The Forensic Geology Box Set: Mystery Thriller Adventure

Book 6: The Forensic Geology Series

by Toni Dwiggins

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

Synopsis

"I've skipped all other reading in favor of this enthralling world of loyalty, betrayal, and pyroclastic flows." (Amazon reviewer)

---

Mystery. Thrills. Adventure. The first three novels in the series:

QUICKSILVER: Forensic geologists Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws plunge into the dark history of the California gold country, into the dark past of two brothers, into a poisonous feud that threatens both lives and the land.

BADWATER: Death Valley earns its name when a terrorist threatens to unleash lethal radioactive material. The only ones who can stop him are the geologists, and 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.

VOLCANO WATCH: The volcano beneath the geologists' hometown is seething, and the mayor is found murdered with a note saying NO WAY OUT. The fate of the town now rests in the hands of an emergency planner with his own twisted agenda. As the volcano moves toward red alert, the geologists race to prevent 'no way out' from becoming a prophecy.

---

-- All books in the series are standalone novels and can be enjoyed in any order.

-- Book #4: Skeleton Sea

-- Book #5: River Run

Release date: January 8, 2014

Print pages: 943

Sample

 

 

QUICKSILVER

 

Chapter 1

 

The man who had hired us took the lead.

His name was Robert Shelburne and he was as sure of himself as he was of this route.

Indeed, he had a name for this way up the mountain: the rogue route.

That it was.

No trailhead marked the beginning. The path did not exist on any map. It had been blazed long ago, surviving today as little more than a hint. It shot straight up the slope and was so thickly haired with trees and brush that we were nearly hiking blind.

I heard my partner Walter Shaws, a couple dozen feet behind me, muttering words he would not normally speak aloud. Walter and I had certainly hiked plenty of unofficial trails and exploited the terrain where no trails ran at all, in rougher country than this—we're geologists who read earth evidence from crimes and crises, which often takes us deep into the field. Still, we weren’t in the habit of bushwhacking up a mountain without good reason.

Shelburne had given a reason, good enough that we'd signed on to this case, but that did not stop Walter from grousing about the topography.

Didn't stop me from keeping a nervous eye on the landscape.

As we climbed, my senses shifted to the olfactory. A breeze kicked up and brought an odd vegetative odor, which I could not identify. Clearly it didn’t come from the rangy manzanita or deer brush that infested the path. It came from deeper into these oak-and-pine wooded slopes, or perhaps up higher.

Up ahead, Shelburne disappeared into the timber as if he’d been consumed.

For a moment I was disconcerted. What if he took a turn that we, in turn, missed? What if the path branched left and we went right? Bad form for two geologists to lose the client in the field. I shouted, “Slow down!”

From the woods above came the reply, “I’ve stopped.”

Lost his way? I picked up my pace and called to Walter to pick up his and a half-minute later I crashed through the brush and found Robert Shelburne kneeling on the path.

I could not see around him so I asked, “Find something of interest?”

He got to his feet and brushed dirt off the knees of his stylish hiking pants and adjusted the hip belt of his backpack and then, almost in afterthought, he stood aside to reveal the ground where he’d knelt. On the trail was a bandana, moon-silver and dirt-smeared. If this had been a proper trail I would have assumed that a random hiker had wiped grime from his face and gotten careless stashing the bandana in his backpack.

The chance of that, here and now, was not worth discussing.

Walter drew up, winded, and crowded in beside Shelburne. Walter in his battered gear and weathered face looked like he’d been out in the field for weeks. Shelburne in his upscale gear and cultivated tan looked ready for a photo shoot for Outside Magazine. As for me, I was comfortable in aged boots and worn backpack, female and unweathered enough to take notice of Shelburne’s stylish look, acutely aware of the messages we sent with the gear we chose.

Like bandanas.

Walter was now studying the bandana in the dirt. “That’s his?”

“I'd lay money on it,” Shelburne said.

“Meaning what?” I asked. “He flagged the trail?”

“I’d say so.”

“And the color?”

Shelburne cocked his head.

“Silver,” I said, “unless you’d call it light gray.”

“Silver,” Shelburne agreed. “That’s his color.”

“So do you read anything into that?”

“Beyond the color identifying it as his bandana?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Beyond that.”

“I could read things into the color silver until death do us part.”

“I was thinking in particular about his state of mind.”

“The state of his mind,” Shelburne said, “is chaotic.”

Walter cleared his throat. “And yet functional enough. Else we wouldn’t be here tracking him.”

We fell silent, gazing down at the bandana. There was no way to tell if it had been dropped a day ago, an hour ago, minutes ago. The ground was thin-soiled, thick with fallen pine needles. No footprints to be examined, identified.

Shelburne turned to go.

Walter said, “Are you going to leave it there?”

“Message sent,” Shelburne said. “Message received.”

I said, “The message being we’re on the right track? No need to lay money.”

Shelburne smiled but there was caution in his eyes.

Walter picked up the bandana and stowed it in his pack, muttering about good wilderness manners.

We continued our ascent, stringing out along the narrow path, Shelburne picking up his impatient pace, Walter soon lagging, me claiming the middle, keeping track of my companions. I tracked Walter by the sound of his heavy breathing. For the briefest moment the thought floated he’s getting slower in the field. And then the thought went away. I tracked Shelburne by the red of his backpack, which stood out from the green of the brush. I wondered if he was brooding on the color silver. 

That odd smell came again—something loamy and rotting, it seemed, beneath the trees beyond the brush.

I thought, not for the first time today, this is not my turf. 

Ten minutes later the trail jacked hard left and then like a gift the trail and I escaped the besieging woods.

We’d achieved the upper slope and it was paved by a field of bedrock. Rubbed raw by ancient fingers of ice, this field was not going to give us an easy traverse. The rock was too steep for us to take a high line, and I saw no ducked trail marking, no little pyramid of stones to point the way.

Shelburne quickly found his traverse, charging ahead.

I followed.

Bare-bone bedrock would normally lift my heart but not here, not now, not pinned to the rock face with a thirty-pound pack on my back and that bandana on my mind.

I looked behind me and saw Walter, just beginning the traverse. Slower in the field, yes, but sure-footed. Not young, but surely not old.

I returned my focus to the path ahead and judged the bedrock—by its silky golden sheen and crinkly foliation—to be phyllite, a rock one metamorphic step beyond slate, not the rock we were hunting but perhaps a close neighbor.

Ahead, Shelburne had reached a hackly break in the bedrock where a ladder of switchbacks ascended the wall.

Shadows moved across the rock. I looked up. I didn’t much like the bruised clouds darkening the sky. The weather report had forecasted a chance of showers, and we were prepared for the possibility of a full-blown storm. In the Sierra Nevada mountains bad weather was not out of the question, especially in September’s dying days.

By the time I reached the switchbacks, the breeze had begun to bite.

Two switchbacks up, as I was mulling over the idea of digging a poncho out of my backpack to have at the ready should the skies open up, there came a clattering sound like rain—no, like hail hitting a sidewalk—and Shelburne up above shouted “look out” and I flinched. Rock fragments fell, shotgunning the bedrock trail. A slaty sharp-edged piece impaled itself in the tongue of my right boot. It was nearly the size of my fist. It stung my foot. I was glad it missed my head.

Walter, still below on the traverse, called, “Cassie, what happened?”

“Dislodged talus,” I called back. “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. Shelburne in his haste was courting recklessness. I hollered up to him, “Be more careful.”

Shelburne called down, “It wasn’t me.”

“What?”

“It came from up there.”

I tipped my head way back. Several switchbacks above Shelburne there was a ledge, slightly overhanging the trail. You don’t get talus unless it’s been wasted out of a rock face and that meant this bedrock sheet we were climbing continued above the ledge. The ledge was a false ridge, with a debris field hanging on its lip just waiting to be dislodged.

Shelburne shouted, “Henry!”

No sound from the ledge above.

Down on the bedrock trail, the three of us waited.

No answer.

My foot throbbed. I bent to extract the rock fragment. It had torn the leather skin of my boot tongue and bruised the top of my foot.

Conceivably, nobody was up on the ledge flinging rocks at us. There was the obvious alternative. A scampering ground squirrel could have done it, although those were a good number of big rock frags for one small squirrel. Could have been a bear. I once encountered a shifty California black bear patrolling a ridge, waiting for hikers to arrive and shuck their packs and open the trail mix. I knew bears. I'd foregone the trail mix, and the bear and I each pursued our own paths.

“Come on,” Robert Shelburne yelled down at us.

I straightened up.

If we hadn't been following Shelburne's rogue route, hunting an erratic man, I might have written off the falling stones. Unfortunately, mistrust came with the job. If I had been, say, a carrot farmer taking the day off to enjoy a hike in the woods, I wouldn't have given the incident another thought. But I'd spent enough years with Walter encountering the darker side of Homo sapiens and I had trouble reaching for the innocent explanation.

Hell if it was a squirrel or a bear.

Odds said that it was the man who’d left the bandana to flag the trail. And now he’d found himself a vantage point to watch for us. And I dearly hoped he’d dislodged the talus by accident.

If not…what the hell, Henry Shelburne?

 

===================

 

 

BADWATER

 

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.

 

==================

 

VOLCANO WATCH

TOWN OF MAMMOTH LAKES

MONO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

SIERRA NEVADA RANGE, the land of fire and ice

Prologue

Twice, the mayor of my hometown gave me advice.

The first time was when she joined my third-grade class on a snowshoeing trip to chop a Christmas tree. She was nobody’s mom—just the town’s busybody mayor who volunteered for everything. Her name was Georgette Simonies. Call me Georgia she’d boom to any kid who addressed her otherwise, and since she was barely five feet tall, kid-size, we could do that. Out in the wilderness that day, I got myself lost. Trees suddenly thick, shrouded. That snow-blanket silence. Georgia was the one who found me. Next time wear a bell, she boomed.

The second time Georgia Simonies advised me, I was eleven. My little brother Henry had recently died. He had hemophilia, wherein the blood refuses to clot. He’d gotten sicker that year, bleeding out again and again, and my parents stockpiled pressure bandages and I fed him pureed broccoli to replace the lost iron, but his luck ran out when he bumped his head and bled into his brain.

I had night terrors for weeks until my parents, cartoonists, did the only thing they really knew how to do. My mother drew me a cartoon-brother snugly dead in his box. My father wrote the caption: death by God.

My older brother added a comma: death, by God.

I knew better.

A week later Georgia dropped by our house and studied the cartoon and then took me aside. She asked, “You feeling guilty?”

I nodded.

“You couldn't watch him every minute.”

“But I was in charge.”

She put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Nobody blames you.”

“Nobody lets me say I'm sorry.”

She picked up the cartoon and put it on the table in front of me. Gave me a pencil. “Say it that way.”

It took me over a week, and an hour with a thesaurus, but I finally added my own caption: death by inattention.

* * *

When I turned thirty, it was halfway through Georgia’s fifth mayoral term. She’d been in and out of office for twenty-five years, mostly in.

She’s been missing almost five weeks.

I’ve been catching the talk around town. People grumble that she can’t disappear on us now, when it’s a question of the town’s survival. A couple of jerks have made bets: accident, or foul play? A couple of wits say she’ll be back, she wants a sixth term.

As for me, I’m paying relentless attention.

 

 

Chapter 1

It was an icy dawn.

The four of us huddled, shivering, at the Red’s Meadow trail head, nursing coffee, inhaling steam, hands stealing warmth from the mugs. Seemed like we’d continue nursing that brew until hell froze over, which appeared imminent. I drained my mug, slushed it out with snow, and gave the three men a look. They cleaned their mugs. I collected the mugs and stowed them in my pack, along with the thermos. Always the female who brings the coffee.

And then there was nothing for it but to snap boots into bindings and get going.

There’s a body on the mountain. From the report made by the ice climber who’d found it, the body had been there awhile. Until proven otherwise, the police had to treat it as a suspicious death. This recovery mission had already been delayed three days because of bad weather, and another storm was forecast for tomorrow.

The corpse, according to the ice climber, was female.

Could be Georgia.

Nobody wanted to postpone.

The climb was too steep for snowmobiles and the weather too iffy for choppers. We had to ski it.

The four of us strung out on the trail, packing yesterday’s snow. We were a silent group but I chalked that up to the weather, to the stress we’ve been under with a missing mayor and our hometown existence touch and go. No need for talk, though, because I knew this team down to the ground. Detective Sergeant Eric Catlin took the lead, cutting trail the way he worked a crime scene, muscular and precise. Recovery team volunteer Stobie Winder followed, ski patrolman in winter and horse wrangler in summer, thickly muscled as one of his pack horses—and that’s why he was hitched to the sled we’d use as a litter. I followed the sled: Cassie Oldfield, meeting although not beating the local athletic standards, gloomy for a time in adolescence and now only in her dreams, good with rocks like Stobie’s good with horses, precise as Eric in her work, once-student and now associate forensic geologist to the persnickety old man following her: Walter Shaws, the backbone of her life.

Eric set a climbing pace but I set mine by the rasp of Walter’s skis. I had to slow, and slow again, to pace his fitful stride. A gap opened between us and the others and within an hour Eric and Stobie had left Walter and me behind.

Georgia would have been slower, had she come this way.

It was a wicked climb. Back when the old sea floor lifted to become the Sierra Nevada range, it tilted sharply westward, so this eastern flank rises without mercy. We live on a plateau of eight thousand feet at the base of an eleven-thousand-foot peak, and we consider a pass of nine thou low. But this climb goes up to twelve. There are those of us who’d hike it or ski it just for the thrill of it, but Georgia tackled the outdoors only by necessity—to take a school group snowshoeing, to ski to the market when the roads weren’t plowed. She fought off her extra pounds on a treadmill, not on a mountain. It took three million Pliocene years to raise this range and it would take three mill more to convince Georgia Simonies to climb up here for fun.

Which could argue that it wasn’t Georgia up the mountain.

Walter and I turned up the next switchback, a pleat of a trail that would lift us another hundred or so feet.

I glanced up. Eric was positioned on the cliff edge above, watching our progress.

We topped the switchback and found Stobie with folded arms, poles dangling from his wrists.

Eric edged down from the cliff. “Listen up folks, I phoned for a weather update and that storm’s moving in faster. We’ve got to make time. Stobie and I talked about it and we can handle this. Cassie, Walter, why don’t you two head back down.”

Walter stiff-armed his poles for support, recovering his breath, eyeing Eric. 

When my own breathing had steadied, I said, “What the hell?”

“Hey babe,” Stobie chimed in, “getting snowed-in up there’s no joke. Eric and I can boogie-woogie it a whole lot faster.” He shook his rump, waggling the sled.

I regarded Stobie, who’s called me babe since we were kids, me being two years younger than Stobie and Eric, the two of them part of my older brother’s group. Stobie’s always quick with a smile, kidding around, more a big brother than my own flaky brother. Now, he smiled but without any warmth. Perhaps it was the cold. I turned to Eric. Eric’s always slow to make a joke, although easily amused. He has inky blue eyes, the left one glass. There’s a delicate network of scars beneath that eye and when he’s amused the skin there crinkles like crystallized ice. The skin stayed taut.

No, I thought, nobody’s kidding.

“I’ll bag your evidence for you,” Eric said, evenly. “Don’t be territorial.”

“But we are,” I said. “And you’ve worked enough scenes with us to know that.”

There was a thick silence, all of us looking past each other and the air heavy with retained snow.

And then Walter smiled. He has a beautiful smile, in a rough seamed face. Walter himself calls it a geologist’s face: it looks igneous. “Eric,” Walter said, “I will get there when I get there, which I can assure you will be no later than twenty minutes after you get there, during which time you can busy yourself with your own duties, and perhaps you, Stobie, can busy yourself photographing the scene, and as long as neither of you disturbs the geology before Cassie and I can put our eyes upon it, all will be well.”

Eric exhaled a long breath. “Your call.” He did a kick turn and took off up the trail.

Stobie pulled a rueful face, and fell in.

And then Walter and I were left stony-faced, looking at each other wondering what just happened here, why had half the team acted like the other half was downright unwelcome on this trip?

But the first half of the team was already leaving us behind and so we fell in as well. Walter set himself an ambitious pace. I followed, taking note of the ease of his stride. A couple of years ago Walter had suffered a series of tiny strokes; according to his doctor he was now fully recovered. Nevertheless, I kept on keeping watch—and keeping it to myself.

It took me some time to find my own pace. There’s a rhythm to be had on skis, even uphill, a rhythm that takes over the body and relaxes the mind, and I aimed for that.

A couple hours later we gained the last switchback and the land leveled into summit country. A wide snowfield lapped up to the jagged tips of the mountain range. The sole representative of the living was a whitebark pine, branches clawing the ground, battered into submission by ages of steady wind.

One by one, we stopped to add layers of clothing.

Eric started off again, leading the way across the snowfield.

We followed our own trails and our own thoughts.

In the distance, Eric stopped and faced up to the headwall of the range. As I neared, I saw what he was examining: a glacier cupped by a steep rock outcrop. This range was littered with remnants of the Little Ice Age, and this glacier was a larger one. Waves showed its progress, the spacing between the crests marking the amount of ice flow in a year. In places, the downflowing glacier had run over ridges and cracked open into crevasses.

The others drifted in. Walter was winded, but hanging on. I thought of the whitebark pine.

After a rest and power-bar snack, we advanced up the glacier. I anchored for a moment near a crevasse, peering at the bluish ice within, thinking what the world had been like when that old ice was water. Thinking how one could dive right down into oblivion.

“Here!” Walter called. He squatted at the head of the glacier.

We converged and looked down.

This was the bergschrund, where the downflowing ice separated from the rock headwall and opened a cleft. It looked to be fifteen or twenty feet deep. Down there on the floor of the schrund was a sprawled form, sheathed in ice but recognizable nevertheless as a woman. She was face-down, arms and legs askew, and a woman’s generous hips humped up. Someone—I assumed the ice climber who found her—had scraped her clean of loose snow.

Stobie dug a spotlight from his pack and planted it on the edge of the schrund, illuminating the scene down below, highlighting the details.

She wore hiking boots. She wore pants, parka, and gloves, matted with mud and ice. She wore a wool cap, beneath which darkish hair hung out. She could be a perfect stranger. She could be Georgia. Georgia had bottle-brown hair. Georgia had disappeared five weeks ago, in early December. It would have been cold. Not a lot of snow then; the big Thanksgiving ski weekend had been a bust. Georgia had complained to God but it wasn’t until mid-December, after she’d disappeared, that the storms came.

“Hiking accident,” Stobie said.

“We’ll know,” Walter said, “when we establish the career of the body.”

Eric’s eyes ticked to Stobie, the glass eye a tick out of sync. “He means what happened to her, Stobe. How she got here.”

The career of the body would be written in the soils she picked up. I glanced around. Certainly, the basin rock would feed minerals into the glacier, but down here on the schrund floor those soils were locked in ice. She could have picked up basin soil up top, around the glacier—walking, sitting, falling?—before she went into the schrund. Assuming the soil was bared then. There could have been bare patches in early December, before the storms hit. I realized I was already identifying her as Georgia. I stared down at her, my eyes aching with cold, as if she could be somebody else. Whenever, however, she got here, she’d come to the end of her career. The career of the body stank.

“Odd,” Walter said. “The climber noticing the body down there.”

“Nah,” Stobie said. “Ice climber wants to get to that rock wall, he’d be checking out the schrund before he crossed.”

Eric opened his pack. “Let’s get on with it.”

Walter and I began sampling the soil in the glacier basin, digging where it was thinnest beneath rock overhangs.

Eric and Stobie rigged a rope ladder and climbed down to the bergschrund floor and then set to work with ice axes. By the time the sky had hardened into a gray roof, enough ice was quarried to loosen the body.

Walter and I clambered down to join them.

And now that I was down there, I took note that the body was that of a short woman. Just how short was hard to tell, the way she sprawled. The face was obscured, planted nose down into the ice, hair fanned like a frozen drape. I had the urge to sweep the hair back, get a look. Bad scene protocol. I kept my hands to myself.

Eric moved in first, to collect evidence that might jar loose when we move her. He exchanged his ski gloves for latex. He plucked out a thick fiber caught in the waistband, and bagged it. Looked like rag wool—heavy-duty winter wear. Could have transferred from her hat or her gloves. Or could have come from somebody else’s. It looked like the rag wool of my own hat. Or Stobie’s gloves. Or Walter’s socks. Eric moved to the right boot and plucked out something caught at the collar. He studied it. He took his time.

Walter said, “What is it?”

Eric said, finally, “Maybe a horse hair.”

I glanced at Stobie, as if the horse wrangler might have an opinion on the matter.

Stobie was silent. And then, almost in afterthought he whinnied.

That was for my benefit, I thought. Showing me the old Stobie, kidding around when things got dicey. Somehow, it did not ease my mind. I said, “Could she have ridden a horse up here? That makes no sense.”

“Her car was left at her office,” Walter said. “However she got here, she didn’t drive to the trailhead.”

“Maybe she caught a ride,” I said, “with somebody else.”

Eric finished his collection and moved back from the body.

Now it became Walter’s and my show. We gloved up. Walter examined her clothing, her hair. I took the boots. I was numb with cold, too cold to speculate whose feet were in those boots. I grasped the left heel, toe still locked to the ice. There was a generous layer of soil preserved in the waffle sole. With the small spatula I pried loose plugs, then with tweezers transferred the plugs to a sectioned culture dish. I shivered.

Walter cast me a sidelong glance. “Something?”

“Not a good match,” I said, “just eyeballing it.” It was a quick and dirty field guess, but the boot soil did not look much like the basin soil we’d collected. Which argued that she didn’t walk here, that she walked somewhere else and picked up soil in her boots and then was dumped here.

I was talking murder, but yet not out loud.

I heard the ratcheting of Stobie’s Nikon and glanced up. He was shooting a roll of the body. He aimed the Nikon at me, and snapped. “Beautiful.”

On my best day—auburn hair clean and shining, gray eyes framed with liner—I’m not beautiful. Been called pretty. And now…nose red, skin bleached cold, eyes squinting, hair roping out from beneath my wool hat. Knot in my chest, although that wouldn’t show in the photo.

I looked away, at the ribbon-like bands of blue ice on the schrund wall, shimmering in the glow cast by Stobie’s spotlight. Beautiful. And then the wall seemed to lean in and all I wanted to do was escape.

But she was still bound here.

When Walter and I finished our collection, we all worked together to chip away the last bonds of ice. Then we eased our arms beneath the body. It was like lifting some valuable piece of furniture you dare not drop. And now that we held her I could not deny who she was. We eased her onto her back.

There lay our mayor.

My heart plunged.

Arms and legs askew, she looked as if she were trying to run. She was iced all over, smooth in some places and rough where chunks of her glacial bed still clung. Her face was abraded and there was damage to the forehead. The ice on the right side of her face was sheet thin and the texture of the skin there was apparent. White and waxy, like boiled fat.

Walter bowed his head.

Eric pulled out a notebook. His face was pale as hers. “Overt marks of trauma to the head,” he said, voice not his own. “No apparent lividity in the visible skin of the face and neck. Suggesting she didn’t die in the position she was found, face down.” He grimaced, and wrote it down.

I said, fury rising, “Suggesting someone put her there, after she died.”

“Aw shit,” Stobie said. “Shit.”

“Dear God,” Walter said.

None of us took it particularly well.

* * *

We had made our collections on her anterior side—more wool fibers, another horse hair, a few more mineral grains—and we were easing her into the body bag when Walter noticed a bulge in her parka pocket. Eric unzipped the pocket, fishing out a small clutch bag. Shiny vinyl, wild tropical print, pure Georgia. I recognized it. She carried it in place of her big purse, when convenient. Eric unzipped the clutch, dumping the contents onto the ice. Keys, cell phone, comb, lipstick, micro-wallet, pen, small notebook.

Walter said, “What’s the notebook?”

I looked. “Weight Watchers—her pocket guide. Calories and all that.”

Walter indicated the pen. “She wrote in it?”

Eric picked up the notebook and flipped through it. “Yeah. What she ate, some kind of point system.”

I asked, “When’s the last entry?” thinking that might pinpoint the day she died because I knew Georgia damn well wouldn’t have skipped a meal or skipped holding herself accountable, and I waited while Eric flipped to the last written entry and read it, while his face closed up tight. “What?” I said. “What?”

Eric passed it to me. Walter and Stobie crowded in. I read the inked notes, then read them again. It looked like she’d been trying different ways to word something. Mostly cross-outs. Nearly blotted-out, the way you’d slash your pen angrily because you can’t get the words right. I could decipher just found out and then, at the end of the slashed-out section that nearly tore the page, she’d found the words she wanted.

No way out.