Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  That time when I awoke, I heard Georgia chiding me. You’re not the victim, I am.

  *****

  Early the next morning I went to the lab and laid out my findings for Walter.

  Walter took his time, poking through specimen dishes, plucking out items of special interest, comparing gunpower grains under the comparison scope, scrutinzing minerals under the polarized lightscope.

  I waited, watching. On the screen of the lightscope, minerals floated like fish in the sea.

  Walter finished and turned to me. “We have a soil match.”

  “I agree.”

  “More than that. We have a gunpowder match. This is especially significant because the powders are so unusual.”

  “I agree.”

  “We need to hurry along the gunpowder lab. We need an ID of those mystery powders.”

  “I sent an email last night. I praised the chief examiner for a paper he presented at the last conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and asked if he could move things along.”

  “Was it a good paper?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I just googled it and grabbed the title.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted, and then he smiled.

  “So,” I said, “what we need now are exemplars that contain the hot springs minerals, and cyanide. Means we have to dig.”

  Still, Walter smiled. “I’ll take the cyanide pond.”

  “You and your mines. Okay, fair enough, you have fun with that and I’ll start the grid search for the spring.”

  “Tomorrow morning?” Walter said.

  “Early. Lot of digging to do.”

  “In the meantime,” Walter said, “we have all of today to do a thorough analysis on the soils.”

  “I need to get caffeinated first.” I poured us both a cup, and we took the time to nurse the brew in companionable silence. Enjoying the small moment of victory. A good-sized step in the direction of solving the case, finding out where Georgia died. And, I had to admit with a small stab of guilt, just the simple pleasure at doing the geology.

  Walter finished his coffee and turned back to the lightscope. He rotated the polarizer, turning a hexagonal crystal to its point of extinction, where all light is absorbed.

  I took a moment to do some scutwork, labeling the gunpowder samples. Unidentified powder number one. Number two. And so on. And, finally, the one powder from the tunnel that I could identify: dimples. Fiocchi, choice of many a biathlete—including Mike and Eric and Stobie and my brother Jimbo.

  My gaze shifted to the Alice-in-Wonderland poster on the wall behind Walter’s bench. Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole. The message being, you follow the evidence wherever it takes you, down the rabbit hole if you must.

  Even if you don’t want to go there.

  *****

  We worked until the dinner hour and my stomach growled and then Walter left to go get takeout.

  Five minutes later, Krom knocked at the door, same time as he opened it.

  I sucked in a long breath, and motioned him to take Walter’s stool.

  He scooted it over beside mine. He assessed the specimen dishes laid out on my bench. He took off his parka and laid it across his knees. His gaze came to rest on me. “I haven’t heard from you for two days, Cassie.”

  “I’ve been too busy.”

  “Nothing of interest to report?”

  I considered our bargain. I decided I’d better warn him. “I might have found the place Georgia died but I have to tell you, there’s nothing there that impacts your job. Nothing to do with the volcano.” I shrugged. “Nothing you can use to spin, over beers with John Amsterdam.”

  His hand slammed down on my workbench.

  I jumped.

  He took hold of my arm, as if to steady me.

  I pulled away.

  “Listen to me.”

  I stiffened.

  “Give me your hand,” he said, soft. “Please.”

  I looked through the storefront window, at the crowds passing by, tired from the slopes and ready to find a place for dinner.

  Krom caught my look. “Please, Cassie. Please.”

  I gave him my hand.

  He shoved up his right sleeve and placed my hand on his forearm, on top of the tattooed scar, so that my palm cupped the raised flesh. “I want to share a vision with you. I want you to feel it.”

  His arm was hot. My hand was unaccountably cold.

  “On the other side of the world,” he said, “a volcano out of the blue starts erupting. There’s a tribe living on its slopes and they blame the outsiders who’ve been drilling holes into their mountain. You see, these outsiders are after geothermal energy. But the tribe thinks the mountain is their mother and the drilling has made her so mad she’s exploded. The tribe runs to escape her anger but two of them—a man and a woman—run toward the eruption, not away from it. The sacrifice satisfies their mother and she lets the rest of the tribe escape.”

  His flesh was beginning to warm my icy hand.

  “The volcanologists come and have a look and decide the mountain is letting off steam. It’s just getting started.” His arm tensed, beneath my hand. “I was one of those outsiders drilling into the mountain. When things got bad, the scientists warned us. Our camp was was evacuated. It was chaos.”

  I thought of the photos in his office.

  “It was dark and raining stones. My truck got separated from the group. Driver went the wrong way, toward the eruption, not away from it. Truck stalled in the ash. Driver and I got out to check the engine. He got hit by a lava bomb. Killed him. I was shit-scared I was going to die. Then I got hit, in the arm. Pain like I’ve never known. I got back into the truck. My arm was a blessing, a sacrifice. I screamed in pain. Pain moved me beyond the fear.”

  He fell silent, waiting for me to speak.

  I did not know what to say.

  He resumed. “Later, I heard about the man and woman who offered themselves up to save their tribe. I decided that’s what I’m going to do with my life.”

  He cupped his hand over mine and pressed. My fingers splayed, the tips coming to rest on the boundary of the scar, where its rubbery surface rose from the soft hairs of intact flesh.

  “And I’ve already proved I can take the pain.”

  I asked, “So we’re the tribe?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Late that night, I stood at the window of the cottage out back of my parents’ house, waiting for Eric.

  I’m bunking here now but this cottage used to be the hangout of my brother and his friends. The paneling is darkened cedar, hung with their old snapshots. It’s one big room with a toilet and sink in the closet, and it’s showing its age. The floor tilts. The wall heater wheezes. The window is crisscrossed by sash bars that have been painted so many times a knife will go in a quarter inch before hitting wood.

  Outside, the yard slopes down to a stream gully. The stream borders the six houses on our side of the street neatly as a fence. Beyond the stream is a meadow. I’ve always liked that because it gives the illusion of wilderness in my backyard.

  I’d picked off two layers of peeling paint when Eric at last appeared. I swung open the door.

  “Evening, Cassie.” He wore his Mammoth PD jacket and he refused my offer of a beer. I ducked into the closet, which stays cold as a refrigerator in winter, and got two cranapples. When I emerged he was reading the names carved into the old table. All Jimbo’s buds had immortalized themselves there. “This place.” He shook his head and hung his jacket over a chair. “It’s a time warp.”

  A fitting place to dive into the mystery of old gunpowder.

  He moved to examine the photos on the wall. He halted in front of the one where the boys, in their early teens, stand on top of some peak. They must have put the camera on a rock and set the timer because all of them are in the picture: Jimbo, Eric, Stobie, Mike, the de Martinis, Bobby Panetta, and Corey Steiner who’s since moved away. I’ve seen enough shots of them with their tongues out, and wo
rse, but in this one they’re solemn kids on top of the world.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said. I gave him the juice.

  He tipped the bottle to me. “Can’t stay long. I’m going to see Stobie.”

  “Jimbo saw him this morning.”

  “Any change?”

  “No. Jimbo would have said. He was rushing for work.” Although the Council was still debating escape route options, work on the Bypass continued. “There’s a change, Jimbo rushing for work.” I took a drink. “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Not after I caught up with him and told him what an idiotic stunt that was at the creek.”

  I tightened, waiting for Eric to mention Lindsay’s name. And mine.

  He didn’t even look at me. He was staring out the window. “What a fuckup. All of it. You know, when we pulled Georgia off the mountain I thought, this is it. This is where the bad stuff happens here, not someplace like L.A. Lot goes down in L.A.—I saw that when I was at the academy. And I know we’ve led some goddamned sheltered lives up here, but our turn had to come sometime. I thought, with Georgia, we’d taken our hit. Some other place was up next. But no. It’s not enough this volcano’s all over us, we’ve got to fuck it up ourselves too.”

  “We had some help.”

  He turned. “Krom? Yeah, guy’s a real cowboy. But he’s got a job I wouldn’t want.”

  “You still think he can do it?”

  “You mean after the creek?” Eric studied his juice. “That took him down a notch or two in my book. Word is, they’re talking about a replacement.”

  “Dicey time to replace him. Changing horses in midstream, and all that.”

  Eric slowly nodded. “So what can I do for you, Cass?”

  I moved to the table. In a green box were the files I brought from my condo. Unpaid bills, journal articles to read, sales on silk long underwear—my hot file. I pulled the front folder and handed it to him.

  He read. He closed the folder and said, neutral, “Nice range of exotics.”

  “They were part of that powder John couriered to the gunpowder lab for us.”

  “Oh?”

  Tonight, when I’d come home from the lab, I’d checked my email and found the report. I sent my thanks and promised to buy the chief examiner dinner sometime. And then I’d phoned Eric.

  Eric returned the folder to me and lifted the cranapple to drink.

  I said, “The gunpowder was in the soil I traced to a mine claim called Gold Dust.”

  The bottle stalled at his lips.

  “There’s a tunnel, about forty meters before it narrows down, almost as long as a biathlon range. I’ve been thinking—wind wouldn’t be a factor indoors. And it stays cold in there.” I remembered the guys as boys talking endlessly about which ammo worked best in the cold. “The one powder in the evidence that I could ID was Fiocchi. Mike told me it was the best. So Fiocchi was the control, and you test-fired the others against it? Exotics, you call them? But none of them ever outperformed Fiocchi.” The chief examiner at the gunpowder lab had identified the mystery makes as limited-production cold weather powders, off the market for over a decade.

  “Heavy artillery,” Eric said. “I’m impressed.”

  “I’m not interested in impressing you.”

  “Then what can I say?”

  “Help me with the chain of events.” I was able to come at it this way, evidence to be dissected. “The evidence—including those unique powders—places Georgia at Gold Dust. It says that’s where she took her last steps.”

  He said, even, “Why ask me about it?”

  “Because we just established you guys used to shoot there. Because Georgia used to sponsor you.”

  He drained his juice.

  I said, “How did Georgia find out about the place?”

  “Because we shot off our mouths and she overheard us.” He shrugged. “Made us a deal—take her there so she could be sure it was safe and she’d keep our secret hangout secret.”

  “Did Lindsay know about it?”

  “Never saw her there.”

  “Was there a hot spring at Gold Dust?”

  Eric cocked his head. “Yeah. Great place to soak. Why?”

  I mentally filed that; confirmation of the spring. “Remember the notes Georgia wrote? She found something.”

  “Damn straight I remember.”

  “Evidence says what she found could be a hot spring.”

  He frowned. “If she meant our spring, it’s sure as hell nothing new.”

  “Maybe it was active enough that she thought it was a big deal.”

  He eyed me. “Is it?”

  “It seems to have died. At least, I didn’t see it. Where was it?”

  He shook his head. “Long time ago. Best I recall, few yards from the tunnel.”

  “How many yards?”

  “You want a guess? Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.”

  “Which direction?”

  “Southeast, I’d say.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “What, take you there? Sure. I’ve got Wednesday off. It’s a date.”

  “Not till Wednesday?”

  “I’ve got a job, Cassie. Protect the peace.” He eyed me. “What’s the hurry? If the spring’s no big deal.”

  “The hurry is I’m going back up there and I’d like to know where to dig.”

  “Then wait until Wednesday and I’ll go with you.”

  “I don’t want to wait, I want to solve this case and, by the way, find out if there’s anything to worry about. We owe it to Georgia to move our butts.”

  He said, “Don’t make it personal.”

  “How do I not make it personal when the vic is Georgia?”

  “I’m not talking about Georgia. I’m talking about you carrying a load of guilt about your little brother and trying to make up for it with every case you work.”

  I said, tight, “This isn’t about Henry.”

  “You can’t always save the day, Cassie. If you save the day fifty percent of the time then you’re doing damn good.”

  “You speaking from experience?”

  “Yup.” Eric moved for the chair where his police jacket hung. “Glad I could be of help.”

  I got there first and rested my hands on the nylon shoulders. Focus, lady. It’s about Georgia. I said, “I’m not done, Eric. Tell me what you know about Georgia and Gold Dust.”

  “What makes you think I know squat?”

  “Because you were such a jerk on the retrieval. Because you were ready to send two able-bodied people—and Walter’s still able-bodied, thank you—back down the mountain. And Stobie was on board with you. I think you suspected from the get-go it was murder. I think you knew Georgia was snooping around Gold Dust. I don’t know if one of you guys saw her, or what. And then when she was found, I think you didn’t want two forensic geologists up at the glacier finding that soil in her boots.” I held up a hand. “I know you wouldn’t diddle the evidence. I just think you wanted time to look it over and see if you were right, if she’d died in your secret place.”

  Eric flipped the empty bottle, caught it. “That’s conjecture.”

  “All right then, explain this. I asked Jimbo for a cartridge to compare to my evidence and he said he didn’t have one when he did. I asked where you guys used to shoot and he couldn’t remember you tested in the mine tunnel.”

  “Ask Jimbo about his memory.”

  I hadn’t had the heart, after the disaster at the race. “I figured I’d get a straighter answer from you.”

  “You got an answer.”

  “A non-answer. You owe Georgia. You owe a straight answer.”

  His eyes, which absorb everything and give nothing, remained on me. Georgia was there when he lost his left eye. She was there for every milestone. I’m eleven and he’s twelve and there’s a Fourth of July party in the meadow behind our house. The boys are trying to launch tuna cans with M-80s, which are illegal for good reason, but the explosives won’t light. Everyone gives up but Eric, who f
inally gets one to ignite. It blows up in his face. And it’s Georgia on the spot with the first aid kit, paramedic in a big straw hat bristling with flags. It’s Georgia who drafts tough new regs about fireworks. It’s Georgia who chews Eric’s butt when he recovers and then sets up a junior firefighter course. He grew up fast after that, faster than I’d realized at the time.

  “All right,” Eric said. “Straight answer.” Very slowly, he hiked himself onto the table. “Starts with Jimbo’s Fiat. He and I were heading out to Casa Diablo to get in some shooting practice—targets were still up. Jimbo’s car died. Big surprise.”

  I nodded. Jimbo’s never heard of car maintenance.

  “Georgia comes by, gives us a lift. She’s on her way to Hot Creek—the Council’s debating an ordinance to put the creek off-limits and Georgia wants to take some photos. And,” he gave a brief smile, “Georgia being Georgia, she micromanages. Decides we’re going to drop her at the creek, take her car to Casa and get our practice—she won’t let anything interfere with that, not with the Cup coming—and when we finish we’ll pick her up. Then we’ll go back to town and she’ll drop us at Chevron and we can arrange to get the Fiat towed.” He shook his head.

  Hot Creek, I thought. Always Hot Creek. “When was this?”

  “Few days before she disappeared.”

  I sat on the bed.

  “So we get to the creek lot and there’s Krom’s Blazer. Georgia tells us never mind, she’ll catch a ride with him. But we want to make sure he’s cool with it, that he’ll wait for her to do her business. We all go down, look around, can’t find him. Nobody’s around. Finally Georgia says let’s look upstream. So we go. Beyond the spot where rocks pile up and there’s that whirlpool. Noisy, water hissing.” He expelled a breath. “Point is, Krom didn’t hear us coming. Neither did Mike. They were together.”