Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  Hap put away his band-aids. “From now on, take care out there.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m not talking bushwhacking.”

  “So I’ll wear a dosimeter. That what you’re talking about?”

  “You know what you are? You’re like every other pragmatist who figures the odds. I’m trying to keep you out of the doodoo and you’re thinking odds are you won’t step in any.”

  “I understand odds.”

  “You’re not listening. Story of my life. Hey, you know Homer? Homer Simpson, works at the nuke plant?” Hap wore a new T-shirt. He stretched it to show off the caption: Trust Me, I’m Here to Help. He sighed. “Nobody listens. I tell everybody I gotta frisk them slow so the reading’s accurate and everybody bitches because they’re under the gun to get stuff done. So I say sure, let’s turbo-frisk, and you can take some home to the kids.”

  “I get your point, Hap.”

  He wouldn't stop. “And you know what’s the real hoot?”

  I shook my head.

  “The numbers. Any idea how the experts came up with theys numbers?”

  “What numbers?”

  “Numbers that say you got a so-and-so chance of getting cancer, or a scratch on the DNA. They don’t rightly know what dose is gonna do it. So they take a guess. And that’s where they get the numbers they feed into the equations.”

  “Will you please stop?”

  He seemed to recoil. “Shore thang.” He unhooked the empty IV bag and folded it around the needle and neatly coiled the tubing. He dropped the package in a wastebasket and tied off the plastic liner. He moved to me, at last, and eased the pressure cuff down my sticky arm, catching the hairs. “Sorry.”

  “It didn't hurt.”

  “Then sorry about the lecture. I do go on and on.”

  “It's not that.”

  “Bad breath?”

  I laughed. “No. It’s just...a long story.”

  He took off his watch and cocked his head.

  “Starts with my grandmother.”

  “Don’t it always?”

  I laughed again. “Okay, you asked for it. She—my mother’s mother—was at NTS way back when they were doing the atomic tests. Nevada Test Site. I’m sure you’re familiar with it.” Of course he was; NTS was almost next door to the dump. “She was a reporter, which was a big deal for a woman back then. Just for the local rag but since local was Vegas, covering the tests was local news. And it was always a big party. I mean, people went to the hotel roofs to watch the mushroom clouds. So when my grandmother gets sent to the test site to cover the story, she wants to make it entertaining. She stations herself in one of the phone booths and does a you-are-there report. She’s dictating as the bomb goes off. The concussion knocks the booth over and shatters the glass. And my grandmother is lying on the ground, cuts all over, the blast wave blowing dirt in her face—and she doesn’t miss a beat. The receiver’s still live so she keeps reporting. She just lies there in the fallout and talks on the phone. Scoop of a lifetime. My grandmother dined out on that story for years. My mom told it around our dinner table. I thought it was exciting, until I got bored with it. And then my baby brother was born with hemophilia. That’s when your blood won’t clot and... Well I’m sure you know.” Of course he knew; he must have learned it in EMT school; might need to tend a bleeder. “Since hemophilia is a genetic disorder, my folks tried to figure out where it came from. But there was no family history of it. So that kind of left the mutagenic factor. We figured Grandma got zapped. No way to prove it, but... She only had one kid—my mom. My mom had three kids. Fifty-fifty chance she was going to pass on that damaged gene each time. My older brother got a pass. My younger brother didn’t.” Poor little Henry, bleeding into his joints, bleeding out, bleeding all over my homework. “That’s when my mom learned she was a carrier. Women don’t express the trait, they just carry it and pass it on. We don’t know about me—there’s no definitive test to determine my carrier status. Only sure way to find out is to have a kid.” I shrugged. “So that’s why I got bitchy about your radiation lesson.”

  Hap had paled, beneath his freckles. “What happened to your brother?”

  “He died. Bumped his head. Bleeding into the brain.”

  Hap folded the pressure cuff and tucked it away in his kit. He said, at last, “Goddamn.”

  I watched the ceiling fan spin. My throat ached. I’d sure done a core dump here. I blamed it on the case, which was scratching around my buried bone like a gamma scratch on the DNA. Normally, I keep it buried deep. Normally, I’m not thinking about my brother, although he’s always there to be plumbed. Normally, I’m not thinking about having a kid, or the fear of losing a kid—it’s something that drifts into my thoughts now and then and I wait until it drifts away. Unless Walter brings it up, worrying that my love life consists of hit and run, warning that I’m consigning myself to a future alone. And I cling to my cowardice and wait until Walter tires of the effort. My leg muscles twitched. I sat up, holding the bedspread to my chest, glancing around the room for my clothes. “I should get going.”

  Hap went to the closet and pulled out a big robe. He backstepped to me, dropping the robe on my feet. “Give a hoot when you’s decent.”

  I smiled. “Thanks but I’ll just use my own clothes.”

  “Can’t,” he said to the wall. “Sent them to be laundered.”

  I dropped the bedspread. “I had soil in my pockets.”

  “That’s why I sent ‘em, Buttercup.”

  “It was evidence.”

  “Whoops.”

  19

  Hap held the door open and I—wearing the voluminous robe and matching terrycloth slippers—stepped out to a roofed walkway supported by stone pillars. The walkway bordered an astonishing lawn.

  Hap said, “Wait’ll you see the pool!”

  We waded into the steaming grass. The rain had stopped and the sun already blistered through black clouds. We passed white-clothed tables and turquoise-cushioned chairs shadowed by fat umbrellas. We went to the edge of the lawn and stopped at the low stone wall. Stone stairways and meandering paths terraced down to a lower level of red-clay tennis courts and there, directly below, was Hap’s slate-decked pool with its splashing kids and sunning thonged ladies—and gentlemen—on turquoise air floats, and the pool was edged by a wall of stone arches and a stone beehive fireplace, and beyond the stone arches was more lawn, and tall palms, and then the astonishing green ended and the real world of desert gravel began.

  “Like I told you,” Hap said, “fantasyland.”

  I turned to look back at the Inn buildings, which climbed right up against a mountain face. The red tile roofs and ocher adobe walls reflected the maroons and browns of the native rock.

  “Those mountains are called the Funerals. Guess that makes this heaven.”

  Close enough, I thought.

  “And that down there—if you’ll turn around again—is the low-rent district.”

  I turned. The Inn sat up at the head of a giant fan. Down below at the fan’s foot were dark radial lines, like crevices between toes. I recognized those smudges—stands of mesquite. This fan had some significant subsurface drainage. Potable water maybe. I stored the thought, although if one were stranded on this fan all one need do for a drink was stick out one’s thumb and hitch a ride with one of the cars traveling the blacktop that ran from the Inn downfan to the oasis.

  “Low-rent district’s known as the village of Furnace Creek.” Hap pointed at the oasis. “Maybe not so low-rent. There’s the Ranch, which is a motel with a pool bigger’n ours. And then there’s gift shops and restaurants and the museum and the stables and the date orchard and the visitor center and the ranger station and the airstrip and...” he swung an imaginary club, “let us not forget the golf course! Ain’t it grand? Hundred and ten in the shade and they got acres of dewey green.”

  My vision suddenly swam.

  Hap’s arm went around my waist. “Steady, there.”

  I leaned
into him.

  “Now heaven’s complete.”

  My breath caught. Not sure how to take that. Not sure how I wanted to take it. With a large grain of salt. I was suffocating in my robe. I whispered, “I need to get out of the sun.”

  He steered me back to the walkway. In the shade it was borderline cooler. I straightened up. He let me go.

  There were eight rooms along this side of the building.

  The girl sat against the wall of the corner room next to mine. There was the same black feathered hair I remembered, and her face was still in shadow. She wore cutoff jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. She hugged her legs. Her arms and legs were lean and brown. She had big puppy feet, brown toes curling over the ends of her sandals.

  Hap bowed. “Miss Alien, might I introduce Miss Cassie Oldfield, whose poor desiccated carcass you found. Whose life you nobly saved.”

  She tipped up her head.

  Her face was childishly round. It hadn’t thinned out like the rest of her. Her eyes were black under straight black brows. Her mouth was wide and curvy. She’s going to get prettier, I thought.

  I cleared my throat. “I want to tell you how enormously grateful I am.”

  She did not respond.

  I began to feel alien, myself. “I don’t even know where it was you found us. On the saltpan somewhere but...”

  “Devil’s Golf Course,” Hap offered.

  I said, “Good name.”

  She spoke. “Bad name.”

  I did not know what to say, so I asked, “What’s your name?”

  She stared at me.

  Hap stepped in again. “How old is youse, Miss Alien?”

  I thought she’d ignore him, or give him a number in Klingon years, but she said “fourteen” in her girlish voice and then pointedly looked beyond me to the black and blue sky.

  Hap leaned in close to me and whispered, “Kids is scary.”

  20

  The air conditioning blasted in Walter’s suite.

  Scotty Hemmings and Milt Ballinger were iced side by side on a wicker loveseat. Hector Soliano, in a deep winged chair, sipped iced tea. Hap Miller leaned against the stone fireplace.

  The team was reassembled. But I had to wonder, now, did we all share the same goal?

  I recalled what Hap said about Ballinger leaving the talc mine early, and I pictured the cocky little man cutting engine wires, slashing water jugs, ripping my purse. Maybe. But Ballinger reveled in his position as dump manager, the small-town boy who made good, the rockstar who came up with the CTC dump motto—Closing the Circle of the Atom. So why would he join forces with Roy Jardine and jeopardize all that? He wouldn’t, I thought. Unless he was pushed.

  Scotty, with his dimpled grin and surfer hair, was so upfront about his lifeguard ethics. But Scotty had little tolerance for anybody he thought didn’t measure up, who joked about serious matters. Like Hap. Maybe Scotty’s disdain was for dump workers, in general. But then he wouldn’t join forces with Jardine, would he?

  Soliano, I couldn’t see as anything but dedicated to his job. He was the foreigner who became a top cop in the heart of America’s law enforcement community. So driven he’d barely stop to eat. And he didn’t know an alpha particle from a gamma ray before this job.

  Hap did, though. Hap with his barbs about radiation dose and turbo-frisking. But Hap didn’t joke about the victims—not about my brother, anyway. I just couldn’t see him misusing the tripleX resins, even to make some point about Homer Simpson incompetence.

  Bottom line, I just couldn’t tie any of these people to Roy Jardine.

  So I went to Walter, the team member who mattered to me.

  Walter stretched on a turquoise chaise, wearing a robe that matched mine. He took hold of my unbandaged hand, his papery skin cold. I scrutinized him. His eyes were inflamed. His color was off. If we’d been alone I would have asked some technical question that required a clear and present mind. Or maybe just, what day is this? Actually, I had to think about that one myself. Wednesday.

  He said, “You look better than one would expect.”

  I had to smile. He was his normal self.

  “Hey,” Scotty said. “You guys gave us some major worry.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Ballinger said.

  I warmed to the sympathy, and took the winged chair beside Soliano’s. These were the good seats, in front of the table. There were buttery pastries, tall sandwiches, a coffee urn, pitchers of iced liquids. Breakfast? Lunch? I checked my watch; nine-thirty. Brunch. There was the lemonade I’d been craving but first I craved water. I poured, slowly, so as not to spill a drop, and drank down half the glass. I took a sandwich, faint with desire. I bit through strata of bread and turkey and ham and cheese and sweet ripe tomato. Nobody else was eating. Hap opened his sketchpad. I wondered whose hands he was going to draw. Mine, maybe. Tomato juice dripped down my wrist. I fought the urge to lick it.

  Soliano said, when my mouth was empty, “If you are able...?”

  “I’m able. Bring in Chickie.”

  “When we locate her. We investigate any and all leads. We run the prints from your vehicle but it appears the perp wore gloves.”

  Of course she did. He did.

  Soliano continued, “We still have the Department of Energy’s aerial team out searching. I am told they have some ‘real neat toys’ that will ‘sniff out’ any nuclide of interest down on the ground.”

  I said, “Unless it’s in a mine.”

  Scotty spoke. “Then we’re blind.”

  “Geologists,” Soliano said, “how long to replace your lost soil map?”

  Walter rubbed his face. “Half a day. At the least.”

  “You will feel equal to the task? We either wait for you to...” He let it die.

  Or we get someone who doesn’t get stranded in the desert and lose their map. Soliano was wondering how long it would take to locate another geologist or two and chopper them here and bring them up to speed. Well, there is no other geologist as formidable as Walter Shaws. As for me, I learned something out there in the desert. Fear lasts only so long. I met Walter’s gaze. Old man in a bathrobe, hair mussed, face mottled, eyebrows lifting: you with me? I nodded; let’s nail her. Him. Them. I turned to Soliano. “We’re good, Hector.”

  Soliano steepled his fingers and tipped them to me. “Then let us move on. We have a development. CTC opened an email early this morning, from Mr. Jardine. It was routed through a resender in Bulgaria. Hence, untraceable. He demands ten million—wire transfer to an account in the Cayman Islands.”

  Ballinger snorted. “Knothead’s dreaming.”

  Soliano regarded Ballinger. “CTC shares your opinion.”

  “Knothead give a deadline?”

  “Friday, noon.”

  “Or what?”

  “He threatens contamination.”

  “Jesus,” Scotty burst in, “of what?”

  “Of the priceless,” Soliano said. “Whatever this is.”

  Walter said, “Life.”

  “Yeah,” Scotty said, “couple resin casks could ruin somebody’s day.”

  Whose day, I wondered? My thoughts switched from possible partners to possible targets. Jardine conceivably bore a lot of grudges—against Hap, Ballinger, the guys in the break room, CTC honchos, and perhaps even Chickie. So he wanted his revenge in dollars? The threat to contaminate something, or someone, was certainly alarming enough.

  But still, the two missing casks bugged me. Jardine went to the considerable trouble of running the swap two times. Two chances of getting caught. Why not cut the risk in half? Surely, one cask of tripleX salsa would suffice.

  No, this scenario was wrong. Something was off. But I couldn’t see what. I was still fuzzy-headed, weak. I took another bite of sandwich. The tomato slipped out. The ham slid on the cheese, where the tomato had been. I stared. A word formed in my fuzzy brain: unconformity. In geology, it’s a place between two strata where there’s a missing piece in the record of time. Where the deposition of rock-forming mu
ds or silts was interrupted, or the rock was eroded away. I’d used that image on the West Side Road, trying to figure what was wrong with our fender soil map. I’d seen its opposite on the saltpan—rings of salt, layer after layer, unbroken. We’d been trying to patch together the fender-soil layers to make rings of salt—unbroken layers, a complete map. But we couldn’t. Our map had unconformities. Missing pieces. Cuts in the road. I suddenly thought I understood. My stomach dropped like I’d just taken a tumble into that abyss. I set down my sandwich. “Hey.”

  They’d all been talking. Speculating. They’d gone on without me. Now, they stopped.

  I said, “I think we got it wrong. About the missing casks.”

  Soliano’s face sharpened. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we didn’t get the chance to separate all the layers of the fender soils. Every trip Jardine took he’d accumulate a layer, but it wouldn’t be complete. Pick up mud here and not there, because it was raining here and not there. And on other trips it’s dry as toast and nothing clings to the fenders.”

  “Why numerous trips? Only two casks are missed. This does not fit.”

  I glanced at Walter. Walter lifted a hand to me. My theory. Or was this a wild-ass guess? Either way, I ran with it. “It fits if you look at it another way. He makes numerous swaps—but he doesn’t need to steal a new cask every time.”

  Soliano frowned. “He steals two casks. This is what he needs?”

  “No. All he needs is one.”

  Soliano’s frown deepened.

  “Just try this on. He steals two empty casks from the dump. Let’s say he puts one aside for some reason—call it the Spare Cask.” I took a water glass from the table and set it aside, on the floor. “Let’s call the other empty cask he steals the Swap Cask.” I picked up another glass. “So he takes this Swap Cask to the talc mine and fills it.” I reached for the salt shaker.