Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) Read online

  Digital Edition. Copyright 2011 by Toni Dwiggins. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without prior permission of the publisher.

  All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. If there are factual or technical errors in BADWATER, they are mine alone. In a real-life radiological emergency, many agencies might be involved and different approaches taken.

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  Cover art: J. Simmons http://www.jsimmonsillustration.com/

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  Maps: Linsie Snyder (MAPS located at the end of the book)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  EPIGRAPH

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  THIS ’N THAT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  EPIGRAPH

  “Before outsiders changed our valley, it was described in the names of the places that were important for our survival here. Many are the names of springs. If the Manly Party, who traveled across our valley in 1849, had known our stories and trails, they would have found water, and Tumpisa (“red rock”) might not be known as a Valley of Death.”

  ~ “The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and Their Living Valley” by the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, published as Keepsake #34 by the Death Valley ‘49ers Inc.

  1

  There was something odd about the figure coming down the dark road and I was not going to be happy until I could put my eyes on the details.

  Walter, stowing the donut bag in his field pack, had not yet noticed.

  Uphill of the figure, emergency spotlights cracked the deep night and more could be seen. Big vehicles clogged the road. Adjacent to the road, yellow rope zoned off a large chunk of desert where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. Well uphill of the crash was another roped and spotlit area, occupied by a hulking crane. What was the crane doing off on its lonesome?

  I refocused on the figure. “Somebody’s coming. A man, I think. But odd.”

  Walter looked, straining to see. “You have young eyes.”

  “It’s more a question of what jumps out at you.”

  “Cassie, what jumps out at me in the dead of night belongs in the realm of bad poetry.”

  I smiled. He would know.

  “However,” he said, still peering, “that is an odd gait.”

  That it was, perhaps due to the muddied condition of the road. I glanced at the sky, where a cloud roof glowed faintly beneath a hidden moon. Summer thunderstorm—local, wherever precisely local was. It had been clear twenty minutes ago in Mammoth, our home base in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We run a two-person lab called Sierra Geoforensics and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at the crime scene. We’d headed for this scene truly in the dark. The FBI sent a helicopter but provided few details. We’d flown east from the Sierra and crossed another range, which meant we’d passed from California into Nevada, then bellied down to the dark desert.

  And here we waited, speculating. All too often, the geological evidence at the scene gets overlooked. This time, though, the FBI considered it urgent enough to bring us by chopper, and that impressed me deeply.

  The oncoming figure, I now decided, was bulky. And yet tall.

  “Ahhh,” Walter said, “I know that walk. That’s an old man’s gait.”

  My heart gave a squeeze. In the dark, Walter could charitably be described as craggy. In the brutal light of day, his face is eroded—compressed by the forces of the years and folded by the weight of the job. Not that I’m keeping watch. I linked my arm through his. “Yeah, you predate the dinosaurs.”

  “At times I feel I do.” Walter’s voice was night-thin.

  He was looking for me to argue the point but my attention now fixed hard on the approaching figure. We watched in silence as the man came fully into range and the details became apparent. It was not age that slowed his gait. He wore a bulky white hazmat suit.

  I suddenly felt a little naked out here.

  The man drew up. “Mr. Walter Shaws? Ms. Cassie Oldfield?” He had graying hair in a salon cut and a beaky face with aristocratic lines. Middle-aged, tops. “I am Hector Soliano with the FBI. We spoke earlier by telephone.” The voice had a faint Spanish accent.

  “Yes, a pleasure,” Walter said, “and you should have informed us that we would need to suit up.”

  “When we spoke, there was no need.”

  “And now?”

  “A precaution.”

  A vein began to throb in my neck.

  “Mr. Soliano,” Walter said, “I don’t guess well. Not on four hours sleep. A cup of coffee would help. Barring that, I would like to know what the devil is going on.”

  Hector Soliano gave a curt shrug. “And I, who have had three hours sleep, would wish to know this as well.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

  “On the surface,” Soliano said, “an attempted hijacking. A shooting. And that is not the worst of it.”

  And it’s like pulling teeth, I thought, for the FBI to share details with non-agency people. Even the worst details. I said, “And?”

  “And it is best you see for yourself. But first I am most anxious to have you suit up.” Soliano started up the road.

  We fell in.

  Walter said, “Where, precisely, are we?”

  We were, as best I could tell by the castoff of emergency lights, on an alluvial fan leading into the hacked-up foothills of a gaunt range that loomed above.

  “We are just off Nevada state highway 95,” Soliano said, “southwest of the town of Beatty. A passing motorist saw ‘something funny’ and notified the Beatty sheriff, who investigated and notified federal responders. I came out here and determined that we wanted a forensic geology consult. We have you on file. I am told you are worth your fee.”

  Walter grunted. We are, we’re here, let’s go put our eyes on the scene.

  As we tramped up the road we topped a small rise and got a better view. The truck appeared to have tumbled down an incline and come to rest in the desert scrub.

  Walter said, “We’ll want to begin with the tires.”

  “Begin with the driver,” Soliano said. “We must know where the driver has been.”

  I found a smile. “He’s been somewhere without the tires?”

  Soliano said something under his breath in Spanish.

  On the road directly ahead was a big white van, lettered RERT, and Soliano led us toward its open door.

  I asked, “What’s RERT?”

  “An acronym...” Soliano touched
his brow—the difficulty of acronyms in a non-native language. “With the Environmental Protection Agency.”

  My attention jumped back to the spotlighted crash scene, which was well uphill of us and the white van. Suited figures had now come into view, poking around the scrub brush near the truck. The figures wore hoods and masks and air tanks.

  Soliano snapped his fingers and turned to me. “R-E-R-T. Radiological Emergency Response Team.”

  I nodded, as if I’d suspected as much. Perhaps I had. Some kind of fateful junction—if I’d believed in fateful junctions. I believe in probabilities. Someone shows up in a hazmat suit and the odds are not all that long that the toxin in question is radiological. But that really is some kind of fateful shit.

  Walter leaned in close and said, low, “You pack some courage in your field kit?”

  I said, evenly, “When have I ever lacked courage?”

  “When have we ever had a case classed radioactive?”

  In my dreams.

  2

  Scotty Hemmings held open the top of the coveralls as if he were holding an evening coat.

  I’d already got the suit up to my waist but it was cramped quarters inside the RERT van and the material was stiff. I wormed into the arms and then started to pull on a latex glove.

  “Whoa Cassie,” Scotty said, “inflate it first. You don’t want a blown-out glove.”

  No, I didn’t want that. I listened intently to Scotty Hemmings, wishing to dress exactly as the RERT chief dressed. He had an easygoing air with looks to match—shaggy blond hair and a big square dimpled smiling face—and we were already on a first-name basis. But there was nothing laid-back about his instructions. Walter, I noticed, was taking exquisite care in the assembly of his own suit. I blew my gloves into fat balloon hands and checked for leaks.

  Scotty handed me rubbery overgloves. The bar-code sticker said Wal-Mart.

  The RERT chief shops discount? I took a closer look at the equipment racks. Indeed, much of this stuff would be at home in Walter’s garage: brooms, shovels, hoses, portable vacuum. Some belonged in an anal-retentive kitchen: fancy scrub brushes, bottles of sodium carbonate and trisodium phosphate. And then there were the defensive items: suits and tanks and probes and meters, the only one of which I recognized was a Geiger counter.

  There was also a thermos of coffee but Scotty warned against a full bladder in hazmat.

  The van door opened and a white-suited red-haired man came in. He held up a meter with its battery compartment open and Scotty jerked a thumb at the shelves. The logo on the man’s suit said CTC. Then he wasn’t with RERT. He was with another set of initials. My head ached.

  The red-haired man gave Walter and me the once-over, then spoke to Scotty. “Pinch me, coach, am I dreaming or are you sending civilians out there?”

  “The name’s Scotty,” Scotty said, “and what business is it of yours?”

  “Funny you should ask. It is my business. My gig’s radiation protection.” The man made us a little bow. “Hap Miller, chief health physicist with the CTC radioactive waste facility—known in the vernacular as the dump. Shipment outside was headed for my facility. Which is why I respectfully asked Scotty here why he’s sending y’all out there.”

  Walter introduced us and explained our business.

  For a long moment Miller’s deep-set blue eyes held steady on us, and then he said “not my call” and turned back to the shelves.

  I looked at Scotty, whose call it was.

  “Hey,” Scotty said, “we got some weirdness going on with the truck outside and everybody’s jumpy.”

  “What weirdness?”

  “I’m gonna let the FBI fill you in on that. Hector Soliano’s running the show and antsy to get you going. My job’s just to get you ready.” Scotty ripped yellow tape from a wide roll. “I will tell you that the truck was carrying radwaste—radioactive waste.” He taped my gloves to my sleeves. “So we need to button you up real tight.”

  “So,” I said, “like...irradiated hospital wastes? Booties and gloves and such?”

  “Fraid it’s more than that,” Scotty said. “According to the manifest, the load is ion-exchange resin beads. Cleans radionuclides from the cooling water at the nuke plant. Beads absorb the rads—that’s why this load was on its way to get buried. I mean, these beads pick up some pretty active puppies.”

  “Such as?” Walter asked.

  “Well, the reactor gets whacked by stray neutrons and you get, say, cobalt-60.”

  Cobalt-60? That vein started up in my neck again.

  “And, you get leaks from the fuel rods. Fission products.”

  Walter looked at me, and I looked at him.

  “You know, the cesiums and the strontiums...” Scotty bent to tape my rubber booties to my coverall legs. “And americium, plutonium...”

  Hap Miller turned. “Also known as oh-my-god-iums.” His thin mouth turned down in a curbed smile.

  I wetted my lips. “Just how hot are these resin beads we have out there?”

  Scotty glanced up at me. “We’re not talking booties.”

  Walter was watching me. He wore the solicitous look he used to throw at me when I was a kid doing scutwork in his lab and he’d take me out to a real crime scene, the look he’d wear when I’d signed on officially after grad school and the scenes became more gritty. The look he still gives me, when it gets truly nasty. Although it’s the geology that brings us to the crime scenes, often enough the evidence is lodged on a body—we’re not spared the impact of human mayhem. As for this case, it wasn’t courage I needed, just clear thinking.

  Scotty took his tape and moved to Walter.

  I threw Walter a look of my own. Two years ago he had a transient ischemic attack—a starter stroke, as his doctor bluntly put it. A sign of things to come if he does not knock off the donuts and pace himself at the scenes, and the risk grows with increasing age.

  Walter rotated his wrists so that his gloves could be taped to his sleeves.

  And this isn’t just another day at the office, is it?

  “Okey-doke,” Scotty said when he’d finished taping Walter, “to be on the safe side you’re gonna used canned air.” He helped me, then Walter, into a tank harness and then passed us facepieces. “Kinda like scuba gear. Either of you dive?”

  I said, “I’ve snorkeled.”

  “Hey, that’s cool. Me, I surf. Learned on the swells at San Onofre State Beach.” Scotty dimpled. “In front of the old nuke plant.”

  I noticed the Saint Christopher medallion around Scotty’s neck. Patron saint of surfers, as I recalled from my beach days at UCLA, worn to protect the wearer from harm.

  “Last thing,” Scotty said, “we’re gonna slap dosimeters on you. Keep track of any exposure to radiation. Anybody asks for a reading, hold it up to the light and sing out the millirems.” He passed us the pen-like objects. “Clip it somewhere between the neck and the waist. Over the heart’s good.”

  Easy to find my heart, since it was drumming. “We might be exposed?”

  “No worry, procedure. We’ve metered the area you’ll be going into and it’s just low-level background rad.”

  “Where are the casks?”

  “Still rounding them up. But they’re in another area—not the one you’re going into. You don’t go near the casks. Even though they’re shielded, some gammas leak through. And this is a hot load.”

  Hap Miller snapped a battery into his meter. “Hotter than you think, coach.”

  “The name’s Scotty and what the hell’s that mean?”

  “Means it came from a real nasty cleanup site, Scotty.”

  I spoke. “How hot?”

  Miller regarded me. “You eat salsa?”

  I nodded.

  “You like it hot?”

  “Medium-hot. Is that some kind of health physics metaphor?”

  “Should be. Resins, metaphorically, work like salsa. They come mild, medium, hot, and...” Miller blew on his fingers, “tripleX.”

  “Chris
t,” Scotty said. He turned for the door.

  “Well then, ever hear of Fukushima Daiichi?”

  Scotty froze. Surfer dude whose waves just went flat.

  Walter said, “The Japanese nuclear plant?”

  “Yowza.” Miller nodded. “Plant that got hammered by the quake and tsunami. Reactors going Godzilla. Spent-fuel pools leaking.”

  Scotty said, “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Frame of reference—for those who don’t eat salsa.” Miller gave me a wink. “Resins used to clean the Fukushima contaminated water were hot as can be.”

  I said, faint, “And the resins we have outside?”

  “That hot.”

  3

  Roy Jardine stood frozen in the desert-night furnace and thought about his life.

  It was a life of one crap job after another.

  In his workaday career he had mastered the details of seventeen crap jobs, and on the eighteenth crap job the details tried to kill him.

  So he’d taken job eighteen commando.

  And look what happened. It had not gone as planned. In fact, things went way out of control. They had a saying for this, in job eighteen. Going critical. Things had really gone critical tonight and Jardine needed a new plan, fast. He was not good at this—thinking on the fly. He liked to chew on a plan for as long as it took. So after the truck crash he’d gone home to lay low. And he’d chewed. Two hours later he had a bellyfull of undigested plan. The problem, he’d realized, was making a plan in a vacuum. He needed to know what was happening.

  So he’d gone out to reconnoiter.

  He’d driven back close to the crash site and pulled off the road onto the desert hardpack. Then he’d crept up a little knoll and raised his binoculars to scope the site. Hells bells, the place was swarming. Everybody was masked and hooded but he imagined their faces. Their expressions. Serious.

  He liked that.

  For the first time since things went critical, he recaptured his grand vision. He came alive. If he had not been afraid of being heard, he would have howled.

  Footsteps sounded.

  He froze. The sounds were at a distance. That gave him hope. At a distance, in the dark, he’d look like a post. The joke was, Roy Jardine was so skinny that if he turned sideways all you’d see was his shadow. As a matter of fact, Shadow was his nickname. He’d earned it on job number three, refrigeration mechanic, shadowing his supervisor’s every move in order to get it right. He’d once read up on his personality type and diagnosed himself as borderline obsessive-compulsive. No sidewalk-crack counting or anything. Just a need to master the details.