Volcano Watch Page 3

  “But?” Lindsay has a fine aristocratic face and it always shows composure.

  “But what if it was something bigger? What if somebody killed her to keep it quiet?”

  “How did she die?”

  Walter answered. “A blow to the head is the probable cause.”

  “That’s not how I would kill her.” Lindsay drummed her fingers on the workbench, her rings popping up like knuckles. “I’d use a gun.”

  “Lindsay.”

  “I’m thinking ‘means’ Walter. Is this not the way you two talk about a case? This is your territory, not mine.”

  I cut in. “We usually say ‘weapon,’ until we know otherwise. We usually say ‘perp.’ As in, maybe the perp came upon her and…saw whatever she found, learned whatever she knew…and the perp was surprised, and used what was at hand. An as-yet unidentified weapon. Or maybe there was a fight.”

  “Weapon. Perp.” Lindsay bowed her head, appearing to gauge the depths of her coffee. “Yes, I see that’s preferable.”

  I thought, this really is too weird, Lindsay consulting on Georgia’s death. The two of them had dueled for years, the volcanologist issuing warnings and the mayor playing down the threat. And then, when the volcano got truly serious and Georgia called in the feds, FEMA sent us Adrian Krom. That set off Lindsay. She had a history with Krom and argued against his appointment, to no avail. So, weirdly, Lindsay’s new allies in volcano response were her longtime enemies. They made an odd team, if team was the right word. In any case, Adrian Krom and Georgia Simonies and Lindsay Nash were the three people in charge of keeping us all safe. One of them was dead now. I thought of Adrian Krom in Red’s Meadow yesterday, bowing his head upon learning it was Georgia we’d recovered from the ice. And so now there were two people left alive in charge of keeping us safe. Two people who detested each other.

  Walter said, mild, “If you’ll speculate on the means of death, Lindsay, might you not speculate on what Georgia could have found?”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be of help.” Lindsay abruptly produced her purse, took two twenty-dollar bills, and placed them on my workbench. “On the other hand, I’d be happy to contribute to the cause.”

  I stared.

  “Bill Bone’s birthday.” She glanced out the window at the Ski Tip Cafe across the street. Then back at me. “You are the one collecting?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m thinking,” she said, “a jacket. Raw silk. Cream, or tan, yellow undertone. Depending on how much you’ve collected, we can accesorize from there.”

  Walter snorted. “Let him put the money toward that remodel he talks about.”

  My stomach tightened. That implied we’d all be here long enough for Bill to remodel the Ski Tip.

  Lindsay stood. “My dears, if there’s nothing further?” She took her coffee mug to the sink, running the water until it steamed.

  Walter frowned. “You’re going?”

  I watched her. Washing her mug just like she always does because she hates to have anyone clean up after her. As if this visit had gone just like always. But it hadn’t. Lindsay thinks geology is volcanology and here she was talking forensics with us. Or not talking. Talking birthdays. She’d been evasive. Evasive as, I suddenly thought, Eric and Stobie had been on the mountain. I fiercely wanted this Saturday in the lab to turn normal. I wanted Lindsay to pour a second cup and stay. Send out for pizza for lunch. Pat Walter’s butt when she thinks I’m not looking. Normalize the situation.

  She caught me staring. She winked. “Got to run—the soaps are on.” This was her running joke, whenever the volcano acted up, whenever the news played it as soap-opera drama.

  I fell in. “Take care of it, will you?” This was my running joke, that the volcano responded to Lindsay like a dog to its mistress.

  “Don’t forget tomorrow night,” Walter said. “We’ll pick you up at six sharp.”

  Tomorrow night was a meeting about the volcano. Adrian Krom called it.

  Lindsay moved to the door, blowing us a kiss in lieu of an answer, and she was gone.

  She left behind a vacuum, in which Walter clattered his tools and I stared at the dirt from Georgia’s boots. Feeling a tension that tightened my neck. I hitched my stool up to the workbench. Okay lady, you want to know what Georgia found, then find out where she walked.

  Just do the geology.

  I selected the next soil plug and found myself a prize. By color, there were two distinct soil horizons and, even better, a piece of leaf was caught in between. Normally, when someone walks, new soil is forced into the crevices of the shoe and with each footstep gets mixed with the soil already clinging there. Once in a while the walker takes a lucky step—lucky for us—and picks up something like this leaf which protects the purity of the layers. I pried apart the strata and plucked out the leaf. Long and narrow, going brittle. Mountain willow, I hazarded. It grows at a variety of elevations. Could be a marker or could have been ferried to the site. More important, the leaf isolated the top layer of soil, the final piece of earth that Georgia stepped upon. Gently, I broke the layer into clumps. Cinders, pumice, sulfur, granite, calcite. Not unlike the other plugs.

  I sliced into the largest clump and it broke apart like a dried seed pod and the seeds inside were silver.

  I breathed out softly, so as not to disturb the display. This was good stuff. “Walter, I’ve got gunpowder again.” I coaxed the disks apart. “Two identical to the first, and six that look to be different makes.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Walter came and adjusted my scope. When he finished, he was nodding.

  The resistance in my neck eased. I was gaining confidence in the gunpowder. There’s a point in an investigation when I gain traction, go on the lookout—for a unique mineral, for a particular consistency of the soil, for an inclusion like gunpowder that could place the evidence in a known plot of the earth. Give it an address.

  Walter said, “The Casa Diablo shooting range comes to mind.”

  Along with the backyards of half the town. But I was already picturing the soil out at Casa and nodding. Casa Diablo is down in the high desert, near the intersection of the major highway and the road up to town. Site of our geothermal plant, along with the shooting range. There would surely be gunpowder there.

  Walter scratched his ear. “Here’s what I propose. Finish your batch, and then let’s send what you find to a gunpowder lab for ID.You might run the powder over to the cop house, see what lab John’s using—he has a courier account. While we await the report, you might take a turn out to Casa Diablo and collect exemplars.”

  “Careful,” I said. “You’re falling in love.”

  “A mild attraction.”

  I got a cup of coffee and a donut and went to the window. It had started to snow, light. Dry snow falls so slowly you can pick out a flake and follow it to the ground, see one crystal pile on top of another, like toast crumbs.

  Geologists hate snow. It hides everything. To hit soil I’d have to dig.

  Through the window I watched a woman scrape her boot on the curb, removing a stratum of acquired crud. I wondered if Georgia had acquired her crud at the shooting range. And why.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before I could return to my workbench, the medical examiner called.

  *****

  Georgia lay on the metal tray with her mouth pried open.

  “Just getting started,” Randy Burrard said. “Afraid I’ve been out with the flu.”

  I focused on Randy, who’s way too sweet-faced for this job. Actually, he did look a little green. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who dissects the deceased has a right to look green. I said, “Feel better,” meaning it.

  “Thanks.” Randy gestured at Georgia. “Surprised the heck out of me when I looked in her mouth. Thought you’d want to get this out yourself.”

  Yeah.

  I went over to the table. Randy had covered her with a sheet but it barely rose over her breasts. I tugged it to her chin. I wanted to say something to her. I
could think of nothing.

  But it wasn’t Georgia, it was her husk, and so in the end I just bent and looked at the soil in her mouth.

  “Livor mortis discoloration on her lower back and buttocks,” Randy said. “Livor starts soon after death and is fixed within four to five hours. So she died lying face up, or was quickly rolled onto her back.”

  I nodded. That’s what we’d assumed on the ice. We’d found her face down but there was no livor purpling on her face. She’d lain on her back long enough for blood to pool and livor to fix. But if she’d died on her back, how had the soil gotten into her mouth? Maybe a struggle, and her face was forced into the dirt, and then she was rolled over. Maybe. I gently probed between her teeth and gums. Nothing there. In fact, the grains primarily coated her tongue, the roof of her mouth, the insides of her teeth. However the soil got there, she must have lost consciousness or died right then; otherwise she would have spat the stuff out. My own tongue quilted; I wanted to spit. Instead, I tweezered the stuff out of her mouth, collecting half a thimbleful, and examined it under the brutal autopsy lights. Pumice, and bits of tree bark.

  I thought about that. If there was enough bark in the soil to show up in this thimbleful, why wasn’t there bark in the samples from her boots and clothing?

  Randy said, “You notice that bruising around her mouth?”

  I placed my hands above the marks, spreading thumb and fingers apart. My thumb fit just beneath her lower lip, and my fingers rested along the cheek and chin opposite. Someone had forced her mouth open. Held it open.

  “Nothing down her throat,” Randy said, “although I’ll get a better look when I…”

  I said, “I understand.”

  But I didn’t. Someone had opened her mouth and dumped in pumice and tree bark? Maybe during the death struggle—he’s trying to suffocate her? With half a thimbleful of soil? That was hardly enough to choke on. In any case, Randy’s initial assessment, on the phone, was that she’d died from a subdural hematoma. So, blow to the head and she’s dead, or nearly so.

  Then why the soil in the mouth? Some creepy arcane message?

  I brought up the image of Georgia’s face, after we had set her on her back on the ice. Her mouth had been closed. Had she shut it herself, before dying?

  Or had the killer done it, unable to look at her lying there dead, open-mouthed.

  What kind of killer closes her mouth to end her silent scream?

  CHAPTER SIX

  I headed for the cop house carrying samples of gunpowder.

  I’d returned from the Medical Examiner yesterday and dived back into the boot soil and it was like hitting the jackpot again and again, cracking open plug after plug and finding the silver prizes. Gunpowder. Seven distinct makes. Georgia had walked in soil rich in gunpowder. Walter and I worked late last night and came in early this morning. As of ten ayem, Walter had finished the glacier basin samples and not found a single grain of powder. It was no longer preliminary—we could say with certainty that Georgia had not taken her last steps at the glacier.

  Wherever she’d walked, someone had done a lot of shooting.

  I had recovered several grains of each type of powder and tubed one of each to send to a gunpowder lab. We needed these grains ID’d.

  I turned off Minaret Road onto the side street where the red-brick cop house squats.

  Jasper Rinehart was at the front desk, watching a hockey game on his laptop. He waved me through with a sudden curse, which I realized was directed at the goalie and not me.

  I headed through the bullpen for chief John Amsterdam’s office, and ran into Eric.

  He smiled. “Morning, Oldfield.”

  “Morning, Catlin.” I smiled. “John in?”

  “On a conference call.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Eric cocked his head. A thick silence fell—Eric clearly wondering what I wanted with the chief of police, why the deputy wouldn’t suffice, and me wondering the same thing. It was as awkward as our exchange on the ski up the mountain, when Eric tried to send me and Walter back.

  Eric recovered first. He offered me a comb-back chair in his cubicle and pulled in a matching chair from the cubicle next door. We sat, knees bumping. He reversed his chair and straddled it. “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. I’m fully caffeinated.”

  We smiled. Stiff smiles.

  I looked away, as if the tumbledown cop-house décor was what I’d come to see. Normally, Eric and I dodged our interpersonal awkwardness by shooting the shit about work, or bitching about how redevelopment’s ruining Mammoth. But now the town was more concerned with survival than with redevelopment; neither of us cared to bitch about survival. And work currently meant the Georgia case; difficult to shoot the shit about that when we were both holding back.

  So I plunged ahead. “Anything yet on the rag-wool fibers?”

  “Too soon to hear from hair-and-fiber.” He shrugged. “But we sent the techs everything from her closet that could be a match.”

  “What about the hair? Is it horse?”

  “Too soon. Even if it is, it’s only the shaft and getting DNA from that is a bitch.”

  “Anything else?” I asked. “What about her cell phone?”

  “Last call she made was the night before she disappeared—which we already knew from her phone records.”

  “Who’d she call?”

  “Ski Tip. Asked Bill to get a take-out order ready.”

  “What about the rest of the contents of her little bag?”

  “Her prints, on everything. Bag too.” He held my look. “And the Weight Watchers notebook. Her prints. The notes looked to be in her handwriting, but we’re having a documents tech check it all out.”

  I nodded. “I, um, know we agreed to keep quiet about the notes but Walter and I had to tell Lindsay.”

  Eric’s eyes darkened. “Why?”

  “Georgia said she found something. What if she found something about the volcano?”

  “What did Lindsay say?”

  “Lindsay wasn’t real interested.” I shrugged. “Anyway, Georgia might have meant something personal. And we should consider that. We don’t know when she wrote the notes. Maybe she had financial troubles. Or man troubles. No way out. That could fit.”

  “We could come up with a dozen theories that fit.”

  “At best, half a dozen.”

  He shrugged. “How about your dirt?”

  “Stuff’s mostly a volcanic mix.”

  “Stuff, Oldfield?” The scar tissue below his left eye quilted. “Love your scientific precision.”

  I relaxed an inch. This was more like it. I said, “Trachybasaltic cinders, calcite with a nice rhombic cleavage…”

  He put up his hands. “Stuff’ll do.”

  “At this point, stuff says Georgia didn’t walk at the glacier.”

  “Oh?”

  I could have stopped there. But I didn’t. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “Help me out.”

  Why’s he need help? He’s a crackerjack crime-scene tech. I said, even, “Murder.”

  “Murder’s a workable theory. Especially considering the fact that we found her face down, and livor says she died face up.”

  “And what about rigor? What does that say?”

  “Rigor mortis sets in within two or three hours. Lasts about twenty to thirty hours. Not sure what else it says.”

  I said, “How about that it’s hard to move a body in the stiffness of rigor on a horse. So wherever she died, she lay there long enough for livor to fix and rigor to come and go. That makes it over a day. And then she was moved.”

  “That’s a workable theory.”

  I nodded. And then I told him about the stuff in her mouth, the bizarre pumice-bark mix.

  He said, slow, “Got a theory about that?”

  “Nothing I’d care to offer.” Just wild-ass guesses.

  His look skated to his wall clock, to John’s office, and then he looked back at me with that damned awkward smile
.

  I said, “And I don’t have a theory for why you were such a jerk on the retrieval. Trying to send Walter and me back.”

  He took a long moment, then said, “You got me.”

  “I do?”

  “I was a jerk. I expected the body to be Georgia and I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

  “Why me? Why not worry about the others?”

  “Because I don’t like seeing you upset.”

  I went cinder red. Was this some big-brother thing? That’s the way we’d begun, way back when we were kids. There was six-year-old me tagging along after Eric and my brother, perfecting the art of annoyance. And then there was nine-year-old awakening me writing Eric mash notes and burying them in the box with my dead turtle. And then, after the summer day that changed everything, there was the both of us waiting for one another to get past pride and hurt. And here we are now, adults who’ve perfected the art of surficial interaction. Shooting the shit, needling one another over the merits of chick flicks versus action movies. If I were to do a forensic dig on our relationship, I would uncover layer after sedimentary layer—eroded events and words deposited over the years and compressed and hardened into rock. As long as we didn’t let that summer day fissure up through the sediments, we’d be fine. That day, along with my love notes, could sleep with the turtle.

  I said, finally, “I should get back to work.” I opened my purse and took out the bubble-pack envelope. “I need to get this to a gunpowder lab. Sacramento or Bakersfield, whichever John’s using.”

  Eric drew back, the way he shies when something comes abruptly into his field of view from the blind side. He said, light, “Powder in the evidence?”

  “Surprised me too.”

  He put out his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I hesitated. Again. And then my eye caught on the shredded target pinned to his cubicle wall. All bullseyes. I’d seen it dozens of times but for the first time I wondered where he’d gone target-shooting.

  And then the obvious hit me.

  The biathlon range.