The Stars Shine Bright

by Sibella Giorello

  I waited until Handler had cleared the hilltop. Then I walked back through the trailers. Three of them had been moved recently, judging by the flattened blades of grass around their wheels. One was black with Dark Horse Ranch written prominently on its side. The second was red, a double, also bearing the ranch’s name. But a third trailer was white. A single. Unfortunately, the back end was positioned in a way that it faced the yurts. When I looked over there, people were running from the tents.

  I unbuckled the leather belt that had Calvin Klein’s initials and used the metal post to pry some soil from the front tire treads. I deposited the sample into a Ziploc bag, then stole another glance at the yurts. The girl with the dreadlocks was coming back. And now a bald guy was with her.

  I closed my purse, looped the belt back into my slacks, and was stepping from the trailers when they appeared.

  “What’re you doing?” Freckles demanded.

  “Sorry.” I continued to work the buckle. “It was a long drive.”

  The bald guy kept his head at a weird angle. Maybe to show off the dragon tattoo that circled his neck. Like an iridescent sideburn, the reptile’s tail slithered up the side of his face.

  “Answer the question,” he said. “What were you doing?”

  “You really need me to explain?” I smiled.

  “She was snooping around the trailers,” Freckles said.

  “Paul said I could look around.”

  “Paul’s not here,” Snake said. “And now you’re leaving.”

  They walked six paces behind me, all the way back to the Ghost. Madame stood with her paws on the window frame, nose lifted, like Washington crossing the Delaware.

  “How could you leave that dog in the car?” Freckles said. “In this heat?”

  She threw her arm toward the sun. A small green tattoo marked the inside of her forearm. Elf, it said. Nickname, I decided. For the elf Santa would’ve fired.

  I tried to smile. “Thank you for thinking of my dog.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  Snake lowered his voice. “Easy, Bo.”

  Madame hopped over to the passenger side, giving me a look that said, It’s about time.

  I turned the key and gazed at the side mirror. The yurts were empty. And my two escorts were running past them.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I drove slowly down the road and found a crowd gathered by the river. Handler was in the water with several men. And a horse. Another horse was being led away by its bridle. It was a deep brown horse, almost black. But its legs were gray.

  Muddy gray.

  I pulled to the side of the road. On the hillside above the river, a group of young boys watched the scene below. They were dark-skinned, with hair so black and shiny it reflected the sun in white patches. One of the boys was pointing at the Ghost, holding something in his hand. An elliptical object, long with tail wings.

  I got out, carrying Madame in my arms to the edge of the road. The water turned west, a slow hairpin turn that had deposited enough sand and debris to form a bar. Water pooled behind it. Which was where Handler was with the horse.

  “Shovels!” he yelled.

  He stood on a plank, and the people on the riverbank slid more boards across the shallow pond to deliver the shovels. A blond girl walked down the boards last, carrying a bridle made of rope. The horse in the water was rocking itself forward and back, muscles flexing under its chestnut coat.

  The men dug around the horse’s front legs. The gray sediment they flung away was a transitional soil, geologically speaking. Mostly clay. The grains ranging from fine silt to sand. But the wooden planks and the catatonic horse told me something else. The clay had the grip of quicksand. Step in it, as the horse had, and it wouldn’t let go. The girl moved to the side, petting the animal’s neck as its ears twitched too fast. Agitated. The men gathered on a plank under the horse’s chest.

  “On three!” Handler called.

  They pressed their shoulders into the animal’s chest. The front legs came out stiff as plaster casts. The hooves clopped onto the board, and the horse immediately leaned forward, trying to yank out its back legs.

  “Hold ’er still!” Handler rushed down the board.

  The girl shifted to the front, taking the long head in her hands so that the animal looked directly into her eyes. The men dug out the back legs. When all four hooves were on the boards, the girl walked the animal to the riverbank. The crowd left with them, toward the hill, and the yurts beyond that. Several men collected the boards, stacking them on the riverbank, but Handler was running up the hill again. He headed for the boys who were watching.

  The boys scattered.

  “I told you kids!” He stopped, watching them run. “No water—no chúush! You’re gonna kill my horses.”

  The boy holding the object in his hand looked back.

  Hander pointed at him, his finger covered with gray mud. “I’ll call the elders!”

  The boy started to kick something on the ground. Again and again. It didn’t move, but the dry stones scattered. And Handler came running for him. The boy turned and raced down the hill where his buddies were waiting by a barbed wire fence. The boy slipped through the wire like a cat burglar.

  Handler watched them go. When he turned toward the river, he saw me watching from the road. He hesitated, then walked down the hill, crossed the bank, and climbed up to the road.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Water rocket.” He tilted his head toward his shoulder, using his T-shirt to wipe his forehead. “New toy for the local Indian kids. They come pinch my irrigation line so the pressure builds up. Then fire the rocket off it. Thing launches like Cape Canaveral. But if it scares the horses, they panic, run into the water. I lost one last month. Legs snapped like twigs.”

  “The horses can’t get out of the water?”

  He shook his head and looked down at his hands. Most of the clay had already dried on his skin, like thin plaster. But several wet chunks clung to his fingernails. He looked up. “I hope you find Cuppa Joe.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate your help.” I moved Madame to my left side and extended my right hand.

  He looked at it, then lifted both hands. To show me how dirty they were.

  I smiled. “A little dirt won’t hurt me.”

  He shook. I could feel the fine, gritty sediment on his skin. A small moist piece, clinging to the outside of his palm.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I nodded, as if I agreed. “Thanks.”

  I walked across the road to the Ghost, tossed Madame through the window, and used my left hand to open the door. When I glanced back, Handler was heading for the yurts.

  Still using my left hand, I opened my purse, removed a Ziploc bag, and pulled it over my right hand, shaking my fingers, brushing my palm.

  It wasn’t much.

  But enough, maybe.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The smell of cows on fire led me down Yakima’s main drag, taking me straight to Miner’s Restaurant. I needed to think, and I needed cheeseburgers—one plain, one loaded. Fries, a chocolate shake, and ice water for the dog. I sat at a picnic table outside in the shade, said grace, divided the food between us, and pulled out my notebook.

  I wrote: Juan misread the plate.

  I considered this theory while eating the cheeseburger. It was possible. Perhaps even probable. After all, Juan had recalled the license plate’s letters out of order. And he missed a letter. Or did he?

  Next: Juan lied.

  This theory bounced around my brain while Madame licked clean the burger’s paper wrapper. And it was bolstered by Juan’s fake social security number. Which, I recalled, traced to Yakima. Specifically, a dead Native American woman. And now the license plate was found on the same farm where Cuppa Joe was raised, just outside Yakima.

  I dipped a fry in mayonnaise, then scrawled, Paul Handler.

  I had two opinions about Handler. Either he had nothing to do with Cuppa Joe’s disappearan
ce, or he had everything to do with it. He was strong, determined, and ambitious. He’d turned a tragic childhood into a productive life. Admirable, no doubt about it. But I’d met enough foster care kids during my years of law enforcement to know they often survived through manipulation and deception. The brightest ones sometimes were high-functioning sociopaths. I couldn’t decide whether Handler was telling the truth about Cuppa Joe, or whether all that goodwill was an attempt to blow smoke across his own trail. He did show me the EKWAS trailer. And there was no way Cuppa Joe ever rode in that thing. But Handler’s first instinct this morning was to pretend he didn’t know why I was there. Why do that, if he was innocent?

  My internal radar was screaming as I divided the fries with Madame.

  I wrote: Dreadlocks.

  I didn’t believe in luck. But probability was an authentic mathematical theory. And the probability models that lined up inside my mind were jumping up and down, begging for attention. The connection between the Dark Horse Ranch and Abbondanza was suspicious enough. But what were the chances that Cuppa Joe was kidnapped by guys with dreadlocks, and Handler’s farm just happened to be populated by a hairy brood? I thought about the redheaded girl, how she wanted me gone. Something was definitely tarnished there, something hard and dark with . . . greed?

  I picked up my milk shake. The warm desert air had melted it to a perfect consistency, about three degrees under soft-serve ice cream. It sluiced through the straw as I wrote one final word.

  Mud.

  Those juvenile delinquents had done me a big favor. Without their mischief, I never would’ve noticed that cloying gray mud down by the river. It looked so familiar, too familiar. Like the stuff Cooper was using. Although forensics-by-appearances seemed criminally simple, geology operated with it. Minerals had highly specific hues. And similar environments, that thing known as provenance.

  I looked down at Madame. “Time to go see the mad scientist.”

  She wagged her tail.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  We were bulleting across the basalt plateau for Spokane when my purse started doo-dahing “Camptown Races.” Madame continued to snooze in the passenger seat, but as I fumbled for the phone, my heart began making little bleating pulses. That small hope. That remaining spark of light that said maybe, just maybe, DeMott was calling me.

  Wrong.

  “Harmon, where are you?” Jack said.

  I tried to control my voice. “Heading to Spokane. I need to see the forensic geologist. And I need you to dig deeper on Paul Handler. I just saw the trailer with the plate. It hasn’t gone anywhere in years.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. It would disintegrate at the first bump in the road. But there’s another wrinkle. Handler sold the kidnapped horse to Sal Gagliardo.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not done. The description of the kidnappers fits Handler’s ranch hands. That’s why I need more information on this guy. Check for any paper trail. Social services. Tax returns, whatever you can find.”

  But there was only silence on the other end. I gazed down the Ghost’s bonnet. The white paint glowed under the blazing sun. “Hello?”

  “You need to come in.”

  “Fine, I’ll do the research myself. Just take care of the guards at the front desk.”

  “No.”

  “Jack, I don’t have any ID to get upstairs.”

  “I understand. It’s not me. It’s management. They want you to come in.”

  An exit blew past. Then a yellow farmhouse, surrounded by fields of wheat.

  “Harmon?”

  “Come in. For good?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “So OPR made its ruling?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “McLeod came by my desk and asked how the case was going. I told him about the kidnapped horse, how you were tracking it down. He said, ‘That’s too bad.’ I thought he meant the horse. But then he said, ‘Tell her she has to come in.’ When I asked why, McLeod said it was beyond his apprehension.”

  The malaprop was closer to a Freudian slip. Worried, apprehensive. My stomach tightened into a knot.

  “When?” The tone of my voice triggered something in Madame. She lifted her head. “When do I have to come in?”

  “Since you’re heading in the wrong direction, I’ll hold them off until tomorrow. Does eleven o’clock work for you?”

  No. It didn’t work for me.

  But I lied. Again.

  “I’ll be there.”

  I walked into the crime lab just before 2:00 p.m. and found Peter Rosser standing on a tripod ladder, leaning toward the exposed I-beam that ran across the ceiling. He was unknotting a nylon noose.

  He glanced down at me. “Don’t tell me you want to use it.”

  “When’s your last day?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow.” He tossed me the rope. “Put it in that box on my desk, would ya?”

  The box contained several sample nooses, all made from different materials. I rummaged through my purse and removed the soil samples, including the one inside Eleanor’s lipstick case. “Any chance you could look at these by tonight?”

  “Let’s make a deal.” He grinned. “I’ll take care of it if you come work in my new lab.”

  “I’m flattered, really, but—”

  “But it’s like riding a unicycle. You never forget how to do this stuff.” He came down the ladder with a black composite rope. It looked like a twisted garden snake. He threw it to me. “In the box with the others, if you don’t mind.”

  I laid the noose inside the box. “Where are the Petri dishes?”

  “I knew you couldn’t resist.” He pointed across the room. “Third drawer down. On the left.”

  I placed the shallow glass dishes on the counter and marked each with a Sharpie, noting the soils in order of importance—or imperative. I needed to know some things right away, in light of my meeting tomorrow with the SAC. The top two were the soil from Handler’s palm and the caked mud inside Eleanor’s lipstick case, from Ashley’s room. I added several drops of distilled water to Handler’s palm dust, because there was so little to sample, and carried the wet clay over to the Scanning Electron Microscope.

  “Who’s taking your place?” I asked.

  “Nobody can take my place.”

  “Who’s got the job?”

  “Nice guy.” Rosser carried the ladder to a far wall. It displayed posters that described igneous minerals in terms of chemistry, texture, and foliation. “But the man doesn’t possess my superior sense of urgency. If you know what I mean.”

  I touched the SEM’s carbon plug to the sediment, coating it, then placed it inside the machine. The SEM made its usual whining noises, but now it sounded like it was crying over the loss of its resident cowboy.

  He called out, “What do you know about pyroclastics?”

  I hit the switch on the computer monitor. An old monitor, the bulky kind that needed to warm up. Pyroclastics were rocks and minerals formed by explosive igneous action. Volcanoes, mostly.

  “Pyro is Greek for ‘fire.’” I had an arcane knowledge of Greek and Latin. “Clastic means ‘broken in bits.’ ”

  “I was talking ash, pumice, obsidian.” He removed the igneous poster, rolling it up. “What about ash?”

  “Highly abrasive, somewhat corrosive, and conducts electricity when wet and won’t dissolve in water.”

  The monitor screen kicked up a colored bar code. Ready to cooperate with the SEM.

  “And the gas?”

  “Shreds the magma, shatters the rock, fuels the flow.” I tapped the computer’s mouse, feeling an odd tingle in my fingertips. This moment, this threshold to new knowledge, had more adrenaline than the races at Emerald Meadows. Those races ended. These only launched more.

  “Name one famous pyroclastic ash flow.”

  I watched the screen. Silica appeared first, in high concentrations. “Peter, if this is about the job, I don’t want it.”

  “Pompeii
.”

  “Preschoolers can name Pompeii.”

  “What about Pelée?”

  “Killed thirty thousand people.”

  “What year?”

  I leaned into the screen. Aluminum had overtaken silica. “Pelée blew in nineteen hundred and one.”

  “Nineteen-oh-two,” he corrected. “Gallop ahead seventy-eight years, what do you get?”

  Seventy-eight plus two was . . . “Mount St. Helens.” I clicked Print with the mouse. “Why do you want to know about St. Helens?”

  “I was curious whether a Southern gal such as yourself knows anything about Northwest geology.”

  I looked up. He had removed the posters and now stood at the counter, looking at my soil samples in the Petri dishes.

  “Some of that was raked off a barn floor,” I said, “if you’re thinking about tasting it.”

  All the barn detritus also meant the test would take time. The samples had to be cleaned first. And I didn’t have time for that.

  I pulled the colored bar graph from the printer. Handler’s clay had extremely high concentrations of three elements: aluminum and silica and selenium. The SEM also detected the same trace radioactive elements. Identical. Not luck. Not even probability.

  Rosser walked over. “What do you got?”

  “Provenance on that gray clay.”

  He grinned. “Puts a spur under your saddle, don’t it?”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  On my way back from Spokane, I only made it halfway. Taking the exit for downtown Ellensburg, I parked the Ghost on West Third. The afternoon temperature was in the high 80s, and when I carried Madame into the Old Mill, nobody batted eye, not even when I placed her in the shopping cart.

  I bought Milk-Bones for her fast-food breath, then picked out a pair of black gardening gloves for me. A set of pruning shears, one spade, and a compact but powerful flashlight. In the clothing department, I found black running shorts and a black T-shirt with gray lettering that said Rodeo Girl. Keds, in black, were going for $9.99. The checkout clerk threw in a baseball cap that advertised the store. It was black too.