Volcano Watch

CHAPTER TWENTY

I watched Walter lay aside the Mammoth Times and then square his face to begin the day, and I just couldn’t tell him. Reading about Adrian Krom’s night in the creek had disturbed him. Learning about Lindsay’s role would stun him.

So I sat dense as rock and kept my mouth shut.

There was a jolt. I grabbed the test-tube ring on my workbench and secured the glassware. Mag four, if I had to guess, and it jolted me out of my stupor. I hoped it would jolt Lindsay, as well — to her senses. Sitting at her desk, no doubt, with the newspaper and a mug of coffee and her cat’s smile. But of course a mag-four jolt would raise, at most, her eyebrow. What she’s on the watch for are quakes you don’t feel. Anonymous little buggers with a low-frequency motion, like a bell ringing, which means fluid’s on the move. That’s the kind of quake that rings Lindsay’s bell. That’s what she should be planning for — not sordid setups in the creek to take down her enemy.

“Mag four?” Walter hazarded. He’d been jolted out of his stupor, as well.

I said, “We don’t have time for this.” I went to his bench and took the newspaper and tossed it in the trash. I said, “I have a new lead.”

He straightened. “Tell me.”

I explained my theory that the calcite and sulfur in the evidence might indicate a hot spring.

“That’s hardly a new lead. Hot springs are certainly one source, but there are other candidates.”

“What if we knew that Georgia had an interest in hot springs?”

“Do we?”

I told him about Krom and Georgia and crinoids and Hot Creek.

His eyebrows lifted. No comment. Decorous Walter.

“So you didn’t know. Well neither did I. Lindsay told me. Georgia confided in her.”

He said, peevish, “And there is a reason Lindsay confided in you?”

“Yes. She has a theory.”

“Which you are about to tell me.”

I explained Lindsay’s theory, the one I’d deconstructed in the shower yesterday evening. I explained that I’d come in early this morning and put the soil I’d gathered with Lindsay under the comparison scope, next to the evidence soil, and found no match.

He said, even, “So you’ve ruled out the site at Hot Creek.”

“Yes.”

“And the lovers-quarrel theory?”

I mulled that one over. I gave a glance to the newspaper in the trash can. No question Adrian Krom had some bizarre thing going with the creek. With women at the creek. But the jump from there to murder was a very large one. “Sure, could have happened somewhere else. But we have no evidence that it did.”

“I must admit,” Walter said, “I have trouble considering Adrian a cold-blooded killer.”

“What about hot-blooded? In a fit of passionate anger?”

Walter shrugged. Shook his head.

“Despite the thing with Jeanine?”

“That was rash.”

“And?”

“That does not make him a killer.”

“So you think Lindsay’s theory is a crock?”

Walter said, even, “Lindsay has distrusted Adrian for a very long time.”

“You chalk up her theory to prejudice?”

“I’m not blind to her faults.”

“I kind of thought you were.”

Walter gave a thin smile, a crack in his seamed face.

I thought, Walter’s greatest strength — and his greatest weakness — is loyalty. And that’s why people value his good opinion so dearly — if he thinks you’re a prince, you’re set for life. Whatever you do, short of a capital crime, you’re still a prince. And you want to live up to that. When I took psych in college I thought I had Walter figured. He’d told me about his own undergrad days; he’d gone through a rough spell, drinking, cutting classes. As misspent youth goes, his sounded tame, but he judged it harshly. Then in his early twenties he straightened out and found his calling. I’d asked what made him change and he said ‘I got tired of being a bum.’ So when I got into Psych 101, I psyched Walter. My theory went: he’s so fiercely loyal because he doesn’t want others to judge him by his years as a bum. Now, I think my theory was a crock. Walter is loyal because it’s his nature. And I think it’s a good thing I escaped the murky waters of psych for the bedrock of geology.

The truth was, neither of us was a forensic genius when it came to reading people.

“Well then,” Walter said, “shall we just do the geology?”

“Sure. If we had some geology to do.”

“We have your new lead, Cassie.”

“But…you don’t buy that.”

“I most certainly do. I buy the fact that we can now connect Georgia with a hot spring, at the creek. I certainly accept that we have sulfur and calcite in the evidence, which could have come from a hot spring, somewhere. Irrespective of why Georgia might have gone there.”

“So you think it’s worthwhile following the hot spring lead.”

“Yes, dear.” He slapped his thigh. “Let’s do the acid test.”

I put a pinch of evidence soil in a test tube and droppered in hydrochloric acid.

There were bubbles, and a nasty smell.

The acid test is a quick way to find out if your samples have certain minerals. In the presence of acid, calcite gives off carbon dioxide and the soil fizzes. Sulfur gives off the odor of hydrogen sulfide.

We already knew we had calcite and sulfur but the question was: in what concentration? High would suggest the sample came from a site near a volcanic source. Like a hot spring.

The sample fizzed madly. The air stank of rotten eggs.

And something else.

Walter grimaced.

I leapt. Snapped on the hood fan. Grabbed Walter’s arm and yanked him off his stool and the two of us scrambled back, covering our faces. I could detect the unexpected smell of bitter almonds.

Jesus.

Before either of us could recover our dignity, the smell dissipated. I took in an exploratory breath. The gas was gone.

Walter returned to his stool, throwing me a speculative look.

“You tell me,” I said, when I could trust my voice, “what’s cyanide doing in the soil?”

Walter was smiling now.

The liquid in the tube, I saw, had gone flat like old ginger ale. I knew what must have happened. When I added acid to the soil it found cyanide, lowered its pH, and drove it into its vapor phase. I just didn’t know what that meant. “Walter,” I said, “I’m not in the…”

“Mines.” His eyes were blue as day.

Mines. I waited. His eyes always gleam when he’s puttering around with the geology of ores. It’s his one vice, in Lindsay’s eyes, wasting time prowling old ruins. Treasure-hunting in her view, although he’s in it for the history — the treasure no longer being economically recoverable. I’m not inspired by old mining tales but I take a guilty pleasure in being the one Walter confides this passion to. Lindsay and I share a passion for shopping flea markets that totally excludes him. My shopping guru. I waited, stewing, for Walter to explain.

He did not disappoint. “Miners around here sometimes used a dilute solution of cyanide to leach the metals from slag ore.”

The meaning fizzed up. We’d got another new lead — mines. The metallic minerals are often picked up by hot water circulating deep and precipitated out near the surface.

By hot springs.