The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  I didn’t get it.

  “Lindsay.” She replaced her lipstick. “Lindsay who’s-cooler-than-you-thought Nash.”

  I froze. I did not believe her. And then I did.

  “See, your brother and some of the guys wanted to beat the shit out of him for the Stobe. I mean, if Mister Bigshot hadn’t surprised us with his drill at the race then nobody would have got shot.” She gave her braid a yank. “But this fixes him. Lindsay’s sending the paper straight to FEMA. This is gonna get Krom’s ass fired. This shows he doesn’t give a shit about safety—I mean, he takes me to the creek, where he’s putting it off-limits?” Her voice edged up. “Shows Mister Safety Dude doesn’t take his job seriously.”

  When I unfroze, I raised my hands to my temples, which felt as though they were going to explode.

  “So,” she said, sliding the check across the table to me, “what do you think?”

  I could not begin to say.

  “Find out what you wanted?”

  More.

  She narrowed her eyes. But she was looking beyond me, and she took on that watchful look, that anxious hometown tic. Glance around, straining to catch what’s in the offing. Then she snapped back. “It’s cool, Cass. We’re all cool. Krom’s the one in deep shit.” She swung her legs out of the booth. “See ya.” She moved away, trailing past the Guardsmen’s table, catching a round of whistles.

  I watched her, numb. Her take on men, men’s take on her. Maybe it would work. It sure made Krom look reckless enough. What it made Lindsay look was, to me, beyond reckless. It made her into someone I don’t know.

  I thought of Krom, in the creek, bowing, giving it the finger. And then with Jeanine. What was that? Playing at sacrifice? Like he’s challenging the volcano.

  Only, how do you win a duel with a volcano?

  You don’t. It’s not an even match.

  My headache erupted into nausea. There is, of course, one arena in which Krom and Lindsay are evenly matched.

  Us. The town. We depend on them both. They each hold our future in their hands.

  CHAPTER 20

  I watched Walter lay aside the Mammoth Times and then square his face to begin the day, and I just couldn’t tell him. Reading about Adrian Krom’s night in the creek had disturbed him. Learning about Lindsay’s role would stun him.

  So I sat dense as rock and kept my mouth shut.

  There was a jolt. I grabbed the test-tube ring on my workbench and secured the glassware. Mag four, if I had to guess, and it jolted me out of my stupor. I hoped it would jolt Lindsay, as well—to her senses. Sitting at her desk, no doubt, with the newspaper and a mug of coffee and her cat’s smile. But of course a mag-four jolt would raise, at most, her eyebrow. What she’s on the watch for are quakes you don’t feel. Anonymous little buggers with a low-frequency motion, like a bell ringing, which means fluid’s on the move. That’s the kind of quake that rings Lindsay’s bell. That’s what she should be planning for—not sordid setups in the creek to take down her enemy.

  “Mag four?” Walter hazarded. He’d been jolted out of his stupor, as well.

  I said, “We don’t have time for this.” I went to his bench and took the newspaper and tossed it in the trash. I said, “I have a new lead.”

  He straightened. “Tell me.”

  I explained my theory that the calcite and sulfur in the evidence might indicate a hot spring.

  “That’s hardly a new lead. Hot springs are certainly one source, but there are other candidates.”

  “What if we knew that Georgia had an interest in hot springs?”

  “Do we?”

  I told him about Krom and Georgia and crinoids and Hot Creek.

  His eyebrows lifted. No comment. Decorous Walter.

  “So you didn’t know. Well neither did I. Lindsay told me. Georgia confided in her.”

  He said, peevish, “And there is a reason Lindsay confided in you?”

  “Yes. She has a theory.”

  “Which you are about to tell me.”

  I explained Lindsay’s theory, the one I’d deconstructed in the shower yesterday evening. I explained that I’d come in early this morning and put the soil I’d gathered with Lindsay under the comparison scope, next to the evidence soil, and found no match.

  He said, evenly, “So you’ve ruled out the site at Hot Creek.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the lovers-quarrel theory?”

  I mulled that one over. I gave a glance to the newspaper in the trash can. No question Adrian Krom had some bizarre thing going with the creek. With women at the creek. But the jump from there to murder was a very large one. “Sure, could have happened somewhere else. But we have no evidence that it did.”

  “I must admit,” Walter said, “I have trouble considering Adrian a cold-blooded killer.”

  “What about hot-blooded? In a fit of passionate anger?”

  Walter shrugged. Shook his head.

  “Despite the thing with Jeanine?”

  “That was rash.”

  “And?”

  “That does not make him a killer.”

  “So you think Lindsay’s theory is a crock?”

  Walter said, evenly, “Lindsay has distrusted Adrian for a very long time.”

  “You chalk up her theory to prejudice?”

  “I’m not blind to her faults.”

  “I kind of thought you were.”

  Walter gave a thin smile, a crack in his seamed face.

  I thought, Walter’s greatest strength—and his greatest weakness—is loyalty. And that’s why people value his good opinion so dearly—if he thinks you’re a prince, you’re set for life. Whatever you do, short of a capital crime, you’re still a prince. And you want to live up to that. When I took psych in college I thought I had Walter figured. He’d told me about his own undergrad days; he’d gone through a rough spell, drinking, cutting classes. As misspent youth goes, his sounded tame, but he judged it harshly. Then in his early twenties he straightened out and found his calling. I’d asked what made him change and he said ‘I got tired of being a bum.’ So when I got into Psych 101, I psyched Walter. My theory went: he’s so fiercely loyal because he doesn’t want others to judge him by his years as a bum. Now, I think my theory was a crock. Walter is loyal because it’s his nature. And I think it’s a good thing I escaped the murky waters of psych for the bedrock of geology.

  The truth was, neither of us was a forensic genius when it came to reading people.

  “Well then,” Walter said, “shall we just do the geology?”

  “Sure. If we had some geology to do.”

  “We have your new lead, Cassie.”

  “But...you don’t buy that.”

  “I most certainly do. I buy the fact that we can now connect Georgia with a hot spring, at the creek. I certainly accept that we have sulfur and calcite in the evidence, which could have come from a hot spring, somewhere. Irrespective of why Georgia might have gone there.”

  “So you think it’s worthwhile following the hot spring lead.”

  “Yes, dear.” He slapped his thigh. “Let’s do the acid test.”

  ~ ~ ~

  I put a pinch of evidence soil in a test tube and droppered in hydrochloric acid.

  There were bubbles, and a nasty smell.

  The acid test is a quick way to find out if your samples have certain minerals. In the presence of acid, calcite gives off carbon dioxide and the soil fizzes. Sulfur gives off the odor of hydrogen sulfide.

  We already knew we had calcite and sulfur but the question was: in what concentration? High would suggest the sample came from a site near a volcanic source. Like a hot spring.

  The sample fizzed madly. The air stank of rotten eggs.

  And something else.

  Walter grimaced.

  I leapt. Snapped on the hood fan. Grabbed Walter’s arm and yanked him off his stool and the two of us scrambled back, covering our faces. I could detect the unexpected smell of bitter almonds.

  Jesus.
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br />   Before either of us could recover our dignity, the smell dissipated. I took in an exploratory breath. The gas was gone.

  Walter returned to his stool, throwing me a speculative look.

  “You tell me,” I said, when I could trust my voice, “what’s cyanide doing in the soil?”

  Walter was smiling now.

  The liquid in the tube, I saw, had gone flat like old ginger ale. I knew what must have happened. When I added acid to the soil it found cyanide, lowered its pH, and drove it into its vapor phase. I just didn’t know what that meant. “Walter,” I said, “I’m not in the...”

  “Mines.” His eyes were blue as day.

  Mines. I waited. His eyes always gleam when he’s puttering around with the geology of ores. It’s his one vice, in Lindsay’s eyes, wasting time prowling old ruins. Treasure-hunting in her view, although he’s in it primarily for the history—the treasure rarely being economically recoverable. We’d worked a case, once, following the geology of precious ore. I’m not inspired by old mining tales but I take a guilty pleasure in being the one Walter confides this passion to. Lindsay and I share a passion for shopping flea markets that totally excludes him. My shopping guru. I waited, stewing, for Walter to explain.

  He did not disappoint. “Miners around here sometimes used a dilute solution of cyanide to leach the metals from slag ore.”

  The meaning fizzed up. We’d got another new lead—mines. The metallic minerals are often picked up by hot water circulating deep and precipitated out near the surface.

  By hot springs.

  CHAPTER 21

  The de-icing sand laid down on Minaret Road had mixed with slush and grit to form a startling brecciation along the sidewalk and I walked it with dread and care.

  I had an appointment in half an hour with Adrian Krom.

  On the way there, I planned to drop in on Lindsay.

  My gut churned.

  ~ ~ ~

  I said, “How could you?”

  Lindsay lifted one fine eyebrow.

  “Hot Creek,” I said.

  She swiveled her creamy leather chair around to the credenza below the window, and bent to open a drawer.

  What was she after? I glared at the landscape of her desk, littered with the detritus of expeditions in the field and the shops. The brass pot-bellied fertility goddess. The tiny Japanese teapot. The bowl made from the skin of a dried orange. The pink tourmalines set like teeth in a bed of pegmatite. The delicate sea lily crinoid in a bed of gray limestone—Georgia’s gift, I assumed. Why’d Lindsay display that? Some kind of memorial for the dead?

  Lindsay swiveled to face me with a gun in her hand.

  “Oh God,” I said, “that’s a gun.”

  She laid the pistol beside the teapot. “Here’s how.”

  I gaped.

  “I was on the right bank, upstream of them.”

  I found my voice. “You were going to shoot him?”

  She lifted her chin. “I was going to keep Jeanine safe. As far as the creek goes, I took measurements at the site before they arrived. Gases were stable. No temperature fluctuations.”

  “But you were going to shoot?”

  “I would have winged him. If need be.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t known she knew how to shoot. I wondered if she’d shot targets out at Casa Diablo, to practice winging people.

  “In any case, there was no need.” She held my look. “And further, honey, he saw me there after they all left. I made certain he saw me.”

  “Waving a gun.”

  “No,” she said, deadly calm. “Holding it steady.”

  “And that helped how?”

  “It clarified where he should direct his wrath.”

  My chair hit the floor and I was moving with a sudden laser fury and I didn’t know where to aim first, didn’t know if it was directed at Jeanine and Jimbo and Bobby for being so dumbass stupid or at Lindsay for using them like that or at Krom for taking the bait.

  She said, “I’m sorry you’re caught up in this.”

  “You going to tell Walter?”

  Her face roughened. “No.”

  Me neither, I’d cut out my tongue before I laid this on Walter. And then I wondered just whose secret I was keeping because it was, after all, me who had given her the ammo. I had, after all, told her about Krom’s midnight swim.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was after six when I left Lindsay’s office.

  I followed Minaret to Forest Trail and took a right and came to the Community Center.

  Lights were ablaze. It’s a huge octagonal building, half windows. Inside looking out, it’s like you’re in a clearing in the woods. Expensive to heat. Georgia got a variance on the building code when she was pushing plans for the center. She wanted a building that mirrored her vision for the town: hub of the known universe. She got it.

  I stood outside until my jeans turned stiff from the cold, then checked my watch. Six-twenty. I was early.

  I waited eight more minutes and then went in.

  ~ ~ ~

  There was nobody to be seen in the vast central orb of the building. This is the heart of the Community Center, the Circle Room. A skating rink could fit in here. Radiating from this hub are corridors which lead to offices.

  I didn’t know which corridor led to Krom.

  I gravitated to the room’s centerpiece, a great pit within which seems to float a good deal of Mono County. I began to circumnavigate the relief map. I saw him then, some thirty degrees northeast, hunched on one of the split-log benches that face the pit. He motioned me forward. I came along, my boot soles squeaking like mice on the tile floor.

  He rose. He had the Mammoth Times in hand.

  I stared, like he’d just risen naked and steaming from the waters of Hot Creek.

  But of course he was dressed. Tan parka, brown cords, brown cowboy boots. Brown hair wet-combed into submission. Tanned face smooth-shaven. His eyes, though, were reddened like he’d not been sleeping well.

  He waited until I got close and then tossed the newspaper onto his bench. “Seen this?”

  No chitchat, no attempt to explain, no bullshit about consenting adults. Still, I could not help reading the headline for the umpteenth time. CZAR TRADES SAFETY FOR SEX. It was worse, this time, because the subject of the headline was standing in front of me.

  I found my voice. “I’ve read it.”

  “And?”

  “That’s not why I asked to see you. I want to talk to you about Hot Creek, yeah. But not...” I scrupulously avoided looking at the paper, “not about you and Jeanine. You and Georgia.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “That was a private matter.”

  “Not anymore. Lindsay told me.”

  “I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a common gossip.” He glanced at the newspaper. “ I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a blackmailer, either.”

  I almost didn’t let that pass. “Lindsay told me about you and Georgia at the creek because there’s sulfur and calcite in the evidence.” That was stretching the truth; she told me because she bears a grudge against him. “Meaning, the last place Georgia walked might have been near a hot spring.”

  “She die at Hot Creek?” he asked, blunt.

  “No. No match there. But I wondered if...after the creek...Georgia might have gone looking for another spring.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

  “I’m speculating.” Wild-ass leaping, more like it. “Georgia had a romantic streak—I mean, going to the creek, to that chunk of limestone to dig out a crinoid for you. That’s not how she normally shopped. But what a perfect gift. I know what that’s like, wracking your brain to find the perfect gift for your boyfriend. When you’re in love—or in lust, whatever—you go the extra mile, so to speak. You get a little black dress, a sexy number to wow your guy. So the crinoid was her sexy black dress. Metaphorically speaking. And it worked. Wowed you enough that you two ended up in the creek.” I ran out of breath. I waited for him to say something.

 
; He didn’t.

  I leapt onward. “If it were me, I’d want to, I don’t know, repeat the encounter. If I were in love, or in lust or whatever.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “She sure liked it. Enough to tell Lindsay.”

  “She liked the experience. But Hot Creek was too public for her.”

  “Then why’d she bring you there?”

  “She didn’t. I brought her. After she told me where she got the crinoid, I wanted to have a look. I collect. And there we were. I like the place.” He looked hard at me. “As you well know.”

  I held his look. I thought, if a shrink got hold of him there was probably a diagnosable condition. The intense need to control. The over-compensating ego. The delusions of grandeur. The almost symbiotic relationship with the volcano and its offshoots.

  I said, raising my question again, “Well then, if she liked the experience, I’m wondering if she went looking for another hot spring. Less public.” A place, I thought, where the soil was rich in sulfur and calcite and pumice and cinders and granite. And gunpowder. And where in the Sierra was that?

  Krom suddenly reached for me.

  I flinched.

  He grazed the small of my back and turned me to face the relief map. “Have a look. You tell me where she went.”

  I looked down at the map. It was eerily real. If you flew over over the actual landscape in a small plane, it would look a lot like this relief map. The flat oval of the caldera is ringed by mountain ranges, like a broad barrel. It always puts me in mind of that carnival ride where you’re spun inside a barrel and the floor drops out, which is pretty much what happened when the old magma chamber vented and the valley floor dropped a mile. The mapmaker had pinched up the mountains into folds so that you can look down upon the topography and feel the climb in your legs. The lakes and streams are so blue they splash. Mammoth Mountain’s broad summit and muscular slopes are sculpted to ski, and beneath, the town in tiny jewels clings to the brawny land.

  But the mapmaker could not show change.

  There was no indication of the rapid swelling in the caldera, where magma’s forcing its way up. There was no depiction of the churning evolution at Hot Creek. Hot Creek was just a slash of pretty blue.