She caught me staring. She winked. “Got to run — the soaps are on.” This was her running joke, whenever the volcano acted up, whenever the news played it as soap-opera drama.
I fell in. “Take care of it, will you?” This was my running joke, that the volcano responded to Lindsay like a dog to its mistress.
“Don’t forget tomorrow night,” Walter said. “We’ll pick you up at six sharp.”
Tomorrow night was a meeting about the volcano. Adrian Krom called it.
Lindsay moved to the door, blowing us a kiss in lieu of an answer, and she was gone.
She left behind a vacuum, in which Walter clattered his tools and I stared at the dirt from Georgia’s boots. Feeling a tension that tightened my neck. I hitched my stool up to the workbench. Okay lady, you want to know what Georgia found, then find out where she walked.
Just do the geology.
I selected the next soil plug and found myself a prize. By color, there were two distinct soil horizons and, even better, a piece of leaf was caught in between. Normally, when someone walks, new soil is forced into the crevices of the shoe and with each footstep gets mixed with the soil already clinging there. Once in a while the walker takes a lucky step — lucky for us — and picks up something like this leaf which protects the purity of the layers. I pried apart the strata and plucked out the leaf. Long and narrow, going brittle. Mountain willow, I hazarded. It grows at a variety of elevations. Could be a marker or could have been ferried to the site. More important, the leaf isolated the top layer of soil, the final piece of earth that Georgia stepped upon. Gently, I broke the layer into clumps. Cinders, pumice, sulfur, granite, calcite. Not unlike the other plugs.
I sliced into the largest clump and it broke apart like a dried seed pod and the seeds inside were silver.
I breathed out softly, so as not to disturb the display. This was good stuff. “Walter, I’ve got gunpowder again.” I coaxed the disks apart. “Two identical to the first, and six that look to be different makes.”
“Let’s have a look.” Walter came and adjusted my scope. When he finished, he was nodding.
The resistance in my neck eased. I was gaining confidence in the gunpowder. There’s a point in an investigation when I gain traction, go on the lookout — for a unique mineral, for a particular consistency of the soil, for an inclusion like gunpowder that could place the evidence in a known plot of the earth. Give it an address.
Walter said, “The Casa Diablo shooting range comes to mind.”
Along with the backyards of half the town. But I was already picturing the soil out at Casa and nodding. Casa Diablo is down in the high desert, near the intersection of the major highway and the road up to town. Site of our geothermal plant, along with the shooting range. There would surely be gunpowder there.
Walter scratched his ear. “Here’s what I propose. Finish your batch, and then let’s send what you find to a gunpowder lab for ID.You might run the powder over to the cop house, see what lab John’s using — he has a courier account. While we await the report, you might take a turn out to Casa Diablo and collect exemplars.”
“Careful,” I said. “You’re falling in love.”
“A mild attraction.”
I got a cup of coffee and a donut and went to the window. It had started to snow, light. Dry snow falls so slowly you can pick out a flake and follow it to the ground, see one crystal pile on top of another, like toast crumbs.
Geologists hate snow. It hides everything. To hit soil I’d have to dig.
Through the window I watched a woman scrape her boot on the curb, removing a stratum of acquired crud. I wondered if Georgia had acquired her crud at the shooting range. And why.
CHAPTER FIVE
Before I could return to my workbench, the medical examiner called.
Georgia lay on the metal tray with her mouth pried open.
“Just getting started,” Randy Burrard said. “Afraid I’ve been out with the flu.”
I focused on Randy, who’s way too sweet-faced for this job. Actually, he did look a little green. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who dissects the deceased has a right to look green. I said, “Feel better,” meaning it.
“Thanks.” Randy gestured at Georgia. “Surprised the heck out of me when I looked in her mouth. Thought you’d want to get this out yourself.”
Yeah.
I went over to the table. Randy had covered her with a sheet but it barely rose over her breasts. I tugged it to her chin. I wanted to say something to her. I could think of nothing.
But it wasn’t Georgia, it was her husk, and so in the end I just bent and looked at the soil in her mouth.
“Livor mortis discoloration on her lower back and buttocks,” Randy said. “Livor starts soon after death and is fixed within four to five hours. So she died lying face up, or was quickly rolled onto her back.”
I nodded. That’s what we’d assumed on the ice. We’d found her face down but there was no livor purpling on her face. She’d lain on her back long enough for blood to pool and livor to fix. But if she’d died on her back, how had the soil gotten into her mouth? Maybe a struggle, and her face was forced into the dirt, and then she was rolled over. Maybe. I gently probed between her teeth and gums. Nothing there. In fact, the grains primarily coated her tongue, the roof of her mouth, the insides of her teeth. However the soil got there, she must have lost consciousness or died right then; otherwise she would have spat the stuff out. My own tongue quilted; I wanted to spit. Instead, I tweezered the stuff out of her mouth, collecting half a thimbleful, and examined it under the brutal autopsy lights. Pumice, and bits of tree bark.
I thought about that. If there was enough bark in the soil to show up in this thimbleful, why wasn’t there bark in the samples from her boots and clothing?
Randy said, “You notice that bruising around her mouth?”
I placed my hands above the marks, spreading thumb and fingers apart. My thumb fit just beneath her lower lip, and my fingers rested along the cheek and chin opposite. Someone had forced her mouth open. Held it open.
“Nothing down her throat,” Randy said, “although I’ll get a better look when I…”
I said, “I understand.”
But I didn’t. Someone had opened her mouth and dumped in pumice and tree bark? Maybe during the death struggle — he’s trying to suffocate her? With half a thimbleful of soil? That was hardly enough to choke on. In any case, Randy’s initial assessment, on the phone, was that she’d died from a subdural hematoma. So, blow to the head and she’s dead, or nearly so.
Then why the soil in the mouth? Some creepy arcane message?
I brought up the image of Georgia’s face, after we had set her on her back on the ice. Her mouth had been closed. Had she shut it herself, before dying?
Or had the killer done it, unable to look at her lying there dead, open-mouthed.
What kind of killer closes her mouth to end her silent scream?
CHAPTER SIX
I headed for the cop house carrying samples of gunpowder.
I’d returned from the Medical Examiner yesterday and dived back into the boot soil and it was like hitting the jackpot again and again, cracking open plug after plug and finding the silver prizes. Gunpowder. Seven distinct makes. Georgia had walked in soil rich in gunpowder. Walter and I worked late last night and came in early this morning. As of ten ayem, Walter had finished the glacier basin samples and not found a single grain of powder. It was no longer preliminary — we could say with certainty that Georgia had not taken her last steps at the glacier.
Wherever she’d walked, someone had done a lot of shooting.