Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)

by Toni Dwiggins

  “Sure did. Checked out fine.”

  “When Security examined it, afterward, they found NFG written on it, in permanent ink.”

  “Youse is in with the in-crowd. Youse knows what NFG means.”

  “No fucking good.”

  “Weren’t me what wrote it. You want my guess? Somebody wrote it after the fact.”

  “By the time the dive master got Collier out, he had a lethal dose.”

  “Not for a couple months. Probably wished he’d gone right away.”

  I said, “That’s a little cold-blooded.”

  “Didn’t cry for him. Doesn’t mean I wished it on him.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  His toes curled, as though he was trying for a better grip on the pool deck. He had long big-knuckled toes. “Nobody listens.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You swim in the SFP, you better take care.”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “He’s a dumb lunk thinking about getting laid over the weekend instead of what he’s got to look out for in the dive. I give him the spiel but he doesn’t listen. He’s in a hurry because the plant wants the maintenance done yesterday because they’re off-line and it’s costing plenty, so the prevailing mindset isn’t ALARA—it’s ALACA. Keep your exposure as-low-as-cheaply-achievable. Anyway, he gets into his dive suit—kind of like your bug suit—and that’s when he asks me what I already told him that he wasn’t listening to. So I repeat the advice, only he can’t hear too well with a face pump going, so who knows? I tried. He goes in.” Hap suddenly leapt over my head and cannonballed into the pool.

  I waited.

  He surfaced and hung in place. “Go under and look around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll add a purty please onto it.”

  I ducked under. I saw Hap’s long legs languidly treading water. He was silhouetted by the pool light. I surfaced and wiped my eyes.

  “See much?”

  “Depends where I looked. You were blocking the light.”

  “That’s the thing. The visibility down in the SFP isn’t always what it should be. Especially when you got a bubble on your head and no peripheral vision. And you’re not expecting an irradiated fuel assembly next door.”

  “And the surface monitor’s not calibrated right.”

  “Was.” Hap lifted his palms. “Maybe it slipped after I calibrated it.”

  “The NRC investigated you for tampering.”

  “NRC investigated the incident up one side and down the other, fined the plant operator, held a lessons learned meeting.” He slowly sank. “I wasn’t cited. No proof.”

  “The plant fired you. The District Attorney filed murder charges.”

  He went under.

  I waited.

  He came up, onto his back, and expelled a spout of water. “I was cleared.”

  “You had a motive.”

  “Didn’t like him. You like everybody crosses your path?”

  “You fought him. At some bar.”

  “Wasn’t a bar, was a tavern. Precision, Buttercup. Didn’t fight him. Didn’t get to lay a hand on him. He didn’t appreciate the way I excused myself for accidentally knocking over his glass of ale and so he beat the stuffing out of me. And then he brought out his dingie and whizzed on my poor battered self—right in front of my fellow workers, who jess knocked theyselves out laughing. Daddy would have cringed, iffen he’d seen.”

  I cringed. I said, “So you bore Collier a grudge.”

  “Yeah. Flipped him off real good behind his back.”

  “So the SFP was an accident?”

  “Isn’t that what Milt said?”

  “He said the DA dropped the charges.”

  “She did, indeed. Still, I did get me a new nickname around the plant. And daddy would have liked that one.” He waved at the sky. “Nothing wimpy about Doc Death, eh daddy?” He straightened. “Whoops, I’s looking the wrong way for daddy.” He rolled face-down, into a dead-man’s float.

  Goosebumps broke out on me. I wondered if it had been what he said, just one little eff-up after another and nobody’s to blame. He couldn’t have planned it because somebody else smudged the work order, somebody else transferred the fuel assembly to the wrong place, somebody else did a survey of the work area with an erratic meter. But somebody else wasn’t reading the surface monitor. He was. He could have sabotaged it. He could have delayed his warning. Just takes a few seconds, when a diver gets too close to recently discharged spent fuel. Opportunity knocks and he answers, like encountering somebody who’s humiliated you on the edge of a crowded platform and the train’s coming.

  I got out and went for my towel. I heard him come up onto the pool deck with a grunt. I heard his wet feet slapping the concrete behind me.

  I heard him start up again.

  “And that’s why I’m here with y’all in Death Valley. Isn’t that something? Chain reaction. I get smeared at the nuke plant, but that’s okay, I’m sick of being a house tech anyway. I hit the road and take on temp jobs, only the life of a road whore isn’t so hot, and besides my deadly nickname keeps catching up. Then good ole Milt comes to the rescue. Milt didn’t mind my checkered past. Fact, he was glad to get somebody who wasn’t shooting for a job at the nuke plant. See, everybody who’s anybody wants to work at the nuke plant. Them boys and girls at the nuke plant is so full of theyselves they think they pulled the rods on the sun.”

  I felt his wet arm go around my shoulders. I ducked away and wrapped in my towel.

  He crossed his arms. “I’m like those unstable atoms. Start out at the nuke plant doing my business, get spent, end up buried at the dump.”

  “You could leave.”

  “Where’d I go?”

  “I don’t know. Go flip burgers. Go to art school.”

  “Yeah.” He turned to go.

  I hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh. “Wait.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s so wrong with keeping people safe?”

  He cocked his head. “About a minute ago you were thinking I’m a killer.”

  “You didn’t specifically deny it.”

  His face tightened, visible even by the castoff lights of the pool. “Cassie, you think I’m going to kill somebody because he makes me look like a fool?” He looked at the sky, then back at me. He produced a brief grin. “Hell, I make me look like a fool six days a week.”

  I laughed.

  “Take a break on Sundays. Wait and see.”

  Maybe I will, wait until we’re not hunting a madman with a lethal stash, wait until we’re done here—if we’re done here by Sunday—wait until we’re out of this liquefying heat that’s making my head swim, wait until Sunday to figure out what I think about Hap Miller.

  He uncrossed his arms. “Sunday’s four days away.” He moved closer and anchored my chin with his thumb and forefinger.

  Startled, I froze. Maybe not startled.

  He leaned in and kissed me. His lips were silky, like mine, tasting of alkali. I dropped my towel. We crowded together, sealing the hold of our mouths. His hands went down to the hiked-up border of my too-small swimsuit. He slipped his thumbs beneath the elastic. My attention jumped there, to the pressure points of his thumbs. He fitted his hips into mine. For a moment, for one long moment in which my heat flared, I stayed planted in place, and then I intertwined my fingers in his and tugged his hands free.

  He pulled back. “You no like?”

  Oh yeah, I like. I adjusted my suit.

  He expelled a breath like it was a spout of water.

  I found my own breath. “Can we just back up a bit?”

  “Ain’t never no way to go but forward.”

  “Okay.” My heartbeat ramped up again. “Sunday’s still coming up.”

  “That it is.” He picked up my towel and handed it to me. “Thing is, Buttercup, I’m near spent. Had one fiasco marriage, got a woman I visit now and then. Fraid I gave you the wrong impression here. I�
�m not looking for a sweetheart.”

  I said, after one more long moment in which to cool back down to stone, “Afraid I’m not looking for a roll on the pool deck.”

  28

  Field day.

  The morning sun already savaged us. I slumped against the Jeep. Walter shifted, sweating, stirring up dust. Soliano wiped his brow.

  Pria hugged herself, fixing her hopes on her aunt.

  The small gray-haired woman with the sour face—Ruth Weeks—was on Soliano’s cell phone. She listened with a tight mouth.

  I expected the answer to be no.

  It was surely a no-looking kind of place, of dusty trailers and adobe cabins, and the only thing good I could say was that it seemed temporary. I looked across a short stretch of desert to a wall of palms and tamarisks and caught a glimpse of green green grass. A small white ball flew above the trees and I imagined a curse in German. I turned and squinted uphill at the Inn, which docked at the head of the fan like a cruise ship in palm-green water. I turned back to this sad outlier of the village of Furnace Creek and thought, everybody around here has water to spare, but them. Even their mesquite looks thirsty.

  Ruth Weeks returned Soliano’s phone like it was contaminated. “Jackson says you’re one of them.” She eyed our borrowed Park Service vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee offroader. “His car. He’s responsible.” She shifted her lawn chair so that it faced her mobile home, giving us the back of her head.

  Pria bounded to the Cherokee. It will be fun.

  Walter slid into the front passenger seat as if by choice, and I took the wheel as if by default, and Pria piled into the backseat beside Soliano.

  I drove past the sign at the end of the dirt road—Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, and below that, Radio 91.1—and Walter reached for the radio and Pria said, “You won’t get nothing. It’s Thursday. You could try tomorrow.”

  Soliano, in my rearview mirror, nodded as if he’d known. Maybe that’s the way it was where he grew up, stations on and off the air unpredictably so all you can do is shrug. Shooting victims in the road and all you can do is wait for them to die. Soliano was on Pria’s wavelength. He’d made his pact with her earlier when he found her waiting outside his room. Undoubtedly looked at his watch. No time, and here’s Miss Desert Alien who knows this area like none of us could know it, who volunteers her services. Dios mio, this is her homeland. What can one do? Refuse the offer?

  Well—Walter had said to me on the way to the parking lot—she’s nearly fifteen.

  I’d been twelve when he first took me into the field.

  I hit the asphalt and and took the road back up the fan and dropped Soliano at the cruise ship and picked up our escorts, two FBI agents in another Park Service offroader.

  Our third escort, Hap, took Soliano’s place in the backseat beside Pria.

  ~

  Something was wrong with Hap.

  He didn’t ask why we were heading for talc country. He made no dire warnings to take care out here. No yak, no Buttercup-baiting.

  No apology for last night at the pool. Then again, he’d been frank about what he wanted last night. Brutally so. It was me who’d been slow on the uptake. I really should paste a warning label on my forehead: romantically needy but touchy as hell. It seemed like a dream now, anyway, in the brutal light of day. The night, the stars, the heat. Fantasyland.

  Walter seemed not to notice Hap’s tense silence. Walter was busy explaining the passing landscape to Pria. “Look Pria,” he pointed at a black ridge, “what do you think carved out those rocks?”

  She looked; star pupil. “Timbisha?”

  “It would have happened before people came along—but it is an ongoing process.” He kinked in his seat and inflated his cheeks and blew.

  “Wind!”

  I waited for Walter to call the rocks by their name, ventifacts. Teach her the Latin, ventus, for wind. That’s the way I remembered the lessons back when he was teaching me—in between instructions on extracting soil from the shoes of a murder suspect—straightforward and no-nonsense. Certainly, no cheek inflating.

  I waited for Hap to step in with a snarky comment. Blowing some hot air, Walter? Hap was mum.

  Maybe Hap wished he was overseeing the borax cleanup with Ballinger and Scotty, instead of babysitting us.

  Maybe he’d picked up a chill at the pool last night.

  Or maybe his weird silence had something to do with whatever he was reading on his cell phone.

  ~

  At Chickie’s talc mine, our trip officially began.

  If we have it right, here’s what happened, time after time: Jardine and Beltzman made the swap, and the radwaste driver took the cargo with the dummy cask to the dump. And then, when the time was right, Jardine drove the offroader rig with its hot cargo from the mine down the dirt road to the highway.

  Our itinerary, today, was this: follow Roy Jardine.

  We took the dirt road, sampling along the way. Layer one of the fender soil map.

  Then, there was a break in the map as Jardine traveled on highway pavement.

  We, too, turned north onto highway 127. Two days ago, we’d traveled this highway southward on our way from Beatty to talc country.

  I checked Hap in the rearview. Pale, silent. Phone now in his T-shirt pocket, a slight lump over Homer Simpson’s right eye.

  Who the hells knows. It’s Hap. I refocused on the highway ahead, on the pools of water shimmering in the distance. The kind of mirage I like. No running figure. No creeping bat.

  We passed the cinder block town of Shoshone and everybody’s heads turned, because it was Chickie’s town. Which one of the squat tin houses was hers? I spotted a white pickup pulling out of a Dairy Queen parking lot and twisted for a longer look.

  “That’s not her,” Pria said.

  “Her?” I said.

  “The one people say messed you up.”

  “You know Chickie?” Walter asked, a tick before I could get it out.

  “She’s my mother.”

  ~

  We passed from California into Nevada. We came to the town of Lathrop Wells, and turned northwest onto highway 95.

  We came mostly in silence, digesting Chickie and Pria.

  Pria hadn’t had much more to say, other than that Chickie and Pria and Ruth had all lived in the trailer with Peter Weeks—Ruth’s brother, Pria’s father, Chickie’s husband. Peter had died of lung cancer when Pria was six. Chickie then left the village because she was not Timbisha. Pria, who was half-Timbisha, remained with Aunt Ruth. Pria had no more to say, other than that Chickie was the devil and that’s why people said it was Chickie who had left us to die.

  Hap’s eyes had widened in surprise and then narrowed. “Devil’s play,” he’d said, when Pria finished. His first comment of the day.

  I agreed. Whichever devil it was who’d bushwhacked us.

  Highway 95 shot straight through the high wide plain of the Amargosa Desert. Keep going on this road and we’d come to the crash site, and then the dump. A lifetime ago we’d been there, wondering what we’d got ourselves into.

  Pria said, “The school bus goes this way, to Beatty.”

  I checked her in the rearview. She was watching Walter, twisting a strand of hair into a cord. It shone like obsidian. If she didn’t have the devil for a mother and a sourpuss for an aunt, someone might have put that hair up in a cool French braid. She was waiting for Walter’s response. High school’s not his strong suit, so I stepped in. “So, Pria, what’s your favorite subject?”

  “Softball,” she said, grudging.

  “What position?”

  “Pitcher.”

  “Cool. I played soccer in high school. Midfield.” I waited for her to acknowledge the coolness of soccer and when she remained silent I looked again. She yanked the cord of hair so that it bisected her face, then crossed her eyes. I yanked my gaze away from the wild child back to the highway.

  Walter said, “Up ahead.”

  Up ahead, to our left, an ungraded road snaked up
the gentle fanglomerate of the eastern flank of the Funeral range to its rough-hewn summit.

  I slowed. This was it: the road we figured Jardine took. This route had been on our list from the get-go, along with many others, but Hap’s spilled glass of water last night jumped it to first place. I said, “You know that road, Hap?”

  “No.” Second comment of the day. In my rearview, he was studying it.

  Well, we were betting Roy Jardine knew that road. If we were right, here’s where he left the pavement. Why he took this route was a matter of speculation but we speculated that he preferred to re-enter Death Valley by the back door, the route no ranger patrolled. Because he didn’t want company.

  Neither did we. I was glad to have the FBI on our tail, instead of the devil.

  Soliano had given us a new toy—a satellite phone—so that we could stay in contact while in the canyons. Walter used it to phone our escort and tell them we were about to go offroad.

  I turned onto the fan road and the FBI followed. I stopped to sample the coarse-grained alluvium, layer two of the fender soil.

  From here, Jardine’s itinerary led up the flank of the Funerals. So did ours. We crossed an old railroad grade, climbed gently, then dropped into the wide pebbly wash of the Amargosa River. Layer three—playa mud and sand. This time, we all piled out.

  The FBI kept watch, submachine guns nodding.

  Hap leaned against the Cherokee. Nothing for him to do until, unless we encounter something requiring a Geiger check.

  While I sampled the soil, Walter resumed his lessons.

  Pria stared at the dry riverbed. “You said we were chasing the water.”

  “We are.” Walter smiled. “When this river floods, water ends up in Death Valley.”

  I wondered if she’d get the significance of the river’s course. It runs through this desert along the eastern border of Death Valley, then cuts down to its southern tip—talc country—and thence takes a hook northeast to exhaust itself three hundred feet below sea level on the Badwater saltpan.

  I pictured the dinner table last night, Hap’s spilled water taking its path along the wood grain and then over the edge. That had sent my thoughts along their own path: if Jardine was trying to nail Ballinger for the leak at the dump, maybe he was following the path of the leak. That path led down into the water table, and thence into the flow system that brings water into Death Valley. On the hydrology website I’d learned there are two major flow paths. One is the Amargosa River, whose riverbed runs somewhat in line with the radwaste truck route. It also runs close to Chickie’s mine. Maybe it had led Jardine there. Maybe he’d been scouting for a site to stage his attack. He’d certainly found a place to stash his equipment and a use for the talc. I wondered if Pria knew we had visited her mother’s mine.