Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) Read online

  His fantasy turned dark. She was already dead. He was glad. He was rid of her.

  And then his rational self intervened. If the geologists died in the desert, Mister FBI would bring in somebody to replace them. Snap his fingers like in a snooty restaurant. Waiter! My wine has spilled. Bring me another! And Roy Jardine would not get the opportunity to study a replacement, up close. He needed to keep these geologists. He felt he knew them. He could plan ahead, predicting what they would do.

  He’d decided there was no need for the geologists to die. He could not count on them to save themselves, or get found, and so he’d saved them himself. He’d texted the message. Pretended it was from backpackers, a real smart detail. Then he’d sent another message, this one to CTC, telling them what was required of them.

  His work for the night at last done, he’d gotten into his sleeping bag and slept the sleep of the just.

  And now, Wednesday morning, a new day. Strike Day.

  Refreshed, dressed for the occasion, he turned again to the mission plan. His desk was a crate and his tools were pencil and paper. In this humble workplace, he would launch the mission. A year in the planning, it was a good plan. He need adjust only a few details to deal with the enemy.

  Fresh start. He crumpled last night’s pages and flung them away.

  He drew up his new timetable. The mission had two stages. He could choose the timing of Stage One. In fact, he had just chosen. Today.

  But Stage Two—the consummation, the grand finale—was harder to schedule. That depended upon forces beyond his control: the trigger event. He could only estimate when that would happen. That’s why, in his email to CTC, he’d given the deadline of Friday noon. That gave him over two days. That should be enough.

  He worked a good four hours adjusting the details. Travel times. Setup times. Tools needed. And then he went over everything again.

  When he finished, he collected his tools and packed his pack. He added three water bottles and more freeze-dried junk because the Stage One strike would take many hours. And then, regretfully, he changed his clothes. The jeans were fine but he needed hiking boots, not high-heeled cowboy boots. He replaced the cowboy shirt with a stained green T-shirt and tucked his ponytail under the Budweiser ballcap.

  Incognito, he went outside.

  Cloudless sky, hot as an oven. He didn’t care. It was a good day because it was Strike Day.

  He set off, hiking full of joy. He arrived at the site at one thirty-five PM, ten minutes ahead of schedule.

  He waited, incognito, watching for vehicles. Watching for other hikers.

  Too hot. There was nobody around.

  He took the booties out of his pocket. He knew, now, how the geologists could track dirt. He probably had dirt from the hideout in his boots, and he knew what happened with dirty footwear. Every day when he came home from work at the dump, he had dump dirt on his shoes, and he’d have to stamp his shoes on the porch to clean them, and then he’d sweep up the dislodged dirt, and then he’d take off his shoes before going into the house because he could never get them clean enough and he hated, just hated, tracking in dirt. Now, of course, stamping his feet wasn’t enough. She would put her nosy nose right to his bootprints and find something. He smiled. Not this time, he told her. He pulled on his booties, covering his dirty hiking boots.

  He hiked up the ridge to the gate.

  He unlocked the gate. His was a duplicate key, made to fit the Park Service lock. He went inside, shutting the gate behind him, reminding himself to leave it unlocked when he left. He moved deeper inside and then unslung his pack and got out the flashlight.

  Dark in here. Of course he knew his way. He’d been here before, two weeks ago, setting up Stage One of the mission. At that point, of course, he had no idea things would go critical. But it really did not matter because the details still worked. The name of the operation still fit: The Trial. He had one adjustment to make, and that’s why he was here again now. It was a brilliant adjustment. It would put the enemy on the run.

  He took out the rest of his gear.

  As he dressed out, he thought about the female. No fantasies now. His thoughts hardened. The geologists had suffered. Not just physically—the mental was more important. The geologists were good. And now they were wounded. In their predictable brains there had been planted an invader. Fear.

  He finished dressing out and started down the tunnel.

  ~

  An hour later he was up at the observation post.

  When he’d settled in, he got out his laptop and sent another message. Telling them it was time. Telling them where to come. An invitation. He liked putting it that way. So polite. Of course, they would not refuse. They would come. And then The Trial would commence.

  23

  I said, “We’re going to have to go back up the canyons.”

  Walter had his nose in the Munsell color charts, ranking the hue of layer five. His tongue was anchored between his teeth. He was showered, shaved, dressed, and looking little worse for the wear.

  I was showered and dressed.

  Walter put up a hand: let me finish. Color is subjective. Most soils are adulterated with gray, so the question is: is layer five’s gray a departure from the neutral, or not?

  I waited. It matters. Color is a signpost of source. I hoped he’d find a lead. I sure had nothing new. In the four hours since Soliano had shot the bat, we’d struggled to reassemble our map. While Walter set up our lab, I’d been choppered to the talc mine to take new samples. When I returned, we began anew the task of creating definable layers out of the odds and ends of fender soils. After two hard hours, the only new thing I had was a craving for ham-and-tomato sandwiches. I said, finally, “Anything?”

  “Same thing I found yesterday.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “A restart. We’ve lost a full day.” Walter closed his chart and swiveled to face me. “As to the canyons, Hector’s offered an escort.”

  We’d lost more than a day. We’d lost our freedom in the field. I curled my hands, where the cut palm stung. I focused on Walter’s hands, which rested on his thighs. Old hands, marked by the years and the sun and the rocks in the field. Blunt-fingered corded hands, still strong. Hap should draw those hands. There was a thin white scar on his right pointer, courtesy of his pocket knife. I had my own knife scar—right thumb, from peeling crystals of mica. And now of course I had a fresh palm wound, although I couldn’t blame that on normal wear and tear. I regarded our four hands. Not a Glock callus in sight. We were sitting ducks. I said, “Good idea.”

  We worked another half-hour and then there came a knock at the door.

  “Will you get that?” Walter said, nose in his soils. “It may be Pria.”

  “Who’s Pria?”

  “Our girl. She appears to spend her free time around here.”

  I rose. “You know her name.”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  There was another knock—pounding this time—and I thought, not only do we require babysitting, we’re becoming babysitters, and I reached the door and opened it before she could pound again. But it wasn’t Pria, it was Hap.

  He said, “We got mail.”

  ~

  We left the Inn by convoy.

  Walter and I rode with Soliano and Hap and Ballinger in a green Jeep Soliano had appropriated from the Park Service. RERT vans tailed us.

  We took highway 190 around the back of the Inn and up the stem of the fan into the mountains. The road followed a wide gravelly wash, which climbed gently between two parallel ranges. To our left continued the abrupt face of the Funerals. To our right began the Black Mountains, which ran southward between the saltpan and the Funerals. We were wedged between two mountain faces as different as Walter’s and—it came to me—Pria’s. The cavernous Funerals were folded in sunburnt browns and somber grays and the gentle Blacks were furred in pastel mudstones. We passed a beard of white issuing from the fault zone along the base of the Funerals. Travertine deposits, I haza
rded. Old dry springs.

  Indeed, we were traveling up a long drainage ditch. I saw how the waters that drained from the Funerals and Blacks would collect in the gravelly wash, which would channel those waters with their sediment load down to spill onto the fan. I saw how the fan was still being built.

  I’d keep that flood channel in mind, what with these hurricane-spawned storms. I had checked the weather report and learned that the hurricane off Baja California, according to Monday’s forecast, would be throwing storms our way all week. I’d keep in mind the Park Service’s doppler radar scan, which provided a detailed flood risk index.

  I peered at the sky. Broken clouds.

  “Dolomite up there,” Walter said, peering at the Funerals.

  I saw. Dolomite in fender layer four. How coy of Jardine if he’d stashed his radioactive booty in the Funerals.

  Our destination, however, was in the Black Mountains. We turned off 190 onto the graded road that cut into Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. The jumbled badlands were naked of any shrub, their eroded contours shaded in mustard and cream and purple and pink. Black-mouthed burrows pockmarked the hills.

  Walter checked his map against the GPS coordinates in Jardine’s email.

  You are cordially invited, Jardine had written. And then he gave the time and place. And then he set the hook: A package awaits you inside the borax mine.

  And we bit. We couldn’t pass up the chance to recover at least some of the stolen radwaste. Of course, we had to consider that it might be a trap, which was why we planned to proceed with all due care. Or, maybe, nothing awaited us in the mine, and this was a hoax—Jardine running us around the desert, deflecting us from our job of following the evidence.

  The road climbed and curved and I stopped admiring the geology and started worrying about the mine we’d been invited to. The mudstone was now shot with snowy veins of borate ore. I knew my mining geology—anyone who worked with Walter had to know her mining geology. An ancient lake once filled this area, collecting alluvia from the surrounding mountains, some of whose rocks contained boron. And then the lake dried up and the borates were precipitated out, and then people came along to mine it, and then Roy Jardine came along to defile it.

  We rounded the bend and Walter said, “Here.”

  The convoy stopped. We piled out and flinched, hammered by the heat.

  There was a small ridge above us and footprints led up the hillside. We paused to examine them. They were fresh, made after this morning’s thundershower. We’d seen their like before, at the crash site: dimple-soled rubber prints, bootie prints. Roy Jardine’s prints. Very smart, Roy. So you really were here. I shivered.

  Scotty took the lead. In his board shorts and Hawaiian shirt he looked like the surfer dude he’d been. But he was RERT chief now with instruments strapped over each shoulder. We went single-file along the spine of the ridge, a beaten path in the crumbly soil. If I were making a movie starring the badlands of Mars, I’d film it here. Where clouds shadowed it, the soil looked bruised, but it nonetheless threw up waves of heat. I took small breaths, hoping to cool the air before it seared my lungs. Mars-breathing.

  Ahead, the ridge dead-ended in the flank of a hill. Scotty metered the area then gave us the thumbs-up.

  We followed the bootie prints to the adit that cored into the hillside. The adit was about six feet high and wide enough for a couple of fat mules. Nothing fancy, no timbers, no rails, just a gate barring entrance and a warning sign: DANGER: Loose rock. Decaying explosives. Bad air. Rattlesnakes.

  To say nothing of whatever Jardine had left for us in there.

  Hap read the sign. “Whew, no bats.”

  Scotty turned to Soliano. “Hey, what about the bats?” Scotty had found and collected the bat on the saltpan and handed off both carcasses to a lab in Vegas that could do a radioanalysis necropsy, fast.

  Soliano squinted, as if fighting a vision of sunlit teeth. “ARS.”

  We digested that. Nobody voiced the thought that two bats, somewhere within their range, had encountered a lethal source of high-rad resins. Nobody said aloud, maybe somewhere is here.

  Soliano had a Park Service key but he didn’t need it—the gate nudged open.

  Walter said, “Look at those.”

  Tire tracks, faint but unmistakable, inside the adit. I looked back along the ridge but if there had been tracks incised there, rain or wind had obliterated them. Still, whatever rolled into this tunnel must have come up that path. Narrow, but doable—fit for a Mars-roving telehandler.

  No way to know when the telly was here but I figured I knew the why. To transport a cask. Any thought that our summons was a hoax wilted in the hot adit mouth.

  “Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s get to it.”

  Soliano started. “But you are not yet suited.”

  “Checking for gas, first, Hector. Carbon monoxide, dioxide. Collects in old mines near the floor. We walk around much and we’ll stir it up.”

  I felt monumentally relieved that Scotty knew this. That he was prepared for whatever mother nature, along with Roy Jardine, had in store for us.

  Scotty took his meters into the tunnel. After a full minute, he emerged. “Yup, we got gas.” He rubbed his face. “Shit, we gotta go in full bug suits. My people’ll die before they even get here, just hiking up that ridge dressed out. Think I’ll set up the zone right here. Christ, I wonder if snakebite goes through rubber.” He glanced at Soliano and dimpled, briefly. “All right, no worry, I got it.”

  Hap lowered his sombrero. “I ain’t worrying. Course, I ain’t going in.”

  Scotty stalked off along the ridge.

  “Let us lend a hand,” Soliano said, to Hap and Ballinger. To me and Walter, he said, “You rest, in the eventuality your skills are needed.”

  Walter and I sank against the hillside. I said, “He expects us to go in.”

  “It’s not his call.”

  “Right.”

  “If we do decide to go in,” he said, “there’s no need for the both of us.”

  I let that hang in the hot air between us.

  We watched Scotty and his crew hauling equipment out of the vans. Soliano, Ballinger, and Hap began ferrying the stuff up the ridge. Hap took the lead, laden with silvery suits. He was whistling—heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. He appeared to be having fun. Just when I think I can predict him, I can’t.

  I glanced at Walter. “I don’t mind snakes, per se.”

  His eyes were closed. “Rattlesnakes, dear.”

  I studied his flushed face. “Big ones, I’d think.”

  “Mean, certainly.”

  “Cranky, anyway.”

  He said, “I go in.”

  “Let’s wait and see what Scotty finds before we take on snakes.”

  “You’re of child-bearing age,” he said. “I go in.”

  He will never, ever, let the subject go. I said, “You’re at an age where your cells are not so resilient.”

  “Thank you for the reminder.”

  “Thank Hap.”

  ~

  We all waited, stacked against the hillside, while Scotty paced and his three RERT colleagues rested. Scotty had sent in the smallest of his team, a wiry woman with a purple punk ‘do named Lucy who, it struck me, looked of child-bearing age.

  The heat was a bath, submerging us. We could drown in this heat. I watched cloud shadows tongue along the ridge and strained to detect the drop of a degree Fahrenheit or two.

  Fifteen minutes later Lucy emerged, looking like her next stop was Mars. Scotty metered her at the hot line then helped her skin off the heavy suit. She pushed back her hood and spat out the respirator and rasped out a word.

  I thought she said fuck and didn’t blame her.

  “Went right,” she rasped. “Nothing.”

  Oh, fork. Shit.

  Scotty raked his hair, spiking the wet strands. “Okay, I getta go.” A tall thin RERT guy named Tim grumbled to his feet to help Scotty dress out.

  We waited, sucking
our water bottles dry. I believed I saw bees buzzing a great sunflower but it was only heat waves flaming off an orange hill.

  Twenty minutes later, by my watch—hours, by my fried brain—Scotty reappeared. When Scotty was stripped to his shorts, when he had downed half a bottle of water, he gave Soliano the thumbs-up.

  Now we know, I thought. Okay, it’s better to know.

  Soliano got to his feet. “In a cask, or loose?”

  Scotty tried to speak, and then just mouthed it. Cask.

  “Contents?”

  “Hot.”

  I licked my cracked lips. The real deal, this time.

  “And so we account,” Soliano said, “for one of two missing casks.”

  I wondered which one. The swap cask, which Jardine recovered from the talc mine? Or was this the rainy-day cask? Then again, what did it matter, which one? What mattered was what it held.

  Scotty cleared his throat. “Another thing. Mud on the cask. Spattered.”

  I sat up straight. “What’s it look like?”

  “Mud.”

  “Well did it look like it came from the surrounding soil?”

  He lifted his palms.

  Whether it was the swap cask or rainy-day cask, it could have been stored at Jardine’s depot before being brought here. I looked at Walter, and he nodded. We wanted that mud.

  “Geologists.” Soliano toed the soil. “This could be Mr. Jardine’s depot?”

  I doubted it. Couldn’t swear to it. If we hadn’t lost our soil map, if we weren’t playing catch-up, we could say something with some heft. I said, instead, “It’s not consistent with the soils we’ve analyzed so far.”

  “Then this is what? A demonstration, that Mr. Jardine has the hot resins and can place them wherever he wishes?”

  Scotty answered. “I’m convinced.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Could be something more, some kind of taunt. I mean, it’s sure the right place for it. Borax mine.”

  “This means...?”

  There came a strangled sound, from Ballinger. I thought he was going to be sick. Hap leaned in whispering, his sombrero eclipsing Ballinger’s glistening scalp. Then Hap got to his feet. “Milt just recalled a little incident that might tie in here.”