels.”

I stared. “How about just not picking any up?”

“How about being prepared? Boy Scout motto.”

“I know the motto. I was a Girl Scout.”

Hap grinned. “Guess that means we’s meant for one another!”

Walter slid me a look; Walter thought not. Walter already disapproved of my flighty love life. And Walter, frowning at me, was clearly thinking the last thing I needed right now was to take a fancy to an ex-Boy Scout warning me about the risks of radiation. But it wasn’t Walter’s call. I slid my own look at Hap Miller. Never met anyone quite like him. I said, “What’s up with strontium-90?”

“Just a for-instance.” Hap shrugged. “For instance, it’s a nuclide that resembles calcium. Get yourself a dose and your body sucks it to the bone, like it’s calcium. And it sits there happy as a clam emitting radiation for its entire half-life. Y’all know the half-life of strontium-90, mayhap?”

I said, “Not offhand.”

“Twenty-eight point nine years. I’d guess that’s close to your own age.”

Twenty-nine point three, actually. I saw where Hap was going with this. I didn’t want to follow. I didn’t need a health physicist to tell me what excessive radiation could do to the reproductive system. I was well-versed in that lesson.

“Mr. Miller,” Walter said, “you might limit your advice to the strictly useful.”

“Shore thang. So might it be useful to point out that a man your age is at special risk? Your cells are already in the decay mode, if I’m not taking too much liberty to say so.”

I said, “You trying to scare us?”

“Just encouraging you to pay attention.” Hap held out the chip bag. “And Walter, please do call me Hap.”

Happy to look out for our well-being. Fine, I guessed it could use looking out for. I took a chip. The brine puckered my tongue. It wasn’t Doritos but I urged Walter to try one. He did, and made a face. I wondered how many radioactive isotopes Walter had absorbed over the years. A good deal more than I had because he’d been around a good deal longer. I offered him another chip.

W
e were finishing off the seaweed when Soliano joined us. “We have a development. We have an owner. She lives in Shoshone, that previous town we passed through. She will be joining us,” he glanced at his watch, “within the hour. In the meanwhile, I have obtained a telephone search warrant for the Serendipity.”

It took me a moment. “This is an active mine?” I’d been thinking the perp chose an abandoned mine, where he could take what he wanted and go about his business in private. But we had an owner.

“That is not all,” Soliano said. “We also have a primary suspect.”

We waited for it.

“Roy Jardine.”

“C
riminy,” Milt Ballinger said, “
Roy’s
the knothead?”

“Suspected knothead.” Soliano did not smile. “My agents report that he left work approximately four hours ago, shortly after our own departure. Taken sick. He is not at his home, or at Beatty’s medical facilities.”

I felt suddenly sick myself. The heat. The McMuffin I’d wolfed. The memory of Roy Jardine. It was a tactile memory, his hazmat sleeve swish-swishing against my nylon shoulder as he tracked my hunt for talc.

“Left sick?” Ballinger said. “That’s all?”

“No, that is not all. My agents have learned that Mr. Jardine’s maintenance job includes the calibration of instruments. He spot-checks meters, on an on-going basis. He is the only maintenance worker with this expertise. His co-worker reports that he volunteered for this duty, which often required overtime. Presumably, on a day of his choosing, he could choose to spot-check the meter of the person monitoring an incoming dummy cask. He could, for that moment, become the key player.” Soliano regarded Ballinger. “You did not know the scope of his job?”

Ballinger wiped the sweat from his skull. “I got over a hundred employees. Don’t have time to get into everybody’s nitty-gritty.”

“I have the time,” Soliano said. “I have issued a be-on-the-lookout for a blue Ford pickup registered to Roy Jardine. From you, I will require his work records.”

“You got fingerprints or anything?”

“Unfortunately, the perp, at the crash site, appears to have been a fastidiously careful man. He wore booties. He perhaps also wore a full suit, since my techs have recovered no prints, hair, fiber, or DNA—other than the driver’s. Nevertheless, we will do a collection at Mr. Jardine’s residence.”

Ballinger shrugged.

“You appear reluctant to accept him as suspect.”

“Nah nah, it’s just...that’d mean Roy’s a killer.”

“Anybody’s a killer,” Hap said, “if they’re pushed.”

Walter said, “That’s a fallacy.”

I recalled Jardine’s offended reaction when Hap teased him about helping the ‘purty lady.’ I wondered if Hap was worrying about having pushed Roy Jardine.

T
he dented white pickup peeled around the parked vans and gunned up the hill and jammed to a stop in an eruption of dust.

A woman swung out and stumped toward us. She was barrel-shaped and dressed in white—white shirt, white bandana, white jeans, white cowboy boots—a white barrel cactus of a woman. She wore a white straw cowboy hat akin to Soliano’s and she carried, clamped by one arm, a shotgun. She barreled up to Soliano. “This is private fuckin property, what the hell you people doin here?”