The Rivers Run Dry Read online

  “You okay?” he asked. “That was a close call today.”

  I hung up.

  Seconds later, the phone rang. But the number did not show up on her caller ID. It was blocked by the sender.

  Because all those numbers were blocked. Mine. Lucia Lutini’s. Byron Ngo’s. Every special agent in the FBI had a blocked ID.

  Including Jack Stephanson.

  JS.

  chapter nineteen

  A hundred miles into my drive to Spokane, the painted yellow lines on the highway began floating off the black pavement and flying into my windshield like javelins hurled by an invisible adversary. I leaned my head out the open window, breathing in the scent of sage that tumbled across the hard basalt of eastern Washington. The draft snapped me awake, I pulled my head back into the car.

  But the javelins returned and I finally surrendered on the outskirts of Ritzville, parking at a truck stop. When I turned off the engine, the Barney Mobile shuddered violently, hissing like a snake. I told myself to check the fluids, then leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  When I woke up, it was past 2:00 a.m. and the parking lot was deserted. Inside the restaurant, a lone waitress in a dingy tan uniform slapped inverted ketchup bottles, squirting the remains into one bottle. She carried it to my table by the window and took my order for a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake. I ate the meal without ketchup, listening to the call-in radio program playing somewhere behind the counter, then carried an extralarge coffee to the car.

  Dawn was still hours away, but the lights around the truck stop created a false gray sky. As I passed the gas pumps, one of them was beeping, beeping, beeping, apparently signaling the pump was ready. But there were no cars around. And there was no attendant in the cashier’s booth between the concrete islands. I pulled a paper towel from the box by the pump, listening to the tinny sound speakers embedded in the metal roof, a wordless tune playing a repetitive rhythm like the song was stuck. I glanced around. At the far edge of the concrete pad, a black eighteen-wheeler idled, its amber auxiliary lights glowing. But I couldn’t see a driver in the cab.

  Setting my coffee on the ground beside the Barney Mobile, I lifted the car’s hood, feeling a desert breeze blow across my shoulders, sending a shiver down my spine. I pulled out the dipstick, wiped it on the blue paper towel, reinserted it, and found I was a quart low. I glanced at the attendant’s booth, still empty. Maybe they sold oil inside. I grabbed the hood, letting it drop to close.

  Then I turned.

  The man stood behind me. He wore a checked flannel shirt. His white beard had the fibrous appearance of torn cotton bolls.

  “You by yourself?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Middle of nowhere,” he said. “Stuff happens.”

  My right hand moved toward my hip.

  “I’m parked over yonder.” He pointed at the idling eighteen-wheeler. Something was in his hand, his gnarled fingers twisted around it.

  I unsnapped my holster.

  “Thank you for your concern,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

  “Well now, I don’t know about that. God told me to come over and talk to you. I told him, ‘God, I just drove twelve hours and I got another twelve tomorrow; I want to sleep.’ But God just kept kicking me and kicking me. Finally I got up and walked over here. You can’t argue with him.”

  I leaned forward, pretending to look at his truck again, my palm on the hard stippled butt of the Glock. I still could not read his face, and when he moved his hand I lifted the gun, the barrel pointing at his forehead.

  “Whoa, there.” His right hand was raised. “I’m not looking for any trouble.”

  “Turn around and walk toward your truck.”

  “Hey, listen, I just want to give you something.”

  “Step away from my car.”

  “But God said I gotta give you this. Don’t you understand?”

  “You don’t understand. Move away from my car.”

  He raised his hands, peering up into the night sky. He was nodding his head, the ragged edge of the white beard bouncing on his shirt collar. “All right,” he said, “all right.” Then he lowered his chin, looking at me. “You got a mighty nice gun and I don’t know why you need this with it. But God’s telling me he wants you to have it.”

  “Turn around,” I growled. “Keep walking until you reach your rig.”

  “Now hold on, sister.”

  “I’m not your sister.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m just gonna put this on the ground. Okay? I promise, that’s all. And then I’m going to turn around, real slow, and walk to my truck. You can pick it up when I’m gone. Just don’t shoot me. I got a family. I got grandkids.”

  His hands stayed in the air as he bent his knees, lowering himself then setting the object on the concrete pad. His hands returned to the air as he straightened. “Now you got it and I’m leaving. I done what he asked.”

  He turned and walked bandy-legged across the pavement, past the empty cashier’s booth, past the entrance to the restaurant. When he reached the eighteen-wheeler, he grabbed a vertical chrome bar beside the cab, hoisting himself inside and slamming the door. The Glock was still in my hand when I picked up what he left.

  It was a knife. The wood handle was carved and shellacked, and one word had been burned into the handle, running vertically like an acrostic. TIGER, it said. I pressed the small button on the handle. Six inches of steel flicked out. Touching my thumb to the blade, it felt sharp, honed to slice. I stared across the parking lot.

  The truck was moving, rolling across the pavement to the highway’s entrance. I watched it drive away, headed west toward Seattle.

  I arrived at the state lab just half an hour later and waited outside, catching a nap in the Barney Mobile. When dawn broke, I opened my eyes to a morning that offered autumn’s grace—sparkling frost and warm sun. I climbed out and walked into the lab, a uniformed trooper holding the door open for me, nodding his blue hat at my thank you. I signed in at the front desk, received a visitor’s pass, and carried Suggs’s tennis shoes and the soil from Stacee Warner’s boots and car to the forensics lab.

  If I had to pick one quality that distinguished great forensics examiners from the merely good, it would be intellectual curiosity. Every good forensic examiner was careful. They were diligent. Focused. But the great ones welcomed the unknown with enthusiasm. For them, the unknown was a thrill waiting to happen. Last night, when I called Peter Rosser’s cell phone as I left the casino parking lot, I asked for another expedite. I told him it was new soil, and part of the puzzle I hadn’t figured, and I needed answers quickly. He didn’t hesitate. “Can you get here tomorrow morning?” he asked.

  Now he handed me the chain of custody forms and accepted my handwritten note outlining the K and Qs in these new soil samples. He slipped on latex gloves and pulled white butcher paper off a roll bolted to the wall. When my cell phone rang, he didn’t seem to notice. The puzzle had him and I stepped to the other side of the lab, where handmade posters listed every animal in Washington State along with a sample of its fur. Bear, deer, moose, raccoon, bobcat, cougar, skunk . . .

  I looked at the caller ID. I repressed a groan.

  “Hi, Claire.”

  “Your aunt said you’re ready to apologize.”

  “At the moment, Claire, I’m a little busy.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk fast.”

  I glanced at Rosser. He was hunched over the butcher paper, spreading out the soil from Stacee Warner’s boots with a sterilized scalpel. He placed a ruler beside the soil for scale, took several digital photographs.

  “Hello?” Claire said.

  “Yes, Claire, what do you want?”

  “You’re looking for a place of fire,” she said.

  “You already said that.”

  “But I didn’t get to explain. It’s not just fire. It’s the place of fire, that’s your answer. I’m having Technicolor spectacles about this, and they would blow your mind because y
ou’re not a trained professional like me. I have experience with these things, so I’m okay.”

  “Thanks for calling, Claire.”

  “And another thing,” she said. “I keep seeing these rocks. They’re all stacked up. I think it’s a grave marker. Maybe she’s dead.”

  “Goodbye, Claire.”

  “Are you on a cell phone?” she suddenly asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because I can feel the sound waves zipping back and forth. I’m getting a headache from it. I have to go, good-bye!”

  I closed the phone. The lab had the steady background noise I loved, the sluicing rhythm that sounded like maracas. The sifter in action. Rosser had turned his attention to Suggs’s mudsplattered tennis shoes, scraping the rubber treads and placing the soil into another brass sieve. When the first sample finished sifting, he took it out and used a pair of tweezers to lift one rock fragment from the soil. He placed a drop of epoxy on a glass slide, deposited the fragment on the glue, waving it gently in the air, drying the epoxy as he carried the slide to a stainless steel sink and flicked a switch before pressing the rock against the wet stone grinder. It spewed distilled water droplets on Rosser’s safety goggles, and he ground the rock to paper thinness, then carried it back to the microscope on his desk. He took a seat.

  “You’ve got a distinct coarse-grained igneous here.” He spoke into the microscope, his back to me. “It’s a peculiar green and I saw it in that other sample you gave me.”

  He twisted the scope’s knobs and I waited. He didn’t need questions.

  “Same markers in this stuff as that other. Same insect exoskeletons.”

  “Insects?”

  He spun around on the swivel chair, placing one pawlike hand on each knee where the corduroy had thinned from wear.

  “Washington’s had a drought for several years,” he said, “and it’s stressed out the trees to the point where they’re susceptible to certain pathogens. Since our winters haven’t been as cold as they used to be, all the hostile insects have a higher survival rate. Which brings me to this soil sample.”

  He got up, walked across the room, and pulled out a drawer full of U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps. He peeled off his latex gloves, stuffing them into the back pocket of his trousers, and licked a finger to turn the map pages.

  “Here’s the quadrangle east of Seattle,” he said, when he came to the map. “You see this part, the western side of the Cascades?” He tapped his finger on the spot. “The forest over there is getting wiped out by the mountain pine beetle.”

  “The exoskeletons are from pine beetles?”

  Mountain pine beetles, he explained, burrowed into the tree bark, killing the trees but leaving them standing, setting the stage for forest fires. The fires further weakened the forest, and the relentless bugs chewed into new vulnerable trees, repeating their destructive cycle until the forest was wiped out.

  “That’s what I found in both samples, pine beetles,” he said. “That only narrows it down by so much. The key is that metamorphosed gabbro under the scope.”

  Gabbro meant dark and coarse-grained igneous rock. It formed when molten magma got trapped beneath the earth’s surface and cooled slowly into a hardened mass without any definite crystal forms.

  “But I thought coal and arsenic were the markers in my sample. You didn’t say anything about gabbro.”

  “I’m talking about the other one,” he said. “That soil you brought in for what was his name, Stevenson?”

  “Stephanson? Jack Stephanson.”

  “Right. Stephanson.”

  I frowned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not questioning your procedures,” I said. “But can you check the mineralogy in the soil from the tennis shoes?”

  He pulled the finished sieve sample from the shaker. I didn’t want to appear hovering, so I walked over to the window, staring out at the small courtyard. A maintenance worker wearing denim coveralls waved his leaf blower at the ground, his work boots melting the frost on the grass and leaving dark impressions from his steps. He worked dead leaves around a cultured stone table, and my mind flashed to the sound of Jack’s voice on Stacee Warner’s phone, “You okay?” And what did he mean it was a close call? Did it have something to do with the soil from Mount Si matching the soil in Stacee Warner’s boots, in the wheel well of her car?

  “Raleigh.”

  I walked over to Rosser’s desk.

  “This clay, I’d know it anywhere,” he said, “I stepped in it once and it almost took my boot clean off.”

  “Where?”

  “It was a case that came into the state police, some vandalism of mining equipment. There’s a company that mines this clay for bricks, and I had to get the samples to link the suspects to the crime scene. It took me weeks to get this stuff off my boots. And there’s only one place it’s exposed. Want to take a guess?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Cougar Mountain in Issaquah. It’s the same area where your coal and arsenic show up.”

  Most clays were notoriously indistinct; they were all basically sticky brown or gray mud, unless the soil carried a particular chemical element. “Do you have a marker for it?”

  “Not yet. But I’m gonna find one.” He stood up and placed some of the clay in a glass petri dish. Then he carried it into the small side room with the scanning electron microscope, the room that sounded like refrigerators working overtime. Just like he’d done with the fabric sample before, he placed some of the clay on a carbon plug and inserted it into the scope.

  The Gateway monitor erupted with spikes of color, the chemical elements flaming into relative peaks and ratios.

  Al for aluminum.

  Si for silica.

  S for sulphur.

  And the final spike was As.

  Arsenic.

  The geologist grinned.

  “Rosser,” he said to himself, “you’ve still got it.”

  chapter twenty

  I drove back toward Seattle following Peter Rosser’s directions to the north side of Cougar Mountain where stratus clouds hung low enough to obscure street signs, including the sharp left for the Anti-Aircraft Trailhead.

  During the 1950s, the U.S. Army carved out compounds like this one because the nation pulsed on high-alert against the communist threat—and Seattle was within easy striking distance for the Soviets. Ten years later, most of the missile compounds were dismantled, and all that remained today on the Cougar Mountain site was a set of concrete stairs that eerily led to nothing but the clouds.

  I hiked behind the nowhere stairs into woods filled with fading oak and birch trees and ferns whose autumn fronds were turning the color of baked tin. A mile later I came to a black lagoon, the water forming a nearly perfect circle, the surface covered with yellow leaves that floated like small boats.

  From what Rosser told me, Cougar Mountain was mined for coal long before it was a missile site. Rich beds of dense carbon ran through the mountain, he said, traversing the terrain all the way to the city of Renton, ten miles to the south. At one time, miners could walk the lightless tunnels from one side of the mountain to the other. When the mining tapered off in the 1920s, there was still enough coal to leach into groundwater and bubble to the surface like black ink.

  I stared at the lagoon, remembering the black smudge on the fabric tied to the tree. At the edge of the water, I filled empty film canisters with sediment, then continued down the trail to a gravel road Rosser had told me about. The road descended into an enormous bowl with fine silt walls that rose a hundred feet, all of it scarred by mining. But even under the darkening clouds, the clay glowed. It was a luminous light blue color that looked as though light was shining through it from inside the earth. Despite the scarce rain, the basin held several puddles, which told me the mining equipment had hit a water table.

  I walked into the basin, my shoes slurping out of the mud until my feet felt weighted with the clay. From a mining perspective, it was excellent c
lay, sticky to the point of annoyance. Nature’s cement. I collected several soil samples, took photographs of the pit, and walked to the far end of the bowl where I found a pile of bricks in the dying weeds. The bricks were uneven, the colors inconsistent, busted seconds dumped by the manufacturer. When I picked one up, a large brown spider scurried out of the pile.

  Facing east, the town of Issaquah lay in the valley below, which meant Ernie Suggs’s house was directly to my right, south as the crow flies. Could he walk here? I wondered. Detective Markel said the trail from his neighborhood led to the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain. Suggs could walk here—then leave with his prey? There would be no trace of him, save for this sticky soil in his tennis shoes.

  I climbed the hill behind the bricks, heading south, and I walked a ledge above the pit, searching the dry grass and the thickened forest, lifting evergreen boughs out of the way. The verdant limbs bounced against my hands and suddenly the ground went out from under me.

  I lay still for several moments, waiting for the pain to register, then slowly rolled over.

  It was steel, rusting rebar, soldered into a kind of grate. Behind that was a black hole, bottomless. The cold wet draft rising up smelled like a dead man’s lungs.

  Scrambling across the rebar, my muddy boots slipped on the metal. Clay fell off my boots, a silent drop through the black mine shaft, followed by a faint splash of water. I crawled—hand, foot, hand—and finally reached the grass next to the grate. I drew long deep breaths, trying to quiet my pounding heart, and pulled my flashlight off my work belt. I flicked on the beam. The light shook into the pit.

  Coal-ripped walls curved into the abyss with no end visible. Picking up a small pebble from the grass, I tossed it between the rebar, then counted. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand . . . The stone splashed eight seconds later.

  Walking the grate’s perimeter, I found a rusting lock welded to the rebar and took a series of photos, then beat my way back to the Clay Pit Road. The wind was kicking up, sweeping leaves from the trees like fishing lures dangling from invisible lines. I ran, the ground sending up a scent of earthen decay of rich soil putting flora to sleep for the winter. The first drops of rain were sporadic, spaced far enough apart that they couldn’t be considered rain. But within seconds the charcoal clouds seemed to open with sudden fury, and I had to wipe my eyes in order to see the trail. My boots sloshed through quick puddles, splashing the cuff of my pants.