“You just startled me.”
“Cassie, right? You work with Walter.”
“Right.” I’d seen Adrian Krom in meetings — the emergency-ops guy sent by the feds — and a few times in the Ski Tip cafe, where everybody in town gathers at one time or another. I’d never actually spoken with him. I said, “Hello Adrian.”
“Adrian, good. Some people call me Mr. Krom. I hate the formalities.” He folded his arms, still in a crouch. “I prefer to be chums.”
It struck me that he was like Georgia, insisting on first name only. Maybe it was a politics thing.
“Cassie, tell me if that’s Georgia. Have we lost our mayor?”
Ours? Adrian Krom has been in town only two months. We looked in unison at the snow-packed body bag, and I nodded.
“Hell,” he said, voice thickening. He bowed his head.
All I could see was his brown pelt of hair. I hesitated, then patted his shoulder. He reached up and grasped my hand. After a decent interval, I slipped my hand free. He came out of his crouch and stood, looking down at me. “You know what Georgia would say right now?”
I thought, this guy likes his drama. I got to my feet. “What?”
“We’re all in this together.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I had to park in the Community Center lot and walk four blocks up Minaret Road threading my way through the crowd on the way to work. Feeling I should say something to these people. Some kind of cautionary thing.
Always park your car facing downhill for a quick getaway.
They acted like nothing was wrong, like this was a normal Saturday in January after a good snowfall. The town of Mammoth Lakes in boomtown gear. Every other car carried skis or snowboards and now, before the lifts opened, there wasn’t a parking spot to be had. The road pooled with slush and the snow was embedded with grit and mashed pinecones and shards of styrofoam cups and it rasped underfoot but that didn’t slow the jostling snow crowd.
No, I amended, they acted like they knew something was wrong and that’s why they came. Ever since the volcano stirred, the snow crowd has swelled along with the ground. That’s what got to me. We could get hit, so we’re edgy. Extreme sports. We’ve never been edgy before — we’ve just been slopes and condos and kitschy shops a half-day’s drive from Los Angeles. Now we’re hot.
And the hometown crowd has been riding the boom. People up and down Minaret Road cleared snow from the paths in front of their businesses. Motels flashed No Vacancy and condos were renting by the week. However, for anyone who cared to see, the signs said otherwise. Sierra Properties windows were plastered with HOMES4SALE. Mountain Hardware screamed CLEARANCE! And new signs were welded to the traffic light poles: orange evacuation arrows that pointed the way out.
Nobody cared to see.
I passed Uphill Sports where guys were unloading snowmobiles from a flatbed truck and I asked how’s it going and one of the guys cupped his palms and intoned “biiig bucks.”
I came to the Ski Tip Cafe and there was a crowd out the door, eager to grab breakfast before heading up to the slopes. Once they’d filled their bellies and bolted, the locals would drift in. The Tip’s owner Bill Bone appeared in the doorway, juggling a clipboard, all elbows and knees, looking like a gawky middle-aged busboy. He called a name and a group cheered and elbowed forward and Bill shot me a gloomy nod. Worrying about running out of eggs, no doubt. I felt a pang of affection for Bill and the Tip, even for its hokey chalet decor. I’d had my first milkshake there, my first legal beer.
I studied the place, with a sudden need to burn it into my memory.
And then I crossed the street to the lab — Sierra Geoforensics big and bold and authoritative on the door — and like everyone else I acted like this was a normal Saturday. Through the lab’s big streetside window I saw Walter inside at his workbench. Entirely normal for us to work on a Saturday on a big case.
This case qualified. Oh yes.
Walter threw me a thin “good morning, dear” as I walked in.
We’d returned yesterday from the glacier too spent to do more than sort our samples. I’d slept badly, dreaming of Georgia. Georgia, I saw, was wearing on Walter as well.
I grabbed a cup of coffee and set to work. On my workbench was the culture dish I’d prepared last night — soil plugs from the left boot. I put the first plug on the stage and bent to the scope. I imagined Georgia at my shoulder, angling for a look. Busybody was her middle name. I took the scalpel and teased apart the clumps of soil. Weathered red cinders and fluffy bits of pumice — volcanic. Yellow sulfur crystals, which could come from fertilizer or pesticides or, more likely, volcanism.
At my shoulder, Georgia cackled. Sulfur was known, in Biblical quarters, as brimstone. Georgia would run with that, I thought: fire and brimstone awaiting the perp.
It didn’t do much for me. Georgia had picked up volcanic soil but that was the norm around here.
I poked further and saw shiny mica, black chips of hornblende, milky quartz, pink feldspar — the stuff of granite. Well, the Sierra is granite country. And now I found grainy white stuff with a rhombic cleavage — calcite. Calcite’s common as furniture.
I told Walter what I’d found. He grunted.
Cinders, pumice, sulfur, granite, calcite: not a telling mix. And not necessarily acquired at the same place, or the same time. Collect a bit of pumice here, a pinch of calcite there.
Still, it was the same mineral suite as the grains Walter had plucked from her clothing, on the ice. Hat, gloves, jeans, parka, front and back. I thought that over. She not only walked in the stuff, she appeared to have rolled around in it.
I turned the scalpel to a nut of compacted soil. It cracked open. Here was something — a wink of silver. It was a disk, concave, with parallel striae. Unmistakable. I let out a soundless whistle. “Walter,” I said, “I’ve got gunpowder.”
Most gunpowder that comes out of a firearm comes out burned and it takes a scanning electron microscope to find that residue, but a few particles usually emerge unburned and those are large enough to be easily seen.
“How many?” he asked at last.
“Just one.”
“Don’t fall in love.”
“Well I haven’t.” A single disk was not significant. Soil is a collector; it likes to latch onto foreign elements. A particle of gunpowder could have blown in on the wind or been ferried on an animal’s fur. Georgia could have picked it up miles from where she died and ferried it herself. It didn’t necessarily say that she last walked in the vicinity of firearms. But, then, maybe she did.
I said, “You finding anything of note?”
He looked up from the glacier basin soil he’d been examining. “Noteworthy, so far, in that it doesn’t match the soils from the clothing or the boots.”
“So she didn’t walk at the glacier. The final place she walked was … elsewhere.”
“Preliminary, but so it appears.”
I said, “What do you think made her write no way out? That’s strong stuff.”
“That it is.”
“You know,” I said, “that could mean something personal.”
“As opposed to something involving us all?”
I said, tight, “Meaning the volcano, you’re saying?”
“Meaning the volcano,” he said.
I said, tighter, “What could Georgia have possibly found out about the volcano?”
“I’ve wondered that, myself.” Walter glanced out the window. “That’s why I’ve asked our volcanologist to drop by.”
Not a bad idea, I thought. Although the need of it sent a chill down my spine.
Ten minutes later the door opened and Lindsay Nash, our volcanologist, swept in.
“Let me have your coat,” Walter said, ushering her inside, “and you’ll want coffee?”
“It’s not a coat and I’m still chilly.” She wore a gray and black wool poncho that set off her hair, which was gray with flecks of black like biotite mica in granite. She produced a bag from beneath the poncho. “Use this. It’s fresh. Garuda.”