Killer Dust

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Killer Dust Page 21

by Sarah Andrews


  In no time at all, Miles had someone expressing my matching samples to Washington, and had a specialist examining my sand sample. Next, Miles turned to the sample from inside the plastic. “What’s the provenance?” he asked.

  Tom let his eyelids drop and rise again, his quiet signal that I should keep mum on certain details. I said, “Well, both were collected on an Atlantic shore beach. The first is from the coating of sand outside of an article of evidence, but the other came from inside, presumably transported in with the article from somewhere else. The carbonates looked exotic to the beach, especially those little pink things.”

  Miles gave me one of his sloppy grins. “Oh, so y’all been fishing for square grouper, huh? Right ch’ar, them’s forams. We’ll call us in a specialist on those.” He picked up his phone and punched in four digits. “Hey, get me ’Livia, will ya? No, you tell her it’s important. No, this time I am not crying wolf. Aw, shit; tell her I got her some foraminifera from the Bahamas, that’ll get her going.” He hung up without saying good-bye, and, still grinning, turned to me and said, “Sometimes y’ jus’ have to know what trough the pig is feeding at.” He chuckled. “Olivia Rodríguez did her doctoral dissertation on them little thingies. Makes her heart go all pitter-pat.”

  Sure enough, in about the time it took for a healthy person to all but sprint from her office to his, Olivia Carmen Rodríguez Garcia arrived at his doorway. Her eyes were little dark holes. “This had better be good.”

  “Oh, it is. Y’all’ll like this one! Looky here!” He had used the time since putting the phone back in its cradle to pour half the sample into a little black cardboard tray and shove it underneath a petrographic microscope. “Just to the right of the Homotrema, check out that little turdlike one.”

  Olivia switched on the light source, bent to the eyepieces, and began to adjust the focus. “Well, yes, that’s Homotrema rubrum,” she said. “This other one is more interesting. A Spiroplectammina, I think. And here’s a Quinqueloculina. Hmm … in order to narrow it from genus to species, I’d need a SEM. Where’d you get this, dear?” She had turned and was looking at me.

  I blinked and fed her question back to her. “Well, that’s what we’re trying to understand. And, um, this man’s from the FBI.”

  She glanced back and forth between Tom and me, but spoke to Miles. “Get Jane over at the University SEM on this. Have her pick the bugs and get them coated. Call me as soon as the sample is prepared.”

  A scanning electron microscope is capable of enlarging our view of a sample by thousands of diameters. To do this, a loose sample is first “picked,” or sorted to select preferred grains. This is done by a person with steady hands who holds a fine brush that is wetted against the tongue then touched gently to the grains of interest. They are thus lifted out of the surrounding materials and stuck with gum paste to a backing. The tiny sample is then coated one molecule thick with gold, then set inside the vacuum chamber of the SEM and pummeled with electrons. The returning electrons “read” the sample, and it can be digitally displayed on a TV screen and enlarged to make a pinhead seem the size of an elephant. The machine can also determine mineralogical makeup of target points of the sample, a kind of mini analytical lab at the snap of a finger, or almost that quick.

  Olivia brought another woman along to view the samples. “This is Hannah Jenkins. She is a pelagic specialist, I am benthic.”

  Tom looked to me for a translation.

  I said, “Floating versus bottom dwelling. It makes a difference if you’re trying to pinpoint where something came from. A bottom dweller stays put, while a floater can move around with the currents. It could have come from somewhere else. So the benthic is of more use to us as a positive indicator of source, but either way we need to know what we’re looking at, so we don’t draw the wrong conclusions.”

  He nodded.

  Olivia said, “The combination we’re finding here suggests a certain overlap of environments.” She opened a thick book called Carbonate Depositional Environments to an article about the Bahama banks written by a man named Robert Halley, and showed us a map that illustrated what she was saying. “Benthic forams tell us a few things. The suite we have found here shows an overlap of these areas in which each would have lived. It’s not very accurate, really, but it’s a best guess.”

  Miles looked over her shoulder. “The Berry Islands.”

  Tom asked, “Can you narrow it to a specific island?”

  “No,” said Olivia. “Foraminifera aren’t that specific. I’m not even certain that it’s the Berry Islands. But I’d say definitely the Western Bahamas.”

  Tom nodded. “Excuse me,” he said, as he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and left the room to place his call. I tagged along and did my best to listen in as he reported the island group to Brad. As he listened to what Brad had to say in return, I saw Tom smile for the first time in days. As he signed off, he even turned that smile on me. “He’s got a line on Jack,” he said. “He’s on a sailboat, or at least he borrowed one from an old friend. He took it out of a marina in Stuart, a port town a hundred miles or so south of Cocoa Beach. So it looks like he’s crossed to the Bahamas ahead of us.”

  It was two in the afternoon when Tom steered the Mercedes back into the driveway at Nancy Wallace’s domain. It was, once again, raining cats and dogs, big splashy drops that hit the gravel like something out of Dr. Seuss. We had been gone less than twenty hours, but it felt like a week. I had been up and going hard since half-past six the morning before, and each time I blinked I was afraid my eyes might stick shut.

  A question punched through my fatigue. “Tom, why did Jack call it ‘killer dust’? I mean, what are the other associations with the word ‘dust’ ?”

  “Look to Miles for that answer.”

  “Anthrax.”

  “Yes. In its most lethal, highly developed form, it is a fine dust. The doses that came in those letters were finely ground. Less than you’d find in a packet of sugar.”

  “But plenty deadly.”

  Tom said, “You keep a close eye on Miles and Waltrine and let me know anything that occurs to you. And keep after him. I have a feeling he knows more than he wanted to say about that island group.”

  I heard a sound behind me. The front door of Nancy’s house opened, and Faye walked out. Her eyes were puffy from crying. She moved forward at a slow, angry stroll, the motion causing her roundness to sway luxuriously. Tom looked on her with longing, but did not get out of the car. Instead, he opened the window and held out his hand.

  “Glad to hear from you,” she said icily. She did not take his hand. Instead, she swung her pregnancy toward him, all but stuffing it in his face. This is your priority, she was telling him.

  Tom dropped his arm to the side of the car. “Sorry, hon. I should have called.”

  Faye ran a hand through his grizzled hair, grabbed the back of his head, and gave it a nasty yank. “That is such an understatement.”

  I thought, You didn’t call.

  Tom said, “And I’m only here to drop Em with you.”

  Faye’s fingers stiffened into claws. She dug them into the back of his neck.

  Tom took her hand from his neck and brought it around to his face. There he spread it between his own, sadly smoothing the tension from it, kissing it gently, stroking each finger separately with his own. He said, “This is where you get out, Em.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going back and you’re staying here.”

  Faye yanked her hand away. She spun on her heel and stormed into the house and slammed the door.

  I said, “You stay. I’ll go. I’m the one with the sand samples. I’m the one who can find out which island.”

  “Get out, Em. Now. Brad can find him.”

  “Then let Brad find him. What do you need to go for?” His voice tightened. “To help Brad and the others. To make goddamned sure you’re not right about this guy having friends.”

  I was ready to kick the dashboard again. Jack was
out there playing macho-boy games when I wanted him here and in my bed. He was out there helping someone else, some other woman when I needed to be able to dream about a life that had him in it, safe and sound. But I also wanted to be able to dream about tomorrow without dreading it. I felt selfish and infantile, because I knew he was doing something noble, even if I was jealous as hell that it might be for another woman. Because there was a woman astronaut going up on this flight, and it was women who were usually stalked by crazy men. I was willing to bet dollars for doughnuts that the young woman in the photograph in Orlando and the woman astronaut were one and the same.

  And I wanted to know if Jack was indeed the friend I thought he was or some kind of monster. My guts writhed, trying to reconcile the tender man who had lain beside me with the gun-toting men in black who had melted in and out of the shadows near Cocoa Beach. These were trained killers who went home at night and cooed at their kids and made love to their women, and when someone called them, they left those kids and those women behind and went and did dangerous things. I said, “You had to help Jack. Now you have to help Brad, whom you only just met. What is it with you guys?”

  Tom stared at his hands. He spoke very softly. “Men who fight together become brothers in a very deep sense. If one of them is in trouble, there are no questions asked.”

  I glanced over at the house. Faye had returned to the doorway, and stood with her arms curled in against her body, her fists crammed against her eyes. Even from this distance, I could see that she was trembling with fear.

  Tom said, “Get out of the car, Em. I have to go now. Please. If I stay any longer, I won’t be able to do what I have to do.”

  “Let me go in your place.”

  “You don’t have the training.”

  Tom started the Mercedes. He gave me an angry push. “Go!”

  I opened my door and got out.

  Faye’s voice rose over the sound of the engine like an injured bird, swooping, begging for him to stay, but Tom was gone.

  – 25 –

  I sat by Nancy’s pool in the strange inside-out room defined by screening, my head back, eyes to the sky, watching the little chameleons run around upside down between me and the afternoon clouds, which were building again into big woolly black things. “They think they know which island group the thing came from,” I told Faye, “but not which island of the group.”

  Faye lay flat on a chaise lounge, shaking with tears. “I keep telling you, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I understand that. But I need to talk about it.”

  “You need to talk about it. I have to figure out how to raise a child without a husband.”

  “Tom will be fine,” I said, not at all sure I believed it myself. I was in fact beyond worry over the whole thing. I was so scared that I was flattened against the deck chair as if something extremely heavy lay against my chest. The great weight even pushed my head back, training my eyes on the sky, the province of the strange African dust. And yet if asked, I could not have named exactly what it was that so frightened me.

  “Okay, damn you,” she said through her tears. “Say it.”

  “There’s something very wrong.”

  “No shit.”

  “I mean something beyond all this. Something about Jack. A piece of the puzzle missing.”

  Faye was silent except for a steady sniffling.

  “I’m sorry, Faye. This is the last thing you need right now, but it feels critically important.”

  Fay took in a long, shuddering breath. “Fix the problem in time,” she suggested, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Maybe that will help.”

  “The thing is …” The thing was what? “It’s like I’m digging, going down layer after layer, but I can’t find the trapdoor that keeps the dark things hidden. There’s something about Jack down there, something he’s not telling me. It’s all locked up, and I can’t reach it.”

  “Something from before you.” She turned her head and looked at me. She was a portrait of grief, and yet she was rallying for me, turning her excellent mind to the game of helping Em one more time, fighting her despair by taking action.

  I loved her so much right then that I began to cry myself. I said, “I’ve never really known much about him. No facts, really. Now I’ve seen where he grew up, but still there were huge holes in the picture. It’s like whatever he’s not telling me isn’t even really there.”

  “Describe the holes.”

  “The holes. There were pictures all over that house but … not a single photograph of his father. Where’s his father ?”

  “Dead, maybe? Your father’s dead. These things … happen.”

  “Yeah, but if he was only dead, there would be pictures. There are pictures of my dad all over the place at the ranch.”

  “Maybe his parents are divorced. A bad divorce, and his mother doesn’t want to be reminded of it.”

  “There’s more. His mother had a bag all packed, and it looked really old, like she’d had it ready for a long time. What does that tell you?”

  “She likes to travel?”

  “Now you’re being flip. This is serious.”

  Faye picked up a leaf that had fallen onto the pool deck and used it to touch my hand. “You know Jack is abnormally attached to Tom. He’s like a big brother to him, or more so. It’s like Tom’s a father figure.”

  “Yes …” Fatherhood seemed woven all through this puzzle.

  Faye rolled onto her back and stared up at the chameleons. “And there’s something in their relationship that goes beyond that. You know and I know that Tom’s kind of a paranoiac. He’s more than careful whom he tells much of anything, and there’s almost no one he’ll rely on. Except Jack.”

  “I know. He keeps saying, ‘I’d trust him with my life.’ Where’s that at?”

  “Well, on the face of it, he trusts him that much. Em, don’t normal people have friends they can rely on?”

  “Don’t ask me about normal. I’m the beat-up cowgirl from Wyoming with the deceased father and drowned brother and the alcoholic mother who kicked me out. I’m the unemployed geologist who keeps getting mixed up in crimes that nobody pays me to solve. I’m the thirty-five-year-old single woman who’s infatuated with an FBI agent who ran off tilting at some other woman’s windmills the morning after she fucked him for the first time.”

  “Don’t say it that way. He loves you. You made love together.”

  Tears at last began to roll down my cheeks, hot and thick. “And I want to do it again. But I don’t know where he is. And he doesn’t tell me things, not anything about himself, not really.”

  “He tells you that he loves you. Can’t you believe that?”

  “But then he leaves a map showing where he buried a fucking Chinese surface-to-air missile.”

  Faye sat up abruptly. “He what? Em, did I hear you say that? You think Jack put that thing there?”

  I slapped my hands over my mouth as if eels were coming out of it. I wanted to run and scream, beat the words into the earth where they couldn’t hurt me. “I didn’t mean it! I just—he’s trained in the art of killing, Faye! I’m supposed to trust him?”

  “Yes, Em. I always used to think that police dogs must be terribly vicious. Then someone explained to me that they’re actually very calm and big-hearted, because you need a really stable animal for that training. You have to be able to teach them to attack, yes, but also to let go the instant you command it. I think it’s the same with these warrior men.”

  “Jack’s not a German Shepherd.”

  “You’re scared out of your wits that Jack’s not as good and stable and trustworthy as you hope he is. Well, let me tell you, Em, you don’t ever get to know somebody until you open yourself up to them and do it the hard way, just like the rest of us poor fools. You think I knew Tom when I married him? Bullshit. You think I know him now? Every woman gets to know her man the same way, by living with him. That’s when you get to see inside the shell, sweetie, not before. Up until
then it’s all chocolates and roses, and that’s all very nice, but it’s crap. You only get to know if they’re good for it by putting it to the test.”

  “Alright!” I yelled. “Alright! I put it to the test. I slept with him. I opened my body and my soul to him, and it was beautiful, and it scared me silly, and he ran away! Where’s that at?”

  “I don’t think he ran away. I heard him that morning, talking to Tom. He was in anguish. He was afraid you’d leave him, but this was something he had to do. He felt he had no choice. He had some kind of promise to a friend, Em. I think that argues well for him.”

  “What friend?”

  “We don’t know. I don’t think Tom even knows. Or maybe he does and he can’t say.”

  “This brotherhood thing! I just don’t get it!”

  “They have a bond. I think you want something like that for yourself. But you’re not built that way.”

  “What kind of paranoiacs can’t call the police when there’s a crime going down?”

  “These guys are paranoid, Em, you’re quite right, but for good reason. There are things out there they deal with every day that scare them shitless. Call it posttraumatic stress if you must, but they band together, and bond, and they do their guy thing, and this is what it looks like. I don’t like it either. If Tom was here right now, I’d be kicking him in the nuts, I’m so angry. Hell, I wanted to be the millennial woman whose man built a new alliance with her. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted every day to be a new day, no strings. And then I got pregnant, and all the old tribal stuff came home to roost. Now the baby has the priority, and I’m just the vehicle for it, and Tom’s gone off to slay the dragon that he feels is threatening it. God help me, Em, I didn’t ask for any of this!”

  I said, “Where was Jack’s dad?”

  “Maybe she had him out of wedlock. Got knocked up. These things happen,” Faye said, looking down at her own belly. “Or maybe she’s gay, and had a turkey-baster job. It’s nobody’s business, Em.”

 

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