Dead Dry Read online

  “I can see that it might have been an addition to my criminal justice major,” she said evenly.

  She’s not deferring, I decided. No, she’s setting the ground rules. You’re there, I’m here, you do this, and I do that.

  Ray observed us intently, as if watching a good tennis match. I wanted to kick him in the shins.

  “So what do you look for?” Michele inquired, turning her attention to the collapsed embankment. She had her pen poised, ready to take down evidence.

  I decided grudgingly that I admired her style. “Geology has its own kind of clues,” I said. I began wandering along the foot of the bank, examining it from a respectful distance. “Most of the landslides I’ve looked at—recent ones, anyway—will have a sharp edge to the top of the slide block. That’s what we call the mass that fell. See? It rotated and flowed a bit as it came down. That’s typical. The toe of the slide shoots out away from the cliff—in this case spreading into a loose fan—and the top kind of sits down on top of it, riding it down. But I look up there and I don’t see a sharp edge to the cliff, so I wonder: Is this normal? Would sediment this loose hold its shape as it slides? Or did something other than gravity or the vibration of passing trucks set off the avalanche? When we’ve got an unexplained corpse lying underneath it, we have to ask these questions.”

  “You can tell if someone triggered this slide?” Michele asked.

  “Maybe. It’s gravel. Loose stuff.” I shrugged my shoulders. “So I compare it to other gravel banks I’ve seen over the years. I look first at what looks right about this one, and then I can begin to spot the features that might have been changed by human activity.”

  Michele said, “The natural versus the unnatural.”

  “Well … we’re part of the natural world, too, you know. But what you’re saying is that we’ve learned to influence our surroundings by machine. Or explosives. But someone wanting to trigger a slide could’ve just stomped on the top of the cliff for all I know, although he’d be risking getting caught up in it himself. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We don’t even know who our John Doe is. For all I know, he had every reason to be here and just got unlucky.”

  Michele raised a reddish eyebrow. “I somehow doubt that.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So what do you do next?”

  “I look at the way the grains of gravel stacked up—what we call its bedding planes—and look at that pattern within the context of the greater geologic picture. You ask how the corpse got here, and I ask how this gravel got here.”

  “Okay, how did it get here?”

  “It was deposited by rivers flowing out of canyons in the mountains.”

  Ray decided it was time to stick his nose into the conversation. “An alluvial fan,” he said, returning one of the terms I’d taught him back when we were dating.

  I nodded. “And in this particular case, the fan was building into a wide, deep lake.”

  Michele glanced around at the dry quarry walls that surrounded us. “There was a deep lake here. Okay …”

  “No, really. Nowadays, the shore of Great Salt Lake is what, twenty miles from here? We call it ‘Great,’ but it’s really just a little puddle next to what it was during the last Ice Age. You see, when the climate was cooler, things didn’t evaporate as much, and Great Salt Lake grew much, much deeper and covered an area at least five times as big as today—and we called it Lake Bonneville. The glaciers that filled the valleys up in the mountains above here acted like great big bulldozers and sanding machines, grinding away at the valley walls and floors as they slid downhill under their own weight. As the glaciers melted, they left all the ground-up rock and gravel in the bottoms of the valleys. The rivers driven by the melt water carried the gravel out of the mountains, and where the rivers hit the lake, they dropped their load. When streams slow down, they can’t carry as much sediment along.” I pointed at the notch in the mountain front from which it flowed. “There was a great, rushing stream at this particular position, and it dumped a lot of gravel, as you can see.”

  Ray blinked.

  Michele said, “Okay.”

  I turned toward the kill site, where that horrifying leg was sticking out from under a different geometry of gravel. I cleared my throat and forced myself to continue. “So because I know how this gravel was deposited, I know what the geometry of its bedding planes ought to look like.” I pointed at the wall that had collapsed. “This gravel was deposited by a natural system, by moving water. It was wet, and the water was moving downhill from the mountains into the Salt Lake Valley … or, more accurately, into Lake Bonneville. Wet gravel has a lower angle of repose—the slope at which it will stack up—than dry. See those big lines running diagonally through the bank? Those are the bedding planes I’m talking about. Those formed as the gravel avalanched out of the foot of the river into the lake, one layer deposited on top of the next.”

  Now I pointed at a stockpile the heavy equipment operator had pushed together some other day. “That gravel was deposited in a heap by machines driven by humans. The machines drop dry gravel straight down from buckets. The gravel avalanches out every direction from a central point and stacks up at a much steeper angle of repose. See? The angle of repose of dry gravel is about twice that of wet.”

  I was beginning to run out of steam. Pretty soon we were just going to have to uncover the rest of that corpse, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I turned and faced the music—literally. The wind for which Point of the Mountain was famous was beginning to pick up, stirring the hot, rising air of the quarry. Little rivulets of dry sand cascaded down its walls and blew into my eyes.

  Michele brushed grit from her face. She said, “Okay … wet, dry …”

  “The bedding angles are stacked up like fallen dominoes. The tops of the dominoes show you where the surface of the lake was.”

  “Okay.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ray shoot an amused look at Michele. Michele deftly lowered one eyelid and raised it again. This was all I needed: Ray making light of me to flirt with the sheriff’s detective. I said, “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be, Ray?”

  “My shift ended half an hour ago.”

  “Just my luck.”

  I was trying not to look, but I saw him smile.

  I pointed again at the bank. “This gravel is still standing because it’s damp. As the quarry face dries, it will slowly become unstable, but the question is, how fast?”

  Technicians had gathered around the jutting boot, taking photographs. Others were getting ready to dig.

  I strode over to them. “While you’re digging, I’d like to get some specific pictures,” I called out, “and before you start, it’s critically important to get a look at the top of the bank before anyone disturbs this ground. More could come down. Obviously, the static load alone is enough to crush a man, and you don’t want to find out what a dynamic load can do.”

  “What?”

  “Static means standing still. Dynamic equals moving.”

  The men who had been crouching by the pile quickly straightened up and stepped back.

  Michele caught up with me. “Are you going up top now?”

  “No, I’m not offering to hike up there and find out the hard way whether there are any cracks in the top of the bank. Damp gravel can stand a long time, but uh …” I waved a hand at the leg.

  Michele said, “I’ll get the equipment operator to bring that truck over here. You can stand on top of the cab.”

  The man brought the truck over, and I scrambled up. In the rising wind, the effort made my lungs feel like I was inhaling hot sandpaper, but I was able to see what I needed to see. The sunlight and shadow picked out slight depressions in the gravel, but were they footprints? I couldn’t tell. I looked for the kind of cracks that would presage a thousand more yards of gravel about to tumble down into the site and saw none.

  The stifling wind dried the sweat on my brow, gluing my hair to it and filling it with grit. From the
top of the ore truck, I could just see the tops of the mountains to the east, and the first hang gliders beginning to hover. “What do you think?” I asked the equipment operator. “Does it look safe to you?”

  The man tensed at the question. “I don’t know … okay to work by machine, but I sit up high, where I don’t get hit.”

  “Gotcha.”

  A second man joined us, and introduced himself as the quarry’s safety officer. He said, “I don’t see any immediate threat of another collapse, but still, we should proceed with caution. If your guys cut a bank more than a few feet high, it’s too dangerous. That’s all it takes to knock a man off his feet, and you’d suffocate before we could dig you out. So if it gets very deep at all, you’ll need to bring in shores to hold it up. We don’t want anyone else getting killed around here.”

  I nodded, and we climbed down to instruct the technicians. The men proceeded with shovels, taking it slowly, and, considering the weight of each shovelful and the quickly rising heat of the day, seemed glad to do it that way. It took an hour to completely uncover the body, given the interruptions for photographs.

  I watched for bedding, evidence that the pile had in fact slid to the place we found it, rather than being shoveled into position. To do this, I had to dodge in and take close looks at the way individual pebbles had lodged against each other. The risk of further collapse of the bank kept me sweating even more than the heat.

  At last the body—or what was left of it—was fully uncovered and more thoroughly photographed than a movie star on a red carpet. It was an odd sight: it lay—twisted and in most places decidedly flattened—on its side, facing the bank, with its knees brought up, as if in sleep. Wherever the skin was exposed it had been battered to a pulp by the avalanching gravel. There wasn’t much left of the face.

  “Looks like someone used a sledgehammer on him to get his teeth,” one of the technicians declared. “That sure screws up chances for a dental ID. But there’s relatively little blood anywhere else, which suggests that the man was dead before his body was crushed by the falling gravel.”

  Michele said, “Well, unless he somehow climbed the fence into the quarry and died of natural causes in the precise location a collapse would later happen to occur, he was killed somewhere else, brought here, dumped, and the avalanche was triggered to hide his corpse.”

  “I concur,” I said. “His hands look weird. What’s up with that?”

  The technician lifted a hand with the end of his pen. “The flesh on the pads of the fingers have been removed. No fingerprints. Someone really did not want this guy identified.”

  “Someone who worked for the federal government or did military service,” Michele said.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  She held out her own hand, palm up, and wiggled the thumb. “To get a driver’s license, all you have to do is give a thumb print,” she said. “So being this thorough—taking them all off—means our killer has had the experience of having all of his fingerprints taken as a set. The feds do that.”

  Ray said, “Or he’s done time somewhere. That makes it a professional hit.”

  Michele said, “Who’d hire a pro who has a record? And smashing the face … that suggests anger. That’s personal.”

  “Quick and dirty,” said Ray. “Efficiency. That’s a pro.”

  Michele asked, “What do you think, Em?”

  I pondered a moment. “I agree that whoever did this was brutal. The fingerprints … maybe that argues ignorance of fingerprinting processes. But what interests me is what the corpse is wearing.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Old-style hiking boots with knotted laces, outdoorsy slacks … that color was probably called ‘mushroom,’ very trendy … the fabric is that easy-clean, quick-dry stuff … I can just see them on page six of some catalog advertising togs for well-to-do travelers, captioned, ‘Washable in your third-world adventure hotel sink or wash as you wear in your Balinese waterfall!’ And that shirt looks like one of those ones that’s supposed to screen out UV rays, or at least it would have before it was shorn to bits by the avalanche. This outfit cost money, except that the boots are past due for replacement.”

  Michele said, “You’re good.”

  I added, “So I’m thinking he’s someone who had money but doesn’t anymore. And I’m thinking he’s someone I would know.”

  “You do?”

  I said, “He’s dressed the way I am—or would be, if I had the cash. He’s an outdoorsman who has used his boots as they were designed to be used: for hiking. They don’t make boots like that anymore, and what’s left of his hair is gray, consistent with buying boots like that new in his twenties. Let’s say he’s now in his late fifties, but his work still takes him outdoors. That’s a geologist or perhaps a biologist. If he was a forester, he would have worn a different style of boots and some kind of uniform. An engineer would not have worn a shirt that style, and …” I broke off to address myself to the technicians, who were beginning to collect evidence. “Make sure you put plastic bags over his boots, okay? The welts and treads harbor soil and grit that might have come from somewhere else. And bag the hands, too, please, if you think there’s anything left underneath those fingernails.”

  “Gotcha covered,” one of the technicians said.

  The other technician stepped forward to search the corpse for identification. He gently peeled back the collar. “No laundry marks,” he said, “but this isn’t the type of shirt you send out to the laundry. Not an obscure brand, so no reason for the killer to remove the label, I suppose.”

  Michele said, “I don’t suppose he was kind enough to leave the wallet.”

  The technician rocked the body as he reached for the obvious first place to look—the back right pants pocket—giving the fabric a slight tug in the process. A large piece tore away, revealing the corpse’s right buttock, which, having been turned away from the flying gravel, was intact, but at first glance still badly bruised.

  The technician gingerly withdrew his hand. “No wallet,” he said.

  “Not fond of underwear,” Michele said. “And what’s that? A birthmark?” She stepped closer and bent to look. “Or … a tattoo?”

  “A bruise from the assault, perhaps,” said the technician. “If he’s only been out here less than twelve hours, lividity won’t have set in yet.”

  Now Ray got into the act. “No, that’s a tattoo, all right. It looks like … a map or something. Like North America, only … it’s cut in half on the diagonal.”

  I stepped into a position where I could see, too. It was indeed a map of North America, but as it had appeared during the Cretaceous Period one hundred million years ago, “cut in half” by the great shallow seaway that once stretched across the continent from northwest to southeast. Suddenly my head rang and felt light. “I know this man,” I said, my voice coming out very small. “I’ve … I’ve seen this tattoo before.”

  “You do?” said Ray. “You have?”

  “Who is it?” asked Michele.

  All eyes turned to me just as I desperately needed privacy. I sat down on the edge of the shallow trench they had dug around the corpse and put my head between my knees, fighting a wave of nausea. I tried to make words, but they had somehow gotten thick, and my lips had turned to rubber. Even in the cloying heat, everything felt very cold and far away.

  Michele put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Do you know his name?”

  “Afton McWain,” I said, trying to lift my head without it falling off my neck. “I knew him in the oil business. Denver.” The ringing in my ears increased, and I pushed my head back toward the ground.

  Michele went into a crouch. “Take your time,” she said. “So you’re sure this is him?”

  I said, “Is there a little red star right where Denver would be? Look on the left shore of the seaway, about halfway up.”

  “The what?”

  “The seaway … that split in the map. Is there a star?”
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br />   The technician said, “Yup, a five-pointer.”

  “That’s our boy.”

  I started to shake. My mouth began to run, a poor attempt to eject the shock. “Afton is—was—famous, or infamous, depending on who you ask. Everyone knew him. He made sure of that. Big ego. But really smart. Excellent geologist. Really knew his rocks. He discovered several oil fields. Regular wizard. Wanted to be the next Bob Weimer. You don’t know him, but he’s the grand man of all that, and Afton worked hard to try to match him.”

  I pointed a shaking finger toward the corpse. “That tattoo was kind of a badge of honor, like he claimed the Cretaceous. That’s how old the rocks in the D-J Basin were. Are. Denver-Julesberg. It’s—it’s—a—the—what you call the geology—the structure of the Denver area. Big down-warp in the rocks, like a big dish. A basin. Am I making any sense at all?”

  Michele said, “You’re doing fine. So … what? He was into skinny-dipping or something?”

  I realized that she was giving me an out, a reason for having seen him naked. “I went on a field trip he led once. Colorado Scientific Society, five or six years ago, the western slope of Colorado. He was the big cheese for the Cretaceous rocks. The trip wound up near some hot springs, you see, and he … arranged for everyone to …”

  “Quite the show-off,” she said.

  I said, “I’m from Wyoming where they teach us to keep our clothes on at high altitudes, so we don’t get sunburned.”

  Michele eased herself onto the bank next to me. “I’m thinking more and more I missed something by not taking geology.”

  I was beginning to tremble. I knew that tears weren’t far away. “Like I said, geology is a good time …” I knew I was having a reaction to the stress of trauma, but that didn’t stop it from coming. I knew also that the shock of seeing this particular old colleague squashed a few inches thick was not all that was causing my reaction, and that made me feel even more out of control. The tears began to spatter from my eyes. “I didn’t know him all that well, but his wife was a chum of m-mine. Is a chum. Unless … unless she’s under there somewhere.”