Volcano Watch

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Caaaseee.” Jeanine came through the doorway, swinging a grocery bag like a large purse. “Luh-uunch.”

I dropped the sieve. “You didn’t have to do that.”

She kicked the door shut, rattling the lab window. “No prob. I’m just the delivery girl.” She held up the bag. “Turkey and cheese, and some other shit, and something mondo fattening for dessert. Where d’ya want this sucker?”

I showed her the fridge where I’d stored the Ski Tip lunches that Bill Bone had been delivering, unsolicited, for the past week.

“Bill says sorry he can’t come himself.” She set the bag on the counter. “Place is jamming. Rumor central.”

The window rattled — a quake, this time. Once or twice a day now, something rattles or shimmies. Of course there are hundreds more every day that we can’t feel. Classic quake swarm.

“Fucking quakes,” Jeanine said. “They’re talking about a WARNING alert, you know?”

Eruption likely within hours or days. “They’re calling a WARNING?”

“Nah. Just talkin.” She found her ponytail and began to twist it.

I glanced outside. Heavy traffic. Cars piled to the roof with stuff, more stuff lashed on top. Some people are leaving for an extended vacation, some for good. Some are staying put, because it’s within the realm of possibility that the volcano will settle back down. Some are hedging their bets — ferrying stuff to storage down in Bishop, fifty miles south along the Sierra fault. Jimbo’s already taken five loads down from the house. I spent all last week packing, when I wasn’t at the lab. Anything to fill the hours. Outside, a big Lexus passed, fully loaded. Driver was Cindy Mathias, the fire chief’s wife.

“Sooo, Caasss. You the honcho around here now?”

“Walter’s at home,” I said, level.

“So how long’s he gonna stay home?”

I shrugged.

“You’re pissed.”

I took up the sieve and a dish of soil. “I’m too busy to be pissed.”

“Jimbo says you’re pissed. Jimbo says you don’t talk to anybody.”

I dropped the dish, peppering soil across my workbench. “Look, I’ve got a bureau in Los Angeles that wanted a report on this evidence last week. I got a call this morning from Costa Rica and they have a corpse with dirt down its throat and a diplomatic situation and they want Walter to come to the jungle before the deceased rots. I’ve got…”

“The Georgia stuff.”

“Yeah.” The pumice-Jeffrey mix — the puzzling soil from inside her mouth — sat in a box on the catch-all table, in limbo. If I listened I could hear its siren song, Georgia calling: Come have another look. Keep looking and I’ll ID the killer for you. Georgia hanging in there, in limbo, never say die. Just like her.

“And the Lindsay case,” Jeanine said.

Very carefully, I began to recover the spilled soil.

Jeanine’s hands alighted on her hips. “You’re not the only one who’s bummed about Lindsay.”

I flushed, not because I was taken down by her remark, although she was right enough, but because it was exactly what I wanted to say to Walter.

Jeanine scuffed to the door. “So if you decide to take a break and hang out, we’ll be at the Tip awhile. Jimbo’s there. DeMartinis. Out of work, you know?” She eyed me. “Pika’s done. Krom’s a real creep but he sure got the road done. So now what? We just kick back and wait, right? Dude says get out, we got a guaranteed way out now, so no sweat. But I’m thinkin nothin’s gonna happen after all. So that’s cool — we still got a new road. Shortcut to Bishop.” Her eyes slitted. “You pray, Cass?”

I should have.

“I’m startin up again. Can’t hurt.” She opened the door. “So anyway, see ya.” She reached under her sweater to yank down the back of her bra, hiking her front, and eased out the door.

“Thanks Jeanine,” I called after her.

The L.A. soil sat waiting on my bench. I had not yet touched the L.Nash evidence. Bad procedure. So far, the cops had next to nothing — no DNA to sequence, no prints to compare against Krom’s or anyone else’s. They did have some fibers; Sears wool. John was waiting for the mineral evidence but he put no pressure on me. He was leaving the scene sealed, should I recover myself enough to go have another look. Eric’s been dropping by, at least once a day. Gives me a smile when he leaves, scar tissue crackling under his eye, a living example that time heals all wounds. But he puts no pressure on me.

Nobody, really, expects me to pull myself together enough to sit upright at my workbench.

But grief isn’t the problem. I’ve been waiting for Walter.

Walter’s only directions, regarding Lindsay, have been to ask that I go through her mail and pay her bills. Even as executor, Walter is unable to cope.

And I’d pissed away the past week doing our bread-and-butter work that was critical to somebody and about which I cared nothing now, nothing.

I gathered the Los Angeles material and dumped the lot on Walter’s workbench. I put the culture dish containing the L.Nash evidence on my bench. Time to do the initial examination. Goddamn well past time. I stuck a scalpel into the stuff in the dish, stuff that in some way had to have some link to the perp who left no other trace.

“The color, Walter.”

He looked. “I’d attribute that to…silicon.” He thought awhile. “Or aluminum.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Chroma…slight departure from the neutral gray…I’d assign it a one, or…” He lifted his head. “Where’s Munsell?”

“Forget the Munsell charts.” I’d spoken heresy. Color’s always the first thing we look at, and we calibrate it by the Munsell color charts. I had no quarrel with Munsell. I’d already ranked the evidence and I didn’t need Walter to confirm it. I was getting at something else — only I wanted it to occur to him, independently, as it had occurred to me. Electrified me.

And here he sat, parked on his stool, waiting for me to tell him why he should forget the god Munsell. Eyes blue and mild as a baby’s; I’d rank them hue of blue and value of eight and chroma of nine, virtually pure. All the acuity — the shadings of knowledge and intellect and wit — was gone from his eyes.

I was sick with impatience. “What is it we’re seeing?”

“What is it? What is it?” He gazed beyond me. “Grains of limestone.”

“Yes I know but I want you to look at the color.”

He said, weary, “Chroma is a one and…”

I snapped, “You sound like a broken record.” I thought his eyes darkened, impurities in the blue. Irritation with me. Whatever it takes. “I need you to think. That’s why I asked — no, that’s why I begged you to come in today.”

He said, “I’m tired.”

I got off my stool. “I’ll make coffee.”

“No.”

“You’re giving up coffee? That’s going to help?”

He looked at me as if he didn’t know me.

“Walter, there’s two pounds of beans in the fridge. Are you going to just leave them there?”

“That’s enough.”

“That’s enough coffee to last indefinitely, or that’s enough Cassie and shut up?”

“That’s enough, Cassie.”

“I drank coffee made from her beans too.” I glared but I didn’t have Jeanine’s gall, and as bummed as Jeanine may have been about Lindsay, I was a thousand times more bummed. And Walter. Bummed beyond endurance. Even coffee caused pain. In truth, I had not gone near the beans either. “Go on home,” I told Walter. “I’ll take care of it.”

He said, contrarily, “I’ll stay.”

He’ll stay because he’s lonely at home, or he’ll stay because he’s decided to help?

He made a close study of the evidence.

Not what I asked. I needed him to leap. I couldn’t stand the wait so I watched the laden cars passing on Minaret. Minaret and I are in different time zones — opposite sides of the date line. It’s yesterday on the street. It’s tomorrow where I am. The world has flipped.

Walter said, “Use the spectrophotometer on it.”

I almost screamed. Yes, I’ve done it, I’ve bingoed the element lamps and I know it was aluminum that painted our limestone gray. It was not gray from iron or silicon, which would have pointed me to other limestones, other places. It was aluminum and that pointed me to a very specific place. I said, “You’ve seen this stuff in the field. You know where it comes from.”

“I’m sure I’ve… Somewhere.”

“We talked about it. Right here. Day we vaporized the cyanide.”

For the first time this morning, for the first time since we lost Lindsay, Walter’s eyes met mine. Not just gazed in my direction, but settled there. “Hot Creek,” he said.

“So you remember.” My core was ice. “Lindsay told Georgia where to collect a crinoid for Adrian. A lover’s gift. Georgia got one for Lindsay, too. A thank-you. And Lindsay must have been touched by the offering because she put it on her desk with all her treasures.”

Walter gave me a hollow look.

“John asked me to look at her desk. The day that… See if anything was missing. I looked but my heart wasn’t really in it. But I visualize it now and I don’t think the crinoid was there. Did you see it? That day?”

The blue of his eyes shaded.

“Then I guess I better go look.”