Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) by Toni Dwiggins Read Free Book Online Page B

“Geologist.”
    He pursed his little mouth.
    I didn’t really mind having a keeper, going out there. Jardine led the way, punctiliously skirting the sand truck to prevent, I guessed, me whacking into it. My attention shifted to the ground. Here’s where it happened, if the swap was run before—if the dummy cask arrived and shed grains of talc. Of course, any talc spilled here would have been scuffed into invisibility. Not, however, invisible to the laser eye of my spectrometer. I selected the chemical fingerprint for talc and began the scan. The laser illuminated the soil, scattering its constituents into their spectral wavelengths.
    Jardine closed in behind me. I saw him by the long morning shadow he cast, which dogged my every move. I grew distracted, almost missing the spectrometer’s chirp. I stared at the screen, at the jagged wavelength line. “Huh,” Jardine said, at my ear, “how’s that thing work?” It doesn’t, I thought. It doesn’t happen this way—first place I stick my nose and bingo. That’s more than luck. That’s a red flag. I said, “Give me some space.” He backed off. I reset the spectro. It scanned and chirped the news. So okay lady, you got lucky. I shook my head and expanded the searchable grid. “There it is,” Jardine said, with me again. He’d recognized the wavelength before the meter chirped. By the time I’d covered the loading zone he acted like it was his show. “Can it tell you where the stuff came from?” he wanted to know. “No,” I said, huffier than I’d intended, “that takes doing geology.”
    As we returned from the scan, Hap Miller was returning with the roster. He gave Jardine a look. Cartoon eyes. “Hey there Roy. You helping the purty lady?”
    Jardine’s face pit purpled.
    “That’s right,” I said, “he was.” Jardine had been, actually, getting on my nerves but it cost me nothing now to include the guy. “We found talc. It’s all over the place.” I waited for them to get it. I waited for Ballinger to object—nah nah, knothead can’t sneak in a cask full of talc. I waited for Miller to make a joke.
    Soliano got it first. He spun on Ballinger. “How many casks are missed from your inventory?”
    “You people are making this case bigger’n it is.”
    I bristled. No we’re not. We’d just proved Soliano’s swap theory was correct. More than that—not only could the perp engineer such a swap but he’d damn well done it before. The dump manager may not like the theory but it fit the facts. So this case was getting bigger than any of us liked.
    I stared at the logo on Ballinger’s shirt and thought, there wouldn’t even be a case if you CTC people did what that motto promised, closing the damn circle of the atom.
    Just keep your plutonium out of my coffee.
~
    J ardine was choking.
    He tried to chew over what he’d just learned but he couldn’t swallow it all. The female with her meter had found the talc and now they all knew that last night wasn’t the first time and they... He stopped. He told himself not to get ahead of himself. How far could that meter take her? The trail stopped here, at the dump.
    He edged away from the little group, filling in the forms on his clipboard like he was interested. They didn’t even see him any more. Snooty Mister FBI had dismissed him. He focused on the others. That bastard Ballinger. Miller the mocker. The know-it-all female.
    Purty lady . His face flamed and his scar burned. She pitied him. He hated pity. Almost as much as he hated Miller’s mockery.
    Miller mocked everybody but what stuck in Jardine’s throat was the time Miller mocked about the prank . Jardine’s first day back on the job, bunch of them were in the break room and Miller told the Three Pigs joke. First little pig builds a house of paper. Big bad Mr. Alpha Wolf tries to get in but even a paper wall stops him. Then big bad Mr. Beta Wolf comes along and he blows right through the paper and fries the pig. Second little pig builds