Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  *****

  My brother drove me downtown and ushered me through the congestion outside the scene at Lindsay’s office building. He lifted the police tape for me and left me in the care of a uniformed officer we had both known since kindergarten, whose name I could not produce.

  “John’s in the office.” The officer stared at my shoulder, her round face blanched by the cold. “He said to send you straight in. Cassie? Man, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Margy.”

  I moved into the hallway and pressed against the cold plaster wall. Someone came around the corner. Slat-thin, angling headfirst into his walk. Disappearing blond hair, buzz cut on a tanned field of scalp. Chief of Police John Amsterdam. Gossiped with him two weeks ago after hypothesizing with Walter up at Pika Canyon. Almost gave him my half-baked theory. Now, he looked past me at the wall, filling me with terror.

  He said, “Such a loss.”

  Loss—that confusion again. If only she were lost. Then she could be found. John led the way, as if I couldn’t find Lindsay’s office all by myself.

  At first I saw only backs, a roomful of people with their backs to the door. Someone was laying dust over the map cabinet, someone was draining a coffee cup into a vial, someone was taking photos. Everyone’s back was to me. A back was bent low over the creamy woolen legs and calfskin ankle boots on the floor. I knew all the backs. Mammoth P.D. The officers doing the crime-scene ident were Bo Robinson and Lupe Cruz-Rios and Jim Breuss. The photog was Don May, Stobie’s roommate. Eric was here. Randy Burrard from the ME’s office was on the floor, attending the body.

  There was an awful odor in the room, body waste and a stale coppery wash of blood that I could taste as well as smell.

  I had to cover my mouth and turn away. Lindsay’s lost, isn’t she? That’s not Lindsay. John caught me as I buckled and put me into a chair. A couple of the backs turned. I shut my eyes. Hideous hot tears burned my face.

  Someone breathed on my cheek and whispered, “Here when you need me, Cass.”

  I looked at Eric through blurred eyes. “Where’s Walter?”

  Eric led me across the crowded office and I punctiliously skirted the open evidence collection kit, not out of crime-scene etiquette but out of horror. I caught a glimpse of the body, prone. It lay on Lindsay’s periwinkle blue jute rug.

  Walter was in her high-backed desk chair, turned to the window. He appeared to be taking in the view. His head lay against the leather cushion, his hands were folded in his lap, his legs sprawled like a rag doll’s.

  I knelt.

  “Thank you for coming, dear.”

  I took his cold papery hand, gripping so hard the knuckles rolled.

  “You take care of things for me, will you?”

  I said, “I can’t stand this.”

  “I know.” He watched the Sherwins, worn old mountains, his face a mirror of the range. He withdrew his hand and patted my head. “Your hair is wet.” His hand dropped back to his lap.

  John approached and courteously asked for my help.

  I stood. “What happened?”

  “Sheesh, nobody’s told you? The changes indicate that she…a time somewhere between ten and twelve last night. She was shot.” He passed a hand across his buzz cut. “Cassie, she went right away.”

  I fixed on John’s long kind face.

  He said, “She’d been reporting threats, going back to the… that helicopter thing out at the Bypass. Well, you were there, you saw how it was.” He made a helpless gesture. “We’ll check it all out. You know, she’d actually gotten herself a pistol. We found it in her credenza. But she clearly wasn’t able to…” He angled toward the desk. “Anyway, we got one lucky break—the janitor cleaned yesterday morning so any prints we find should be fresh.”

  Her desk was an expanse of white lacquer grained with fine black dusting powder and splotched where pressure-wound tape had lifted prints.

  “Check them against Adrian’s,” I said.

  “Adrian? Cassie, I can’t see why he’d…”

  Neither could I. He’d already destroyed her.

  “Actually, he’s not here. He’s flying to Sacramento this morning. Supposed to go last night, but the snowstorm… We’ll ask him to cooperate when he gets back. If he has any information to contribute.”

  Clearly, John didn’t want to consider Adrian Krom. Who did? The volcano’s ramping up, and Lindsay’s lost. We need Krom, now more than ever.

  “She has a lot of knickknacks,” John said, escaping the subject. “We need to establish if anything is missing. You’d know, would you?”

  I looked at her desk. So cluttered. So many pretty things. I could never work at such a cluttered desk.

  “Is everything there?”

  “I guess.”

  John glanced around. “Anything else you’d know about? What about her rock collection?” He indicated the tall cabinet.

  I looked. These were the minerals not pretty enough for her desk, the business stuff. Obsidian and basalt and rhyolite and andesite and scoria—the evidence from old eruptions to help forecast the new. “I don’t know.” I was muddled, confusing her collection of volcanics with Krom’s. “I think everything’s okay.”

  John nodded. He said, “She was working at the time.”

  I could see that. It was warm in the office; although the first responders would have turned off the heat, the room had not yet cooled. Desk lamp was lit. Her computer was on, the Matisse screen-saver. “Go ahead,” John said, and I tapped a key and the screen morphed to seismograms and I studied until it became clear this was a current picture of low-frequency quakes in the moat. I tapped another key and Red Mountain came up, with its two new fissures.

  John said, “Evidently she kept up on the situation.”

  Jim Breuss, I saw, was taking measurements of Lindsay’s apothecary cupboard and reading off numbers to Lupe, who was sketching. The cupboard is an antique, in which Lindsay stores her coffees. Eric and Carl knelt on the floor. Everyone was occupied—even Walter, with the view of the Sherwins. I could no longer smell the foul odor. The olfactory nerves go numb after a few minutes in such straits.

  I began to sink and gripped the desk for support and John made a small noise and I saw what I’d done, I’d just smeared the dusting powder and added my own prints. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, “I know better.” I wiped my gritty hands on my jeans, again and again as though I were a princess whose hands were not to be soiled, crazy just crazy because my hands are not lily white, my hands are stained by chemicals, calloused from hammers and cold chisels, and my nails are so at risk that polish is out of the question. Even Lindsay, who used sunscreens religiously, has the hands of a field geologist. And here I am—what?—cleaning up before approaching Lindsay, as if she would object to grit on my hands. She’s immaculate but if she gets dirty she doesn’t make a fuss, she just goes about her business and cleans up when she can. I fastened my hands and stopped the obsessive wiping.

  I saw John and Eric conferring, glancing at me. “What?” I said.

  “Ummm.” John skimmed his hair. “Randy is ready. To go. But in her ring, there’s some dirt and… we just need to make that collection and Eric said he’d do it.”

  Eric smiled at me, so gentle. “I got it covered.”

  “Cassie does it.”

  Every head in the room snapped up.

  Walter turned in Lindsay’s chair. His face was angry. His color was not good. He looked from face to face, not seeing anyone, not seeing me, and then, not finding what he sought, he turned back to the window. He began to cough, dissolving into a helpless fit of coughing.

  My head swelled again with tears. I didn’t want to do the collection. I said, “I don’t have a kit.”

  “What do you need?” Eric asked. “Tweezers, evidence bags. Anything else?”

  I began to panic.

  “Cassie, do you want me to…”

  I strode to the body.

  She was, for the first time since I ha
d entered the room, alone. Someone had covered her with a metallic blanket, the kind you carry on backpack trips. This was disconcerting—the deceased covered by a survival blanket. But it had been done kindly, for my benefit, because the material covered every sprawling inch of her body except for the right hand.

  I knelt. I was hollowed out, my sickened core removed, leaving this kneeling husk. I seemed to have gone elsewhere, like Lindsay.

  I bent close enough to kiss her hand. The skin was waxy and translucent, the signs of age and fieldwork dimmed as if she’d found some miraculous beauty cream. Her hand was curled so that the fingertips pressed into the rug, and there at the tips, where blood had pooled and lividity was now fixed, her skin was purplish. It looked as though she’d stained her fingers picking berries. She wore rings on the pointer, ring finger, and pinkie. The ring on the pointer was a wide gold band with open scrollwork. I recognized this ring, which she’d bought in Argentina. The Cerro Galan caldera. I stared until the hand with its odd coloration and exotic rings became a composition, framed against the periwinkle blue of the jute rug. Like the folk art prints framed on her walls.

  There were tweezers, I noticed, and a hand lens and plastic evidence bags on the rug beside me.

  I took the lens and tweezers, reviewing the movements necessary to extract evidence. First you do A and then you do B. A finely calibrated robot could do it.

  Her ring was crusted near the web between the pointer and index fingers. Under the lens, the crust resolved into mineral grains, and I should have been able to do an eyeball ID but the names and properties of even the most common minerals were lost to me. I was a robot, able to perform physical tasks but dead to thought. I plucked the grains from the filigree, the stuff that had caught someone’s attention upon initial examination of the body, that had necessitated calling in forensic geologists. I bagged the evidence.

  I tried to rotate the ring but it would not budge. And then her hand was in mine and I tried to pry it open, just enough to see if there was crust on the underside of the ring, but she was in advanced rigor and her hand was as rigid as if it had been fossilized. So for a moment I just held her hand, the warmth of my own flesh against her cold skin. Warmth leaking vigor into cold, basic wilderness survival technique.

  I found myself looking at her wall, at a carved mask she’d unearthed in Mexico, a hideous face with slitted eyes and a snarling mouth with its tongue sticking out. I’d hated it the first time I saw it, and I’d asked her why she bought such a thing. “Keeps me on my toes, honey,” she’d said.

  She deserved her money back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Caaaseee.” Jeanine came through the doorway, swinging a grocery bag like a large purse. “Luh-uunch.”

  I dropped the sieve. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  She kicked the door shut, rattling the lab window. “No prob. I’m just the delivery girl.” She held up the bag. “Turkey and cheese, and some other shit, and something mondo fattening for dessert. Where d’ya want this sucker?”

  I showed her the fridge where I’d stored the Ski Tip lunches that Bill Bone had been delivering, unsolicited, for the past week.

  “Bill says sorry he can’t come himself.” She set the bag on the counter. “Place is jamming. Rumor central.”

  The window rattled—a quake, this time. Once or twice a day now, something rattles or shimmies. Of course there are hundreds more every day that we can’t feel. Classic quake swarm.

  “Fucking quakes,” Jeanine said. “They’re talking about a WARNING alert, you know?”

  Eruption likely within hours or days. “They’re calling a WARNING?”

  “Nah. Just talkin.” She found her ponytail and began to twist it.

  I glanced outside. Heavy traffic. Cars piled to the roof with stuff, more stuff lashed on top. Some people are leaving for an extended vacation, some for good. Some are staying put, because it’s within the realm of possibility that the volcano will settle back down. Some are hedging their bets—ferrying stuff to storage down in Bishop, fifty miles south along the Sierra fault. Jimbo’s already taken five loads down from the house. I spent all last week packing, when I wasn’t at the lab. Anything to fill the hours. Outside, a big Lexus passed, fully loaded. Driver was Cindy Mathias, the fire chief’s wife.

  “Sooo, Caasss. You the honcho around here now?”

  “Walter’s at home,” I said, level.

  “So how long’s he gonna stay home?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re pissed.”

  I took up the sieve and a dish of soil. “I’m too busy to be pissed.”

  “Jimbo says you’re pissed. Jimbo says you don’t talk to anybody.”

  I dropped the dish, peppering soil across my workbench. “Look, I’ve got a bureau in Los Angeles that wanted a report on this evidence last week. I got a call this morning from Costa Rica and they have a corpse with dirt down its throat and a diplomatic situation and they want Walter to come to the jungle before the deceased rots. I’ve got…”

  “The Georgia stuff.”

  “Yeah.” The pumice-Jeffrey mix—the puzzling soil from inside her mouth—sat in a box on the catch-all table, in limbo. If I listened I could hear its siren song, Georgia calling: Come have another look. Keep looking and I’ll ID the killer for you. Georgia hanging in there, in limbo, never say die. Just like her.

  “And the Lindsay case,” Jeanine said.

  Very carefully, I began to recover the spilled soil.

  Jeanine’s hands alighted on her hips. “You’re not the only one who’s bummed about Lindsay.”

  I flushed, not because I was taken down by her remark, although she was right enough, but because it was exactly what I wanted to say to Walter.

  Jeanine scuffed to the door. “So if you decide to take a break and hang out, we’ll be at the Tip awhile. Jimbo’s there. DeMartinis. Out of work, you know?” She eyed me. “Pika’s done. Krom’s a real creep but he sure got the road done. So now what? We just kick back and wait, right? Dude says get out, we got a guaranteed way out now, so no sweat. But I’m thinkin nothin’s gonna happen after all. So that’s cool—we still got a new road. Shortcut to Bishop.” Her eyes slitted. “You pray, Cass?”

  I should have.

  “I’m startin up again. Can’t hurt.” She opened the door. “So anyway, see ya.” She reached under her sweater to yank down the back of her bra, hiking her front, and eased out the door.

  “Thanks Jeanine,” I called after her.

  The L.A. soil sat waiting on my bench. I had not yet touched the L.Nash evidence. Bad procedure. So far, the cops had next to nothing—no DNA to sequence, no prints to compare against Krom’s or anyone else’s. They did have some fibers; Sears wool. John was waiting for the mineral evidence but he put no pressure on me. He was leaving the scene sealed, should I recover myself enough to go have another look. Eric’s been dropping by, at least once a day. Gives me a smile when he leaves, scar tissue crackling under his eye, a living example that time heals all wounds. But he puts no pressure on me.

  Nobody, really, expects me to pull myself together enough to sit upright at my workbench.

  But grief isn’t the problem. I’ve been waiting for Walter.

  Walter’s only directions, regarding Lindsay, have been to ask that I go through her mail and pay her bills. Even as executor, Walter is unable to cope.

  And I’d pissed away the past week doing our bread-and-butter work that was critical to somebody and about which I cared nothing now, nothing.

  I gathered the Los Angeles material and dumped the lot on Walter’s workbench. I put the culture dish containing the L.Nash evidence on my bench. Time to do the initial examination. Goddamn well past time. I stuck a scalpel into the stuff in the dish, stuff that in some way had to have some link to the perp who left no other trace.

  *****

  “The color, Walter.”

  He looked. “I’d attribute that to…silicon.” He thought awhile. “Or aluminum.” />
  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Chroma…slight departure from the neutral gray…I’d assign it a one, or…” He lifted his head. “Where’s Munsell?”

  “Forget the Munsell charts.” I’d spoken heresy. Color’s always the first thing we look at, and we calibrate it by the Munsell color charts. I had no quarrel with Munsell. I’d already ranked the evidence and I didn’t need Walter to confirm it. I was getting at something else—only I wanted it to occur to him, independently, as it had occurred to me. Electrified me.

  And here he sat, parked on his stool, waiting for me to tell him why he should forget the god Munsell. Eyes blue and mild as a baby’s; I’d rank them hue of blue and value of eight and chroma of nine, virtually pure. All the acuity—the shadings of knowledge and intellect and wit—was gone from his eyes.

  I was sick with impatience. “What is it we’re seeing?”

  “What is it? What is it?” He gazed beyond me. “Grains of limestone.”

  “Yes I know but I want you to look at the color.”

  He said, weary, “Chroma is a one and…”

  I snapped, “You sound like a broken record.” I thought his eyes darkened, impurities in the blue. Irritation with me. Whatever it takes. “I need you to think. That’s why I asked—no, that’s why I begged you to come in today.”

  He said, “I’m tired.”

  I got off my stool. “I’ll make coffee.”

  “No.”

  “You’re giving up coffee? That’s going to help?”

  He looked at me as if he didn’t know me.

  “Walter, there’s two pounds of beans in the fridge. Are you going to just leave them there?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “That’s enough coffee to last indefinitely, or that’s enough Cassie and shut up?”

  “That’s enough, Cassie.”

  “I drank coffee made from her beans too.” I glared but I didn’t have Jeanine’s gall, and as bummed as Jeanine may have been about Lindsay, I was a thousand times more bummed. And Walter. Bummed beyond endurance. Even coffee caused pain. In truth, I had not gone near the beans either. “Go on home,” I told Walter. “I’ll take care of it.”