We’d turned right off highway 127 onto a dirt road then bumped across a salt-encrusted delta up into the Ibex Hills. Striped in sedimentary layers like a tabby cat, the hills showed blazes of pure white.
It was a short steep hike up a sandy trail to the mine entrance. The hillside was littered with old timbers and the ruins of a long chute. White tailings spilled down the slope.
I envisioned the perp with a shovel.
Walter and I divided our labor. He sampled the soil, looking for a match to the radwaste driver’s coating: the place he had rolled in the mud. I went for the mine, looking for the mother lode: a match to our tremolite talc.
Scotty preceded me into the tunnel, metering for gases or gammas. When he reappeared and raised a thumb, I headed inside to grab an unweathered dishful of talc.
We were hotter, wearier, grumpier, and the shadows were longer. Thunderclouds had gathered. The convoy, visible down below, was parked in a flood plain. I kept an eye on the cloud-to-blue-sky ratio. I knew how fast summer storms could brew up.
Mine number four on our list was a ragged mouth rimmed with snow-white crystals shining like teeth.
Easier access to this mine than the first two, should that count with the perp.
Scotty trudged in, trudged out, thumbs-up.
A decaying sign post guarded the entrance, warning: Tresspassers Will Be Prosecuted. A bullseye target completed the thought.
I went inside and shined my light.
A tall straight tunnel shot into white depths. A pepperminty smell stung my nose. The ceiling moved. I shifted my beam and it caught splintery timbers hung with pale furred bodies. Leathery wings flared. I let the beam plummet, revealing piles of guano on broken ore tracks.
“Here’s the deal,” I said, “I leave you alone and you leave me alone.”
The ceiling settled down and I turned my attention to the walls. A slash of very dark rock caught my eye — diabase, a much older intruder than the bats. The diabase, eons ago, had plunged into the carbonate rock, ripping out oxides and replacing them with magnesium and silicon, and thus rudely metamorphosed the carbonate rock into talc.
I plucked a white crumb and slid it between thumb and forefinger. It flaked apart, like filo dough.
I liked it.
I took five samples near the entrance. Scotty had only metered the main tunnel; there were offshoots right and left and likely down. I was no more likely to charge deeper into this mine than I was to start tap dancing, and it wasn’t the bats that deterred me.
Outside, Soliano watched while I set up my little field lab. I did a quick hand-lens study then moved to the spectrophotometer. It was a cousin of the meter I’d used at the dump, the meter that so interested Roy Jardine. This one would impress him more because it’ll tell me not only what I have, it’ll tell the concentration. Talcs differed according to the parent rock from which they formed and the minerals that grew alongside — like tremolite.
It will tell me if I’ve found the source.
I mixed my sample with a pillow of indicator compound then inserted it into the SP. I recorded the numbers that came up on the window. I repeated the process with my evidence talc. Same numbers came up.
I sat back to savor it. This was what I dreamed of, when I dreamed of work, which was more often than was probably healthy. The moment of capture, the moment when I’d grab hold of a piece of the earth and give it an identity. A name, a set of vital statistics, and — the holy grail of forensic geology — an address. I tracked you down, pal. I know where you hang. You’re mine.
I told Soliano, “We’re here.”
He produced his cell phone. While he talked, demanding every piece of data recorded on the Serendipity Talc Mine, I opened my water bottle and drank long and deep. Not cold lemonade but it would do.
Scotty went down to the RERT vans and returned with two team members, the three of them dressed out. They paused at the mine entrance to set their facepieces and breathers, then lumbered in.
I saw Walter come out of a van and start up the hill.
Hap Miller sat down beside me. He lifted his sombrero and poured water over his head. His hair darkened to hematite, a match to the red bandana tied around his hat. “Hot enough for you, Buttercup?”
“Buttercup?”
“Nickname I picked out for you. Now, you ask why I’d name a brunet with gray eyes after a yellow flower?”
I bit. “Okay, why?”
“It’s due to the egg yolk you dripped on your shirt.”
It took all the will I possessed not to look down.
“And please do call me by my nickname. Hap, short for Happy. Happy to look out for your well-being, ma’am.”
For all his joking, he didn’t strike me as particularly happy. Well, I didn’t strike me as a yellow flower, either. “Thanks,” I said, “Hap.”
Walter topped the trail and made a beeline for us. I studied his face. Red, but so’s everyone else’s. Streaming sweat, but sweat’s good — he’s hydrated. I said, “Where are you going?”
He tried to speak, then lifted the little ice chest. It had come with the Blazer; we were putting it to work.
“Beer?” Hap said.
“Soil samples,” I said. “Sorry.”
“No problemo. At least I got snacks.” Hap unshouldered his day pack and pulled out a bag of chips.
Walter joined us and Hap offered the chips. They were greenish-brown.
“Seaweed,” Hap said. “Taste like Doritos only they’re good for you. Full of alginic acid, which binds itself with any strontium-90 we mayhap pick up in the course of our travels.”
I stared. “How about just not picking any up?”
“How about being prepared? Boy Scout motto.”
“I know the motto. I was a Girl Scout.”
Hap grinned. “Guess that means we’s meant for one another!”
Walter slid me a look; Walter thought not. Walter already disapproved of my flighty love life. And Walter, frowning at me, was clearly thinking the last thing I needed right now was to take a fancy to an ex-Boy Scout warning me about the risks of radiation. But it wasn’t Walter’s call. I slid my own look at Hap Miller. Never met anyone quite like him. I said, “What’s up with strontium-90?”
“Just a for-instance.” Hap shrugged. “For instance, it’s a nuclide that resembles calcium. Get yourself a dose and your body sucks it to the bone, like it’s calcium. And it sits there happy as a clam emitting radiation for its entire half-life. Y’all know the half-life of strontium-90, mayhap?”
I said, “Not offhand.”
“Twenty-eight point nine years. I’d guess that’s close to your own age.”
Twenty-nine point three, actually. I saw where Hap was going with this. I didn’t want to follow. I didn’t need a health physicist to tell me what excessive radiation could do to the reproductive system. I was well-versed in that lesson.
“Mr. Miller,” Walter said, “you might limit your advice to the strictly useful.”
“Shore thang. So might it be useful to point out that a man your age is at special risk? Your cells are already in the decay mode, if I’m not taking too much liberty to say so.”
I said, “You trying to scare us?”
“Just encouraging you to pay attention.” Hap held out the chip bag. “And Walter, please do call me Hap.”
Happy to look out for our well-being. Fine, I guessed it could use looking out for. I took a chip. The brine puckered my tongue. It wasn’t Doritos but I urged Walter to try one. He did, and made a face. I wondered how many radioactive isotopes Walter had absorbed over the years. A good deal more than I had because he’d been around a good deal longer. I offered him another chip.