Dead Dry Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY SARAH ANDREWS

  Raves for the novels of Sarah Andrews

  GET A CLUE!

  Copyright Page

  With love and admiration

  to Susan Landon,

  Empress of Geology,

  who blazed so much of the trail ahead of me,

  and to Robbie Gries,

  who walked that trail with Susan

  and did so much to bring her back to us

  ONE

  I AWOKE THAT MORNING IN THE BLISTERING HEAT OF summer with something tickling my foot. At first I thought it was some kind of bug because I was sleeping in the backyard in the bed of my pickup truck where such creatures are not uncommon, but when kicking the sheet and wiggling my toes didn’t make it go away I opened my eyes to see what it was.

  “It” was Fritz Calder, a six-foot two-inch male of my own species who was smiling at me quite mischievously. Even though I had begun in recent months to grow quite fond of this male, I flinched with surprise. “Fritz!” I gasped. “Where did you come from?”

  A shadow of worry swept across his face. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you, I—”

  “Out for your morning run?” I asked, quickly reassuring him with a smile. I didn’t want him to go away. It was nice to see Fritz in the morning in his T-shirt and shorts, his cheeks flushed with exercise. He looked really good leaning against the side of my truck, the branches of the apple tree spreading out over him, the deep blue Utah sky winking between the green leaves and reddening fruit, but then, Fritz usually did have a way of looking good. In fact, in that moment, goodness suffused that tiny backyard, filling the intimate confines of the cedar fence and my landlady’s tomato plants with a bucolic glow.

  I had known Fritz for a year and a half now, and we had become good friends. Of late I had seen him mostly on evenings when one or the other of us thought up something nice to do together, such as a game of tennis (unbelievable, I know … cowgirl Em Hansen swinging a tennis racket) or a hike in the hills above the city or even a spin in the new airplane Fritz is developing. The plane needed exercise, too. It went like spit and Fritz knew I liked to zoom out across the desert landscape of Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats.

  Fritz smiled back. “Up and at ’em, bright eyes. Seven A.M. and it’s already eighty-five degrees out. Gonna be another scorcher.”

  “Pray for rain.” I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, hugging the sheet to myself with my elbows. I couldn’t remember what I had on underneath it. A T-shirt was my standard sleep attire, but had I kept on much else in this heat?

  “Too hot in the house?” he inquired.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked up at the brick Victorian in which I rented an upstairs apartment. “I’ll bet it roasts up there when it gets this hot, but isn’t it a little unsafe to sleep outside like this? Salt Lake is the big city, Em. You’re a long way from Wyoming. People might come by and see you here.”

  “Joggers, for instance. Renegade flyboys like yourself. No end to the depravity.” I slid a hand under the sheet and discovered, to my relief, that I was indeed wearing a pair of athletic shorts and not just panties. I flicked off the sheet and was pleased that Fritz’s gaze immediately dropped to my legs. “Breakfast?” I inquired.

  Fritz’s lips stretched into a grin. “Whatever you want to call it.”

  Fritz’s jest tippled me into the wobbly sense of confusion in which I had been finding myself with increasing frequency around him. “I meant something like eggs and toast,” I said.

  Fritz’s smile tightened and a scorching blush crept up his throat. “Well … ah …”

  I was saved from thinking up my next volley by the arrival of a second healthy male of the species, good old Detective Thomas B. Raymond of the Salt Lake City PD. The gate squeaked shut behind him, bringing me to wonder how Fritz had come through it without waking me up.

  Fritz turned to face Ray, his smile vanishing.

  Ray nodded at Fritz, his expression equally unwelcoming.

  I said, “Kinda early, Ray.”

  Ray said, “Sleeping in your truck again?”

  “What do you mean, ‘again’ ? You turning into a prowler or something?”

  Ray’s jaw muscles flexed.

  Fritz’s did, too.

  I stood up, put a hand on the side of the truck bed, and vaulted out onto the gravel driveway. “Fritz and I were just getting ready for breakfast,” I announced, realizing too late that saying this would make the collision even worse. “I suppose you’ve already eaten.”

  “Right.” Ray’s eyes were still on Fritz.

  I sighed with irritation. “All right, what’s up, Ray?”

  Ray finally turned to me. “Fresh corpse. Still in place, just the way you like them. Nobody’s touched it yet.”

  I stared at the ground, where I had a nice view of everybody’s feet. “Circumstances?”

  I saw Ray’s weight shift in his shoes as he transferred his gaze back to Fritz. “Point of the Mountain. The gravel quarry. Employee just found it the hard way, with a front-end loader. All that’s sticking out so far is one leg.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, it is not. I warn you, this one’s going to be bad.”

  I scratched my head. “So … a quarry wall collapse. Nailed by a few tons of falling gravel, right?”

  Ray said nothing. I looked up at him. His eyes were closed and his eyebrows were beginning to jump. Not a good sign.

  “A John Doe?” I asked.

  Ray said, “Everyone who works there is accounted for, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s not my jurisdiction. I’m just here to perform a courtesy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was asked to locate the state’s forensic geologist, who’s not answering her phone because she’s sleeping in her truck.”

  “Who has the jurisdiction?” I asked, ignoring his barb.

  “Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “They have a homicide squad?”

  Ray nodded.

  I began to think out loud. “So they’re wondering who the guy is and what he was doing wandering around a quarry in the middle of the night.”

  Ray’s eyes snapped open. “That will be the sheriff’s department’s problem to figure out. Your job is to examine the … what do you call it?”

  “Trace evidence.”

  “The trace evidence.”

  Fritz gave Ray a cocky smile. “The dirt in the dead man’s shoes.”

  Ray’s jaw muscles began to bunch again. He refused to look at Fritz as he told me, “You look at the dirt in his shoes, and then you go back to your office. Stay out of trouble. If you know how to do that.” His scowl deepening, he said, “They need you now.”

  I said, “Give me ten minutes, Ray.”

&
nbsp; “No, I’m going back to my office,” he said. “Identify yourself to the sheriff’s deputy at the gate to the quarry. There is more than one quarry out there. You want the one on the west side of the highway. The others are part of Draper City’s jurisdiction. Take whatever ID you have as a state employee, or they won’t let you in.”

  “Oh, come on, Ray, you want to see this.”

  Ray closed his eyes again.

  I said, “I’ll follow you down there. That will make it quicker for me to get through the gate.” I started toward the back door of the house, leaving Ray to make his decision.

  Fritz fell in beside me on the walkway, bowing his head to get it closer to mine. “I don’t have time for chow anyway,” he said, keeping his voice down.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  “I need to be at the airport in an hour. So this is it, your big chance, huh?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been trying to tell them to let me look at things before they yank the body. There’s so much a geologist can learn from a clandestine gravesite. Tool marks, for instance, and—”

  Fritz patted me on the head. “I know, I know. You’ve told me all about it. You gonna be okay with this guy?”

  “Yeah. Ray’s okay … just got dropped on his head too many times when he was a kid.” I looked up at Fritz and impulsively gave him a squeeze. “Besides, it’s you he doesn’t like.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  I almost said take it as a victory, but instead asked, “You flying a charter this morning?”

  “No, but Faye’s got one, so I’ve got to run the shop while she’s gone. It’s challenging having a business partner.”

  “You mean it’s challenging having Faye as a business partner.”

  “Right. You come out over your lunch hour. We could take a quick flight, get up above the heat for a while.”

  I smiled. “Sure. I’d like that. In exchange, I’ll make you some dinner this evening. That way you still get something to eat out of the deal.”

  Fritz shook his head. “Can’t do dinner.”

  “Is my cooking really that bad?”

  “Cooking? Is that what you call that?”

  I swatted him on the elbow.

  “Nah, I love the way you char hot dogs, and your ‘leftovers surprise’ is the tops, but I have a charter later in the afternoon, soon as Faye gets back with the plane. That guy that likes to run back and forth to Denver all the time.”

  “Be gone overnight on a Friday? Doesn’t that guy have a life?”

  “He pays his bills on time.”

  “Gotcha. Noon it is.”

  Fritz gave me a quick one-armed squeeze, then turned himself around, gave Ray a serene little wave—barely a twiddling of the fingers—and jogged away.

  Which left Ray standing a respectful but irritated ten feet away with one hand clamped on the nose of my truck as if he were about to crush it.

  I let it pass. “Okay, I still have eight minutes. About time enough to get a quick shower and stuff some food into my mouth, okay?”

  “I’ll wait here,” said Ray.

  TWO

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, I WAS STANDING BESIDE A BOOT that still had a foot in it. The foot was attached to a battered and rather flattened leg. I was sorry I had eaten after all.

  We had driven down a long ramp road into the pit, following a conveyor belt constructed to carry gravel uphill to the sorting machines. Loaders and ore trucks thundered away in the far reaches of the workings, hauling away sand and gravel to make concrete for the foundations of the new housing that was quickly filling the Salt Lake Valley.

  The sun was barely on it, but the gravel was already beginning to cook, superheated air rolling off it like the breath of Cerberus. I wondered what that was going to do to the dead flesh that now lay exposed to the desert air.

  The bank of gravel that had fallen had been almost two stories tall. Trying to abstract myself from the corpse, I stared up at what was left of the bank. A mass at least twenty feet wide and perhaps ten feet deep had collapsed. At 120 pounds per cubic foot, or a ton and a half to the cubic yard, that would add up in a hurry.

  “I can’t figger out how it let go,” the heavy equipment operator was saying. “I work these faces all day long, so I know how to be careful. I was just workin’ this one yesser-day, so I remember real good. I swear I dint leave it too tall or over-steep, and you can see where all the rest of them is fine.”

  A woman detective from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department was asking the questions. “Was it like this yesterday when you left?”

  “No! Hell no! It was standing. I just thought it must’ve caved during the night.”

  “So whoever this is wasn’t there when you left yesterday.”

  “I swear it! I tell ya, I got no idea who that is!”

  In contrast to the equipment operator, who was clearly at the edge of his wits, the detective was cool and matter-of-fact. She was about thirty and very fit. She had a halo of strawberry blond hair and loads of freckles and the kind of ease about her that comes from knowing that men will find her appealing. She said, “What time did you say you came to work this morning?”

  “Six,” the operator said. “It’s been so hot I like to get started early, and it keeps the dust down. Wind doesn’t get strong for another couple hours.”

  I looked up over the brink of the quarry toward the mountain front. The constant winds were why the hang gliders liked this area. On any sunny day, there were always at least three hang gliders or parasailers hovering over the nose of rock known as Point of the Mountain. Had this man flown in over the fence?

  The operator was apparently thinking along the same lines. “The place was locked up like always. Really. And them hang gliders stay on the other side of the highway. Just hover, like.”

  I thought of the scrawny fence we had passed coming in. I wasn’t impressed by their security measures.

  The woman nodded. “Okay, I got it. Funny thing that you should choose this pile first thing and find a leg sticking out.”

  The man’s eyes shone with horror. “I went to it because it was all loose, like. Makes it easy to move the stuff. You gotta think of these things!”

  “Just tell me what you saw.”

  “Nothin’! I tell ya, I saw nothin’! I was just backin’ away from takin’ my first load outta the pile and I saw … I saw … it’s a boot, right? With a leg in it, for crissake!” The man’s face was beginning to swell with a nasty cocktail of emotions.

  Ray, who had conjured excuses to hang around, leaned toward me and mumbled, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He was right, this one was bad. My stomach had gotten all spongy on me the instant I saw that boot sticking out from under the trailing edge of the pile of loose gravel. Geologists are too often exposed to unstable quarry and mine faces. But I didn’t want Ray to think I couldn’t take it. I had trained hard to do this job. It was time now to do it.

  I crouched down and focused on the boot. It had old-fashioned hand-sewn welts. The edges to the rubber soles were worn completely round, and there were knots where the laces had broken. When new, the boot had obviously been expensive, but after years of wear it was about worn out, and after being subjected to catastrophic burial, it and the leg protruding from it looked like so much road kill. In fact, that’s what the remains reminded me of most: a jackrabbit after it’s been run over by three or four tractor-trailer rigs.

  I took a deep breath. “Size 45,” I read from the center of the arch. “European sizing.” Knowing what size boots the dead man wore made him a little more real, and that increased my queasiness. I slipped into the kind of flippant, dark humor that can help separate the living from the dead. “Is our John Doe a Juan Gama?” I inquired, murdering a little Spanish.

  The woman looked at me. “Nah, the Spanish make the cork sandals. That boot is from Switzerland or maybe Italy, so let’s call him a Johannes Damhirschkuh or a Pinco Pallino.”

  I g
lanced up at her. The day had just improved immeasurably.

  The woman held out a hand for me to shake. “We haven’t met. I’m Michele Aldrich.”

  “Em Hansen.”

  “You’re the geologist.”

  “Guilty as charged.” I stood up, dug into my wallet, and handed her a business card. “I’m with the Utah Geological Survey. It’s a state agency.”

  “What do you survey?”

  “Huh? Oh, I get it. Yeah, a geological survey is literally that, a survey of the geological wealth and hazards of a state. Most states have one.”

  “And you are their forensics specialist?”

  “Sort of. Most days I’m a mild-mannered, rank-and-file geologist evaluating mineral resources and such, but when a case like this comes in, I’m it.”

  Ray scowled for the second time that morning. He said, “Em, don’t exaggerate. This is your first case.”

  Michele looked from me to Ray and back again with the micrometer eyes of a trained observer.

  I counted to ten but said something defensive anyway. “While this is in fact my first murder case since coming to work for the Utah Geological Survey, it is my tenth overall. More often, forensic geology runs to civil cases.”

  “Civil cases?” Michele inquired.

  “Sure. Someone puts expensive stone tile in a bathroom and it starts to fall apart right away. Did the contractor install actual Italian marble or was it Italian something else—serpentine, for instance? A common misperception. Not a gram of calcium carbonate in it. Or—”

  “You lost me already.”

  “Sorry. Your command of foreign languages suggested—”

  “I was a military brat. My dad was attached to a couple of different embassies. But rock-ese is not one of the languages they spoke there.”

  “Okay …” I turned my attention back to the gravel bank. It was bad enough being grilled for my bona fides by your average cop, but being fried by a smart, young, pretty one with abundant self-esteem had the potential to get downright unbearable. “I’ll try to speak English.”

  “I wish I’d taken some geology,” Michele said.

  I winced, thinking that she was now trying to mollify or, worse yet, play me. Was I that much older than she? I had blown out the candles of my fortieth birthday cake, yes, but what did she think, I was her mother’s age? I didn’t like to be reminded of all the years that had stacked up around me, particularly because there were so many things I thought I’d have done by now. Like marry, and yeah, become someone’s mother, I grumbled to myself, remembering what hadn’t worked between Ray and me. “Geology’s a good time,” I said tersely.