Badwater: A Mystery Thriller Adventure

Book 2: The Forensic Geology Series

by Toni Dwiggins

Genres: Action & Adventure; Mystery; Private Investigators; Female Sleuths; Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

• DANGER IN THE DESERT •

Death Valley earns its name when a terrorist threatens to unleash lethal radioactive toxins--in America's most fragile national park.

Forensic geologists Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws embark on a perilous mission to find and stop the terrorist. But this hunt pushes them to their limits. The summer desert is brutal. The material they seek is hotter than the desert in August--and they are each particularly vulnerable to its effects.

As the hunt turns dangerous, Cassie and Walter learn that they are up against more than pure human malice. The unstable atom--in the hands of an unstable man--is governed by Murphy's Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

And it does.

• All books in the series are complete novels, and can be enjoyed in any order. •

Release date: November 10, 2013

Print pages: 372

Sample

PROLOGUE

 

What Sheila Cook saw in the desert dirt made her want to run.

But she controlled herself.

And then she took a big step backward, keeping an eye on the material, as if it was alive, as if it could still reach her.

Strike her like a snake.

She looked around to see if anybody had noticed her backpedalling. There were two guys over by the fence but they weren't looking her way.

Her heart raced.

She told herself there was no need to panic. After all, she was a trained professional. She'd worked this job for over a year and earned a reputation—the cool chick. She hated being called a chick but she was one of the few women working this job and it was easier to just be a chick than to make a fuss about it. She liked being called cool, because she'd had to work hard to get to the point of being cool while doing this job.

Way too easy to get rattled, thinking about the material she worked with.

Most of her co-workers didn't seem to worry. Probably didn't think too much about the job.

It was Sheila's curse to think too much.

Her imagination was famous, in her family.

Now that she had moved away from the material, she forced herself to look more closely. She'd seen this stuff in a training video, although there of course it was held in a container and not spilled.

Here, in the dirt, in real life, the material actually glowed. She figured that was because of the bright sunlight, that hateful desert sun that was making her squint, that was making her sweat so hard she took off her ball cap and pushed her wet bangs off her forehead. She wiped her face with the back of her forearm. She tried to pluck her work shirt away from her sticky wet skin.

The material in the dirt looked wet. Like it was sweating too.

There was no need to panic but, really, this material should never see the light of day.

And she'd stepped in it.

All of sudden she knew she needed to examine her boots. She looked down. Saw what she had dreaded. Some of the material was clinging there. Was caught in the laces. She hadn't just stepped in the spill, she'd waded in it up to her ankles.

Shit.

Numbers filled her head—she knew this stuff, she'd learned this stuff, she knew what the numbers meant, which numbers she had to worry about.

The numbers, here and now, should be below the panic threshold.

Still, they weren't zero.

Get the stuff off.

She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pants cargo pocket and put them on and then bent to clean the stuff off her boots. She started with her right boot. The material had caked there in the gully under the laces. It looked like some kind of wormy creature, something that lived underground, and then when she brushed it, the material broke apart into separate little beads that seemed to take on their own lives, that went in all directions, and some of them got deeper into the tongue of her boot, got under the tongue, got down inside the boot, and now she was panicking. She sank to the ground and unlaced her boot in a fury and yanked it off and then yanked off her thick sock and somehow the sticky material got onto her bare foot. The skin of her foot showed the stripy white tan—when she finished work she couldn't get out of her boots and into her flip-flops fast enough—but her foot now almost looked like it had gotten sunburned and blistered. She furiously brushed the little beads off her skin, off her foot, and then she scooted backward in the dirt, getting away.

She was sweating so hard she was drenched.

She glanced over at the guys at the fence. Now, they were looking her way.

She tried to see all this through their eyes. Her backhoe was parked at an angle in the slumping trench. The containers were unearthed, and her backhoe had hit them. She hadn't noticed them because the damned trench had collapsed and dirt covered the containers. Still, she should have known they were there. That was the point of the trench.

To bury the material.

Her second mistake was getting out of the backhoe to examine the damage she had done. Procedure was, she should have called health physics to come check it out.

The guys at the fence—just trench jockeys, like her—had seen her sitting in the dirt and now they were coming her way.

Starting to run.

She lifted a hand and waved. It's okay, I'm okay, no need to run.

I'm the cool chick.

But, really, she wanted them to run. She wanted some help here.

* * *

She stood in the trench—far far away from the stuff, which had already triggered a full-out alarm but which was still waiting to be recovered. A mistake had been made. This material was in the wrong place.

She stood with her legs spread and her arms straight out and her teeth clenched.

The health physicist was a big bald guy who'd once asked her for a date. He was all business now. He started at her feet. He ran the wand across her boots.

He whistled—a bad-news whistle.

She'd tried to keep calm and stationary so that he could read the numbers and do his job.

Don't move. Don't talk.

Don't distract him.

But when he whistled she'd lost her cool and given a little body jerk, and when he looked up at her he didn't scold, he just had pity in his eyes.

* * *

Two days later, she started the vomiting.

It got worse before it got better, but she recovered.

You got lucky, everybody said. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

In time, it was.

Seven years later she won the cancer lottery.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

The figure coming down the dark road had an odd gait—and it didn't take me long to figure out why.

I suddenly felt a little naked out here. 

Walter, crouching to stow the donut bag in his field pack, had not yet noticed.

Uphill of the figure, emergency spotlights cracked the night and more could be seen. Big vehicles clogged the road. Adjacent to the road, yellow rope zoned off a large chunk of desert where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. Well uphill of the crash was another roped and spotlighted area, occupied by a hulking crane.

I refocused on the figure. Tall, and yet bulky. I said, “Somebody's coming.”

Walter looked up. “Our man?”

“I assume so. But he's wearing hazmat.”

Walter stood. “That wasn't mentioned.”

“No kidding.”

The oncoming man was moving slowly—perhaps due to the muddied condition of the road. I glanced at the sky, where a cloud roof glowed faintly beneath a hidden moon. Summer thunderstorm—local, wherever precisely local was.

It had been clear twenty minutes ago in Mammoth, our home base in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We run a two-person lab called Sierra Geoforensics and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at the crime scene. We’d headed for this scene truly in the dark—it was four A.M. The FBI sent a helicopter but provided few details. We’d flown east from the Sierra and crossed another range, which meant we’d passed from California into Nevada, then bellied down to the dark desert.

And here we waited, speculating. All too often the geological evidence at the scene got overlooked—this time, though, the FBI considered it urgent enough to bring us by chopper, and that impressed me deeply.

Urgent enough to meet us wearing hazmat.

That really should have been mentioned.

I said, “He's not wearing an air tank.”

Walter peered. “You certain?”

Certain enough that I sucked in my next breath of air with more confidence. “Certain.”

“You have young eyes.”

“Hey, it's more a question of what jumps out at you.”

“Cassie, what jumps out at me in the dead of night belongs in the realm of bad poetry.” He added, “Night vision goes to hell as one ages.”

I shot him a look. In the dark, Walter could charitably be described as craggy. In the brutal light of day, his face was eroded—compressed by the forces of the years and folded by the weight of the job. Not that I was keeping watch. I linked my arm through his. “Yeah, you predate the dinosaurs.”

“At times I feel I do.” His voice was night-thin.

He was looking for me to argue the point but my attention remained on the approaching man.

We didn't know him, hadn't met him—Walter had spoken with a woman from his office on the phone, had been given only his name and rank, Special Agent in Charge—but seeing him now I got the impression he was a worried man.

He drew up. “Mr. Walter Shaws? Ms. Cassie Oldfield?” The hazmat suit encased him from booties to plastic collar line. From the neck on up, he was unprotected. He had graying hair in a salon cut and a beaky face with aristocratic lines. “I am Hector Soliano with the FBI. My assistant spoke with you earlier.” The voice had a faint Spanish accent.

“Yes, a pleasure,” Walter said, “and your assistant should have informed us that we would need to suit up.”

“At that point, there was no need.”

“And now?”

“A precaution. The situation evolves.”

A vein began to throb in my neck.

“Mr. Soliano,” Walter said, “I don’t guess well. Not on four hours sleep. A cup of coffee would help. Barring that, I would like to know what the devil is going on.”

Hector Soliano gave a curt shrug. “And I, who have had three hours sleep, would wish to know this as well.”

Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

“On the surface,” Soliano said, “the attempted hijacking, the shooting...my assistant should have explained this.”

“She did,” Walter said. “But now the situation has evolved?”

“Yes. And that has led us to err on the side of extreme caution.”

And it's like pulling teeth, I thought, for the FBI to share details with non-agency people. I said, “And?”

“And it is best you see for yourself. But first I am most anxious to have you suit up.” Soliano started up the road.

We fell in.

Walter said, “Where, precisely, are we?”

We were, as best I could tell by the castoff of emergency lights, on an alluvial fan leading into the hacked-up foothills of a gaunt range that loomed above.

“We are just off Nevada state highway 95,” Soliano said, “southwest of the town of Beatty. A passing motorist saw ‘something funny’ and notified the Beatty Sheriff, who investigated and notified federal responders. I came out here and determined that we wanted a forensic geology consult. We have you on file. I am told you are worth your fee.”

Walter grunted. We are, we’re here, let’s go put our eyes on the scene.

As we tramped up the road we topped a small rise and got a better view. The truck appeared to have tumbled down an incline and come to rest in the desert scrub.

Walter said, “We’ll want to begin with the tires.” 

“Begin with the driver,” Soliano said. “We must know where the driver has been.”

I found a smile. “He’s been somewhere without the tires?”

Soliano said something under his breath in Spanish.

On the road directly ahead was a big white van, lettered RERT, and Soliano led us toward its open door.

I asked, “What’s RERT?”

“An acronym…” Soliano touched his brow—the difficulty of acronyms in a non-native language. “With the Environmental Protection Agency.”

My attention jumped back to the spotlighted crash scene, which was well uphill of us and the white van. Suited figures had now come into view, poking around the scrub brush near the truck. The figures wore hoods and masks and air tanks.

Soliano snapped his fingers and turned to me. “R-E-R-T. Radiological Emergency Response Team.”

I nodded. Made sense.

And then some.

Emergency evolving.