Volcano Watch: A Mystery Thriller Adventure

Book 3: The Forensic Geology Series

by Toni Dwiggins

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

Synopsis

• NO WAY OUT •

The mountain town is in trouble. It sits beneath a seething volcano. Its mayor is found murdered, with a note threatening the only evacuation route.

And the town's fate rests in the hands of an emergency planner with his own twisted agenda.

The homicide case is personal for investigators Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws. This is their hometown. They are desperate to save their families and friends. To do that, they must discover how the mayor died—and what she found.

Their field is forensic geology, and they can track the mineral clues to find out where she went.

As the volcano moves toward red alert, Cassie and Walter 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. •

Release date: November 12, 2013

Print pages: 388

Sample

 

PROLOGUE

TOWN OF MAMMOTH LAKES

MONO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

SIERRA NEVADA RANGE, the land of fire and ice

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.