Volcano Watch

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Were it not for Jimbo’s cartridge burning a hole in my pocket, I would have gone straight home for reheated cider and a hot bath.

Instead, I cranked the lab thermostat up to seventy and nuked this morning’s coffee. I got the tube of gunpowder from the secure evidence vault, hitched my stool up to the comparison scope, yanked the nose off Jimbo’s cartridge, and spilled half the powder onto the floor. Slow down. I slowed, pouring the remaining powder into a culture dish.

I got up and locked the lab door and pulled down the blinds.

Now focus. I focused.

Gunpowder, Walter likes to say, has a fingerprint. During manufacture it is cut into tiny grains, and the cutting leaves tool marks. These show not only who manufactured the powder but also what batch it came from. The tool marks are like the whorls on fingertips.

I put a grain of Jimbo’s powder on one slide and an evidence grain on a second slide. There had been a wealth of gunpowder in the soil from Georgia’s boots — seven distinct makes. I’d put one of each make into the envelope that was couriered to the gunpowder lab, and kept the rest. I had eighteen grains to compare against Jimbo’s powder.

I snapped the slides in place. Two fields of view came through the prisms of the comparison bridge, putting the grains into lineup. Jimbo’s biathlon grain was dimpled, like clay indented with pencil points. The first evidence grain was crosshatched. No match. I did the next. No match. And no match a third, and a fourth time.

I paused, thinking I heard steps outside. Nothing. Nerves. I refocused.

Evidence grain five, shiny as a new dime, was dimpled.

Evidence grain five — which Georgia had picked up in one of her last steps on earth — was a dead-on match to the grain from Jimbo’s cartridge, the ammo he had lied about. I felt a little sick.

Same dimples showed up six more times. That made eight total that matched, out of eighteen grains. Nearly half the powder from Georgia’s boots was biathlon powder.

Biathlon powder, I reminded myself — not, exclusively, Jimbo’s powder. Any biathlete’s powder would presumably have matched.

Okay. Move on to the samples I’d collected at Casa Diablo.

I first went to the window and scissored apart two vanes of the blinds but all I could see was the reflection of my own eye in the glass. I closed my eyes and saw Krom at the creek, only in my fatigued imagination he bowed and extended his middle finger to me. I let the blinds snap shut.

Death from being a dumbshit.

I went back to work.

From lockup I got the Casa soil samples and combed through them, separating out the gunpowder. I lined up the Casa grains, one by one, against the evidence grains. The only make that matched was dimples. Like Jimbo said, they practiced at Casa with the powder they use in a race.

But I still had six makes of gunpowder from the evidence soil that did not match any of the Casa grains, which argued that Georgia’s boot soil did not originate there.

Dimples was my only ID. Dimples, in quantity. Dimples said, you lose. You’re going to have to dig through a shitload of snow at the biathlon range.

Tomorrow. Right after the races.

I was cleaning up when I heard a noise outside. I grabbed the nearest thing to hand — the heavy marble pestle from the bowl of the mortar, our mineral-crusher — and went to the door and listened. Silence, then a shuffling like snow sloughing off a tree limb. Then silence again. I could stand no more. I opened the door and came out.

Krom was at the window, forefinger raised. He said, “Saw your lights. Didn’t want to disturb you. Didn’t want to just walk on by like we’re strangers.” He touched his finger to the window then wiped his hand on his pants. “Your window is dirty.”

I came all the way out and looked. The glow from inside the lab seeped through the blinds enough to illuminate the dusty glass and show the circle and dots and curved line. It made me think of the circles and lines he’d drawn on the map overlay at the Inn, only that drawing was of the Inyo craters and evac routes and this, which he’d put on my window, was a smiley face.

Show Len Carow, I thought. And tell him about the creek.

Show him a smile and tell him about a swim?

I said, “What are you doing here this time of night?”

“I’m a night owl, like you. I like to keep an eye on things when everybody else is sleeping. No distractions. Some nights I stroll through town for hours. Gives me the feeling I own the place.” He pulled a wrench from his big parka pocket and held it out, making me a little bow. “Yours, I believe.”

I had no choice but to accept it. Subaru lug wrench in one hand, lab pestle in the other, I stood speechless, armed to the teeth.

He smiled and bid me good night.