Dead Dry Read online

  Carlos said, “So why are you here?”

  I said, “I’m eating.”

  Fritz let out an appreciative “Mmm,” as he swallowed his first mouthful, then said, “She hitched a ride with me to tell an old friend that her former husband had been murdered. You know Em, she knows how to party.”

  I swatted him on the knee.

  Fritz bit into his burrito again and moaned with delight. “This is the best burrito I’ve had in ages!”

  I thought, I like this a whole lot better than playing tennis.

  Carlos said, “You and I are going to be friends, Fritz. So tell me about this dead former esposo de tu amiga, Emmy.”

  I did. I gave him the whole nine yards, right down to the calculated weight of the gravel and the resultant thickness of the corpse, just to pay Fritz back for spilling my story. “But you didn’t hear any of this, Fritz.”

  “Any of what?”

  Carlos furrowed his brow. “You shouldn’t be talking about a case this freely, Em.”

  I nodded. “You’re right, of course. But Fritz has a high-security clearance. If I can’t trust him, who can I trust?”

  Carlos shook his head and averted his eyes. He went back to eating, something he did for both pleasure and therapy.

  He was right, I had made a mistake. Was I showing off for Fritz? I quit talking and ate.

  Carlos licked the juice off his fingers. “I should put you in touch with Tim Osner. He investigates clandestine gravesites. He’s a geologist, like you. He volunteers his expertise to the police and sheriffs’ departments here in Colorado. When we find a buried body—or can’t find a burial we know has to be out there—we always call him in. We get so much more information, tighter cases. Always before, we just looked at the corpse, mostly, but Tim finds information for us by the way the corpse was buried.”

  “Such as?” said Fritz.

  Carlos opened a jug of coffee and poured some for each of us. “Actually, I’ve never worked directly with them,” he said. Unlike me, Carlos knew how to keep his mouth shut.

  I said, “Such as … how deep is the grave? That gives a clue about whether the killer was in a hurry, and there are others just in the way the grave is dug. Here’s an example from a case that we can discuss: a young woman was found buried in a shallow grave in the dirt floor of the crawl space underneath her family home. Her brother confessed to the murder but said it was a crime of passion, said she was shaming the family by threatening to marry outside their faith, and that someone had to set her straight. After the coroner removed the body, the investigators carefully removed the soil until they had the bottom of the grave. And they noticed they had desiccation cracks in the soil.”

  Fritz tipped his head to indicate that I should explain.

  I said, “Desiccation means drying. If you have a lot of clay in the soil, it will shrink as it dries and crack, just like a mud flat. They have archaeologists in their crew as well as geologists. And biologists, and all sorts of specialties. So what do the geologists on the team say? ‘Move over five feet and dig another grave, just alike. Time how long it takes the cracks to form.’”

  Fritz said, “And how long did it take?”

  I raised my coffee cup in a toast. “Seven days! A full week. Some crime of passion, eh? He’d been passionately waiting for a week for her to come home and get murdered.”

  Carlos waved his hand dismissively, then licked his thumb. “Murder two became murder one.”

  I slurped my coffee appreciatively. It was piping hot and laced with cinnamon.

  Carlos said, “Now, about this teaching …”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up so I could address my little schoolroom. “What we have here is not unlike what your Tim Osner does. You see, the rock tells just as much of the story of what happened here as the bones do. Paleontologists learned that lesson the hard way. When these rocks were first quarried for bones back in 1877, they just blasted the bones out of the rock—they used dynamite—and left as much rock behind as possible. They considered it waste.” I pointed up the rock face in front of us. “Look what they missed.”

  Fritz said, “It’s all clouds to me, B/N. What am I looking at?”

  I said, “Those bulges in the rock. What do you think they are?”

  Fritz shook his head. “I don’t know. Are they anything special?”

  I nodded. “They’re dinosaur footprints.”

  “No.” He got up and stuck his nose quite close to the rock. “Where?”

  “Look at the way the sandstone protrudes down into the layer of mudstone below it. Something heavy stepped in the mud, and then it was filled in with sand.”

  “I never would have noticed that,” he said.

  “And I can’t fly a jet the way you can. There’s a great deal more information here. The way the rocks are interlayered—sand, mud, sand—tells a story, too. And if you follow the Morrison Formation rocks along the mountain front, you’ll discover that although the whole thing’s bent up into a hogback now, it was once as flat as a pancake. And if you follow it far enough, you’ll find the plant fossils that represent what the animals ate. All this tells the story of what life was like then. And then there’s the story of the animals’ death. That’s right here in front of us.”

  Fritz and Carlos both squinted at the rock.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not something tiny. In fact, you’ve got to step back and sweep your eyes left and right to see it. See how far apart the bones are scattered? And the way they’re in the sandstone rather than the mud layers? Think it through. Mud settles out of slow-moving water; sand, by contrast, equals fast equals flood. These are the bones of animals that came apart after death and got dumped along a sandbar in a river. It must have been one hell of a flood.”

  Carlos sighed. “Magnifico.”

  I continued with my lecture. “In other dinosaur quarries, you’ll find the bones still articulated. Those were dinosaurs that lay down and died without getting swept away and torn apart. Other places you’ll find the bones have been chewed before they fossilized. The kinds of clues are endless.”

  “¡Qué bueno!”

  “Here’s something else you’ll like: In some kinds of fossil remains in particular—oyster beds or fossil trees—we sometimes find the fossilized organisms arranged as they were found in life. A whole fossilized reef, for instance, that was suddenly covered by sand during a huge storm but not displaced. That’s called a life assemblage. Other places, like this, the creatures were swept away from their life zone and dumped in a disorganized heap. This, my dear Carlos, is a death assemblage.”

  Carlos laughed merrily as I led the way up over the crest of the hogback and down the other side.

  Fritz asked, “What kind of dinosaur were we looking at?”

  “Several kinds,” I said. “As I recall, they were your big long-neck guys—Diplodocus and Apatosaurus—and some Stegosaurs and maybe an Allosaurus or two. The first time I saw this hogback, none of these interpretive displays were here. I came with a field trip for my freshman geology class.”

  Fritz winked at me. “Eighteen-year-old Emmy. Now, that would be interesting.”

  “It’s a classic teaching site,” I said, feeling my face grow hotter than the day dictated.

  We walked on until we faced an immense slab of rock that was rhythmically pitted by impressions the size of dinner plates and larger. Fritz said, “Okay, this time I don’t have to be told: These are more footprints, right?”

  “Yes, that’s a whole dinosaur trackway. On the other side of the ridge, we were looking at footprints in cross-section. Here, they’re in map view.”

  Fritz held a hand out parallel to the rock, which the forces of mountain building had bent up at least thirty degrees off the horizontal. “But this rock wasn’t at this angle then.”

  “Imagine a gently sloping beach that went on for miles along a sleepy ocean.”

  Fritz stood with mouth agape, like a big kid. “Dinosaurs coming down to swim.”

 
“No, probably dinosaurs using the beach as a highway. They may have been migrating from south to north and back again. It’s late Cretaceous, so the plants were flowering.”

  “Plants didn’t flower before the Cretaceous?”

  “Flowering plants evolved sometime in the Jurassic, after those dinosaurs died and left their bones back there and before these dinosaurs walked by over here. I forget the exact date.”

  Carlos said, “It was a Thursday, wasn’t it?”

  I laughed at myself. “No, if you adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible, I think flowering plants showed up on the third day, which would have been Tuesday, or perhaps Wednesday, depending on whether you count Sunday as the first day or the seventh, and … or how about es-pañol? En el dia de tres, Los Dios creatár los árboles y todos los otros vegetales y los flores, y todos están bueno.”

  Carlos laughed so hard that tears ran down his cheeks. “Oh, Emmy, I’ve missed you so! Your Spanish is so awful!”

  “Gracias, Carlito.” I pointed at the nearest track, a three-pronged, two-inch-deep concavity in the sandstone, about a foot or so long. “That’s some sort of ornithopod, an herbivore who walked on all fours most of the time. Maybe she could rise onto her hind legs to forage for juicy flowers. It’s thought to have been something like an Iguanodon, your ol’ duckbill gal. Over there,” I pointed at a narrower, pointier track, only nine inches long, “that guy was some kind of carnivore. Perhaps Ornithomimus.”

  Carlos said, “And the point is that police investigators often miss much of the evidence that is right in front of them.”

  I nodded. “Exactamente. Nowadays, paleontologists know to examine the sediments the bones are found in, because it’s full of trace fossils like these footprints, not to mention microfossils, and the minerals themselves say much about the environment the animals lived in.”

  Fritz said, “It tells us not only how they lived, but often how they died.”

  I nodded. “So that, Carlos, mi corazón, is what I’ve been up to, continuing to use the techniques I have learned as a geologist in the service of crime investigations.” I added, “You were good students today. You both get A’s.”

  As we retraced our steps to the Toyota, Carlos said, “I’ve missed you.”

  I put an arm around him, drawing him close. “And I’ve missed you, Carlos.”

  Fritz had wandered ahead a little ways. Carlos put his lips close to my ear and whispered, “I like this one, Emmy. Don’t let him get away.”

  THE AIR OVER COLORADO AND EASTERN UTAH WAS calm, making for a gentle ride home over the mountains to Salt Lake City. T-revor rex snoozed in his seat until the air grew choppy as we came over the Wasatch. Tall clouds were building, portending an afternoon of thunder and lightning.

  Fritz was quiet, except for the requirements of radio communications. He listened to the frequency for Denver Center until that controller handed him over to Salt Lake Center and from there he was handed to Salt Lake Approach, which lined him up for a straight-in approach on Runway 35. This took us within spitting distance of Point of the Mountain. Far below us, several hang gliders floated in the mid-day heat, oblivious to the scene of carnage beneath their feet. I wished I could see back in time, to know who had taken my old colleague to that death assemblage. The image of Afton McWain’s corpse returned to my mind’s eye with sudden force, and I shifted my gaze abruptly to my pilot and friend.

  He was flying with only his left hand on the yoke. The growing turbulence might have seemed jarring to our passenger, but to a pilot trained to fly a two-seat jet off an aircraft carrier into the worst kinds of weather through anti-aircraft barrages, it was nothing. Between slight adjustments to the throttles and an occasional tweak of the electric trim switch on the yoke, his right hand lay calmly on his thigh, only inches from mine.

  An urge rose within me. I thought about it for only a moment before I acted on it. Looking straight forward, as if nothing interested me more than the view out the windshield, I laid my hand on top of his.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fritz smile. He curled his thumb around to give my hand a brief squeeze, then lifted his hand to put the flaps down to their final notch for landing.

  TWELVE

  BY THE TIME I HAD THE PLANE TIED DOWN, THE clouds were growing dark with rain. “Now that I’m on the ground,” Trevor Reed said, “I’m glad the clouds are building. It’ll cool things off this afternoon, and I’ve got a tennis date this evening.” He turned to me. “I checked you out with some of my contacts this morning. You’re not just a geologist.”

  This startled me. “What did you hear?” I blurted.

  “That you work for the Utah Geological Survey. That you are a forensic investigator.” He raised his eyebrows impishly. “And that you weren’t just along for the ride yesterday. You were on a case.”

  I cocked my head to one side. “Who were you talking to?”

  Reed grinned. “A smart man never exposes his sources. But let me know if I can ever help. To an investments specialist, information is everything. I do a little detective work myself some days.”

  I watched dumbfounded as he hopped into his car and drove away.

  Fritz was in something of a hurry, as he was due to pick up Brendan in under an hour. Dropping me at the UGS parking lot, where I had left my car, he got out and gave me his patented one-armed hug but bent into it a little more, giving me the full expanse of his chest. I matched his hug, and then brought up my other arm, hesitated only a fraction of a second, and put it around the other side of him.

  He broke the hug without reciprocating and backed away, smiling inscrutably.

  Had I misunderstood his gestures over the past twenty-four hours? I did my best not to show my uncertainty.

  Fritz turned and strode away toward his car. As he reached it, he turned, facing me fully for just an instant, but in that moment he brought his right hand up to his heart, touched it gently to his chest, and then turned it toward me. With one last smile and nod, he got into his car and drove away.

  I drove quickly home, ran upstairs, unlocked the door to my apartment, dove inside, and slammed the door behind me. For what reason was such adrenaline pumping through me? Fritz was my friend, someone I could trust. I knew I could trust him. And yet I had no idea what he was trying to tell me through his gestures. I had hoped that he would squeeze me close, even kiss me. Had he decided that he saw me only as a friend, just as I was beginning to realize that I wanted more?

  I told myself to calm down and forget what had happened over the last thirty-six hours, but I was tired and wired at the same time. I asked myself again if my growing desire for Fritz was just a reaction to seeing another friend brutally murdered.

  Who had killed Afton McWain, and why? I shuddered, once again reliving the sight of his mashed body. Whoever had done that was deeply angry with him or felt nothing for humanity in general. Was it one of the men at that bar in Sedalia? I mentally scanned their faces, trying to decide which among them might have been covering his native brutality. Even in the heat of the day, I felt cold at the thought.

  A light was flashing on my telephone answering machine. I turned to it, anxious for something else to think about, and punched the PLAY button.

  A familiar voice crackled out of the speaker. “Em, this is Ray. Uh … this is Saturday, and … I’m down at the station, and … well, there’s a woman here who says she knows you and that you’re going to give her a place to sleep. Her name is Gilda. Didn’t say Gilda who, just Gilda. Said you’d know. Um …” His voice grew increasingly discomforted. “Uh … either way could you please give me a call? If not here—I’m off at four—then, uh, at home?”

  I punched in Ray’s direct number at the police station. When he realized it was me, he sounded extremely relieved. “So can I bring her to you?”

  “Well, I think so, but how’d she get to you? Michele Aldrich gave her a card, so shouldn’t she be at the sheriff’s department?”

  “Oh, she was there, all right,
but Michele wasn’t. They wanted to question her, but she’s not their dream date.” The pitch of his voice was rising.

  “Ray, old pal, you don’t have to explain. I got a dose of that woman yesterday, so I read you loud and clear. She’s persistent. Let me guess: She couldn’t find Michele, who I take it isn’t back from Colorado yet, so she’s going after me, and they handed her to you. Ray, my dear, she is an accomplished mooch. So tell me: What did she want from the sheriff’s department?”

  “Can’t talk just now, your friend is returning from the ladies’ room.” He sounded almost giddy, as if the woman was tickling him, which is not something Ray Raymond would enjoy. That would be too much like not being in control of what was happening to him.

  I looked out the window at the dark clouds that hung all moist and threatening over the mountains. The scene was set for trouble. “Bring her over,” I said.

  We signed off and I hung up the phone. I stared at it a moment, relieved to find myself in the middle of an emergency, especially as long as it was something as ludicrous as this. The heap of energy I’d brought home now had a place to run.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, GILDA STOOD IN THE MIDDLE of my glorified one-room apartment, her head swiveling this way and that, taking in the lay of the land. She had walked in like a customer checking into a hotel, dropping her satchel in the middle of the floor. If I’d had a little desk bell for her to ring, I’m sure she would have rung it. Ray had set her cosmetic case next to her, releasing the handle as if it were made of something sticky.

  “Hi, Gilda,” I said. “How was your trip?”

  “Terrible. Do you have any filtered water?”

  “No.”

  “Can you boil some water, then? Perhaps with an inch of raw ginger root in it? If you have organic.” She examined my habitation inch by inch. When her gaze panned onto a print of a Remington poster I’d put on the wall, she scrunched her nose up into a tiny sniff.

  Snob, I thought. I considered showing her the door, but curiosity won out over irritation. In my best East Coast lockjaw accent, I said, “I’ll put the kettle on. Why don’t you take a seat?” I pointed at the only chair in the room, which was right next to the only table. The matching chair was out on the tiny sun porch.