Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  Something silver glinted east of the highway on a gravel fan, the alluvium washed out of a canyon over the millennia. As Michael turned off the pavement and streaked dustily up a side road toward it, the glint became an aluminum travel trailer, one of those vintage Airstreams. Two bruins of dogs stirred from beneath it and charged his cruiser. He slowed so he wouldn’t run over their paws but kept driving, marveling how tangled and filthy their cinnamon-colored fur was. They trotted alongside him all the way up to the trailer, barking until he shut off his motor and got out. Then they gave him a sniff, turned, and loped back to their shady wallow under the Airstream.

  Parked nearby was an Electra Glide police motorcycle, stripped of insignia and emergency lights but in good condition. It could never tow the twelve-foot trailer, and there were no other vehicles on the property. Didn’t matter, the Airstream had been propped up on blocks for years.

  The door swung open, and a frighteningly thin man in a buckskin loincloth peered out, suspiciously. He seemed skinnier at each visit, which made Michael wonder how much interest he had in food or anything other than his books and his dogs. It was remarkable that he’d avoided skin cancer, as his once-fair skin had been burned almost as dark as that of some Shoshone. “What are the two extremes Schopenhauer noted in human nature?” he asked Michael as if they’d been talking in this vein for hours.

  “The egotist, who sees everything in relation to himself. And the altruist, who can act beyond his own desires.”

  “You read my goddamned books,” the man said, a grin splitting his snowy beard. He had lost more teeth since their last meeting, mostly uppers.

  “Good to see you, Woody,” Michael said, offering his hand. It was like shaking with a mummy. Noise from heavy equipment drew his eye a few miles to the southwest, where Caterpillar-yellow graders and dozers were stitching back and forth over the valley floor. “What’s the Navy building now?”

  “A track so they can test military vehicles against improvised explosive devices. Damned thing is going to be ten-thousand-feet-long. Batch plant is almost finished, so they should finally start pouring concrete ten-inches thick by the end of the month. Heaven forbid anybody fall in, because once they start they won’t stop for anything. Step inside, young man.”

  Michael really didn’t want to go into the insufferably hot aluminum box, but the sun was now too high to cast a shadow from the trailer over the two lawn chairs outside, and he didn’t want to spurn the man’s hospitality. After this morning’s encounter with Horace Dock, hospitality seemed precious—even when offered by the unwashed. They sat at the kitchenette table, which Michael suspected Woody folded down at night to sleep on, for the bed in the back was buried under stacks of books and magazines.

  “How was your drive?” Woody asked.

  “Nice. The morning light was nice on the big dunes at Mesquite Flat.”

  A decade back, three years before Michael entered into service, Woodrow Bryant had been a California Highway Patrol sergeant assigned to the desert. A master’s degree in criminal justice and a bright future in law enforcement. Then things had happened to him, terrible things beyond his control, things his superiors sympathized with. But the result had been behaviors too bizarre to let pass, such as giving speeders lectures about the laws of physics instead of tickets, sobbing instead of rendering first aid at accidents. Medically retired, Woody vanished. But he was one of the few missing in this country to reappear. He showed up in Panamint Valley, philosophizing to anyone who stumbled upon him. Most cops chalked it up to his having gone 5150, the section for enforced psych evaluation. One of these officers had urged Michael to check out the lunatic in Panamint. But Michael had found otherwise: Separating from the CHP had liberated an intellect that had lain dormant all those years of spit-and-polish conformity. Besides, the Shoshone expected wise men to be a little crazy, and the friendship had come at a time when Michael needed stimulation. In Death Valley, if you didn’t read and think, you drank.

  “I brought some of that iced green tea you like,” Michael said. “Want me to get it out of the car?”

  “In time, in time,” Woody said with a dismissive wave. “That why you drove all the way out here?”

  “No, just passing through,” Michael admitted. “But I’m working a few things right now and want to discuss them with you.”

  “How many is a few?”

  “Two.”

  “Give me the first riddle, then.”

  “A homicide, a body-dump near Daylight Pass. Identification of the deceased might be up in the air for quite a while.”

  “Problem with the prints?” Woody asked.

  “Hands were lopped off at the wrists. I managed to recover one, but a coyote had gotten to it.”

  “Yes,” the man snorted, “I’d call that a problem with the prints. All the teeth extracted?”

  “No, and that’s a contradiction.”

  Woody nodded. “Second riddle?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “No such thing, Michael. There are just links in causality we can’t see at first. I’ll take that tea now.”

  “I didn’t bring any ice.”

  “I never have ice. Why get hooked on something you can’t have regularly?”

  Stepping outside, Michael sensed that, as usual, Woody was right. The desert didn’t readily surrender its dead. Michael knew this better than most. So why, after contacting him, had Dulcie Kincannon driven within a half mile of a body that happened to be putrefied in a land that usually desiccated its victims? She’d seemed sincere in her answer that Chloride Cliff Road was the shortest route to her home. But still.

  Returning to the table, he asked Woody if, in his years with the CHP in the Inyokern area, which included Indian Wells, he’d ever run across Dr. Kincannon.

  The man paused while cracking open his plastic bottle of warm tea. His sun-bleached eyelashes had stopped blinking. “Is Carl your homicide victim?”

  “No. Physical dissimilarities are just too much.”

  Woody took a pensive sip. “Yeah, I knew him.”

  “Friends?” Michael asked, just on the off chance.

  “No. Carl has no friends, just devotees. What are Schopenhauer’s three primary moral incentives?”

  “Uh, I knew you’d ask me this—”

  “Then don’t stall.”

  “Wait—egoism, malice and compassion. Egoism and malice are corrupt as moral incentives. Compassion is the only true one.”

  “Let me put them in order as they relate to Carl Kin—” Woody closed his mouth and Michael braced as a shriek of jet exhaust buffeted the Airstream. Neither man bothered to track the F-18 Hornet through the trailer windows as it continued its bomb-run over the lake bed and toward a target in the Argus Range west of them. “Like most ambitious folks, young Carl set his sights on achievement—brilliant and provocative scientist, all that. Of course, the more brilliant and provocative you are, the more enemies you make.”

  “Do you know any of his enemies...by name, I mean?”

  “I don’t even know my own enemies by name. The end result of egoism is malice, correct? It seems only right to wish your critics ill. Yet, there are a few who grow to see the futility of that. They move on to compassion...” Woody lofted a saintly-looking hand. “...and maybe even fucking enlightenment.”

  “Did Kincannon?” Michael asked, wondering now if the eccentric geophysicist had not vanished but simply removed himself from the world to find peace of mind, as Woody had.

  “Let’s just say that he dabbled in compassion for a while, then gave up on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Woody stretched his emaciated arms over his head. “Carl would whisk young doves off the streets of Haight-Ashbury and play Pygmalion to them, remolding them into women worthy of his company.”

  “Were they underage?”

  “Some of them looked it,” Woody said. “I tried to get Kern S.O. to investigate. But they kissed it off. Carl can be manipulative when he needs to be. At t
hat time, he had the whole substation in his hip pocket. My boss didn’t want me to jump over Kern’s head on a non-traffic matter and go directly to San Francisco P.D., so it all came to naught. As Dickens wrote in Great Expectations...have you read it yet?”

  “You told me to get going on Kierkegaard next.”

  “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.”

  “How many little women are we talking about?”

  “That’s Alcott, not Dickens. Oh, no more than four, maybe five.”

  “At the same time?” Michael asked.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Michael, it wasn’t a harem. They came through Carl’s life one by one. One replaced by another, usually a younger model of the same type. And this was over twenty years.”

  “Did you know his current wife, Dulcie?”

  “I don’t recall his marrying any of them. That’d be a first. But let’s remember what Schopenhauer said—The ultimate aim of all love affairs is more vital than all the other aims in a man’s life...” He scowled. “Did I tell you the Navy’s construction firm keeps their floodlights on all night while they work? The racket. And worse, they’ve stolen the stars from me, Michael. Not a bit of wire or rebar in the concrete, though. A workman told me that would foul the magnetic field during electronic testing. Schopenhauer tells us—The aim of love affairs is more vital than anything else...and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it...” Woody began scratching his beard. “Dammit, where were we?”

  “Kincannon’s incentives.”

  “Very good,” the man said approvingly. “Instead of achieving true compassion, Carl moved sideways like most outwardly successful people do. Note my choice of word outwardly.” Woody gestured toward his library of a bed. “You can go through years of People Magazine and not find a single truly successful person. Not one. Instead of genuinely serving humanity, Carl was satisfied just to give the appearance that he was. So restless. Such a restless, tortured soul. You remember when he changed his firm’s name from Alternative Energies Incorporated to Alternative Energies Institute?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Can’t you see through the altruistic smokescreen he was laying down? What is true altruism? It’s my leaving the key in my motorcycle, just in case somebody needs the machine more than I do. It’s you driving out of your way to bring me tea. It’s...” Woody cocked his head as if he could hear something approaching out of the distance. Michael thought that it might be another warplane, but several seconds transpired and nothing broke the morning calm.

  Michael asked, “Can you think of any reason Kincannon had to make himself scarce?”

  Again, the man gave every appearance that he was listening to something. Finally, he confirmed it by saying under his breath, “Schopenhauer hit the nail on the head. Music is everything...”

  Michael waited patiently for Woody to return to the moment. But several minutes passed, and the man continued to listen to the silence.

  Quietly, Michael got up and went out.

  Driving back to the highway, he reminded himself why he made allowances for Woodrow Bryant. While with the CHP, his car partner, his best friend all the way back to their days together at the academy in Sacramento, had raped and strangled Woody’s nine-year-old daughter. A year later, his wife shot herself with his service pistol while he was in the shower.

  He had every right to hear his own music. And resent the construction floodlights that took away the stars.

  Chapter Seven

  The security guard at the main gate was waiting for Michael. He checked his credentials, told him he would be met, then raised the barrier arm and let the cruiser pass into the parking lot of the Coso Arroyo Geothermal Plant.

  Leaving Woody Bryant to his demons, Michael had driven on another hour to Alternative Energies Institute’s headquarters at the Inyokern airport. The building was a converted hangar, a thought-factory teeming with geeks constantly checking their BlackBerries. Michael asked to see Dr. Kincannon on the off chance the man might be found sitting at his desk, oblivious to the fact that he’d been reported missing by a young prostitute claiming to be his wife. However, Michael was directed to the offices of Joanna Wallace, the institute’s honcho whom Dulcie claimed had ignored her calls to find out at what hour Kincannon had left here on the first of the month. An assistant explained that Ms. Wallace was up at the geothermal plant for the entire day. At this juncture, Michael expected to be stonewalled: She can’t possibly meet with you until next week, et cetera, et cetera. Instead, the assistant went on, “Ms. Wallace wants to see you immediately, if you don’t mind driving to the plant. She can’t break away because of a problem up there.” Coso Hot Springs were less than twenty miles over the county line in Inyo, so Michael agreed and jumped back in his car.

  Pulling into a parking space at the plant now, he unfolded the sunshade over the dash and stepped out into temperatures in the high nineties. The Sierra Nevada rose just ten miles to the west, the granite wall that had once been the limit of the Shoshone world. He stared out over the sprawling facility that appeared to be leaking steam from a dozen places. His father’s ancestors had known these hot springs but avoided them. They were a haunt of the pauhas, or water-babies, hideous beings who had the ability to turn themselves into infants with such pitiful cries no traveler could resist picking up and comforting them. The water-babies then drowned their kind-hearted victims. It was a lesson to Shoshone youngsters not to have too much sympathy for strangers.

  He glanced up at somebody crossing the pavement toward him. In that split-second, he believed the shapely figure in the white AEI cap and khaki jumpsuit to be Dulcie. But, on closer look, the woman was at least twenty years older. And while the two shared some physical traits—womanly hips, upturned noses and a tendency to freckle, this female’s manner was obviously more jaded than innocent, more assertive than vulnerable.

  “Investigator Long Shore?”

  “Yes, Ms. Wallace?”

  “Call me Joanna. Thanks for coming on such short notice.” Only after shaking did she seem to realize that her hands were stained by grease or some other lubricant. “Sorry about that. Our air-cooled condenser is on the fritz, and we’ve been off-line now for several hours. This way, please...”

  Michael wasn’t quite sure what to make of her inference that she’d arranged this meeting. His stop-off at her headquarters had been unannounced. “Do many of your executives pinch-hit as mechanics?”

  “At AEI, we all do. Carl’s philosophy is that nobody’s above turning a wrench. Besides, one of my degrees is in mechanical engineering.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Three—the bachelor’s in engineering, a juris doctor and a master’s in business administration.”

  “What do you do in your spare time?”

  She smiled. “This your first visit to our plant?”

  “Been past it a thousand times, but never swung inside.”

  “Well, as you probably know,” she said, raising her voice over the whirr of turbines, “ there are weak spots in the earth’s crust where magma heats the groundwater. When that water hits at least two hundred and twenty degrees, Fahrenheit, you can make electricity from it. That’s what we’re doing here at Coso Arroyo...” She pointed at high-tension lines sweeping up from the complex and looping across the desert toward Los Angeles, 150 miles to the south. “The magma-heated water is pumped from our geothermal wells to this separator...” Almost affectionately, she tapped the side of the piece of apparatus in question. “Pressures are lowered, and the water flashes into steam...” Michael didn’t volunteer that coso was the Shoshone word for steam. “...which keeps the turbine generators humming and voila—electricity. Any questions?”

  “Yes, where’s Carl Kincannon?”

  Joanna Wallace stopped and faced him. “I don’t know, and I’m beginning to get a bad f
eeling about this. We’re lost without him. Really lost. Come, there’s a quiet place we can talk.” They passed through a door and into an air-conditioned control room, where some engineer-types were huddled over a console, murmuring to one another in worried-sounding tones. Beyond a second door was a small office. An interior window let Joanna keep tabs on the engineers. She sat behind the desk and motioned for Michael to take the chair opposite it.

  “Have you filed a missing-person report with Kern County Sheriff’s Department?” he asked.

  She swept off her hat, loosing a fall of auburn-brown hair. “No, although we’ve discussed their taking a courtesy report for you people.”

  “We people, being Inyo County?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why should we take the lead in this?”

  Joanna took a roll of paper towels from a desk drawer, ripped off one and began wiping her hands. “On July first, Carl left Inyokern for Beatty, presumably Nevada—”

  “Do you know what he had going there?”

  “I don’t. And I only learned this because his assistant told me Carl entered Beatty on his computer calendar. At around eleven-thirty that morning, I got a call from Carl. I was at my desk in headquarters, and I asked him where the devil he was. Stovepipe Wells, he said. I asked him what’s so interesting about Death Valley this time of year, and he said I just need to clear my head and resolve a thing or two. Beyond that, I didn’t feel the need or right to pry. And I can see it in your eyes—there was no mention of Beatty.”

  “What was his purpose in calling? He called you, right?”

  “Oh, it was about the condenser. As usual, Carl foresaw a problem the rest of us didn’t. We put it on the back burner and now this...” She flicked her chin toward the engineers, visible through the window, in crisis mode. “He also asked me if he had any pressing messages.”

  “Did he?”