God I’m easily bought. Give me an appreciative audience and I show off. I silently chose a second site and wormed my boot into the snow.
He followed along. “What if the dirt doesn’t match? What do you do next?”
“Go somewhere else.”
“I hope to hell you find it soon.”
“It?”
“The place your evidence came from. That is what you’re looking for?”
I nodded. Obvious enough. I wasn’t out here digging for gold. I knelt and sunk my trowel into the snow. “Did you work closely with Georgia?”
“Very.” He began to pace, in front of the dig. “She was invaluable. I want to know what happened to her.”
“We all do.”
“And I need to find out what she found. What she was referring to in her note.”
I froze. Hand on my trowel, trowel in the frozen ground. I looked up at him. “You know about that?”
He halted. He came into a crouch, that balancing act of his. He held my look. “You think I came out here for a stroll, Cassie? Of course I know. John told me. We’re colleagues. The chief of police and the emerg-ops chief have a common goal. Keep this town safe. We shared that goal with our mayor, but now our mayor is dead. Our mayor found something. Something that caused her to write an alarming note. No way out. Does that not interest you, Cassie? It interests John. It interests me.”
I said, “She wrote ‘just found out’. Could mean she learned something upsetting, something personal.”
“Could be.” His eyes warmed to copper. “Could be she found something we need to know about. Considering that Georgia was a conscientious mayor, I would like to know what the hell it was. How about you?”
Yes. Oh god yes. I said, light, “Any guesses?”
“I don’t guess. I want to know.”
I didn’t mind guessing. The wildest-ass of guesses. Something that got her killed. Something someone didn’t want her to find. I glanced around. Was it something out here — the geothermal plant? She found evidence of some planned sabotage or something? If the plant got bombed, say, that would sure impact the intersection of highways 395 and 203. That would qualify as no way out. That is, until an escape route is finished.
Krom stood. He checked his watch, a rugged sportsman’s model with a brown leather band. “I have to be at Hot Creek in half an hour. I’d like you to come.”
“Hot Creek?” It’s not far from here, but what the hell? “What’s happening at Hot Creek?”
“I think you should come and see for yourself.”
CHAPTER TEN
I left the fires to burn through the ice in my digs and went along with Krom to find out what was up with Hot Creek.
Krom drove, a red Jeep four-wheel drive. Good vehicle for an evac.
We headed south on Highway 395. If the evac is southward, we’d continue this way the forty miles to the next town, Bishop. If Bishop can’t absorb us all, we keep going to Big Pine, and then on to the next town. Sierra towns are strung along the highway, leagues apart, their backsides dug into the mountains. If the evac comes on a big ski weekend, the twenty thousand visitors can head back where they came from, all the way to L.A. I used to make the drive when I was doing grad work at UCLA. I tried to imagine it with an eruption in the rearview.
We stayed on 395 only minutes, then turned onto the narrow Hot Creek road. There are few roads that breach the caldera; they don’t go far and they’re intermittently plowed.
Krom took another turn, toward our little airport.
I looked at him.
“Len Carow’s due in,” he said, pulling into the parking lot, “and no, I didn’t forget to mention it back there, I chose to sandbag you here.” He stopped the Jeep and shut off the engine. “Len’s my immediate superior at FEMA HQ. Len’s my boss. There are some dirty politics being played. I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting you to come if I told you that back at Casa Diablo.”
I sat stiff. He got that right. “I don’t like being sandbagged.”
“Then let me make it worth your while. Decisions are being made that affect you. I’m making some of them. Len’s aiming to stop me — courtesy of Lindsay. It’s that simple.”
“You’re saying he’s going to fire you?”
“He can’t without cause, and I’ll give him no cause. As long as I have the support of your Council, I’ll do my job. They invited me, and they can ask me to leave, but I won’t give them cause.”
“The escape clause.”
He gave a half-smile. “Is that what you call it?”
“It’s what Lindsay calls it,” I said, then softened. “Look, I just want somebody who knows what he’s doing and if you’re it, then outstanding.”
“I am it. But Len’s not interested in my qualifications.”
“Why?”
“Goes back to Mount Rainier. Up in Washington state. Lindsay told you about Rainier?”
“She did. But tell me your side.”
He stared straight ahead, at the runway. “It was my first posting. I wanted to do my best. I wrote my own eruption-sim software and ran the numbers, of course, but I didn’t stop there. I got to know the towns in the volcano’s flowpath. I drove the roads, I walked the land. I knew by how much the population of Puyallup was swelled by its annual fair. I went with the Tacoma mayor to his favorite brewery, and I went back again to meet the locals. I needed to understand their fears, and I needed them to trust me when I made the hard calls.” He craned his neck and peered at the sky, where a slip of silver separated itself from the blue. “Len and Lindsay were at Rainier, too. Len was senior to me and he thought he should be in my job. She thought so too. Len and Lindsay. You didn’t find them at the breweries, they kept to their own.”
I said, “She’s a wine drinker” and then I said, “never mind.”
“Rainier got serious but the volcanologists kept dithering. I had a call to make — and it’s a hell of a call to order the evacuation of entire towns — and the officials, my friends at this point, were on the spot too. But my obligation was damn clear. It was to the locals. The everyday people who were sitting in the way of disaster. I made the call. We emptied the towns. It was a month before it became clear Rainier was not going all the way.” His head turned, as he followed the jet down onto the runway. “Cost the towns a lot of money. Lost business. Disruption. I felt like hell about that. But Lindsay…” He unbuckled his seat belt. “She crucified me. She told the press I was out of my depth.”
His voice held so much bitterness I thought he might stop.
He went on. “I accepted a demotion. And I’m still trying to rebuild my reputation. At the start, I did it on my own time. When a volcano acted up — anywhere — I flew there on my own nickel. I listened and I learned. FEMA was still rebuilding its own reputation and they had to be convinced to give me another shot. I convinced them. I’ve been proving my worth. Again, and again.” He angled in the seat to face me. “I made a mistake at Rainier, I won’t dodge it, but it was a mistake in timing, not priorities. I wanted to save lives. That’s what I aim to do here. I want you to know you can count on me to be single-minded in the pursuit of my job. I’d like to show you. If you’ll come to Hot Creek, there’s a slight chance in hell Len Carow will agree to come too. You’re one of the lives I’m here for, and he can’t ignore that. I’m going to show him I’m on the job. He’ll have to put it into the record.”
I believed Lindsay had crucified him, all right. I knew she didn’t suffer fools lightly, not when it came to her job. But I wasn’t convinced Krom had been a fool, at Rainier. I had to give him credit, now, for owning up to his mistake. And I couldn’t argue with his priorities. But if Lindsay was trying to crucify him again, now, she’d have a reason. She would never let her animosity interfere with her volcano.