The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  We took highway 190 around the back of the Inn and up the stem of the fan into the mountains. The road followed a wide gravelly wash, which climbed gently between two parallel ranges. To our left continued the abrupt face of the Funerals. To our right began the Black Mountains, which ran southward between the saltpan and the Funerals. We were wedged between two mountain faces as different as Walter’s and—it came to me—Pria’s. The cavernous Funerals were folded in sunburnt browns and somber grays and the gentle Blacks were furred in pastel mudstones. We passed a beard of white issuing from the fault zone along the base of the Funerals. Travertine deposits, I hazarded. Old dry springs.

  Indeed, we were traveling up a long drainage ditch. I saw how the waters that drained from the Funerals and Blacks would collect in the gravelly wash, which would channel those waters with their sediment load down to spill onto the fan. I saw how the fan was still being built.

  I’d keep that flood channel in mind, what with these hurricane-spawned storms. I had checked the weather report and learned that the hurricane off Baja California, according to Monday’s forecast, would be throwing storms our way all week. I’d keep in mind the Park Service’s Doppler radar scan, which provided a detailed flood risk index.

  I peered at the sky. Broken clouds.

  “Dolomite up there,” Walter said, peering at the Funerals.

  I saw. Dolomite in fender layer four. How coy of Jardine if he’d stashed his radioactive booty in the Funerals.

  Our destination, however, was in the Black Mountains. We turned off 190 onto the graded road that cut into Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. The jumbled badlands were naked of any shrub, their eroded contours shaded in mustard and cream and purple and pink. Black-mouthed burrows pockmarked the hills.

  Walter checked his map against the GPS coordinates in Jardine’s email.

  You are cordially invited, Jardine had written. And then he gave the time and place. And then he set the hook: A package awaits you inside the borax mine.

  And we bit. We couldn’t pass up the chance to recover at least some of the stolen radwaste. Of course, we had to consider that it might be a trap, which was why we planned to proceed with all due care. Or, maybe, nothing awaited us in the mine, and this was a hoax—Jardine running us around the desert, deflecting us from our job of following the evidence.

  The road climbed and curved and I stopped admiring the geology and started worrying about the mine we’d been invited to. The mudstone was now shot with snowy veins of borate ore. I knew my mining geology—anyone who worked with Walter had to know her mining geology. An ancient lake once filled this area, collecting alluvia from the surrounding mountains, some of whose rocks contained boron. And then the lake dried up and the borates were precipitated out, and then people came along to mine it, and then Roy Jardine came along to defile it.

  We rounded the bend and Walter said, “Here.”

  The convoy stopped. We piled out and flinched, hammered by the heat.

  There was a small ridge above us and footprints led up the hillside. We paused to examine them. They were fresh, made after this morning’s thundershower. We’d seen their like before, at the crash site: dimple-soled rubber prints, bootie prints. Roy Jardine’s prints. Very smart, Roy. So you really were here. I shivered.

  Scotty took the lead. In his board shorts and Hawaiian shirt he looked like the surfer dude he’d been. But he was RERT chief now with instruments strapped over each shoulder. We went single-file along the spine of the ridge, a beaten path in the crumbly soil. If I were making a movie starring the badlands of Mars, I’d film it here. Where clouds shadowed it, the soil looked bruised, but it nonetheless threw up waves of heat. I took small breaths, hoping to cool the air before it seared my lungs. Mars-breathing.

  Ahead, the ridge dead-ended in the flank of a hill. Scotty metered the area then gave us the thumbs-up.

  We followed the bootie prints to the adit that cored into the hillside. The adit was about six feet high and wide enough for a couple of fat mules. Nothing fancy, no timbers, no rails, just a gate barring entrance and a warning sign: DANGER: Loose rock. Decaying explosives. Bad air. Rattlesnakes.

  To say nothing of whatever Jardine had left for us in there.

  Hap read the sign. “Whew, no bats.”

  Scotty turned to Soliano. “Hey, what about the bats?” Scotty had found and collected the bat on the saltpan and handed off both carcasses to a lab in Vegas that could do a radioanalysis necropsy, fast.

  Soliano squinted, as if fighting a vision of sunlit teeth. “ARS.”

  We digested that. Nobody voiced the thought that two bats, somewhere within their range, had encountered a lethal source of high-rad resins. Nobody said aloud, maybe somewhere is here.

  Soliano had a Park Service key but he didn’t need it—the gate nudged open.

  Walter said, “Look at those.”

  Tire tracks, faint but unmistakable, inside the adit. I looked back along the ridge but if there had been tracks incised there, rain or wind had obliterated them. Still, whatever rolled into this tunnel must have come up that path. Narrow, but doable—fit for a Mars-roving telehandler.

  No way to know when the telly was here but I figured I knew the why. To transport a cask. Any thought that our summons was a hoax wilted in the hot adit mouth.

  “Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s get to it.”

  Soliano started. “But you are not yet suited.”

  “Checking for gas, first, Hector. Carbon monoxide, dioxide. Collects in old mines near the floor. We walk around much and we’ll stir it up.”

  I felt monumentally relieved that Scotty knew this. That he was prepared for whatever mother nature, along with Roy Jardine, had in store for us.

  Scotty took his meters into the tunnel. After a full minute, he emerged. “Yup, we got gas.” He rubbed his face. “Shit, we gotta go in full bug suits. My people’ll die before they even get here, just hiking up that ridge dressed out. Think I’ll set up the zone right here. Christ, I wonder if snakebite goes through rubber.” He glanced at Soliano and dimpled, briefly. “All right, no worry, I got it.”

  Hap lowered his sombrero. “I ain’t worrying. Course, I ain’t going in.”

  Scotty stalked off along the ridge.

  “Let us lend a hand,” Soliano said, to Hap and Ballinger. To me and Walter, he said, “You rest, in the eventuality your skills are needed.”

  Walter and I sank against the hillside. I said, “He expects us to go in.”

  “It’s not his call.”

  “Right.”

  “If we do decide to go in,” he said, “there’s no need for the both of us.”

  I let that hang in the hot air between us.

  We watched Scotty and his crew hauling equipment out of the vans. Soliano, Ballinger, and Hap began ferrying the stuff up the ridge. Hap took the lead, laden with silvery suits. He was whistling—heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. He appeared to be having fun. Just when I think I can predict him, I can’t.

  I glanced at Walter. “I don’t mind snakes, per se.”

  His eyes were closed. “Rattlesnakes, dear.”

  I studied his flushed face. “Big ones, I’d think.”

  “Mean, certainly.”

  “Cranky, anyway.”

  He said, “I go in.”

  “Let’s wait and see what Scotty finds before we take on snakes.”

  “You’re of child-bearing age,” he said. “I go in.”

  He will never, ever, let the subject go. I said, “You’re at an age where your cells are not so resilient.”

  “Thank you for the reminder.”

  “Thank Hap.”

  ~ ~ ~

  We all waited, stacked against the hillside, while Scotty paced and his three RERT colleagues rested. Scotty had sent in the smallest of his team, a wiry woman with a purple punk ‘do named Lucy who, it struck me, looked of child-bearing age.

  The heat was a bath, submerging us. We could drown in this heat. I watched cloud shadows
tongue along the ridge and strained to detect the drop of a degree Fahrenheit or two.

  Fifteen minutes later Lucy emerged, looking like her next stop was Mars. Scotty metered her at the hot line then helped her skin off the heavy suit. She pushed back her hood and spat out the respirator and rasped out a word.

  I thought she said fuck and didn’t blame her.

  “Went right,” she rasped. “Nothing.”

  Oh, fork. Shit.

  Scotty raked his hair, spiking the wet strands. “Okay, I get to go.” A tall thin RERT guy named Tim grumbled to his feet to help Scotty dress out.

  We waited, sucking our water bottles dry. I believed I saw bees buzzing a great sunflower but it was only heat waves flaming off an orange hill.

  Twenty minutes later, by my watch—hours, by my fried brain—Scotty reappeared. When Scotty was stripped to his shorts, when he had downed half a bottle of water, he gave Soliano the thumbs-up.

  Now we know, I thought. Okay, it’s better to know.

  Soliano got to his feet. “In a cask, or loose?”

  Scotty tried to speak, and then just mouthed it. Cask.

  “Contents?”

  “Hot.”

  I licked my cracked lips. The real deal, this time.

  “And so we account,” Soliano said, “for one of two missing casks.”

  I wondered which one. The swap cask, which Jardine recovered from the talc mine? Or was this the rainy-day cask? Then again, what did it matter, which one? What mattered was what it held.

  Scotty cleared his throat. “Another thing. Mud on the cask. Spattered.”

  I sat up straight. “What’s it look like?”

  “Mud.”

  “Well did it look like it came from the surrounding soil?”

  He lifted his palms.

  Whether it was the swap cask or rainy-day cask, it could have been stored at Jardine’s depot before being brought here. I looked at Walter, and he nodded. We wanted that mud.

  “Geologists.” Soliano toed the soil. “This could be Mr. Jardine’s depot?”

  I doubted it. Couldn’t swear to it. If we hadn’t lost our soil map, if we weren’t playing catch-up, we could say something with some heft. I said, instead, “It’s not consistent with the soils we’ve analyzed so far.”

  “Then this is what? A demonstration, that Mr. Jardine has the hot resins and can place them wherever he wishes?”

  Scotty answered. “I’m convinced.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Could be something more, some kind of taunt. I mean, it’s sure the right place for it. Borax mine.”

  “This means...?”

  There came a strangled sound, from Ballinger. I thought he was going to be sick. Hap leaned in whispering, his sombrero eclipsing Ballinger’s glistening scalp. Then Hap got to his feet. “Milt just recalled a little incident that might tie in here.”

  “Yes?” Soliano said.

  Ballinger hunched, silent.

  “Sorry Hector,” Hap said. “Milt doesn’t have a fully developed sense of irony.”

  “I have,” Soliano said. “Explain to me this irony.”

  Hap shrugged. “Like Scotty said, this place makes a point. Borax ore contains the element boron. And boron, Hector, is a crackerjack neutron absorber. They put it in the reactor control rods to slow the fission process—keep that chain reaction under control.”

  “Yes?”

  “So, Milt’s little incident began with the boron-recycle system at the nuke plant. Once upon a time plant’s getting decommissioned and sends the dump the resins they’d used to clean the system. Low curie-count, so casks get buried in the trench.”

  Soliano frowned. “I thought resins were hot. Or hotter.”

  “Depends what they pick up. Pick up hot clides, they're hot. Boron resins are low-rad.”

  “Mild salsa,” I said.

  He nodded. “Anyhoo, couple weeks later a guy’s digging a drainage ditch—and he’s a mite hungover—and he sideswipes a row of containers. Including the boron resin casks. But he doesn’t notice. Couple months later somebody sees the trench is slumping. Now, they have to regrade it.” Hap sighed. “Lady by the name of Sheila Cook gets nominated. Gets her backhoe stuck. Gets out to inspect, sees she’s tramping around in beads. Dang. She calls in the cavalry. And when they frisk the beads, surprise! Triple-X hot.” He winked at me. “Been used to clean the spent-fuel pool. Turns out somebody at the nuke plant loaded them into the wrong cask and it shipped with the low-rad load.”

  “Christ,” Scotty said, “nobody caught it before it got buried?”

  “What you gotta understand, Scotty, is trucks were backed up half a mile waiting to unload. Busy time at the dump. So they frisked the resin truck and the overall dose rate was under the limit and they were under-staffed and all those high-rad trucks were waiting.” Hap smiled that curbed smile of his. “And that story came to be known in the dump oral history as Boron-gate.”

  “Very witty,” Soliano said. “And Ms. Cook?”

  Hap sighed again. “Starts woofin her cookies couple days after the incident. But she recovers, so the question becomes what’re the long-term effects? She gonna win the cancer lottery? By gum, she do. About seven years later she gets leukemia.” Hap whipped off his sombrero and held it over his heart. “Now, I didn’t see the lady get crapped up—this all happened afore I found my fortunate way to the dump—but it’s one of them legendary stories what get told to the new guy.” He glanced down at Ballinger. “That’s what Milt’s feeling a mite sick over right now.”

  I fixed on Ballinger oozing sweat and thought, he’s doing the math.

  Soliano said, “Mr. Ballinger, you were manager at the time of this incident?”

  Ballinger nodded.

  “You gave the order to hasten the disposal?”

  Ballinger started to speak, and then just nodded.

  “This was CTC policy?”

  Now he spoke. “Policy is avoid delays and make a profit. Safety first, and all.”

  “Did CTC bear liability for Ms. Cook’s contamination?”

  “Paid workers comp till she recovered.”

  “And later? The leukemia?”

  “No proof that one-time incident caused it. Lotsa things cause cancer.”

  “The cancer lottery,” Soliano said, with distaste.

  “Yeah, that's what it's called around here. You know, black humor.”

  “I will wish to contact Sheila Cook.”

  Ballinger wiped his skull. “She’s dead.”

  I recoiled, as though I hadn’t expected that.

  “She died....when?”

  “That would be, uh, two years ago.”

  “And you learned of her death...how?”

  “Grapevine.”

  Soliano squatted in front of Ballinger. “And Mr. Jardine? When did he come to work for you?”

  “That would be, um, three years ago. Same year she left. You know, when she got, uh, sick.”

  “So their employment overlapped?”

  “No, he came later in the year.”

  “Then Mr. Jardine would not have encountered her?”

  “Not at the dump.”

  “Meaning what? He encountered her outside the work place?”

  “Girlfriend, I’m thinking,” Hap said.

  Ballinger looked at his shoes. “Sister.”

  Soliano cursed softly in Spanish.

  I cursed silently, in English.

  “Mr. Ballinger.” Soliano gathered himself. “You did not recall a grievance he might hold against you, in regard to his sister?”

  “Just found out she was. She’s listed as his emergency contact on the new hire form. Sheila Cook. Sister. Guess it was her married name.” Ballinger wiped his oiled face. “And I guess after she died, Roy never bothered to change his info. Point is, I didn’t know. I mean, who reads that stuff anyway—unless you need it?”

  Soliano said, precise, “I read that stuff.”

  “Okay, see, I looked it over before I gave it to you and it ki
nda broadsided me—her being his sister. So I, uh, deleted it.” Ballinger took on a tight unwilling look. “Didn’t see any point in the FBI digging up ancient history. I mean, what difference does it make now?”

  Soliano said, icy, “Motive.”

  “So he’s got a bone to pick.”

  “Two bones, Mr. Ballinger. Let us not forget the prank that scarred his face. He might, perhaps, blame you for a...culture of lax management?”

  “Well he never complained to me about it.”

  Hap looked pained. “Uh, what if he’s sending a message now, Milt? You know—boron, control rods, chain reaction? And we’re at the wrong end of a chain reaction. Let’s see, nuke plant shuts down, got no more use for all the gear but you can’t sell the gear on eBay because the gear’s crapped up, so the gear gets shipped to the dump, but the paperwork’s effed up and the backhoe driver’s hung over and then poor Ms. Cook steps in and gets contaminated and wins the cancer lottery. Then brother Roy gets a feather up his and decides to put it to you, brother Roy’s got access to all those rads—and brother Roy’s gonna pull the rods and let that chain reaction go critical. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “Christ,” Scotty said, “so that diagram he drew on the truck—skull and bones, guy running away? That’s you, Milt?”

  I stared. My stick figure?

  Ballinger said, “That’s a buncha crapola.”

  “No Milt,” Walter snapped, “that’s revenge.”

  My thoughts took off along the chain of events. Brother Roy takes a job at the radwaste dump where his sister got crapped up. Maybe he’s looking to gather evidence of mismanagement—a lawsuit. Then his sister dies. And the prank is just one more grievance. So he settles upon revenge. He plans the swap. He enlists Chickie and her talc, or he just steals it. He enlists the truck driver; maybe he sells the plan as extortion, offering a cut. The pothead buys it. They siphon off radwaste for who knows how long. Then something goes wrong. Maybe Ryan Beltzman finds out Jardine’s real motive and wants no part of it. And there’s the fight, the chase, the crash, the shooting. And that changes things...how? Where does the chain reaction go from there? Metaphorically speaking.

  If the running figure is Milt, he’s not running alone any longer. We’re right there with him.