Quicksilver (reissue)

by Toni Dwiggins

  Walter still waited. Attentive.

  “Okay,” I said, “I actually do get it. We chose not to press charges against Henry Shelburne. We absolved him. We decided where justice lay, in this case. And now you get a phone call to say that the search for Henry has been terminated. And you're thinking, Cassie is going to get all metaphorical about calling off searches for wounded souls named Henry. And you're hoping she'll call off her own search for justice in the case of her brother. That she'll absolve herself.”

  “Something along that line.”

  I thought of chiastolite, of that Maltese cross, that metaphorical symbol for Henry Shelburne of obsession, crusades. Such a cross could lodge in my own mind, if I chose to let it. Or I could just call off the crusade. I gave Walter a shrug, encompassing all Henrys, and said, “It's a work in progress.”

  Walter nodded, and finished his donut.

  ~ ~ ~

  Two days after the search for Henry had been terminated we got a phone call to inform us that Gail Hawkins had been indicted for the murder of Robert Shelburne.

  Justice, served.

  A killer brought to justice was categorically a good thing, a righting of wrongs. But in this case, I found myself unable to mourn for the victim.

  The victim was a killer, himself.

  That day on the Yuba, Robert Shelburne had watched his father have a heart attack, watched him fall into the river. He'd just watched. And then he'd left. And then, the animals got to Camden Shelburne. If Robert had, say, experienced a measure of guilt and returned to retrieve his father's body, it would have turned out way too Wild Kingdom for him. But he hadn't returned. Rangers found Camden Shelburne.

  Robert Shelburne had watched his father drown, paying full attention.

  I didn't know if the Shelburne brothers had held any kind of service for their father, but I did find the notice in the San Jose Mercury News about the service for Robert Shelburne. I'd been following the digital Silicon Valley newspaper, ever since we returned from the gold country. I'd been thinking that a hotshot venture capitalist was going to get an obituary. And he did.

  Robert Shelburne's life was celebrated at 2:00 P.M. on a sunny September day at a bayfront park, “the type of outdoor setting Robert loved.” There were over one hundred colleagues and former clients of The Bayfront Group gathered to reminisce about Golden Boy, “a nickname Mr. Shelburne carried from childhood.”

  No family members were in attendance.

  EPILOGUE: ELEMENTS 79 & 80

  Another week passed.

  Walter was at his workbench analyzing a feldspar from our current case. He paused to rub his eyes. To stretch. I suggested a coffee break. Walter was up for it. I poured two mugs and Walter grabbed the ubiquitous donut box and we settled in at the map table.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said, sliding the day’s newspaper closer. I opened it to the business section.

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Since when did you start following the stock market?”

  “Since today.”

  Actually, since several days ago when I’d googled it and found the salient abbreviation. They ID stocks with numbers and letters, like elements on the periodic table. But when it came to following the market Walter was still an ink-and-paper man—he liked newsprint on his fingers to go with the donut crumbs—and so I did it his way. I pointed out the salient abbreviation.

  He read. “Deep Pockets?”

  “Yup.”

  “The company Robert was handling, creating the subsidiary to get into the environmental remediation business.”

  “Yup,” I said, “Robert's shell game. The green cred for the money guys. The promise of big bucks to his father.”

  “You’ve been tracking it?”

  “I figure I might buy a share. Attend the next shareholder meeting. They let you ask questions, right?”

  “They do,” he agreed.

  “Tells them the shareholders are paying attention, right?”

  “It does.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll have a few questions about AquaHeal.”

  “Such as?”

  “Along the lines of, do you intend to invest enough to get the technology right, and if not, why don’t you get out of the way?”

  He rubbed his chin.

  “Because if you let AquaHeal fail, you’re souring this market for clean tech.”

  Because I’d become a numbers chick, googling to find the salient number—how much mercury was deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra during the gold rush. Because that number blew my mind. Fifteen point two million pounds of quicksilver lost to the land. I’d grabbed hold of fifteen or so of those pounds, cupped on the ledge in the crevice, that day on the Yuba. Looked like a river cobble, felt like a heart.

  Walter reached for the newspaper. “What was today’s quote...”

  “Hundred and twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents. Per share.”

  He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I’m in.”

  ~ ~ ~

  In one of those odd juxtapositions of timing, the call Walter had been waiting for came in later that day.

  And we did a turn back to gold.

  The next morning Walter flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, and drove to a modest house in the suburb of Burbank to discuss Brown Woman Valley. The land, Walter discovered, was leased. The Burbank woman, Dorothy Morse, held the mineral rights. She had inherited them from her late husband, who himself had inherited the rights, several generations of rights holders who didn't have the capital to do exploratory drilling. Walter had spread a map on her coffee table and showed her where he dug through the bushes and found a plum-sized gold-studded ore specimen. She had served him a good whiskey and thanked him for the information and said she'd consult with her financial adviser.

  When he returned, he filled me in.

  I said, “So that's that?”

  “The widow played her cards close to the chest.”

  “You sound like a character from Dogtown.”

  “He's in here somewhere.” Walter tapped his chest. And then he picked up the plum-sized rock that had been sitting on his workbench since we returned. He held it on his flat palm so that the gold grains caught the light. He studied it, and then said in the resonant voice he adopted when quoting poetry, “Gold, gold, gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold.”

  I said, “I don't know that one.”

  “The Grip of Gold.”

  “You intend to recite the entire poem?”

  He shot me a flint-eyed look.

  “I'm kidding. I'd love to hear it. Go ahead.”

  “One more line will do,” he said. “Price of many a crime untold.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The next day Walter said, in passing, “I might take a jaunt one of these days back to the gold country. Find the blue lead somewhere, fresh. Just for the experience. No exploratory drilling intended.”

  “Yeah? What if there was gold?”

  “Ah.”

  I got the coffee and donuts and we sat at the map table.

  He blew on his steaming brew. “Very well, let us say that I come across a sizable grain embedded in the blue gravel.” He sampled his coffee and nodded his approval. “I would get out my rock pick.”

  “Just the one grain?”

  “That would suffice.” He added, “Speaking as my current self, silencing the Dogtown boy.”

  I sipped my coffee.

  He asked, “And you, Cassie? If you came across that grain of gold?”

  A vision rose, along with the steam from my coffee. Me, walking the bedrock tunnel up at Enchantment Valley, the tunnel walls changing to cemented gravel. Me, entering the lost river channel. And then stopping in my tracks, chiseling my way to the virgin blue, the bright blue indigo wings of a jay. I shivered, feeling again the chill of the tunnel, the thrill of the blue. And now I envisioned another color, a bright sunrise. I envisioned a grain of gold in that gravel. A coarse grain, water-worn from its rough travels in the ancient river. Ab
out the size of a kernel of wheat. I saw it now clearly. That one grain. Shining gold.

  “And you?” Walter repeated. “Would you get out your rock pick?”

  “I might,” I said. “If I didn't worry that one grain would lead to another.”

  ~ ~ END ~ ~

  ► For a preview of Cassie and Walter's next adventure,

  please turn the page...

  BADWATER

  The Forensic Geology Series, Book 2

  Preview

  ______________

  PROLOGUE

  What Sheila Cook saw in the desert dirt made her want to run.

  But she controlled herself.

  And then she took a big step backward, keeping an eye on the material, as if it was alive, as if it could still reach her.

  Strike her like a snake.

  She looked around to see if anybody had noticed her backpedalling. There were two guys over by the fence but they weren't looking her way.

  Her heart raced.

  She told herself there was no need to panic. After all, she was a trained professional. She'd worked this job for over a year and earned a reputation—the cool chick. She hated being called a chick but she was one of the few women working this job and it was easier to just be a chick than to make a fuss about it. She liked being called cool, because she'd had to work hard to get to the point of being cool while doing this job.

  Way too easy to get rattled, thinking about the material she worked with.

  Most of her co-workers didn't seem to worry. Probably didn't think too much about the job.

  It was Sheila's curse to think too much.

  Her imagination was famous, in her family.

  Now that she had moved away from the material, she forced herself to look more closely. She'd seen this stuff in a training video, although there of course it was held in a container and not spilled.

  Here, in the dirt, in real life, the material actually glowed. She figured that was because of the bright sunlight, that hateful desert sun that was making her squint, that was making her sweat so hard she took off her ball cap and pushed her wet bangs off her forehead. She wiped her face with the back of her forearm. She tried to pluck her work shirt away from her sticky wet skin.

  The material in the dirt looked wet. Like it was sweating too.

  There was no need to panic but, really, this material should never see the light of day.

  And she'd stepped in it.

  All of sudden she knew she needed to examine her boots. She looked down. Saw what she had dreaded. Some of the material was clinging there. Was caught in the laces. She hadn't just stepped in the spill, she'd waded in it up to her ankles.

  Shit.

  Numbers filled her head—she knew this stuff, she'd learned this stuff, she knew what the numbers meant, which numbers she had to worry about.

  The numbers, here and now, should be below the panic threshold.

  Still, they weren't zero.

  Get the stuff off.

  She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pants cargo pocket and put them on and then bent to clean the stuff off her boots. She started with her right boot. The material had caked there in the gully under the laces. It looked like some kind of wormy creature, something that lived underground, and then when she brushed it, the material broke apart into separate little beads that seemed to take on their own lives, that went in all directions, and some of them got deeper into the tongue of her boot, got under the tongue, got down inside the boot, and now she was panicking. She sank to the ground and unlaced her boot in a fury and yanked it off and then yanked off her thick sock and somehow the sticky material got onto her bare foot. The skin of her foot showed the stripy white tan—when she finished work she couldn't get out of her boots and into her flip-flops fast enough—but her foot now almost looked like it had gotten sunburned and blistered. She furiously brushed the little beads off her skin, off her foot, and then she scooted backward in the dirt, getting away.

  She was sweating so hard she was drenched.

  She glanced over at the guys at the fence. Now, they were looking her way.

  She tried to see all this through their eyes. Her backhoe was parked at an angle in the slumping trench. The containers were unearthed, and her backhoe had hit them. She hadn't noticed them because the damned trench had collapsed and dirt covered the containers. Still, she should have known they were there. That was the point of the trench.

  To bury the material.

  Her second mistake was getting out of the backhoe to examine the damage she had done. Procedure was, she should have called health physics to come check it out.

  The guys at the fence—just trench jockeys, like her—had seen her sitting in the dirt and now they were coming her way.

  Starting to run.

  She lifted a hand and waved. It's okay, I'm okay, no need to run.

  I'm the cool chick.

  But, really, she wanted them to run. She wanted some help here.

  ~ ~ ~

  She stood in the trench—far far away from the stuff, which had already triggered a full-out alarm but which was still waiting to be recovered. A mistake had been made. This material was in the wrong place.

  She stood with her legs spread and her arms straight out and her teeth clenched.

  The health physicist was a big bald guy who'd once asked her for a date. He was all business now. He started at her feet. He ran the wand across her boots.

  He whistled—a bad-news whistle.

  She'd tried to keep calm and stationary so that he could read the numbers and do his job.

  Don't move.

  Don't talk.

  Don't distract him.

  But when he whistled she'd lost her cool and given a little body jerk, and when he looked up at her he didn't scold, he just had pity in his eyes.

  ~ ~ ~

  Two days later, she started the vomiting.

  It got worse before it got better, but she recovered.

  You got lucky, everybody said. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

  In time, it was.

  ~ ~ ~

  Seven years later, she won the cancer lottery.

  _______________

  CHAPTER 1

  The figure coming down the dark road had an odd gait—and it didn't take me long to figure out why.

  I suddenly felt a little naked out here.

  Walter, crouching to stow the donut bag in his field pack, had not yet noticed.

  Uphill of the figure, emergency spotlights cracked the night and more could be seen. Big vehicles clogged the road. Adjacent to the road, yellow rope zoned off a large chunk of desert where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. Well uphill of the crash was another roped and spotlighted area, occupied by a hulking crane.

  I refocused on the figure. Tall, and yet bulky. I said, “Somebody's coming.”

  Walter looked up. “Our man?”

  “I assume so. But he's wearing hazmat.”

  Walter stood. “That wasn't mentioned.”

  “No kidding.”

  The oncoming man was moving slowly—perhaps due to the muddied condition of the road. I glanced at the sky, where a cloud roof glowed faintly beneath a hidden moon. Summer thunderstorm—local, wherever precisely local was.

  It had been clear twenty minutes ago in Mammoth, our home base in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We run a two-person lab called Sierra Geoforensics and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at the crime scene. We’d headed for this scene truly in the dark—it was four A.M. The FBI sent a helicopter but provided few details. We’d flown east from the Sierra and crossed another range, which meant we’d passed from California into Nevada, then bellied down to the dark desert.

  And here we waited, speculating. All too often the geological evidence at the scene got overlooked—this time, though, the FBI considered it urgent enough to bring us by chopper, and that impressed me deeply.

  Urgent enough to meet us wearing hazmat.

  That really should have
been mentioned.

  I said, “He's not wearing an air tank.”

  Walter peered. “You certain?”

  Certain enough that I sucked in my next breath of air with more confidence. “Certain.”

  “You have young eyes.”

  “Hey, it's more a question of what jumps out at you.”

  “Cassie, what jumps out at me in the dead of night belongs in the realm of bad poetry.” He added, “Night vision goes to hell as one ages.”

  I shot him a look. In the dark, Walter could charitably be described as craggy. In the brutal light of day, his face was eroded—compressed by the forces of the years and folded by the weight of the job. Not that I was keeping watch. I linked my arm through his. “Yeah, you predate the dinosaurs.”

  “At times I feel I do.” His voice was night-thin.

  He was looking for me to argue the point but my attention remained on the approaching man.

  We didn't know him, hadn't met him—Walter had spoken with a woman from his office on the phone, had been given only his name and rank, Special Agent in Charge—but seeing him now I got the impression he was a worried man.

  He drew up. “Mr. Walter Shaws? Ms. Cassie Oldfield?” The hazmat suit encased him from booties to plastic collar line. From the neck on up, he was unprotected. He had graying hair in a salon cut and a beaky face with aristocratic lines. “I am Hector Soliano with the FBI. My assistant spoke with you earlier.” The voice had a faint Spanish accent.

  “Yes, a pleasure,” Walter said, “and your assistant should have informed us that we would need to suit up.”

  “At that point, there was no need.”

  “And now?”

  “A precaution. The situation evolves.”

  A vein began to throb in my neck.