I had recovered several grains of each type of powder and tubed one of each to send to a gunpowder lab. We needed these grains ID’d.
I turned off Minaret Road onto the side street where the red-brick cop house squats.
Jasper Rinehart was at the front desk, watching a hockey game on his laptop. He waved me through with a sudden curse, which I realized was directed at the goalie and not me.
I headed through the bullpen for chief John Amsterdam’s office, and ran into Eric.
He smiled. “Morning, Oldfield.”
“Morning, Catlin.” I smiled. “John in?”
“On a conference call.”
“I’ll wait.”
Eric cocked his head. A thick silence fell — Eric clearly wondering what I wanted with the chief of police, why the deputy wouldn’t suffice, and me wondering the same thing. It was as awkward as our exchange on the ski up the mountain, when Eric tried to send me and Walter back.
Eric recovered first. He offered me a comb-back chair in his cubicle and pulled in a matching chair from the cubicle next door. We sat, knees bumping. He reversed his chair and straddled it. “Coffee?”
“No thanks. I’m fully caffeinated.”
We smiled. Stiff smiles.
I looked away, as if the tumbledown cop-house décor was what I’d come to see. Normally, Eric and I dodged our interpersonal awkwardness by shooting the shit about work, or bitching about how redevelopment’s ruining Mammoth. But now the town was more concerned with survival than with redevelopment; neither of us cared to bitch about survival. And work currently meant the Georgia case; difficult to shoot the shit about that when we were both holding back.
So I plunged ahead. “Anything yet on the rag-wool fibers?”
“Too soon to hear from hair-and-fiber.” He shrugged. “But we sent the techs everything from her closet that could be a match.”
“What about the hair? Is it horse?”
“Too soon. Even if it is, it’s only the shaft and getting DNA from that is a bitch.”
“Anything else?” I asked. “What about her cell phone?”
“Last call she made was the night before she disappeared — which we already knew from her phone records.”
“Who’d she call?”
“Ski Tip. Asked Bill to get a take-out order ready.”
“What about the rest of the contents of her little bag?”
“Her prints, on everything. Bag too.” He held my look. “And the Weight Watchers notebook. Her prints. The notes looked to be in her handwriting, but we’re having a documents tech check it all out.”
I nodded. “I, um, know we agreed to keep quiet about the notes but Walter and I had to tell Lindsay.”
Eric’s eyes darkened. “Why?”
“Georgia said she found something. What if she found something about the volcano?”
“What did Lindsay say?”
“Lindsay wasn’t real interested.” I shrugged. “Anyway, Georgia might have meant something personal. And we should consider that. We don’t know when she wrote the notes. Maybe she had financial troubles. Or man troubles. No way out. That could fit.”
“We could come up with a dozen theories that fit.”
“At best, half a dozen.”
He shrugged. “How about your dirt?”
“Stuff’s mostly a volcanic mix.”
“Stuff, Oldfield?” The scar tissue below his left eye quilted. “Love your scientific precision.”
I relaxed an inch. This was more like it. I said, “Trachybasaltic cinders, calcite with a nice rhombic cleavage…”
He put up his hands. “Stuff’ll do.”
“At this point, stuff says Georgia didn’t walk at the glacier.”
“Oh?”
I could have stopped there. But I didn’t. “You know what I’m saying?”
“Help me out.”
Why’s he need help? He’s a crackerjack crime-scene tech. I said, even, “Murder.”
“Murder’s a workable theory. Especially considering the fact that we found her face down, and livor says she died face up.”
“And what about rigor? What does that say?”
“Rigor mortis sets in within two or three hours. Lasts about twenty to thirty hours. Not sure what else it says.”
I said, “How about that it’s hard to move a body in the stiffness of rigor on a horse. So wherever she died, she lay there long enough for livor to fix and rigor to come and go. That makes it over a day. And then she was moved.”
“That’s a workable theory.”
I nodded. And then I told him about the stuff in her mouth, the bizarre pumice-bark mix.
He said, slow, “Got a theory about that?”
“Nothing I’d care to offer.” Just wild-ass guesses.
His look skated to his wall clock, to John’s office, and then he looked back at me with that damned awkward smile.
I said, “And I don’t have a theory for why you were such a jerk on the retrieval. Trying to send Walter and me back.”
He took a long moment, then said, “You got me.”
“I do?”
“I was a jerk. I expected the body to be Georgia and I didn’t know how you’d take it.”
“Why me? Why not worry about the others?”
“Because I don’t like seeing you upset.”
I went cinder red. Was this some big-brother thing? That’s the way we’d begun, way back when we were kids. There was six-year-old me tagging along after Eric and my brother, perfecting the art of annoyance. And then there was nine-year-old awakening me writing Eric mash notes and burying them in the box with my dead turtle. And then, after the summer day that changed everything, there was the both of us waiting for one another to get past pride and hurt. And here we are now, adults who’ve perfected the art of surficial interaction. Shooting the shit, needling one another over the merits of chick flicks versus action movies. If I were to do a forensic dig on our relationship, I would uncover layer after sedimentary layer — eroded events and words deposited over the years and compressed and hardened into rock. As long as we didn’t let that summer day fissure up through the sediments, we’d be fine. That day, along with my love notes, could sleep with the turtle.
I said, finally, “I should get back to work.” I opened my purse and took out the bubble-pack envelope. “I need to get this to a gunpowder lab. Sacramento or Bakersfield, whichever John’s using.”
Eric drew back, the way he shies when something comes abruptly into his field of view from the blind side. He said, light, “Powder in the evidence?”
“Surprised me too.”
He put out his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”
I hesitated. Again. And then my eye caught on the shredded target pinned to his cubicle wall. All bullseyes. I’d seen it dozens of times but for the first time I wondered where he’d gone target-shooting.
And then the obvious hit me.
The biathlon range.
I looked to the hook where his ballcap hung. I’d seen it hundreds of times but now I saw it anew. The US biathlon team logo is stitched over the bilclass="underline" stick-figure skier in a lunging stride, rifle strapped to its back. World Cup races start next week. Eric’s racing, along with my brother Jimbo, and Stobie is the team armorer. I remembered the guys, as kids, trekking up to the Lake Mary biathlon course nearly every winter day after school to ski and shoot. Year in, year out, rifles firing, unburned powder falling into the snow and sinking with snowmelt into the soil.
My stomach tightened.
I remembered Lindsay driving me to the course to cheer my brother when the boys started holding races. She got interested; she got them organized and into the U.S. Biathlon Association. And that’s how Georgia was drawn in. The mayor saw the biathlon as a fine place to divert boys who were into civic mischief. So Georgia and Lindsay — already at odds over the volcano — became uneasy co-den mothers.
Mothers without children of their own.