Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  “Sorry, my sense of humor gets out of hand rather easily.”

  “No, it’s just … well, I happened to know the guy.”

  “Ooo! Bad luck! So how can I help you?”

  “Well, I’m mostly making contact. Us forensic geologists have got to stick together.”

  “Yeah, we’re rare as hens’ teeth. So, you working on anything? Carlos suggested you might be.”

  “I’ve got some red clays as trace evidence. Do you guys have an index of Colorado soils or clays lying around loose?”

  Tim Osner laughed. “No, sorry, but I’d love to play ‘Where’s the clay?’ any Saturday. Sorry if it dulls my luster, but the rest of the week I mostly fly a desk. Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m staring into a computer. My forensic work is on a volunteer basis. I don’t get paid for it, but it sure gets the blood running in the veins.”

  “Tell me how that works.”

  “Well, a couple of chums and I have an association with the law enforcement detectives. When they have a missing corpse, someone’s gone and gotten lost in a river or drowned in a lake, and the job is to find the body, they give us a call. We use geological tools and logic to figure out where it is. I narrow the search by using geological computer software—RockWare—to plot probabilities in three and four dimensions. Say you’re trying to figure out where the body (a three-dimensional object in three-dimensional space) went (moved through time, the fourth dimension). I tickle the software into crunching a bunch of coordinates and running a wad of probability algorithms and then plotting the whole mess on the computer screen or a sheet of paper, all color-coded to indicate hot spots of likelihood.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

  “It’s a blast. We call up our buddies: Geologists, geophysicists, biologists, botanists, psychologists, anthropologists, meteorologists, criminologists, and use cadaver dogs, software, telemetry, you name it. All week long I plug away at my boring little life, but on Saturday if the police have a job for us, I charge on out to the site and I’m … some-body!”

  “A regular Walter Mitty.”

  “In person. At your service, ma’am. Which way to the self-help session on hero self-worship?”

  We fell into a fit of giggles. I knew I’d have no trouble getting along with the likes of Tim Osner.

  “So when are we going looking for red dirt?” he inquired. “I’m free tonight.”

  “I’m calling from Utah, friend. And sorry, I’ve already made my run to Colorado with this case, but may I call you if I have any questions in the future?”

  “Sure. Ciao, baby.”

  MICHELE PHONED TEN MINUTES LATER. SHE HAD READ my fax. “That’s all?”

  “My, you are cranky! Okay, so it’s nothing very helpful, not without something to stick it to on the other end.”

  “What does that mean, specifically?” The surge of hope in her voice was intense and immediate. I began to wonder what she had riding on this case.

  “I have limonite-stained kaolinite on the man’s boots. He had a chert pebble in his pocket, probably a worry stone. The—”

  “A what stone?”

  “A worry stone. You know, something smooth you fiddle with. So far as I know, he could have carried it in his pocket since he was nine or something.”

  “I was hoping for some clue about where he’d been during the days he was missing.”

  “Missing? How long is he unaccounted for?”

  “Not missing as in reported to the police, but no one can say where he was, or will say where he was since Wednesday afternoon. He was found at the quarry Friday morning. Attabury said he saw him in Castle Rock on Tuesday. Upton said he wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen him, it could have been weeks. Entwhistle said it had been late the week before but wasn’t sure of the date. Johnson said he’d been out of town himself. Gilda—”

  “So you finally got something out of Gilda? What did you do, nail both of her feet to the floor and threaten her with a greasy French fry?”

  “No. She has issued a statement. Through Todd Upton, who is apparently her lawyer. She states that she was away when McWain left—down in Colorado Springs getting her skin exfoliated, but why that takes two days I don’t understand—so she didn’t know when he left the ranch. She last saw him on Tuesday, or so she states. She was only just returning from Colorado Springs when she stopped at the Sedalia Grill to use the bathroom and ‘just happened’ to run into the men.”

  “So how did McWain get to Utah?”

  “I’ve searched all the airlines and bus lines, and I’ve asked everyone at the ground-water conference who drove over from Colorado if anyone gave him a ride and they all said no. He must have hitched a ride. Looking for someone who gave a ride to a hitchhiker is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I may have to put a plea out on TV. But on the other hand, if one or more of our star suspects is lying, and one of them drove him over here and killed him, well … I’m going to have to figure out how to prove it. I’m trying to run their credit cards, to see if any of them charged gas in, say, Grand Junction or Green River, but so far, nothing.”

  “So where did you get that Wednesday time fix?”

  “Bart Johnson’s son Zachary picked him up on the road and gave him a lift as far as Bud’s Bar in Sedalia, where he works.”

  “So Afton told him he was leaving town? Did he get any more out of him?”

  “No, it’s just the last fix I could get on him. Zachary said McWain used to hitch rides with him a lot, because otherwise it’s a five-mile hike to town.”

  “Was he carrying anything? A backpack or anything? As if he was leaving town for a while?”

  “No, he was just dressed ‘as always.’ Slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, hiking boots. That was it.”

  “I’ll bet he was just going into town for some reason. He didn’t have to be in Utah until Sunday. Why would he leave early?”

  “But he did leave early,” Michele pointed out. “He was here by Thursday night.”

  “Yeah. So what are the alibis you’re trying to crack? Where were the four men Thursday and Friday?”

  “Oh, they’ve got some good lines. Gilda was at that spa,” she said, beginning to tick off a list.

  “Oh, it was a spa.”

  “All very tidy, eh? She checked into a spa so she would have plenty of witnesses that she was a good little girl. Upton was in his law office from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. or later every day last week except Thursday, when he took off a little early to play golf. Bart Johnson was looking after his cattle up on his ranch, and Zachary vouches for him, so Zachary and Bart have each other covered.”

  I said, “Sounds like you’re putting a lot of stock in this Zachary, in his word.”

  “I am not. I don’t trust him. He’s the type who’ll tell you what he believes in, rather than what is accurate.”

  “I know the type.”

  “Except Zachary Johnson is not bright enough to start a war. No one would follow him into battle.”

  “But perhaps they’d send him to do battle for them. Anyway, what about Entwhistle, the banker?”

  “Entwhistle was at his bank during the days and home with his wife at night. And Attabury was likewise at his real-estate office, and he was Upton’s golf partner on Thursday evening.”

  “That’s pretty tight,” I said. “It’s over five hundred miles by road from Castle Rock to Salt Lake City. That’s an eight-hour run each way, let alone what it takes to break into a gravel quarry, dump a body, and set off a landslide to cover it. And then of course there’s the time it takes to strip the body of its identifying marks, although if you have two guys in the car, one driving and one working at a corpse with a knife and a pair of pliers in the backseat, but then that would be kind of messy, and …”

  “Nah,” Michele said, “it just doesn’t work. I’ve got to go back to Colorado and dig for someone else who’s pissed at this guy, or figure out what’s staring me right in the face on this end. My boss thought Gilda did it.”

&nb
sp; “Why?”

  “Because she hitchhiked over here to identify the body, when she wasn’t even next of kin. He figured that was a big performance to make it look like she was deeply aggrieved and show everyone how long it takes to hitchhike back and forth. Sort of like doing it with the judges watching.”

  “There’s some merit in that argument. It did seem odd to me that she came over here.”

  “Yeah. But now that she’s presented her alibi, my boss thinks McWain got mugged and dumped.”

  “That seems pretty far-fetched. And it still doesn’t explain why he arrived in Salt Lake City ahead of the conference.”

  “So what do you think?” Michele asked. “Would there be someone at that conference in Snowbird who’s got a gripe?”

  I said, “That’s a long shot. The opportunity might be there, but there would be no motive. Intellectually, scientists have rivalries all over the place, but they don’t go around killing each other over them. That would end the game; it’s much more fun to keep it going. And besides, you know the old saw that murder is usually about money or sex. Well, science doesn’t pay well, and it sure isn’t sexy. And speaking of sex, McWain was only boffing Gilda—or have you checked out that angle?—and he wasn’t in contention for jobs that have a price tag to them anymore. He’d left the oil patch. He’d left the profession entirely, until he dove back in on his quest to save the aquifers. But that presents the motive: People like Attabury and Entwhistle or his neighbor Johnson would not want someone as persuasive as Afton McWain campaigning against them.”

  “Campaigning. An interesting choice of words,” Michele commented. “That reminds me to look into the political arm of this situation. What was that state senator’s name?”

  “White. Good idea, because these people who did not appear to be surprised by news of Afton’s death and who had a reason to want him quiet, each have an alibi. Maybe they know someone else who did it. Some other Realtor who had a piece of the action, or something like that. Man, this is frustrating!”

  Michele said, “Welcome to my world. They all feel like this if they hang on more than forty-eight hours.”

  “Why forty-eight?”

  “Because the crimes you solve faster than that are the easy, obvious ones. There’s an adage that if it goes on for more than two days it’s going to be a difficult one because someone’s actually done a halfway decent job of covering his tracks.” She sighed. She sounded tired. “Do you have anything else for me? Anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to Julia again?”

  I said, “You don’t have to ask me three different times in three different ways. I have nothing else. Zip. I’m done.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I didn’t even argue this time. I knew she was right.

  EIGHTEEN

  AFTER THEIR EVENING MEAL, RITA MAE SAT AT HER sister Mary Ann’s dining table with a pad of paper, making notes. Across the table lay sheets of paper that she had pulled from Henry Nettleton’s file labeled MCWAIN. She took a sip of tea and cleared her throat. “It’s a mess, but I think I understand it now,” she said. “I’m glad Henry held on to this.” She held up a sheet of notes entitled CITIZENS’ GROUP, and pointed at the telephone number that Henry had underlined three times. “That woman we telephoned will be along shortly now.”

  Mary Ann looked up from the sock she was knitting. She had been knitting all day and knitting with a fury she had not previously brought to that activity. The yarn was wrapped so tightly around her aging fingers that it was polishing her thin skin to a shine. “All right, I’m ready to hear it.”

  “This man McWain, he did a lot of research,” Rita Mae began. “There’s all this science he did, for instance. It took me a while to understand any of it, but it seems that the water comes out of the rock, not an underground river as the well drillers told you.”

  “Out of rock? How can that be?”

  Rita Mae looked at her sister over the tops of her reading glasses. She loved Mary Ann and knew her to be highly competent at the tasks she liked to do, but it had always been clear that other jobs were best left to someone who had other talents. It took all kinds to make a world, and Mary Ann was simply not the analytical type. “Just take that on faith,” she said. “The thing is, some kinds of rock can hold more water than others.”

  Mary Ann set down her knitting and held her hands together to make a cup. She looked up at Rita Mae with a pathetic glimmering of hope in her eyes.

  Rita Mae said, “No, Mary Ann. Think of it like a sort of sponge. Like in your kitchen here, some materials will soak up the water and then let you wring it out more easily than others.”

  The dawning of comprehension softened the lines on Mary Ann’s forehead. “You mean the way a good cotton terry makes a better towel than polyester.”

  Rita Mae said, “Something like that, Mary Ann. But for the moment, think of it like a nice, big bucket. You stick your straw in there and have yourself a drink. You can drink for quite a while before the water runs out. And then maybe there’s a tiny little trickle of water coming back in from somewhere—drip by drip—but if you’re drinking from that straw and your neighbor’s got a straw going, too, and his neighbor … well, you see, it’s just coming out faster than it’s going in, and you’re out of water.”

  “So you’re saying we can’t share like our dear father taught us to.”

  “I’m saying there are more people in this world than there used to be, so there’s not enough to go around.”

  Mary Ann said, “That’s frightening, Rita Mae. I don’t like thinking about that.”

  “I understand, Mary Ann, but this time you don’t have a choice. You can refuse to think about it, but the facts don’t change.” She cocked an ear to the sound of a car approaching in the driveway. “Ah. That will be her now.”

  The doorbell rang, and Mary Ann got up to answer it.

  At the door was a woman carrying a well-worn accordion file tied up with black ribon. “I’m Helga Olsen,” she announced. “I’m so glad to meet you at last.”

  “Come in, Mrs. Olsen. This is my sister, Rita Mae Jones.”

  When they were all settled at the kitchen table with fresh cups of tea, and Mary Ann had once again resumed her frantic knitting, Mrs. Olsen opened her file and began to take out papers. “As you may know, a group of us have formed a citizens’ alliance to stop development in this area. Now, I know that sounds like, ‘I’ve got mine, now the rest of you stay away,’ because few of us grew up here, but I see it differently. We have our investments to protect, and we also prefer that anyone who might be thinking of moving in here not get swindled by purchasing a house that’s going to run out of water in jig time.”

  Helga extracted a stack of newspaper clippings and laid them out on the table. “These articles may have a lot of unfamiliar words in them, but the thrust of the matter is clear enough: Colorado doesn’t have enough water for all the people who are being born here, let alone the people who are moving in from other places. In the northern and western parts of Colorado, the water supply is pulled from the rivers mostly, but down here in the southeast, most of it has to come out of the ground. And there just isn’t enough water in the ground, so municipalities like Denver and surrounding cities have begun buying up the water rights from the farmers.” She pointed at a sidebar that summarized the facts. “Thousands of acres per year—even tens of thousands—are being pulled out of production so the water can be piped to the cities.”

  Mary Ann said, “Well then, our municipality should be looking after this!”

  “No, dear, you don’t live in a municipality. You are on a private well. You’re out here on thirty-five acres, and you have to find your own water.”

  Mary Ann’s knitting needles clacked faster and faster. “You’re telling me that this is widely known. That there have been articles published in … in a newspaper or something and that people know this and they didn’t tell Henry or me.”

  “That appears to b
e the fact.”

  “What newspaper was that article in?”

  Rita Mae looked at the margins of the papers. “It’s The Denver Post, sister. And this one’s in your local paper here in Castle Rock.” She tipped her head forward and studied Helga Olsen over the tops of her glasses. “Now, I imagine that if it was in that paper, it would have been the talk of this whole county.”

  Helga opened another section of her accordion file. “And here’s a whole packet of articles about a development some people from out of state wanted to put in just south of here, that would have pulled the water out of our ground even faster. Luckily, we’ve put a stop to that one, for the time being. But there’s one more thing you need to know, Mary Ann.”

  “What’s that? I can barely stand this!”

  Helga turned another page in the sheaf of notes. “This is a photocopy of the permit to drill a well on your property.”

  Mary Ann’s face knit with angry confusion. “I don’t understand. What are you trying to tell me? Do I need a permit to drill my new well? Or does it already exist?”

  Helga shook her head. “You do need a permit, but this is not it. This is the permit for your existing well, drilled one month before you purchased this property. And this …” She turned the next page. “This is the permit for the original well drilled on this property two years before that, when the house was built.”

  “I’ve got two wells? Where’s the other one?”

  Helga turned a sad face toward her neighbor. “No, dear, you have just the one. It appears that the first one is just a hole in the ground, and it’s dead dry.” She tapped that page. “The people who first lived in this house ran out of water, too. They knew there was almost none left, so they drilled themselves another well and quick sold the property to you.”

  “Then … I have to drill deeper yet?”

  “No, it looks like you’re already clear to the bottom of the aquifer. You see, the water here is all but gone. Each new well is lucky if it hits a tiny part of the rock that just didn’t get drained yet, and those wells don’t make water but a little while. But Mr. Attabury’s company wants to build more houses out here anyway.”