He now turned right, making a short dogleg that delivered him to the center of Carrara.
Three hours after greeting the sunrise on the Great Salt Pan, he stood beside a concrete ring that had once been the town fountain. It’d been an opulent gesture to have one in a valley with no visible water, but like most mining boomtowns Carrara had been full of dreams that proved less lasting than the scars those dreams left on the Amargosa Desert. The most visible scar was the old railroad grade that climbed from the remains of the marble-finishing mill into the canyon on Bare Mountain that hid the quarry itself.
Two things had convinced Michael that Nastour Razin meant this namesake and not the Italian original in the note he’d left behind in the kitchen of his West Hollywood apartment. First, that note had been tucked in the phone directory pages for U.S. area codes, not international calling codes. And, of course, the Iranian-American parking valet had wound up dead in a mine less than fifteen miles from Carrara, Nevada.
Michael felt a little ashamed for not being upfront with Special Agent Higgins about this. But only a little. Sheriff Gorman had warned him, on pain of termination, against wild speculation. This morning’s foray into Nevada clearly fell into that category, so Michael had felt from the beginning that it was best kept to himself. But there was something more. What had Woody Bryant said three days ago about there being no such thing as coincidence—just links in causality we can’t see at first? Those links were still half-formed in Michael’s mind, so tenuous they’d never survive a team of federal agents swarming over this piece of desert, busily contaminating traces of evidence to crimes that had yet to be defined.
Last night, returning from Tehachapi, Michael had found the document-receiving tray of his fax machine full. In addition to routine traffic were the L.A. Sheriff’s reports from Higgins, as promised. They concerned a body dump in a gravel pit outside Lancaster, the remains of a former Iranian air force officer with a single gunshot to the head. He’d been reported missing by his family in San Fernando a week earlier. Nastour Razin was mentioned only because the victim had met with him at the Persian restaurant on Melrose Avenue the previous month. A quickie interview with Razin had been conducted over the phone by a sheriff’s detective who obviously hadn’t been privy to what the FBI knew about the parking valet. Razin claimed not to have known the deceased former officer; he’d been given the man’s name in the hope of locating a mutual friend. LASD had not considered Razin to be a suspect. That had been conjecture on Higgins’s part, even wishful thinking, perhaps because he imagined how an execution would give force to Razin’s drive to get exiles to go home. And the gravel pit was less than an hour’s drive from the valet’s West Hollywood apartment.
Michael began checking the foundations and tumbled-in cellars, scattering small lizards before him. There were tracks, vehicular and human, all over the ground. Some wandered out into the brush. But nineteen days had now passed since July first, the most likely date for Razin’s arrival here, and the town site was within a stone’s throw of a heavily-trafficked interstate.
He sniffed the still air.
Nothing.
Where to begin? As usual, he was confronted by a vast country that only grudgingly surrendered its secrets.
Sighing, he looked up into the sky. It was an achingly clear morning, but not too hot for him to expand his search on foot. He needed to gain some elevation for an overview of the scene. Grabbing his day-pack, with its invaluable cigars, he locked his cruiser and set off through the creosote bushes that had invaded the town.
Years ago, Florence had been tickled by a news report about this spindly plant. Botanists had discovered that what appeared to be a thirty-foot-wide ring of individual bushes was in fact a single organism that had been spreading outward over thousands of years. The discovery substantiated her most fundamental belief that everything in the desert was invisibly connected in a circle of life. And that got back to what Woody had said, that things could be connected in unexpected ways.
Trudging up the old railroad grade toward the quarry, Michael saw that this path would soon take him into the depths of the canyon. He needed a high vantage where he could sit and think. The summit of Bare Mountain towered three thousand feet above him, but he didn’t have all morning for the climb. He needed to interview Dulcie again on Kincannon’s disappearance before heading home to Furnace Creek, hopefully killing two birds, two unrelated cases, with one stone on the same trip.
He angled off toward a knoll on the southern extension of the mountain. As he gained altitude, he walked backward to gaze down on the faint grid of Carrara’s deserted streets. He guessed that Razin, not knowing it was a ghost town, had been after the phone number to a motel here. Did that mean he’d agreed to a meeting at a location unfamiliar to him? Not a smart move. Had he used directory assistance to find the listing for a contact living here in southern Nye County?
Or, contrary to appearances, had Razin already known of Carrara, Nevada?
Still looking west, Michael traced the length of Chloride Cliff Road to make sure nobody was following him. No vehicles were visible, but he’d keep checking.
He was shuffling around again—when movement sprang from a nearby gully. Instinctively, his hand went to his pistol. But it was only a jackrabbit. The large-eared hare bolted past him and down the slope. He watched it bound over the railroad embankment and continue west. Just beyond the old grade, twin tire impressions formed a loop. They were almost imperceptible except in places where the wheels had mashed down the creosote bushes and left stop-start divots in the sand. Somebody, days or even weeks ago, had parked there and then driven back to the highway. Nearby was a patch of disturbed earth, possibly the jackrabbit’s wallow or a place where an antique bottle hunter had been digging.
Michael would take a closer look later.
For now, he climbed on, Jimmy’s warning rattling around inside his head.
There was nothing new in a Death Valley Division deputy living under a death threat. While holed up in the Panamint Range, Charlie Manson had ordered his family to bring him the head of the deputy assigned to the resident post in the town of Shoshone. Fortunately, the man had been away from his mobile home the night the Manson assassins came calling. He’d been fortunate in another sense—he could put a face to the danger he faced. The problem with Michael’s own threat was that he had no idea where it was coming from. Who felt the need to eliminate a probationary Inyo County investigator?
Reaching the top of the knoll, Michael found a flat rock to sit on. He dropped his pack, broke out a water bottle and sipped from it while studying the topography all around.
To the south, west and northwest lay Death Valley National Park, ever close. Two portions of it spilled over the border into Nevada here. Even without binoculars, he could make out the waste-rock dump left by the Lucky Boy Mine on Chloride Cliff. For a second time within minutes, he scanned the fifteen miles from Carrara to the mine, knowing that the parking valet had been killed either here, at the ghost town, or somewhere along that back road routinely used by Dulcie and known to her missing husband. Where in those fifteen miles had the homicide occurred?
But he was getting ahead of himself.
Slow down, think.
Shifting around on the rock, Michael skimmed his eyes along the eastern horizon. It was filled by a long, low ridge. This unremarkable-looking rise was Yucca Mountain, the sole candidate for a permanent repository to store America’s spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste. Chief among the U.S. Department of Energy’s performance specifications was that the site be safe for 10,000 years. Critics said the radioactivity would be a problem longer than that. In the parlance of the old Indian treaties, the bowels of Yucca Mountain would be dangerously hot for as long as grass grows and the wind blows.
A breeze stirred, cooling Michael’s sweaty skin. It came out of the south, carrying the balm of the conifers it had picked up while sweeping over the Spring Mountains earlier in the morning. He inhaled deeply, trying
to catch a hint of death in it. You never found just one corpse. Bad things always came in threes.
According to the feds and the nuclear power industry, you couldn’t find a nicer place for a radioactive waste dump than Yucca Mountain. It was arid, and what little precipitation that fell was trapped by a closed basin. The vegetation was sparse. The immediate population was even sparser. Most of the mountain was already within the Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of underground atomic tests had been conducted. Perfect.
But Dr. Carl Kincannon disagreed.
After going through the LASD reports, Michael had still found it hard to sleep. The abstract on Kincannon’s Yucca Mountain study had arrived from Joanna Wallace, so he read a big chunk of it. In short, Kincannon said that nobody could predict the geologic behavior of an area for 10,000 years. And while the water table was an average of 1,000 feet below the surface of the ridge, even deeper groundwater had been forced up by natural mechanisms through fractures in the earth’s crust, like the Ghost Dance Fault that ran right through the mountain, to the level of the planned repository. The trouble with water flooding the underground chambers—particularly hot and mineralized water—was that it would corrode the casks holding the waste. The population in the area was sparse today; but, based on Las Vegas’s explosive growth of late, southern Nevada might one day be a megalopolis, and some of its future suburbs could be unknowingly built over caverns seething with radioactive decay.
The abstract had cleared up one question in Michael’s mind.
During their chat in the columbarium, the man calling himself Carson had claimed that his boss had no interest in Razin. “No, kiddo, he doesn’t give a crap if dead bodies are falling out of the sky over Death Valley. He wants to be kept up to speed on the Carl Kincannon disappearance.”
Now that made sense.
Two sides had dug in their heels on Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy and the nuclear industry were hell-bent on going ahead with the project as rapidly as possible. Waste was stacking up in makeshift dumps outside nuclear plants all over the nation. Environmentalists and the State of Nevada were opposed, and it now seemed a safe bet that the governor had sent Carson to find out what had happened to Kincannon, his state’s most valuable expert in the fight against Yucca Mountain.
But did that also mean somebody powerful with a dog in this fight was prepared to eliminate the lead detective in the missing-person case if he got too close to the truth, explaining the contract Jimmy had caught wind of?
Michael had come close to throwing away the cell phone Carson had given him. But then, on second thought, he charged it and stored it in the glove box of his cruiser. Ultimately, he might have his own questions for Mr. Carson.
He faced north.
He could see the quarry up the canyon, the angular voids where slabs of marble had been hewn out of Bare Mountain. One side of the pit’s floor was carpeted in brown. Tumbleweeds, he supposed, that had rolled into the cavity and been trapped there by the steep walls.
Something glinted from that direction, briefly.
Michael had caught it from the corner of his eye and wasn’t sure where it had come from, maybe some houses along U.S. 95 south of Beatty, maybe from the windshield of one of the vehicles speeding along the highway.
Then it sparkled again, longer this time.
There—it was coming from the bottom of the quarry. Over the last few minutes, the sun had been clearing the jagged eastern rampart of the pit, and now its rays stopped flickering and poured steadily down on the nest of tumbleweeds.
Something glassy beneath them was reflecting the mid-morning light.
Rising, Michael started that way.
* * *
He had returned to railroad grade and was working his way toward the quarry when he decided that, before he trespassed any deeper into Nye County, he’d put in a courtesy call to the sheriff’s office here. However, instead of phoning Nye County to admit that he was checking out Carrara, he’d ask for directions to Dulcie’s home, based on the rural route mailing address she’d given him. He would explain only that he was doing a follow-up interview with the spouse on a missing person, making it sound so routine and boring the on-duty deputy would decline the offer to tag along.
There was only one problem.
The rail bed coursed through the bottom of the canyon, and his cell-phone screen showed only one bar. He clambered up the mountainside in hope of a stronger signal.
Funneling through the canyon, the breeze strengthened. It whistled through the brush, and from somewhere higher up came the unmistakable sound of corrugated tin buckling in the harder gusts.
He came across human tracks. They were weeks, perhaps even months old, but he could still make them out to be large-soled boot impressions. Michael, in cataloging Razin’s patent-leather oxfords before the autopsy, had determined the valet’s shoe size to be eight-and-a-half. These were more like twelves or thirteens, and they zigzagged up the slope in the way an experienced outdoorsman would tackle a steep incline.
The impressions vanished on a rock-strewn road, the access for motor vehicles to the quarry. He advanced slowly, hoping to find the boot tracks again. Desert holly had colonized the berms to the old road bed, and the wind made its white foliage shiver. Around the next bend stood a guard shack. Just beyond was the mouth of the pit. The shack had been constructed of corrugated tin and partly disassembled by a century of howling gales.
Michael had enough signal at this height to make his call. He was dialing the Beatty Substation—when he abruptly broke the connection and listened to the wind rattling the loosened sheets of tin.
I’ll be damned.
Changing his mind, he hit his speed dialer for the U.S. Weather Service forecast office in Las Vegas, which served eastern California as well as southern Nevada. The meteorologist who answered remembered him from previous calls, and Michael was spared a long explanation. “What can I do for you today, Investigator?”
“Would you happen to have a wind-speed observation for Stovepipe Wells on July first this year at eleven-thirty hours?”
“Should, but it’ll take me a minute.”
“No problem.”
“What’s that racket in the background?” the meteorologist asked.
“Tin. Corrugated tin in the wind.”
During the interview at the geothermal plant, Joanna Wallace had said that Kincannon called her on his cell phone from Stovepipe Wells on that date and at that time. 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...
“All right,” the meteorologist said, returning, “the wind speed at Stovepipe Wells airport on the first at eleven-thirty: zero.”
So, mostly likely, Kincannon hadn’t made his mid-day call to Joanna Wallace from Stovepipe Wells while traveling through Death Valley. “Do you have the same observation for the Carrara area in southern Nye County that date and time?”
“There no instrumentation at Carrara. Beatty airport okay?”
“Yes.”
The man was back on the phone in less than a minute. “South sixteen miles-an-hour, gusting to twenty-six miles-an- hour. Will that do it?”
“That’ll do it, thank you.” Michael pocketed his cell phone. Kincannon had made his call from right here. And from her experience with AEI’s wind farm at Tehachapi Pass near Mojave, Joanna had even correctly estimated the speed of the gusts she’d heard on his end of the connection.
Michael raised his wristwatch and noted the time: 11:02 A.M. He didn’t do this for the report. He did this because he wanted to mark the moment when he realized that two cases were actually one.
Then he went down into the Carrara quarry.
Chapter Thirteen
A blood-red sun dipped out of sight as Michael watched a brown sedan park near the tin guard shack. Wisely, the driver had realized the worsening road would be too rough on his two-wheel-drive Crown Victoria. He got out. Although Mich
ael stood three hundred yards below in the quarry pit, he could tell that it was R.J. Higgins. The FBI agent hadn’t dressed for the desert: He was still in the blue blazer, gray slacks and street shoes he’d worn to the office in Los Angeles this morning.
Technicians from the Las Vegas field office had beaten him here by five hours. At Michael’s suggestion, the techies had come in four-wheel-drives. They were now busy setting up a generator and portable lights so work on the crime scene could continue into the night.
By now, Michael had made all the notifications a probationary detective should have made in the first place. If somebody figured out the actual timeline of these cell-phone calls they’d see how it had been doctored. Around noon, he left a message on Dulcie Kincannon’s answering machine, asking to meet with her today, though he’d infer in his eventual report that this call had been placed prior to his leaving Furnace Creek. Then he asked the Inyo County watch commander to get a hold of Higgins. Finally, he personally called Nye County Sheriff’s Department, seeking forgiveness for nosing around their turf without prior permission. All of this was necessary because he’d found something major while overstepping his bounds. The Supreme Court said probable cause existed if the facts and circumstances known to an officer warranted a prudent man believing that an offense had been committed. Often, those circumstances had to be re-arranged in a more coherent sequence than they’d tumbled into the investigator’s life.
Higgins had just reached the Nye deputy on the scene, who’d set up a checkpoint at a wide spot in the road. The agent showed his credentials, then hiked on toward the pit. It was still hot, despite the coming of dusk, and he was sweating profusely by the time he reached Michael. “Is this what you call Death Valley-hot?”
“This would be sweater weather in Furnace Creek,” Michael replied.
The agent’s smile—and his dimples—quickly vanished. “How did you ever find it in a godforsaken place like this?”
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 10