“What about the glitter?”
“Also versatile. The glittery substance is actually small flecks of mica.”
“What’s mica?”
“The micas are an important group of minerals. There are more than thirty different kinds, and they’re used for a lot of industrial purposes: as a lubricant, in paints, in roofing shingles, and in insulation. I think years ago the pioneers used mica to make windows. In the rough, it’s very pretty and shiny. It can come in big sheets, or in much smaller chunks and flakes. It is often ground up for industrial purposes. Nowadays, you can find mica in all sorts of products. I think they even use it sometimes to put the sparkles in ladies makeup.”
He went on to describe the mica mining process, but I was only half listening. I was still stuck on his list of products that contained mica: paint, shingles, insulation.
In other words, construction materials.
“So if I theorized that he died at a construction site,” I said when he paused to take a breath, “that wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption?”
“A construction site? Well, yes and no. The chemicals could be used in a variety of ways in a construction setting. But the mica… hmm… I’m not sure.”
“But you just said they put mica in shingles and paint and insulation. The man disappeared near a construction site where there were pallets of shingles, not to mention other building materials.”
“Yes, ground mica. But the mica in the subject’s lungs wasn’t ground up at all. It was in flakes, the way that it comes in its original state.”
“What about glitter?” I asked, thinking of Go the Distance. “Could he have drowned in a bucket of cleanser that had flecks of glitter in it, like the kind you’d find in a school?”
“Again, mica is used to make glitter sometimes, but these flecks were unprocessed. So, no, it’s not glitter.”
“Then what are you saying?” I pressed. “Given the chemicals and the mica, where do you think he was killed?”
“If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it happened at a mica processing plant.”
“Are there such things in the area?”
“There aren’t any in Greenbriar, of course, but there’s one in Asheville, and probably ten more within a sixty mile radius. The hills around here are full of mica, so it stands to reason that it would be processed nearby.”
“So you think he was killed at a processing plant and then brought back to the orchard and put into the apples?”
“Doesn’t sound likely, does it? Yet I don’t know how else you could account for all three elements to be present at once—sodium hydrosulfite, sodium bisulfite, and mica flakes.”
I took a deep breath and let it out, wondering when, exactly, this case got so complicated.
“So what have you concluded about the manner of drowning?” I asked finally.
“Only that the body wasn’t fully immersed. As far as I can tell, only his head was submerged. My guess is that someone grabbed him by the hair and shoved his face into a vat or some kind of container that had the chemicals and the mica in it. It wouldn’t have taken long for him to die, so while it wasn’t a pleasant end by any means, at least it would’ve been mercifully brief.”
I thanked the doctor for his help, gave him my numbers in case he came up with anything further, and concluded the call.
After entering all of the information in my database, I went online and did a search for “mica.” Right away it was obvious that I would need to be a bit more specific. I checked out a few websites, but they were mostly filled with processing specifications, so finally I gave up and went into my e-mail.
Sadly, there was nothing there from Tom, but I was glad to see that the e-mails I had sent out for references on MORE the day before had come pouring back in. I went through them one by one and entered them into my database. I was thrilled that every single contact had returned a glowing review. When I finished assembling the data, I began typing up my report, summarizing some of my conclusions. Harriet was in with the director of development, but I hoped that when she came back to the conference room we could review the entire investigation.
The phone rang while I was waiting for her; it was the medical examiner, and he sounded excited.
“Ms. Webber,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind that I called you back. I just thought of something.”
“Yes?”
“It was your questions, actually, that led to me it. After we hung up, I was trying to imagine a situation other than a processing plant in which sodium hydrosulfite, sodium bisulfite, and raw mica might all be found in the same place. And then it hit me.”
“Yes?”
“Gem mining.”
“Gem mining?”
“Yes! In its natural state, mica is often found in a cluster with other gemstones. Rubies, sapphires, quartz, aquamarine—you name it. I won’t go into the geology of it, but the fact remains that many different kinds of gems are often found together with mica. And an old gemhunter’s trick is to soak the stones in iron remover. It gets some of the marks and stains off, and then they can get a better idea of the quality of the gems.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I admitted.
“If you went panning for rubies,” he said, “the first thing you might do once you got home would be to take a bucket, fill it with a solution of iron remover—in other words, sodium hydrosulfite mixed with sodium bisulfite and water—and then soak your stones in it. Chances are, there would be some mica in those stones. And, chances are, some mica flakes would break off and float in the water.”
“You’re saying that Enrique Morales could’ve been drowned in a bucket of soaking gemstones?”
“It’s quite possible,” he said. “At least that would explain the presence of all three elements at once. And since a bucket of rocks and stain remover could be found almost anywhere, he could’ve been killed right on the premises there and then easily hidden in the apples. No trip to a mica processing plant necessary.”
“Can you think of any reason why someone would be soaking their gems right out in the open at an orchard?”
“Well, now you’re really getting into conjecture, which isn’t my area. I deal in physical analysis.”
“Oh, come on, Doc,” I urged. “Your job’s not as cut and dried as all that. If you didn’t like conjecture, you wouldn’t be a forensic pathologist.”
He laughed.
“Fine, then,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot. You said something earlier about a construction site? In these mountains, it’s not all that unusual for stones to turn up—sometimes valuable stones—right on the ground. Right in the dirt. You hear stories all the time about people walking through the woods and picking up a rock that turns out to be an emerald worth a thousand dollars.”
“Really?” I asked, my heart pounding as many pieces of the puzzle began to click into place.
“Sure. I know the stories get exaggerated, but there’s no question that the mountains are filled with important rocks and minerals. I would imagine that a little construction could stir things up, maybe unearth some precious gems. Who’s to say that the workers didn’t find some stones and set them to soaking right there on the site? It’s hard to know what you’ve got, really, until it’s been cleaned. Maybe our man was caught stealing valuable rocks from somebody’s bucket.”
“He wasn’t that kind of guy,” I said quickly. “More likely, he saw the gemstones and threatened to tell the landowner. By all rights, the stones would’ve belonged to him, wouldn’t they?”
We threw around several different scenarios, but I didn’t want to hold the doctor up any longer, so I let him go with a request that he contact the police with the same theory. As we hung up, I had to resist the urge to jump up and dance around the room, just from the relief of finally understanding what was going on. Gem mining! Of course!
Zeb Hooper was mining gemstones, traveling to New York to sell them, and coming back home to launder the profits through Su Casa! I
thought about the kudzu-laden field where I had tracked his footprints this morning. I had to wonder if somewhere up there, hidden by the vines, was an entrance to a mine.
I thought of Zeb’s asset report, and I realize that was why he owned so much undeveloped property in the area. He must’ve bought it all for the mineral rights!
How Enrique had stumbled across what Zeb was doing, I could only imagine. But, as the medical examiner said, there was probably a bucket with soaking stones right there at the Su Casa work site.
I felt sad for poor Luisa, for poor Enrique, and for all of the migrants. Despite Karen’s rosy descriptions of life in the migrant camps, one of the driving forces in their lives was pure poverty. I thought back to Enrique’s last day, to the conversation he’d had with his son. He had talked about being poor but honorable, saying that a man’s honor was the most valuable thing he could have. “You can’t put a price on honor” he’d said to Pepe.
Perhaps he had been trying to decide whether it was worth trading his honor for some gemstones.
Forty-Four
Feeling antsy, I checked my watch and tried to calculate where Tom might be at that moment, but “somewhere over the Pacific” was the best I could figure. For some reason, knowing I couldn’t contact him by phone made me want to talk to him a thousand times more! Soon we would be together, I told myself, and that’s all that really mattered.
But if our reunion was to come together seamlessly, this investigation had to be brought to a close before then. Fortunately, Harriet finished her session with the fund-raising person, and she and I were finally able to get down to brass tacks in the conference room. We pulled out the list of ten criteria for judging a nonprofit and went down one item at a time, looking at my data and her records as we wrote out our conclusions.
This part of the job was always very painstaking, but I still enjoyed it immensely. There was such closure in slowly going down a list and tying up all of the loose ends that we had been working with all week.
By the time we got to the bottom of the list, we knew we were almost finished. Harriet still needed to look into a few things that related to the board of directors, and I still needed to sit down with Dean and Natalie and talk about their future plans for MORE. One of the criterion was “plans and spends wisely,” and though Harriet and I had already verified that they spent their money very wisely, I still needed to know where they planned to take this place in the future.
Of course, “plans wisely” was a fairly subjective guideline. I generally tried to watch for two danger signs: underplanning, where a company simply let their development unfold willy-nilly, and overplanning, where they had an unrealistic expectation for the things they would be able to accomplish in the immediate future. As long as a company fell between those two extremes, I was fairly generous with my approval. Dean and Natalie were such level-headed people that I felt certain this criterion would give us no problem.
All that was left, then, was for Harriet and me to write our list of contingencies for approval. We had three: sever ties with the problematic Su Casa, take steps to mend relations with the County Migrant Bureau, and implement better protections and procedures regarding passwords. If MORE could do those things, then we were going to recommend that they receive the grant of 1 million dollars.
Dean had already said he was willing to break off from Su Casa if there were some unethical goings on there. But I didn’t see how the relationship with the County Migrant Bureau could be mended until the events of last fall had fully come to light. The agent at the bureau was convinced that the problems had happened because MORE suffered from “shoddy controls,” but that simply wasn’t true. If we could prove to him that the two security violations were actual cases of criminal mischief and malicious intent, then perhaps he would revise his rating of MORE.
Of course, in order to do that, more of the questions surrounding the death of Enrique Morales needed to be answered. My hope was that I could close out the final part of the charity investigation and then dedicate my efforts solely toward identifying Enrique’s killer.
Luckily, the local police were working to achieve the same goal, and Detective Sweetwater was a nice woman who was willing to share in a fairly open exchange of information. Needing some of that information now, I dialed her number and was surprised to get through to her in person.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re actually at your desk?”
“I’m staying close to the office today,” she said. “We’ve got plenty going on right here.”
“Can you tell me what happened with Snake?” I asked. “I’ve been worried about him since I talked to you last night.”
“We’ve been questioning him for quite a while,” she said, “but so far he won’t name names. Somebody has him good and scared.”
“I guess I’d be scared too if I watched someone get stabbed right in front of me.”
“I suppose you’re right. Part of the problem, of course, is that we can’t exactly go at him like we would a normal adult. I don’t want any problems down the line when it comes time to prosecute, so we’re treating Snake as a juvenile. In other words, nobody’s screaming in his face. We’re just trying to gently wear him down.”
“Has he admitted to any wrongdoing?”
She hesitated, and I knew we were walking a thin line here between the sharing of information and the violation of confidentiality.
“We’ve managed to get some details of a few incidents, yes,” she said vaguely.
“Then I have to ask you about two specific ones. Just tell me what you can.”
I went on to remind her of the files that had been stolen from the MORE office and the database that was erased. Though I doubted Snake was intelligent enough to handle the computer side of things, I felt certain that he had stolen Ellen Mack’s cell phone and given it to someone who was smart enough to take it from there.
“Actually, Callie,” the detective said, “those were both on our list of suspected crimes, and he did talk about them. He admitted to taking the files but said he didn’t break into the office to do it. Apparently, his mother was working in the building at the time, and all he had to do was walk over to Luisa’s desk and take them. We believe that’s how he earned his first bead. Putting the files in the Laundromat later that night probably earned him the second.”
I sat back and thought about that, feeling very stupid. The day we met, Trinksie mentioned that last fall she was trying to start up a nonprofit fund-raising business. Was it really too big of a leap for me to realize that she had been doing it in one of the “starter offices” at MORE? With a great flash of clarity, I understood that the county agent had a point. If all of the outside people who took advantage of those offices had access to confidential information within the building, then MORE did have shoddy controls. Quickly, I pulled out my list of contingencies for approval and added one more: Construct a physical barrier between the starter offices and the rest of the MORE facility.
“So tell me this,” I said to the detective. “Has he admitted to stealing a smartphone?”
“Actually,” she laughed, “he confessed to taking a ‘little baby computer’ from someone’s drawer. We weren’t sure what he meant, but I bet that’s it. According to him, he put it back the very next morning.”
“What did he do with it while he had it?”
“That’s the big question, Callie. He gave it to someone, but he will not tell us who that someone is.”
I thought of Zeb Hooper, and I wondered if he had the computer knowledge to break into a mainframe and wipe out a database. Somehow, the picture didn’t quite fit.
“Pretty soon,” the detective said, “whether he names names or not, we’re going to have to book Snake for aiding and abetting.”
“I was afraid of that. How about his mother? Is she there at the station, freaking out on you?”
“You’re a very perceptive person, Callie. Let’s just say one of her other children has taken her to the doctor
so that she can get a sedative.”
“Poor thing.”
“So tell me quickly and then I have to go, did our white-collar crime investigator get in touch with your coworker?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, and then I asked Harriet, who was absorbed in her own work across the room.
“He’s meeting me here in the morning,” Harriet replied, and I repeated that back to Detective Sweetwater.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not moving on Zeb Hooper or Su Casa until our guy has had a chance to see what you’ve got.”
“I assume the medical examiner called you today with his theory about the gemstones and the iron remover?”
The detective was quiet for a moment.
“You sure do manage to find things out,” she said. “I suppose I should’ve asked this a lot sooner, but are you by any chance licensed to investigate in the state of North Carolina?”
“Yes,” I laughed. “I am. Since I travel for my job, I’ve kept current in a number of states. There’s also some reciprocity. I can fax you copies of my papers, if you need.”
“Are you a bounty hunter too?”
“No. Just a private investigator.”
“Do you have a permit to carry?”
“Nope. I don’t even own a gun.”
“All right, then,” she said, “I guess we’re on the same page. But I think you need to step back a bit and let us do our jobs.”
“Aw, come on, Detective,” I said. “You’re doing your job, and I’m just doing mine.”
Forty-Five
After I hung up the phone, I entered a few notes in my database and then went to see if Dean and Natalie had returned yet to the building. I was glad to see that they were both in Dean’s office. I knocked on the door and asked if they had a few minutes to meet with me.
“Of course, Callie,” Natalie said. “We’re at your disposal.”
A Dime a Dozen Page 28