“You just did, Mr. Ballinger.”
It didn’t sound okay by Jardine. He had a nasal voice that broke as it rose. And it didn’t look okay by him. He held his head high. He had a high forehead, skin pulled tight by the skinned-back hair in the tight ponytail. Wide-set brown eyes, downturned at the corners. Flattened nose, spreading at the nostrils. Long horsey jaw in which the small mouth got lost. Large irregular oval on his left cheek, with a mottled interior and a rim that wormed around the crater.
I was not bothered by the scar. My little brother Henry had scars. The last one, which I remember best, was a dent like a jack-o-lantern grin below his knee where the joint lining had been excised. So Jardine’s scar didn’t bother me. It was his expression that hurt. He looked so very sad.
Soliano asked, “Who played this prank?”
“Never found out,” Ballinger said. “Called in the Sheriff but no luck. Still, CTC officials put their trust in me to handle things and that’s what I did. Ran a lessons-learned session for all my people. Attendance mandatory. And I made dead sure the company covered Roy’s medicals. Pain and suffering, to boot.”
Soliano turned to Jardine. “This resolution satisfied you?”
“Yeah.”
I watched his scarred face. I’ve seen lesser insults be motive for mayhem.
Soliano pulled out his wallet and showed Jardine his ID. “Mr. Jardine, may I inquire as to your whereabouts last night?”
Jardine said, slowly, “Home in bed.”
“Alone?”
Jardine went scarlet. He nodded.
“And your job here is?”
“Maintenance.”
“Have you ever worked on the cask team?”
“No.”
“Do you wish to?”
Jardine shrugged. “Takes a lot of training.”
Ballinger nodded. “Darn right.”
“I see.” Soliano regarded Jardine. “Thank you for your time.”
So that’s it? I thought Jardine warranted a few more questions but I couldn’t come up with any. I agreed with Soliano that the key player was whoever metered the cask. Jardine might have motive, but not the training or the opportunity. He was likely just one of those unfortunates who swallowed the insult and collected his compensation.
“All right then, Roy,” Ballinger said. “Lady wants to poke around out there. I need somebody to go with her. Make sure she doesn’t whack her head or trip or… Liability stuff.”
Jardine turned to me and his gaze fixed on the spectrometer hanging from my shoulder. He said, in that nasal complaint, “What are you?”
I said, “Geologist.”
He pursed his little mouth.
I didn’t really mind having a keeper, going out there. Jardine led the way, punctiliously skirting the sand truck to prevent, I guessed, me whacking into it. My attention shifted to the ground. Here’s where it happened, if the swap was run before — if the dummy cask arrived and shed grains of talc. Of course, any talc spilled here would have been scuffed into invisibility. Not, however, invisible to the laser eye of my spectrometer. I selected the chemical fingerprint for talc and began the scan. The laser illuminated the soil, scattering its constituents into their spectral wavelengths.
Jardine closed in behind me. I saw him by the long morning shadow he cast, which dogged my every move. I grew distracted, almost missing the spectrometer’s chirp. I stared at the screen, at the jagged wavelength line. “Huh,” Jardine said, at my ear, “how’s that thing work?” It doesn’t, I thought. It doesn’t happen this way — first place I stick my nose and bingo. That’s more than luck. That’s a red flag. I said, “Give me some space.” He backed off. I reset the spectro. It scanned and chirped the news. So okay lady, you got lucky. I shook my head and expanded the searchable grid. “There it is,” Jardine said, with me again. He’d recognized the wavelength before the meter chirped. By the time I’d covered the loading zone he acted like it was his show. “Can it tell you where the stuff came from?” he wanted to know. “No,” I said, huffier than I’d intended, “that takes doing geology.”
As we returned from the scan, Hap Miller was returning with the roster. He gave Jardine a look. Cartoon eyes. “Hey there Roy. You helping the purty lady?”
Jardine’s face pit purpled.
“That’s right,” I said, “he was.” Jardine had been, actually, getting on my nerves but it cost me nothing now to include the guy. “We found talc. It’s all over the place.” I waited for them to get it. I waited for Ballinger to object — nah nah, knothead can’t sneak in a cask full of talc. I waited for Miller to make a joke.
Soliano got it first. He spun on Ballinger. “How many casks are missed from your inventory?”
“You people are making this case bigger’n it is.”
I bristled. No we’re not. We’d just proved Soliano’s swap theory was correct. More than that — not only could the perp engineer such a swap but he’d damn well done it before. The dump manager may not like the theory but it fit the facts. So this case was getting bigger than any of us liked.
I stared at the logo on Ballinger’s shirt and thought, there wouldn’t even be a case if you CTC people did what that motto promised, closing the damn circle of the atom.
Just keep your plutonium out of my coffee.
Jardine was choking.
He tried to chew over what he’d just learned but he couldn’t swallow it all. The female with her meter had found the talc and now they all knew that last night wasn’t the first time and they… He stopped. He told himself not to get ahead of himself. How far could that meter take her? The trail stopped here, at the dump.
He edged away from the little group, filling in the forms on his clipboard like he was interested. They didn’t even see him any more. Snooty Mister FBI had dismissed him. He focused on the others. That bastard Ballinger. Miller the mocker. The know-it-all female.
Purty lady. His face flamed and his scar burned. She pitied him. He hated pity. Almost as much as he hated Miller’s mockery.
Miller mocked everybody but what stuck in Jardine’s throat was the time Miller mocked about the prank. Jardine’s first day back on the job, bunch of them were in the break room and Miller told the Three Pigs joke. First little pig builds a house of paper. Big bad Mr. Alpha Wolf tries to get in but even a paper wall stops him. Then big bad Mr. Beta Wolf comes along and he blows right through the paper and fries the pig. Second little pig builds a house of plastic, shielding enough to stop both Alpha and Beta wolves. But along comes Mr. Gamma Wolf, who’s pure penetrating energy, and he goes through those walls and fries the second pig. Third little pig builds his house of thick earth with concrete siding and steel doors, which almost stops Gamma Wolf. Still, it’s not possible for Gamma to be completely stopped and so a whisker and a couple teeth get through. Third pig doesn’t even notice the nibbling.
Jardine had sat stone-faced.
The real pigs were the ones who’d snuck in while he was napping — after pulling a sixteen-hour double shift! — and planted a sealed cesium source under his pillow. Source turned out to be leaking. A beta-and gamma-emittter. Nibbled a hole in his face. Unintended consequence, Ballinger’s incident report said, prank that went out of control.
He thought, now, there are always consequences.
He crawled out of the memory and continued his recon.
The group shifted and the female waved and Jardine saw a newcomer approaching. Old fellow. Dressed like he lived in the desert, same as the female. The old fellow started talking but it was the female Jardine fixed on. Not fixated — that was different, that was obsessive. Fixed just meant he’d watched her work, up close, and noticed how she paid attention to her details.