The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  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.

  CHAPTER 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 behind two agents to follow up and now he 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 would 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, “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 road-stop 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.”

  CHAPTER 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 with 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: Trespassers 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.

  It will tell me if I’ve found the source.

  I mixed my sample with a pillow of indicator compound then inserted it into the SP. I recorded the numbers that came up on the window. I repeated the process with my evidence talc. Same numbers came up.

  I sat back to savor it. This was what I dreamed of, when I dreamed of work, which was more often than was probably healthy. The moment of capture, the moment when I’d grab hold of a piece of the earth and give it an identity. A name, a set of vital statistics, and—the holy grail of forensic geology—an address. I tracked you down, pal. I know where you hang. You’re mine.

  I told Soliano, “We’re here.”

  He produced his cell phone. While he talked, demanding every piece of data recorded on the Serendipity Talc Mine, I opened my water bottle and drank long and deep. Not cold lemonade but it would do.

  ~ ~ ~

  Scotty went down to the RERT vans and returned with two team members, the three of them dressed out. They paused at the mine entrance to set their facepieces and breathers, then lumbered in.

  I saw Walter come out of a van and start up the hill.

  Hap Miller sat down beside me. He lifted his sombrero and poured water over his head. His hair darkened to hematite, a match to the red bandana tied around his hat. “Hot enough for you, Buttercup?”

  “Buttercup?”

  “Nickname I picked out for you. Now, you ask why I’d name a brunet with gray eyes after a yellow flower?”

  I bit. “Okay, why?”

  “It’s due to the egg yolk you dripped on your shirt.”

  It took all the will I possessed not to look down.

  “And please do call me by my nickname. Hap, short for Happy. Happy to look out for your well-being, ma’am.”

  For all his joking, he didn’t strike me as particularly happy. Well, I didn’t strike me as a yellow flower, either. “Thanks,” I said, “Hap.”

  Walter topped the trail and made a beeline for us. I studied his face. Red, but so’s everyone else’s. Streaming sweat, but sweat’s good—he’s hydrated. I said, “Where are you going?”

  He tried to speak, then lifted the little ice chest. It had come with the Blazer; we were putting it to work.

  “Beer?” Hap said.

  “Soil samples,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “No problemo. At least I got snacks.” Hap unshouldered his day pack and pulled out a bag of chips.

  Walter joined us and Hap offered the chips. They were greenish-brown.

  “Seaweed,” Hap said. “Taste like Doritos only they’re good for you. Full of alginic acid, which binds itself with any strontium-90 we mayhap pick up in the course of our travels.”

  I stared. “How about just not picking any up?”

  “How about being prepared? Boy Scout motto.”

  “I know the motto. I was a Girl Scout.”

  Hap grinned. “Guess that means we’s meant for one another!”

  Walter slid me a look; Walter thought not. Walter already disapproved of my flighty love life. And Walter, frowning at me, was clearly thinking the last thing I needed right now was to take a fancy to an ex-Boy Scout warning me about the risks of radiation. But it wasn’t Walter’s call. I slid my own look at Hap Miller. Never met anyone quite like him. I said, “What’s up with strontium-90?”

  “Just a for-instance.” Hap shrugged. “For instance, it’s a nuclide that resembles calcium. Get yourself a dose and your body sucks it to the bone, like it’s calcium. And it sits there happy as a clam emitting radiation for its entire half-life. Y’all know the half-life of strontium-90, mayhap?”

  I said, “Not offhand.”

  “Twenty-eight point nine years. I’d guess that’s close to your own age.”

  Twenty-nine point three, actually. I saw where Hap was going with this. I didn’t want to follow. I didn’t need a health physicist to tell me what excessive radiation could do to the reproductive system. I was well-versed in that lesson.

  “Mr. Miller,” Walter said, “you might limit your advice to the strictly useful.”

  “Shore thang. So might it be useful to point out that a man your age is at special risk? Your cells are already in the decay mode, if I’m not taking too much liberty to say so.”

  I said, “You trying to scare us?”

  “Just encouraging you to pay attention.” Hap held out the chip bag. “And Walter, please do call me Hap.”

  Happy to look out for our well-being. Fine, I guessed it could use looking out for. I took a chip. The brine puckered my tongue. It wasn’t Doritos but I urged Walter to try one. He did, and made a face. I wondered how many radioactive isotopes Walter had absorbed over the years. A good deal more than I had because he’d been around a good deal longer. I offered him another chip.

  ~ ~ ~

  We were finishing off the seaweed when Soliano joined us. “We have a development. We have an owner. She lives in Shoshone, that previous town we passed through. She will be joining us,” he glanced at his watch, “within the hour. In the meanwhile, I have obtained a telephone search warrant for the Serendipity.”

  It took me a moment. “This is an active mine?” I’d been thinking the perp chose an abandoned mine, where he could take what he wanted and go about his business in private. But we had an owner.

  “That is not all,” Soliano said. “We also have a primary suspect
.”

  We waited for it.

  “Roy Jardine.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Criminy,” Milt Ballinger said, “Roy’s the knothead?”

  “Suspected knothead.” Soliano did not smile. “My agents report that he left work approximately four hours ago, shortly after our own departure. Taken sick. He is not at his home, or at Beatty’s medical facilities.”

  I felt suddenly sick myself. The heat. The McMuffin I’d wolfed. The memory of Roy Jardine. It was a tactile memory, his hazmat sleeve swish-swishing against my nylon shoulder as he tracked my hunt for talc.

  “Left sick?” Ballinger said. “That’s all?”

  “No, that is not all. My agents have learned that Mr. Jardine’s maintenance job includes the calibration of instruments. He spot-checks meters, on an on-going basis. He is the only maintenance worker with this expertise. His co-worker reports that he volunteered for this duty, which often required overtime. Presumably, on a day of his choosing, he could choose to spot-check the meter of the person monitoring an incoming dummy cask. He could, for that moment, become the key player.” Soliano regarded Ballinger. “You did not know the scope of his job?”

  Ballinger wiped the sweat from his skull. “I got over a hundred employees. Don’t have time to get into everybody’s nitty-gritty.”

  “I have the time,” Soliano said. “I have issued a be-on-the-lookout for a blue Ford pickup registered to Roy Jardine. From you, I will require his work records.”

  “You got fingerprints or anything?”

  “Unfortunately, the perp, at the crash site, appears to have been a fastidiously careful man. He wore booties. He perhaps also wore a full suit, since my techs have recovered no prints, hair, fiber, or DNA—other than the driver’s. Nevertheless, we will do a collection at Mr. Jardine’s residence.”