THE INSPECTOR WAS NOT DEAD, NOR WAS HE INJURED. WHEN we reached him, he was panting and perspiring freely, but he waved us off, whimpering, “Go, please. It’ll pass. Please.”
Pet took his hand and felt his pulse. Her eyes widened with alarm, but in the calmest of voices, she said, “There, there, we wouldn’t leave you like this. Guard, please go get a doctor. Em and I will stay with Mr. Schecter.”
The guard turned to go, but the inspector called him back. “No! No, I don’t need a doctor. I just … I need to get home.”
“Can you tell us what’s the matter?” Pet asked.
“No. I’d rather not. It’s … a silly thing. I’ll be fine. I always am. I just … need a few minutes is all.”
“Do you have medication you take for this?” she asked.
“Um, well … yes.”
Pet gave the guard a pert little smile. “Can you get Mr. Schecter some water, please?” As he turned to fill her request, she sat down, lifted the inspector’s head away from the hard, cold metal where it rested, and cradled it against her bosom. I eased out of sight beyond the inspector’s line of vision. As his eyes closed in the comfort of her kindness, she put a finger to her lips to indicate that I should keep quiet. She murmured, “Well, you had me worried for a moment there, Jim, but I see now that you’re just fine, aren’t ya? Tough work, this inspecting business.” She patted
his hair smooth. “So, do you have these attacks often? My dad had them. My, how he hated it. Laid him out for days sometimes.”
“The poor man.” Schecter sighed. “Did he find anything that helped? Any of the sedatives? The analgesics?”
“No, but he’d let me hold him just like this sometimes, and if I spoke really quietly and kept things nice and dark for him, he’d feel better after awhile.”
“Yeah, dark helps. Just got to cut down the stimulation, that’s all. But after yesterday … I don’t know …”
“You had one yesterday, then,” she said confidentially. “How frightening.”
“Oh, yes. It was terrible.”
“But you’re such a brave man,” she whispered. “What could have frightened you that much?” She patted his cheek, smoothed his shirt.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, barely above a gasp. “Strictly confidential, I was told.”
“Of course,” she murmured. “Please, don’t say a word.” She began, ever so slightly, to rock him. She even hummed a soothing tune.
After awhile, as if in deep torpor, he said, “I was doing okay with the height. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course …”
He opened his eyes and looked imploringly up at his elfin guardian. “It was the cracks,” he pleaded.
“In the wall?”
“No! In the roof! The welds!”
“Yes, of course. That would have terrified me, too.”
“And all those people are going to be so disappointed.”
“It’s terrible,” she agreed. “The opening games.”
“Brand-new stadium,” he said, a tear leaking from underneath his closed lids.
“SO THE BUILDING Department’s red-tagged the new stadium which was going to be used for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. You knew that coming into this meeting, right?” I asked Pet after we had gotten the inspector safely into a taxi and then had gotten ourselves to a place where the two of us could talk. I had said I was hungry, and she had offered me a handful of nuts and raisins. I had allowed as how I was not a squirrel, and that any combination of beer and Mexican food would do nicely. Pet had taken me south of town, to a place called the Lone Star Taqueria, a quirky little joint with a new spin on the use of fish and cilantro in Mexican cuisine. Pet was beginning to look like my kind of woman. I ordered a sampling of the house fare and we each ordered a long-neck Corona.
She took a pull at her beer. “No, I didn’t know, and no, it hasn’t been red-tagged. Jim thinks it should be, but if I read him right, he reported it and nothing happened. He phoned his office to report his findings, but he was told to lose his notes. And this is all confidential. Remember? The poor dear had himself tied in knots trying to keep the secret he so badly needed to lose.”
“Then how did you peg the location that quickly?”
“Oh, I don’t know … public buildings … acrophobia … that narrowed the field. It had to be somewhere with a big drop. I didn’t consider the stadium right away, because it’s privately owned. It should have a different inspector. But as soon as he started talking about disappointment for lots of people, I knew he meant the Olympics, and the new stadium west of Temple Square was a likely subject, because it’s sitting right in line with the Warm Springs branch of the fault. Beyond that, call it instinct.”
“You’re good.”
Pet smiled, pleased with herself. “Damned good, to be precise.”
I raised my burrito de carnitas in recognition. I was famished. I had ordered enough to keep me going for a week.
Pet spirited a raisin out of a pocket and nibbled at it.
I pushed a taco de pollo asado across the table at her.
She said, “Well, just to be polite,” and took a bite, and then another. She added, “I’m so good, in fact, that you’re going to tell me what you were doing at the City and County Building yesterday.”
I lowered the burrito back to my plate. “Sorry.”
“Ooooo. Another secret, huh?” She crunched down on her taco and moaned.
I smiled at her. “Give up, Pet. I’m not a sweet old engineer with a fear of heights. I don’t crack that easily. I don’t have acrophobia or—what was that other one again?”
“Agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. That means the guy’s not only afraid of heights but that he’d much happier in a box with the lid taped shut.”
“You know all that because your dad really had it?”
She took a sip from her beer. “Never met my dad.”
I laughed, nearly choking on my own cerveza. “Sorry again, because that’s not funny at all.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. It makes it handy when I need to invent someone who’s just like whomever I’m trying to pump. I’m not blinded by the truth that way.”
And you pass yourself off as the pert little reporter from the Daily Blah, I thought. “So somebody’s trying to keep a lid on Jim Schecter’s findings. Who? Developer? Politician?”
“I don’t know. I intend to find out, though.”
“You said the stadium was privately owned. So who owns it?”
“An investment group. It’s part of a big package of urban redevelopment. They get federal, state, and local redevelopment funds—you know, grants-in-aid—if they improve the place, but to qualify, they have to include a feature that’s in the public interest. Like a symphony hall or a museum. This particular
group wanted to put in another huge shopping mall—a cultural mecca if ever I saw one,” she said dryly, “so they stuck it to the stadium, which they built first, right next door. It’s a clever scheme. They want a sports franchise, so they need a stadium, but stadiums are expensive. And they want to put in their shopping mall, but they need to have a feature in the public interest. So they put the two together, making sure they have the stadium in time for the Olympics, and tell the city, ‘See? You okay our development, and you can have a brand-new stadium for your big show-off event. How much more in the public interest could you want?’ So the political bosses tell the Building Department to give it the go-ahead. And the developer is happy as a skier in deep powder, because now he’s got public money subsidizing both the mall and the sports franchise.”
I said, “But the truth is, or should be, that if that stadium’s unsafe, it can’t be used.”
“That’s the way I read it too.”
“Then why help keep it secret? Hell, if that roof falls in on how many thousand spectators, that’s a black eye the city would never recover from. In fact, there should be a big red tag on the front door barring entrance. And you’re telling me there’s not.”
“Not according to everything I had from the Building Department up till ten minutes before we met the inspector. Unless you got something I missed when you went to Planning yesterday.”
Evading her probe, I asked, “When did he inspect the stadium?”
“Yesterday. Monday. Earthquake day. That would have gotten a man like him pretty wound up all right. And then someone told him to keep quiet about it. Imagine.”
“I wonder who got to him.”
“Got to his boss, you mean. It’s probably grounds for dismissal, if not a felony, to leave something like that unreported. Or it should be.”
I took a bite of my taco de pescado, the house specialty. It was a choice little morsel with shredded cabbage, tomato, fresh cilantro, onion, and lime nestled on a soft white corn tortilla and slathered with jalapeño mayonnaise. It was delicious, although under the circumstances my enjoyment of it was abstract. I was beginning to feel personally responsible for the safety of a great many people. “What exactly are you working on, Pet? It’s not just a follow-up on Monday’s quake, is it?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me.”
“No can do.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
As I took another draw on my beer, I mapped the deception in her elaborately innocent face, read the tension in her shoulders, read the runes of her hands, which now curled so tightly around her coffee mug that the knuckles were bleached. I thought, We both love the science in this story, but earthquake alone don’t make us that tense. No, you’ve found something all too human in the middle of your story. “I get it,” I said slowly. “You’re trying to figure out who killed Sidney Smeeth.”
Pet’s smile crimped up tight as a little raisin. “Then you are, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The police haven’t yet released what they know. You’ve forgotten that the unwitting public still thinks her death was accidental. So your connections confirm that it was murder. That’s terrific.”
I sank my face in one hand, then snapped it up again. “No. I—I didn’t know until you just told me. Oh, how surprising—”
“Cut it out, Em. You’re a lousy actress.”
“Wait a minute; how do you know it was murder?”
Pet bit into her taco. “I was on my way up to interview her when the ambulance pulled up. They said it was an accident, but
I waited awhile in my car, writing up my notes. Okay, I hid and watched. I saw them put up the crime tape.”
“You were going to interview her. Why?”
“Because she is—was—the state geologist.”
“No, there was more.”
“Because they cut off her TV interview.”
“Which she had staged in front of the new stadium.”
“Correct.”
“So here’s the question,” I said. “Who’s they?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Okay, so I’ve given you something; now it’s your turn. Who told you? Was it that cop boyfriend of yours?” She wiggled her eyebrows at me.
I wondered what to say. There was no way I was going to tell her about my FBI connection. I could tell Pet that I’d heard it from Ray, because he was city police, whose jurisdiction it was to investigate the murder. That would cover my tracks with Tom Latimer, whose interests went far past the termination of one life to the protection of tens of thousands. But saying that Ray had spilled the beans would get him crosswise with his bosses, if they found themselves reading it in the Tribune, and that would be very bad for our relationship. I decided on the slipperiness of another nonanswer. Let her presume what she would presume. “How did you know I was dating a cop?” I asked.
“Like you say, I’m good. And this is a small town. It didn’t take me long to dig up the connections. Okay, I have a friend who covers the police desk. She remembered your name from the dinosaur job you got involved in, the one where you met Ray. You were something of a celebrity for a day or two there, little that you let yourself be interviewed for our paper. Like I say, it’s a small town.”
“Not that small.”
“Well, okay, Ray was at the funeral, and—”
“Sidney Smeeth’s?”
“Yes, and his brother-in-law. Quite the family affair.”
That made my head spin. What had Ray been doing at Sidney Smeeth’s funeral? “What, is he working the case?” I looked askance at Pet, who was sipping at her beer, looking even more elaborately innocent. “You’re fishing,” I said. “Quit messing with me.”
“Okay, okay. I know Ray’s sister Katie.” She gave me a look of sympathy.
Now I put my head all the way down on the table and groaned. “Katie,” I said into my plate, “my guardian angel.”
“Yeah, I thought she was a real bitch, too, first time I met her. Clear back in grade school.”
“Wait—how did you know I was at the Planning Department yesterday?”
“I asked the guard if he’d seen you before. Evidently, your red boots made an impression on him. But don’t change the subject. Katie Harkness is one of my very favorite bitches.”
I vowed right then to leave my old red ropers in the bottom of my closet forevermore. “Listen, I have to give Katie the benefit of the doubt. It’s serious business between me and Ray, and—”
“You’ve got to be kidding! You’re not a Mormon, and the Raymond clan are as Mormon as they come. Wow, this is incredible!”
I stared at Pet, wondering how she’d gotten off on a spree of gossiping, but then realized that she was just using a gossipy tone as a way to try to railroad me into spilling my guts. “No sale,” I said.
Pet moved meditatively back to her taco, applied a little more of one of three salsas the waiter had provided, and studied me for a while. “I like you,” she said, “so this I’m giving you for free. Watch out for Katie. She doesn’t play by the same rules you and I do. You and I like to know the truth. The truth doesn’t matter to Katie. She just wants to be in control.”
“You mean she wants to be a good Mormon, and I don’t fit that picture.”
Pet shook her head. “No, that would be her mom’s department. Katie’s agenda has nothing to do with the church. Katies are born into every religion. She’s just a jealous, grasping bitch who only feels secure when she’s making the decisions for everyone around her.”
“Wait a minute. Jealous? Manipulative, I’d say. Proud to a fault. But jealous? What’s she got to be jealous of?”
“An older sister who’s prettier, and a younger sister who’s more talented, a sister younger yet who gets to be the darling. A brother who gets crowned king. I don’t know, maybe she was just born with a tin can for a heart. Maybe her mother wasn’t ready for another baby just yet. It doesn’t matter. Jealous people are like paranoiacs. They’re feeling inferior and have to have someone to blame it on. If there’s nothing real around to hang that feeling on, they’ll simply find something. So Katie’s found you, or should I say added you to her list. You must drive her wild.”
“What are you talking about? I’m no beauty. I’ve got no money, no influence. Why should she be jealous of me?”
“Oh, Em, you’d make her nuts simply because she can’t control you. You get it? People like her feed on family structure. They’re like vampires. They need everybody to hold still so they can get their big red drink. The more rigid the family, the better. Her family confuses her pushiness with support of the family interests. Just imagine: If someone comes in from outside who perturbs that structure, she’s got to make that person go away. Particularly a truth junkie like you.”
“Truth junkie. What are you talking about?”
“It takes one to know one. You want the truth, and you’ll risk everything to get it. People like Katie want order—with them at the top—and they’ll suck the blood out of anything in their path
to maintain it. They’ll tell themselves-and you—that they’re the big victims, working their tails off while everyone else loafs. And they lack the capacity to see that their precious orderliness isn’t even in their own best interest, let alone anyone else’s.”
I leaned back and took Pet in from a wider angle. Her little poppet eyes had grown wide and fierce, and both of her hands had tightened into fists.
Pet looked away, out the window at the cars passing in the street. Her mouth ran on with her. “Yeah. Control is more important to them than truth. More important than love, because they wouldn’t know love if it jumped up and kissed them. But it doesn’t jump up, because everyone around them is either cringing or in deep, deep denial. They keep pushing people away from them, even while they’re trying so damned hard to hold on. Their hunger for power and importance is insatiable, and it makes them mean. Then it all becomes a big game to yank the rug out from under the people who have disappointed them. They’ll bad-mouth their own daughters one minute and then try to extort special treatment for them the next.”
My jaw was hanging halfway to my knees. Who knew that beneath Pet’s perky exterior beat a heart filled with such rage? And what had provoked it? I said, “You seem to know a lot about this.”
Feeling my eyes on her, Pet forced her hands to open, but they quickly contracted back again. She glanced at me, looked away. “Let’s just say I’ve known a lot of Katies.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s no matter. I have a good job, and I’m going to have a great life.”
Going to have. What about now? I wondered.
We said nothing for the space of several heartbeats. I watched her chest rise and fall with her breath. Watched her hand dance lightly on the table, saw it dart out and grasp the remains of her taco and whip it up to her mouth.
I said, “So you’ve known Katie since school. Does that mean you’re a Mormon, too?”
“I’m drinking beer, aren’t I? The term is Jack Mormon, dear heart.”
“You can go in some doors but not others.”
“Precisely. And control freaks love keeping doors closed.”
Instinctively, I asked, “Tell me about her husband, Enos.”
Pet winced.
So that was it: Katie had beat Pet out for a husband.
Pet’s spirits seemed to wobble for a moment, but she recovered quickly and said smoothly, “Yes, I’ve known Katie since when, and Enos, too. He was supposed to become somebody, be the big engineer, but then Katie got her mitts on him. He was never brilliant, but he was a hard worker, did his missionary year, worked his way through college, all that, so he should have been okay.”
“Poor boy?”
“No, his folks had a little money, or they could have at least helped him, but they believed in tough jobs to build tough men. Kinda harsh.”
“The Raymonds have money.”
“Yeah, Ray senior was treasurer of the company. Did very well for them all.”
“So, did Katie marry down?”
“Katie married someone she could control.”
“He seems happy enough,” I said, pushing her.
“Happy? He never knew what hit him. She latched onto him so fast his head spun. She insisted that they not wait to get married, that they have babies immediately. He crumpled under the strain of trying to do school and work and become a father at the same time. That’s what Katie wanted, see, so that’s what she got. Crank out the babies as fast as you can, because that’s the big badge of honor in our community. But it wasn’t enough for her that he worked as a humble little guard at the City and
County Building. Night shifts. Imagine trying to do college and family and work nights. The minute he graduated with his degree in engineering, she booted Enos into the family business, real fast-track job, lots of responsibility but almost no experience, but it pays the freight. I guess he’s done his best, but he sure doesn’t laugh anymore. She even wants him to run for political office! She has a big plan. First county commissioner, then—”
“Wait. Laugh? Enos?”
“Used to be a real cutup. You think I’m kidding? He used to kid me that I should come on down and he’d take me up that very same clock tower we just climbed.”
“Enos? He doesn’t strike me as the romantic type.”
“Liked to do it, you know?”
This time, I did choke on my beer.
Pet said, “Oh, you’d be surprised. He was fun and romantic and—now he’s just stressed. Gone real secretive. Doesn’t come around to see his friends anymore,” she added, as if it were an indictment.
“Well, parenthood alone can do that, right?” I said, still playing the Devil’s advocate.
Pet gave me a “you fool” look. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She reached over and polished off the last of my tamale. “Now, give.”
“I’m sorry. It sounds like you already know more than I do.”
She eyed me carefully. “At least tell me why your geologist pals clam up around me. What am I doing wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. You’re just an outsider.” Glad to turn the wheel toward safer ground, I continued. “Geologists gossip with one another but clam up around people who aren’t their professional colleagues.”
“Talk about paranoid,” she said.
“It’s not that. It’s the nature of the work, and the training. Geology’s a close-knit community, but more importantly, it’s a community of people who speak a special language. We all know
what constitutes a presumption in our language, and what’s a fact, so we don’t have to label them separately when we’re together. We can let our hair down and chew on ideas. But ideas are exactly that, just speculation, and we’re not allowed to speculate in public. It’s against the rules. We might set off a panic. We’re dealing with information that can influence people’s lives, or even whether they live or die. You’re the last person we’d want to shoot our mouths off around.”
“But I’m a science writer. I understand the difference between fact and conjecture.”
“Yeah, but you’re trained in journalism, not geology. Geology is a very qualitative science, full of incomplete or ambiguous data. We speculate all the time around one another, think aloud. That’s how we work. Exchange ideas, then go out and test them. But our mandate is different. We’re trying to get at the story, but we’re not trying to sell papers. We wait until an idea has been tested into a good, solid, predictive theory before we announce it to the press, because again, the public doesn’t understand the difference between an idea and a fact, not to mention a theory. You want me to start giving you some examples? A meteorologist in Missouri gets a little gaga with age, but that doesn’t erase the ink on his Ph.D. diploma. He gets to playing with numerology and decides that one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine spells earthquake. So he announces: ‘On January second, at three-forty-five P.M., there’s going to be a magnitude six point seven quake that will kill eight hundred and ninety people.’ The press picks it up, reports this guy’s prediction and people go nuts, because he’s a Ph.D., so he must know, right? No matter that his Ph.D. isn’t even in geology.”
“Then why not educate the public? That’s my job, right? You’d think your pals would love to talk to me.”
“Sure, that’s part of our job, especially folks who are in the public sector—Hugh Buttons, Logan de Pontier, Sidney Smeeth—it’s their job to get the information out there, so we can help the people
we’re mandated to help, but at the same time, we have to push our observations and data through rigorous analyses and colleague reviews before we launch it into the public sphere. Otherwise, we might go off half-cocked and cause more harm than good. That’s why public employees are told to ‘state facts but not create public policy.’ We’re supposed to leave policy making to the elected officials, because they’ve got a lot of political footballs to juggle. It’s a real bugaboo.”
“That didn’t seem to stop Sidney Smeeth.”
“No, it didn’t.”
Pet said, “I applaud her. She really knew how to get her issues into the press.”
“Yes, but you’re also thinking that it looks like her media savvy got her killed. So now maybe you understand another reason why other geologists won’t talk to you.”
“Not even about something as important as seismic hazards? Hey, I’m trying to educate a public that’s living right on top of a killer fault in unreinforced brick houses!”
I said, “First off, you called it a ‘killer.’”
“Isn’t it?”
“That’s editorializing. Or anthropomorphizing. And inaccurate, Faults don’t kill people, falling buildings kill people. This city lies entirely within Seismic Code Four; but almost nothing here is built to that strict a code.”
“People can’t afford to build to Code Four.”
“Now you’re a politician, not a scientist. Aren’t you going to tell them that their lives are at risk below Code Four?”
“But drawing attention to the fault gets the facts about risk across,” Pet countered. “Then the citizens can make informed decisions.”
“Does it? You’re college educated and interested in the sciences, an easy sell. But do you really understand what is meant by risk? We talk about earthquake probability—how likely it is that one will occur in a given place within a given period of
time—but earthquake risk is a measure of how likely it is that people will be killed if the earthquake occurs.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s the greatest seismic risk in the U.S.?”
“California, right? Or Alaska?”
I started listing the numbers I’d read the day before in my geology text. “No. Probably Boston. One good shock through that area, with all that unreinforced brick, and wham. Or Saint Louis. Neither city has earthquake protection in its building code, and yet the most destructive earthquakes on historic record have occurred not far from them. Boston: Saint Lawrence River, 1663, Mercalli magnitude ten—that’s like a Richter seven. Devastating if it happened today. Boston, wham. Half of New York, too, I’d imagine. Or the 1886 quake that knocked down Charleston, South Carolina. Saint Louis: shaken by New Madrid quakes, 1811 and 1812, both magnitude eight or worse. The ground accelerated so fast that it snapped the tops off the trees. And yet the average citizen does not think of Saint Louis as a big seismic zone. In California, everyone braces for the earthquakes, and every revision of the building code decreases risk. In Saint Louis, they have diddly.”
Pet was silent for a moment, thinking. “Thank you. You clarified my thinking on that point. But still, the main point is to get people thinking about these things.”
“No, the tough part is getting them not just thinking but also educated, so that they understand. People don’t seem to understand that the Earth’s crust is continuously under tremendous stress, and that there are certain places where it’s likely to snap. California, sure. Alaska. Salt Lake City. There are places where the stress is minimal, and we worry about other things instead. And there are other places where we don’t even know it’s likely to snap, because while we don’t have historic records of movement, Mother Nature may have been winding up the spring for eons. And Congress just cuts the budget, thinking it’s not important
to have scientists out there studying these things, that God won’t let it happen here, or that we’ll all be dead from pollution or viruses when it does happen, or who knows what!” Noticing how strident I was beginning to sound, I leaned back in my seat and took a long pull on my beer. “The Earth’s crust is being moved by convection cells in the mantle,” I said more calmly. “We’re riding around on a big heat engine. The flywheel goes clear to the center of the Earth. There’s no amount of wishful thinking on our part that’s going to make it stop.”
“You’re talking about plate tectonic theory,” Pet said briskly. “The Earth’s crust is broken into large and small plates that are driven this way and that by those convection cells in the mantle, the molten layer below the crust transferring heat from the core outward. See? I know this stuff. The plates stretch apart, as here at the Wasatch fault, or they collide and push upward, as the Himalayas.”
I added, “Or they grind past each other, as the San Andreas fault in California. Or one slides under the other, as the Juan de Fuca Plate diving under the North American at Seattle. But the human mind cannot comprehend things happening at such immense scales except in the abstract. We think in a scale as long as our arms, or the lengths of our feet. We’re just scrambling around trying to make a go of it over the few decades we’re alive, always much closer to the edge than we like to contemplate.”
“But geologists are good at that abstraction. You eat ambiguity for breakfast.”
“Yes,” I said. “We deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, and for the most part, we do it qualitatively, not quantitatively. That makes it even more difficult to get our points across. If geology were a more quantitative science, it would be easier, because while most people don’t really understand numbers, they’ve at least been taught to respect them. When we give a statistician all the carbon fourteen data we can regarding how many episodes
of fault rupture we have and how long ago they occurred, he crunches them through a preset formula and comes up with an average number of how often a quake that size occurs. The public thinks that means they know how likely they are to get hit by a magnitude seven earthquake. They believe it out of hand. When engineers deal with uncertainty, they also put a number on it, and even though that number is conjured out of thin air and dressed up with a fancy title—an ‘uncertainty coefficient,’ or something like that—people get real impressed. But most of the work of geologists is qualitative, because we’re dealing with things that are so large or so long-term that assigning numbers is sometimes meaningless. So we say things like, ‘We’re building houses in a fault zone. Don’t you think we ought to build them stronger, or perhaps build somewhere else?’ And everyone accuses us of being simpleminded. Give them a number—say ‘On average, we’ll only get a magnitude seven quake here every twelve hundred years, and the last one was maybe a thousand years ago’—and they figure they’ve got two hundred years to go, and feel all comforted, like they’ve got the picture straight.”
“So what would you do?” Pet asked.
“Well, for one thing, I won’t build a house in a fault zone.”
“But you rent an apartment in one.” Pet smiled sardonically. The expression looked odd on her perky little face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Seems like I’m a risk-taker after all.” I stared into my beer, trying to take comfort the soft reflection of light off the surface of the brew. “In order to see what we see, we also have to know that we don’t quite see it perfectly. We perceive the imperfection of our own understanding. And that’s necessary, because it keeps us from going off half-cocked, like I said. But it also forces us into an odd kind of humility. It’s a funny package, huh?”
“You’re like a bunch of lizards, each hiding under his own little rock.”
I laughed at the image. “We’re born to see things in four and
five and six dimensions at once, and it makes us a little apprehensive. Ambiguity can be anxiety-producing. We see our own capacity for error, see the incompleteness of the incoming data. So we appear hesitant, reclusive, while all the time we’re the only ones who can hope to resolve the questions we’re grappling with. When will the next earthquake strike, and where? What, therefore, should be the policy regarding construction of homes in Salt Lake City? Or Boston? How much oil is left to fuel the cars and trucks on which we depend, and where is it? What killed the dinosaurs, why are the coral reefs in the Caribbean dying now, and will similar events kill us?”
“All right, but yesterday morning, the Warm Springs branch of the fault slipped, and the earth shook. How ambiguous is that?”
“It isn’t,” I said. “And it is. Where’s the fault?”
“Well, it’s …” Pet paused. “Oh. Yeah. You’re having to interpret where it is most of the time, not just when it’s going to slip.”
“Uh-huh, and that spells dollars and cents, because it means that we’re uncertain how to prepare for life in a fault zone. How long before it slips again? Are you going to make everybody build to the expense of Code Four even if the big quakes might not come around except once every twelve hundred years? That’s over fifteen times our lifetime. Do the math. It’s a sticky mess. And finances are finite. If you have only X dollars to spend on seismic renovation, do you spend it all on one or two structures, or do you spend a little bit on all of them? And do you close schools because of the risk of what might happen to the buildings?”
“You sound like a politician,” Pet said.
“I just try to understand the problems they face,” I answered. “That way, I don’t get riled enough to kill one of them.”
Pet smiled. “Now we are back on a riddle we can solve. Dr. Smeeth.”
“‘Screaming Sidney,’ I’ve heard her called.”
“Not your typical geologist.”
“No,” I agreed. “She was much more vocal than most of us. But a damned good geologist, from all I’ve heard about her. And, as director of the UGS, she had to take a lot of flak from above.”
Pet nodded. “Okay, so Sidney Smeeth answered to the governor—through Maria Teller, the director of Natural Reserves—and neither of them have training in the sciences. What do you suppose that does to the mix?”
“I don’t know. I guess you’d have to look at what she was answering to them for—her exact mandate, that kind of thing.”
“Fair enough. The state geologist is there to manage the exploitation of the state’s mineral wealth, and guide examination of things like geologic hazards.”
“Landslides,” I said. “Earthquakes. Swelling and liquefying soils.”
“Precisely,” Pet said. “And we have all of those right here in Salt Lake County, as well as most of the state’s human population. In support of public housing but perhaps contrary to public safety, we also have a mandate to develop the ‘built environment’ of the state.”
“A mandate?”
“Yes. Building and planning departments work with people who are building. If no one was building anything, the Building Department would not exist, because they make their income by charging fees for writing permits, not by keeping land undeveloped. When you think about it, it’s a conflict of interest to put building and planning in one department.”
“Do you have a specific development in mind?” I asked.
“Well, the new stadium, like I said, and the mall it’s attached to. The Towne Centre project.”
“Hmm. Yesterday’s earthquake put the stadium to the test. It flunked. And the seismic record Hugh Button’s getting may reveal
the exact location of that branch of the fault, turning a dashed line into a solid one.”
Pet nodded. “Makes you wonder why that dashed line was deleted in the first place, doesn’t it?”
I pulled back, insulted. “You think a USGS geologist would leave a line off a map for political reasons and the UGS would follow suit?”
“Lots of hands touch those maps.”
“Now you are sounding paranoid.”
“And you are sounding naïve.”
I said, “That deletion of a dashed line is a perfect example of a geologic controversy. One geologist thinks the fault stops somewhere north of town; another looks at the same evidence and says it marches right on through.” I took a sip of beer so I could momentarily hide behind the bottle. “Who put that interpretation into the UGS seismic map anyway?”
“I hear that the infamous Frank Malone had a hand in it.”
Frank Malone, the engineering geologist whose name appeared in one of the files Tom had me read. Now is when I definitely begin shutting up! I told myself, but I said, “The same Frank Malone who digs trenches but won’t let anyone see what’s in them? What’s he got to say for himself?”
Pet replied, “Interestingly enough, I can’t reach him for comment. He is not answering his telephone calls.”
“Well, there are talented geologists and there are not-so-talented geologists,” I said, evading her gaze by looking out the window.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “The geologist clams up again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Pet replied, the annoyance in her tone putting the lie to my apology. “If I can’t get what I need from a geologist, I think I know who to ask.”
Embarrassed, I took advantage of the call of nature to take a break from our conversation and headed for the rest room. When
I came back, Pet was just finishing up a call on her cell phone. Her tone was much more terse and aggressive than it had been. “I want to ask you about the cracked welds in the new stadium,” she was saying into the phone. “Fine, off the record. What I tell my editor depends on what you tell me. Uh-huh. Right. And I want to talk to you about Sidney Smeeth. Yeah, I have a lit-tle suspicion that you have something to tell me about all that. Mm-hmm. What? Well, okay, eleven will do nicely.” She listened a moment longer, then said acidly, “I understand perfectly.”
“You get hold of Frank Malone?” I asked when she put the phone down.
“Perhaps. Let’s just say someone who’d know more about that fault and that stadium than you.”
That hurt. “You’re getting kind of rough there, Pet.”
Pet covered her reaction with a final long sip of her beer. At length, she put down the bottle and gave me a deeply probing look, all fluff and playful artifice gone. “I suppose I should say I’m sorry. But this is too important.”
“I can respect that. Just be careful.”
Pet shook her head dismissively. “No, you’re being careful, and that’s fine for you, if you must. But let me tell you, being careful doesn’t get you there. Being careful is staying home and doing what mommy tells you to. Being careful is watching it all happen and not doing a damned thing about it. Sometimes you just have to open up your mouth and report what’s happening.”
That sounded to me like the bull was charging, only I wasn’t sure if Pet would find a matador or an abattoir on the other side of the red cape. And with that thought, it occurred to me that Tom’s cautionary training was finally beginning to take hold. I said, “Well, if you don’t like being careful, there’s also being reasonable.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m right in the middle of trying to figure that out myself.”
And that was it. Pet went to wherever she was going, and I went home. I phoned in a report to Tom, telling him everything I had just learned. He thanked me for the information but took points off for my being such a sieve. I defended myself by saying that at least I hadn’t blabbed that I was working with the FBI. He said that I had that part straight anyway and to cut the nonsense and make myself scarce next time Pet Mercer came looking for me. I said I would, but I wasn’t entirely sure I meant it. I suggested that he have a talk with her, and he said he would first thing tomorrow.
After hanging up the phone, I ate a solitary late-evening snack, climbed into bed, did some reading, and eventually got some sleep. How I wish that Pet Mercer had done the same.