We were bulleting across the basalt plateau for Spokane when my purse started doo-dahing “Camptown Races.” Madame continued to snooze in the passenger seat, but as I fumbled for the phone, my heart began making little bleating pulses. That small hope. That remaining spark of light that said maybe, just maybe, DeMott was calling me.
Wrong.
“Harmon, where are you?” Jack said.
I tried to control my voice. “Heading to Spokane. I need to see the forensic geologist. And I need you to dig deeper on Paul Handler. I just saw the trailer with the plate. It hasn’t gone anywhere in years.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. It would disintegrate at the first bump in the road. But there’s another wrinkle. Handler sold the kidnapped horse to Sal Gagliardo.”
“What?”
“I’m not done. The description of the kidnappers fits Handler’s ranch hands. That’s why I need more information on this guy. Check for any paper trail. Social services. Tax returns, whatever you can find.”
But there was only silence on the other end. I gazed down the Ghost’s bonnet. The white paint glowed under the blazing sun. “Hello?”
“You need to come in.”
“Fine, I’ll do the research myself. Just take care of the guards at the front desk.”
“No.”
“Jack, I don’t have any ID to get upstairs.”
“I understand. It’s not me. It’s management. They want you to come in.”
An exit blew past. Then a yellow farmhouse, surrounded by fields of wheat.
“Harmon?”
“Come in. For good?”
He didn’t say anything.
“So OPR made its ruling?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “McLeod came by my desk and asked how the case was going. I told him about the kidnapped horse, how you were tracking it down. He said, ‘That’s too bad.’ I thought he meant the horse. But then he said, ‘Tell her she has to come in.’ When I asked why, McLeod said it was beyond his apprehension.”
The malaprop was closer to a Freudian slip. Worried, apprehensive. My stomach tightened into a knot.
“When?” The tone of my voice triggered something in Madame. She lifted her head. “When do I have to come in?”
“Since you’re heading in the wrong direction, I’ll hold them off until tomorrow. Does eleven o’clock work for you?”
No. It didn’t work for me.
But I lied. Again.
“I’ll be there.”
I walked into the crime lab just before 2:00 p.m. and found Peter Rosser standing on a tripod ladder, leaning toward the exposed I-beam that ran across the ceiling. He was unknotting a nylon noose.
He glanced down at me. “Don’t tell me you want to use it.”
“When’s your last day?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.” He tossed me the rope. “Put it in that box on my desk, would ya?”
The box contained several sample nooses, all made from different materials. I rummaged through my purse and removed the soil samples, including the one inside Eleanor’s lipstick case. “Any chance you could look at these by tonight?”
“Let’s make a deal.” He grinned. “I’ll take care of it if you come work in my new lab.”
“I’m flattered, really, but—”
“But it’s like riding a unicycle. You never forget how to do this stuff.” He came down the ladder with a black composite rope. It looked like a twisted garden snake. He threw it to me. “In the box with the others, if you don’t mind.”
I laid the noose inside the box. “Where are the Petri dishes?”
“I knew you couldn’t resist.” He pointed across the room. “Third drawer down. On the left.”
I placed the shallow glass dishes on the counter and marked each with a Sharpie, noting the soils in order of importance—or imperative. I needed to know some things right away, in light of my meeting tomorrow with the SAC. The top two were the soil from Handler’s palm and the caked mud inside Eleanor’s lipstick case, from Ashley’s room. I added several drops of distilled water to Handler’s palm dust, because there was so little to sample, and carried the wet clay over to the Scanning Electron Microscope.
“Who’s taking your place?” I asked.
“Nobody can take my place.”
“Who’s got the job?”
“Nice guy.” Rosser carried the ladder to a far wall. It displayed posters that described igneous minerals in terms of chemistry, texture, and foliation. “But the man doesn’t possess my superior sense of urgency. If you know what I mean.”
I touched the SEM’s carbon plug to the sediment, coating it, then placed it inside the machine. The SEM made its usual whining noises, but now it sounded like it was crying over the loss of its resident cowboy.
He called out, “What do you know about pyroclastics?”
I hit the switch on the computer monitor. An old monitor, the bulky kind that needed to warm up. Pyroclastics were rocks and minerals formed by explosive igneous action. Volcanoes, mostly.
“Pyro is Greek for ‘fire.’” I had an arcane knowledge of Greek and Latin. “Clastic means ‘broken in bits.’ ”
“I was talking ash, pumice, obsidian.” He removed the igneous poster, rolling it up. “What about ash?”
“Highly abrasive, somewhat corrosive, and conducts electricity when wet and won’t dissolve in water.”
The monitor screen kicked up a colored bar code. Ready to cooperate with the SEM.
“And the gas?”
“Shreds the magma, shatters the rock, fuels the flow.” I tapped the computer’s mouse, feeling an odd tingle in my fingertips. This moment, this threshold to new knowledge, had more adrenaline than the races at Emerald Meadows. Those races ended. These only launched more.
“Name one famous pyroclastic ash flow.”
I watched the screen. Silica appeared first, in high concentrations. “Peter, if this is about the job, I don’t want it.”
“Pompeii.”
“Preschoolers can name Pompeii.”
“What about Pelée?”
“Killed thirty thousand people.”
“What year?”
I leaned into the screen. Aluminum had overtaken silica. “Pelée blew in nineteen hundred and one.”
“Nineteen-oh-two,” he corrected. “Gallop ahead seventy-eight years, what do you get?”
Seventy-eight plus two was . . . “Mount St. Helens.” I clicked Print with the mouse. “Why do you want to know about St. Helens?”
“I was curious whether a Southern gal such as yourself knows anything about Northwest geology.”
I looked up. He had removed the posters and now stood at the counter, looking at my soil samples in the Petri dishes.
“Some of that was raked off a barn floor,” I said, “if you’re thinking about tasting it.”
All the barn detritus also meant the test would take time. The samples had to be cleaned first. And I didn’t have time for that.
I pulled the colored bar graph from the printer. Handler’s clay had extremely high concentrations of three elements: aluminum and silica and selenium. The SEM also detected the same trace radioactive elements. Identical. Not luck. Not even probability.
Rosser walked over. “What do you got?”
“Provenance on that gray clay.”
He grinned. “Puts a spur under your saddle, don’t it?”