Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) Read online

  The sound came closer and now he identified it. Claws on hardpack dirt. Coyote. If it started to bark he’d howl in relief along with it.

  He found he’d sweated through his shirt.

  He plucked the shirt away from his ribs. He swiped the back of his neck, lifting aside his ponytail. It was a thick black snake that made people ask if he was part Indian. He wasn’t. He’d grown the ponytail on his first crap job—one-hour photo clerk—to look like he was in on the joke. He’d kept it because females liked to braid it and dudes noticed it instead of his perfectionism. And after the incident on job eighteen it gave them something to look at instead of his face.

  Shadow, the long lean dude with the outlaw tail.

  Go for it, dude.

  He knew what he had to do. Recover control. There was already a plan in place: the grand vision, the mission, a long careful time in the making with attention paid to the details. And it was still an excellent plan. But now he needed to make adjustments, adapt to the new situation. He told himself: you can do that, Roy. What happened tonight changed things. You have new enemies. The cops are in it now. They’re going to try to stop you. Don’t let them, dude.

  I won’t, he promised.

  He hooked his thumbs in the loops of his jeans and strolled back to the pickup.

  He turned on the engine, revving it. That sounded ace.

  But as he drove onto the highway he worried that somebody might have heard and he lectured himself for being cocky and even though he saw no other cars he made himself sick on adrenaline.

  He’d overreacted. As he drove past the crash site nobody came to chase him. He was just another drive-all-night roadie going about his business.

  He tooled along highway 95, riding high now, and he gave himself another lecture. Listen Roy, you’re doing good. You’re incognito for now but very soon you’re going to step out of the shadows. They won’t call you Shadow, then.

  He pressed his shoulders against the seat. He felt his chest swell. He’d heard of people doing this, being thrown out of their comfort zone and growing stronger. That’s what he was doing right now: growing into his destiny. He was like the outlaws of the Old West who start out being ordinary dudes going through their crap days and then some villain kicks them in the comfort zone and they turn into outlaws. Not low-down outlaws. Outlaws with a mission.

  He suddenly wondered if he should have a hideout. Just in case.

  Yeah.

  He knew just the place. It was already set up for the mission but there was plenty of space he could make his own. He liked that so much he decided to name it. He put on his thinking cap. He was a bit of a history buff and since he was now an outlaw he wanted to name the hideout after a famous Old West outlaw lair. It came to him: Hole-in-the-Wall. That’s where famous outlaws like the Wild Bunch had their base of operations. That wasn’t just in the movies, that was a real place, up a narrow pass, hidden in the rock, impossible for the enemy to approach without being seen. Jardine’s hideout was like that. If the enemy got on his tail, he’d make a stand at Hole-in-the-Wall.

  The Long Lean Dude was back in the saddle.

  Getting ready to take on the enemy.

  He’d never counted sidewalk cracks but now he counted his chances.

  4

  Scotty Hemmings led the way out of the van, touching his neck where the Saint Christopher medallion hung beneath his suit. Walter followed, adjusting the tank harness belt where it cut across his belly.

  As I squeezed past Hap Miller, who did not give me an inch, he grinned. Not the same species as Scotty’s good-natured smile. It was a toxic grin, as though Miller had leached up a few too many contaminants.

  “Hold on,” Miller told me, “you look a mite stressed. Allow me to send you forth with the health physics blessing.”

  I paused.

  He used his meter probe to outline a cross over my chest. “In the name of alpha, beta, gamma, and holy neutron, go with low dose.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know dose? Amount of radiation absorbed. Potential for damage.”

  Yeah, I knew dose. I said, “Thanks for the good wishes.”

  He put on his facepiece, adjusting the head straps, electrifying his curly red hair. “Ladies first,” he said, indicating the door.

  ~

  Outside the van, Miller set off on his own course and I joined Walter and Scotty.

  “Listen up, folks,” Scotty said, “like I said in the van, there’re places you can go, and places you can’t go. Up ahead, where it’s roped, is the hot zone. Zone runs alongside the road, waaay uphill. Some areas have been metered and okayed—like the area we’re going into, where the truck is. We’ll call that Area One. The area you’re not going into is uphill of that, where the crane’s working—Area Two. That’s where the casks got thrown. Questions?”

  Only one: what’s the weird thing you’re saving up for us? I held my tongue. We’d find out soon enough.

  “Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s mask up.”

  We fitted our facepieces and raised our hoods and opened the regulator valves and the air flowed. We headed up the road to the crash site, where Hector Soliano awaited us. Masked-up now, like us, features obscured, like ours, he was nonetheless readily identifiable by his height and his ramrod FBI posture.

  Scotty led the three of us through the control point into the hot zone.

  Spotlights showed a path already tramped by other feet in the muddied soil. I felt bulky, moving with a truly odd gait in my rubber booties. I carried the field kit in my balloon-tested hand. I scanned Area One for stray casks. Nothing. Nothing but desert, no worry, just the everyday naturally occurring background radiation emitted by the native soil and rock, to which I never give a thought unless I’m doing a chem analysis for a soil profile.

  We came to the truck.

  It was a flatbed tractor-trailer. In essence, a delivery truck. But for the lead shield between the cab and the trailer, it could have been delivering refrigerators. The battered rig had come to rest on its right side, belly facing us, wheels painfully skewed. I pictured it rolling, shooting refrigerators out the top as it tumbled.

  Soliano gathered us. “I will first explain what we know.”

  His voice came tinny over the speaker in my facepiece. I had to ignore the hiss of my air tank and my own Darth Vader breathing.

  Soliano continued. “The vehicle is owned by Alliance Freight. Alliance reports that it was following the correct route, according to its transponder. It was en route to the CTC waste repository, five miles ahead off highway 95.”

  Highway 95 was just visible, the dark strip that bisected the desert.

  “Skid marks indicate the hijacker forced the truck off the highway, onto this road. Tire marks take the vehicles farther uphill, where the truck went over the edge. The trailer portion took the brunt and was breached, scattering its cargo. The truck continued to tumble downhill and came to rest here.”

  I looked uphill, where the truck had gouged something of a bobsled run.

  “Footprints suggest the hijacker left his vehicle and followed on foot.”

  “Hijacker, singular?” Walter asked.

  “A single series of prints, which we attribute to the hijacker.”

  “On what basis?”

  “Location. Direction.” Soliano shrugged. “The scene is difficult—everyone who left a print was wearing protective booties. Including, presumably, the hijacker, since there are bootie prints around his vehicle tire marks.”

  “Hijacker, male?” I asked.

  Soliano waved a hand—the default assumption. “Hijacker, homicidal. The driver has been shot.”

  I gazed up at the dented cab. “Maybe the intent was homicide, not hijacking.”

  “The intent reaches beyond homicide.”

  So now we came to it.

  Soliano led the way to the back of the trailer. I steeled myself for something hideous—there were things beyond murder that qualified—but the first thing I noticed on th
e crippled back panel was the standard radiation placard. Black fan-bladed symbol in a yellow triangle, RADIOACTIVE in black. The only thing unfamiliar to me was the red Roman numeral III and the number 7. So okay, we rank our soils, they rank their rads.

  I thought, there’s nothing weird about a rad symbol on a radwaste truck.

  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.”

  ~

  Soliano 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.

  5

  Old 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.