Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  So I wandered into the room. Inside I found chairs for about one hundred people, but nobody sitting in them. There were four men standing over to one side of the room, communing by a coffee urn. Only one was in uniform, and he looked as clueless as I felt. He was young and had bad skin. One of the other men had the look of a plainclothes cop. He was conservatively dressed, impatient, and imbued with a certain aura of crafty intelligence. The third man was short and cheaply dressed and looked like he was only along for the ride. The fourth was the oldest among them by probably twenty years, judging by his great swath of silver hair and his sun-battered skin. He was wiry in build and made a lot of quick, foxlike movements. He was dressed in white linen slacks and a dark blue silk shirt. He was the first to notice my arrival, his lively eyes riveting on me with a look of interest and welcome. “And who do we have here?” he asked with a Southern twang.

  I looked over my shoulder to see if someone was behind me. Finding no one, I said my name.

  “Emily! Fantastic timing! Say, fellows, this is just the person you need to help you with this. Emily here is known all over the place for the work she’s done with police and FBI. She’s what you call a forensic geologist, deals with murders and things. A real sleuth. She can sniff the jack of spades out of a deck of cards with a blindfold on. Hey, welcome, Emily. Come right on in. Can I get you some coffee?”

  I stuck out my hand and shook his. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Miles Guffey at your service. My, but you couldn’t have come at a better time. Did y’all hear what happened?”

  Several possible replies zapped through my brain, such as You can’t be a geologist; you look like a nightclub performer! but I said, “Why don’t you give me an update?”

  Guffey’s eyes darted back and forth between me and the other men. “First let me introduce you to these fellers. This here is Detective James and this one’s Officer Petry, both with the local constabulary. This other guy works here. Well, I was explaining to these fellers when you walked up that our microbiologist has gone missing. It’s a terrible thing. Terrible.” His face grew grave. “Last seen on a cruise ship where he was trying to get some samples for our dust project.” To the detective he said, “Now you tell me how’s a feller just go and disappear off a 500-foot ocean liner a hundred miles from the nearest shore? You don’t just fall off’n those things. There’s got to be foul play, fellers, I feel it in my bones!”

  Detective James cleared his throat. “Now, Dr. Guffey, I know this is upsetting, but I’m sure there’s some other explanation to cover the facts. You’re saying no one that was on board knows exactly when he was last seen; in fact, no one was even certain he was gone until the ship pulled into port in Barbados the next day. He could have gotten off without telling anyone, or—”

  Guffey jumped on that. “I’m telling you, this is murder! I should have heard from him that evening before they reached port, so he was gone by then. He was collecting samples for a very sensitive project. It’s a matter of homeland security. It’s …”

  Just then, several more people came into the room led by a petite, middle-aged woman in a fuchsia blazer. She moved with the force and precision of a drill sergeant.

  The detective took advantage of the moment to cut Dr. Guffey off. “Here’s your press corps. Listen, I’m sure this is upsetting for you, and I understand your concern, but there’s two things you need in order to make that a crime scene, and one of them is a body.” I never got to hear what the other thing was, because he went on quickly with, “And no matter what the case, I’m not your man. If your biologist is dead, he died in a foreign country, or on the high seas, neither of which are my jurisdiction. If he’s alive, all you have is a missing person, and that likewise would be managed by the jurisdiction in which he went missing. I suggest you pursue things with the authorities in Barbados. Now, I’m going to get myself out of here before I have to talk to the press about a matter I know nothing about.” With that, he left, Officer Petry bobbing along in his wake.

  His eyes as bright as an addict trying to spot his source, Guffey scanned the assembling press, the police detective already forgotten. “Thank you for coming,” he cried, waving them in as if setting up for a revival meeting. “We got coffee for y’all right here. We’ll get started in just a minute.”

  The woman in the fuchsia blazer was closing now on the lectern at the head of the room. When she reached it, she clicked on the microphone, whipped her hand spasmodically through her glossy black hair, and said, “Okay, I think we can get started. Now, you all know me, I’m Olivia Rodríguez Garcia, the chief scientist here at the St. Petersburg office of the Coastal and Marine Geology Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. As most of you know, one of our colleagues has disappeared while in the line of duty. His name is Calvin Wheat, and he is a microbiologist in the employ of the USGS as contract personnel. He is working on the identification of microbes that we hypothesize to be traveling in the atmospheric dust that is derived from Africa. Dr. Wheat was last seen on board the cruise ship Caribbean Queen about ten hours before the ship put into Barbados, where he was scheduled to present a talk at a technical conference that begins in a few days. That is all the information we have on him at this time. Are there any questions?”

  A young woman with close-cropped hair raised her pen and started speaking. “Dr. Wheat came to you from the National Institute for Health, is that correct?”

  “No. Dr. Wheat holds certification in public health, but prior to working with us, he was on postdoctoral fellowships in Puerto Rico and here in the U.S.”

  Another reporter asked, “He was gathering sensitive information. Has this office received any threats that might be connected with his disappearance?”

  “No, none whatsoever. I believe you are referring to Dr. Guffey’s assertions of a possible correlation between intercontinental dust clouds with outbreaks of diseases such as foot-and-mouth or citrus canker.” Here she shot Miles Guffey a look over her half-glasses. “But I assure you, our mandate is as a government organization that does science. We are charged with reporting findings but do not create policy or present unsubstantiated ideas. Next?”

  The questioning continued for several more rounds, during which Olivia Rodríguez Garcia volleyed differing arrangements of the same bits of information but added none that were new. Finally, one of the reporters turned to Miles Guffey and said, “Miles, you called this press conference. For all we know, Calvin Wheat is alive and well and sipping rum in Barbados. What makes you think this is murder ?”

  Guffey’s posture went through some interesting adjustments as he strolled up to the podium. His head slid back, and his spine grew sinuous with the motion of his walk. When he reached the front, he leaned sideways against the podium and rested an elbow next to the microphone. In one smooth gesture that was half charismatic preacher and half lounge lizard, he had completely upstaged his boss. When he spoke, his voice was sonorous and almost confidential in tone. “Friends, what we have here is a situation that requires attention but isn’t getting any. I refer both to the disappearance of a dear friend and a highly valued colleague, and to the problems of dust-borne particles damaging the health of humans and our coral reefs. We got folks getting sinus headaches and going to the emergency rooms with asthma when the wind gets to blowing off Africa. They know all about it down in the islands; that’s where they’ve been scrubbing that red silt out of their cisterns and off their boats for years. Everyone knows that we’ve seen a die-off of staghorn corals and sea fans throughout the Caribbean, and in one season, about ninety-five percent of Diadema sea urchins died, and they’re the fellers that keep the algae off what’s left of the reef so’s it can grow.”

  A reporter interjected a question. “Don’t other researchers theorize that the reef die-off is from sewage outfall from the islands?”

  “Folks have all sorts of ideas, but now we got hard data. Garriett Smith up at University of South Carolina has documented that it’s
a nonmarine fungus killing the sea fans. That means one thing only, that the source of that infection is from the land, and is constantly replenished from the land. Just look at this satellite image.”

  Here he turned, herding their attention to the screen behind him. He pressed a button and an image appeared, a view from space of the west coast of northern Africa, the broad band of the Sahara Desert a parched brown against the deep blues of surrounding seas. But to the west of it, curling out into the white clouds that bedecked the Atlantic, lay a swirling mass of brown smut that stretched thousands of miles.

  “This,” he said, “is airborne dust. Our data indicate that it is carrying live pathogens. This is groundbreaking data. Critical to our national welfare. So now, you tell me: Why’s a guy who was about to prove beyond any doubt that these diseases are being transported from Africa suddenly find himself missing off the ship from which he was catching his samples?”

  Another reporter spoke. “But hasn’t dust always blown off Africa?”

  Guffey nodded. “Sure. And we need that dust, or some of it. It provides important nutrients to seawater, and it’s all we got for soil on some of the islands. But the thing is, there’s a whole lot more dust getting launched into the skies than there used to be. There’s been a drought going on thirty years now in Africa, and they’ve drained Lake Chad down to one-tenth its original size. Now it’s just a big dustpan. And that same wind crosses Mali before it gets to the west coast of Africa, and do you know how folks get rid of their garbage there? They burn it. Piles of plastic bags and rubber tires just burning, no scrubbers, nothing. And heaps of camel dung just drying in the sun. That’s what we’re breathing, folks: burned plastics, camel dung, and way too much mineral dust. And that dust is down below ten microns in size—that’s half a human hair in width—and that means you can breath it in, but you can’t breathe it out. The human lung’s not built to expel such tiny particles. Nasty little cocktail, huh?”

  I glanced around the room. The reporters looked respectfully bored. I began to gather the impression that they had heard from Dr. Guffey once or twice before. So I asked a question of my own. “Dr. Guffey, why was Dr. Wheat traveling on a commercial cruise liner to gather his samples?”

  Guffey gave me a look that was pure appreciation. “That’s a very good question, young lady. And the answer is this: Because we can’t get these samples any other way. We simply lack the funding. We’re having to scrounge for opportunities to do meaningful science. Calvin’s berth on that ship was paid for by the cruise line in exchange for him giving lectures. The USGS gives us no funding to cover this important work, and we can’t get it from the Center for Disease Control or the Department of Agriculture. So far, in fact, the only funding we’ve received is from NASA, and that was barely covering Dr. Wheat’s salary.”

  Slam dunk, I decided. He’s worried about his colleague maybe, but he’s a whole lot more worried about where his funding for the next piece of corroboration of his theory is coming from.

  Miles Guffey was happy enough with my little assist that he offered to buy me lunch before driving me over to Aunt Nancy’s house. “It’s right on my way,” he said. “I got to get home now anyway. The pool guy’s coming to fix a leak, and my wife is out selling real estate or something. And that way we can have our little chat away from prying ears.”

  I was only too happy to comply with the idea of eating, having been up flying since I couldn’t remember when. We swam through the hot, humid air beyond the building to Guffey’s car, which was what I’d have to call unbearably hot, even though the windshield had been armed with a set of telescoping covers. The seats were searingly hot. The car’s air-conditioning unit did its best, but was just getting the interior temperature down from scald to broil as we pulled in at our destination.

  Chattaway’s is an outdoor lunch joint set off from the road and the parking lot by a bulwark of pink claw-foot bathtubs planted with the most enormous philodendrons and trailing plants I’d ever seen. We sat down at a wooden picnic table under a big canvas umbrella and were handed menus by a young thing wearing short shorts and an incredibly tight tank top. I might have thought she was being provocative in interest of grubbing for tips except that she was no less clothed than half of her customers. I flapped the placket of my shirt, quickly realizing that Florida was a place where clothing seemed almost optional.

  I turned my attention to my stomach. The menu featured something called grouper, which could be had fried and in a sandwich or batter fried and served with french fries, aka a ‘Tony Blair Special.’ “Does everything here come fried?” I asked.

  “Darlin’, you are south of the deep-fry line.”

  “Oh. What’s grouper?”

  “It’s a kind of fish,” my host replied, “but if you haven’t never had it, you should come to the house and let me barbecue some for you first.”

  Okay … So I ordered the bacon-cheese Chattaburger, and Guffey had one without the bacon, saying he had to look after his boyish figure. After dispatching the waitress with our orders, Guffey waved at several colleagues who were just wandering out of the open-air bar that surrounded the grill, then turned back to me and opened with, “Molly Chang says you’re looking for a thesis project. That right?”

  “Possibly. My background is in oil and gas, but I’ve been around blowing dust before, growing up in Wyoming.”

  “Oh yeah, you got illite clays that blow clear to the Chesapeake. But I hear you got another trick or two up your sleeve.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Beyond your oil and gas experience.”

  The waitress brought us each a giant glass of lemonade, and I used the distraction to collect my thoughts. I considered pouring the lemonade over my head, but instead drained it rather quickly down my throat. Thus more fully hydrated, I began to mind the heat a little less. I said, “You mean the work I’ve done on crime scenes. Yeah, I was thinking my angle might be to treat the project as just that: a crime scene. The forensic geology of African dust.” Having made my pitch, I watched him carefully.

  Guffey took a healthy draw on his own lemonade. “I like that. It’s got panache. But it looks like we got us two crimes to solve, now don’t it?”

  I took another swill of lemonade and pondered this. “You got me there. I just rode into town as it were, and you say there’s been a fight. What’s your evidence? I mean, the part you didn’t tell the police or the press.”

  Guffey nodded. “We been having all kinds of problems with this funding picture,” he began. “First off, there’s the point-source guys who don’t want us to be right, because then they lose their funding. Then we got the agribiz guys who don’t want people even thinking about what’s getting into the food supply. And that crosses right over into the medical field. We got docs saying if you blow the whistle on certain things that’s flying around in that dust, you’re likely to find yourself in a one-car accident way out in the boonies.”

  “You mean a Karen Silkwood kind of story.”

  “Essackly.”

  “You said at the press conference that the Center for Disease Control isn’t interested.”

  “The CDC won’t ante up ’cause they want proof it’s a health hazard before they’ll add it to their list of woes. And even if we do, they got their rigid parameters about how they go about things, like maybe if we find a big enough red cape to wave at them they’ll find a spare bull to give it a charge.”

  “Got their own funding problems, no doubt.”

  “Essackly.”

  “And let me guess: Congress doesn’t like it because the source is out of our control. As in, even if we identify the problem, they can’t make the Africans quit stacking their camel dung where the wind’s going to pick at it.”

  “Essackly. My, I do see why Molly likes you.”

  I considered feeling puffed up by the compliment but remembered that I was being worked over by a pro. Molly Chang might or might not have said anything nice about me, but this Miles Guffey was in the bus
iness of recruiting free labor. So I did my best to ignore his bait. “I’m looking for something that would give me some good training in forensic work,” I said noncommittally.

  Guffey cleared his throat. “Oh sure, I can set ch’all up with a project. We got arsenic showing up in cisterns in the Caribbean, and we got to show where that’s coming from. That could be a good way in for you. Prove the source terrain for that, maybe. See if you can fingerprint some of the minerals, maybe attach them to mining being done in North Africa. What d’you think?”

  I bit into the hamburger that had just arrived. It was succulent. I could see why the USGS gave Chattaway’s its business. It offered the perfect fuel for the discerning geologist: cheap, unpretentious, al fresco, yummy, and plenty of it.

  I used the time it took me to chew and swallow to decide how I was going to play things now that I knew a little more. I had read up on Miles Guffey’s reputation during my brief sortie through the university library, and he was highly respected. He had umpteen-jillion publications and had served at a number of prominent posts within the profession and had taught highly regarded short courses. Judging by his white hair and heavily sun-blasted skin, he was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy, definitely nearing the sunset of his career, at least as a federal employee. But he also had the bearing and crowd-handling technique of a carnival barker. And that, for me, was a red flag. He was skating right to the edge of sensationalism. Did I want my career associated with that?