Nature Noir (12 page)

One autumn morning I stopped in at the Auburn Police Department to get permission to use their gym for one of my defensive tactics training sessions. While I was there, an officer I knew introduced me to their new guy, Rich Morita, who'd just been rotated in off patrol for his first stint at investigations. We made small talk over Styrofoam cups of weak detective coffee, and when Morita learned that I worked in the dam site, he asked me if I had a few more minutes to talk. I said I did. The officer who'd introduced us drifted back to his desk.

I followed Morita across the detectives' office to two battered cardboard file boxes on a counter along one wall. He removed a folded piece of paper from one of them and smoothed it out on the counter. It was a primitive computer-plotted map of the lower North Fork and the western edges of Auburn, with a scattering of red stars on it.

He cleared his throat and began: "I got this from the Bureau. The red stars are old mineshafts."

"Okay. Go on," I said.

"On September 8, 1982, a woman named Karen Dellasandro disappeared from her home here"—he dropped an index finger on one of the squiggles of streets in the Skyridge housing development along the canyon rim—"where she lived with her husband and two kids. He was a sheriff's deputy."

"Right. A sergeant at the jail. I've met him, and I've heard the story—a little of it, anyway," I said.

Morita corrected me: "He's not with the Sheriff's Department anymore. He transferred to the Southern Pacific Railroad Police, but he still lives around here. Anyway, there was a missing persons investigation by Auburn PD, and over the months that followed it began to be looked at as a possible homicide and focused on her husband as a potential suspect. But here's the problem—"

"I know," I interrupted him. "No body."

"Right. No body. She was never found. And no murder weapon or anything else that could bring the case to trial as a homicide."

"So?" I asked him.

"Well," he continued, "during the first investigation they tried about everything they could think of to find her, and around Thanksgiving of 1982 they even consulted a psychic. The psychic told them she'd seen Karen's grave around the arch of the dam's foundation, downhill from those radio towers on the hill by the Auburn Dam Overlook—you know the place, less than half a mile from the Dellasandro home."

"Yeah, I know the place."

"On the fourth of December, the sheriff's search and rescue team assisted our detectives in a ground search of that area with four of their dogs. It was one of several searches they made in various areas of the county around that time, most on hunches and tips and few, if any, on solid leads. Anyway, I guess by that time there wasn't much construction going on, and—"

"But a psychic—I mean, that's really grasping at straws."

"Well," he replied, "it's the closest open land. It's less than five minutes from their house, so he could have left his kids asleep in their beds that first night. The place was deserted once the Bureau people went home at five. And our profiler from the FBI says, based upon what is known about the type of crime, he would have put her body somewhere close where he could keep an eye on her. It's about control—"

Again I interrupted him. "And of course, once the Bureau gets everything worked out with the dam, the grave goes under a couple of hundred feet of water."

"That too." He nodded patiently. "Anyway, the psychic said she saw a grave, a mound of earth, I guess—and in the ground search they didn't find anything recent enough to dig up. But they found three old mineshafts, or what they described as mineshafts, and for some reason—maybe they ran out of time, or they hadn't brought lights and caving equipment—they didn't search them."

"And..."

"And there's a note in the report ..." He rifled through the stacks of manila folders in one of the boxes. "Well, it's here somewhere—saying the PD was going to come back and look in them later. But I've gone through the rest of the reports, and there's no indication we ever did."

"I'm getting your drift."

"Yeah," he said. "That's what I want to ask you. Do you know of any mineshafts on that side of the dam site? They're not on this map the Bureau made for me."

"Well," I responded, "I don't recognize the particular mineshafts you're referring to, but I can tell you that there are old mineshafts all over in these canyons, and a lot of them are not on present-day maps. And the dam site is
full
of things that look like old graves—miles of slit trenches the geologists dug and then filled back in, to study potential faults after the Oroville earthquake. And the rocks under the dam? They're like Swiss cheese ... there's over nine thousand feet of abandoned underground tunnels, drifts, and raises under the dam site, and over a hundred thousand feet of bore holes they made taking core samples."

Morita was looking at me. "You think she's in there, don't you?" I said.

He shrugged.

At that point a blue-uniformed receptionist stuck her head through the door and called Morita to the front counter to talk to a witness who'd come in about another matter. Morita excused himself. I was left looking at the map of those mineshafts and wondering if I'd been feeling a little down when I'd walked in there, or if it had come on during our discussion. Maybe it was just the time of year.

By September the foothills were worn out from the deprivations of the dry season, and everything waited breathlessly for rain. The dusty trails in our canyons were covered with the riverine tracings of whiptail lizards and racer snakes, and although it was still hot, there was a certain aging of the light. The smoke from the burning stubble on the rice fields down in the valley backed up against the mountains, and the lowering slant of the sun through it brought a nameless melancholy to the mornings of the well-adjusted, and to the desperate, more desperation. What had you done, now that the year was three quarters gone? What had your life come to? What of the New Year's resolutions you'd made? The dry weeds stood in silent ranks on the roadsides, the wind didn't blow the smoke away, and at the Maidu graveyard across Auburn-Folsom Road from the Indian Rancheria at the south end of town, bunches of faded plastic flowers and abalone shells from the coast were arranged on the bare humps of red clay between the dry grass. Many of the graves had only the crudest markers, a name painted by hand or applied in adhesive mailbox letters on a ceramic patio tile, laid upon the mound. Others had no markers at all.

Of course, for most of the time there have been human beings that is all we could expect, an unmarked grave. But we want better than that now. We want order, completion, closure, a granite monument, a public mourning, and in the event of some wrongdoing, an orderly assignment of it to the culpable. So when Morita came back, I offered to help. My involvement in the case would never be anything more than peripheral, but for the rest of that fall I did what I could to help them find Karen.

In the photograph they'd used on the missing-person poster, she was pretty, in her late twenties. Her dark, glossy hair cascaded in curls just past her shoulders, and her blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. Her smile was broad and generous, accentuating her cheekbones and perfect teeth and the little dimple in her chin. Morita told me she'd been a stay-at-home mother, but in the photo she wore a navy blue blazer and a high-necked white blouse with a little lavender bow at her throat. She looked like a job applicant, one most of us would have been pleased to hire.

Skyridge, where she'd lived, was a lakefront subdivision still waiting for its lake. The more expensive homes would have a view of the lake whenever it was finished, but Les and Karen's wasn't one of them. Theirs was what real estate agents call a starter home, an arrangement of shed-roofed lean-tos with an attached garage, sheathed in regrooved plywood stained gray with white trim. It was located at the end of a cul-de-sac where the developer had wrung one more awkward lot out of his acreage. The back of the house was hard up against a steep, wooded hillside, and from the west wall the ground fell away into a swale. In the swale was a barbed-wire fence, and on the far side was a cow pasture, and on the far side of that, the Stations of the Cross on the grounds of the Our Lady of Mercy nunnery. At the south end of the same pasture was the Indian graveyard.

Thirteen years after his wife disappeared, Les Dellasandro went to court to have her declared legally dead so he could sell their home. It had been rented out for years by the time I got involved, and the tenants had used it hard. The untrimmed oaks had grown in around it as if in shame, and the garage door sagged under its own weight and the weight of whatever had happened inside it on September, 8, 1982, when the house was new and Karen and Les's kids were little.

In 1966, after the Bureau of Reclamation received a $425 million appropriation to construct the Auburn Dam and the Folsom South Canal to carry the water away, the agency found out that the dam they'd sold Congress wasn't practical. There simply wasn't enough low-value land in the immediate vicinity from which to quarry the huge quantities of fill needed to build it. A 685-foot earth and rock dam of the kind the Bureau had proposed would have required the strip-mining of five square miles to a depth of 30 feet. But the site was right next to Auburn, the county seat of Placer County, and surrounded by residences, cattle ranches, and orchards. So in 1967, after evaluating more than thirty alternatives, the Bureau announced a new, daring design. It would be the largest double-curvature thin-arch dam ever built, 196 feet thick at its base but only 40 at its over-three-quarters-of-a-mile-long crest, a veritable eggshell of steel-reinforced concrete.

There are two basic kinds of dams: gravity dams and arched dams. The dam the Bureau had completed the decade before at Folsom was of the first type, a clunky, 340-foot-high lump of cast concrete with great dikes of earth and stone on either side, holding back more than 326 billion gallons of water by the sheer mass of its materials. In contrast, a dam like the one the Bureau now proposed for Auburn derives its strength not from sheer mass, but rather from its elegantly engineered shape. An arched dam transfers forces outward into the walls of a canyon in the same way the arched ceilings of Gothic cathedrals transfer their weight outward and down into the cathedrals' walls and flying buttresses.

Because of this, an arched dam's strength ultimately depends on the strength of the rocks into which it's built. Unfortunately, the rocks of the Auburn Dam site were not the best. They were a jumbled mess of amphibolite and chlorite schists, metavolcanics, slick green serpentinite, and talc zones, all extensively faulted and intruded by mafic dikes, quartz, and calcite veins and sloping crazily to the north. Several generations of graduate theses in geology could have been done on them, and indeed, over the following decades, they became some of the most-studied rocks in the world.

But flush with three decades of accolades and swelling budgets since Hoover and Grand Coulee, the Bureau's engineers thought they could repair the flawed rocks. Two years after the thin-arch design was announced, the Bureau finished blasting the first seven thousand feet of tunnels under the massive crescent-shaped engravure they were cutting into the canyon walls. From inside the tunnels and from the surface above, they drilled nearly fourteen miles of core samples, and using these, they made elaborate charts of the extent of the weaknesses. Then they excavated the worst sections of rock and filled the resulting cavities with over two hundred thousand cubic yards of concrete. Not surprisingly, the engineers referred to what they were doing as "dental work," and in dam construction, it wasn't unusual. What was exceptional was the extent of it. At Auburn, it might have been better described as dental reconstructive surgery—like several root canals and a whole suite of crowns.

Regrettably, the site's problems were deeper than the teeth. In fact, the canyon's jaws, indeed its whole body, were a Frankenstein's monster assembled out of bits of older stuff grave-robbed from dead landscapes elsewhere and sutured together at ragged, partially healed scars. And while dam geology concerns itself more with description than narrative, the dam's engineers and geologists had no idea at the time how the rocks they were working on had been formed, and no idea of the nature of the motions even then underway beneath them. From the first surveys of the dam site in the 1920s through the decision to build a thin-arch dam, the American River country had always been thought of—if warped, twisted, uplifted out of the sea, upended, and its rocks remanufactured by heat and pressure—as, in some sense of the word, still a
place.
But in fact the Sierra foothills were a whole collection of places, plucked from a world map that, reconstructed backward at fifty-million-year intervals, looks at first distorted and then entirely unrecognizable.

By 1982, Les Dellasandro was a supervising deputy at the old sheriff's jail next to the county courthouse in Auburn. On his days off he tended a few cattle he kept on the ranch of a fellow deputy over in El Dorado County. In a town where horse trailers vastly outnumbered European cars, that didn't make him unusual. He was tall and blond, with a well-trimmed mustache, and he had a kind of natural gravitas that demanded respect but didn't invite easy friendship. "He's a cold fish," a retired Auburn businessman once told me. "I never liked him much."

Les's wife's nose had been broken a long time ago, either before or just after she met him, and she had a scar on her arm. Karen told people she'd gotten these injuries in an accident, which may well have been true. But in the days after her disappearance witnesses told police that they'd seen Les ridicule her for these flaws in her appearance, calling her names like "Scar Arm." One neighbor told investigators she could always tell when Les was home, because, she said, you could hear the shouting from his house. A fellow deputy told detectives that he and his wife had been seeing the Dellasandros socially, and on a double date at the county fair the previous summer, they'd witnessed Les Dellasandro excoriating his wife, saying she was dressed like a prostitute. The deputy said the incident had made them so uncomfortable they'd stopped seeing the Dellasandros. Another coworker of Les's phoned the police when he heard Karen was missing, telling them he feared for her safety because he believed Les was fully capable of hurting her. But we've all probably heard something similar about some unfortunate couple in our acquaintance, and to be fair, these accounts don't add up to a murder or, for some married people, even a divorce.