“You know, I did see somebody here about when you were saying, Friday. I thought he was corporate. He wasn’t in a Carhartt or anything, just a black jacket, with hat and vest.”
The worker’s name was Antoine Gibbs.
Schoal said, “The execs from the head office, they come to the site, they don’t wear suits a lot of times.”
Gibbs said, “So this guy, he was talking to somebody else. I guess one of ours — he did have on boots and was wearing Carhartt. They talked, and looked around, and then they walked away, toward Seven. It was kind of odd, suspicious, I guess, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“Seven?” Sachs asked.
Gibbs indicated one of the drilling pens surrounded by the six-foot-high green fence. This one did not have a derrick rising from it. Beside a gate was a sign.
As they walked to the site Sachs asked the tall worker, “Did you see his face?”
“Not clear, no. Sorry. Pretty much the build of the guy was in that picture you showed me. But no face.”
Her eyes were on the battered fence.
“Could they get inside? Maybe they wanted to conduct some business out of sight.”
Gibbs told her, “If he had a key. A lot of guys do.”
“What’s in there?” Nodding at the fence.
Schoal answered. “Shafts and a mud pit.” He could see she didn’t understand and added, “See, geothermal works by pumping fluid from the surface down hundreds, or thousands, of feet, and back up again.”
“I read your billboard.”
“PR guy wrote it but it gives you an okay idea. The first step is we drill shafts — in this case about five to six hundred feet — into bedrock. Then we feed pipe into it. That loop I mentioned, basically two thick hoses joined at the end — called HDPE, high-density polyethylene — so the fluid can circulate. Since geothermal only works when the piping’s in contact with the ground we pour conductive grout down the shaft after the piping’s in place. This one, Area Seven, there’re twenty shafts. We’ve drilled them all but they’re not scheduled for the piping to go in for a couple of weeks — April third. It’s shut down till then.”
She said to the supervisor, “So there’d be nobody working and they could talk in private. Can you open it up for me?”
Schoal asked Gibbs, “Mud pit?”
“Haven’t dredged it out yet.”
He said to Sachs, “Just watch your step. The way drilling works is we pump water down with the drill face, and mud and rock’re pumped back up into what we call a mud pit. Eventually it’s emptied out and the sludge and stone’re taken to dump sites but the one in Seven hasn’t been emptied yet. Nasty stuff.”
Schoal fished a key from his belt and opened the gate. Sachs walked inside, adding, “Can you wait out here?”
He nodded, though he didn’t get why, his expression said.
She told him, “Don’t want to disturb any evidence from where they might’ve been standing.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Crime scene stuff. We see all those shows, the wife and me. I love ’em. You guys can catch a butterfly that was at the murder scene and there’ll be an image of the killer in the damn thing’s wings. That’s just amazing. You ever do that?”
“Never have.” Sachs reminded herself to share that one with Rhyme.
She donned gloves and put rubber bands on her shoes — to differentiate her footprints from the unsub’s — leaving it to the supervisor to draw his own conclusions about that high-tech forensic tool.
Butterfly wings...
But once inside she noted that this site was useless — more than useless, then smiled at the grammatical contradiction that Rhyme would have loved. Like “extremely unique.”
Or would it be less than useless?
The problem, forensically, was that the ground inside was gravel and rock, which wouldn’t reveal any footprints, so she had no idea where the unsub and the worker might’ve stood — if they’d been here at all.
Still, with gloved hands she scooped up about a half pound of stones from the place where they logically might have been — near the gate — and placed them in a plastic evidence bag.
The center of Area 7 was the mud pit: a trough, running lengthwise from one end of the fence to the other. It was about fifteen feet wide, surrounded by the narrow rocky walkway. It was filled with what Schoal had described: a mucky pool, deep brown and gray, its surface iridescent with oil or other chemicals. A yellow measuring stick, rising from the middle, showed the pit was just over six feet deep. The smell was a powerful mix of damp earth and diesel fuel.
Nasty stuff.
A dozen of the geothermal shafts, twelve inches in diameter, rose from the pool too. They were covered with plastic bags. To one side was a machine that looked like a small, stationary cement mixer, presumably for pouring the grout into the shafts once the piping was fed down them.
The only way to get across the pit was to walk on planks laid over it, between the shafts... and to walk very carefully. They were only about ten inches wide and, because they were eighteen feet long or so, appeared quite springy.
Sachs was wondering if the unsub would have walked over one of them to get to the other side. There was a window cut into the far fence, about head height. It would make sense for the unsub to have walked to it and looked out to see if it was safe to exit. It wouldn’t hurt to get a few samples from the ground beneath the window.
She eyed the precarious wooden plank.
Shaking her head. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it isn’t.
Then smiling to herself and thinking: And when, exactly, has it been easy?
She began across the plank, walking carefully, one foot after the other, as the narrow bridge bounded up and down. On the other side she scooped up stones and dirt from beneath the window and started back.
She was halfway back when the world changed.
The ground around her shook fiercely and she heard a deep rumbling. What the hell was going on? A derrick had fallen, one of the buildings under construction collapsed, a plane had crashed nearby.
A voice from behind her, Schoal’s, in a much higher register than earlier, called out, “Christ Almighty.”
As car alarms began bleating and people screamed, Sachs struggled to stay upright. The plank was bouncing hard and, desperate to keep from falling, she dropped fast and hard on one knee, her bad — well, her worse — one. Fiery pain rose from the limb to her jaw. The plank dipped under her weight, but then rebounded and pitched her off like a swimming pool diving board. Arms flailing, Amelia Sachs fell toward the mud. In the second before she hit she tried frantically to twist upright, to keep her face to the sky so she could breathe after she landed.
But the maneuver didn’t work and she dropped face-first into the brown-and-gray glue, which slowly began to suck her beneath the surface.
Chapter 23
You feel that? That shudder?” Ruth Phillips, putting away groceries in the cupboard, shouted to her husband.
He didn’t answer.
This happened a lot. Not that he was hard of hearing. It was more of an architectural issue.
They were in their bungalow in Brooklyn, on the edge of the Heights. The home was a railroad-style structure, which, she’d learned when they moved in decades ago, you saw much more in the South. Railroad, it was called, because there was a long hallway running from the front door past the living room, the three bedrooms and the dining room to the kitchen, in the back. Like the trains you saw from the old-time movies, with a corridor beside the passenger compartments. Ruth didn’t think any trains still had this feature but there might have been some somewhere. Her only experience with that mode of transport was the LIRR, which they took out to Oyster Bay to see daughter number one.