Badwater

9

I said, hopefully, “I could use some breakfast.”

Soliano looked at his watch.

I thought, Soliano’s the kind of cop who gets so consumed with a case that he forgets to eat. He’d struck out at the dump, questioning the cask team without producing a suspect. He’d left agents to follow up and now he’d turned his attention to the hunt for the missing radwaste. He clearly did not want to strike out again.

Nor did I. But I never forget to eat.

We’d come to Beatty to gear up. Beatty was a hamlet tucked into the high desert hills, home to trucker cafes and jazzy casino buffets and most dump employees, including Hap Miller and Milt Ballinger. Soliano had drafted them both — Miller for his health physics expertise and Ballinger as the CTC official who would take possession, and responsibility, when we tracked down the stolen property.

We were, officially, a team now: Soliano and his FBI agents, Scotty and his RERT crew, two geologists, two radwaste reps. We were a thrown-together team of contentious egos but we had a single purpose. Find the missing resin casks.

And therein, in my view, lay a mystery. Ballinger had checked inventory and found that two casks — along with two portable cranes and one shielded trailer — were missing. This certainly confirmed the theory that the swap was run twice. Once last night, interrupted. Once at an unknown earlier date, to completion. The thing was, all that talc I’d found made me think that more than one dummy cask had made it to the dump. But…only two casks were missing. It bugged me.

Soliano said, “A take-away breakfast.”

Ballinger said, “Egg McMuffin’s always good.”

Good didn’t look to enter into it but right now I’d settle for egg anything.

Ballinger hit the McDonald’s, Miller went home for his favorite tech-tools, Scotty resupplied at the Beatty Wal-Mart, and Soliano went to borrow a Blazer from the sheriff for Walter and me to use in our field work.

While the others scattered, Walter and I holed up in our makeshift lab in the RERT van and built ourselves a map. The perp had left one hell of a trail in talc. The dummy cask. The unloading zone. The mud from the radwaste driver, Ryan Beltzman, which Walter had found to be ripe with talc. We hoped the map would point us to the place the swaps were made, and if we got real lucky there we’d find the two missing resin casks.

That place was talc country.

An hour later the team was ready to go.

There was a hard moment when Walter made to get behind the wheel of our borrowed Blazer. Doctor orders say he does not drive until another six months without another transient ischemic attack. I said, low, “I’ll drive.” Walter, jaw set, detoured to the passenger side.

Resupplied, ill-fed, cranky, we hit the road.

Our convoy backtracked on highway 95 past the dump, past the crash site, then continued another forty miles of straight asphalt through stunning high desert to the roadstop town of Lathrop Wells. There, we turned due south onto highway 373. We followed that baked desert road across the state line—373 becoming 127—back into California through mud hills and eroded buttes and a couple of cinder-block towns.

We were taking the same route the radwaste truck had traveled, in reverse. A route that, right here, cut between two of the richest talc deposits in eastern California.

Which might explain why the perp used talc to fill the dummy casks. There was a huge supply to choose from.

Walter and I had seven mines on our list, which I’d downloaded from the California Division of Mines. Seven mines that tap into schistose rock and produce a talc high in the mineral tremolite — seven candidates to produce the talc to match our evidence.

I wanted to find the source mine, more than I wanted a cold lemonade or a long hot bath, and I wanted those a great deal.

I said, “Let’s go this way.”

Walter, Soliano, Ballinger, Miller, and Scotty turned their heads in unison to look beyond the sandy wash to the spiky sand-plastered hills.

Our convoy was parked on the shoulder of highway 127. It was time to make a choice. Time to leave the asphalt.

Soliano said, “You prefer to turn right?”

It was, actually, a tossup. There were likely deposits to the right of highway 127, and to the left. Either way was going to take us on primitive roads.

“Yup,” I said, “let’s go right.”

“Why?” Miller lowered his aviator shades and gazed at me. “Why does a geologist decide to turn right?”

On a hunch. On consideration of the geography as well as the geology. On a look at the starred attractions on the Auto Club map in the Sheriff’s Blazer, a reminder of what’s where. From Beatty to here, for over seventy miles, our route — the radwaste driver’s route — bordered a place that had attracted its share of schemers.

“To the right,” I jerked a thumb, “is Death Valley.”