Dead Dry (19 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

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“The only thing that’s hot today is this weather,” she replied. “You know and I know what the story is there in Colorado: Those guys at the Sedalia Grill are cold as ice. They were having a business meeting, sizing Gilda up for an heir to the throne who will do their bidding. Attabury and Entwhistle both have money on the line already invested in that development project, and Johnson loses big time if it doesn’t go through. And if Upton hasn’t figured out how to get a sizeable bite out of the deal, I’m not sure how good a lawyer he is. So we’ve got motive galore—good old greed—but I can’t prove an opportunity to save my life. They all swear they were snug as little bugs in their little bitty beds last Thursday night.”
“Better you than me,” I said. “I’m just going to go commune with these bits of muck.”
“Get me something I can hang someone with, will you?”
“Emmy’s the name, dirt’s my game. Just gonna go crawl off into a nice, cool laboratory and stay out of trouble.”
She glanced at me over the tops of her sunglasses. “You? Stay out of trouble? You’re as big an adrenaline junkie as the worst cop on the line.”
I stopped and stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, everybody in law enforcement in Salt Lake County, if not in the state of Utah, knows that you’re—how should I say this?—very enthusiastic about your work.”
I stood there weighing possible comebacks. Phrases like,
That was when I was as young and stupid as you are
came to mind, but I settled for, “Man, you’ve sure got your undies in a bundle.”
To which she replied, “So you have absolutely nothing else to tell me.”
“Me? Not a single, solitary thing. But if you’ll get off my case, I’ll put you in touch with an investment banker who might be able to dig up some inside information for you.”
Michele smiled wickedly. “You’ve got it bad.”
I argued with her in my head all the way up the hill to the university.
 
A SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE WORKS BY BOMBARDING each sample with electrons like radar. You can watch the results on a TV screen. It can enlarge a sample by tens of thousands of diameters, and it comes with an electron microprobe, which is a gizmo that can focus on one tiny part of the picture and tell you what it’s made of. The results print out as an image and a graph. It’s a great tool to use when analyzing clays and other trace evidence. Each type of clay has a different and recognizable appearance—illite, montmorillonite, kaolinite, and on and on—and the microprobe graph shows both the elements present and their relative proportions.
Best of all, in a heat wave like Salt Lake City was having, SEMs are kept in a refrigerated, interior room with no windows.
My time in the cool room told me that the red clay sample had mixed bentonite and kaolinite clays with considerable limonite staining (a fancy term for iron oxide, or rust). Under the intense magnification of the SEM, bentonite appears fibrous while kaolinite is revealed to be a stack of thin plates. Together they are about as common geologically as … well, dirt.
Bentonite and kaolinite are common along the eastern plains of Colorado. Finding these minerals in the evidence samples told me almost exactly nothing, except that the dirt on the dead man’s shoes did not come from the quarry in which he was found, which, being geologically somewhat peculiar, was mostly gravel. Which was why it made a good quarry, if gravel happened to be what you were wanting.
The fingernail goo was similarly unexciting. It was min-eralogically nearly identical to what was on his shoes. All that told me was that he had put his hands in the same dirt he had stepped in and hadn’t washed since.
I dropped the samples back at the sheriff’s department—cleverly nipping in the back way so I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near Michele’s office—and took the results back to my own office where I could set to work writing my report.
I didn’t have much to say. Afton McWain had had clay on his boots and dirt underneath his fingernails that didn’t match the sand and gravel in the quarry. Not surprising, considering that all evidence said that he had been murdered before being taken to the quarry. He’d had a pebble in his pocket. Whoopee.
I wrote up these results, printed it out on a piece of Utah Geological Survey letterhead and signed it, then faxed it over to the sheriff’s department to Michele’s attention and
put the hard copy in the mail and a photocopy in the proper file. Then I sat back down at my desk and promised myself that that was that.
Feeling let down that my involvement in the case had ended so anticlimactically, I telephoned Tim Osner, Carlos Ortega’s contact—mostly to add him to my professional network, I told myself.
Tim answered on the first ring. “Osner,” he said, in a bored voice.
“Hey, Tim, this is Em Hansen. Calling from Utah.”
“Oh yeah, Carlos said you’d be calling. Didn’t you work for Blackfeet Oil back in the before times?”
“Yeah, for a couple years.”
“Those were the days. So you’ve got a road kill in Utah that belongs in Colorado.”
“A road—oh, I get you.”
“Sorry, my sense of humor gets out of hand rather easily.”
“No, it’s just … well, I happened to know the guy.”
“Ooo! Bad luck! So how can I help you?”
“Well, I’m mostly making contact. Us forensic geologists have got to stick together.”
“Yeah, we’re rare as hens’ teeth. So, you working on anything? Carlos suggested you might be.”
“I’ve got some red clays as trace evidence. Do you guys have an index of Colorado soils or clays lying around loose?”
Tim Osner laughed. “No, sorry, but I’d love to play ‘Where’s the clay?’ any Saturday. Sorry if it dulls my luster, but the rest of the week I mostly fly a desk. Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m staring into a computer. My forensic work is on a volunteer basis. I don’t get paid for it, but it sure gets the blood running in the veins.”
“Tell me how that works.”
“Well, a couple of chums and I have an association with the law enforcement detectives. When they have a missing
corpse, someone’s gone and gotten lost in a river or drowned in a lake, and the job is to find the body, they give us a call. We use geological tools and logic to figure out where it is. I narrow the search by using geological computer software—RockWare—to plot probabilities in three and four dimensions. Say you’re trying to figure out where the body (a three-dimensional object in three-dimensional space) went (moved through time, the fourth dimension). I tickle the software into crunching a bunch of coordinates and running a wad of probability algorithms and then plotting the whole mess on the computer screen or a sheet of paper, all color-coded to indicate hot spots of likelihood.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
“It’s a blast. We call up our buddies: Geologists, geophysicists, biologists, botanists, psychologists, anthropologists, meteorologists, criminologists, and use cadaver dogs, software, telemetry, you name it. All week long I plug away at my boring little life, but on Saturday if the police have a job for us, I charge on out to the site and I’m … some-
body
!”
“A regular Walter Mitty.”
“In person. At your service, ma’am. Which way to the self-help session on hero self-worship?”
We fell into a fit of giggles. I knew I’d have no trouble getting along with the likes of Tim Osner.
“So when are we going looking for red dirt?” he inquired. “I’m free tonight.”
“I’m calling from Utah, friend. And sorry, I’ve already made my run to Colorado with this case, but may I call you if I have any questions in the future?”
“Sure. Ciao, baby.”
 
MICHELE PHONED TEN MINUTES LATER. SHE HAD READ my fax. “That’s
all
?”
“My, you are cranky! Okay, so it’s nothing very helpful, not without something to stick it to on the other end.”
“What does that mean, specifically?” The surge of hope in her voice was intense and immediate. I began to wonder what she had riding on this case.
“I have limonite-stained kaolinite on the man’s boots. He had a chert pebble in his pocket, probably a worry stone. The—”
“A what stone?”
“A worry stone. You know, something smooth you fiddle with. So far as I know, he could have carried it in his pocket since he was nine or something.”
“I was hoping for some clue about where he’d been during the days he was missing.”
“Missing? How long is he unaccounted for?”
“Not missing as in reported to the police, but no one can say where he was, or
will
say where he was since Wednesday afternoon. He was found at the quarry Friday morning. Attabury said he saw him in Castle Rock on Tuesday. Upton said he wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen him, it could have been weeks. Entwhistle said it had been late the week before but wasn’t sure of the date. Johnson said he’d been out of town himself. Gilda—”
“So you finally got something out of Gilda? What did you do, nail both of her feet to the floor and threaten her with a greasy French fry?”
“No. She has issued a statement. Through Todd Upton, who is apparently her lawyer. She states that she was away when McWain left—down in Colorado Springs getting her skin exfoliated, but why that takes two days I don’t understand—so she didn’t know when he left the ranch. She last saw him on Tuesday, or so she states. She was only just returning from Colorado Springs when she stopped at the Sedalia Grill to use the bathroom and ‘just happened’ to run into the men.”
“So how did McWain get to Utah?”
“I’ve searched all the airlines and bus lines, and I’ve asked everyone at the ground-water conference who drove over from Colorado if anyone gave him a ride and they all
said no. He must have hitched a ride. Looking for someone who gave a ride to a hitchhiker is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I may have to put a plea out on TV. But on the other hand, if one or more of our star suspects is lying, and one of them drove him over here and killed him, well … I’m going to have to figure out how to prove it. I’m trying to run their credit cards, to see if any of them charged gas in, say, Grand Junction or Green River, but so far, nothing.”
“So where did you get that Wednesday time fix?”
“Bart Johnson’s son Zachary picked him up on the road and gave him a lift as far as Bud’s Bar in Sedalia, where he works.”
“So Afton told him he was leaving town? Did he get any more out of him?”
“No, it’s just the last fix I could get on him. Zachary said McWain used to hitch rides with him a lot, because otherwise it’s a five-mile hike to town.”
“Was he carrying anything? A backpack or anything? As if he was leaving town for a while?”
“No, he was just dressed ‘as always.’ Slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, hiking boots. That was it.”
“I’ll bet he was just going into town for some reason. He didn’t have to be in Utah until Sunday. Why would he leave early?”
“But he did leave early,” Michele pointed out. “He was here by Thursday night.”
“Yeah. So what are the alibis you’re trying to crack? Where were the four men Thursday and Friday?”
“Oh, they’ve got some good lines. Gilda was at that spa,” she said, beginning to tick off a list.
“Oh, it was a
spa.
”
“All very tidy, eh? She checked into a spa so she would have plenty of witnesses that she was a good little girl. Upton was in his law office from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. or later every day last week except Thursday, when he took off a little early to play golf. Bart Johnson was looking after his cattle
up on his ranch, and Zachary vouches for him, so Zachary and Bart have each other covered.”
I said, “Sounds like you’re putting a lot of stock in this Zachary, in his word.”
“I am not. I don’t trust him. He’s the type who’ll tell you what he believes in, rather than what is accurate.”
“I know the type.”
“Except Zachary Johnson is not bright enough to start a war. No one would follow him into battle.”
“But perhaps they’d send him to do battle for them. Anyway, what about Entwhistle, the banker?”
“Entwhistle was at his bank during the days and home with his wife at night. And Attabury was likewise at his real-estate office, and he was Upton’s golf partner on Thursday evening.”
“That’s pretty tight,” I said. “It’s over five hundred miles by road from Castle Rock to Salt Lake City. That’s an eight-hour run each way, let alone what it takes to break into a gravel quarry, dump a body, and set off a landslide to cover it. And then of course there’s the time it takes to strip the body of its identifying marks, although if you have two guys in the car, one driving and one working at a corpse with a knife and a pair of pliers in the backseat, but then that would be kind of messy, and …”
“Nah,” Michele said, “it just doesn’t work. I’ve got to go back to Colorado and dig for someone else who’s pissed at this guy, or figure out what’s staring me right in the face on this end. My boss thought Gilda did it.”

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