The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  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 5

  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 6

  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 A.M., 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 decor 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, evenly, “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.

  I looked to the hook where his ball cap hung. I’d seen it hundreds of times but now I saw it anew. The US biathlon team logo is stitched over the bill: stick-figure skier in a lunging stride, rifle strapped to its back. World Cup races start next week. Eric’s racing, along with my brother Jimbo, and Stobie is the team armorer. I remembered the guys, as kids, trekking up to the Lake Mary biathlon course nearly every winter day after school to ski and shoot. Year in, year out, rifles firing, unburned powder falling into the snow and sinking with snowmelt into the soil.

  My stomach tightened.

  I remembered Lindsay driving me to the course to cheer my brother when the boys started holding races. She got interested; she got them organized and into the U.S. Biathlon Association. And that’s how Georgia was drawn in. The mayor saw the biathlon as a fine place to divert boys who were into civic mischief. So Georgia and Lindsay—already at odds over the volcano—became uneasy co-den mothers.

  Mothers without children of their own.

  Mothers with a loving blind spot. They had lobbied this year’s World Cup races to Mammoth. And then the volcano stirred again and they joined forces to prepare the town. But they could not bear to cancel the Cup. Oh, they got Squaw Valley as a backup but unless there is lava flowing here day after tomorrow, the races will proceed here as scheduled. Georgia would kill to watch her boys compete in the Cup on their home turf. Would have killed. Lindsay would...what? Sacrifice her good judgment to cheer on her boys, I thought sourly. While keeping a goddamn close eye on ground deformation and quake patterns, I hoped.

  I fingered the bubble-pack envelope, wondering if my unidentified gunpowder originated at the biathlon range. Thinking, the mayor’s dead, the volcanologist is weirdly interested in how she died, the FEMA guy is oddly devastated, and the cop I most trust in the world tried to get a jump on the crime scene. Thinking, these are the people whose job it is—or was—to keep us safe.

  Eric had been looking where I looked—the target, the ball cap—and now he came back to the envelope I was mangling. “Never mind.” He laced his hands behind his head. “It all works out. I’m a jerk on the retrieval, you’re anal retentive with your powder. Save it for John.”

  “No need.” I passed the envelope to Eric. “We’re on the same team.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “We don’t want to be late,” Walter said. He pried me from my scope, sent me home to change, collected me within the half-hour, collected Lindsay at six sharp, and in his fire-engine red Explorer he ferried us up the mountain toward the lights.

  I had to wonder about this meeting. Why did Adrian Krom call it on the mountain, up at the Inn? Why not call it at the Community Center? Why call this meeting with just one day’s notice? Why call it at all, since we had a meeting a week ago and covered everything conceivable. I reached over the seat and tapped Lindsay. “Are you talking about raising the alert level?”

  “No,” she said, “we’re still at ADVISORY.”

  I sat back. The Geological Survey issues four-tiered volcano alerts, starting at NORMAL, meaning typical background activity, all
the way through WARNING, meaning get the hell out. We’ve been at ADVISORY, meaning elevated unrest, for the past six months. I said, “If nothing’s changed, why’d he call this meeting?”

  “Ask Walter,” Lindsay said. “He’s become such great pals with Adrian.”

  Walter said, mildly, “Adrian’s doing his job.”

  I had to agree, although I did not care to say so in Lindsay’s presence. Walter had put his faith in Adrian Krom—just as I had—because Walter believes in authority. Just as I do. Adrian Krom certainly has the authority, and the resources, to prepare us for what looks like is coming. But Krom had gone beyond the mandate from FEMA. What Walter saw in Adrian Krom was a man who came to town and leased a condo and settled in and linked his fate to ours. And that, to Walter, was loyalty.

  Lindsay said, “You think he’s a prince, Walter. He’s not a prince.”

  Walter took the curves a little fast, throwing us all into silence.

  Two curves later Walter’s headlights caught the silhouettes of stripped conifers, and I looked hard. Was this patch of dead trees bigger than last time I came this way? Tree-kills around Mammoth were old news—quakes breached a fault and gas has been leaking up from an old magma chamber, asphyxiating trees, along with a few people. What we do is tread carefully. Don’t camp near tree-kills. Don’t ski roped-off areas and if you do for God’s sake don’t do a faceplant.

  This tree-kill looked no larger. Okay, then. Steady at ADVISORY.

  We topped the road and parked at the shuttlebus plaza, getting out near the statue of the woolly mammoth. Once, the real thing roamed here and now its iced effigy rears in bronze, town mascot. Our nod to the Pleistocene.

  We were on the broad shoulder of Mammoth Mountain, two thousand feet below its summit. I glanced up. Impossible not to. The mountain’s great bulk showed by starlight—a hotshot’s mountain with headwall chutes and plenty of vertical drop. I once took a header down the chute known as Grizzly, which in my opinion should be skied only by paramedics. Down here on the shoulder, backing into the mountain, were the lodge and lift stations, where I used to earn my paychecks. Across the shuttle roundabout was Mammoth Mountain Inn, alpine fancy, where I endured my senior prom. Light spilled from the Inn and mixed with the inky night to grease the snow with a butternut glow.