Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  The action was down there but the mystery was up here. Scotty voiced it. “So where’d Jardine go?”

  One by one, we turned to scan the red tile rooftops and the reddened hills behind the Inn. Nothing out of the norm, or what had become the norm. Clouds had bunched again, though, throwing down fat shadows.

  I had another question. I moved for a closer look at the tarp covering Jardine’s pickup bed. It looked like one of the silvery drapes I’d seen in the talc mine ‘garage.’ Leaded, no doubt. I dredged up the scenario we’d spun, how Jardine learned at the dump—courtesy of my bragging—that I could follow the talc trail, how he rushed to Chickie’s mine to get the resin cask. I expanded it now: he couldn’t just drive off with the cask visible and unshielded. So he covered it with the lead tarp. And off he went. And ended up, finally, here. With a tarp, but no cask. I studied the tarp. Where it puckered, rainwater pooled. That said it had rained since the cask was removed. Not much help. It rained last night. It rained this morning. It’s been raining on and off since we got here. He could have ditched the cask anytime in the past three days—although if he was going to ditch it then why take it to begin with? I wetted my lips and asked the obvious. “Where’s the cask?”

  Soliano yanked on the driver-side door handle. It was locked. He withdrew his pistol from his waistband holster and with the butt-end smashed the window. He unlocked the door and climbed inside. He rooted around, and when he finally swung out of the truck he was unrolling a sheet of paper.

  We gathered around.

  It was a map—a schematic—and you had to study it a moment before recognizing the razor-thin lines and sharp angles and precise arcs as a water distribution system. At the top of the diagram was a water storage tank. A pipeline ran downhill, to the Inn, to its bones, its framework, its pipes and faucets and inflows and outflows, its sinks and toilets and tubs and showers, its pool, its lawns, its sprinklers, its stream-cut gardens and water-rich palms.

  A post-it note stuck to the map said $10 million—water water everywhere.

  ~

  Water water everywhere. What if he’s already contaminated it?

  My mind raced, inventorying. Water in the glass on the lawn table this morning. Hap drank it. I drank it. Was it bottled? Wouldn’t they serve something like Evian at a place like the Inn? But earlier, breakfast in the room, Walter and I drank coffee and they surely didn’t use Evian to brew the coffee. And before that, a quick shower, water on my lips. And then brushing my teeth. My stomach curdled.

  The others, too, looked glazed, looking inward, thinking back, reviewing—what’d I have for breakfast, what’d I have to drink, where and when and in what circumstances have I come in contact with the water over the past twelve hours or is twelve long enough? How long do I need to work backward?

  What if the water’s not happy?

  Soliano recovered first. He was on his cell. “The water main. Shut it off.”

  ~

  “We have the target,” Soliano told the small crowd he’d assembled. “Proceed on the assumption that it has been hit. If it has not, assume that it will be hit, if not now, then one minute from now.”

  “Hit how?” a baby-faced agent asked.

  “Radioactive material, either in a cask or loosed. You will divide into teams, each team consisting of my agents and RERT members who will monitor for radioactive traces. You will search every nook and cranny of the Inn and its grounds—most specifically, the water system.” Soliano addressed the baby-faced agent. “Andre, you will coordinate, with the concomitant objective of locating Roy Jardine.”

  Andre scowled. “What if he’s poofed?”

  “His vehicle is here,” Soliano snapped, “so you will proceed on the assumption that he has not poofed.”

  Andre moved.

  Soliano said, “Full ninja.”

  My chest thumped.

  Soliano was on the phone again. “Secure the annex. Every room. No person goes in, no person goes out.”

  The teams fissioned. Soliano and Walter and I made up our own team, with the object of doing a room check.

  ~

  There was no one in sight on the annex walkway but Special Agent Hal Dearing, a sunburned monolith with a peeling nose and a Sig Sauer in hand. Nobody’d come out, he said. Not since the doctor came and Hap Miller left, about an hour ago. Miller, whom Dearing would trust about as far as he could throw him, had said he was going for a walk.

  “Going for a walk where?” Soliano said.

  Dearing shrugged.

  Soliano phoned Andre and told him to put out a BOLO for Hap Miller.

  Be On the Lookout—that one I knew. Try a lounge chair somewhere, I thought, or the sauna room. I looked at the lawn, at the table where Hap told me a couple of hours ago that he’s staying put, safe and sound here at the Inn. Only, looks like the Inn is Jardine’s target. I doubted Hap would appreciate the irony. Then again, maybe Hap knows the Inn is the target. Maybe he’s in on it. Maybe that’s why he left.

  Soliano brushed past Dearing and opened the door to his room.

  I glimpsed, inside, a doctor in hospital scrubs with a saddlebag gut, adjusting the IV that fed into Chickie’s inert arm.

  Soliano moved to the next room and banged on the door. “Mr. Ballinger!” He tried the knob. “Milt?” He drew his pistol and broke the window. He looked inside then spun on Dearing.

  Dearing’s sunburn radiated. “Didn’t know he wasn’t in there.”

  I said, “What about Pria? I gave her my key.”

  Walter shot me an incredulous look.

  Dearing went purple. “Nobody came out of nowhere.”

  I looked around. No Hap, no Milt, no Pria. No Roy. Empty lawn, empty walkways, empty rooftops. Everybody’s poofed.

  We took off. Walter went for his room and I stopped at mine. I knocked, then Soliano shouldered me aside. He banged on the door and shouted “open up,” as if Pria had barricaded herself inside, as if Jardine were holding a gun to her head or a glass of water to her lips. Before Soliano could bring out his gun and break my window, Walter opened my door from the inside. He had to have come through the adjoining door that linked our rooms into a two-room suite.

  I said, “She’s in the bathroom.”

  Walter and Soliano stood aside.

  I opened the bathroom door. She was not there but she oh-so-clearly had been there. Even as I shifted to allow them a look, I could not take my eyes from the bathtub with its porcelain scummed almost to the tiled rim.

  She’d taken a bath.

  Shit.

  “Where is she?” Walter asked, eerily calm, as if there were some logical progression from the tub to the place she would naturally go next. To Soliano’s room? All scrubbed for her mom, only to find her mom sedated by the paunchy doctor? And so she went elsewhere.

  I hoped for that.

  Soliano was on the phone, trying to reach Aunt Ruth.

  Walter said, brittle-calm, “She had to have left through my room.”

  He led Soliano through the adjoining door. I stayed behind. I figured they’d find the sliding door unlocked that led from Walter’s bedroom out to the tiny veranda that had so impressed Hap, and bordering the veranda they’d find a stone wall that any one of us but Walter could scale on the first try. And on the other side of that wall they’d find the walkway that led away from the main walkway where Dearing stood useless guard. Which was why Dearing in all honesty could say nobody came out of nowhere.

  She’d left unseen, but had she left alone?

  I braced a hand against the doorjamb. How would Roy Jardine know she was in my room? How would he know who was in what room? And if he did, why not go into Soliano’s room and take care of Chickie, who knows what he does not want told, along with the doctor who is trying to save her life?

  Because he’d have to go through Dearing, the monolith with the Sig Sauer.

  But still, why go after Pria? Does Roy Jardine know Pria from Adam?

  Well, it’s my room and he knows me.

/>   I heard Soliano and Walter stampeding through Walter’s suite and then I heard Walter’s door crash open and slam shut.

  I stared at the bathtub. How long had she soaked? I feared I was going to be sick. I moved for the toilet. I had to kick aside the wet towels humped on the floor. The toilet seat was up. There was no paper left on the roll. I changed my mind and went to the sink for a tissue to wipe my face. There were none left. Soiled tissues papered the counter. Her used bandaid clung to the mirror. I turned away. The tub was worse. Gels and shampoos drained their last and made a purple slick along the bottom. The drain was plugged by a nest of black hairs.

  She’d used everything. She’d gorged. She’d finally got a room at the Inn.

  Pity convulsed me.

  I stared into the tub. I could see the path made when the water drained. It had cut a channel through the purple slick. My vision suddenly jumped, to the giant fan Walter and I had hiked after being stranded. I saw again the fan rocks coated in black desert varnish and I felt again the heat they threw off. I felt the relief when Walter and I took shelter in the coolness of the channel that was unvarnished, that had been washed clean by floodwaters. I saw how the unvarnished channel ran down the fan and then snaked out onto the saltpan. My legs cramped, now, like I was wading again across the white floodplain.

  And then that vision morphed into another that beggared belief.

  I ran out the door.

  ~

  Soliano and Walter and Scotty were lined up like ducks at the stone ledge, looking down at the pool. As I sprinted across the lawn I heard Soliano shout “break the lock.” Down below, I saw Andre’s team on the hunt. They were armored and padded and helmeted and booted, hugging submachine guns. Full ninja.

  “Yes?” Soliano said, spotting me.

  I lifted a hand, panting. I felt, suddenly, unsure. This was an absurd idea. But they were waiting so I began. “What if this is a diversion?”

  Soliano held up the rolled map. “Until you find me another target, I am diverted.”

  Walter eyed me. “Diversion from what?”

  I waved at the clouds. “This is all an offshoot of that hurricane off Baja California. Right?”

  They glanced at the sky. Scotty turned, stiff in his suit.

  “According to the weather report, the storms were forecasted to start hitting us Monday and continue through the week.”

  They waited.

  “What if the forecast was a trigger? So Monday night Jardine’s ready to go. He does the last swap. But Beltzman gets cold feet—maybe he doesn’t want to go offroading with major storms on the way.” I took in a deep breath. “But major storms are just what Jardine needs.”

  Soliano stared. “Why does he need storms? For cover?”

  I saw Andre’s team, below, fan out to the pool house and the fireplaces and the banquet room. They were cautious, mincing their way, big ninjas on tiptoe like they didn’t want to find what Soliano had dispatched them to find. Unlike the ninjas, I plunged ahead. “How about for a delivery system?”

  Scotty’s phone rang.

  I clarified. “A flood.”

  Soliano frowned. “He needs storms to create a flood? And this flood will deliver the resins to...his target. This is what you are saying?”

  “Yes. He’s been waiting for a flood. And now the storms from the hurricane are going to give him one.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “No dear. A flood is not predictable. At a set time. In a set place. He has to have chosen his site a good long while ago.”

  “Okay but what if he checks out the Park Service doppler radar system every time there’s a storm? And he gets a pattern, where the risk index is high. And he maps out likely areas. Then all he has to do is wait until a big enough storm hits.”

  Walter was shaking his head.

  “He’s got to move the resins from the mine to the target. How’s he do that?”

  “He releases them in situ,” Walter said. “And your rains wash the resins down into the groundwater. Toward the aquifer. As we discussed.”

  “There’s a better target.”

  “Hector.” Scotty closed his phone. “That was Lucy. My RERT, with your man Andre. She says we got hit.”

  ~

  We took the service road that ran up behind the Inn. RERTs and their vehicles formed a wall. Ninjas hovered. I couldn’t see anything. Scotty barreled ahead.

  I tried to hold on to my bathtub vision. I had carried it like a cup of smoke and already it was curling away. I caught a glimpse of a RERT edging toward a field of black vinyl. The ninjas backed up. Somebody swore. I heard beads. I heard crapped up. And now I could see that the vinyl overlaid a water tank sunk into the ground. The vinyl was ripped. The RERT dipped his tallywhacker through the hole. Like ice-fishing. Crazy ice-fishing in the desert in a pool of crapped-up water.

  My mind raced, inventorying. What did I have to drink?

  Scotty joined us, unmasking. “This tank’s an auxiliary.”

  Soliano opened the map. “For?”

  “For watering the lawn.”

  I gaped. So this tank’s not the main water tank on the diagram Soliano found in Jardine’s truck. This tank doesn’t supply potable water. We didn’t drink the water from this tank. Pria didn’t take a bath in this water. We all gaped at the auxiliary tank. All that worry. Out it went. Gushing out. Soliano expelled a breath. I sagged. Walter put his arm around me.

  “And,” Scotty added, grim, “it’s piped to the swimming pool.”

  It took us a long moment, to move from relief to horror. From us to them—the lap swimmers who got in the pool in all good faith for a little exercise, a little fun. And what they got was a big taste, courtesy of Brother Roy, of what’s to come. My skin crawled. But beneath the skin, beneath my outrage and my horror, I still swam in my own relief.

  “Scotty,” Soliano said, “check it all. Re-check. Every place the water flows.”

  “We’re already on it,” Scotty said.

  I stared at the exposed water in the auxiliary tank. Water water everywhere. Not really. I looked down at the dry fanglomerate soil. The rain squall of half-hour ago had left no liquid trace. The world again steamed dry. I watched Scotty run his hand through sweat-plastered hair. Blond filaments dried before my eyes. I turned to look at the service road, which ran from the Inn uphill to where we stood, and thence further up to the main water storage tank. Water water everywhere. Now you see it, now you don’t. The sun glared. My bathtub vision came back so strong I had to squint. I spun to Soliano. “It is a diversion, Hector.”

  “This?” Soliano glanced at the tank.

  “This is a bucket. He’s going to poison the well.”

  Walter understood. He turned to look upfan, up toward the Furnace Creek Wash. We couldn’t see it from here but we’d sure seen it yesterday. The mounds of travertine. The stands of mesquite, dotted along the fault trace for nearly a mile. The thrust fault that channeled water up from the aquifer, through the alluvium, spitting out that line of bighorn-attracting springs.

  I said, fierce, “Springs.”

  Soliano looked directly at me, for the first time. “They supply water to the Inn?”

  “Yeah. And the Ranch and the rangers and the Timbisha and the golf course and the campgrounds and all the rest. The whole village. And the bighorns and the coyotes and the bats and the snakes and the mesquite and these amazing little daisies that pop up when it rains and... The whole ecosystem, Hector.”

  “I see.”

  Not yet you don’t. I said, “How about if he craps up the water supply for national park headquarters? How’s that for a symbol?”

  “Of what?”

  “The virgin.”

  “Yes, I see.” Soliano swept a hand. “An oasis.”

  No you don’t see. My tongue seemed to harden, down to its roots. “Do you know how hard it is to find water out there?”

  “I have not had to look.”

  I looked at Walter, whose jaw was working like he was sucking on
a pebble.

  “I see,” Soliano said, this time like he did.

  “You see what?”

  “The priceless.”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Walter said, finding his voice, “he can’t hit the springs.”

  I knew. We had a map that said he didn’t, that said the geology took his offroader only as far as point D, well upcanyon from the springs. But Pria changed my mind. Pria in her bath. The draining water had carved a channel through the purple shampoo slick that coated the tub bottom. That bathtub vision reminded me of the giant fan where Walter and I took shelter, and how floodwaters had carved a channel through the desert-varnished fan. Pria’s bath had left me a demonstration—the power of a channeled flood. I said, “Maybe he could hit the springs if he had a damn delivery system.”

  Soliano said, “The flood again?”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” Scotty said. His hand was at his neck, at the medallion. “Because if you’re right, we’re S-O-L.”

  Soliano frowned.

  “Shit-out-of-luck,” Walter translated.

  “You gotta remember,” Scotty said, “they’re dewatered resin beads.”

  I went cold. He’d never mentioned that.

  Soliano’s frown deepened. “What are dewatered beads?”

  “Dried out, for disposal. Locks in the rads.”

  “Locks in? But I thought the beads were dangerous.”

  “They are—nasty hot. But at least when they’re dry, they keep the nuclides from escaping.” Scotty’s face tightened. “Put the beads in water, they rehydrate.”

  “And they do what?” Soliano asked. “When they rehydrate?”

  “They swell. Maybe crack. Degrade.”

  Walter said, alarmed, “Aren’t the radionuclide ions chemically bound to the beads?”

  “Bond’s weak.”

  “This means what?” Soliano asked.

  “Means keep the beads away from materials that can break the bond.”

  I got a sudden taste of the water in the hole beneath the mesquite. I thought, Badwater. It’s why they call that water bad—it’s saltier than the sea. But then all Death Valley water is high in sodium. Even an oasis like the springs has some salt. And that’s how he turns an oasis into bad water. I said, “Sodium breaks the bond?”