Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  “No.”

  “Do you know what he was driving? A registration check through DMV came up with no personal vehicles.”

  “That’s right, Carl grabs whatever he needs from our motor pool. I’m sure he took one of our Hummers. You can’t miss them. They’re all lime-green.”

  “I’ll need the license and, more importantly, the vehicle identification number.”

  “Of course, I’ll get right on it.”

  “Does the firm own any aircraft?”

  “Not anymore. All the toys have been sold off.”

  “Things not going well?”

  She shrugged but didn’t answer.

  Michael wanted to pick up on how she felt about the man. Without directly asking. Otherwise, he’d get another rehearsed spiel like the one on geothermal energy. “Did Dr. Kincannon personally hire you?”

  She paused. “In a sense. As the biggest shareholder, he selected our board of directors. They, in turn, hired me.”

  “Does he regularly check in with you?”

  “No, not anytime recent.”

  Michael had caught a trace of sadness in her voice. “I’m assuming he made the call on his cell?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like that number, plus one I can reach you at most of the time.”

  She gave both to him, and for the first time Michael reached inside his shirt pocket for his pen and spiral pad. “Was there any background noise, telling you where he was?

  “I told you—Stovepipe Wells.” Joanna frowned with what seemed impatience.

  But Michael kept at her. “People chatting, silverware jingling, a bar maybe, something like that?”

  She pondered a few seconds, then said, “Wind. I could hear wind on his end of the connection. And something like corrugated tin rattling in it. This was so loud I had to ask Carl to repeat himself a couple of times. At least a twenty-five mile-an-hour blow.”

  “Do you know that for certain?”

  “Know what?”

  “How do you know from just the sound that the wind was at least twenty-five miles-an-hour?”

  “Oh.” She smiled briefly again. “We used to operate a wind farm at Tehachapi Pass. Sold it and some other assets a few months ago. Anyway, I can tell how strong it’s gusting from talking all the time on the phone to our technicians down at the farm.”

  Mention of Tehachapi made him think of the correctional institution just outside the mountain town. It was from there that his brother Jimmy had a sent a message through the Shoshone grapevine that he needed to talk to Michael. Maybe on this trip. Maybe not. He made a note to check the weather observations at Stovepipe Wells for July first. “Has anybody you know had further communication with Carl?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Which makes me ask—why the delay in reporting ‘til now?”

  “It’s not unusual for Carl to need his space now and again. We all respect that, maybe too much. I hope we don’t live to regret it.” She tossed the soiled paper towel in the waste can. “Are you aware of the Yucca Mountain study Carl did back in the nineteen-nineties?”

  “No.”

  “Or the controversy about the site?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Meaning—what you’ve read in the newspapers?”

  “And what my late father told me,” Michael said. “He was a nuclear technician in the Navy. Later went to work for the government at the Nevada Test Site.”

  “How did he die, if I might ask?”

  “Anaplastic thyroid cancer.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said as if it confirmed a bias against the site. “A father is so important for self-esteem. Given your family history, I’m sure you’ll understand why Carl is passionate about making sure Yucca Mountain never becomes a nuclear waste dump. This is at the core of institute’s mission: not only to turn away from nuclear energy, but replace it and fossil fuels with viable and sustainable alternatives—”

  “In a nutshell,” Michael interrupted, “what’s Dr. Kincannon’s study all about?”

  “In our business, we call nutshells abstracts. Give me your business card, and I’ll make sure you get a copy of the abstract on Carl’s report to the Department of Energy.”

  “Is it possible someone inside the DOE or nuclear energy industry might mean him harm?”

  “That would be pure speculation on my part, Investigator. I’m not prepared to go there.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, handing over a card, “and please call me Michael. One more question and I’ll get out of your hair for the time being.”

  “I’m sorry. Do I sound impatient? I realize you’re helping us.”

  “Are you keeping any information on Dr. Kincannon’s whereabouts from his wife?”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Dulcie Kincannon.”

  Joanna said, her words coming fast and cold, “As far as the board knows, Carl is legally married to no one. I’m withholding nothing from you, and I’ll give you whatever assistance you require...” But then she settled down again, her look warming. “Forgive me. I’d like to get off to better start, especially since we might be cooperating on this for some time to come. Would you mind joining me for an early dinner this evening?”

  * * *

  Michael was barreling down Coso Wash when headlights blinked three times at him. The sun was another hour from dipping behind the Sierra, but the vehicle was parked in the shadow of a Joshua tree-covered ridge. Michael recognized the unmarked sedan even before the portly man in the off-white suit got out of it.

  Gorman motioned with the handkerchief crumpled in his fist for Michael to stop.

  He pulled off on the opposite shoulder and strolled over the yellow line to the sheriff, who was leaning against a fender and dabbing his shiny face with the handkerchief. “When will you learn to go slow?”

  Michael wasn’t sure if Gorman was referring to his driving speed or the warning he’d been given two evenings ago about the Kincannon case. It didn’t surprise him that the sheriff had intercepted him coming out of the geothermal plant—like a good little probationary, he had reported today’s various stops to dispatch. What he found curious was that Gorman had been so conveniently positioned: Coso was fifty miles south of his office in Independence.

  “Is there an Irishman somewhere in your family tree, Long Shore?” the sheriff asked, giving his neck a final swipe before pocketing the soaked handkerchief.

  Michael hiked a shoulder.

  “Well, you sure as hell have the luck of the Irish.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “Remember how you thought the victim might’ve been a lounge lizard out of Vegas?”

  The man’s clothes had suggested something like that.

  “Well, try this on for size,” the sheriff said, scarcely able to contain his pleasure, “he was no entertainer. He was a parking valet at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

  Michael couldn’t make up his mind if this news was good or bad. There would have been a kind of comfort in tying the case to Las Vegas, a hint of normalcy, as most body dumps in Death Valley began in Clark County as gang or mob-related homicides. But of more immediate concern, by what process had the victim been identified—and with none of Michael’s help? “How’d we get so lucky?” he asked without enthusiasm.

  “ID sent out a flyer, describing our John Doe and asking for help from our law enforcement brethren in identifying him...”

  Michael had to bite his tongue. He hadn’t authorized the release of this circular. Leaking too much detail too soon, even to law enforcement, could make it hard to eliminate time-wasting leads and suspects. But silence was the price of being back on probation.

  Happily, Gorman went on: “Within the day, Long Shore—the day—we got a hit back from the L.A. field office of the FBI. They had a hunch our John Doe was an Iranian-American they’ve been keeping tabs on for the past year. They transmitted dental records to their Vegas office, and the long and short of it is that we have a confirme
d ID. What kind of mine was that, anyway?”

  “Probably silver.”

  “Any dolomite taken out of it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, there was dolomite dust on this subject’s uniform,” Gorman said. “Oh, and something else you might have a nominal interest in. The pathologists nailed down the cause of death. They looked really closely at the entry wound in the skull. It’s not a bullet entry, unless somebody is shooting square ammunition. It’s from some kind of square-tipped tool, tapered but basically square.”

  The initial pathologist had put off the examination of this wound on Tuesday until a specialist could fly in from Salt Lake City. That’s why Michael had been unaware of this development. But he made no excuses. “The FBI give a reason they were keeping tabs on the victim?”

  “All will be revealed if only you get down to L.A.” Gorman pushed himself off the side of his sedan and reached through the open driver’s-side window for a manila packet. “This is our contribution to the cause—photos, evidence inventories, everything except your report. Give it to the FBI with my compliments. Now that you’ve been handed almost everything, I expect you to wrap this up in short order.” He looked down his nose at Michael’s aloha shirt. “I trust you carry a blazer, white shirt and tie in your cruiser?”

  “Always,” Michael said coolly.

  “Good.” With that, the sheriff got back inside his car, turned around and headed back to the main highway.

  Michael followed at a distance. When they got to U.S. Route 395, Gorman turned right, toward Independence and his throne-like booth in the back of the Elk’s lodge, and Michael turned left, toward Southern California.

  A few miles down the highway, Michael spotted a patch of big sage. He pulled off, parked and walked out into the sun-wilted growth with his cell phone.

  Joanna Wallace must have alerted by her caller ID. “How may I help you, Investigator?”

  “Afraid I’ve got to ask for a rain-check on dinner tonight in Indian Wells,” he said, harvesting six-inch leaders, or terminal shoots, off the sage plants.

  “Oh no,” she whined, almost playfully, “a hotter date than me?”

  “The FBI in L.A.”

  “Well, I’ll hold you to the postponement. And seriously—if you need anything from AEI, call anytime.”

  Chapter Eight

  Long before the arrival of the Spanish in California, a Shoshone had made his way down to what was now Los Angeles from Death Valley. The reason was lost, maybe a trading expedition. He brought back wondrous tales about this paradise to the south, a world of strange foods taken from the sea, skies like rabbit fur and greenery everywhere. Of course, what had seemed lush to a desert Shoshone had been only chaparral scrub. The grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel—overgrown with palms and tropical flowers—were truly lush, Michael noted as he left them in a brown FBI Crown Victoria.

  Special Agent R.J. Higgins drove east on Sunset Boulevard through sylvan neighborhoods where billionaires had probably driven out the millionaires. The agent paid no attention to the surroundings, maybe put off by the June gloom, the overcast off the Pacific that had persisted into mid-summer. Higgins was a trim, well-groomed man in his thirties with dimples that appeared unexpectedly when he smiled. Which wasn’t often. He was short on chitchat, so Michael wasn’t sure if his counterintelligence section was based here or in Washington, D.C. He also had no idea with the “R.J.” stood for.

  With Michael sitting in, the agent had just finished a series of interviews with the Iranian-American’s co-workers at the hotel. Nastour Razin had been their swing-shift supervisor. His photograph revealed one of those ascetic Middle Eastern faces that could have belonged either to a university professor or a suicide bomber. The sum of these interviews was that on Monday, June 30, Razin had been granted family emergency leave to see his brother, who’d suffered a heart attack at his home in Portland. Except, according to Higgins, Nastour hadn’t gone to Oregon in his 1991 Buick Reatta convertible, which was still missing. The agent knew this because the man’s brother, who hadn’t had a heart attack, was under FBI surveillance as well.

  “You hungry?” Higgins asked.

  It was almost noon, but it was obvious what the agent really wanted to do. “Let’s go ahead and hit the apartment before we grab a bite,” Michael said.

  An anemic sun was beginning to burn through the overcast as they crept through midday traffic along a block of nightclubs. Higgins had said nothing about entertaining Michael tonight, the custom for visiting law enforcement brethren, so he guessed that he was on his own. Maybe he’d wander back this way for a drink.

  Higgins parked in front of a four-story brick apartment building in West Hollywood. From the film companies that regularly descended on Death Valley, Michael had surmised that the entertainment industry consisted of wanna-bes who believed they were on the way up, has-beens who had yet to realize they were on the way down, and a razor-thin stratum of those hanging on by their fingernails. Judging from the Hollywood types he saw in the creaky elevator, Michael guessed that the residents of the Chateau Lorraine consisted mostly of those on the crawl up, mingling irritably with those on the slide down. An exception would have been a parking valet. Even a supervising valet would have found the rent here pricey. He assumed Higgins had already figured that out.

  The agent had the key to Apartment 404. He unlocked the door and stood aside for Michael to enter.

  The interior was stuffy and depressing. Gray walls and thrift-shop furniture. Homicide victims became more real when you saw where they’d lived, and obviously Razin, like many immigrants, had retired after work to the gritty and anonymous fringes of society. Virtually no intelligence targets warranted around-the-clock shadowing by the FBI. At least, that’s how Higgins explained Razin’s slipping out of L.A. without the bureau’s knowledge.

  Had he left directly from the hotel for the rendezvous with the blow to back of the skull that killed him? That he’d been found in his valet uniform said so. What had he been thinking on that night drive across the desert? What were the dreams of an Iranian spy?

  “Look around,” Higgins offered, “and don’t worry about touching stuff. Our evidence people have already been through the place. But let me know if anything you see ties back to Death Valley.” Apparently, he didn’t believe that a cow-county detective could ever figure out why Razin had wound up in a mine shaft. Michael didn’t take particular offense to this. It was a common attitude of urban cops toward their country cousins.

  “Shadowing Razin all these months...” Michael let his voice trail off.

  “All these years. What about it?”

  “What’d you pick up about the guy?”

  “He was a hot-headed son of a bitch.”

  “Could that alone have gotten him killed?”

  “Maybe. He went completely off his nut if he thought he’d been double-crossed. I can see where somebody could’ve taken him out in self-defense.”

  “What was his mission here in the U.S.?”

  “Keeping tabs on the Iranian émigré community in L.A. It’s mostly dissident, you know, people from the old regime who fled when the ayatollah took over. Razin had an interest in anybody who’d done service for the shah.”

  Michael realized that he was being subjected to the usual FBI striptease. Everything was revealed at the last possible moment before the lights went out. “Is that all he did? Snitch on Iran-Americans to Teheran?”

  Higgins hesitated, the ingrained habit of somebody in counterintelligence, then said, “Best we can figure, Razin was a headhunter.”

  “Figuratively or literally?”

  “Both. The Islamic revolution resulted in a big brain drain, especially in the sciences. He persuaded some of these people to return, although we believe one of them was shot as soon as he arrived back in Iran.”

  “What was the deceased’s specialty?”

  “Biology. He’d written a text about evolution.”

 
“And the specialties of those they didn’t shoot?”

  “Nuclear physics, mostly.”

  “Did Razin have any criminal history?”

  Another hesitation. “Maybe.”

  “Such as?” Michael asked.

  “Suspect in a homicide in the late nineties. Nothing ever came of it.”

  “Investigating agency?”

  “L.A. Sheriff, Lancaster Station.”

  “Do you have their reports?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind shooting me copies?”

  “No, give me your fax number before you shove off.”

  On the counter in the kitchen was the take-out menu to a Persian restaurant on Melrose Avenue. The coyote-gnawed hand Michael had found once held it, turned the sink taps on and off.

  He had already asked the agent if there was any evidence that Razin had been murdered here in the apartment. None. Which made sense. Simple was seldom smart, and the killer or killers in this case knew that. A fresh crime scene was ripe with physical evidence, and modern forensics was more than up to harvesting it. Distance added something else to a homicide—time. The first forty-eight hours after the death were critical. Beyond that, the trail cooled exponentially. Michael had gotten on to Razin two weeks after the fact, and he still didn’t know where the man had met his end.

  Higgins had joined him in the kitchen. “Find anything interesting?”

  “Nada.”

  “Then take a look at this for me...” The agent reached past Michael and opened the West Los Angeles phone directory to where a piece of note paper had been tucked between the two pages entitled List of U.S. Area Codes. But it was the note with the Beverly Hills Hotel logo to which Higgins pointed: “Graphologist established this is in Razin’s hand. Mean anything to you?”

  The single word Carrara.

  Michael said, “Yes...” The agent was watching him, intently. “It’s where the best Italian marble comes from.”

  Higgins asked with undisguised suspicion, “How do you know something like that?”

  “My mother was Italian.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Lone Pine, California.”