The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  I began to sink and gripped the desk for support and John made a small noise and I saw what I’d done, I’d just smeared the dusting powder and added my own prints. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, “I know better.” I wiped my gritty hands on my jeans, again and again as though I were a princess whose hands were not to be soiled, crazy just crazy because my hands are not lily white, my hands are stained by chemicals, calloused from hammers and cold chisels, and my nails are so at risk that polish is out of the question. Even Lindsay, who used sunscreens religiously, has the hands of a field geologist. And here I am—what?—cleaning up before approaching Lindsay, as if she would object to grit on my hands. She’s immaculate but if she gets dirty she doesn’t make a fuss, she just goes about her business and cleans up when she can. I fastened my hands and stopped the obsessive wiping.

  I saw John and Eric conferring, glancing at me. “What?” I said.

  “Ummm.” John skimmed his hair. “Randy is ready. To go. But in her ring, there’s some dirt and... we just need to make that collection and Eric said he’d do it.”

  Eric smiled at me, so gentle. “I got it covered.”

  “Cassie does it.”

  Every head in the room snapped up.

  Walter turned in Lindsay’s chair. His face was angry. His color was not good. He looked from face to face, not seeing anyone, not seeing me, and then, not finding what he sought, he turned back to the window. He began to cough, dissolving into a helpless fit of coughing.

  My head swelled again with tears. I didn’t want to do the collection. I said, “I don’t have a kit.”

  “What do you need?” Eric asked. “Tweezers, evidence bags. Anything else?”

  I began to panic.

  “Cassie, do you want me to...”

  I strode to the body.

  She was, for the first time since I had entered the room, alone. Someone had covered her with a metallic blanket, the kind you carry on backpack trips. This was disconcerting—the deceased covered by a survival blanket. But it had been done kindly, for my benefit, because the material covered every sprawling inch of her body except for the right hand.

  I knelt. I was hollowed out, my sickened core removed, leaving this kneeling husk. I seemed to have gone elsewhere, like Lindsay.

  I bent close enough to kiss her hand. The skin was waxy and translucent, the signs of age and fieldwork dimmed as if she’d found some miraculous beauty cream. Her hand was curled so that the fingertips pressed into the rug, and there at the tips, where blood had pooled and lividity was now fixed, her skin was purplish. It looked as though she’d stained her fingers picking berries. She wore rings on the pointer, ring finger, and pinkie. The ring on the pointer was a wide gold band with open scrollwork. I recognized this ring, which she’d bought in Argentina. The Cerro Galan caldera. I stared until the hand with its odd coloration and exotic rings became a composition, framed against the periwinkle blue of the jute rug. Like the folk art prints framed on her walls.

  There were tweezers, I noticed, and a hand lens and plastic evidence bags on the rug beside me.

  I took the lens and tweezers, reviewing the movements necessary to extract evidence. First you do A and then you do B. A finely calibrated robot could do it.

  Her ring was crusted near the web between the pointer and index fingers. Under the lens, the crust resolved into mineral grains, and I should have been able to do an eyeball ID but the names and properties of even the most common minerals were lost to me. I was a robot, able to perform physical tasks but dead to thought. I plucked the grains from the filigree, the stuff that had caught someone’s attention upon initial examination of the body, that had necessitated calling in forensic geologists. I bagged the evidence.

  I tried to rotate the ring but it would not budge. And then her hand was in mine and I tried to pry it open, just enough to see if there was crust on the underside of the ring, but she was in advanced rigor and her hand was as rigid as if it had been fossilized. So for a moment I just held her hand, the warmth of my own flesh against her cold skin. Warmth leaking vigor into cold, basic wilderness survival technique.

  I found myself looking at her wall, at a carved mask she’d unearthed in Mexico, a hideous face with slitted eyes and a snarling mouth with its tongue sticking out. I’d hated it the first time I saw it, and I’d asked her why she bought such a thing. “Keeps me on my toes, honey,” she’d said.

  She deserved her money back.

  CHAPTER 33

  “Caaaseee.” Jeanine came through the doorway, swinging a grocery bag like a large purse. “Luh-uunch.”

  I dropped the sieve. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  She kicked the door shut, rattling the lab window. “No prob. I’m just the delivery girl.” She held up the bag. “Turkey and cheese, and some other shit, and something mondo fattening for dessert. Where d’ya want this sucker?”

  I showed her the fridge where I’d stored the Ski Tip lunches that Bill Bone had been delivering, unsolicited, for the past week.

  “Bill says sorry he can’t come himself.” She set the bag on the counter. “Place is jamming. Rumor central.”

  The window rattled—a quake, this time. Once or twice a day now, something rattles or shimmies. Of course there are hundreds more every day that we can’t feel. Classic quake swarm.

  “Fucking quakes,” Jeanine said. “They’re talking about a WARNING alert, you know?”

  Eruption likely within hours or days. “They’re calling a WARNING?”

  “Nah. Just talkin.” She found her ponytail and began to twist it.

  I glanced outside. Heavy traffic. Cars piled to the roof with stuff, more stuff lashed on top. Some people are leaving for an extended vacation, some for good. Some are staying put, because it’s within the realm of possibility that the volcano will settle back down. Some are hedging their bets—ferrying stuff to storage down in Bishop, fifty miles south along the Sierra fault. Jimbo’s already taken five loads down from the house. I spent all last week packing, when I wasn’t at the lab. Anything to fill the hours. Outside, a big Lexus passed, fully loaded. Driver was Cindy Mathias, the fire chief’s wife.

  “Sooo, Caasss. You the honcho around here now?”

  “Walter’s at home,” I said, level.

  “So how long’s he gonna stay home?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re pissed.”

  I took up the sieve and a dish of soil. “I’m too busy to be pissed.”

  “Jimbo says you’re pissed. Jimbo says you don’t talk to anybody.”

  I dropped the dish, peppering soil across my workbench. “Look, I’ve got a bureau in Los Angeles that wanted a report on this evidence last week. I got a call this morning from Costa Rica and they have a corpse with dirt down its throat and a diplomatic situation and they want Walter to come to the jungle before the deceased rots. I’ve got...”

  “The Georgia stuff.”

  “Yeah.” The pumice-Jeffrey mix—the puzzling soil from inside her mouth—sat in a box on the catch-all table, in limbo. If I listened I could hear its siren song, Georgia calling: Come have another look. Keep looking and I’ll ID the killer for you. Georgia hanging in there, in limbo, never say die. Just like her.

  “And the Lindsay case,” Jeanine said.

  Very carefully, I began to recover the spilled soil.

  Jeanine’s hands alighted on her hips. “You’re not the only one who’s bummed about Lindsay.”

  I flushed, not because I was taken down by her remark, although she was right enough, but because it was exactly what I wanted to say to Walter.

  Jeanine scuffed to the door. “So if you decide to take a break and hang out, we’ll be at the Tip awhile. Jimbo’s there. DeMartinis. Out of work, you know?” She eyed me. “Pika’s done. Krom’s a real creep but he sure got the road done. So now what? We just kick back and wait, right? Dude says get out, we got a guaranteed way out now, so no sweat. But I’m thinkin nothin’s gonna happen after all. So that’s cool—we stil
l got a new road. Shortcut to Bishop.” Her eyes slitted. “You pray, Cass?”

  I should have.

  “I’m startin up again. Can’t hurt.” She opened the door. “So anyway, see ya.” She reached under her sweater to yank down the back of her bra, hiking her front, and eased out the door.

  “Thanks Jeanine,” I called after her.

  The L.A. soil sat waiting on my bench. I had not yet touched the L.Nash evidence. Bad procedure. So far, the cops had next to nothing—no DNA to sequence, no prints to compare against Krom’s or anyone else’s. They did have some fibers; Sears wool. John was waiting for the mineral evidence but he put no pressure on me. He was leaving the scene sealed, should I recover myself enough to go have another look. Eric’s been dropping by, at least once a day. Gives me a smile when he leaves, scar tissue crackling under his eye, a living example that time heals all wounds. But he puts no pressure on me.

  Nobody, really, expects me to pull myself together enough to sit upright at my workbench.

  But grief isn’t the problem. I’ve been waiting for Walter.

  Walter’s only directions, regarding Lindsay, have been to ask that I go through her mail and pay her bills. Even as executor, Walter is unable to cope.

  And I’d pissed away the past week doing our bread-and-butter work that was critical to somebody and about which I cared nothing now, nothing.

  I gathered the Los Angeles material and dumped the lot on Walter’s workbench. I put the culture dish containing the L.Nash evidence on my bench. Time to do the initial examination. Goddamn well past time. I stuck a scalpel into the stuff in the dish, stuff that in some way had to have some link to the perp who left no other trace.

  ~ ~ ~

  “The color, Walter.”

  He looked. “I’d attribute that to...silicon.” He thought awhile. “Or aluminum.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Chroma...slight departure from the neutral gray...I’d assign it a one, or...” He lifted his head. “Where’s Munsell?”

  “Forget the Munsell charts.” I’d spoken heresy. Color’s always the first thing we look at, and we calibrate it by the Munsell color charts. I had no quarrel with Munsell. I’d already ranked the evidence and I didn’t need Walter to confirm it. I was getting at something else—only I wanted it to occur to him, independently, as it had occurred to me. Electrified me.

  And here he sat, parked on his stool, waiting for me to tell him why he should forget the god Munsell. Eyes blue and mild as a baby’s; I’d rank them hue of blue and value of eight and chroma of nine, virtually pure. All the acuity—the shadings of knowledge and intellect and wit—was gone from his eyes.

  I was sick with impatience. “What is it we’re seeing?”

  “What is it? What is it?” He gazed beyond me. “Grains of limestone.”

  “Yes I know but I want you to look at the color.”

  He said, weary, “Chroma is a one and...”

  I snapped, “You sound like a broken record.” I thought his eyes darkened, impurities in the blue. Irritation with me. Whatever it takes. “I need you to think. That’s why I asked—no, that’s why I begged you to come in today.”

  He said, “I’m tired.”

  I got off my stool. “I’ll make coffee.”

  “No.”

  “You’re giving up coffee? That’s going to help?”

  He looked at me as if he didn’t know me.

  “Walter, there’s two pounds of beans in the fridge. Are you going to just leave them there?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “That’s enough coffee to last indefinitely, or that’s enough Cassie and shut up?”

  “That’s enough, Cassie.”

  “I drank coffee made from her beans too.” I glared but I didn’t have Jeanine’s gall, and as bummed as Jeanine may have been about Lindsay, I was a thousand times more bummed. And Walter. Bummed beyond endurance. Even coffee caused pain. In truth, I had not gone near the beans either. “Go on home,” I told Walter. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He said, contrarily, “I’ll stay.”

  He’ll stay because he’s lonely at home, or he’ll stay because he’s decided to help?

  He made a close study of the evidence.

  Not what I asked. I needed him to leap. I couldn’t stand the wait so I watched the laden cars passing on Minaret. Minaret and I are in different time zones—opposite sides of the date line. It’s yesterday on the street. It’s tomorrow where I am. The world has flipped.

  Walter said, “Use the spectrophotometer on it.”

  I almost screamed. Yes, I’ve done it, I’ve bingoed the element lamps and I know it was aluminum that painted our limestone gray. It was not gray from iron or silicon, which would have pointed me to other limestones, other places. It was aluminum and that pointed me to a very specific place. I said, “You’ve seen this stuff in the field. You know where it comes from.”

  “I’m sure I’ve... Somewhere.”

  “We talked about it. Right here. Day we vaporized the cyanide.”

  For the first time this morning, for the first time since we lost Lindsay, Walter’s eyes met mine. Not just gazed in my direction, but settled there. “Hot Creek,” he said.

  “So you remember.” My core was ice. “Lindsay told Georgia where to collect a crinoid for Adrian. A lover’s gift. Georgia got one for Lindsay, too. A thank-you. And Lindsay must have been touched by the offering because she put it on her desk with all her treasures.”

  Walter gave me a hollow look.

  “John asked me to look at her desk. The day that... See if anything was missing. I looked but my heart wasn’t really in it. But I visualize it now and I don’t think the crinoid was there. Did you see it? That day?”

  The blue of his eyes shaded.

  “Then I guess I better go look.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The yellow crime-scene tape was still in place. It seemed right that this place was sealed. It should remain sealed for eternity.

  I unlocked the frosted glass door and ducked under the tape.

  Her office had not been disturbed. Every surface that would hold prints was fuzzy with black powder, and there were wads of discarded tape on the floor. Actually, it made being here easier. I could not picture Lindsay at that grimed desk. She would not sit shivering in this cold. The room had finally cooled down. I kept my jacket on.

  The irregular dark stain on the rug looked permanent.

  I could not look at that. I looked, instead, at her desk. All the pretty cluttered things. And no pretty crinoid.

  I took a seat in Lindsay’s desk chair. Creamy soft leather. A dream of a chair. The thought came that Lindsay would want me to have it. I stiffened. I could never sit and work in such a chair.

  But surely this is where she sat that night. Working. Monitoring the progress of the quakes. And then the perp barges in. Does he show the gun right away? Soon enough. And what about her gun? I pictured, vividly, sitting on the other side of this desk and asking her how she could have set up that thing at Hot Creek, and I saw, vividly, how she had to swivel her chair to retrieve her gun from the credenza, to show me how she had the situation covered. She can’t do that now, with him. She swivels and he says freeze, or something. Whatever he says, whatever he wants, he gives her time enough to think up a plan. His gun tells her she may not come out of this alive. She can’t reach her gun. She sees the crinoid on her desk—the symbol. At some point while he glances away—maybe she distracts him, says who’s that in the hallway—she palms the rock. She drops her hand to her lap, hidden from him by the desk, and she sets to work.

  She’s scared, of course, but she’s Lindsay and her wits never leave her. So here she sits, worrying grains from a telling stone into the matrix of her ring, knowing it won’t escape the attention of two cop geologists, should it come to that. Knowing they’ll get the message.

  And what’s the gunman doing? Just watching? What does he want? Why is he going to kill her? Why doesn�
�t he shoot her right away? What does he want?

  My head was spinning. I opened my eyes.

  And once she works the grains into the ring, what does she do with the rock? He never sees it—if he saw it he would have known enough to see what she’d done. After all, he’s fallen in love with forensic geology. He would have taken the rock and the ring. But he didn’t. The encrusted ring stayed on her finger.

  So where’s the crinoid rock?

  I’m Lindsay and I have to hide this rock and I can’t make any obvious moves or he’ll notice. I’m standing on the jute rug when he shoots me, so I had to have hidden the rock before I got there.

  It had to be in the desk.

  I reached to open the top right-hand drawer. No. He’ll see my arm move.

  And then the obvious hit me, as it must have hit her. There is a shallow center drawer, and all I have to do is raise my knee to slide it open. The modesty shield on his side of the desk will block his view.

  I raised my knee and nudged the drawer open and it slid silently because her desk is the kind of quality craftsmanship that makes drawers slide smoothly. I looked inside. Keys. Hand lens. Flashlight and batteries, pens and pencils, paper clips. Tape measure. Clinometer. Rock hammer and cold chisel. A geologist’s catch-all drawer. Not surprisingly, containing a rock. Bo or Lupe or Jim would not have found it odd upon checking the drawer to see a rock. Not worth mentioning—she had rocks on her desk, in the cabinet, on top of the apothecary cupboard. She used a rock as a doorstop.

  I took out the chunk of gray limestone with the white disk standing in high relief. I used her lens. Under high-power, the limestone looked the same as the ring evidence I’d examined in the lab. Or darned similar to. I bagged the crinoid.

  I felt nauseated.

  There was a terrible odor in the room and it came from the apothecary cupboard. I hadn’t noticed when I first entered because it was so familiar. Someone had left the cupboard doors ajar and the coffee bean oils were scenting the office. I covered my mouth but the odor was on my hands. It was in my clothes, in my hair.