“Either that or she’s next in line to find herself two inches thick,” I said. “This case smells more and more like organized crime. Give it over to the feds, Michele. Stay alive.”
“So what are you going to do next?” she asked, ignoring any advice.
“Me? I’m going to analyze what little trace evidence we got off that body—and there wasn’t much, Michele, so don’t pin any hopes on my results—and I’m going to write up my report and fax it to you. Then I’m going to go back to the work I was doing before Friday, with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.”
“Sure you are. This guy’s a friend of yours. You want to know who killed him even more than I do.”
Michele was beginning to get on my nerves. “He was a colleague, not a friend. And if he had been a friend, all the more reason to bow out of the case. Give me your fax number, so I can send you my results, then find someone else to be an idiot, if you want a partner for this case.”
I wrote down her number and hurried off the phone. Focused my eyes on a book, though it would not cooperate and hold my attention. Turned out the light and tried to sleep. At length, succeeded. Got up the next morning and headed to the sheriff’s department evidence room, where I examined the following items collected at the crime scene:
1. Reddish clay soil collected from the welts and treads of the corpse’s boots. (I was beginning to have trouble connecting my departed colleague’s name with his remains.)
2. A sack of sand and gravel taken from the quarry site immediately surrounding the corpse.
3. Residue taken from underneath the corpse’s few undisturbed fingernails.
4. A pebble found deep inside a pocket in what was left of the deceased’s pants.
The pebble was the easy part. It was a two-inch-long, sub-oval bit of chert, which is a quartz mineral, and as such very common on the face of the Earth, and I do specifically mean the face, because quartz is one of those less-dense, silica-rich minerals that “float” on certain others, as I had explained to Trevor Reed. Having a low freezing temperature, quartz is the common mineral that forms near the surface of the Earth and has a sturdy crystal structure. It is stable and durable. Grinding by glaciers and tumbling by wind and water do little more than wear away the corners of its crystal laths. In the case of this pebble—which I held in a gloved hand as I examined it underneath a ten-power hand lens—it had traveled far enough to become delectably smooth, which was probably why it was in Afton McWain’s pocket. A Ph.D. in geology he might have had, but he would have carried this stone in his pocket simply because it was nice to touch. Now it was sealed in a plastic bag that was marked with chain-of-custody and evidence ID numbers. A pity.
I set the pebble back in the evidence tray and turned to the dirt from his boots. This was mostly a fine, red clay, but there were tiny bits of silt and fine sand there as well. It was markedly different from the sand and gravel from the quarry, which was monochromatically gray and totally lacking in red clays as viewed through the lens. The gunk found under McWain’s fingernails looked more animal and vegetable than mineral, but I would do my best to identify it once I got it under the far more powerful eye of the scanning electron microscope, or SEM, at the university.
After signing the chain-of-custody document in the sight of a proper witness and taking splits of the samples, I drove up to the University of Utah to log some time on that SEM. When I got there, I discovered that someone with a higher priority than mine had a gob of analyses to run, and I’d have to come back tomorrow.
Having the brakes jammed on like that hit me like a brick. I realized in a flash that Michele was right, I didn’t want to go back to other tasks. I wanted to stay on this one. So much for being able to walk away from the case.
Restless for something to do but determined to get it done, I put the various samples under a binocular microscope and picked through them with a stainless steel probe that had a wooden dowel for a handle. I selected a few representative clods of clay and prepped them for a trip through the SEM. The SEM would unmask the minute platy structures of the clays, and I could identify the bits of grit, helping me evaluate whether or not the soils from which those samples came could be fingerprinted or at least narrowed to a state, county, or municipality. But even if that could be established, which was unlikely, it might be indicative of exactly nothing. A man as adventuresome as Afton McWain might have picked up that clay years earlier on a safari to Africa, for all I knew, and could have left the boots in the back of his yurt until the day he was murdered.
Which got me to thinking about those boots again. Hand-sewn welts were almost a thing of the past, having been largely replaced by the glued-on soles that were coming out of China. Whoever stripped the body of its identifying marks had not thought the boots unusual. That would argue for someone old enough to have worn boots like that himself. Whoever had dumped his body at the quarry—and presumably performed the murder, as well—had taken a lot of trouble to obscure the corpse’s identity. Teeth and face smashed, fingerprints gone.
But this brutal killer had not known about the tattoo. This eliminated Gilda from the list of suspects, unless she was smart enough to make the murder look like the work of someone who hadn’t ever gotten naked with the victim. And I couldn’t see someone who took such care with her own manicure cutting off her lover’s fingertips, let alone finding the strength to swing a sledge into his face.
I realized that I was skating mighty close to breaking my resolution about not getting any more involved in this case, so I jotted a few notes about what I had surmised, took the samples to lockup at the sheriff’s department, and headed back to my office to concentrate on other work.
IT WAS ONLY II A.M. I WAS SOON DRUMMING MY FINGERS on my desk, restless as a mare with a burr under her saddle, and by eleven thirty I was all but walking around on the ceiling. When the phone rang, I jumped to answer it.
It was Faye, calling from the airport. “Can you look after Sloane over your lunch hour?” she asked. “I know it’s short notice, but I’ve got a student who wants desperately to go up and shoot some touch-and-goes.”
The idea delighted me but not the venue. “Is Fritz there?”
“No,” she said. “He’s flying Mr. Reed to Reno. Why?”
“Just curious. I’ll be there in ten.”
“What a pal.”
The Utah Geological Survey is on West North Temple, about two-thirds of the way from downtown out to the airport. I stopped by the deli at the local supermarket and grabbed a turkey-and-Swiss sandwich and a big bottle of mineral water for me and a box of animal crackers for Sloane. When I arrived, Sloane ran up to the door to hug my legs, and I hoisted her up for a cheek-to-cheek nuzzle. She ferreted the cookies out of my pocket before I could ask Faye’s permission to give them to her. “Sorry,” I said. “They’re organic anyway.”
“She’ll burn it off. Hey, you’re a peach. The phones are pretty quiet today. No one wants to fly a low-horsepower trainer in this heat except old Barfie there.” She indicated the rather wan-looking young man who was waiting by one of the two-seat Katanas Faye and Fritz had on the line. “Oh, that reminds me,” she said, and pulled a half dozen barf bags out of a cupboard to take with her to the plane.
I said, “Imagine that. Your weakest stomach wants to go up on a high density altitude day.”
“That’s what he says.”
“When’s he going to make his solo flight?”
“Never, at the rate he’s going. He has almost a hundred hours already.”
“He must just have a crush on you.”
“That’s it. He has a weak stomach, so he goes after women twice his age.”
“You still have your come-hither, Faye.”
“Yeah, that’s why the kid barfs every time we go up. Okay, you know the drill: Stay awake, make notes of any calls, and keep Sloane from making any calls to her bookie.”
“Gotcha.”
Such was the tenor of our friendship. We were like an old married c
ouple some days. I had helped her raise Sloane from birth to eighteen months, and since I’d moved out and Faye and Fritz started the business, I had still looked after the little girl once or twice a week over lunch hours and some evenings after work. Faye got the odd bit of child care, and I got pure love.
Now Sloane Renee skipped over to me where I was sitting on a stool by the phones and patted my knee, an old signal meaning that she wanted to get up. I lifted her into my arms and hugged her again. Exuding the intimate aroma of child, she sat cross-legged on my lap, her back braced against the counter, arranging the animal cookies along her legs. She had on bright red pants and wore tiny moccasins. I touched her soft cheek and drifted into a moment of peace.
Two minutes later, the phone rang. It was Fritz. “Oh, hi, Em. Where’s Faye?”
“She and Barfie are touring the pattern.”
“The Barfs? What a man. Would you give Faye a message for me?”
“Certainly.”
I could hear Trevor Reed calling to him from the background. Something about being in a hurry. Fritz said, “Please tell her that I’ll be back there by two. Mr. Reed wants home quicker than we thought.”
“Check.”
“Thanks, Em,” he said brusquely. “See ya. Oh, wait—”
“What?” A flutter of hopefulness tickled my heart.
“Mr. Reed wants to talk to you.” He passed the phone to his client.
“This is Em?”
“Yes, Mr … . Trevor.”
“I read the papers yesterday. Did your quick flight to Colorado Friday have anything to do with that corpse the sheriff found in that gravel quarry down near Point of the Mountain?”
I considered denying this but decided against it. I wanted to hear what he had to say. “Yes, it was,” I replied.
“My contacts in the investment banking business tell me that McWain was trying to block development down in Douglas County.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Want me to look into it on my side of the fence?”
“That … would be fine. But perhaps I should introduce you to the sheriff’s detective who’s on that case.”
“If she’s as smart as you are, I’d be delighted.”
“How’d you know she was a she?”
He laughed. “I have my ways. I’m handing you back to Fritz.”
Fritz came back on the line. “Just tell Faye I’ll be back sooner,” he said again, then the connection went dead.
“Over and out,” I told the phone. To Sloane I said, “That’s us, Sloany my dear, just one big family, where we’re all single and no one’s getting hugged but you.” I sat hugging her for a while, but even during these fine moments, my mind managed to slither back to the case. I found myself contemplating Trevor Reed’s offer. So I wrote him a note.
Dear Trevor,
What can you tell me—and Michele Aldrich of the SLCo Sheriff ’s Dept—about a Realtor named Hugo Attabury and his proposed development of a ranch belonging to Bart Johnson near Sedalia? It’s called the Wildcat Estates Project or something like that. The bank of record may be Castle Rock S&L, and I think the head of that is named Entwhistle. On the QT, por favor … need I point out that someone who might be connected to this crew has gotten very rough? Thanks,
Em Hansen
I read it back several times to gauge whether or not I had made the connections between the named parties and organizations sufficiently vague. Satisfied, I added my office phone number and Michele’s, put the note in an envelope, licked it and stuck it shut, and left it with Faye to await Trevor Reed’s return from Reno.
TUESDAY MORNING, TO MY IMMENSE RELIEF, I MANAGED to get my mind back on other work for a while. I’d been assigned to help update a database of dimensional building stones quarried from the state of Utah. So I was fiddling with a map trying to locate some of the more obscure quarries of the Navajo Sandstone when, at noon, I got a call from the SEM lab up at the university telling me that the machine was available now if I wanted to run my samples.
I dropped everything and headed back to the sheriff’s department to pick up the evidence. I signed for it and hurried back out the door. As I walked through the gathering heat of the parking lot toward my truck, I bumped into Michele, who was just walking in. “How goes the hot pursuit?” I inquired.
“The only thing that’s hot today is this weather,” she replied. “You know and I know what the story is there in Colorado: Those guys at the Sedalia Grill are cold as ice. They were having a business meeting, sizing Gilda up for an heir to the throne who will do their bidding. Attabury and Entwhistle both have money on the line already invested in that development project, and Johnson loses big time if it doesn’t go through. And if Upton hasn’t figured out how to get a sizeable bite out of the deal, I’m not sure how good a lawyer he is. So we’ve got motive galore—good old greed—but I can’t prove an opportunity to save my life. They all swear they were snug as little bugs in their little bitty beds last Thursday night.”
“Better you than me,” I said. “I’m just going to go commune with these bits of muck.”
“Get me something I can hang someone with, will you?”
“Emmy’s the name, dirt’s my game. Just gonna go crawl off into a nice, cool laboratory and stay out of trouble.”
She glanced at me over the tops of her sunglasses. “You? Stay out of trouble? You’re as big an adrenaline junkie as the worst cop on the line.”
I stopped and stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, everybody in law enforcement in Salt Lake County, if not in the state of Utah, knows that you’re—how should I say this?—very enthusiastic about your work.”
I stood there weighing possible comebacks. Phrases like, That was when I was as young and stupid as you are came to mind, but I settled for, “Man, you’ve sure got your undies in a bundle.”
To which she replied, “So you have absolutely nothing else to tell me.”
“Me? Not a single, solitary thing. But if you’ll get off my case, I’ll put you in touch with an investment banker who might be able to dig up some inside information for you.”
Michele smiled wickedly. “You’ve got it bad.”
I argued with her in my head all the way up the hill to the university.
A SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE WORKS BY BOMBARDING each sample with electrons like radar. You can watch the results on a TV screen. It can enlarge a sample by tens of thousands of diameters, and it comes with an electron microprobe, which is a gizmo that can focus on one tiny part of the picture and tell you what it’s made of. The results print out as an image and a graph. It’s a great tool to use when analyzing clays and other trace evidence. Each type of clay has a different and recognizable appearance—illite, montmorillonite, kaolinite, and on and on—and the microprobe graph shows both the elements present and their relative proportions.
Best of all, in a heat wave like Salt Lake City was having, SEMs are kept in a refrigerated, interior room with no windows.
My time in the cool room told me that the red clay sample had mixed bentonite and kaolinite clays with considerable limonite staining (a fancy term for iron oxide, or rust). Under the intense magnification of the SEM, bentonite appears fibrous while kaolinite is revealed to be a stack of thin plates. Together they are about as common geologically as … well, dirt.
Bentonite and kaolinite are common along the eastern plains of Colorado. Finding these minerals in the evidence samples told me almost exactly nothing, except that the dirt on the dead man’s shoes did not come from the quarry in which he was found, which, being geologically somewhat peculiar, was mostly gravel. Which was why it made a good quarry, if gravel happened to be what you were wanting.
The fingernail goo was similarly unexciting. It was min-eralogically nearly identical to what was on his shoes. All that told me was that he had put his hands in the same dirt he had stepped in and hadn’t washed since.
I dropped the samples back at the sher
iff’s department—cleverly nipping in the back way so I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near Michele’s office—and took the results back to my own office where I could set to work writing my report.
I didn’t have much to say. Afton McWain had had clay on his boots and dirt underneath his fingernails that didn’t match the sand and gravel in the quarry. Not surprising, considering that all evidence said that he had been murdered before being taken to the quarry. He’d had a pebble in his pocket. Whoopee.
I wrote up these results, printed it out on a piece of Utah Geological Survey letterhead and signed it, then faxed it over to the sheriff’s department to Michele’s attention and put the hard copy in the mail and a photocopy in the proper file. Then I sat back down at my desk and promised myself that that was that.
Feeling let down that my involvement in the case had ended so anticlimactically, I telephoned Tim Osner, Carlos Ortega’s contact—mostly to add him to my professional network, I told myself.
Tim answered on the first ring. “Osner,” he said, in a bored voice.
“Hey, Tim, this is Em Hansen. Calling from Utah.”
“Oh yeah, Carlos said you’d be calling. Didn’t you work for Blackfeet Oil back in the before times?”
“Yeah, for a couple years.”
“Those were the days. So you’ve got a road kill in Utah that belongs in Colorado.”
“A road—oh, I get you.”
Dead Dry Page 16
