The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  Claims so ephemeral they never made it onto a map.

  Five claims were described as being near hot springs.

  Three for me, I thought, and two for Walter.

  Thank you, Adrian Krom.

  CHAPTER 23

  I was up Coldwater Canyon again.

  I skied past the turnoff I’d taken two days ago and paused to check behind me. No fog today, just sunshine. Nobody in sight, just me and my visions.

  Ahead was a stand of lodgepoles with their trunks snapped off above snowline, unlucky enough to grow in an avalanche trough.

  I kicked up my pace and didn’t slow until I left the canyon trail behind. I was concealed now, in the hemlocks and silver pines. The climb steepened and my muscles burned. I topped a ridge and followed the map I’d made around an outcrop of granite, finding my way to the little fold in Red Mountain. Here was the nearly hidden draw that I’d read about at county records, that its claimant had expectantly named Gold Dust.

  I skied in.

  The draw backed into the mountainside, to a tunnel whose entrance showed a reddish cinder face. The adjoining rock wall showed another face, gray granodiorite.

  It was a place where two different kinds of rock meet.

  Looked like someone, sometime, found something here worth scavenging.

  There was the stone foundation of a building, still timbered. A stream bisected the old camp, and frozen into the waterway was a rusted contraption of gears and teeth. Slightly uphill were snow-covered mounds that looked for all the world like sand dunes. That was likely the dump, boneyard of discarded ore. Below that was a circular depression—the cyanide pond where someone had leached the remaining gold from the tailings. I’d seen its like before, couple of days ago, at two other sites on Red Mountain. I didn’t know precisely how much cyanide the leaching process left in the soil. Way too much for the good of the environment. Ironic, that it would bode well for my case.

  But not here, because this cyanide pond did me no more good than the others, because the snow of this draw spread sparkling and unbroken. There was no hot spring.

  Still, my eye fixed on the stream, where several bushy trees bent beneath the weight of snow. Mountain willow—dwarfish at this altitude.

  Georgia had picked up a willow leaf somewhere.

  I decided to sample the draw.

  Because the soil would be bared in the tunnel, I began there. Exchanging skis for a flashlight, leaden with cold, I went in, stopping just inside. The tunnel was a skinny incursion into the mountain, high-ceilinged at the front end. At the far end, it closed down to a narrow throat. I played the flash over the rock face, half-expecting to see lusters of gold, but the only luster my flashlight caught was in the flattened cans of Mountain Dew that littered the floor. The floor was hard rock dusted with a thin soil, which not surprisingly looked cinder-red. Here and there it was studded with dark nodules. Upon closer examination of the nodules near the entrance, I identified them as animal scat. Alpine chipmunk or pika, I figured, at this altitude.

  I took a soil sample near the entrance and went out into the light to see what I had.

  I spread a tarp, laid out my tools, and put a hand lens to the dish of soil. Oxidized cinders, bits of pumice. A wink of mica, duller hornblende, milky quartz, pinkish feldspar—granite. I assumed the nearest source was the gray rockfall, chunks of which had weathered and crumbled, and that decomposed granite had fed into the soil.

  My interest stirred.

  Not lab conditions, but in the field under the hand lens this soil looked a close match to the evidence from Georgia’s boots.

  I sat back on my heels and thought it through. What was missing? Well, cyanide for starters, although there was the obvious source. I debated whether to dig a sample near the ore dump but the snow there was deep. I decided to put that off. As for the hot spring minerals, there was no visible source of sulfur and calcite.

  And then the obvious hit me. I felt like a fool.

  What if Georgia had found a spring here—the spring the prospector described in his claim—and it had subsequently died? She’s been dead over two months now. In two months, a hot spring can die too. And then the snow comes and buries the corpse.

  For my purposes, dead’s just as good as alive.

  I scanned the draw. A grid search of this place would take well over a day. If need be, I’d come back with Walter and do the work. For now, I was willing to stipulate that there was a spring here somewhere, dead and buried.

  Okay then, move on to the next missing bit. Gunpowder.

  I looked at the tunnel. Soil was bared there so it was worth another search. I went back in, pausing again at the mouth. This time, playing my flashlight over the soil, I was looking for bootprints. There was some scuffing here and there but nothing identifiable. Might have been animals, might have been the Mountain-Dew drinkers, but the thin soil wasn’t saying. I went farther inside the tunnel and did a thorough sampling.

  Outside again, spreading my haul on the tarp, my eye was drawn to the mouth of the draw and I stared until every shape resolved itself into a tree.

  I bent to work and was rewarded in the second dish. I stared, in disbelief. I took the twenty-power hand lens and looked again. And then, feverish, ransacked all the dishes. Strike after strike: the mother lode. Not dust of gold but disks of silver. Their faces burned into my memory. Including dimples, my old friend.

  Gunpowder.

  My hand was shaking. I set down my lens.

  Somebody did a great deal of shooting in the tunnel—or in the draw and then somebody or a lot of somebodies tracked the powder around.

  Somebody who used biathlon powder.

  Shit.

  What happened here? And why was Georgia involved?

  And who was here with her?

  I went very cold. Georgia, den mother to the biathlon team, indefatigable booster who brought the biathlon World Cup to Mammoth.

  But I could not make the leap from the biathlon course up here to Gold Dust. I couldn’t even venture an onageristic estimate on that.

  Wait. Back up. There were still all those unidentified grains of powder, that were not biathlon powder.

  I didn’t get it. I was ninety percent convinced I’d found the place she last walked—I’d bump that up to one hundred percent in the lab—but I had no idea what she was doing here.

  Okay, so back up again. How in hell did she come here in the first place? Did she go to county records and find the Gold Dust notice of location? And if she did, why? Well maybe she wasn’t after a hot spring, after all, maybe she was looking for a mine and the spring was secondary. But why?

  And what in the name of all that is logical did she find so compelling here? Enough to write no way out.

  If indeed she wrote it here.

  Well, there was the hot spring. The stipulated hot spring. Although a hot spring—one that was so ephemeral that it died—was hardly enough to set her heart racing. Was it?

  I shrugged. Just go back to the lab and do the analysis.

  As I was packing my field kit, I thought about the quirky mix of Jeffrey pine bark and pumice that was in her mouth. No Jeffrey pines here—it’s too high for Jeffrey, too far from the nearest Jeffrey forest for an animal to ferry in enough bark to mix in any significant proportion with the soil here.

  I thought back to Georgia’s body on the tray in the medical examiner’s lab. The bruising around her mouth had led to my assumption that someone had opened her mouth and dumped in the pumice-bark mix.

  No wild-ass guesses necessary to conclude that whoever was here with Georgia brought that quirky mix.

  I gritted my teeth, and I thought about Adrian Krom. I thought about Lindsay’s theory, and I could concoct my own corollary—Georgia finds a new hot spring here, a new place for a romp—and brings her lover but he’s not as impressed as she’d hoped. He says something in his brusque way, and she responds in kind. Or maybe he gets weird. Maybe he invites her for a dip and quotes Dante and even if she’s loves
truck she’s not stupid and she says what kind of nonsense is this? She fears we’ve put the town in the hands of a nutcase. She decides what must be done—get him fired. No fooling around like Lindsay with reputations, she’s the goddamn mayor and she’s got clout with everyone who counts, when push comes to shove. And it does, because Krom sees her react. She tries to cover but she’s Georgia and she’s lousy at evasions. She manages to steal a moment alone—maybe in the tunnel—to write her quick notes in the Weight Watcher’s. But in the end, Krom finds her.

  The sun dipped behind the rock wall and Gold Dust fell into gloom.

  Suddenly in a hurry, I finished packing and geared up.

  In the process, my corollary to Lindsay’s theory fell apart. If Adrian Krom killed Georgia here, why in the name of all that is logical was he trying to help me find this place? If it wasn’t for Adrian Krom, I might not have thought to check county records.

  I pushed off. I skied full-out to the mouth of the draw but when I skirted the granite outcrop, my skiing turned awkward. I was following the tracks I’d made on the way in and it took me two or three glides to figure out what was wrong.

  I bent to the tracks.

  Too many basket holes, too close together. When you ski cross country you don’t break new trail if there is already a set of tracks going where you want to go. You take advantage of the first skier’s labor. You’ll set the tracks a little deeper. Hardly noticeable. But it’s nearly impossible to ski and set your poles in someone else’s basket holes. By the progress of the baskets, the skier had come just to the bend, just far enough to sight up the draw. He’d done a kick turn and headed downhill in the same tracks.

  The tracks didn’t say how long he’d stayed.

  I got out my pocket knife and opened the blade, listening to my own sharp breathing, and then because I couldn’t ski with an open blade I put the knife away. I ran on my skis until the slope angled enough to take the downhill in a tuck. Drops ran down my spine—not the sweat of exertion but the cold oily trickle of fear.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I reached the Lake Mary parking lot I saw Mike Kittleman changing the tire of his Explorer.

  I saw his skis racked on top, caked with snow.

  Mike Kittleman was on the biathlon team as a kid, before Georgia kicked him off.

  I watched him a moment. Thinking, he’s such a runt but he’s wiry and strong. I recalled that day in the gondola barn when the machinery broke and Eric came and I told Mike to let Eric fix it, and I recalled just how wiry and strong Mike had been when he grabbed me by the hair and put the screwdriver to my neck—and I wondered if I needed to be afraid now. But there were other cars in the lot, and there was a family unloading a sled and the dad was big and burly.

  I took off my skis and approached Mike.

  He saw me. He pretended not to, his head bent to the job.

  I said, “Mike.”

  He looked up. Feigned surprise. Spoke, at last. “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I waited for him to say what does it look like, I’m changing a tire. Mike is unrelentingly literal. He said, instead, “Just came back from a ski.”

  I was blunt. “Did you follow me?”

  He lifted the spare tire onto the wheel studs. He screwed each lug nut back on, slowly and meticulously, by hand. He said, finally, “No,” like he was so unaffected by my question that he nearly forgot to answer.

  “Then what were you doing out skiing? Where did you go?”

  He picked up the tire iron and tightened the first lug nut. He shot me a glance. Face set in naked hatred. “It’s a free country.”

  “Yes it is,” I said. “And I’m free to tell the chief of police my unfounded suspicion that you’ve been following me. And you’re free to prove me wrong.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I went straight home after my trip to Gold Dust. No reporting in to Krom, no chats on the split-log bench.

  I ate an apple and cheese for dinner and had little appetite even for that. I took a steaming hot shower. I went to bed early. I had a nightmare in which Krom followed me to the hidden draw and barged in and dug a hole in the snow and when the steam licked up, he forced me into the hot blue pool. I awoke sweating and went outside and stood for two minutes in the snow to cool off. Went back to bed, back to sleep, and had another nightmare, in which Mike followed me only this time he had the nerve to confront me while I was pondering the gunpowder under my hand lens, and Mike knocked me over and put a screwdriver to my throat.

  That time when I awoke, I heard Georgia chiding me. You’re not the victim, I am.

  ~ ~ ~

  Early the next morning I went to the lab and laid out my findings for Walter.

  Walter took his time, poking through specimen dishes, plucking out items of special interest, comparing gunpowder grains under the comparison scope, scrutinizing minerals under the polarized lightscope.

  I waited, watching. On the screen of the lightscope, minerals floated like fish in the sea.

  Walter finished and turned to me. “We have a soil match.”

  “I agree.”

  “More than that. We have a gunpowder match. This is especially significant because the powders are so unusual.”

  “I agree.”

  “We need to hurry along the gunpowder lab. We need an ID of those mystery powders.”

  “I sent an email last night. I praised the chief examiner for a paper he presented at the last conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and asked if he could move things along.”

  “Was it a good paper?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I just googled it and grabbed the title.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted, and then he smiled.

  “So,” I said, “what we need now are exemplars that contain the hot springs minerals, and cyanide. Means we have to dig.”

  Still, Walter smiled. “I’ll take the cyanide pond.”

  “You and your mines. Okay, fair enough, you have fun with that and I’ll start the grid search for the spring.”

  “Tomorrow morning?” Walter said.

  “Early. Lot of digging to do.”

  “In the meantime,” Walter said, “we have all of today to do a thorough analysis on the soils.”

  “I need to get caffeinated first.” I poured us both a cup, and we took the time to nurse the brew in companionable silence. Enjoying the small moment of victory. A good-sized step in the direction of solving the case, finding out where Georgia died. And, I had to admit with a small stab of guilt, just the simple pleasure at doing the geology.

  Walter finished his coffee and turned back to the lightscope. He rotated the polarizer, turning a hexagonal crystal to its point of extinction, where all light is absorbed.

  I took a moment to do some scutwork, labeling the gunpowder samples. Unidentified powder number one. Number two. And so on. And, finally, the one powder from the tunnel that I could identify: dimples. Fiocchi, choice of many a biathlete—including Mike and Eric and Stobie and my brother Jimbo.

  My gaze shifted to the Alice-in-Wonderland poster on the wall behind Walter’s bench. Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole. The message being, you follow the evidence wherever it takes you, down the rabbit hole if you must.

  Even if you don’t want to go there.

  ~ ~ ~

  We worked until the dinner hour and my stomach growled and then Walter left to go get takeout.

  Five minutes later, Krom knocked at the door, same time as he opened it.

  I sucked in a long breath, and motioned him to take Walter’s stool.

  He scooted it over beside mine. He assessed the specimen dishes laid out on my bench. He took off his parka and laid it across his knees. His gaze came to rest on me. “I haven’t heard from you for two days, Cassie.”

  “I’ve been too busy.”

  “Nothing of interest to report?”

  I considered our bargain. I decided I’d better warn him. “I might have found the place Georgia died but
I have to tell you, there’s nothing there that impacts your job. Nothing to do with the volcano.” I shrugged. “Nothing you can use to spin, over beers with John Amsterdam.”

  His hand slammed down on my workbench.

  I jumped.

  He took hold of my arm, as if to steady me.

  I pulled away.

  “Listen to me.”

  I stiffened.

  “Give me your hand,” he said, softly. “Please.”

  I looked through the storefront window, at the crowds passing by, tired from the slopes and ready to find a place for dinner.

  Krom caught my look. “Please, Cassie. Please.”

  I gave him my hand.

  He shoved up his right sleeve and placed my hand on his forearm, on top of the tattooed scar, so that my palm cupped the raised flesh. “I want to share a vision with you. I want you to feel it.”

  His arm was hot. My hand was unaccountably cold.

  “On the other side of the world,” he said, “a volcano out of the blue starts erupting. There’s a tribe living on its slopes and they blame the outsiders who’ve been drilling holes into their mountain. You see, these outsiders are after geothermal energy. But the tribe thinks the mountain is their mother and the drilling has made her so mad she’s exploded. The tribe runs to escape her anger but two of them—a man and a woman—run toward the eruption, not away from it. The sacrifice satisfies their mother and she lets the rest of the tribe escape.”

  His flesh was beginning to warm my icy hand.

  “The volcanologists come and have a look and decide the mountain is letting off steam. It’s just getting started.” His arm tensed, beneath my hand. “I was one of those outsiders drilling into the mountain. When things got bad, the scientists warned us. Our camp was evacuated. It was chaos.”