Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  Soliano set down his fork.

  “Fact, some of those other leaks Milt mentioned got connected to cancer clusters.”

  I watched the water find its way over the table’s edge. “Cancer again.”

  “Ain’t it a bitch? Everything gives you cancer these days.”

  “Let us confine ourselves to this leak,” Soliano said. “Which appears to parallel the contamination of Mr. Jardine’s sister, yes? One more grievance to lay at Mr. Ballinger’s door?”

  “Well he didn’t threaten me,” Ballinger said, “he threatened the priceless, remember? So why don’t we friggin drop this leak crapola?”

  “Why don’t we follow the evidence,” Walter said, “and see where it leads.”

  I ached, suddenly, muscles sprung from slouching through a tunnel in a sixty-pound bug suit in pursuit of mud on a cask. But I’d do it again tomorrow if I thought I’d get the evidence. Because Walter’s right, that’s what’s going to get us to Roy Jardine and I wanted that sick bastard got. As Walter taught me back when I was learning the ropes at his bench, a crime does not happen without leaving its mark. One of the golden rules of forensic geology says that whenever two objects come into contact, there is a transfer of material. The methods of detection may not be exquisite enough to find it, but nonetheless the transfer has taken place. That means if you don’t find it the first time, you hold it up to the light and look again. And you keep looking until you see what was hidden. Like a flash of mica in granite that suddenly catches the sun. And if your evidence soils are stolen and you have to start all over again, you suck it up and keep looking. Because that’s what you signed up for. Because a sick bastard has got hold of lethal shit and is playing god with it. Because I don’t want him crapping up anything, priceless or pricey or overlooked or underprotected or just plain unlucky. I had a bad taste in my mouth, redolent of rattlesnake and canned air. I said, “We’ll find the place, Hector.”

  “I await. Meanwhile, let us consider the priceless, which he threatens to contaminate. What is it? Where might it be? What can we extrapolate from his choice of locations so far? His cask-swapping setup is in Death Valley. His first attack comes in Death Valley. Death Valley appears to be his chosen venue. Thoughts, Mr. Ballinger?”

  “Christ on a crutch,” Ballinger said, “I...don’t...know. Figure it out yourself. Or ask somebody else for a change.” He turned to Hap. “Like Mr. Know-it-all here.”

  “Very well,” Soliano said. “Thoughts, Mr. Miller?”

  Hap cocked his head. “You asking me to speculate, Hector?”

  “I am asking what attracts Mr. Jardine to Death Valley. Yes, do speculate. It may help if you use his perspective.”

  I thought, that role-playing thing again, like Soliano used with Ballinger in the talc tunnel. Very effective.

  Hap chuckled. “Should get me a Roy mask. Anyhoo, let’s see. I’m Roy, with a shitload of hot resins. What I have to do is find a worthy place to threaten. Think I’ll call it the priceless. Nice ring to it, and it’ll sure grab everybody’s attention.”

  “Where, Mr. Miller, is this worthy place?”

  “Well it sure ain’t the dump.” Hap sat back and laced his hands behind his head. “Sooo, what else could I contaminate? There’s the Nevada Test Site down the road—that’s where Uncle Sam buries his waste. That’s been contaminated since the atomic tests.” Hap glanced at me.

  I met his look. Go ahead.

  “Anybody gonna notice if I crap up NTS? Nah. Over the hill from the dump is Yucca Mountain, which is where they keep changing their minds about if they’re gonna put the spent fuel rods, if they ever quit bitching about earthquake faults. Anybody care if I crap up Yucca? Nah. Well then, how about Death Valley? Compared to the neighbors she’s a downright virgin. And if I crap up a virgin—long as she’s called a national park—I’ll get somebody to sit up and pay attention.”

  “And why do you wish attention?” Soliano asked.

  “Remember, I have a grudge or two against Milt. Sooo, attention’s going to come back around to Milt—like it’s doing right now—and the old news is going to leak out. Then John Q Public’s going to read about it with his morning coffee and have a cow. Holy hell, all them nuclides in the water table, that’s where I dug my well! And here’s where John Q is going to ask what Milt’s plutonium is doing in John’s coffee.”

  “As you phrased it yesterday morning at the dump.”

  “As Hap phrased it. When Buttercup here asked what happens if the resins get loose in the environment.” Hap shrugged. “But I’m still playing Roy, right? Sooo, once I get all this attention, with John Q screaming and all, I figure the Nuke Regulating Commission is going to have to step in again, get tougher. And then Milt’s going to get his radioactive materials license yanked, or get fired, or get drawn and quartered.” Hap unlaced his hands and folded his arms, decapitating Homer Simpson. “So whaddya think? That why Roy chose Death Valley?”

  “It is plausible.” Soliano considered. “And yet, Death Valley is a very large target.”

  “Anywhere in the virgin’s gonna turn the trick.” Hap grinned. “So to speak.”

  I thought, suddenly, we’re asking the wrong question. Forget the where for a moment—what about how? I watched, electrified, as the last drops of water plinked down from the table into the carpet. I saw Walter scratching his ear, looking where I was looking.

  Ballinger said, “Well I think you’re full of it, Hap.”

  “Well thanks, Milt.” Hap’s cave-pool eyes darkened. “Because Hector asked for my help and I just tried to give it. Because, you know, it’s my ass too. It’s all our asses, because dog knows how Roy’s fixing to unleash his stockpile. So you might be a little more forthcoming, Milt.”

  “Why don’t you be forthcoming, Hap? Why don’t you tell them all about the nickname you got when you worked at the nuke plant?”

  Hap rolled his eyes.

  Ballinger turned to us. “They called him Doc Death.”

  Scotty stared. “Wait a minute...he’s that guy?”

  26

  We had a new vision, glimpsed in a spilled glass of water.

  After dinner we’d returned to Walter’s room and downloaded USGS reports on the leak from the Beatty dump. The hydrologists had been having a cow, as Hap might say.

  And then I had to wonder how I could have any idea what Doc Death might say.

  I shook that off. Right now, it didn’t matter what Hap did at the nuke plant.

  It mattered what Roy Jardine had done with the radwaste.

  It mattered whether we could follow the trail he’d left.

  I stared at the coffee table I was using as a workbench. Dishes of fender soil lined up, layer one through layer six. Walter and I had built ourselves a new map—patchy, riddled with unconformities. It took us where we’d been two days ago, considering a dozen or so candidates. And there we’d be right now if not for the new vision. It was one part onageristic estimate and three parts hydrology.

  And I liked it. Not least because it pared the candidates down to two.

  Which one, Brother Roy? Where’d you go? Either way, I’m with you from the get-go. You leave Chickie’s talc mine with your offroader rig and its nasty cargo and at some point you abandon paved road to drive up a fan across a wash into a canyon. You follow that canyon until you pick up layer six, the final layer. Point D, we’re calling it, for destination. And then you do your dirty deed, and then drive back to the talc mine. You make the trip again and again, dozens of times. I can’t say precisely how many because of the patchy nature of the layers. But ultimately, Roy Jardine, you left us a freaking map.

  Once we find Point D, we’ll see where we go from there.

  There was the sudden clatter, outside, of hard rain. I looked up. More hurricane spinoff? Still, come hell or high water, we’re going into the field tomorrow. We’re going to find your address, pal.

  “I read about a mine over in the Tucki Wash,” Walter said. “The story goes that the owners quarre
led and shot each other and the skeletons are still there, arms extended.”

  “They’re gone now,” Pria said.

  I thought she’d fallen asleep—she’d been silent for so long. She was folded into a wicker chair and her head rested on its broad arm but her eyes were open. She met my look and then her black eyes skated back to Walter. We’d found her stationed outside Walter’s room when we returned from dinner and Walter invited her in for a lemonade. Isn’t someone expecting you at home? he’d asked. Nobody’s home, she’d said, and asked if she could stay awhile. He didn’t appear to know how to refuse.

  She said, now, in that high girlish voice that seemed too young for her, “Grandfather, you wanna go see where Walter Scott had his hideout up a canyon?”

  “You’re talking about Death Valley Scotty?”

  “That’s a bad name. His name was Walter, like you. You wanna go?”

  “I certainly do,” Walter said, watching the soils settle out in his test tubes. “When I’m not quite so pressed for time.”

  “He never found any gold. He was a faker.”

  “That could be said of a good number of people who came here.”

  She giggled.

  He smiled.

  “You wanna go see where a prospector cut his name on the rock where there’s old drawings that tell stories?”

  Walter said, “We appear to be concocting a tour of killers and frauds and petroglyph-desecraters.”

  Well you started it, I thought, you just had to bring up those skeletons.

  “A lot of them’s came here,” Pria said.

  Walter turned to look at her. “You know the area well?”

  “I got coyote eyes.”

  “Do you?” He thought a moment. “I may want to go see a mine but I haven’t quite figured out where it is. If I could describe the surrounding territory, could you help me?”

  Her head lifted. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She raised a clenched fist, pinkie extended. “Roger, Grandfather.”

  He did not smile. “I’ll tell you what. Let me finish my work here and then tomorrow after I’m back from the field, we’ll look at some maps together.”

  “I could come along,” she said. “To your field.”

  I took in a breath. I used to say something like that. Come on Walter, take me with you. It would be fun.

  He said, “I’m afraid not, Pria.”

  “There’s mines not on maps,” she said. “I need to come.”

  He rubbed his chin.

  I held my breath. She had a point. What if Jardine had chosen a mine that’s not on the maps? How many dozens of unmarked prospects and shafts and adits were there in Death Valley? Nobody knew. Did she? I came over to Walter and whispered, “She’s a kid, we can’t take her.”

  Pria shot me a look with those black coyote eyes and then seized hold of her large feet and tucked herself deeper into the chair.

  Walter whispered, “You were just a kid.”

  I said, “You should start a club.”

  27

  Midnight at the pool.

  The thermometer on the stone wall beside the stacked lounge chairs read ninety-one and the underwater thermometer read eighty-eight. The silky water left the faint taste of minerals on my lips and dissolved the ache from my shoulders.

  I corked along under stars so bright they radiated haloes.

  The night was mine. The rainstorm of two hours ago had vanished. Pria had vanished. Walter had called it a night and tucked in. Everyone at the Furnace Creek Inn appeared to have called it a night. Sunburns and bellies full of rattlesnake and soft beds. No stargazers, no lovers, no partiers. Just me and the sky and the water.

  A coyote screamed.

  I dove, dolphining underwater.

  There was an explosion.

  I saw a water-sheathed torpedo and then flailed for the surface and came up gasping and seconds later the torpedo surfaced and assumed the features of Hap.

  “Nice suit, Buttercup.”

  Treading water, heart pounding, I reflexively looked down at my bathing suit. Big flowers. Small suit. I’d borrowed it from the maid. When I could speak with a steady voice, I said, “Why are you here?”

  He flipped on his back and crossed his hands beneath his head. “Get me some exercise.” His trunks were long and loose and floated like purple jellyfish around his pale legs.

  “You said you were going to bed. When you left dinner.”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” He righted himself, treading water. He was so close our feet brushed. His wet hair was hematite red, already curling in the hot night air. He smiled. “Next question.”

  All right. “How’d you get your nickname?”

  “Youse is curious as the cat.”

  He tucked and dove under and surfaced at the far end of the pool. He climbed onto the deck and I thought he was going to leave. He didn’t. He took a diver’s stance. Despite the ludicrous purple trunks, he had the look of a real athlete, long and leanly muscled. He dove, easing into a smooth crawl that took him the length of the pool in the time it took me to reach the side and hang on. He jackknifed and went under and emerged halfway and backstroked to the far end, then came back my way in a butterfly. I watched, mesmerized, as he did his laps.

  On the eighth lap he angled over to me and hooked an arm onto the tiled ledge. “So,” he said, barely winded. “My nickname.”

  I nodded.

  “Fifth grade. Music class. We were learning folk songs and there was this one called The Happy Miller. All about an indolent fellow who’s happy to sing and dance all day and not toil like the other drudges at the mill, although I never did see how he got any milling done if he spent all day dancing. And you can imagine—me having the last name Miller—what happened. All those little dickenses start calling me Happy. Of course I hated it. What kid doesn’t hate what the other kids call him? But then my daddy heard the kids calling me Happy and that jess pained my daddy. See, daddy’s the one picked my given name—which is Brendan—even before I was born. Brendan ain’t jess a name, see? It’s a calling. It means, in old Celtic, from the fiery hill. Don’t that give you visions of a manly man striding down out of his Celtic castle to fight the good fight against the incoming hordes? Well,” he tugged a curling lock, “I got the fiery hair. But I wasn’t ready to take on the incoming hordes of fifth-graders. And my daddy told me flat-out he didn’t wanna never hear nobody calling me Happy, I guess because that made him Happy’s daddy—Chuckles or Goofy—and my daddy wasn’t much of a chuckler. Still, I did have the last laugh because I got to fuck over my daddy without doing anything to get in trouble. Alls I had to do was beg the kids not to call me Happy.” His eyes shone. “God my daddy hated a victim.” He flicked the water. “Kids eventually shortened the name to Hap. And I did come to get used to it. That satisfy your curiosity?”

  I looked away, across the water to the stone arches that rose like Roman aqueduct bridges on the far side of the pool deck, framing a view of blackness that was the night desert. I had to fight off a wave of sympathy that threatened to pull me under.

  Hap splashed. “Well, I’ve had me my exercise.”

  I looked back to see him lever out of the pool. I said, “I meant the nickname at the nuke plant.”

  He stood dripping. He looked down at me. “Milt told you. About five hours ago. In the dining room. Memory not so good?”

  “Milt told us what he knew. Scotty’d sure heard about it. I’d guess it’s one of those legendary stories in the nuke industry. I’d like to hear your side.”

  “Whyever for?”

  To know if I need to be watching my back. “It’s a nasty story.”

  He shrugged.

  “Okay,” I said, “since you left the table in the middle of it, let me recap. You were working at the nuke plant, keeping watch on a diver in the spent-fuel pool.”

  “RC, Buttercup. Radiation Control. In the SFP. You tell my story, you need to talk like the in-crowd.”

  “I’m not
in the in-crowd.” I didn’t like having to look up at him. Neither did I like the idea of climbing out to face him in my skimpy suit, so I stayed where I was and spoke to his feet. “There was a diver—Drew Collier—installing fuel racks.”

  “Fuel rack support plates. Precision, Buttercup.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, somebody misread a smudged work order and transferred a spent fuel rod to the wrong place, which was near Collier’s work area. The dive contractor surveyed the area before the dive but didn’t pick up a reading. He said later that the survey meter had been behaving erratically.”

  Hap snorted. “Isn’t that what I’ve been going on and on about? A little eff-up here, a little eff-up there.”

  “And Collier got too close to the fuel rod.”

  Hap nodded at the pool. “Water’s a great shield but you got to watch out for the dose gradients.”

  “But you didn’t watch out.”

  He folded his arms.

  “Collier wore teledosimeters set to alarm at your surface monitor if his dose rate went too high.”

  “That’s right. I monitored the readouts and relayed them to Collier on the intercom. Readouts looked a little hinky—I didn’t know why, I didn’t know some inbred effed up the work order and put a rod in the wrong place. All I knew was I didn’t like the readouts so I relayed to Collier to move into a lower-dose area. He relays to me he is in a low-dose area. By the time he stopped arguing, the monitor alarms were going off. So I relayed the standard what the firetruck you doing down there, get TF out.” He shrugged. “You get yourself into a high-rad field and it only takes seconds to get yourself a nasty dose.”

  “Your readouts were too low. You should have warned him sooner. Your surface monitor was faulty.”

  “Wasn’t mine. Was the dive contractor’s.”

  “You didn’t check it before the dive?”