Volcano Watch

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The day after he got out of the hospital, Walter accepted my invitation to breakfast at Bill Bone’s new donut shop in Bishop. While Walter was giving his customary attention to dissecting the coils of a cinnamon roll, I placed an envelope on the table.

“Georgia,” I said.

As he read I gazed out the window. Where the Mammoth refugees had snarled traffic a month ago, there was again a jam, this one caused by a parade of geese. A car with skis on the roof honked. Bishop, with the Sierra scarp at its back, is not so unlike Mammoth, which is both good and bad. Walter has no opinion on the subject. I worried about his disinterest. I worried about his mental faculties, although brain scans and clinical tests showed no damage. I worried about every fault line on his face.

He laid the report beside his plate like a napkin. “Your work is flawless.”

“Thank you.”

He drank his tea. “What brought you to it?”

“Stobie.”

“Stobie’s doing well?”

I nodded. Better than you. “So, we have Mike causing Georgia’s death at Gold Dust, probably by accident in a fit of temper. Can’t prove what got them up there together but I’d say jealousy. She shows up at Krom’s office, hyped, Mike’s there and she lets slip where she’s been. He goes to find out what she found. She follows. Or maybe they even go together. Anyway, it ends badly. Mike tries CPR, that doesn’t work, and then he panics. But eventually he pulls it together and gets a horse and takes her to the glacier.” I reminded him of Eric’s scenario.

Walter nodded.

I saw Bill emerge from the kitchen carrying a tray of crullers. Limited menu here; limited seating capacity. Still, chatter was thick, more faces were familiar than not, and Bill was back in business. Good for him. I turned back to Walter. “You up for tying some loose ends?”

Walter shrugged. He was circling his tea cup, round and round.

“Question is, who found the body? Some random climber? Possible, but real coincidental. So try this on for size: after Georgia disappears, the town’s in an uproar and Mike starts worrying someone will connect him with Georgia and Gold Dust, that he’ll get nailed. He worries himself sick. Decides it’s better if she’s found in the bergschrund — it’ll look like an accident. So he goes up there and scrapes the new snow off the body, so it will be believable someone could find her. Then he calls in the anonymous report.”

Walter nodded.

“But weather’s iffy so there’s a delay before we go up there for the recovery. That’s where Adrian comes into it.”

Walter eyed me. “Is this speculation, now?”

“Partly. John told me he told Adrian about the climber’s report as soon as it came in. Adrian would surely wonder if the body was Georgia. And he’d surely think of Mike, how jealous Mike was of Georgia. And so he confronts Mike, and Mike caves and confesses. Can’t you just see it? Help me, Mr. Krom, I’ll do whatever you say. And yeah, I’m into speculation now.”

“Continue,” was all that Walter said.

“Once Mike’s confessed to Adrian, he’s surely going to have to reveal the fissure at Gold Dust. Maybe, Mike himself had been worrying about the fissure and that’s what made him confess. Either way, Adrian will sure want to see that fissure. So Mike takes him, shows him, and Adrian reacts. Holy shit.” I recalled that feeling myself. “But Adrian also sees an opportunity. Remember, he’s been battling with Lindsay about escape routes ever since he came to town. He can’t abide using hers. He wants to build his own. And here, with the fissure, he finds a solid reason to kill her road.”

Walter flinched.

“Now all he has to do is publicly champion Pika as his route, and then get the fissure ‘discovered’ to discredit her route, and he’s the hero.” I paused, to be sure Walter was with me. I wasn’t speculating this time. I was extrapolating, from hard evidence. From the monitor I’d found in Walter’s pack — the monitor he had taken from Lindsay’s safe. This case had hurt so long I wanted Walter with me.

Walter cocked his head.

I said, “Mike being the killer — however accidental — explains the timing, something that never quite fit. I’d suspected that Georgia showed Adrian the fissure and he killed her to keep her quiet — give him time to set his plan in motion. But why wait a month? Why not champion Pika right away? Now it makes sense. Adrian did go public right away — Mike confesses to Adrian, shows him the fissure, Adrian makes his plan and then calls the meeting at the Inn.”

Walter frowned. “Why didn’t Adrian kill Mike? Given your supposition that he would have killed Georgia.”

“Plan A. Remember, there had to have been an original plan, before he came upon me and the geology. So plan A, I’d say, was to force Mike to confess when the time was right, which would reveal the fissure — and keep Adrian’s part in it quiet. I’m sure he promised to stand by Mike, get him a good lawyer, send him love notes in prison. Do we have any doubts Mike would do whatever Adrian asked of him?”

Walter expressed no doubts.

“It didn’t come to that, of course, because plan B worked. I found the fissure. Mike didn’t have to confess. And Adrian found other uses for him. And — caveat — I’m speculating again but it’s not particularly wild-ass. Adrian needs to keep track of me while I’m hunting for the site of death, just in case I don’t keep him in the loop. He needs to know if and when I find it. So he sends Mike.” Poor loyal love-besotted Mike. “It’s possible he found another use for Mike — blowing up 203—but I don’t think so. I don’t think Adrian would have risked that. I think he planted the explosives himself. I don’t think Mike would have done it.”

Walter said, “I agree.”

“In the end, Mike became a liability. Adrian couldn’t have him making peace with his conscience in front of you. Or Eric.” I took a drink of milk and it coated my mouth. What I wanted was coffee. I wanted the bitter scalding heat. “And so Adrian asked Mike to step out into the eruption and Mike went.”

Walter took a long time with this. He seemed to watch Bill, with a moment’s freedom behind the counter playing online poker on his new laptop. Eight hundred birthday bucks well spent. Walter came back to me, finally. “Is that it?”

“No. There’s still a loose end. Regarding the other case.”

“Let’s confine ourselves to the case at hand.”

“Can’t. The one leads to the other.”

He worried his cup.

I said, “Jimbo took charge of our packs and things, from the mountain, when we were in the hospital. When I got out he dumped it all on me.”

“I don’t see…”

“Your pack. The volcano monitor.”

He took a moment. “I see.”

“Yup. I recharged the battery and ran it all, data and video. Whole nine yards. Sure explains why Adrian wanted it back.”

China scraped wood, Walter’s cup circling and circling.

“My guess is, Len Carow told Lindsay that Adrian was monitoring the volcano. And that pissed her off. So she decided to take it. Adrian was supposed to fly to LA, so there’s her chance. I figure she used that credit card trick she showed you to force the lock of his office. She took the monitor back to her office. Played the recordings. And she must have been shocked, like I was. It was truly damning stuff. So she put it in her safe. Planning to go to John Amsterdam in the morning, I would hope. But Adrian got snowed in and came back. Stopped by his office, found the door unlocked, or the storage cabinet open. He found something amiss, because he telephoned her, about an hour before she died. I had John pull Adrian’s phone records.” I paused. I could see it. Krom phones her, really pissed, and she tells him to take a hike. Or maybe she invites him over so she can crucify him in person. Not considering, in her arrogance, his response.

Walter anchored the cup.

“So, Walter,” I said, “the loose end. When were you in her office? When did you find the monitor in the safe? Was Adrian there? On the floor, under the bookcase?”

“That’s some loose end.”

“Did you leave him there, to the mercy of her volcano?”

Walter gave me a hollow blue stare. “Do you think I did?”

I took a very long time to answer. “No.”

“Let me ease your mind, anyway.” He gave a thin smile. “I spent the night of the evacuation in her office. I was not in a good state. In the morning, before leaving, I wanted a keepsake. I thought she might have kept my letters in her safe. The two of us wrote one another, when we were off on assignments.”

My heart twisted. “So you were looking for love letters?”

He nodded. “They weren’t there. Most likely she kept them at home. What was there was the monitor. I had no idea of its significance. I was not in an analytic frame of mind. But she’d valued it enough to put in the safe, and so I took it with me when I went up to the Inn. Before the eruption.”

Relief ran through me. “So you didn’t know Adrian was in town?”

“No.”

“So Adrian must have gone to her office after you’d left. But why?”

“I believe I left the lights on.”

I gaped. “That’s what he said.”

Walter shrugged. “He spoke the truth, when he had no need to lie.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Then it was just chance.”

“Indeed. Chance I forgot to turn out the lights, chance I left the safe open. I suspect when he came into the office and saw that, it gave him cause to worry. He believed she had his monitor, he’d not found it the night he killed her, and now he saw where she’d kept it. He must have had a difficult few moments, wondering who took it.”

I had to smile. “I doubt he wondered long. Who else would know about her safe, but you?”

Walter smiled then.

I said, “So he’s in her office, freaking out, and then the quake hits. And the bookcase falls.”

Walter said, even, “I’d offered more than once to anchor that bookcase for her.”

“When did you figure out what the monitor meant? What it could prove — the motive for Adrian to kill her.”

“At the Inn. Battery was dead so I used the AC adapter. I played the video.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

All at once, Walter sagged. His chamois shirt appeared too broad in the shoulders, too loose, the weight he’d lost in the hospital suddenly apparent. He said, soft, “I was afraid of what you would do with the knowledge.”

I flinched. Like he’d slapped me. And my thoughts spiraled down into the pit. If I’d ended up alone on the mountain with Adrian Krom — if Walter hadn’t been there for me to worry over — what would I have done? Knowing Krom killed Lindsay, knowing he sent Mike out to his death, knowing he might as well have sent Eric — what would I have done? Knowing we might die there anyway. I said, finally, “I would have done what you did. Give him the correct dose. Put him to sleep.”

“Thank you,” Walter said. “You’ve eased my mind.”

Just as he’d eased mine. Neither of us willing to take that final irreversible step. But we’d each thought about it, and we’d each wondered if the other was capable of it. I shifted my gaze outside, to the snowy peak of Mount Tom — a new skyline to get used to, although all high Sierra peaks will forever remind me of my home base, of Mammoth. But home was gone. Along with a few illusions about the people I loved. About myself.

Walter said, “Is that it, dear?”

I came back. “Yeah, that ties it up. If you agree, we’ll close out Georgia. Geology nailed it, all the way.” The reality is, it’s DNA or prints more often than the geology that places the perp at the scene. Not this time; we did well by Georgia. “And we may as well close out the Nash case. I’ve done the report. I didn’t mention the monitor — as John told me last week, it may be motive for murder but there’s no hard evidence to tie Adrian to the scene.” No fluids, no fibers, no prints. Crinoid’s speculative. “So — bottom line, casewise — we’re batting fifty-fifty.”

“You could look at it that way.”

“I’ve tried. But the fifty percent on the failure side of the column is just too painful.” I placed the second envelope on the table.

He opened it and read for a full minute, long enough to have committed my resignation to memory.

No other way out.