Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) Read online

  I was not bothered by the scar. My little brother Henry had scars. The last one, which I remember best, was a dent like a jack-o-lantern grin below his knee where the joint lining had been excised. So Jardine’s scar didn’t bother me. It was his expression that hurt. He looked so very sad.

  Soliano asked, “Who played this prank?”

  “Never found out,” Ballinger said. “Called in the Sheriff but no luck. Still, CTC officials put their trust in me to handle things and that’s what I did. Ran a lessons-learned session for all my people. Attendance mandatory. And I made dead sure the company covered Roy’s medicals. Pain and suffering, to boot.”

  Soliano turned to Jardine. “This resolution satisfied you?”

  “Yeah.”

  I watched his scarred face. I’ve seen lesser insults be motive for mayhem.

  Soliano pulled out his wallet and showed Jardine his ID. “Mr. Jardine, may I inquire as to your whereabouts last night?”

  Jardine said, slowly, “Home in bed.”

  “Alone?”

  Jardine went scarlet. He nodded.

  “And your job here is?”

  “Maintenance.”

  “Have you ever worked on the cask team?”

  “No.”

  “Do you wish to?”

  Jardine shrugged. “Takes a lot of training.”

  Ballinger nodded. “Darn right.”

  “I see.” Soliano regarded Jardine. “Thank you for your time.”

  So that’s it? I thought Jardine warranted a few more questions but I couldn’t come up with any. I agreed with Soliano that the key player was whoever metered the cask. Jardine might have motive, but not the training or the opportunity. He was likely just one of those unfortunates who swallowed the insult and collected his compensation.

  “All right then, Roy,” Ballinger said. “Lady wants to poke around out there. I need somebody to go with her. Make sure she doesn’t whack her head or trip or... Liability stuff.”

  Jardine turned to me and his gaze fixed on the spectrometer hanging from my shoulder. He said, in that nasal complaint, “What are you?”

  I said, “Geologist.”

  He pursed his little mouth.

  I didn’t really mind having a keeper, going out there. Jardine led the way, punctiliously skirting the sand truck to prevent, I guessed, me whacking into it. My attention shifted to the ground. Here’s where it happened, if the swap was run before—if the dummy cask arrived and shed grains of talc. Of course, any talc spilled here would have been scuffed into invisibility. Not, however, invisible to the laser eye of my spectrometer. I selected the chemical fingerprint for talc and began the scan. The laser illuminated the soil, scattering its constituents into their spectral wavelengths.

  Jardine closed in behind me. I saw him by the long morning shadow he cast, which dogged my every move. I grew distracted, almost missing the spectrometer’s chirp. I stared at the screen, at the jagged wavelength line. “Huh,” Jardine said, at my ear, “how’s that thing work?” It doesn’t, I thought. It doesn’t happen this way—first place I stick my nose and bingo. That’s more than luck. That’s a red flag. I said, “Give me some space.” He backed off. I reset the spectro. It scanned and chirped the news. So okay lady, you got lucky. I shook my head and expanded the searchable grid. “There it is,” Jardine said, with me again. He’d recognized the wavelength before the meter chirped. By the time I’d covered the loading zone he acted like it was his show. “Can it tell you where the stuff came from?” he wanted to know. “No,” I said, huffier than I’d intended, “that takes doing geology.”

  As we returned from the scan, Hap Miller was returning with the roster. He gave Jardine a look. Cartoon eyes. “Hey there Roy. You helping the purty lady?”

  Jardine’s face pit purpled.

  “That’s right,” I said, “he was.” Jardine had been, actually, getting on my nerves but it cost me nothing now to include the guy. “We found talc. It’s all over the place.” I waited for them to get it. I waited for Ballinger to object—nah nah, knothead can’t sneak in a cask full of talc. I waited for Miller to make a joke.

  Soliano got it first. He spun on Ballinger. “How many casks are missed from your inventory?”

  “You people are making this case bigger’n it is.”

  I bristled. No we’re not. We’d just proved Soliano’s swap theory was correct. More than that—not only could the perp engineer such a swap but he’d damn well done it before. The dump manager may not like the theory but it fit the facts. So this case was getting bigger than any of us liked.

  I stared at the logo on Ballinger’s shirt and thought, there wouldn’t even be a case if you CTC people did what that motto promised, closing the damn circle of the atom.

  Just keep your plutonium out of my coffee.

  ~

  Jardine was choking.

  He tried to chew over what he’d just learned but he couldn’t swallow it all. The female with her meter had found the talc and now they all knew that last night wasn’t the first time and they... He stopped. He told himself not to get ahead of himself. How far could that meter take her? The trail stopped here, at the dump.

  He edged away from the little group, filling in the forms on his clipboard like he was interested. They didn’t even see him any more. Snooty Mister FBI had dismissed him. He focused on the others. That bastard Ballinger. Miller the mocker. The know-it-all female.

  Purty lady. His face flamed and his scar burned. She pitied him. He hated pity. Almost as much as he hated Miller’s mockery.

  Miller mocked everybody but what stuck in Jardine’s throat was the time Miller mocked about the prank. Jardine’s first day back on the job, bunch of them were in the break room and Miller told the Three Pigs joke. First little pig builds a house of paper. Big bad Mr. Alpha Wolf tries to get in but even a paper wall stops him. Then big bad Mr. Beta Wolf comes along and he blows right through the paper and fries the pig. Second little pig builds a house of plastic, shielding enough to stop both Alpha and Beta wolves. But along comes Mr. Gamma Wolf, who’s pure penetrating energy, and he goes through those walls and fries the second pig. Third little pig builds his house of thick earth with concrete siding and steel doors, which almost stops Gamma Wolf. Still, it’s not possible for Gamma to be completely stopped and so a whisker and a couple teeth get through. Third pig doesn’t even notice the nibbling.

  Jardine had sat stone-faced.

  The real pigs were the ones who’d snuck in while he was napping—after pulling a sixteen-hour double shift!—and planted a sealed cesium source under his pillow. Source turned out to be leaking. A beta-and gamma-emittter. Nibbled a hole in his face. Unintended consequence, Ballinger’s incident report said, prank that went out of control.

  He thought, now, there are always consequences.

  He crawled out of the memory and continued his recon.

  The group shifted and the female waved and Jardine saw a newcomer approaching. Old fellow. Dressed like he lived in the desert, same as the female. The old fellow started talking but it was the female Jardine fixed on. Not fixated—that was different, that was obsessive. Fixed just meant he’d watched her work, up close, and noticed how she paid attention to her details.

  But now that he was fixed on the female he had to say she was comely. Her auburn hair was sun-kissed—he was sure the light streaks were natural, not bottle. Her eyes were soft gray, round and innocent, but her cheekbones and jaw were sharp and strong. She had a good height—he was five foot eight and her head just reached his chin. She had a good shape, a female’s curves but trim. She made him think of an Old West schoolmarm. Strict but fair, resourceful in harsh circumstances. And underneath, a raw untamed streak. He wondered what it would be like to have the female braid his ponytail.

  She hadn’t pitied him, he decided. It had been sympathy.

  He edged in closer so he could hear. They never noticed.

  The old fellow was complaining how he didn’t like being rushed, how he couldn’
t do his best work that way—and Jardine agreed, you should never rush your work—and then Jardine’s heart stopped. “Tremolite” the old fellow was saying and then “talc” and then he slapped hands with the female and then Mister FBI started asking questions.

  Jardine didn’t need it explained.

  The geologists were saying they could figure out where the talc came from.

  He had to get out of here now.

  His legs worked first—keeping it to a stroll, just another crap worker on his way to another crap outpost of the workday. His heart raced on ahead, pumping out that adrenaline. But he kept strolling and his mind caught up to his heart and told it to slow down and finally he reached a point where he could think.

  He needed to take back control. The enemy was coming. A whole posse he was sure but the biggest threats right now were the old fellow and the female.

  He’d been weak, for a moment, about the female. He needed to see her clearly.

  The enemy had hair the color of a worn saddle and eyes like brushed steel and dirt under her fingernails.

  9

  I said, hopefully, “I could use some breakfast.”

  Soliano looked at his watch.

  I thought, Soliano’s the kind of cop who gets so consumed with a case that he forgets to eat. He’d struck out at the dump, questioning the cask team without producing a suspect. He’d left agents to follow up and now he’d turned his attention to the hunt for the missing radwaste. He clearly did not want to strike out again.

  Nor did I. But I never forget to eat.

  We’d come to Beatty to gear up. Beatty was a hamlet tucked into the high desert hills, home to trucker cafes and jazzy casino buffets and most dump employees, including Hap Miller and Milt Ballinger. Soliano had drafted them both—Miller for his health physics expertise and Ballinger as the CTC official who would take possession, and responsibility, when we tracked down the stolen property.

  We were, officially, a team now: Soliano and his FBI agents, Scotty and his RERT crew, two geologists, two radwaste reps. We were a thrown-together team of contentious egos but we had a single purpose. Find the missing resin casks.

  And therein, in my view, lay a mystery. Ballinger had checked inventory and found that two casks—along with two portable cranes and one shielded trailer—were missing. This certainly confirmed the theory that the swap was run twice. Once last night, interrupted. Once at an unknown earlier date, to completion. The thing was, all that talc I’d found made me think that more than one dummy cask had made it to the dump. But...only two casks were missing. It bugged me.

  Soliano said, “A take-away breakfast.”

  Ballinger said, “Egg McMuffin’s always good.”

  Good didn’t look to enter into it but right now I’d settle for egg anything.

  Ballinger hit the McDonald’s, Miller went home for his favorite tech-tools, Scotty resupplied at the Beatty Wal-Mart, and Soliano went to borrow a Blazer from the sheriff for Walter and me to use in our field work.

  While the others scattered, Walter and I holed up in our makeshift lab in the RERT van and built ourselves a map. The perp had left one hell of a trail in talc. The dummy cask. The unloading zone. The mud from the radwaste driver, Ryan Beltzman, which Walter had found to be ripe with talc. We hoped the map would point us to the place the swaps were made, and if we got real lucky there we’d find the two missing resin casks.

  That place was talc country.

  ~

  An 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.”

  10

  It 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.

  ~

  We 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 wi
th 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.