Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery

by Kirk Mithchell

  “Yes. R.J. is a friend of the family.” He swung his legs over the side of the lounge and thrust his feet into his flip-flops. His pounding head told him that it was going to be a long day on the heels of the same old slippery slope—a woman afraid to be left alone, one bottle of wine and then two. “What brings you from Inyokern on a...?”

  “Sunday morning,” Joanna finished for him.

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you often sleep during the day?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something very Latin about you.” She paused to take a deep breath. “Last time, you accused me of withholding information. I’m here to show you otherwise, as much as it pains me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve been going through one of Carl’s offices. I hated doing it.”

  “One of his offices?”

  “His main one is at our headquarters, and his assistant guards it like a lioness. But Carl keeps some papers in a smaller office at the geothermal plant. That’s where I found something I wish I hadn’t. But it hit me you should know about this right away, even though I’m sure you’d discover it on your own, given time. More than anything, I didn’t want you to think that I was withholding something material...” A sigh. “I feel like I’m betraying Carl, but here...” She handed him a folded piece of paper. As she reached over, he glimpsed the lower edge of an armband tattoo, but her short-sleeve slid down over it again before he could make out the design. He hadn’t figured her for the tattoo type.

  He unfolded the paper and scanned it. A lode mining claim location notice for the Lucky Boy Mine. The claimant was Carl Kincannon. “You and I never discussed the body found in the mine.”

  “The story was in this week’s Inyo Register. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “They depress me—all that crime and violence.” He wondered if she knew about yesterday’s discoveries in the marble pit as well. That hadn’t made the papers. In any event, he was now certain this was not a good moment for Higgins to intrude on the investigation. At least, not until Michael figured out what all of this meant. He’d make himself—and Joanna Wallace—scarce while he questioned her in detail. “Where are you parked?” he asked, rising and pocketing the form.

  “The space in front of your office.”

  “Mind taking a drive with me?”

  “No, but why?”

  “I’ve got rounds to make,” he replied, starting off for the bungalow, scanning the grounds of the resort for anybody who looked capable of murder-for-hire. No longer did Michael forget to take his pistol to the pool.

  She fell in beside him. “Like patrol rounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do detectives make patrol rounds?”

  “The sheriff’s philosophy is that nobody’s above patrolling,” he said, echoing Kincannon’s dictum she’d shared with him at the geothermal plant that nobody at AEI was above turning a wrench.

  “Touché.”

  He tore the note off the bungalow door. Higgins would have to call Michael on his cell now, giving him fair warning of his presence in the valley. A few moments later, as he jiggled the flyswatter under the seats of his cruiser, she asked, “What’re you doing?”

  “Snake check.”

  “You mean snakes get in your car?”

  “Happens out here,” he said, opening the passenger-side front door for her.

  “Michael, you’re sliding into paranoia.”

  A well-tended paranoia, he noted inwardly, that made you distrustful of everyone, even those you’re attracted to. Like Dulcie. It was now possible that Kincannon had personally put out the contract to eliminate anybody who got on to the trail leading away from his intentional disappearance. And if Dulcie were helping him in that effort, her outward innocence bordered on the pathological.

  Backing out from under the awning, he glanced over the AEI vehicle Joanna arrived in, a lime-green Hummer pickup much like the one that he would now guess was long gone, abandoned in a location far from Death Valley. She had yet to give him the particulars, like the vehicle identification number, on that Humvee. Was it more than simple forgetfulness? Omission was often more revealing than anything a subject said. He’d play along a bit longer.

  More importantly, he’d just been handed a lead on a platter. “The claim form is almost twenty-years old.”

  “That’s right, nineteen-eighty-nine. And I don’t know if Carl renewed it after that.”

  Before the national monument became the expanded national park, and mining activity stopped. Michael asked, “Have you ever been up to the Lucky Boy?”

  “No,” she said, licking her lips.

  Once again, for the thousandth time, he had to pick his way through the hordes of tourists. This morning’s foreigners were queued up for their busses, sweating in a cloud of diesel fumes. Death Valley could now be scratched off their itineraries; Las Vegas awaited. Reaching the log arch, Michael turned south. “Why would Carl want a silver mine? I’ve been told he wasn’t into prospecting.” Told by Dulcie at their first meeting, but he left that unsaid.

  “Not silver, per se. He was looking for deposits of high-grade antimony back then.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An element that occurs in copper and silver ores. Most of our supply comes from China, and he was looking for a source closer to home. But this is just my guess.”

  He caught her taking notice of the road sign pointing the way to Zabriskie Point, three miles away, and Las Vegas beyond. So far, she hadn’t asked him to power up the windows and turn on the air-conditioning. Maybe she was used to the heat, relished it even. “Ever been there?” he asked.

  “Vegas?”

  “Zabriskie Point.” Michael would swear that the snapshot of Joanna and Kincannon taped to his computer monitor had been taken here at the overlook.

  “Yes, long ago,” she admitted. “May I ask you something personal?”

  A neat turning of the tables. “I guess.”

  “Your father worked at the Nevada Test Site and died of thyroid cancer.”

  “Correct,” Michael said, checking his rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  “Do you blame the government?”

  Michael paused. Where was she headed with this? She always had an agenda. “The source of the exposure was never pinned down. He was a nuclear technician in the Navy, so it could have been while he was in the service. Or maybe it was the adobe hut he grew up in. There are high levels of radon places in the valley.” Blame. The trouble with blame was that it never stayed within bounds. Even now, his mind flashed back to his father’s virtual abandonment of them while he worked at the federal site—and shacked with a Paiute woman on the reservation north of Las Vegas. “What’s antimony used for?”

  “Lots of things,” she said, “alloys, bearings, fire retardant, semi-conductors. But Carl needed it for storage batteries. Back then, the thing holding back the growth of solar power was the quality of the batteries.” She smiled fondly. “As with everything else, Carl set out to revolutionize that field too.”

  “Did he work overseas much?”

  She held her hand out the window into the slipstream. “Meaning?”

  “Did he contract with foreign governments?”

  “Earlier in his career.”

  “In layman’s terms, what was the work about?”

  “Site feasibility studies for nuclear plants.”

  Michael put on his blinker for the Zabriskie Point turn-off. “Which countries?”

  “France, Germany, Italy.”

  “What about the Middle East?”

  “I believe he did something preliminary for the shah of Iran.”

  “What do you mean by preliminary?”

  “The plant was never built. The shah was overthrown and Carl never went back to complete the study. But I could be speaking out of turn. This is before I came to AEI, Michael.”

  “Could there be any documentation left from that project, you know—the names of co
ntacts with the Iranian government, that sort of thing?”

  “I have no idea. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to look.”

  The one-way lane climbed out of Furnace Creek Wash toward the point.

  “How’d Carl and you meet? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “No, I suppose not. Born and raised in Florida, but I’d come west and was working in San Francisco. He persuaded me my best opportunities for professional growth were in eastern California. Carl can be very persuasive.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Sorry?” she asked, leaning toward him and away from the sound of the air rushing by.

  “What sort of work were you doing in San Francisco?”

  “Freelancing.”

  “At what?”

  “Media relations.”

  “Was this before or after you went to college?”

  “When haven’t I been in school?”

  He took the park ranger’s reserved parking spot, got out and opened Joanna’s door for her. A stiff morning breeze had risen, and he only had to let go of the handle for the door to slam shut. He led her along the footpath toward the crowded overlook. “Isn’t AEI having some kind of tax dispute with the county over the geothermal plant?”

  “I’ll have to refer you to our legal counsel in Los Angeles,” she said, her tone cooling, instantly. “I’m not comfortable discussing this with somebody from Inyo.”

  “Joanna, I’m not prying for the county counsel. I’m trying to find out what happened to Carl. His state of mind at the time might help.”

  When she said nothing, he thought that was it—subject closed. But as they slowly wended their way through sightseers who insisted on stopping in the middle of the path to shoot pictures, she volunteered, “The geothermal plant is on leased federal land, part of the Navy base actually, but the county has been taxing us anyway. It’s in litigation, so I can’t get into specifics. These court battles are eating up our cash, and Carl had to sell off our wind farm a few months ago just to meet payroll. Now the IRS is putting us under their microscope. So Carl’s state of mind hasn’t been the best. A number of assumptions can be made about the parties attacking him, but I’m not going to speculate, Michael.”

  “Such as—not making the assumption the feds and the county might be in collusion to give Carl trouble?”

  She said nothing.

  “And not making the assumption the Department of Energy is siccing the IRS on Carl for payback on what his study is doing to delay the Yucca Mountain project...and...and what?”

  She was smiling at him again. “You’re a lot like I was years ago. Too much potential to be in the situation you find yourself.”

  “Thank you, if that was a compliment.”

  “It was,” she said.

  “When Carl called you that last time from—where was it, Stovepipe Wells...?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “He said something about the need to clear his head and resolve a thing or two. Were these the reasons—court, IRS, cash flow—he needed to get away from Inyokern?”

  “Again, I don’t know. I didn’t pry. I’m not in a position to.”

  “Were you ever?”

  “That’s personal, Michael, until such time I’m under oath. But trust me, it has no relevance to your investigation.”

  He nodded. “The other day, you said it was like him to take up some big project, only to lose interest. From that, is it fair to say he can change his mind without warning?”

  “Yes, it’s fair to say that. You can almost see the curtains close behind his eyes.” They had come to the overlook. She leaned her arms on the railing and took in the vista. The sulfur-yellow hills of the badlands spread before them, the wind hot in their faces. A strand of her auburn hair had caught in a corner of her mouth, and she brushed it aside.

  “It is as you remember?” Michael asked.

  She reflected a moment. “No, it seemed cleaner back then.”

  “Some smog is blowing in from Southern California today,” he said. “It didn’t use to do that.”

  * * *

  Higgins stabbed the little square of ham he’d just cut and stuffed it into his mouth. The agent didn’t look happy. He was tired, of course, and had even made a concession to the fact it was the weekend by not wearing a tie with his blazer. As expected, he had called Michael’s cell phone when he found the front door of the resident post locked. That heads-up had given Michael time to arrange a late breakfast with the agent at the Forty-Niner Café, which was just around the corner from the bungalow, and then drop Joanna Wallace off at her Hummer, unobserved. This time she’d suggested brunch with Michael, but once again he asked for a rain check. By now, almost noon, she was well on her way home to Kern County and the FBI man was glowering at him over his ham and eggs at a table in the empty banquet room Michael had asked for so they could talk in private.

  “Late last night,” Higgins said in an offhand way that was at odds with his sour expression, “AFIS helped us crack one of the better latents our techies lifted from the blood smudges on Razin’s Buick.”

  AFIS was the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. “Good news?”

  “We’ll see. The subject is a Carl Kincannon. Heard of him?”

  Michael stopped chewing on his breakfast burrito. “He’s just the missing I’ve been working for the past week.”

  “Well, he had an old ten-print card on file from when he got clearance to do work for the Department of Energy on Yucca Mountain.”

  “Then that explains it.”

  “Explains what, Mike?”

  Michael slipped the Lucky Boy claim from his shirt pocket and handed it over.

  Higgins scanned the form, then asked, “How’d you get hold of this?”

  “Claims are registered with the county.”

  “When did you get it?”

  “It was waiting for me when I woke up today, Rupert.”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “Beg pardon, R.J. And please don’t call me Mike.”

  “Fine.” Examining the claim more closely, Higgins appeared to calm down, slightly. “You actually got some sleep?”

  “Some.” Michael let Higgins pore over the claim for a minute more, then said as if thinking out loud, “I wonder why Kincannon didn’t wear gloves.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, had he shown up at the marble quarry intending to kill Razin, why he wasn’t better prepared? This is a detail guy, a scientist who does safety studies for nuclear facilities all over the world.” Michael could tell by Higgins’s look that he hadn’t known that. Or much else about Carl, other than the tidbit that he’d been a contractor at one time for DOE.

  “Lay it all out for me, Michael,” the man said in a new tone that bordered on pleading, “help me put my head around this.”

  “Then help me with this—in all the taps you must have had on Razin, your people never overheard Kincannon on the other end of the call?”

  “Never.”

  Unless the agent was lying, that made it almost certain the arrangements for the meeting at Carrara had been handled over pre-paid cell phones.

  Michael poured Higgins a fresh cup of coffee from the pitcher the waitress had left on the table. “Follow along— Monday, June thirtieth, Razin gets emergency leave from the hotel to see his sick brother in Oregon. Next morning, Kincannon phones his estranged wife, telling her he wants to come over to Beatty to see her, talk things over before the divorce.”

  “You mean Beatty, Nevada?”

  “Right, except it’s pronounced like Warren Beatty.”

  “That’s close to Carrara, isn’t it?”

  “Just up Ninety-five.”

  Higgins dropped his voice. “The truth, goddammit —you knew it wasn’t Carrara, Italy, from the second you saw that note in Razin’s place.”

  “You want to argue or hear me out?”

  Higgins glared a moment longer, then took pen and pad from the
inner pocket of his blazer.

  “The important thing about Carrara is that we now have proof both Razin and Kincannon showed up there,” Michael continued. “Their paths crossed—big time. But the stumbling block that kept me from connecting the two cases was this—what’d they have in common? Then, while interviewing AEI staff, I asked if Kincannon had worked abroad, fishing for places he may have skipped out to. I learned that, years ago, he did this study for the shah of Iran for a nuclear plant. Remember how you told me in Razin’s apartment how he had an interest in anyone who’d done service for the shah?”

  Higgins stopped scribbling. “Mother of God.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, go on.”

  “Wait, R.J.,” Michael said, tilting back in his chair, “Where’s the quid pro quo here?”

  “Such as?”

  “What did Razin do before he became a parking valet and part-time spook?”

  “This and that. I think he worked in the stockroom at the Macy’s in the Beverly Center for a while.”

  “You know, here’s my problem with the FBI. You ask me to spill my guts, and in return you tell me a big whopping secret like Razin stocked shirts at Macy’s. Counterintelligence must be so exciting I don’t know how you guys contain yourselves.”

  The agent glanced around to make sure they still had the banquet room to themselves. “Not a word or my ass is grass—”

  Michael impatiently gestured for him to go on.

  “Razin was trained in nuclear physics at the University of Pisa. That’s why you got my heart pumping when you started talking about Carrara, Italy. As far as a job, he worked in the shah’s energy ministry, but even then his real bosses were the revolutionaries plotting to take over the government. And I clearly told you Razin was headhunting here for nuke technicians. So don’t you see? Teheran needed Kincannon’s expertise. That explains the meeting in the quarry. And we’ve got proof from the Lancaster case that Nastour liked to close his deals in quarries—one way or the other.”

  “But it doesn’t tell us why Razin wound up dead instead of closing that deal. What did the physical evidence tell your team from Vegas about a possible scenario?”

  Higgins glumly conceded, “Our technicians say just too much time elapsed—what, nineteen days?—for them to put it all together.”