Volcano Watch

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I was in the shower when Jimbo banged on the bathroom door. I shut off the tap. “What?”

“Get on a towel,” Jimbo said, “I’m coming in.”

Despite the steam, I was abruptly chilled. Not since childhood has Jimbo entered the bathroom when I’m showering. I hastily wrapped up.

Jimbo came in, examined the tile floor, then took me in a hug so tight my head knocked his chin. My stomach turned hollow. “Mom and Dad?”

He muttered into my hair, “Lindsay. John Amsterdam called and said we’ve lost her.”

“Lost?” I had a crazy vision of Lindsay fleeing across the caldera, playing my role in the nightmare, and then I thought, she’s angry at being out of the loop and she’s left town and the chief of police is going to retrieve her, but none of this made sense, and even if it had it would not have driven my brother into the bathroom with me. Lost? A thousand alarms went off and cutting through them was the rising wail of my own voice. Jimbo picked up the towel and wrapped it around me. I said, “Lost how?” Jimbo was watching the floor again, the blond wings of his hair shielding his face, and he said “dead, shit, she’s dead” and he took away the world as I knew it.

My brother drove me downtown and ushered me through the congestion outside the scene at Lindsay’s office building. He lifted the police tape for me and left me in the care of a uniformed officer we had both known since kindergarten, whose name I could not produce.

“John’s in the office.” The officer stared at my shoulder, her round face blanched by the cold. “He said to send you straight in. Cassie? Man, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Margy.”

I moved into the hallway and pressed against the cold plaster wall. Someone came around the corner. Slat-thin, angling headfirst into his walk. Disappearing blond hair, buzz cut on a tanned field of scalp. Chief of Police John Amsterdam. Gossiped with him two weeks ago after hypothesizing with Walter up at Pika Canyon. Almost gave him my half-baked theory. Now, he looked past me at the wall, filling me with terror.

He said, “Such a loss.”

Loss — that confusion again. If only she were lost. Then she could be found. John led the way, as if I couldn’t find Lindsay’s office all by myself.

At first I saw only backs, a roomful of people with their backs to the door. Someone was laying dust over the map cabinet, someone was draining a coffee cup into a vial, someone was taking photos. Everyone’s back was to me. A back was bent low over the creamy woolen legs and calfskin ankle boots on the floor. I knew all the backs. Mammoth P.D. The officers doing the crime-scene ident were Bo Robinson and Lupe Cruz-Rios and Jim Breuss. The photog was Don May, Stobie’s roommate. Eric was here. Randy Burrard from the ME’s office was on the floor, attending the body.

There was an awful odor in the room, body waste and a stale coppery wash of blood that I could taste as well as smell.

I had to cover my mouth and turn away. Lindsay’s lost, isn’t she? That’s not Lindsay. John caught me as I buckled and put me into a chair. A couple of the backs turned. I shut my eyes. Hideous hot tears burned my face.

Someone breathed on my cheek and whispered, “Here when you need me, Cass.”

I looked at Eric through blurred eyes. “Where’s Walter?”

Eric led me across the crowded office and I punctiliously skirted the open evidence collection kit, not out of crime-scene etiquette but out of horror. I caught a glimpse of the body, prone. It lay on Lindsay’s periwinkle blue jute rug.

Walter was in her high-backed desk chair, turned to the window. He appeared to be taking in the view. His head lay against the leather cushion, his hands were folded in his lap, his legs sprawled like a rag doll’s.

I knelt.

“Thank you for coming, dear.”

I took his cold papery hand, gripping so hard the knuckles rolled.

“You take care of things for me, will you?”

I said, “I can’t stand this.”

“I know.” He watched the Sherwins, worn old mountains, his face a mirror of the range. He withdrew his hand and patted my head. “Your hair is wet.” His hand dropped back to his lap.

John approached and courteously asked for my help.

I stood. “What happened?”

“Sheesh, nobody’s told you? The changes indicate that she…a time somewhere between ten and twelve last night. She was shot.” He passed a hand across his buzz cut. “Cassie, she went right away.”

I fixed on John’s long kind face.

He said, “She’d been reporting threats, going back to the… that helicopter thing out at the Bypass. Well, you were there, you saw how it was.” He made a helpless gesture. “We’ll check it all out. You know, she’d actually gotten herself a pistol. We found it in her credenza. But she clearly wasn’t able to…” He angled toward the desk. “Anyway, we got one lucky break — the janitor cleaned yesterday morning so any prints we find should be fresh.”

Her desk was an expanse of white lacquer grained with fine black dusting powder and splotched where pressure-wound tape had lifted prints.

“Check them against Adrian’s,” I said.

“Adrian? Cassie, I can’t see why he’d…”

Neither could I. He’d already destroyed her.

“Actually, he’s not here. He’s flying to Sacramento this morning. Supposed to go last night, but the snowstorm… We’ll ask him to cooperate when he gets back. If he has any information to contribute.”

Clearly, John didn’t want to consider Adrian Krom. Who did? The volcano’s ramping up, and Lindsay’s lost. We need Krom, now more than ever.

“She has a lot of knickknacks,” John said, escaping the subject. “We need to establish if anything is missing. You’d know, would you?”

I looked at her desk. So cluttered. So many pretty things. I could never work at such a cluttered desk.

“Is everything there?”

“I guess.”

John glanced around. “Anything else you’d know about? What about her rock collection?” He indicated the tall cabinet.

I looked. These were the minerals not pretty enough for her desk, the business stuff. Obsidian and basalt and rhyolite and andesite and scoria — the evidence from old eruptions to help forecast the new. “I don’t know.” I was muddled, confusing her collection of volcanics with Krom’s. “I think everything’s okay.”

John nodded. He said, “She was working at the time.”

I could see that. It was warm in the office; although the first responders would have turned off the heat, the room had not yet cooled. Desk lamp was lit. Her computer was on, the Matisse screen-saver. “Go ahead,” John said, and I tapped a key and the screen morphed to seismograms and I studied until it became clear this was a current picture of low-frequency quakes in the moat. I tapped another key and Red Mountain came up, with its two new fissures.

John said, “Evidently she kept up on the situation.”

Jim Breuss, I saw, was taking measurements of Lindsay’s apothecary cupboard and reading off numbers to Lupe, who was sketching. The cupboard is an antique, in which Lindsay stores her coffees. Eric and Carl knelt on the floor. Everyone was occupied — even Walter, with the view of the Sherwins. I could no longer smell the foul odor. The olfactory nerves go numb after a few minutes in such straits.

I began to sink and gripped the desk for support and John made a small noise and I saw what I’d done, I’d just smeared the dusting powder and added my own prints. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, “I know better.” I wiped my gritty hands on my jeans, again and again as though I were a princess whose hands were not to be soiled, crazy just crazy because my hands are not lily white, my hands are stained by chemicals, calloused from hammers and cold chisels, and my nails are so at risk that polish is out of the question. Even Lindsay, who used sunscreens religiously, has the hands of a field geologist. And here I am — what? — cleaning up before approaching Lindsay, as if she would object to grit on my hands. She’s immaculate but if she gets dirty she doesn’t make a fuss, she just goes about her business and cleans up when she can. I fastened my hands and stopped the obsessive wiping.

I saw John and Eric conferring, glancing at me. “What?” I said.

“Ummm.” John skimmed his hair. “Randy is ready. To go. But in her ring, there’s some dirt and… we just need to make that collection and Eric said he’d do it.”

Eric smiled at me, so gentle. “I got it covered.”

“Cassie does it.”

Every head in the room snapped up.

Walter turned in Lindsay’s chair. His face was angry. His color was not good. He looked from face to face, not seeing anyone, not seeing me, and then, not finding what he sought, he turned back to the window. He began to cough, dissolving into a helpless fit of coughing.

My head swelled again with tears. I didn’t want to do the collection. I said, “I don’t have a kit.”

“What do you need?” Eric asked. “Tweezers, evidence bags. Anything else?”

I began to panic.

“Cassie, do you want me to…”

I strode to the body.

She was, for the first time since I had entered the room, alone. Someone had covered her with a metallic blanket, the kind you carry on backpack trips. This was disconcerting — the deceased covered by a survival blanket. But it had been done kindly, for my benefit, because the material covered every sprawling inch of her body except for the right hand.

I knelt. I was hollowed out, my sickened core removed, leaving this kneeling husk. I seemed to have gone elsewhere, like Lindsay.

I bent close enough to kiss her hand. The skin was waxy and translucent, the signs of age and fieldwork dimmed as if she’d found some miraculous beauty cream. Her hand was curled so that the fingertips pressed into the rug, and there at the tips, where blood had pooled and lividity was now fixed, her skin was purplish. It looked as though she’d stained her fingers picking berries. She wore rings on the pointer, ring finger, and pinkie. The ring on the pointer was a wide gold band with open scrollwork. I recognized this ring, which she’d bought in Argentina. The Cerro Galan caldera. I stared until the hand with its odd coloration and exotic rings became a composition, framed against the periwinkle blue of the jute rug. Like the folk art prints framed on her walls.

There were tweezers, I noticed, and a hand lens and plastic evidence bags on the rug beside me.

I took the lens and tweezers, reviewing the movements necessary to extract evidence. First you do A and then you do B. A finely calibrated robot could do it.

Her ring was crusted near the web between the pointer and index fingers. Under the lens, the crust resolved into mineral grains, and I should have been able to do an eyeball ID but the names and properties of even the most common minerals were lost to me. I was a robot, able to perform physical tasks but dead to thought. I plucked the grains from the filigree, the stuff that had caught someone’s attention upon initial examination of the body, that had necessitated calling in forensic geologists. I bagged the evidence.

I tried to rotate the ring but it would not budge. And then her hand was in mine and I tried to pry it open, just enough to see if there was crust on the underside of the ring, but she was in advanced rigor and her hand was as rigid as if it had been fossilized. So for a moment I just held her hand, the warmth of my own flesh against her cold skin. Warmth leaking vigor into cold, basic wilderness survival technique.

I found myself looking at her wall, at a carved mask she’d unearthed in Mexico, a hideous face with slitted eyes and a snarling mouth with its tongue sticking out. I’d hated it the first time I saw it, and I’d asked her why she bought such a thing. “Keeps me on my toes, honey,” she’d said.

She deserved her money back.