I looked uphill, where the truck had gouged something of a bobsled run.
“Footprints suggest the hijacker left his vehicle and followed on foot.”
“Hijacker, singular?” Walter asked.
“A single series of prints, which we attribute to the hijacker.”
“On what basis?”
“Location. Direction.” Soliano shrugged. “The scene is difficult — everyone who left a print was wearing protective booties. Including, presumably, the hijacker, since there are bootie prints around his vehicle tire marks.”
“Hijacker, male?” I asked.
Soliano waved a hand — the default assumption. “Hijacker, homicidal. The driver has been shot.”
I gazed up at the dented cab. “Maybe the intent was homicide, not hijacking.”
“The intent reaches beyond homicide.”
So now we came to it.
Soliano led the way to the back of the trailer. I steeled myself for something hideous — there were things beyond murder that qualified — but the first thing I noticed on the crippled back panel was the standard radiation placard. Black fan-bladed symbol in a yellow triangle, RADIOACTIVE in black. The only thing unfamiliar to me was the red Roman numeral III and the number 7. So okay, we rank our soils, they rank their rads.
I thought, there’s nothing weird about a rad symbol on a radwaste truck.
And then Soliano stood out of the way so that the entire placard was visible. A drawing had been added. The first thing I noticed was that I could read the drawing without tipping my head. Which meant it had been done after the crash, with the trailer on its side.
Walter made a sound, tinny in my earpiece. Astonishment.
It was a crude sketch in black marker. Radiating lines fell from the fan blades, like rain. Like fallout. The lines fell onto a stick figure, who was running. Behind the figure was a skull and crossbones. Over my canned breathing I could hear Scotty mutter, “Goddamn weird-ass game.”
Soliano said, “Our hijacker leaves us a message. The radiation…” He seemed to search for the words. He found them. “Escapes control.”
“Yup,” Scotty said, grim. “That promises a bad nuclear day.”
I focused, hard, on the scene at hand. “Has anything here been touched?”
Soliano led us around to the front of the truck. “My evidence technicians have processed the scene. Photos, serology, fibers, prints. They recovered bullet casings, nine millimeter. We have established from the entry angle that the weapon was fired through the windshield from here.” He pointed to a patch of ground marked by orange cones. “The soil evidence is untouched. I lack the budget for a full-time geologist.”
Yes, that keeps us in business.
“However, I am most anxious that you see the driver.” Soliano gestured to a ladder leading up to the cab. “The driver is encased in mud.”
Walter eyed the ladder. “Why don’t you take the driver, dear?”
I shifted. Walter doesn’t think he can get up the ladder. I’ve seen him climb far worse than that, but not in bulky hazmat. And not, I calculated, since the strokes.
He opened the field pack. “And why don’t I begin with the tires.”
I selected my tools as if it was, after all, no big deal. But it was. As I crabbed up the ladder I worried it — what if Walter’s field days are numbered? — and then I reached the cab and my worry found a new focus.
I leaned against the bent frame and gazed through the broken windows, sucking in several Darth Vader breaths.
Jesus.
I set out my tools on the side of the cab then shined the flashlight around the interior. There was a garbage dump on the caved-in downhill side. Crumpled brown bags. Grande Starbucks cup. Spilled tool kit. CDs. A paperback. I angled the light; Don Quixote. Son of a gun. Attached to the visor was a credential with the driver’s name, Ryan Beltzman, and next to that a red-lettered sign: Engage Brain Before Engaging Engine. I came back, finally, to the driver, around whom I had been peering, who I’d been avoiding.
Ryan Beltzman was still strapped in, slumped rightward. His legs were jammed under the dashboard. Even hanging from the seat belt, he showed the stiffness of early rigor. He was blond, like Scotty, although his hair was longer. The side of his head was dented, like the cab itself. He’d been shot. I couldn’t tell how many bullets it had taken to deconstruct his face. Gunshot wounds are not my field but I’ve seen enough of them at other crime scenes to think that what happened to Beltzman, here, was overkill.
Perp’s a marksman, I thought. With a temper.
I took a big inhale and moved on to the rest of the body.
Beltzman was coated with mud — Soliano got that right. Jeans, T-shirt, back of the head. I picked up my scalpel, clumsy in gloved fingers. I chose a thick skin of mud on the left shoulder and pried a chunk free. Not a pretty piece of work. Probably didn’t matter — this guy had clearly rolled in the mud and I was not going to be finding any neat sequences of deposition. I deposited the mud chunk in a specimen dish. I took two more samples and then something caught my eye, in his shirt pocket. I poked with the scalpel. Mud flaked. It was a joint.
Oh God. The radwaste driver’s a pothead.
I would have liked to get to his shoe soles but I’d have to climb in with him. I did not really care to do that. I climbed down and told Soliano I’d need Beltzman’s shoes and access to the cab to finish my collection when they righted the truck.
My attention turned to Walter. He was squatting at the right front tire, prying mud from the treads. For a long moment I just watched him work, and his balance was fine and his motor skills were fine and I took that in and stored it up against the ladder thing, balancing the scales of doubt and hope.
I moved to the coned area and kneeled for a look. Just eyeballing the soil here — a fine-grained alluvium — I’d have to say it was a poor match to the mud on Beltzman. So where did he pick it up? Once I got the stuff under the scopes I’d do a profile but it helped to consider likely neighborhoods. The most obvious would be a rest stop along his route. So let’s say the hijacker jumps Beltzman at the rest stop, and they wrestle in the mud. And the driver gets away that time, but the hijacker follows and forces the truck off the road here, and Beltzman doesn’t get away this time. I’d want a geophysical map of the land along his route. It was a workable theory, the sort of thing I call an educated guess and Walter calls an onageristic estimate. An onager is a wild ass.
I had no wild-ass guess on what the hijacker had in mind next: the intent in black marker.
Maybe the stick figure knew — runninng for its life. Who wouldn’t try to escape those radiating lines? And who was the poor stick figure supposed to be? Man, woman? Or did the figure stand in for people in general? I shivered. Let’s make it just one person. Let’s make it a him. Let’s wish him godspeed.
“Geologists?” Soliano hovered.
I rose. “I’d like to collect samples up the road.”
Soliano said, “I will lead you.”
Soliano and I tramped further up the graded road, paralleling the yellow-rope line, leaving Area One behind. When we reached the big flatbed trucks bearing the CTC logo I saw we’d come alongside Area Two — the area we were not going into. Nevertheless, we paused to watch the suited figures at work. The slope gentled here, which was why, I supposed, the casks had come to rest here. I saw only one cask, in the grip of a portable crane. It looked, more or less, like a mammoth tin can.
It should look scarier.
Soliano leaned close. “It pulls on the mind, yes?”
Yes.
We edged around the trucks and continued up the road. We brought out the flashlights because the steeper hillside up ahead was not lighted. This was one of the areas, according to Scotty, that had already been checked and okayed.