Quicksilver (reissue)
Page 1
QUICKSILVER
Toni Dwiggins
__________
The Forensic Geology Series, Book 1
All books in the series are stand-alone and can be read in any order.
Digital Edition. © 2013 by Toni Dwiggins. Revised second edition 2015. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without prior permission of the publisher.
All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. If there are factual or technical errors in Quicksilver, they are mine alone.
Cover design: www.wickedgoodbookcovers.com
** To be notified of new releases, sign up here **
Mailing List
** Contact the author at **
Website
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
EPIGRAPH
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
PART TWO
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
PART THREE
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
EPILOGUE: ELEMENTS 79 & 80
BADWATER
FROM THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EPIGRAPH
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
— Robert W. Service
PART ONE
Sierra Nevada Gold Country
Tuesday
~ on the hunt ~
CHAPTER 1
The man who had hired us took the lead.
His name was Robert Shelburne and he was as sure of himself as he was of this route.
Indeed, he had a name for this way up the mountain: the rogue route.
That it was.
No trailhead marked the beginning. The path did not exist on any map. It had been blazed long ago, surviving today as little more than a hint. It shot straight up the slope and was so thickly haired with trees and brush that we were nearly hiking blind.
I heard my partner Walter Shaws, a couple dozen feet behind me, muttering words he would not normally speak aloud. Walter and I had certainly hiked plenty of unofficial trails and exploited the terrain where no trails ran at all, in rougher country than this—we're geologists who read earth evidence from crimes and crises, which often takes us deep into the field. Still, we weren’t in the habit of bushwhacking up a mountain without good reason.
Shelburne had given a reason, good enough that we'd signed on to this case, but that did not stop Walter from grousing about the topography.
Didn't stop me from keeping a nervous eye on the landscape.
As we climbed, my senses shifted to the olfactory. A breeze kicked up and brought an odd vegetative odor, which I could not identify. Clearly it didn’t come from the rangy manzanita or deer brush that infested the path. It came from deeper into these oak-and-pine wooded slopes, or perhaps up higher.
Up ahead, Shelburne disappeared into the timber as if he’d been consumed.
For a moment I was disconcerted. What if he took a turn that we, in turn, missed? What if the path branched left and we went right? Bad form for two geologists to lose the client in the field. I shouted, “Slow down!”
From the woods above came the reply, “I’ve stopped.”
Lost his way? I picked up my pace and called to Walter to pick up his and a half-minute later I crashed through the brush and found Robert Shelburne kneeling on the path.
I could not see around him so I asked, “Find something of interest?”
He got to his feet and brushed dirt off the knees of his stylish hiking pants and adjusted the hip belt of his backpack and then, almost in afterthought, he stood aside to reveal the ground where he’d knelt. On the trail was a bandana, moon-silver and dirt-smeared. If this had been a proper trail I would have assumed that a random hiker had wiped grime from his face and gotten careless stashing the bandana in his backpack.
The chance of that, here and now, was not worth discussing.
Walter drew up, winded, and crowded in beside Shelburne. Walter in his battered gear and weathered face looked like he’d been out in the field for weeks. Shelburne in his upscale gear and cultivated tan looked ready for a photo shoot for Outside Magazine. As for me, I was comfortable in aged boots and worn backpack, female and unweathered enough to take notice of Shelburne’s stylish look, acutely aware of the messages we sent with the gear we chose.
Like bandanas.
Walter was now studying the bandana in the dirt. “That’s his?”
“I'd lay money on it,” Shelburne said.
“Meaning what?” I asked. “He flagged the trail?”
“I’d say so.”
“And the color?”
Shelburne cocked his head.
“Silver,” I said, “unless you’d call it light gray.”
“Silver,” Shelburne agreed. “That’s his color.”
“So do you read anything into that?”
“Beyond the color identifying it as his bandana?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Beyond that.”
“I could read things into the color silver until death do us part.”
“I was thinking in particular about his state of mind.”
“The state of his mind,” Shelburne said, “is chaotic.”
Walter cleared his throat. “And yet functional enough. Else we wouldn’t be here tracking him.”
We fell silent, gazing down at the bandana. There was no way to tell if it had been dropped a day ago, an hour ago, minutes ago. The ground was thin-soiled, thick with fallen pine needles. No footprints to be examined, identified.
Shelburne turned to go.
Walter said, “Are you going to leave it there?”
“Message sent,” Shelburne said. “Message received.”
I said, “The message being we’re on the right track? No need to lay money.”
Shelburne smiled but there was caution in his eyes.
Walter picked up the bandana and stowed it in his pack, muttering about good wilderness manners.
We continued our ascent, stringing out along the narrow path, Shelburne picking up his impatient pace, Walter soon lagging, me claiming the middle, keeping track of my companions. I tracked Walter by the sound of his heavy breathing. For the briefest moment the thought floated he’s getting slower in the field. And then the tho
ught went away. I tracked Shelburne by the red of his backpack, which stood out from the green of the brush. I wondered if he was brooding on the color silver.
That odd smell came again—something loamy and rotting, it seemed, beneath the trees beyond the brush.
I thought, not for the first time today, this is not my turf.
Ten minutes later the trail jacked hard left and then like a gift the trail and I escaped the besieging woods.
We’d achieved the upper slope and it was paved by a field of bedrock. Rubbed raw by ancient fingers of ice, this field was not going to give us an easy traverse. The rock was too steep for us to take a high line, and I saw no ducked trail marking, no little pyramid of stones to point the way.
Shelburne quickly found his traverse, charging ahead.
I followed.
Bare-bone bedrock would normally lift my heart but not here, not now, not pinned to the rock face with a thirty-pound pack on my back and that bandana on my mind.
I looked behind me and saw Walter, just beginning the traverse. Slower in the field, yes, but sure-footed. Not young, but surely not old.
I returned my focus to the path ahead and judged the bedrock—by its silky golden sheen and crinkly foliation—to be phyllite, a rock one metamorphic step beyond slate, not the rock we were hunting but perhaps a close neighbor.
Ahead, Shelburne had reached a hackly break in the bedrock where a ladder of switchbacks ascended the wall.
Shadows moved across the rock. I looked up. I didn’t much like the bruised clouds darkening the sky. The weather report had forecasted a chance of showers, and we were prepared for the possibility of a full-blown storm. In the Sierra Nevada mountains bad weather was not out of the question, especially in September’s dying days.
By the time I reached the switchbacks, the breeze had begun to bite.
Two switchbacks up, as I was mulling over the idea of digging a poncho out of my backpack to have at the ready should the skies open up, there came a clattering sound like rain—no, like hail hitting a sidewalk—and Shelburne up above shouted “look out” and I flinched. Rock fragments fell, shotgunning the bedrock trail. A slaty sharp-edged piece impaled itself in the tongue of my right boot. It was nearly the size of my fist. It stung my foot. I was glad it missed my head.
Walter, still below on the traverse, called, “Cassie, what happened?”
“Dislodged talus,” I called back. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. Shelburne in his haste was courting recklessness. I hollered up to him, “Be more careful.”
Shelburne called down, “It wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“It came from up there.”
I tipped my head way back. Several switchbacks above Shelburne there was a ledge, slightly overhanging the trail. You don’t get talus unless it’s been wasted out of a rock face and that meant this bedrock sheet we were climbing continued above the ledge. The ledge was a false ridge, with a debris field hanging on its lip just waiting to be dislodged.
Shelburne shouted, “Henry!”
No sound from the ledge above.
Down on the bedrock trail, the three of us waited.
No answer.
My foot throbbed. I bent to extract the rock fragment. It had torn the leather skin of my boot tongue and bruised the top of my foot.
Conceivably, nobody was up on the ledge flinging rocks at us. There was the obvious alternative. A scampering ground squirrel could have done it, although those were a good number of big rock frags for one small squirrel. Could have been a bear. I once encountered a shifty California black bear patrolling a ridge, waiting for hikers to arrive and shuck their packs and open the trail mix. I knew bears. I'd foregone the trail mix, and the bear and I each pursued our own paths.
“Come on,” Robert Shelburne yelled down at us.
I straightened up.
If we hadn't been following Shelburne's rogue route, hunting an erratic man, I might have written off the falling stones. Unfortunately, mistrust came with the job. If I had been, say, a carrot farmer taking the day off to enjoy a hike in the woods, I wouldn't have given the incident another thought. But I'd spent enough years with Walter encountering the darker side of Homo sapiens and I had trouble reaching for the innocent explanation.
Hell if it was a squirrel or a bear.
Odds said that it was the man who’d left the bandana to flag the trail. And now he’d found himself a vantage point to watch for us. And I dearly hoped he’d dislodged the talus by accident.
If not...what the hell, Henry Shelburne?
CHAPTER 2
Gail Hawkins watched the three hikers on the rocky slope down below.
They had looked up but they did not see her.
She saw them.
She watched them with her golden eyes.
She was fit and lean and she was on the hunt—a lioness.
From her position on the ridgetop she could track them. They were nearing the top of the rocky slope. Soon they would reach the trees again and then it would be all trees to the summit. They had seen something up above them—they had shouted and looked up.
The leader had shouted “Henry.”
She hadn't seen Henry.
The upper woods interrupted her view. The woods above the rocky slope were solid and if anybody was in those woods, she couldn't tell. And once her three hikers reached those woods, she would lose sight of them. It didn't matter. She would find another lookout. She would find them.
Now, she just waited.
Burning to hunt.
The people she hunted were going to lead her to her prize.
The sound of her name was the sound of her prize. Hard G for Gail. Hard G for gold.
She'd been born in gold country. At birth her eyes were golden and the irises didn't turn brown as she grew. Amber eyes, they said. She said golden. As a child she had golden hair. It darkened in her teens. She streaked it, adding veins of the pure true color. She'd lived her whole life close to these mountains. She'd inhaled mountain dust and that dust came from rock that covered the land that hid the gold. She breathed the air that whispered, gold. She bore the name that shouted, gold.
Not Abigail.
Gail.
Gold.
This was her destiny.
She watched her targets come up the mountain. Still on the rocky part. So slow. So unfit. She could run that path. She burned to run. She could dash off right now and run down—circle them, run them into the ground.
Hurry them.
She burned to hunt and if she didn't burn off the need right now she was going to show herself. She stepped back from the precipice, to where her pack lay. She did twenty squats. Ran in place for three minutes. Flamed off a tongue of the hypers.
Not enough.
Her hand went to the sheath on her belt. Her fingers danced, wanting to withdraw the Buck knife. Her nerves sang.
And then she reconsidered.
She needed to center herself.
She shut her eyes and saw the hard G. Big and gold, flaming like the sun.
When she opened her eyes the G still blazed, an afterimage.
She returned to the viewpoint and stared down at the rocky slope. The three of them were still there. Still climbing. She wanted to shout their names, tell them to hurry. She knew every one of them. Their lives were available to her online. Such carelessness.
The one in the lead: male, age 34, Robert Shelburne. Looking fit enough, but she could easily overtake him.
Second: the female, age 28, Cassie Oldfield. Fit enough but hesitant. No contest.
Third in line, the straggler: male, age 63, Walter Shaws, fit for his age but slow. So easily taken down.
She watched them, from her precipice. Female, age 41, name Gail Hawkins, fitter than any of them.
Hungrier than any of them. Only one desire.
She stretched like a lioness.
PART TWO
The Other Side of the Mountains
Monday, the day
before
~ the hunt begins ~
CHAPTER 3
The Shelburne case had begun on the other side of the mountains.
California’s Sierra Nevada range showed two faces—the severe steepled eastern side and the gentler lusher western side. Our home base was the mountain town of Mammoth Lakes, on the eastern side.
It was mid-morning on Monday when Robert Shelburne knocked at our door.
Normally our business didn’t come from droppers-by. Most of our work came from law-enforcement referrals and defense-attorney requests. Still, we had a Sierra Geoforensics sign over the door and a working website, and someone looking for world-class forensic geologists could find us easily enough.
Actually, Shelburne had phoned the night before to ask for an appointment. And then he showed up this morning five hours early.
He strode into the lab, giving it the once-over, tossing us a smile and an inquiry. “Robert Shelburne here, earlier than expected but might I steal fifteen minutes of your time right now?”
“That depends on what you intend to do with them.” Walter rose from his workbench. “Mr. Shelburne.”
“I'm afraid my schedule dictated the timing change.” Shelburne extended his hand. “I hope that arriving in person will convince you to fit me in, Mr. Shaws.”
“We have a schedule as well,” Walter said. Eyebrows lifting, astonishment at the man's brass. Nevertheless accepting the extended hand. Politeness bred in the bone.
They shook and then Shelburne crossed the room to me. “And you'll be Ms. Oldfield.”
I rose from my workbench and accepted the handshake. I knew from his phone call last night that he wanted to consult Walter, specifically, but he showed no preference here, offering the junior partner equal recognition. He held my hand a moment longer than pleasantries required. Firm handshake. Direct eye contact. No flirtation; direct and professional.
That should have impressed me. It nearly did.
It certainly gave me the time to assess him.
He had the air, and look, of a man who took charge. He had a strong face with a bladed nose and black brows that cambered like bird wings. His green eyes were narrow, his face all angles. He looked to be in his mid thirties. His black hair was diked with a single silver ray, slicked back and feathered at the neck. He wore a multi-pocketed khaki jacket over black hiking pants. Power grooming, mountain style. He carried a stylish and very large leather satchel.