Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  Jersey whined. When he didn’t pet her, she started barking.

  “Enough, girl.” He had to smack her, lightly, on the rump to shut her up.

  Now think Roy. He thought.

  He picked up the phone and called his shift mate—not a buddy, Jardine didn’t have buddies—but a dim dude who sometimes swapped shifts with him. Sorry it’s so early but would you mind taking my shift this morning?—I’m hungover. Jardine wasn’t, he’d never been, but this was an excuse any of the guys would buy. What the excuse bought Jardine now was an info dump from his shift mate. Oh Roy, man, ya gotta come in cuz Ballinger’s callin in everybody cuz—shit man you dunno?—and then the dimwit went on to tell Jardine what three other guys had told him.

  Roy Jardine concluded he was presumed as innocent as the next guy.

  He went to the kitchen and rinsed out the ice cream carton and put it in the trash and washed his spoon and put it in the drainer. Jersey followed, nosing around the trash. “No, girl.” She knew something was up. She knew he wasn’t going to bed and so she wasn’t going to be curling up in her plush dog bed on the floor beside him.

  He went back to his Lazy-boy and picked up the yellow pad. Under Roy’s Action Items, he wrote Undercover Recon At The Dump.

  He moved into action. He packed up emergency supplies—extra clothing, toothbrush, paste, soap, deodorant, washcloth, all the things he’d need at the hideout. Freeze-dried food, bottled water, and sleeping bag were already stored there.

  Jersey sat on his pack and wouldn’t get off.

  He squatted beside her. He ruffled her curly topknot and scratched under her chin. He wished he could take her along, but she’d hate the hideout. Too cold, too dark, no soft bed. No ice cream. Easy to get lost. He wished he knew how long he’d be there. He scooped her in his arms and carried her into the bathroom. He set her on the sink and turned on the water. She loved to lap out of the faucet. He leaned over and slid his left hand under her belly, hugging her to him. She kept lapping. So thirsty. He felt bad; he hadn’t checked her water dish. He opened the drawer and took out the Buck knife and slid his right hand beneath her chin and made the cut quick and deep. She shuddered but made no sound and went limp in his arms and he held her close while she bled out and the water washed the blood down the drain. When she was finished, he laid her on the counter. He had to use the sink himself, then, to wash away the tears.

  He wrapped her in a towel and carried her to the back yard. He was in a hurry—he really had no time to spare—but he owed her a decent burial. She was a small dog, a toy poodle, and it was not much work after all. He spoke over her grave. “Farewell, girl. I’m sorry. I’m going on a dangerous mission and it’s better this way.”

  He gathered his supplies and locked up the house. He drove through Beatty and out onto highway 95.

  When this was all over, he decided, he’d get another poodle. A big one, a standard. Definitely not a toy. That would be sacrilege. There could never be another Jersey.

  By the time he reached the dump he had put his feelings in order.

  Back in the saddle. The Long Lean Dude was going undercover.

  8

  I opened the van door and stepped into the ninety-degree glimmer of Tuesday’s dawn at the radioactive waste dump.

  With daybreak I could see that we were on a high plain dotted with creosote and sage, which already stung my nose. To the east and west were bald mountain ranges. To the north and south ran highway 95. I toed the ground. A gravelly soil, nearly dry now. No talc seams here. If I found talc at the dump it wouldn’t be native. It would have hitched a ride.

  Walter remained in the van, where we had set up a rudimentary lab. He’d said you have the talc, dear—and the heat—and I’ll have the driver’s mud and the air conditioning.

  How does he do that? Make it sound like I’m doing him a favor.

  But he’d read me right. I wanted that talc.

  We’d convoyed here from the crash site—RERT vans, FBI vans, Soliano’s big SUV, Miller’s little CTC sedan. I watched everybody pile out, fan out. FBI agents and Scotty’s RERT team to scour the dump for the missing resin cask, on the theory the perp panicked and dumped it here. Soliano had already called for a Department of Energy helicopter to search from the air, measuring for radionuclides.

  Miller came over and gave me a bow. “Welcome to Nowheresville.”

  “Not to me. I like the desert.”

  “I see that by your hands. I admire a woman who uses her hands.”

  My hands are chapped, nicked, the unpolished nails cut blunt. I put them in my pockets. Miller’s gaze moved to my face. I fought the urge to wipe away the sweat. Even a good washing, though, would not erase the marks that the years in the field were beginning to leave, despite my devotion to hats and sunscreen. Still and all, if I had to rate my looks on the geological scale, I’d say I was in the uplift phase. I gave Miller a smile.

  Soliano joined us and Miller led the way. I trailed them, gawking at the scenery.

  Earthen embankments rose twenty feet high and extended in rows beyond my field of view. The nearest horizon was a six-foot chainlink fence topped by barbwire. Directly in front of us were the kind of crackerbox buildings that make staff think Nowheresville. Right now, everything glowed. Sunup gilded the dump.

  I spotted the CTC logo on a low-slung warehouse with titanic doors. Underneath, the logo was decoded: Closing The Circle Of The Atom.

  I got it. I wasn’t sure I believed it, though. There’s at least one cask of radioactive resins deserving of closure that’s not getting buried. And if the swap theory’s right, the perp stole a cask from here to fill with talc. And nobody here even noticed, until the swap was derailed with the crash. This place did not inspire great confidence in me. Maybe it was just the stress of the past few hours but I was thinking, this place promises what it cannot deliver. Closing the circle of the atom. They unleash the power of the atom and then try to put it back into the ground but it’s a sitting duck, there waiting for something to go wrong. What kind of earthquake protection do they have? What kind of scumbag protection?

  We passed an embankment with an open trench. It was lined with wooden crates and metal drums six rows deep and ten layers high. A forklift crawled along the trench with a fresh box in its tines, hunting for space for one more.

  “That’s the low-rad stuff.” Miller winked. “Booties and gloves and such.”

  We moved on.

  Ahead was an inner fence with a sign that said Restricted Area, Controlled Access. Miller signed us in at the guardhouse and passed out dosimeters.

  Passing through the gate was like going from kindergarten to college. Now, it got serious. The open trench here was lined with concrete vaults. The package being lowered into the nearest vault was hung on the end of cables. Miller steered us behind a huge wheeled crate full of earth. It was labeled Portable Shield.

  Good idea.

  “Here’s the man,” Miller said, waving, “here’s Mister Radwaste himself. Cassie Oldfield, Hector Soliano, I give you the dump’s own manager—Milton Ballinger.”

  A compact man with the bantam stride of a nervous rooster approached. “Put it away Hap, these people aren’t looking to be entertained, they came with a problem and I got it covered.” Ballinger was middle-aged and boyish-looking. Egg bald, smooth tan from the scalp down, jawline firm to its sharp chin. He could have been an advertisement for the uranium health cures the atomic enthusiasts used to promote.

  Miller said, “Milt himself came up with our motto—closing the circle. Made him a rockstar with the honchos.”

  “We just go by the initials. You know, CTC.” Milt Ballinger’s small eyes shone bright as new pennies.

  ~

  Roy Jardine was having trouble paying attention to his job. Nerves. Well, he bet outlaws got nervous sometimes.

  He needed to keep up with his recon.

  He watched Ballinger come over to where Miller was. There were two strangers with Miller. A tall snooty-looking male
and a female dressed like she was going for a hike. They must be plainclothes cops. That made sense. He bet they came here looking for the resin cask.

  As long as they weren’t looking for him. How could they be? None of them were paying attention to him. The cops were listening to Miller.

  He wondered what Miller was saying. Some joke. Miller thought he was so much better than everybody, so he mocked them. One time when this dude contaminated a finger on a crapped-up wrench, Miller said he’d have to meter the dude’s nose and crotch too. Ha ha.

  But Jardine had to admit, when Miller mocked Ballinger, Jardine liked it.

  Ballinger was talking to the cops now. He was probably bragging how he rushed to work to make sure no terrorists were launching an attack, or something. Mr. Whoop-de-doo General Manager. Jardine wondered what they’d think if they knew what Ballinger’s nickname was around the dump. It was the password he used online: Hot-Boy. He told his bigmouth assistant it meant hot as in rad, and she told everybody. Everybody knew that when he logged onto his porn sites he didn’t mean rad.

  Jardine watched Hot-Boy bullshitting the cops.

  ~

  Milt Ballinger jabbed a finger at the CTC flatbed from the crash site. “Just unloading the last package.”

  Indeed, only one of the casks recovered from the crash remained on the flatbed. The truck was parked within a coned-off zone. A crane loomed.

  Soliano eyed the cask. “It contains what it should contain?”

  “Hundred percent,” Ballinger said.

  “You know this how?”

  “Because it’s hot,” Miller put in. “Notice we’re remote-handling it?”

  I watched as the remote-operated crane attached a grappling device to the cask. Here’s where it happened, if the perp tried this before and succeeded. Here’s where the dummy cask got craned off the truck and, maybe, got jostled and, perhaps, shed grains of talc. I was going to have to get up there in the unloading zone, I saw. Up there where it’s too hot to touch. I had my own monitor—I wore the laser spectrometer slung over my shoulder like a purse—but it was not remote-operable.

  Ballinger nudged Soliano. “See that gal over there with the tallywhacker?”

  We looked at the suited figure poking a long telescoping wand into the cask lid assembly. Only way to tell she was a she was by the color of her booties, hot pink.

  “She’s not doing it long distance for grins.”

  “And what,” Soliano said, “does this tallywhacker tell her?”

  “She’s reading the surface dose rate.” Ballinger hooked his thumbs into his belt buckle, a brass horseshoe. “See, these’re high-gamma resins, gonna throw off some serious dose.”

  “How often do you receive these serious resins?”

  “Often as somebody has nasty messes to clean up.”

  I spoke. “What happens if the serious resins—the ones that are missing—get loose in the environment?”

  “Depends.” Ballinger shifted. “If they get cleaned up in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “Before they release their rads.”

  “Into the air?”

  “Yeah. Air, soil, water, that’d be the worry.”

  Hap Miller sighed. “And then, by and by, we’d get John Q Public asking what’s your plutonium doing in my coffee?”

  I stared. “Are you serious?”

  “Nearly always,” Miller said.

  “C’mon,” Ballinger said, “we got one missing cask. You find it, we’ll bury it.”

  Soliano’s face sharpened. “You are certain this has not happened before?”

  “Darn right. We keep track of every shipment.”

  “How?”

  “Gal over there with the tallywhacker matches her readings to the numbers on the shipping manifest. Manifest says what’s in the load—types of rads, curie count, tracking numbers, the whole shooting match.”

  Soliano frowned. “The manifest cannot be altered?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Even if some knothead diddled it, we’ll catch it. See, the shipper sends us an electronic copy to check against the papers that go in the truck. Got that crypto stuff, real secure.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  “Hey, nothing’s foolproof but we take all reasonable precautions.” A stitch of sweat appeared on Ballinger’s lip. “This...incident...this is a first.”

  “Your facility has had no problems before?”

  Ballinger licked the sweat off his lip. “No more’n anybody else’s.”

  “Anti-nuclear agitation?”

  “Nah nah, we don’t get that crap here.”

  “Right,” Miller put in, “the locals love us. We employ them. And once a year the feds make the good citizens of Beatty pee in a cup, just to keep us honest.”

  “Hey,” Ballinger said, “I myself grew up in Beatty and there was real competition for jobs here. Course, you need serious training you wanna go far in this biz.”

  I wondered if some local was upset about not getting a job here, if this was a question of sour-grapes sabotage. My attention caught on a suited figure checking the mechanics of a truck filled with sand. He kept glancing at us, like he expected Ballinger to come correct him. I wondered if he was new on the job. He abruptly turned his back. Name on his tape was Jardine. My attention returned to the issue at hand. I said, “Mr. Ballinger, I’d like to check the unloading area.”

  “For what?”

  “Talc. On the chance our perp tried this before. And succeeded.”

  “Missy, that’s friggin nuts.”

  I flushed. I was beat, out of my element, and not a little hungry. I said, “I’d still like to monitor.”

  “Oookay, but you’re not going out there unsupervised and you’re sure not going right now.”

  I did not really care to go out there right now. The suited figures, retreating behind a portable shield, did not care to be out there either. The sand truck guy, Jardine, threw us another glance. I fought the urge to wave. I folded my arms and watched the delicate dance of the crane boom as it lifted the cask from the flatbed. The operator directed this dance with a handheld remote, guided by a camera mounted on the boom. I held my breath. I guessed he held his.

  “What puzzles me,” Soliano said, “is why the perp filled the dummy cask with talc—the cask we found at the crash site. Why not simply leave it empty?”

  “Nah nah,” Ballinger said, “that’d set off alarm bells. Package gotta weigh what the manifest says it weighs—that’s how we adjust the crane boom angle.”

  “I see. He is clever.”

  “No he’s not. Because he’s not gonna sneak it past us. Not today, not last week, not ever. See, it’s gonna get metered and if it contains talc we’re gonna say, well that cask isn’t throwing off any gammas. Then we’re gonna sample and find out why not.”

  “Who is going to say? The woman with the tallywhacker?”

  “Her, today. Another day, whoever on the cask team signs up.” Ballinger blew a shot of air onto his moist upper lip. “How’s it matter?”

  “You tell it to me. We have ruled out the manifest, which is possible to diddle. It is possible to spoof the weight, with talc. But it is not possible for a cask of talc to give off gammas, as you explain.” Soliano lifted his palms. “Consequently, the person metering the cask is a key player. That person could falsely report, yes?”

  Ballinger turned to Miller.

  “Moi? The site radiation safety officer god? Falsely report?”

  “You join the cask team, Hap? Criminy, just go get the roster.”

  I watched Hap Miller saunter off, feeling a little naked without the radiation safety officer god on immediate watch. And then my attention returned, like a grappling hook had got hold of it, to the unloading zone. The crane boom swung slowly, so slowly that if it were moving a bucket of water not a drop would spill. It came to a halt over the trench, bobbed, and the cask sank into its concrete coffin.

  Almost time.

  ~

 
Jardine was doing better now. Doing the job. Handling the recon.

  He came back to the unloading zone and checked the hydraulics on the boom lift truck then gave the operator the okay, and the operator backfilled the cask caisson with sand, and Jardine watched the procedure like he cared.

  What he cared about was why Miller had suddenly left. Did something happen?

  And now Ballinger and the cops were watching Jardine and Jardine’s skin prickled and it wasn’t just the sweat inside his suit. But if they knew something they would have already come for him.

  Still, maybe it was time to go. He put his tools in the caddy and casually strolled past the enemy toward the security gate.

  “Hey Roy.”

  Jardine nearly died.

  “Come on over here.”

  ~

  “Roy’s a little hoity-toity,” Ballinger confided. He jerked his thumb.

  The man slowly came our way.

  “This here’s Roy Jardine,” Ballinger said. “Roy, these people are helping out with the incident. Need you to assist the lady. Go ahead and unmask.”

  Jardine unhooded and threaded the straps of his facepiece over a long braided ponytail. He pushed up the facepiece.

  I tried not to stare but... Holy moly.

  Soliano spoke, low, to Ballinger. “Mr. Jardine’s...this is significant?”

  “His face? Nah nah. See, awhile back there was a little, uh, incident with a cesium-137 source. You know, kind they use for gauges, or cancer treatments? Was a prank that went out of control.” Ballinger clapped Jardine on the shoulder. “Okay by you, Roy, I tell them what happened?”

  “You just did, Mr. Ballinger.”

  It didn’t sound okay by Jardine. He had a nasal voice that broke as it rose. And it didn’t look okay by him. He held his head high. He had a high forehead, skin pulled tight by the skinned-back hair in the tight ponytail. Wide-set brown eyes, downturned at the corners. Flattened nose, spreading at the nostrils. Long horsey jaw in which the small mouth got lost. Large irregular oval on his left cheek, with a mottled interior and a rim that wormed around the crater.